Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  I said that to Dave.’

  At the door he stared into the refl ection and got a good angle, recognising the goon standing around the corner. He looked solid and fi t: expensive black slacks, white trop shirt with his hand poised under it.

  He was one of the sports page readers. He had been in a silver Accord.

  Mac whipped around, wanting to secure the front door against any backup. But he couldn’t risk it. He wanted the goon alive and talkative, so he dropped Minky’s semi-conscious head, walked around the corner and snap-kicked the goon under his left patella. The bloke’s mouth fell open but no sound came out. One hundred and six kilos driven through the front foot will do that. The knee hyperextended but the goon stayed on his feet. Mac put his weight onto his front left foot and threw a low-high hook combination off his left hand. The low shot to the right kidney broke the goon; the high shot to the jaw fi nished him.

  Dropped. Like a cheating girlfriend.

  Still struggling for breath, Mac looked through Minky’s front door to the packed street outside. He fl ipped the closed sign, slid the bolt, pulled the venetians down and walked into the back room with the goon’s Glock in his back pocket and the Heckler in his right hand.

  He tried to control his heart rate with deep breaths. His mind raced.

  Who was the goon? What was the larger picture?

  Minky was struggling to breathe through coughing fi ts, purple in the face and vomiting. The goon lay on his left elbow, eyes rolling back in his head, face slackened by the broken jaw, leg useless.

  In shock.

  Neither of them said a word. They knew what came next. Minky would squeal straightaway. He was a pro. He didn’t know much and what he did know he would give up fast for a torture-free morning.

  The goon was well dressed, probably Javanese - a contractor sent to woop woop to deal with the Skippy troublemaker. If that was the case there’d be at least another person. Mac thought hard but couldn’t recall another man in the silver Accord.

  His heart rate normalising slightly, he moved to the back door, bolted it. There was no glass. He moved to his right, along the back wall that was covered with electronics, and found a window high up. He stepped on a chair, peeked through the window. His vision was thwarted. Couldn’t see the door area but could see the dusty Accord fi fteen metres away in the dirt car park area. He clocked the registration plate. A man was in the passenger’s seat: Asian, but he didn’t vibe local. Black polo shirt, Ray-Bans and something familiar about him.

  Mac got off the chair. He probably had fi ve minutes before the cavalry tried to burst in. He pieced it as good as he could: the Americans had sent him to Minky to catch another American, a CIA rogue who was still Agency. So who was working for whom? Minky had a couple of Javanese thugs ready for a reception party. Or did he have no choice?

  Only one of the thugs went in. They didn’t look bumpkin enough for Sulawesi, they looked very Jakarta. The goon gasping on the fl oor wore fl ash slacks and even smelled of Old Spice. That made him either American-or Australian-trained, which pointed to ex-BIN or maybe Indonesian Army special forces, the Aussie-trained Kopassus. However it worked, Mac was feeling fear.

  Mac moved to Minky fi rst. He didn’t need prompting. ‘I sorry, Mr Mac. So sorry, please.’

  Sorry? They always were.

  ‘Who’s this, Mink?’ asked Mac, waving the Heckler at the goon.

  Minky shook his head.

  Mac shot him in the bladder. Knelt on his chest so he couldn’t scream.

  Minky’s face went purple.

  ‘Who’s this, Mink?’ Mac pointed the gun at the other side of the bladder, intimating a second shot. Minky convulsed, groaned deep and vomited on Mac’s safari suit pants.

  The goon started moving. Mac stood, looked down on him. The goon wouldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘This a Garrison job?’

  The goon looked at him, surprised.

  ‘Where’s Garrison?’

  Now the goon went back to his studied nonchalance. He tried to shake his head but the jaw situation made him wince.

  ‘Where’s the girl?’ This time Mac raised the Heckler, pointed it at the goon.

  Minky sobbed, puked again. Blood soaked into his dentist get-up.

  Mac didn’t want to leave without having at least one part of the puzzle. And he didn’t know where he was supposed to be looking.

  The goon looked back at the gun. Mac looked at the back door, expecting a charge-in at some point. The goon lashed out with his right leg, caught Mac on the inside of the right wrist. The Heckler tumbled, bounced and slid along the white lino fl oor.

  Mistake one: Mac’s eyes followed the gun.

  Mistake two: the goon had his hand on the Glock in Mac’s back pocket before the Heckler had stopped sliding.

  Mistake three: the goon didn’t fi re immediately.

  Mac swung an arc with his left hand, grabbed the goon’s gun hand, twisted it slightly away from pointing at his stomach. Grabbed the gun-hand elbow with his right hand and snapped the goon’s forearm across his knee. The goon was built in the arms but Mac’s adrenaline and speed broke the forearm bones as if he was about to start a camp fi re.

  The goon screamed. The cavalry would be coming.

  Mac pulled the Glock from the goon’s limp hand and hit him in the temple. Hard. The goon sagged back to the lino, blood running out of his head.

  Mac frisked him for a wallet. There was none. He scooped the Heckler, checked for load. An unnecessary yet robotic habit from the Royal Marines.

  A kick sounded at the door.

  Mac breathed fast and shallow.

  Another kick. A man yelling in Bahasa.

  He knelt beside Minky, looked at him hard. Saw the bloke’s eyes, saw a deeper fear. The penny dropped. ‘They got your wife, Mink?’

  Minky shook his head. The shock was making his teeth chatter.

  ‘Daughter?’

  Minky nodded, tears starting.

  ‘I’ll get her, Mink, but you have to tell me where.’

  Minky was on his way out. His eyeballs were rolling back.

  A shot fi red outside the door. No splinters. Minky’s back door was steel.

  Mac slapped Minky. A bladder shot usually gives you ten minutes, but Mac’s slug might have bounced into the leg’s main artery.

  ‘In Makassar? Is that where she is, Minky?’

  Another head shake.

  ‘Is she with Garrison? Tell me, Mink.’

  Minky vomited again. This time green and red. It dribbled rather than poured. A bloke about to cark it.

  Minky looked up, said, ‘Eighty.’

  Mac slapped Minky as his head lolled. ‘What’s that, Mink - you say “eighty”?’ He didn’t get it.

  Minky nodded almost imperceptibly, his face pale.

  Then he was dead.

  Collapsed like a rag.

  More gunshots. The sound of lead pinging around in the door.

  Mac stood, raced to the front door, then had another thought and went back to the Javanese goon. He pulled back the guy’s trop shirt collar. No luck. Then unzipped the bloke’s pants, pulled them down.

  ‘If we don’t tell, then it never happened, hey butch?’

  He grabbed the waistband, pulled it round. Bingo! A pink piece of paper stapled to the tailor’s label. Mac tore the dry-cleaner’s ticket off the pants, grabbed his black wheelie bag.

  He prepared for the worst as he exited. It didn’t come. He walked straight into tourist crowds. Malaysian lawyers and dentists with their kids all kitted out in genuine Sulawesi tribal headdresses.

  He fl owed with them, adrenaline bursting like fi reworks behind his eyes. His vision darted everywhere at once, breathing shallow and raspy. His brain was working so fast he could barely think of anything else except silver Honda, black polo shirt; silver Honda, black polo shirt. Silver. Black. Black. Silver …

  He walked for fi ve minutes like that before he took his hand entirely off his right hip. There didn’t seem to be
a tail. Not from the silver Accord, at least. The two Western-style Javanese hit men probably hadn’t wanted to take their business into the street.

  Mac had got lucky.

  He lurched to a stand of hibiscus behind a bus stop shelter. Vomited.

  For all his reputation as a tough customer, he hated shooting, hated guns and loathed seeing someone die. But no amount of training or experience could stop a trapped and scared animal behaving like a trapped and scared animal. Mac hadn’t shot Minky because he was tough; he’d shot him because he was scared and wanted to control the situation by making the other guy more scared than him. It was a mistake. He’d known that as soon as he pulled the trigger.

  He walked and walked. He backtracked, overlapped and did the oldest trick in the game: turned on his heel suddenly and walked straight back from where he came. It looked natural if you pretended you’d forgotten something. He walked past the markets, down to the waterfront, a thriving fi shing town for a thousand years and now concentrating on netting South-East Asia’s holidaying middle classes.

  The local jihadists were trying to reverse that with the aid of their old friend, potassium chlorate.

  Midday turned into two-thirty real fast.

  He dipped into a series of dime stores of the type that blanket Asia: the ones that sell cigarettes, incense and cigarette lighters where the girl’s bikini drops when you turn it upside down. They sell the local rags as well as Tempo, the Straits Times and the Jakarta Post. Mac bought plain Nokias and pre-paid cellular network cards for a Philippines telco called EastCall. He ducked in, he ducked out. He bought phones from different shops and bought a packet of wet-wipes. He ate goreng at a street stand, sitting back in the shadows where Grandma wrapped spring rolls. He didn’t let his eyes leave the street or his hand leave his right hip, and he cleaned Minky’s vomit off his pants.

  He did numbers: six shots left in the Heckler, but it would have to be dumped. He didn’t want to go back to the Pantai for the Walther - too risky now. He should have taken the goon’s Glock with him, but now he’d have to pick up a gun when he RV’d with Sawtell.

  Would they have a spare? How many more did Garrison have coming for him? And who or what was Minky talking about when he said

  ‘Eighty’?

  He walked some more, looking for a car hire place that wasn’t a big American brand - the CIA data-tapped those franchises quick-smart. And the Americans were starting to look like being part of the problem rather than the solution. Minky was an Agency contractor and the hit squad was probably the same. But whether the ambush was American or Australian, Mac felt relieved that he’d changed the RV with Sawtell from Makassar to Ralla, up the coast. Mac hadn’t been thinking about double-crossings when he’d done that at the last minute. He’d just wanted to keep a posse of highly conspicuous special forces soldiers out of town until he needed them. Now it might give him a day’s head start on whoever was after him.

  He asked around and headed inland to a place called Paradise Holiday Hire Cars. A couple of locals had said it was cheap and reliable.

  And they took cash.

  He passed by the Golden Hotel on the waterfront and watched a bunch of Anglo and Asian junketeers milling around, waiting to get on a tour bus. They looked like IT consultants or telecom engineers.

  Local police lolly-gagged with their assault rifl es. Mac slid in amongst the junketeers, smiling and making quippish non sequiturs to no one in particular.

  Hoo-fucking-rah!

  The junket-lovers were putting their day luggage into a pile to be loaded into the luxury coach. Mac wandered among them with his wheelie case. No one challenged him, probably because he was Anglo. One of the great weaknesses of the coalition of the willing’s War on Terror was its inherent ethnic bias. Something was wrong when a pale-eyed white man could wander through the world’s largest Muslim country and receive less attention than a local.

  Mac bent down, pulled his blue Service Nokia from his wheelie and put it in the side pocket of a carry-all. The name tag on the bag said Richard Taylor, accompanied by a Melbourne address. The ASIS

  listening post would track the junketeers for hours, maybe days, before it sounded all wrong.

  Mac walked another three blocks, found his rental car place and hired a white Toyota Vienta. He paid in cash for ten days and coughed up for an insurance policy which was worth more as emergency bog paper in Sulawesi than as something that would save him from being sued.

  Driving to the outskirts of Makassar, he pulled over into an elevated tourist lookout and tried to collect himself. Rummaging in his safari suit pocket Mac gasped a little at his right wrist as it caught on the fabric. The wrist was now swelling from the kick he’d taken from the goon. He fi shed out the pink dry-cleaner label. It had a serial number under the name SUNDA LAUNDRY - PALOPO. Palopo was a mid-sized coastal town a day’s drive north. If those fl ash slacks had been recently pressed, then Mac was prepared to bet that Garrison -

  probably Judith Hannah and Minky’s daughter too - were somewhere in the vicinity.

  It was all he had to go on. With Minky dead, it would have to do.

  Mac grabbed a set of spare socks from the wheelie bag, tied them together in a knot and pulled the lever to open the gas tank fl ap. He found a stick on the ground, about three feet long, and moved to the back of the Vienta. Pushing the socks into the gas tank with the stick, he held the other end and waited for a few seconds before pulling the petrol-soaked socks out. Unclipping the entire hip rig and Heckler from his belt he knelt and wiped down the gun until the whole thing was shiny with gasoline. He dumped it in a rest area bin and went back to the Toyota, grabbed the Winchester loads and the spare mag, wiped them down with the socks and then dumped them too, along with the socks.

  Then he got on the road for Ralla, where he was meeting Sawtell the following morning.

  He was exhausted. Adrenaline does that to you.

  As he drove he thought back to what he had done with that Service phone. It was only the second time in his career that he’d deliberately slipped Canberra’s internal bugging and tracking.

  And that time he had also suspected the Service had a mole.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mac’s need to win was not a recent development. At Nudgee College in Brisbane, they drafted him into the fi rst XV as a fi fteen-year-old.

  They put him at half-back and the theory was that if he couldn’t handle the knocks they’d pull him out.

  Near the end of that year, Nudgee played Churchie in the annual grudge match: Micks vs Prods. Mac’s mum and dad and sister Virginia came down for the occasion. Mac could tell they were intimidated by the school’s Renaissance architecture and pillared buildings as they took their seats in the bleachers.

  The half-back from Churchie was their captain, a senior and full of lip. The guy wasn’t tall but he was built like a brick one. He got in Mac’s face, sledged him something terrible from the start and didn’t exclude Virginia from his abuse. Mac did it the Nudgee way, with a stiff upper lip.

  At half-time, Mac was in the middle of the fi eld listening to the coach when he became aware of a red-faced, pale-eyed maniac on the sidelines calling his name. In front of the high-society set of Brisbane, Frank yelled in his broadest North Queensland accent: ‘Do something about this wanker - he’s a fl amin’ ponce.’

  His father was right. If the match had been played in Rockie, Mac’s opposing half-back would have copped a slapping quick-smart.

  No more sledging.

  Mac gave Frank the nod. His father walked back up to the bleachers where Mac’s mother whacked him on the forearm, rolled her eyes.

  Virginia stared at Mac, winked.

  At the second half’s fi rst scrum, Mac had the feed. The sledger got too close, trying to edge Mac off his mark. So Mac shifted his weight, lifted his right foot, drove his heel down on the bloke’s foot, putting all his weight on that heel. Wind rushed from the sledger’s lungs, the alloy studs creating agony.

  The sledger
screamed, stood back, eyes rolling in his head. Mac winked at him, blew a kiss. The sledger threw a haymaker, wide-eyed with rage. Mac rolled slightly and copped it above the left ear. Felt like a bowl of ice-cream. The sledger threw another that completely missed. The ref stepped in, sent the bloke off. He had to be escorted by his team-mates.

  Nudgee won and Mac wore the taunts about having the Mad Dad for the rest of his schooling. Mac learned this about himself: he could play the Nudgee game, but he preferred Rockie rules. Which didn’t mean he was right to kill Minky. In golf you didn’t get to choose how your ball lay, and in the intelligence game you often had to work with what you had. Mac’s job now, simply, was to get Judith Hannah and, hopefully, Minky’s girl too.

  There were no guarantees on that second one. Mac was now cut off from Canberra and pretty sure there was a mole in the organisation, either in Jakarta or Australia. Something had gone wrong in Makassar but it had gone wrong in a way that felt basically out of step. In his profession there was a structure to every type of assignment, and small but badly placed elements could make it all feel wrong. It was like hearing a pop tune on the radio thirty times and on the thirty-fi rst time you hear it, you hear the live version and someone changes a few tiny notes. Your brain still hears the song, and you can adapt, but you know instinctively that a pattern has been broken. That’s where Mac was focusing: you didn’t get a last-minute tasking to go to Jakarta from the Asia-Pacifi c director, and then a late-night briefi ng from a combined ASIS-CIA team to go into Sulawesi, and then on the fi rst and only contact you are given, the bad guys are waiting for you. It didn’t happen like that.

  Someone had set it up.

  It came down to a case of who: Tobin? Garvey? Urquhart? That Agency wanker with the He-Man handshake?

  Mac drove all night. He wanted to beat the heat, avoid taking a rest, stay ahead of anyone chasing him.

  The Vienta wheezed up the hills, dying every time Mac needed extra grunt to overtake the hundreds of overloaded freight trucks that populated Indonesian roads by night. The driver’s seat had no cushioning left and most of the asphalt on the blacktop had washed away. Every turn of the tyres was a new jolt that threatened to break the suspension and Mac was constantly throwing the Vienta onto the shoulder of the road as oncoming trucks used the ‘third lane’ to overtake straight down the middle. A nightmare, but negotiating it kept him awake.