Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  Boo laughed. Big, bamboo-toothed laugh. ‘Missus won’t be happy, I can tell you.’ He let his mouth fall open in a big leer. ‘Might have to play nursie to poor old Barry. Know what I mean?’

  Mac shut the bathroom door, sat on the toilet lid and fi red up the phone with his left hand. His right was so far gone he couldn’t even make a fi st with it. He scrolled down ‘dialled calls’ and hit the one starting with 63.

  The switchboard bloke came on and Mac asked for Captain John Sawtell. Mr Switchboard said, ‘No can do,’ like he was relishing it.

  When Mac asked why not, the bloke said, ‘He’s operational.’

  Mac thought back to their last conversation. Sawtell had said he was on stand-by to go into Manila. Now the CBNRE boys needed more special forces? It must have turned weird.

  ‘Can you patch me through?’ asked Mac. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Can’t do that from a civilian line.’

  Mac knew the rules and why they existed. If you had the right gear and a bit of luck you could pinpoint a military handset from a civilian-originated call. Not something most people would think about, but a handy tool for terrorists and spies.

  ‘Can I get a message to him?’ Mac pushed.

  ‘I can try, sir, but no guarantees.’

  Mac gave him a mobile number and the Indonesian country code.

  He didn’t want to do it that way, but since the I-team had found him he fi gured there wasn’t much cover left to blow.

  ‘Tell him I’ve got something down here that the Twentieth are going to be very interested in, okay?’

  Sonny wanted to move out. He gestured at Mac. ‘Let’s go, Chalks - got something you might want to see.’

  Sonny, Hemi and Billy stowed real quick and made for the door.

  In their grey ovies they looked like the Beagle Boys.

  Mac lingered, wanting to ask more questions. Sonny stood at the door with a Glock behind his back and fl icked his head at Mac.

  Impatient.

  Mac held his hand up and, turning back to Boo, asked, ‘Mate, how did you track me to Makassar?’

  Boo shrugged. ‘Didn’t.’

  Mac looked at Sonny, and Boo got the picture quick-smart.

  ‘You know, Macca, let the mountain come to Mohammad,’ said Boo.

  ‘What the fuck’s he talking about?’ Sonny demanded.

  Mac said nothing.

  ‘We didn’t have to chase you, mate,’ said Boo. ‘Just sit back and wait for you to come to Garrison.’

  Sonny let the door spring shut, came straight over, got in Boo’s face, fi st clenched. ‘Garrison?! What the fuck you know about Garrison, huh Chalks?’

  Mac put his hand out to pull Sonny back, said, ‘Boo, why were you tailing Garrison?’

  Boo shrugged. He was into territory that was now confusing him too. ‘We came in from Tokyo couple of nights ago. Jakarta put us on you; briefed us on Garrison.’

  Mac still didn’t get it. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The theory was since you were associated with Garrison, if we could fi nd him then you’d be around the shop somewhere.’

  Mac was incredulous. ‘ What? I’m not associated with Garrison.

  They sent me out here to kill him fi ve days ago! Jesus Christ!’

  Boo shrugged. Sorry.

  Mac pulled his temper back a notch. ‘Who briefed you, Boo?

  Garvey? Urquhart?’

  ‘Nah. Internal, APS.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Steinhardt and that sheila with the bloke’s haircut.’

  ‘No one from the Service?’

  Boo shook his head. ‘They met us as at the airport, wanted us into Makassar quick-smart.’

  Mac breathed out. He’d been set up. Getting briefed at the airport or a bar was how it worked when someone didn’t want the order taped and logged. It was like a briefi ng that had never happened, a

  ‘tasking’ that never existed. He’d bet the Australian Protective Service had no record of Boo’s assignment and no paper trail linking it to ASIS. All that would remain was a verbal connection between Mac and Garrison. It was as good as saying that Alan McQueen was rogue.

  Mac rubbed his temples with his left hand. He had to think, had to think.

  Sonny stepped in, menacing, gave Boo that look, said, ‘Where’s Garrison? Where is he right now?’

  Boo shrugged.

  Sonny prepped a straight right and Mac leapt in.

  ‘Mate, give me a chance,’ said Boo, holding his good hand in front of his face. ‘Last I saw of Garrison, he was getting on a speedboat down at Hatta.’

  ‘When?’ said Sonny.

  ‘This morning, ‘bout ten to eight.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Sonny, his nostrils fl aring.

  Mac saw fear in Boo’s eyes. ‘Listen, Boo, you and I - we’ve been set up against each other. Right? Me and Sonny, we’ve been chasing Garrison. We’re not with him, right? Had a gunfi ght with his boys three nights ago,’ said Mac.

  Boo nodded.

  ‘So Sonny isn’t going to kill you, right?’ said Mac, turning to Sonny for assurance.

  Sonny said, ‘Not if someone tells me what the fuck’s goin’ on,’

  said Sonny.

  ‘Okay, we watched them load up the speedboat - about a forty footer - with six large gear bags. An Asian bloke seemed to be running the show. There was a girl …’

  Mac was getting impatient. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘They got in the boat, three of them, and took off west.’

  ‘Out to sea?’

  ‘Like there was no tomorrow.’

  Mac could feel Sonny getting restless. Cookie didn’t pay him to try hard, he paid him for results. The way it sounded, Garrison - the walking payday for Cookie - had just sailed off into nowhere. Mac thought about the missing piece of it all. ‘Boo, what puts Garrison together with me? Where did that come from?’ he said.

  ‘He’s been porking your missus - didn’t you know?’

  Mac’s jaw dropped.

  ‘She was the one on the boat,’ continued Boo. ‘I was coming to that. On the boat with Garrison. Tall, blonde. Big sheila.’

  CHAPTER 26

  Mac had only been gulled by a female once in his career and that was early days, in China. Part of his early training with ASIS had seen him infi ltrating the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program, which was still a big tool for the People’s Republic into the 1990s.

  The cultural exchanges and scholarships had become a joke. The Commies would announce that some academic, teacher, political researcher or journalist from a Western country had won one of their friendship junkets and then bring them over to China for a couple of weeks of offi cial wining and dining. They would tour them around the countryside, get them drinking at all opportunities, and wear them down with isolation, fatigue and fl attery. Then they’d lure them into compromising situations and record the whole thing, and when those people were settled back in Melbourne or San Francisco or Auckland, contact them and have a quiet word. The Chinese liked it best when their leftie was closet gay, liked children or had a money problem, gambling debts or a secret heroin habit. Strangely, a sense of being underappreciated was often the best lever for creating an agent.

  The cultural exchange program was an old Soviet trick that had already been overdone by the KGB in the 1960s and 1970s, producing a stream of Marxists in culturally infl uential positions. But the MSS

  was still having fun with it when Mac joined up.

  In the fi rst couple of years in an intelligence organisation, the brass would let the recruits have a shot at different things, to see where their aptitude lay, and also detect weaknesses. When Mac asked if he could infi ltrate the MSS exchange programs, his regional director said, ‘Go for your life.’

  He posed as a freelance journalist, writing socially important articles for the Courier-Mail and the Age under the name of Andrew Stevens. He picked on subjects that the Commies loved: wealth distribution being appalling in the West; the education sys
tem not working for those with no money; women living in Melbourne’s suburb of Broadmeadows having fewer rights than females living in northern Pakistan; Australians and Americans were richer, but Cubans and Vietnamese were happier. All the classics.

  Mac was amazed how easy the stories were to write. Academics spouted forth to him, statistics could be pulled out and twisted to mean what he wanted and social workers would say anything to get in print. He even won an award from a Sydney ‘peace institute’ that had been set up as a KGB front in the 1960s and had somehow become self-perpetuating after the Soviet Union imploded.

  One day the letter from the People’s Republic of China arrived, containing the kind of fl attery and enlisting techniques that Mac knew well. It even quoted lines of his stories back at him. Mac got into character with a shabby suit and a bad haircut, developing a dreamy yet self-righteous manner that he remembered from the socialists at UQ. The Chinese interviewers saw a bloke who started every second sentence with, ‘I feel it’s so important that …’ and appended anti-capitalist remarks with ‘not that I’m really an average Australian’. The panel were impressed, looking at each other and nodding at each other as if to say, He’ll do.

  In hindsight, the MSS probably knew who he really worked for before he landed. And wouldn’t you know it, Mac was bedridden with gastro four days into the junket and was assigned a woman to keep him company while the main junket pack moved on into the interior to look at hydro dams and tyre factories. So Mac lived in Beijing’s Palace Hotel for a week with a woman whose fi rst name contained a jumble of x s and vowels, but who was known in intel circles as Daisy Dau.

  Daisy’s basic approach was to have lots of sex, drink lots of wine and fl atter a man or woman into incriminating confessions. The Palace was part-owned by the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, and it was wired like a recording studio.

  When Mac got back to Canberra and debriefed, the older guys got a laugh out of that for a while. Every young Westerner got pounced on by Daisy Dau. She was beautiful, smart and sexy and renowned for comparing her male companions to Kevin Costner. Ooo, you such strong man, you so handsome, like Krevin Cottner.

  Those had been early days. The Service wasn’t trying to trip him up. He was allowed to call it a learning experience. He didn’t know much and wasn’t a great pillow-talker anyway. He joked with the guys that the MSS listening post had a stack of tapes of an Aussie bloke growling energetically for about thirty seconds, followed by hours of snoring.

  This Diane thing was in a totally different league. It had completely blind-sided him. Through her he had glimpsed a new life, a new way to be in the world. It wasn’t just her sexiness. She was the kind of woman you could have a laugh with and be serious with inside the space of fi ve minutes. She had an appetite and loved a drink, she was shallow and deep. When Mac was a teenager he used to fl ip through Virginia’s magazines, the ones with the sealed sections. He remembered the fresh-faced girls with their clean lines, tans and their fl ashy, confi dent smiles. He’d thought girls like that didn’t actually exist in his world, and even if they did, a boofhead from Rockie wasn’t allowed to meet them. Diane was one of those girls, and he hadn’t had to change a thing about himself.

  She was the only woman in Mac’s adult life who had got him up for a dance. Even though she’d regretted it.

  He’d wanted to go civvie for her.

  He’d bought her a ring.

  And she was screwing a rogue CIA agent.

  Looking back now, there’d been lots of small clues, of course.

  There were the subtle defl ections from Mac meeting Diane’s father which, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been a big deal. There were smaller things he could have picked. The fact she thought the ‘A’

  in ADSL referred to ‘advanced’. Or the time he’d made a joke about IUDs - the contraceptives - and Diane, a bit drunk, continued what she thought was the joke, but punchlined with something about using Nokia phones for detonation. Mac had been confused until it clicked: she must have thought he’d said ‘IEDs’. There were only three types of people who really spoke in terms of IEDs: cops, military and spooks. Certainly, you’d have to be one of those to refl exively translate IUD to IED. You must have it in your head, on your brain, recently been at a symposium or rotated through one of the Israelis’ excellent specialist courses. The ones where they make you dress like a terrorist, show you your raw materials and then get you to make your own Improvised Explosive Device, just like they would in Syria or Malaysia.

  The thing that Mac should never have overlooked with Diane was the occasion when he knew she was at a big IT trade show down at the Jakarta Convention Centre. He’d found her at the Atlas Network Security stand and surprised her. Atlas was in the same area as the stand for a computer security organisation called ASIS.

  Mac had looked across, seen the ASIS - ADVANCING SECURITY

  WORLDWIDE signage and quipped that the name certainly had a ring to it. Diane had touched her nose, eyes darting to the left and back again. Now why would a Pommie IT maven have even a clue what Mac had been smiling about, let alone react to it like that?

  It was amazing how much information a bit of love could gloss over. But it sat there in your subconscious, waiting for the moment when you were ready. And suddenly there was the information, clear as day. A warning light you’d never miss if the agent was a hairy fella with bad breath.

  It reeked of the old squirrel-grip. That and Chanel No. 5.

  Sonny leaned around from his position in the front passenger seat of the LandCruiser. ‘Any big ideas, Chalks?’

  Mac shook his head, ‘I’m waiting for a call from Zam. I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘That doesn’t help me, does it?’ said Sonny.

  Mac shrugged, overcome with exhaustion, suffering excru ciating pain in his wrist and still in shock at the news about Diane. He was rooted.

  ‘Let me say that another way,’ said Sonny, getting annoyed. ‘It doesn’t help us much, right?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Cookie if you want, say it’s my fault,’ said Mac, looking out the window at the passing scenery.

  They were on their way to Hasanuddin Air Base, the military facility that fringed the commercial airport outside of Makassar.

  They’d opted for the scenic route to the Eurocopter because of certain cargo in the luggage compartment - a bound and gagged bloke Mac knew as Ray-Bans.

  Sonny ignored Mac’s offer. ‘You get something out of that cunt back there and no one will have to take the blame for anything.

  I mean, you’re the spook, right Chalks?’

  This was the time that the military guy looked at the intel guy and said, Okay smartarse, do your thing.

  But Mac had no answers. He wasn’t a torturer, didn’t get off on that kind of interaction. Hemi and Sonny had already beaten their captive to a bleeding pulp and it was amazing the bloke was still alive, let alone conscious. Mac had no insights into what the guy might know or not know. Garrison was Agency and Sabaya’s techniques were notoriously cellular, so they’d both be secretive. And Diane was starting to look like a very smart operator who would not be giving much away to the hired help. If Ray-Bans said he didn’t know what was going on then Mac was inclined to give him a fi fty per cent assumption of honesty. He didn’t think the bloke knew anything.

  He was a Sabaya henchman, hired to get Mac out of the way.

  ‘The answer is in the Macassar Strait. Garrison and Sabaya are out there, you can bet on it,’ said Mac.

  ‘I don’t want to bet on anything, McQueen. Understand?’ Sonny fi red back.

  Mac could see why Cookie used him.

  Sonny and his team were being called back by Cookie for a mining situation - something that required a little more pressure than the local cops could exert. They’d want to know that they’d taken care of their excess baggage problems before they left.

  Mac had got Boo and his boys spared on the basis that they weren’t so unlike Sonny and his boys. Mac h
ad had to work on that, emphasising that dead APS blokes would bring POLRI’s Criminal Investigation detectives in from Jakkers. But he didn’t know about the bloke in the luggage compartment.

  They drove past the turn-off to a popular family swimming hole where the waterfall emptied straight into a big pool. Mac’s mind worked overtime, struggling to work out what Garrison and Sabaya were doing, what the missing container in Manila contained and why Garrison had Diane working as a double agent months before this thing had gone down. He had to stay clear on that without the feeling of betrayal muddying everything.

  His immediate goal was to create a scenario where the guy in the back didn’t have to die.

  Mac leaned forward, whispered in Sonny’s ear, ‘I reckon I can get something out of this bloke if we’re alone. You guys go on, leave him with me. Whaddya reckon?’

  ‘I don’t care if you want to fuck him, make him your missus. All I want is something I can take to Mr B. Got that?’

  Mac nodded.

  Sonny’s sat phone trilled and he took the call before passing it back to Mac.

  ‘Hello,’ Mac rasped.

  Cookie Banderjong wanted Mac to stay in touch. Reckoned there was still life in the Garrison-Sabaya thing. Said, ‘Don’t be a stranger, mate. Remember your friends.’

  Cookie was really saying, The trail’s dead for now but if you come back to this island, you’re dealing with me.

  Mac’s head spun and he struggled to breathe properly.

  As Cookie was signing off Mac had a sudden thought. ‘Mr B, if the US military is shipping something to Johnston, what are they doing?’ he said.

  Cookie chuckled. ‘They’re burying their mistakes, mate.’

  Mac said nothing; he was beyond riddles.

  ‘Johnston Atoll is a US Army base about two hundred miles south of Hawaii. It’s a huge incinerator plant out there in the Pacifi c. Hush-hush, run by DIA,’ said Cookie.

  ‘What do they burn?’ asked Mac.

  ‘All their CBNRE stuff - diseases that don’t work, explosives that don’t meet stability specs, dogs with two heads. All that scientist shit.’

  Mac was totally awake again, his heart thumping.