Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Any ideas?’

  Mac thought about it. Didn’t want to throw up a false alarm. ‘If I had to bet on it, I’d say they were heading south, across the Java Sea.

  For Surabaya, maybe Fremantle.’

  ‘You know what that much CL-20 would do to a container load of VX?’ said Hatfi eld, almost whispering.

  ‘Aerosol effect?’

  ‘Damned right, son. Damned right.’

  CHAPTER 28

  Mac made good time to the Pantai, then drove up and down the road on the main entrance, looking for cars and eyes. There was a white Commodore with two men in it. Australian by the look of it.

  He parked at the front doors on the far side of the drop-off area, positioning the HiAce side on to give him some cover when he got out. Leaving the motor running, he went in through the front lobby, hoping it would look like a trade delivery. He slapped down his Richard Davis passport at the front desk. The girl behind the desk was reading Vanity Fair. She got up in a hurry, smoothed her skirt.

  Mac winked. ‘About that story on me - don’t believe a word of it.’

  The girl rolled her eyes and Mac showed his deposit box key. ‘Like to make this fast. Got a plane to catch.’

  They made their way down into the security basement and Mac walked up to the box behind the desk girl. They opened it and Mac simply piled everything from the box into his backpack, zipped it up, shut the deposit box and left the basement.

  He got to the van and pulled out into the street, keeping an eye on the white Commodore in his mirror. It pulled out, followed.

  Mac had choices: lose them or confront them.

  He sped up, slowed down, waiting to see if they’d make a move.

  It was two am in Makassar and the two cars had the roads largely to themselves. He sped up and slowed down, ran a red light and made the tail come with him. There was a line of taxis outside the Kios Semarang, an upstairs nightclub haunt of the expat community.

  Across the road from it was a narrow Dutch-built alley.

  He drove around the block again and, fi nding the other end of the alley, pulled in beside it so the HiAce blocked it lengthwise. He leapt from the van and took off down the alley. The Commodore pulled up behind him and he could hear a door open and a bloke say ‘Fuck it’ in an Aussie accent as he realised he couldn’t get by the van to get into the alley. The door shut again and Mac heard the V6 scream off round the block.

  Mac stopped and sprinted straight back to the HiAce, leapt in and swung around, making a dogleg exit from Makassar with as many illogical turns as he could. He drove conservatively, not wanting POLRI asking questions about the monkey window. On the outskirts of the city it was dark with no street lighting. Mac swung onto the road to Hasanuddin and fl oored it.

  He had a fl ight to catch.

  Mac waited under the trees over the road from the fl oodlit security gate at Hasanuddin Air Base. He’d left the joint hours ago with no worries because Cookie had arranged it. But he wasn’t game to stand there at two-thirty am and tell some MP and his dog that he should be allowed back in. He didn’t want to test his luck in the early hours.

  He was back in his blue overalls, the Walther .38 in a hip rig beneath the ovies. He wore his black Adidas cap. Everything else he might need was in the pack.

  Lying down, he looked at the stars. Conserving his energy, he tried to map out exactly what he was doing. Boo and his boys had obviously escaped from the Pantai, where Mac had left them in their fl exi cuffs. The spook who called himself Paul and claimed to be MI6

  seemed to have slipped out without anyone noticing and the four hundred dollars would get him from Hasanuddin to Manila. Maybe.

  Where Mac went from here was a bit of a guess. He was as surprised as Hatfi eld when he came up with his Surabaya scenario.

  He hadn’t been planning to say it. Didn’t want to sound like a nutter, but that’s what it had sounded like: a container ship carrying what amounted to a VX bomb would sail into a major South-East Asian port and detonate.

  The impact would be incredible. If you could get the right winds behind you, and get the VX to erupt far enough into the atmosphere, the body count could be huge. Mac had said Surabaya because he was thinking about a ship sailing south-bound from Manila down the Macassar Strait. Where was the biggest city? Across the Java Sea in Surabaya, where the city of three million people was totally built around the ports and most of the citizens lived in densely populated shanty towns. Surabaya was also built at sea level - low enough to have fl ooding problems. A nerve gas vapour would have no problems descending to where lungs were inhaling.

  Mac had no idea what Hatfi eld and his CBNRE team were going to do. They had the weight of the White House and Pentagon behind them. But how would you search every ship? And if the ship was already in port, wouldn’t an interdiction by the US Army just get the bomb detonated?

  The Madura Strait that passed by Surabaya was a busy shipping lane - one of the world’s busiest for oil supertankers. And Surabaya’s port was as busy as Jakarta’s. The shipping world measured container movements by the shortest containers - the twenty-footers - even though many of the containers were thirty and forty feet. So all movements were listed as TEUs, or Twenty-foot Equivalent Units.

  Surabaya’s major port, Tanjung Perak, had a throughput of about seven thousand TEUs every day. The three hundred ships that went through Surabaya each month had a pre-paid schedule for berthing and loading/offl oading. The commercial disincentive for the port master to shut down the port and allow the docked vessels and those standing off to be searched was substantial. If the request came from a Yankee and the substance they were searching for was odourless and colourless, Mac couldn’t see how that was going to work. Indonesia’s path to full economic development would be predicated on its maritime importance and it could not afford to be seen as a dangerous or money-losing shipping destination. A container ship had to carry a stowage plan showing exactly which container was in which bay, row and pier. They were all numbered, sure, but when you had a ship with eight thousand containers on board you’d be looking at three or four days to search it. And what if the ship with the VX wasn’t going to Surabaya? What if it was bound for Lombok or Denpasar? That was turning into a shitload of containers to be searched - and when?

  Tonight? Dawn? All at once?

  His other concern was that last sighting in Makassar. Just because Sabaya, Garrison and Diane were seen speeding westward from the dock, it didn’t mean they intended to board the ship with the VX on it. They could have been planning something totally different. Sabaya’s chosen MO had always been to travel separately from any heisted cargo.

  The VX could be going in the opposite direction, up to Shanghai or Yokohama, or across the Pacifi c to Oakland or Long Beach. Garrison might have spotted a tail, decided to put everyone off the track.

  That’s what Mac would do.

  Intelligence people didn’t work on ‘cases’ like cops. Spooks built a picture, synthesised information, had an area of specialty. The only reason Mac’s specialty had any currency with the US Army’s Twentieth was that his covert work had a regular overlap with Special Forces.

  He couldn’t afford to screw this up. He needed some shuteye to deal with it properly. Lying down and using all the meditation tricks he’d been taught in the Royal Marines - as well as being chosen for their ability to deal with extreme pressure they’d been shown a trick or two - he slipped into a restless sleep.

  Mac awoke to his phone vibrating in his breast pocket.

  ‘McQueen, Hatfi eld. Twentieth. How you doing, son?’

  Mac croaked something out. He still felt rooted. Could have slept for another day.

  ‘We’ll touch down in about fi ve. Refuel. I’ll send someone over to the main gate. Still up for this?’

  ‘Sure am, sir.’

  There were a few mis-cues between the men. Mac made to start a sentence a couple of times and then stopped.

  ‘Everything okay, son?’

 
‘I was just wondering what Jakarta had to say, sir. About me, I mean.’

  ‘I have a request in for a secondment of Alan McQueen, aiding the United States Army in a crucial CT operation,’ said Hatfi eld.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Well I had to go through the proper channels, Mr McQueen.

  Through CINCPAC. Which means I haven’t heard back yet.’

  ‘Gotta love those offi ce guys.’

  ‘Pride of the Pentagon,’ Hatfi eld chuckled. ‘By the way, McQueen, I don’t have to lecture you on Army SOPs, do I? Helos, comms, appropriate behaviour - that sort of thing?’

  ‘Right as rain, sir.’

  Six minutes later an Indonesian Air Force MP came out of the bullet-proof glass cage and signalled with a fl ashlight into the trees, calling, ‘Queen, queen!’

  Mac presented himself for the search and the wand. Another MP

  stood back with the German shepherd. Mac declared the Walther. The bloke put his hand out and Mac handed it over.

  They were halfway across the sprawling area of Hasanuddin in a black LandCruiser Prado when Mac had a sudden pang about Diane.

  He’d been dumped before. He’d been told off, passed over and left behind for better things. But he’d never felt such a cold touch. He wondered if she’d known who he was. Odds on. Wondered if she fully knew the reputations of Garrison and Sabaya. His mind circled the past. How far back? That trade fair in Jakarta in May? Was she a plant? Had she just seen me as a target of opportunity? All that bullshit he’d told her about what he did for a living? Was she part of the ‘Paul’ set-up?

  There was another feeling, even stronger than his embarrassment.

  Diane and Garrison had made a fool of him, but his real instincts were protective. He prayed to God he hadn’t left them a trail to Jenny.

  The US Army contingent milled in front of an unmarked hangar at the northern edges of Hasanuddin, the whole place lit up like a Vegas showroom. There was refuelling going on and the air was thick with fumes, humidity and dust. Mac clocked two Chinook CH-57D

  tandem-rotor helos, four Black Hawks and lots of US military types with their bad haircuts and drab T-shirts.

  The MP stopped the Prado, walked Mac over to a group of soldiers and asked for Hatfi eld. One of the soldiers peeled off, escorting them to the second Chinook. The soldier walked up the fold-down stairs, stuck his head in. Came back down. They waited. A middle-aged man in tropical battle dress uniform stuck his head out, full head of white hair. ‘McQueen?’

  ‘That’s me, sir.’

  Hatfi eld came down the stairs, shook Mac’s hand with a soft grip.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, son. Sorry about all this fuss.’

  Mac liked him immediately. In a huge military outfi t like the US

  Army, there was a lot of discretion about how much plumage the brass could wear. Hatfi eld wore BDUs of the same pattern and cut as his men. His only identifi er was the word HATFIELD on standard tape over the right breast pocket. His aide sidled up while Mac was being introduced to Hatfi eld’s offsiders. Mac noticed that he and the retinue called him ‘General’. Mac liked that too - they could have said ‘sir’.

  Mac sensed an outfi t where there weren’t too many offi ce guys round the shop. He might just fi t in. It was unusual for US Army generals to fl y around in Chinooks. Earning that rank gave you the right to sit in leather armchairs in DC and go to fi ve-star lunches in Manila. Mac only knew of two other generals who fl ew around the world in helos, commanding directly some of the brightest people in any military organisation. They did so because of the decisions that had to be made on the ground in real time. They weren’t the kind of judgements that could be phoned in and they couldn’t be made by a less experienced or qualifi ed person.

  The MP handed Mac’s Walther back to him. The seven-shot .38

  felt like a pea-shooter among the special forces gear.

  ‘Thanks, champ,’ said Mac.

  He looked across the US Annex apron, saw Sawtell and his boys stowing extra bags from the back of a Toyota pick-up truck, saw what looked like Navy SEALs in black Nomex doing the same thing at their Black Hawks. The Army Special Forces boys were eyeing off the SEALs, Spikey sneering at one in his biker bandana. The Green Berets might be the hard men of the special forces world, but the SEALs were certainly the rock stars.

  Hatfi eld motioned the team, including Mac, into his Chinook.

  Four of them fi led in and Hatfi eld waited at the top of the fold-down steps. He shepherd-whistled at Sawtell, waved him inside.

  The Chinook was large. Shorter than a 737 but wider. There was a situation room near the front, just behind the cockpit stairs. It consisted of a round map table bolted to the fl oor and fi ve padded swivel stools also bolted down. There was a bank of three computer terminals along the side of the aircraft. One of them was a black SGI screen, the hardware behind the Powerscreen systems that allowed the Americans to take satellite imagery and computer-model them into 3-D, moving images.

  Further aft of the situation room, there were eight airline-styled seats with what looked like pillows and blankets on them. Mac felt his eyelids drooping just looking at them.

  Two men looked over the table at him, one in Army BDUs with no name tape, the other in grey ovies. Hatfi eld introduced them as DIA and referred to Mac as Australian intelligence. ‘This is Alan. The guy who put that pizza box thing together with Abu Sabaya. Remember that?’

  The DIA spooks showed no enthusiasm as they shook hands with Mac. The senior one, in the ovies, called himself Don. He got straight to the point.

  ‘You know where the shipment is?’

  Mac shook his head. ‘Do you?’

  ‘It’s serious, Mr McQueen,’ said Don.

  ‘Sure, so why’d you lose it?’

  Don narrowed his eyes at Mac, who looked back, unblinking.

  The bloke had got all cute with knowing his last name. It was a no-no in the intel world, unless you were desperately trying to prove something.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ said Mac, ‘Sabaya’s like a black belt in this stuff. He wrote the manual on it. He’d have had one person, maybe two, in the security annexe - what’s it called?’

  ‘Hazardous Cargo Control area.’

  ‘That’s the one, HCC. I’d say the VX will be in the same container your Technical Escort guys loaded it into. It’ll just have new, non-military markings and it may have been painted.’

  ‘I don’t follow how Sabaya could defeat the microdot tracking,’

  said Don. ‘What’s this about degaussing?’

  Mac wasn’t much of a scientist, but he could give the basics.

  ‘Well, every steel structure has an electromagnetic current running through it, and it runs in one direction which creates what they call a signature.’

  ‘Like a ship?’ asked Don.

  ‘Yeah. And you can change the current and therefore the signature by introducing electromagnets and strategic copper coils. Navies do it to defeat signals intelligence on their ships and subs.’

  ‘So … ?’

  ‘So the container pirates in this part of the world use degaussing on containers, and if they get it right it defeats the microdots. You can’t track them.’

  Don and Hatfi eld glared at one another.

  ‘So the agent is still in the same box?’ asked Hatfi eld.

  ‘That’s the Sabaya MO, sir. There’s about twenty million containers in circulation around the globe with an annual theft rate of four per cent. This is happening all the time.’

  Don couldn’t grasp it. ‘Why wouldn’t they take the material out of the container and put it somewhere else?’

  ‘Because Sabaya isn’t a terrorist in the traditional sense,’ said Mac.

  ‘He’s not on a suicide mission, he wants to make money. So he makes it easy for himself and pulls a sort of three-card trick. You know those guys on the corner?’

  ‘Yep, sure do,’ smiled Don.

  ‘That’s what Sabaya does. The container d
oesn’t get opened. Who’d want to try and open a container full of nerve agent?’

  The group nodded.

  ‘The container just gets put somewhere else. It’s just another container box, going onto a ship, coming off a ship, being stacked.

  It’s just that they think it’s something else.’

  ‘So where does it go?’

  ‘It goes on to a different ship at Manila, but with a new RFID

  tag on it. A legit RFID tag. A tag that the stevedores can tick off as belonging on the ship they are loading.’

  The RFID tags sealed most containers going between major ports.

  They identifi ed the container and included an electronic manifest which could be checked by scanning. They were ‘sealed’ onto the container doors so an RFID tag meant that the shipping company and freight forwarders certifi ed what was inside. The US Department of Defense sealed all its containers with proprietary RFIDs. Mac knew you couldn’t ship a container through MICT without such a tag.

  ‘The DoD container with the new tag is shipped to another port where it comes off as a legitimate container and can be moved to a warehouse somewhere. You let the shipping system work for you. That’s how most heists now work across South-East Asia.’

  ‘That easy? Can’t be that easy,’ said Don, sceptical.

  Mac gave them the example of a car with a tollway e-tag on the windscreen. The tag is registered to the car. But if someone took the e-tag off that car and put it on another, the electronic scanners would record that the original car had gone through the toll gates. It was the same with RFID tags on containers.

  ‘There is a catch,’ said Mac.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Hatfi eld.

  ‘Catch is, General, that I need two things to do this properly. I need someone on the inside, down at MICT, to do the actual switcheroo.

  It should take fi ve, ten minutes. Second, I need to have another RFID

  tag to seal that box. And it will have to match with what the Customs guys at Surabaya are expecting. This only works if I have a mimic of what the next port is expecting. So I need to fi nd a real container with a real RFID tag going to a real location. And then steal it.’