Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘The thing we have to remember is that Garrison or Sabaya -

  whoever’s running the show - asked for Hatfi eld by name,’ said Mac.

  ‘Clever,’ said Paul.

  ‘Well, yeah. Ensure confl ict and confusion in the other camp before you make a single demand.’

  They fl ew over the Pasir Panjang terminal, the western-most of the four major terminals at the south end of Singers. To their right, more than twenty large container ships sat at their berths in the other three terminals: Brani, Keppel and Tanjong Pajar. Keppel and Pajar clung to the main island but Brani was a small island in the Singapore Strait, just in front of the larger island of Sentosa.

  Paul trained his binos on the ships below, picked out a name plate.

  ‘Second away from us on the mainland quay,’ said Paul into the mic. ‘That’s our Golden Serpent.’

  Activity around Keppel Terminal seemed to have stopped. The rubber tyre gantries and portainers were stationary.

  ‘The MPA has fi nally gone to Em-Con. Or the cops have done it for them,’ said Mac.

  ‘Em-Con?’

  ‘Emergency contingency.’

  The pilot crackled into their two-way radio chat, ‘I’m being asked to divert. It’s controlled air space.’

  ‘Circle back, mate - go to Plan B,’ said Mac.

  The Gazelle banked hard, dipped and accelerated downward before tearing back along the path it had come. Diving to a very low fl ight path, they zapped back into the Malacca Strait for two miles and then banked hard left at ninety degrees. Mac was convinced the rotor was going to hit the sea and the pilot was not backing off in the speed department.

  Mac swivelled to his right and checked out the two eastern terminals. ‘They’ve shut down Brani and Pajar too. The media will be on it soon.’

  They fl ew low behind Sentosa Island, the peak of the island’s hill hiding the Gazelle from anyone on Golden Serpent.

  The pilot dropped to the beach behind the plush greenery of the Sentosa Golf Club. Paul and Mac checked radios, watches, weapons and cell phones. They threw two black Cordura gear bags onto the sand and jumped out. The pilot and Weenie gave thumbs-up as the Gazelle lifted away, and Mac realised it had dropped a large webbed sling on the beach from a release-hook beneath the fuselage.

  Mac walked over, grabbed the sling and dragged it up the beach beneath a stand of trees and undergrowth. Then went back for the black bags.

  Paul checked radio contact. Ran some tests and redundancies with Weenie.

  Mac got the three gear bags to the undergrowth, unharnessed the four points of the sling, let it fall open and saw a bunch of equipment.

  In its own light canvas bag he saw a folding kayak, known as a Klep.

  There were black nylon webbing sacks which contained goggles, fi ns, weight belts, snorkels and rebreathers. Two of everything.

  Mac exhaled, stared. He knew this stuff from the Royal Marines.

  The thirty-two-week basic commando course had given way to another six months of what they called the ‘canoeists swimmer’ program, the selection course for the Special Boat Service, or SBS.

  It was hell, especially the nocturnal frogman sections. He had learned how to be very scared yet put the fear aside by focusing on a mission. But it didn’t mean he was comfortable having a frogging exercise foisted on him with no warning.

  ‘We okay, mate?’ asked Paul, who had moved up to the stand of trees.

  ‘You ran a database, found my military listings, didn’t you?’ said Mac. ‘And then you dreamed up this shit!’ Mac kicked the Klep.

  ‘Mate, watch the boat,’ said Paul.

  Mac saw confusion and he pulled himself together. The guy was just trying to do his job, and picking another bloke with a military background was the smart thing to do.

  ‘Sorry, champ,’ said Mac, smiling. ‘I walked up, saw that rebreather, and woah!’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s okay. I just have to get psyched into the frogman bit. No more surprises, okay?’

  Paul laughed. Shook his head at the joke of it all. ‘Mate. Glad I’m not the only one.’

  ‘You what?’

  Paul eyeballed him. ‘Let’s just say that if we can do this during daylight, that’d be out-fucking-standing. Know what I mean?’

  CHAPTER 34

  They made it to the top of Sentosa Island in three and a half minutes, through the golf course and skirting the buildings on the top of Serapong Hill. No one from the golf club stopped them. In their ovies they looked like contractors or tradesmen, which was why the British military trained intel and special forces to wear them. They took the shape away from a man, made it harder to see gait, and created a sense that the person must be where he was for a reason. More importantly, the block-colour of the overall took all the observer’s attention, making the face retreat. Add a cap and you became the grey man. For people like Mac and Paul ovies were about the cheapest and most basic building block of fading into the background.

  They edged through trees to reach the top of the hill. To their right they looked down fi ve hundred metres to a new canal residential subdivision. In front of them was Brani Island, sitting in the harbour channel. Beyond that was Keppel Terminal on the main island of Singapore.

  They perched behind a fallen spruce, panting. Paul pulled out the binos, had a quick look. Handed them to Mac. ‘You know what we’re looking for, mate. I’ll get Weenie working for his dough,’ said Paul.

  As Paul keyed the radio and spoke to Weenie, Mac put his eyes to the rubber-coated Leicas. He touched the auto focus a couple of times to make sure there wasn’t a sharper position, then he looked.

  The fi rst impression was total stillness. Port of Singapore was a 24/7

  business and Keppel Terminal was never still. Mac swept from left to right, moving from the massive truck/rail freight interchange depot on the far side of Keppel Road to the end of the terminal beside Keppel, Tanjong Pajar. At Pajar the apron squared off and suddenly fell into open sea and the Singapore Strait.

  No movement.

  He dipped the binos to the foreground. In front of him, on Brani Island, the activity on the container terminal had stopped too.

  To the left of Brani Island Mac saw the causeway that linked Sentosa and Brani islands to the main island. It was chocka, all the vehicles heading in one direction.

  A blast of noise behind them caused Paul and Mac to duck refl exively. It was the Singapore cops telling people to get the hell out of the buildings and the car parks and move across the Gateway Avenue causeway.

  They listened to a man in the car park at the top of the hill argue with the cop. A tense police offi cer snapped back, ‘Get in the car, get across Gateway, and there’s no right turns into downtown today, sir.

  Get on the Ayer Rajah Expressway and go to Malaysia for the day.’

  The cop car moved off down the drive towards the golf club, and Mac heard the man whining to his family, heard the wife say, ‘Let’s just do what he says.’

  Paul continued on the radio while Mac went looking for Golden Serpent through the Leicas. It was a red-hulled vessel, perhaps three years old, with its deckhouse two-thirds of the way down the ship from the bow. It belonged to a Korean shipping company, Golden Dragon Line. All of their ships started with ‘Golden’.

  Mac had her as a nine-thousand-container ship, what they called a Post-PanaMax because it was too big to fi t through the Panama Canal’s locks. It looked fully laden, an absolute shitload of containers to search.

  He scanned back and forth. No movement. Sitting stock still he scanned for any refl ections from inside the bridge. The cloud cover hadn’t arrived yet so there was every chance he might catch a glint.

  Nothing.

  He switched to the cargo decks, looking for any sign of the VX

  bomb. It had been shipped in a forty-foot red container box that looked completely standard, except for a smart box on one end. A smart box would stick out like a household fusebox about halfway up the he
ight of the container. Mac knew what to look for, but couldn’t see it.

  He gave the Leicas back to Paul, who said into the mic: ‘Yeah, mate, get back to me in ten, huh? Cheers, mate.’

  Weenie had jammed into the radio chatter on the Singaporean side, said Paul. ‘Something called the EOC?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘That’s the Emergency Operations Centre. I’m betting it’s down at Tanjong Pajar. It’ll be in the MPA ops centre.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Mate, while you were running around with Aldam Tilao, I was pretending to be all sorts of things. Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘Okay, well they’re fully panicked. Weenie says there’s lots of scream ing and blame mongering,’ said Paul.

  ‘Glad to hear it. Any word on what they’re doing?’

  ‘Evacuating the whole city. Apparently there’s no safe levels of this stuff. You can’t have people wandering around. There’s arguments about that, but a fi re chief has stepped in.’

  ‘That’d be right.’

  ‘Weenie wasn’t sure. He thought the word was Hazmar, or something. Said it sounded Arabic.’

  Mac laughed. ‘It’s HAZMAT.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry.’

  ‘The arguments are jurisdictional. In most EOPs -‘

  ‘Speak English, mate.’

  ‘In most Emergency Operations Plans there’s a command and control chart for who makes the fi nal call. But once it goes to HAZMAT, the fi re chief - in most countries - has control of the ground.’

  ‘Thought you said the Yanks had brought in some classifi ed cavalry? Yanks going to let a fi re chief run the show?’

  Mac didn’t know quite how to explain it. ‘Mate, the bottom line in emergency management is who runs the cops. You can’t run an evacuation without them. And when things get stressed, and people are talking about nerve agent and evacuations, the cops will work with who they know and trust. And that would be the fi re department, not some American general.’

  Paul nodded. Made sense.

  ‘Has Weenie heard anything about what Garrison and Sabaya want? We need to work out where this is going, maybe get there before them,’ said Mac.

  ‘I’ll get back to it.’

  ‘Mate, didn’t bring any tucker did you?’ asked Mac.

  Paul pulled out a couple of protein bars from his breast pocket, chucked one. ‘What, they can’t feed you?’

  ‘Mate, I thought the Australian Air Force was going to personally attend to me. Till you turned up.’

  Munching on the protein bar, Mac looked down on Golden Serpent and, seeing Brani Island between themselves and the ship, made a decision.

  Paul got off the phone. ‘Weenie says he picked up a conversation between a cop and a politician. Something about prisoners? The politician told him he had no jurisdiction over Philippines prisons, let alone over Moro separatists. Weenie’s still on it.’

  Mac stood, looked down at Brani Island. ‘Moros, huh?’

  ‘It’s what he’s hearing,’ said Paul.

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Mate, looks like you saw a ghost.’

  Mac nodded. ‘I don’t buy it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know these guys are pretty smart. They heist a couple of rare birds: VX and CL-20. They hijack a huge container ship and sail it into Keppel Terminal. Right beside the city that’s alongside the busiest port in the world.’

  ‘Pretty smart, I guess.’

  ‘Then the fi rst contact they make is to a US Army general who hasn’t even arrived yet, a move guaranteed to cause confusion and dissent in the Singaporeans.’

  ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘You know, Paul, those two blokes made everything so much harder for the Singaporeans by fi rst making this a terrorism issue, and then compounding things by making it HAZMAT. Think you’ll also fi nd that Interpol have probably listed VX as a weapon of mass destruction. These guys down at the MPA are opening their ring binders at pages they never thought they’d be opening.’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘But the third complicating strategy would have been surprise.

  That would have sealed it. They could have berthed, been picked up by helo, by speedboat, frogged out of there, whatever. And then triggered the bomb with a Nokia as they fl ew off to their suite in the Maldives. Voomph! One hundred and eighty VX bombs aerosoling fi ve hundred metres into the air. Take about two hours for that vapour to descend all over Singapore.’

  ‘Okay. So they didn’t do that.’

  ‘No. They’ve been sitting there.’

  Paul took a moment. ‘What about the Moro demand?’

  ‘If you were Sabaya, would you go to Singapore?’

  ‘Nah, just raid the prison. He’s done it before.’

  ‘Precisely. So what’s he doing in Singers fucking round with namby-pamby political demands? He’s some Brigadi Rossi uni student all of a sudden? That sound like the Abu Sabaya we know and love?’

  Paul nodded, agreeing. If Sabaya wanted someone out of prison, he’d do it Filipino-style: bribe some guards, kidnap the governor’s daughter, show up with some fi repower and walk out of the joint with whoever he wanted.

  ‘Secondly,’ said Mac, ‘have you ever heard of Sabaya making a demand that didn’t have a dollar sign at the front and a handful of zeroes hanging off the back?’

  Paul laughed. ‘Oh mate. You’re good.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No, you’re right. You’re right.’

  Mac put the rest of the protein bar in his mouth and looked across at Golden Serpent. The Singaporeans would have to negotiate with Sabaya and Garrison, but Mac and Paul weren’t under those constraints. They had to get aboard that ship.

  CHAPTER 35

  They swam fast to Brani Island, both happy for the daylight. Mac led, keeping to a depth of fi ve metres. Though hard on the lungs, the rebreather wasn’t as bad as Mac remembered. He focused completely on where he was trying to go to make the fear go away.

  They frogged to the south side of Brani Island where they were expecting no surveillance. The cars were already fl ooding off Brani, and the Singapore Coast Guard were on the water.

  They were naked, dry clothes sealed in their backpacks.

  Mac brought them up beside the stern washboard of a moored mid-sized roll-on/roll-off ship. To their right was the large slipway for ships, and further on was the Coast Guard depot. No cops. No boats against the quay.

  They went up a galvanised iron ladder onto the wharf. To their left was the western extreme of the Brani container terminal. None of the rubber tyre gantries were moving, there was no one to be seen.

  They kicked off the Turtle Fins, looped them over their elbows.

  Shook off the waterproofed backpacks and made for an area where forty-gallon drums had been stored against the side of a wide, squat security building with a central roller door entry.

  Pulling off their nose clips and small swimming goggles they tore the velcroed rebreather bladders from their chests, breathing shallow in the morning sun, not talking. Each man pulled the double seal-lock bags from his backpack and retrieved dry clothes. They wiped themselves dry with a chamois, pulled on undies, put on hip rigs then ovies over the top. Put watches back on, turned them inside their wrists.

  Mac checked the Mark I injector kit: a nerve agent antidote that neither of them had any faith in.

  Paul pulled the radios out of a seal-lock. Booted up.

  Mac pulled the Heckler out, pulled on his Hi-Tecs and did a quick recce, looking for eyes.

  There were several buildings on Brani but the only movement seemed to be the cars of the employees trying to get off the island and onto the Gateway bridge. He couldn’t see to the north side of Brani so he couldn’t see Golden Serpent across the channel.

  Coming back along the southern quay, he looked up at the ro-ro ship. It was white with blue and green piping, no evidence of a shipping line and no name. It seemed out of place amidst the beh
emoths on the other side of the island.

  He froze as something caught his eye. Thought he saw movement on the upper decks, but couldn’t catch it again. Must have been a bird.

  He kept moving, saw that the ship’s rear tail gate was down on the quay. But no people.

  ‘Place is deserted,’ said Mac, returning. ‘Can’t believe this is what they wanted.’

  Paul nodded. ‘I see your point. It seems like a whole lot of trouble to go to and not push the button.’

  Mac had talked Paul into the minimal approach if the bomb was detonated: jump into the water with rebreathers. It might not be foolproof, but VX was water-soluble and if they stayed in the water with their closed-circuit rebreathers they at least wouldn’t be breathing the stuff.

  Paul got through to Weenie, nodded, signed off. ‘Development.

  Our terrorist mates are broadcasting on maritime frequencies. They’re telling other captains what they’ve got and what they’re gonna do with it. They’re giving them an hour to get out of Dodge.’

  ‘I guess they’re still on the bridge, trying to create confusion, huh?’ said Mac, not entirely convinced.

  ‘Weenie reckons the message started going out about fi ve minutes ago.’

  They looked at each other, puzzled. It was the weirdest terrorist incident they’d ever heard of.

  Putting their dive gear into their webbing backpacks, they stowed them and readied themselves to speed-march a route north that would take them through the small forest in the middle of Brani and across the huge city of containers on Brani’s north shore.

  As they set off, Mac thought he heard movement in the security building. Couldn’t be sure because at the same time the still air started vibrating as helos came into view. Two dark Singapore Army Apaches swept low over their position and headed north for the tip of Brani Island. Boeing’s AH-64D was one of the most heavily armed helicopters ever built and their mushroom pod above the main rotor gave them a sinister appearance. But with all their rockets and air-to-air missile capability, Mac knew they’d be pulling up well south of Golden Serpent. There wasn’t much that air power could achieve in the current situation. It would boil down to a couple of men getting onto the ship and doing what they had to do. It would be close-range and Mac was already nervous.