Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  Mac shrugged.

  ‘You asked me if our side had someone infi ltrated to Garrison, remember? I said I didn’t know,’ said Paul.

  ‘Yeah, got ya,’ said Mac.

  ‘That’s her, mate,’ said Paul, jigging his thumb over his shoulder.

  Paul and Mac looked at one another. At every meeting of even friendly intel types, there was a point where you had to decide if you were going to divulge, or bullshit.

  Mac’s brain spun. He decided to half-divulge, see what it would fl ush out. ‘You know, I thought she was a double,’ he said.

  ‘For who?’ asked Paul.

  Mac smiled at him. The Poms knew Mac had been sleeping with her. Must have. They had him logged going into the British compound, they had Carl to debrief, they had tapes logged of Mac’s night in the cottage. They had prints and DNA, if that’s what they wanted.

  ‘Well, put it this way, mate,’ said Mac. ‘She was enlisting me but actually working with Garrison.’

  ‘Coincidence. I mean, you’re gorgeous. Not that you’re my type.’

  Mac sniggered. ‘She was enlisting me while I was being stalked by Garrison and Sabaya.’

  Paul nodded. ‘She was driving that BMW, too, right?’

  ‘Didn’t see her struggling to escape her captors,’ said Mac.

  ‘And according to Wylie, she was driving the tender craft that took Garrison and Sabaya and the Canadian hostage to Brani.’

  Mac had said enough, now he wanted answers. ‘So she’s working for you lot? What capacity?’

  ‘Then I’d have to kill ya.’

  ‘Where’d you pick her up?’

  ‘POLRI found her wandering around on the road to Bogor. She was disoriented.’

  ‘Beaten up you mean? You guys do that?’

  ‘Nah, mate. Sri - the big one with the white shirt - he reckons it’s scopolamine. Something like that.’

  ‘That’s what they did to Judith Hannah,’ said Mac.

  Paul poured the tea. ‘Thought you might like a chat with her?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She might open up to you.’

  ‘Why? She was just playing me.’

  ‘Never know, mate.’

  The fact Paul had even got him down to another outfi t’s cabin was a big fi rst step. The way it worked was Mac was supposed to reciprocate. Show good faith.

  Mac jiggled his tea bag. ‘What are we trying to fi nd out?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Usual. Is she one of ours? Is she doubled? What does she know about Garrison and Sabaya’s plans that we should know? Just a reminder that that’s what she was sent out to do.’

  ‘What do we know so far?’ asked Mac.

  ‘You’re right about Brani Island and that ship. Something is going on there. She said they called it ‘the stuff’. She doesn’t know what they’ve taken off with. But they did take off with something from Golden Serpent, according to her. They called it the insurance policy.’

  ‘She’s telling the truth in one regard. The US Army has lost a VX

  bomb during the hostage drama.’

  ‘Okay. That’s one tick for her. She says she was a hostage after that.’

  ‘She didn’t look too scared in that BMW,’ said Mac.

  ‘Well this is it, mate. She reckons they injected her with the scopolamine and interrogated her on the road to Bogor. The goons wanted her dead. Garrison saved her. Had some theory about how he doesn’t kill his lovers.’

  ‘Man of integrity.’

  ‘Real gentleman.’

  ‘Sounds like you got it all, mate,’ said Mac.

  ‘It’s not adding up for us. Have a crack?’

  ‘Can I do it without an audience?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Sure. We’ll be on the patio.’

  Diane curled her legs under herself and turned to Mac on the sofa beside her. ‘So, don’t tell me - you’re the good cop, right?’

  Mac looked at her, stony-faced.

  ‘This is shit. I should be in a hospital, Richard. Not putting up with this sexist crap!’

  She yelled it so the blokes on the patio could hear. The one called Sri turned, looked in through the glass and went back to his tea.

  Mac realised he still liked her. ‘Sexist?’

  ‘They train us up, just like the blokes. They assign us, just like the blokes. They even pay us the same. But when it comes down to it, as soon as they ask you to infi ltrate a man’ - she curled her fi ngers over, making inverted commas - ‘then you’re a slut.’

  Mac raised his eyebrows.

  ‘But wait, there’s a catch,’ said Diane. ‘You’re this special breed of slut who’s actually virginal and innocent. So you sleep with a man once and you’re so overcome by the amazingness of the experience that you become a double agent just to be with him forever.’

  ‘Didn’t know I was that good,’ said Mac.

  Diane laughed, shook her head. ‘Not you. Bloody hell! You were a mistake.’

  ‘A mistake?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were who you were, okay?’ she said.

  ‘Until when?’

  Diane gave him the look. ‘Don’t get cheeky.’

  Mac looked into his tea. ‘You telling these blokes everything?’

  ‘I’m doing what I can. You ever been doped up?’ she asked.

  Mac thought about it. ‘No. Don’t think so.’

  ‘Well it blots things out, leaves some things clear. That’s why I’ve been telling them I need some medical care, get detoxed from this stuff. But I’ve been up all night going over it. I need rest, not interrogation.’

  ‘What can’t you remember?’

  She rolled her eyes, like duh!

  Mac thought about it. ‘Let’s see if I can jog your memory. That souvenir Garrison and Sabaya took off the ship?’

  ‘Yeah. The comms gear?’ she said.

  Mac shook his head. ‘They’ve got a VX bomb. Took it from the container.’

  Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Why? Why would they do that?’

  ‘I need you to tell me.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s a hundred-pound bomb, so it can be lifted by one strong man. You can drive around with it in the boot of a car, walk it onto a train, hide it in a sports stadium, leave it in a mosque …’

  Diane was silent, a blank.

  ‘So where are they headed?’ asked Mac.

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Diane, you have to think about this. Where are they going?’

  She shook her head. ‘North? Maybe? I don’t …’

  She was synthesising, trying to please him. In Mac’s experience, when an interrogation got to this point you either went straight to the hard stuff, or you let them rest. He’d try to get something from her, maybe spare her the unpleasantries.

  ‘Okay, what do they want with the VX bomb?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t even know it was a bomb until you told me,’ she complained. ‘Stop trying to trick me, okay? I’ve been up all night with that shit.’

  He couldn’t tell if she was lying. She was tired, there was a drugs component and Sabaya and Garrison were not the kind of people to tell their secrets to a fl oozie. There was no reason to tell her they had a VX bomb or where they were taking it. On the other hand, Diane may have been turned by Garrison and been planted back in the British camp to keep an eye on things. It had happened thousands of times before - it was the basic building block of counter-espionage.

  He went for the easiest question of the day. ‘Diane, what’s on that ship?’

  Her eyes sparked up. ‘Gold!’

  ‘Gold?’

  She nodded. ‘Thousands of tons of the stuff.’

  Mac continued on for a while but didn’t get any further. He was a pro, she was a pro. They both knew the game and they weren’t getting anywhere.

  He wanted to talk about them, work out the real stuff. The cabin was wired for sound and Mac knew the boys from Six would have a great old laugh about McQueen grovelling to a bird.
But he didn’t give a rat’s. ‘I thought you were the one. You know that, don’t you?’

  She shrugged, offhand, her beautiful pale eyes suddenly looking cruel.

  ‘That it?’ asked Mac. ‘A shrug?’

  Diane gave him an impassive look. ‘Guess it’s wrong girl, wrong number.’

  Mac didn’t get females sometimes.

  CHAPTER 45

  Mac opened the patio doors. The bloke called Sri looked him up and down, exhaled smoke and fl icked the butt over the edge without looking where it would land. Mac hated that.

  ‘She needs sleep, guys. Get her down to MMC,’ said Mac.

  The blokes glanced at one another. All Poms, but looking like a spectrum of Asia: Paul Filipino-Mex, the other bloke Chinese and Sri with his southern Indian fi zzog.

  Sri was obviously in charge and seemed like the guy who looked after the pliers and crocodile clip department. Mac clocked his big wrists and forearms, had a fl ash of what he’d do to Diane.

  Mac may have just been played by a beautiful woman, but he also felt disgust at what Sri might be planning to do next. Maybe his lust and love for Diane were still there. Couldn’t work that one out. What he knew was that torture and bashing were the lazy spook’s way of doing his job.

  Sri and Mac stared at one another and Paul stood, grabbed Mac by the arm. They walked back into the kitchen.

  ‘Watch it, mate,’ said Paul.

  ‘What? That wanker?’

  ‘Not in the Marines now, tough guy. I’m telling ya, friendly like, don’t fuck with Sri.’

  ‘Diane’s lost it, mate. Drug-fucked. Detox her and let it come back. Do it natural,’ said Mac.

  Paul nodded, smiled.

  ‘What?’ said Mac.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Mac felt a blush start. ‘You’ve got a fi lthy mind, know that?’

  ‘Oh, come on, mate.’

  ‘Me come on? Would Sri be so keen for the wet work if Diane was a bloke?’

  They stared at each other.

  Paul looked away fi rst. ‘So what did you get?’

  Mac thought about it. ‘Well she had no idea they’d taken nerve agent off Golden Serpent.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And that white ro-ro ship on Brani? They did steal it. And it’s loaded with gold.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ said Paul. ‘How much?’

  ‘A lot, she reckons. Starting to see a motive?’

  Paul shook his head. ‘The greedy cunts!’

  ‘Not what I’d write in my report, but you’re getting there.’

  Mac noticed something. Looked down at Paul’s chest. ‘What the hell’s that?’

  Paul looked down, pulled apart the dome fasteners on his new grey ovies. There was a massive black and blue bruise on the right pectoral. An egg yolk was developing in the middle.

  ‘Christ, mate!’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah, imagine it without the kevlar.’

  ‘Spaghetti bolognaise,’ said Mac.

  ‘Fucking paella with Tabasco.’

  Mac saw the oven clock. ‘Mate, gotta be somewhere at noon.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Man about a dog,’ said Mac.

  ‘You too, huh?’

  They got out of the Humvee, into the intense heat and humidity of a late morning at Halim Air Base. Mac had it at thirty-seven degrees.

  The MP got out of the driver’s seat, came around and gave Paul his SIG and Mac his Heckler.

  A bunch of Army guys toted bergens to a Black Hawk and John Sawtell appeared out of a hangar behind them. Back in his BDUs and wearing a boonie hat and sunnies, Sawtell greeted the spooks. Mac wondered if he’d been drinking last night, trying to erase the memory of the kids in the container.

  Mac kicked it off. ‘Mate, need a detour to Brani Island. Can do?’

  ‘Can do, my man. Didn’t DIA tell you? You guys are calling the shots.’

  They hugged the coast back up to Singers, Sawtell sitting behind the pilot. The other six sat in webbing hammock seats in the back.

  Mac keyed the mic and asked Sawtell why they appeared to be going a slower return route. They’d come straight over the sea on the way into Jakkers.

  ‘Asymmetric routes,’ Sawtell shouted above the din. ‘Never fl y an exact return route. Never know who’s down there with a SAM, waiting for you to come back the way you went.’

  The fl ight would take an hour and a half. Mac relaxed, trying to put pieces of the puzzle together. See how it worked out.

  It looked like Garrison and Sabaya had planned the Golden Serpent to heist a shipload of gold. It seemed like a lot of trouble to pull a heist.

  Maybe it worked if you saw it through locals’ eyes? If Mac took the Edi approach - that Sabaya and Garrison were carrying out an inciting incident to give the Chinese naval base more leverage - and added that to the Cookie theory that wherever Sabaya and Garrison went, there was loot, then what you had was a unifi ed theory. Sort of.

  Mac wasn’t going to buy it just yet. If it was that simple, then where did the stolen VX bomb fi t in? Just a decoy to keep the port closed down a bit longer, to get the Americans and British and Singaporeans searching for WMDs rather than a shipload of gold?

  Maybe.

  Other things pulled at Mac’s mind. Who did the gold belong to?

  What was it doing on Brani? How did they heist the whole thing?

  An inside job? Pretty big inside job - Diane had said there was thousands of tons of the stuff. He wondered what that looked like.

  Mac joined the hook-up to Don as Brani Island came into sight. Don had satellites, AWACS, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and the US Navy sweeping for the stolen ship, but fi nding it was not proving easy.

  They couldn’t get a proper ID on the thing and the Singaporeans were proving cagey about why it was unmarked, who owned it and who was operating it. Basic stuff but no response.

  ‘Can you get the State Department to insist?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Already asked,’ said Don.

  ‘Have you told the Singaporeans that it’s transporting a stolen cache of VX nerve agent?’

  ‘Sorry, McQueen. That’s classifi ed. It’s not the kind of thing we discuss.’

  ‘Well, around in circles we go again. Just like nine-eleven, huh?’

  ‘Oh, come on, McQueen.’

  ‘Looks like it to me. The Singaporeans won’t tell you about the ship.

  You won’t tell about the VX. Same old same old. Just like the Agency and the Bureau.’

  There was a pause. Mac leaned over, pointed out the southern point of Brani where he wanted to land.

  ‘Look, I’m about to talk with them again,’ said Don.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Mac. ‘Tell this Singers bloke, tell him from me that that’s the last time I show my arse on global television to save his crummy container port.’

  Don laughed, wearily. ‘Think it’ll work?’

  ‘Chinese sense of humour, mate. Might do the trick.’

  Mac felt the Black Hawk descending. To the right, Golden Serpent was still in port, bio-hazards swarming her like an army of white ants.

  The portainers removed containers - probably to work out what else was on the ship. It’s what the Twentieth were known for. They’d take that thing apart like they were watchmakers, and the delay would be driving the Singaporeans nuts.

  Mac had been thinking more and more about how and where the Chinese fi tted into this. He was leaning towards the Indonesian interpretation and decided to twig Don to a possible Chinese angle.

  ‘Don, mate, have a good think about this: is there an alternative you can talk to in the Singapore government?’ asked Mac.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you may be dealing with someone who’s stonewalling, perhaps on behalf of the Chinese.’

  ‘What, you mean that whole conspiracy about whether CIA or MSS is running Singapore?’ said Don.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ said Mac. ‘The Singapore power structure is split between being gener
ally pro-China on security grounds, and totally anti-China on Commie grounds. When it comes to this ship, I’d be trying to speak with someone who doesn’t trust the PLA as far as you could spit them. Reading me?’

  ‘Copy that. I know just the man.’

  The security building was partially sunk into the ground, like a bunker

  - as if the thirty metres it rose into the air had been pushed up out of the surrounding quay apron.

  Mac, Paul and Sawtell walked the perimeter while the troopers stayed by the Black Hawk. After one full circuit Sawtell stopped at the front, said, ‘Well that’s it, ladies. Two entry points: security vehicular roller door - high-tensile steel, custom fabricated by the looks of it.

  And a security pedestrian entry which looks like one of those Austrian vault doors.’

  ‘Security building,’ said Paul.

  ‘Locked down tighter than a Q-store,’ added Sawtell, smiling.

  Mac looked at the concrete driveway, saw faint dirty tyre marks in a line between the roller door and the rear of where the roll-on/roll-off ship had berthed. He looked at Sawtell. ‘Gotta get in there, John.

  Can do?’

  Sawtell shrugged, called to Jansen, said he wanted guys on the roof too, checking any entries through the air-con or a ceiling window.

  All around the island the thromping sound of helos fi lled the air. The DIA and Twentieth were still looking for their VX in the most obvious places: in a line between Golden Serpent and Brani Island.

  They dangled huge alloy pods below the aircraft and fl ew at about ten miles per hour along the top of the water. They’d be picking up every old anchor and car wheel that had ever gone to the bottom, but that was going to have to be part of the process.

  Jansen and his sidekick started on the pedestrian door. Spikey made quick work of getting onto the roof and came back almost immediately, looked over the roof line, and said, ‘Ducted air-con.

  Send up the jockey.’

  Special forces spent a lot of their time training to get into places they weren’t supposed to be in. For that reason, most units had their unoffi cial ‘jockey’ - a smaller man who could pull the kind of break and enters someone like John Sawtell was not built for.

  A sinewy little bloke Mac recognised as Fitzy ratted up the rappel rope in three strides and hauled himself over the edge sideways like he was on a pommel horse.