Mark Abernethy - Double back

‘I’ve got two masks, gloves for Didge -’

Robbo looked Mac in the eye. ‘You were going to tell Didge when? When you got the top off the fucking ventilator?’

That was precisely what Mac had intended, though he decided not to say so.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Mac. ‘That’s the gig.’

‘That’s the gig?’ demanded Robbo. ‘You mean, if the dumb soldiers knew where they were taking you, we might find a way not to get there?’

Mac just shrugged.

Sighing, Robbo gave Didge a look and then turned back to Mac. ‘Why is it, McQueen, that all of you spooks are just total fuckers?’

The army trucks continued transporting people out of the facility as Mac cased the campus from behind the middle ventilator. After the flare-up about vaccines and diseases, Mac was leaving the topic alone with Didge. Mac harboured his own fears about scientists playing with diseases, but his objective was to infiltrate the underground section of Lombok – the fact that it could be a drug lab was only very small comfort.

The paddock area had been dog-free for twenty minutes thanks to the Xanax baits and the five floodlights around the paddock were weak enough to create darkness around the ventilators.

After a concerted effort, Didge loosened the final screw on the circular vent cover and he and Mac lifted it off in silence, placing it quietly on the grass beside the vent.

‘Cap off, Blue Leader. How we doing on the circuit boards?’ asked Mac over the headset.

‘Standing by, Albion,’ said Robbo, cool but professional. ‘We’re in – gonna use a bio-suit to infiltrate.’

Heart thumping, Mac listened for any out-of-place sounds as the crickets started up and the birds died down. Bats flapped and monkeys chattered as the last line of orange-red glow evaporated on the horizon. And then night came like a black velvet cloak had been thrown over the day.

Checking their handguns and controlling their breathing, they concentrated on saving their energy for the real work. Johnno was supposed to be a good operator, but Mac always got nervous when someone was going into enemy territory.

‘Stand by, Albion,’ came Robbo over the headset.

‘Standing by, Blue Leader.’

Looking at each other, Mac and Didge got the okay forty seconds later.

‘Green for go, Albion. Repeat – green for go.’

‘Roger that Blue Leader. Albion out.’

Tapping Didge on the shoulder, Mac held out one of the biohazard masks. When they both had the helmets in place, he handed Didge a pair of gloves.

Looking over, Didge peered down the open shaft and then brought a flashlight up and into the shaft, turning it on and cupping a gloved hand over the lens to stop it shining too brightly below.

The light reflected on a circular shaft that dropped for fifteen metres, ending in a sealed fan unit which blocked the shaft.

‘Shit,’ hissed Mac, his voice bouncing within the confines of the biohazard mask.

‘You okay, Albion?’ asked Robbo over the headset.

‘Affirmative, Blue Leader,’ said Mac, watching as Didge looped his rope, strained at the knot and then put a slip-knot at the base of a tree next to the vent. ‘Fan unit blocking entry. It’s sealed, but working on it. Out.’

Didge picked up a new set of wrenches and screwdrivers from his B amp;E kit, clambered over the edge of the vent shaft and rappelled into it, disappearing quickly.

From above, Mac shone the flashlight at the sides of the shiny steel, letting the light bounce around long enough for Didge to release the screws. Standing on the far corners of the fan unit, Didge undid his rappel harness and attached it to the metre-wide fan.

Climbing out of the shaft, Didge jumped down, then turned and tried to pull the fan out with the rope. Mac joined him, the two of them straining until a groaning sound came from the shaft, followed by the fan unit coming loose as Mac and Didge fell back on the grass.

Shining the flashlight down the shaft again, Mac saw that it ended in a right-angle intersection with a box-section air shaft that ran parallel to the ground. Pulling a small cloth bag from his breast pocket, Didge put his fingers in and sprinkled a substance that looked like talc. As it drifted downwards through the light, Mac guessed he was looking for motion-sensing beams. Mac had already told him that there was no wiring for such a system, but he liked that Didge was thorough.

Packing his B amp;E kit, Didge dropped down first. Touching on the parallel shaft, he pulled himself into it head-first and started crawling forwards. Mac stood on the bottom of the shaft, removed his rucksack, and pushed it ahead of him behind Didge as he followed into the dark hole.

Lying behind Didge’s boots, with all lights killed, Mac listened to himself breathing in the biohazard mask and tried not to think about the enclosed space and his fear of being trapped. It was hot in the shaft and even hotter in his mask.

A faint clink sounded and Didge moved forward. Up ahead, Mac could make out the talc floating, then the rope they’d dragged through went taut beside Mac’s head as Didge disappeared through a new hole in the shaft.

The radio headset crackled and Didge gave a sit-rep. Mac crawled forwards, pushed head-first into the hole and looked around. Didge stood on the floor of a large laboratory, machine and equipment hidden by vinyl covers, beakers, pipettes and test tubes standing upside down on racks, cleaned and sterilised.

After sliding down the rope, Mac stood beside Didge, squinting at the room. Red engineer’s lights were placed at intervals in the walls and the surveillance cameras looked to be down.

‘Clear,’ came Didge’s voice, muffled through his mask’s breathers.

‘Let’s make this fast, mate,’ said Mac, pulling the Nikon from his rucksack and setting off.

The underground component of Lombok was huge, about three times the size of the official facility. As he took pictures of the labs – largely decommissioned or mothballed by the looks of it – the camera’s flash lit the area in eerie glimpses of the rooms, the strangeness intensified by the sounds of Didge and Mac breathing through the biohazard masks.

The labs led through double air-lock doors into a sterilisation area, complete with autoclave pressure cookers. Whatever they did in here, they were thorough. Walking into another long room, Mac photographed eight fermentation vats which could be used for many purposes, from making beer and MDMA, to making vaccines and bioweapons.

Pushing a stepladder up to the line of vats, Mac took wipes from three of them, before sealing the samples and moving on. Sweat rolled down his temples as he kept the Nikon’s shutter going. The air-conditioning had been switched off and the combination of the stuffiness and the glow of the engineer’s lights was making him queasy.

They’d just passed through another double air-lock doorway when the radio crackled to life and then crackled out again. Didge knocked at the receiver on his belt and then pressed through the helmet’s material to shake the headset. Nothing. The radio crackled and then it died, possibly something to do with the negative pressure lock most of these facilities had, thought Mac, fear rising.

The next room got Mac’s heart pumping. Along both walls were large cabinets made of grey painted steel and glass which Mac identified as spray driers and freeze driers – machines that could take agent from the fermentation vats, dry it, then reduce it to particles of less than ten microns. It could also reduce heroin and cocaine to desirable grains.

His hands swimming in the gloves, Mac tried to manhandle the wipes and the sample vials. Tapping on Mac’s shoulder, Didge pointed to a door on their left with a large skull-and-crossbones in the middle, something written in Bahasa below. The word Bahaya rang a bell. Pushing through the double doors, the thick rubber seal-flaps in the middle made a grinding sound that gave both of them a start. After passing through the next air-lock door, they surveyed the scene that confronted them. There were fourteen glass panels on fourteen grey steel doors. Walking up and peering through one, Mac opened the door to a room which was the size of a small prison cell. There were four cages on each wall, their bars rising to the ceiling. Mac took a photo, knowing that DIA would want to see this. These were animal rooms – or ‘inhalation chambers’ – in which monkeys, dogs and cats were sealed and forced to inhale various agents to see how they reacted.