Mark Abernethy - Double back

‘We put it on the hard drive, okay?’ he said, opening a file. ‘What you want to call it?’

‘Call it “Mickey”,’ said Mac.

The downloads took twenty minutes and as Mac watched the images from Operation Totem flash up while the on-screen bar showed them being downloaded, Set made tea.

‘How’s business?’ asked Mac, sipping jasmine tea.

‘Better than the other one,’ said Set, lifting his mangled left hand. The smallest three fingers had been badly broken at some point and Set could no longer make a fist with them.

‘What happened?’ asked Mac.

‘I was working for the BAKIN in Jakarta, right?’ said Set. ‘I put camera and bug in this Korean bank, but then I am caught, right?’

‘Caught by who?’ asked Mac.

‘By army intelligence,’ sighed Set. ‘They tell me the generals own this bank with the Koreans, and they… well, you know, okay?’

An image on the laptop screen caught Mac’s eye as it downloaded. Focusing on it, his breath caught slightly. It was one of his shots of the airfield where the spraying booms were stored, where they’d seen Haryono getting out of his helicopter. The glare that had made it impossible to see the registrations of the Black Hawk helicopters parked in front of the admin building was clear through the Nikon lens.

Peering at the screen, Mac found himself smiling. The Black Hawks’ registrations all started with ‘9V’ – the sign for Singapore.

‘Can we zoom in on that one?’ asked Mac, as the image downloaded and was replaced by another.

Set grabbed the laptop, found the stored image and enlarged it.

‘The tail section of that helo in the front,’ said Mac, watching as the registration came to life.

‘That’s as far it goes,’ said Set, as it zoomed to the point where the image quality degraded.

‘It’s okay,’ said Mac, slumping a little in his chair and wondering what it meant. The full registration was 9V 1124F – Pik Berger’s surviving gunship.

The coffee machine was working overtime in DIA’s front office in Denpasar as Mac was ushered through the security checks. Grabbing a mug of black coffee, he made for the briefing room and was taken aback as he found Tony Davidson and Jim sitting at a table, looking morose.

‘Thought you guys would be debriefing Blackbird right now?’ said Mac, sliding his satchel onto the table and taking a seat as Simon joined them.

‘We were,’ said Jim, sheepish.

‘In Australia or Singapore – but not here,’ said Mac.

‘Tony?’ said Jim, deflecting the question.

‘What’s the drum, guys?’ said Mac.

‘The debrief was in Darwin,’ said Davidson. ‘And that was a nice job grabbing Blackbird.’

‘Thanks,’ said Mac, looking to Jim and back to Davidson.

‘Yeah, but we got her from Darwin air base, drove her into the city, and there was a crowd of diplomats and lawyers waiting for us down on Cavanagh Street,’ said Davidson.

‘But -’ said Mac.

‘Indonesian diplomats and lawyers,’ said Davidson with a growl. ‘They pulled the consular crap and they drove away with Blackbird in the back seat.’

‘But can they -?’

‘Yes they can,’ said Simon. ‘She’s an Indonesian national apprehended in Indonesian territory and illegally transported across an international border.’

‘Blackbird went along with this?’ asked Mac.

‘She didn’t fight it,’ said Davidson, rubbing his face.

‘Bottom line,’ said Jim, lighting a cigarette, ‘she’s gone and we have a leak.’

Mac told the truth: he didn’t know where Blackbird was being rendered and he had no motive to reveal her destination even if he had known. No one on HMAS Sydney had asked any untoward questions and the 4RAR Commandos didn’t care less.

The next part was harder. ‘Perhaps I should have told you this earlier,’ said Mac, feeling stupid. ‘She tried to escape at the exfil point. She drugged me with Mogadon and the Commandos rounded her up, found she’d taken the sat phone. That’s why we were twenty-four hours delayed on her delivery.’

‘We looked at the phone,’ said Simon. ‘But the only calls were to us.’

Mac took a closer look at Simon – he had steady eyes and an unmoving face. A period of silence followed, which suggested to Mac he was probably already under surveillance by DIA. He’d kicked up a fuss with Atkins, he’d proven himself a loose cannon with his Bongo partnership, and someone was bound to have made a comment about Mac’s personal interest in Jessica Yarrow, possibly Gillian Baddely.

The rest of the meeting was perfunctory: Mac took the participants through his journey, the airfield, the booms, the tanks on the helos and Haryono’s appearance. The underground partition of Lombok AgriCorp, the inhalation chambers filled with people, one side dead, the other looking sick but still alive. He mentioned the Falintil engagement at Lombok, the fire at the facility and the fact he’d asked the guerrillas to disrupt the mule lines of US dollars that were being walked across the border from West Timor to the airfield.

Jim responded with an analysis of the samples taken from Lombok: they were an advanced type of pneumonia, or SARS.

‘Nothing new,’ said Jim with a shrug, slightly too casual.

‘It’s the SARS vaccine?’ said Mac.

‘It’s the same disease they’re cultivating,’ corrected Jim.

‘Have a look at the pics,’ said Mac, taking the Nikon from his satchel and handing it to Jim. ‘Like to know what you think.’

‘Sure,’ said Jim, taking the camera. ‘So let’s talk about Blackbird.’

‘Let’s,’ said Mac, grabbing at coffee.

‘Snatch went okay?’ asked Davidson, leaning forward.

‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘The 63 grabbed her from the Kopassus compound in Maliana, we took her across the island and she was cooperative and moved with the rest of us.’

‘She talk?’ asked Davidson, focusing.

‘Sort of,’ said Mac.

‘What happened?’

‘I overstepped with the questions, I think,’ said Mac, trying to remember the point at which he’d lost her. ‘I caught her in a lie – she claimed that no one at Kopassus had asked her if she’d ever copied a file at army HQ.’

‘Unlikely they’d leave that off their list,’ said Jim.

‘What I said,’ said Mac. ‘She got testy so I asked her why she was seen with Benni Sudarto. She said that wasn’t true and I said her sister had told me.’

‘Nice,’ approved Jim.

‘From there she admitted to being a double agent: recruited by the Indonesian Army to work at HQ in Dili, then recruited by us on the promise of sending her to an Aussie university, and then turned by Benni Sudarto to work for Kopassus.’

‘What was Benni’s deal?’ asked Davidson.

‘Do what we ask or your family suffers – in front of you.’

‘Love that Kopassus approach,’ said Davidson.

‘She said she’d never heard of Operasi Boa and had never copied a file on Boa,’ said Mac.

‘You believe her?’ asked Davidson.

Thinking back to the conversation again, Mac took his time. ‘No, I don’t, Tony. I think she knows what Boa is.’

‘Any evidence?’ asked Simon.

‘No,’ said Mac.

‘So she did copy it?’ asked Jim.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Mac. ‘But if she did, it’s not worth her while to let us know about it. They got to her, mate – they got to her bad.’

Walking in the sunshine, Mac wrestled with a few aspects of the DIA operation that were not adding up for him. He wondered why Jim had pulled that too-casual deflection of the samples from the underground rooms of Lombok. It perhaps wasn’t a complete fabrication, but Jim hadn’t wanted to dwell on the samples Mac and Didge had risked their lives for. Jim was also surprisingly calm about what Mac and Didge had seen down there – not a drug factory but a human-testing lab. Even given DIA’s famous intelligence-exclusion policy when dealing with allies, Mac had expected more. An explanation perhaps. There was a disconnect between the drug lord, Lee Wa Dae, and the vaccine program at Lombok: the two didn’t marry. Yet, the airfield where Pik Berger’s helicopters visited Ishy Haryono did seem to be joined to the Koreans by the bags of money arriving there. It looked like a drug network, not something that the Pentagon would pursue with such vigour.