Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

‘The password is VIK7979,’ said Mac. ‘Open the fi rst message, and when you’ve read it, delete it, okay Vik?’

‘Sure, McQueen.’

‘And, mate, if you have a computer outside the Institute -‘

‘I get this,’ said Viktor, long enough under the Soviets to know what was going on.

They rang off, with Vik promising to respond within the hour.

The curry fi sh arrived and, as he ate, Mac’s clean Nokia rang.

He took the call and didn’t stuff about. ‘Joe – Akbar’s dead,’ he whispered.

There was a pause, two seconds of dead air.

‘You there?’ asked Mac.

‘Yeah, mate, yeah,’ came Joe’s voice.

‘So, Akbar -‘

‘Yeah, look Macca,’ said Joe, searching for a tone. ‘Yeah – Akbar.’

It was uncharacteristic for Joe to stumble. Before being restreamed into ASIS management and becoming a controller, he’d been a top-notch fi eld guy out of Beijing. Joe was fl uent in Cantonese and Mandarin at a time when Foreign Affairs had Australians who generally only spoke one or the other. He used to joke that, because he grew up in a house with a Calabrian mother and a Roman father, he had to balance peasant Italian with the highfalutin language of the metropole. He saw the same distinction between China’s two main languages – he didn’t see a drama. After Joe got married he’d pulled back a bit and then when the fi rst of his three kids arrived, he asked for a desk job – Wife’s Orders.

‘So, you saw it – I mean Akbar?’ asked Joe.

‘Confi rmed,’ said Mac, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘Had eyes.’

‘Fuck!’

‘What I said.’

Joe heaved a breath. ‘Who?’

‘One of Hassan’s crew. Shot him in the back rather than let him be taken by the BAIS team.’

‘Jesus!’ Joe spat, a cross between amazed and disgusted.

‘So you know about Hassan?’ asked Mac, trying to get Joe to connect the dots.

‘Yep.’

‘Know he’s one of Doctor Khan’s operators?’

Joe sighed. ‘Look…’ he started, then trailed off.

‘Joe, we’re talking about people who sell enriched uranium.’

‘McQueen -‘

‘Abu Samir is part of the crew. Did you know that, mate? He’s JI, case you were wondering.’

‘Okay, so look -‘ Joe started again.

‘- we’ve got an atomic weapons dealer running around with Jemaah Islamiyah and they’ve already bombed Kuta, killed a carload of BAIS guys and assassinated an Osama bagman -‘

‘Macca -‘

‘So what the fuck’s going on?’ snapped Mac.

‘Mate, some people have just joined me, I’ll get back ASAP.’

‘What’s the mission, now?’ asked Mac.

‘Stay put, help BAIS fi nd the other -‘

‘Other?’ asked Mac.

But Joe had hung up.

Mac had a friend in Medan by the name of Johnny Hukapa, who owned a tour company with his father. To the public, the owners of Sunshine Tours were your friendly guides to Lake Toba and Gunung Leuser National Park. To Mac, Johnny Hukapa was a former SAS soldier whose main source of income now came from bodyguarding the gold and gem merchants who made their trips into the subcontinent, Sumatra and Kalimantan to get their materials wholesale. He was conspicuous in Sumatra for his size and presence, but Mac needed to make a quick trip into the hills and Johnny Hukapa had precisely what he needed: highly secure jungle transport.

The bell dinged as Mac walked into Sunshine Tours, located in an old Dutch-built freestanding house set back from the road. The woman behind the counter was a thin, short, middled-aged local with a weathered face and a big genuine smile.

‘Hello, mister,’ she said.

Mac asked for John Hukapa and the woman said, ‘Okay, you come now,’ dragging him by the hand through a curtain of multicoloured plastic ribbons and into an offi ce. A large Maori man in military shorts and a black T-shirt stood up from an armchair and came towards Mac.

‘Macca! Long time, bro!’ said the man with a smile.

‘Johnny – how you going?’ said Mac, shaking the proffered hand.

Mac had met John Hukapa in Iraq in the late 1990s, when Hukapa had been doing clandestine patrols with the Aussie SAS around Iraq’s borders with Jordan. Mac’s assignments were concerned with the Jordan stevedoring and trucking companies and the extent to which they were really Saddam’s corporate fronts. John and Mac had become friends, especially when they worked out that their fathers had been in the Vietnam War together.

John brewed tea and they chatted about the old days. As they relaxed, a very large middle-aged Maori man walked into the offi ce and looked through Mac like he was a pane of glass.

‘Dad, this is Alan McQueen,’ said Johnny.

The big man put his paw out, his eyes steady on Mac’s. ‘You Frank’s boy?’

Mac nodded, shook the man’s hand. ‘Sure am.’

‘Name’s Tom, but my friends call me Huck.’

‘People call me Macca.’

‘So Macca – what’s up?’ asked Tom, as he sat behind his desk.

Mac spelled it out as best he could. There was an old airfi eld somewhere inland from Binjai but before the actual Sumatran highlands.

‘The Palau fi eld,’ said Tom, with a nod. ‘What are we doing up there?’

‘Just having a nosey-poke.’

Tom looked at his son. Johnny raised his eyebrows slightly, and Tom looked back at Mac. ‘So let’s go.’

They got to the airfi eld at half past two, the red Sunshine Tours LandCruiser bursting out of the dimness of a Sumatran jungle track and onto an open space that was almost a mile long. It ran north-south and, as they drove across it towards some dilapidated buildings on the far side, Mac realised they were driving on slabs of concrete.

‘Japs built this in ‘41 and ‘42,’ said Tom. ‘There’re fi elds like this all over Sumatra and Java – they were supposed to form a defence of the new territories. Guess it didn’t work.’

The area was huge and Mac was quietly amazed at such a piece of infrastructure going to waste. ‘So it’s not used – I mean for anything ?’

Tom chuckled. ‘Mate, Sumatra has a pretty basic economy. If you can’t grow rice on it, fi sh in it, or graze livestock on it, then it’s useless, right?’

Mac wasn’t sure what he was looking for but there’d been something odd about the night and morning’s events. The Indonesian military had deterred a plane coming in to exfi ltrate the Hassan-Samir team, but as far as Mac could gauge, the Hassan-Samir team seemed to be doubling back. Maybe they’d left something at the airfi eld, something worth going back for, worth killing for.

They stopped in front of the old buildings and Johnny pulled a couple of M16 assault rifl es from the luggage compartment of the Cruiser. Johnny was a slightly smaller, more athletic version of his father, about six-one, one hundred and ten kilos, very built and yet strangely careful on his feet – the one unifying hallmark of special forces operators.

They started with the main building, a medium-sized Quonset-style hangar. Some of the curved iron roofi ng had fallen in under the weight of vines and creepers over the years, but the frame was intact. Inside, it was fi lled with foliage and clearly no one had been in there for years.

The next building was a two-storey wooden barracks that sagged in the middle. Johnny crouched down at the entrance and inspected it for pressure pads, trip wires, hooks and any other booby traps. There wasn’t much in the barracks either except vines and the smell of bird shit.

They came out into the heat of the afternoon and Mac regretted having worn his civvie clothes. He was already sweating through them heavily.

‘Seeing anything, Mac?’ asked Tom.