Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

‘You know how it is, mate,’ said Johnny, who had always made assumptions about Mac’s past, ‘you put yourself in a gunfi ght and you need to be in the zone. I mean, totally in the zone. I went up there now? I’d freak out or maybe I’d have no instincts. Either way, mate, I’d take a bullet and I’m too old for that.’

Mac listened intently. They were both in their late thirties, fi rst-time dads who had left dangerous professional lives behind them to go straight and forge futures without the physical risk. Mac was lecturing and tutoring two days a week at the University of Sydney. Johnny had a long-term contract with Movie World Studios, bodyguarding visiting actors – a gig whose chief danger was getting shot by the paparazzi.

But while Johnny found it easy to send the private army guys packing, for the past month Mac had been talking with one of his mentors from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Mac had realised Tony Davidson, now semi-retired, was trying to enlist him as soon as he played that fi rst voicemail on his mobile phone, but he’d called him back anyway. Davidson was the former director of operations for an ASIS jurisdiction stretching from India to Japan and down to Indonesia. He was the last genuine fi eld guy in the Service to have risen to any prominence. These days all the top jobs went to people who boasted about their time at INSEAD or Harvard rather than what they did to get Imelda to open the secret exit behind the mirror in her shoe-room.

Davidson wanted Mac back in. The former chief of spies was putting together an ‘outer circle’ of intel professionals to pick up a lot of the fi nance and trade espionage that had been overlooked as Australia focused almost exclusively on counter-terrorism. The result of Canberra’s de-prioritising of economic counter-espionage in favour of following the Yanks was a wholesale infl ux of Chinese money into Indonesia via legitimate-looking and commercial-acting companies backed either by the rich power bases of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a counterpart of the KGB.

Mac had been following it vaguely, especially the quite brazen economic infi ltration of East Timor and West Irian by MSS front companies. There was also the fi nancial blandishments being offered by PLA General Staff companies in Aceh province, where they were fl attening Sumatra and putting in palm-oil plantations, the largest the world had ever seen. Palm oil was the best and cheapest feedstock for bio-diesel, an industry the Chinese would basically own in the west Pacifi c within twenty years.

These were only a few of the issues that Davidson was worried about. There were Russian gangsters on the Gold Coast, Khmer Rouge gangs in regional slavery rackets and the Burmese Junta engaging in quite conspicuous heroin production and distribution.

They got to Gold Coast Highway and Johnny peeled right to walk towards Mermaid.

‘Take it easy, brother,’ said Johnny, slapping a big thumb handshake on Mac, who was heading on to Broadbeach. ‘And next week we’re on the mats, mate. See if you’re so cheeky then.’

‘Don’t know, Johnny. It’s me knee, mate – playing up again,’ laughed Mac, hamming a knee injury.

‘Monday, one o’clock, bro,’ said Johnny as his crossing light went green. ‘No excuses.’

Mac groaned. Johnny liked to warm up with a few rounds of Greco-Roman, followed by some Judo forms, followed by a half-hour of sparring. And when Johnny Hukapa sparred, it wasn’t hugging. The PCYC judo room would resound to a strange banging sound as Mac consistently tapped out, unable to deal with the power and technique of the bloke.

Mac stood and watched Johnny go, his gear bag held at his side in a huge paw. His hair was still thick and in a military cut, and he walked like he was marching to a C-130 for another secret rotation.

Mac turned to his own crossing, hit the pedestrian button and pondered what Johnny had said about anxiety and instincts: Either way, I’d take a bullet…

There was nothing wrong with Johnny’s reasoning. But still Mac had decided to say yes to Davidson and was meeting him the following afternoon.

He felt very nervous. He was back in… and he hadn’t told Jenny yet.

Mac and Jenny walked the fi ve blocks north to the Surfers Paradise Surf Club. It was a balmy evening with a light salty breeze coming off the Pacifi c, the setting sun making the ocean look like a purple carpet.

The transformation in Jenny once she’d left the stress of her AFP role in Jakarta had been remarkable. They’d been lovers on and off since meeting in Manila seven or eight years before. During a period in ‘05, Mac had been in Sydney while Jen was in Jakarta, and Mac had become besotted with an English girl, Diane. But Diane wasn’t all she pretended to be and Mac had found his way back to his true love, Jen, and since they’d married and had Rachel, Mac had fallen for her all over again. He’d always admired her resilience and toughness in the face of people smugglers and the sex-slavers, but she had the strength to be a wife and mother too.

At thirty-seven, Jenny could pass for someone ten years younger with her long dark hair and athletic body, and Mac always enjoyed the way she held his hand in public and leaned into him when she spoke.

They got the stand-up table next to the window overlooking the sea and Mac brought over a couple of Crown Lagers. Tradies and real-estate hawkers sank beers in the sprawling bar while plasma screens carried news about what someone had said to someone else in Canberra. The surf club was a tourist-free zone and drinkers spoke in Queensland mumbles.

They chit-chatted and then Jenny cornered Mac about getting his will done at the solicitors. Jenny had had one drawn up when she fi rst joined the Feds and had it altered after they got married in ‘07 and again when Rachel was born. She couldn’t understand how someone could get to be almost forty and not have a will.

‘You’re a dad, mate,’ she chided gently. ‘Now you get to sit in front of a lawyer, tell her whether it’s burial or cremation.’

Mac did the yeah, yeah – I’ll do it, and Jenny said that was just as well because she’d already made an appointment to see Sian next Tuesday at ten o’clock.

Mac groaned. Sian Elliot was a former federal cop who was now in general practice in Southport. As a rule, Mac steered clear of people who asked too many of the right questions.

‘So, Mr Macca,’ said Jenny, giving him the look that told him she knew something was eating him, ‘what’s up?’

Mac had spent the year commuting down to Sydney to do his classes at the University of Sydney. He’d had them scheduled on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and by putting everything on the rewards card it had become viable. The fact that his mate Scotty from the Service had arranged a Commonwealth apartment in Pyrmont for him had pushed the idea into profi t. As a family they’d got used to it, even though Mac sometimes ached to see Jen and Rachel. Now things were changing.

‘I’m not going back,’ Mac said quickly. ‘I’m marking assignments but that’s me, I’m done.’

Jenny gave him the patient look. ‘Not going back where?’

‘Uni. Lecturing. That shit.’ He couldn’t look at her, fi ddled with the bottle.

‘Oh, that shit?’ smiled Jen.

Mac felt himself getting nervous. There were two women in the world who could get him on the back foot. The other one was his mother.

‘Look, Jen -‘ he started, before running out of words. He’d done his best with civvie life and he liked teaching South-East Asian politics to postgrad students. But the academic world had moved on since he was at UQ and it was no longer enough to put themes to students, get them to do the reading and then insist that they formulate their own arguments in essay form. Modern students had been trained to adopt the right pose rather than construct arguments, and what he did felt more like preaching than teaching to Mac. The fact he couldn’t do it made him feel like a failure.