Mark Abernethy: Second Strike

Mac and Sosa sat in the front seats of the van as they drove west through the Flores countryside with farm vehicles, old Hino trucks and Honda motor scooters. To the left Mac caught glimpses of the sapphire Savu Sea and the green of Sumba Island, which rose out of the water like a croc waiting for prey. On either side of them were market gardens, candlenut orchards and forests. But mostly it was subsistence farms, grandparents with young children tending roadside fruit stalls with three or four items for sale.

Sosa’s offsider, Charles, sat in the back with Akbar, who was chained to the inside of the van, a blood pressure strap around his bicep and a drip in his forearm. Mac had changed into a black T-shirt and a pair of blue boardies and, letting the adrenaline come down, made small talk with Sosa about politics and the Chinese – the one nationality that united most nations in South-East Asia.

‘They change date for their Olympics,’ sneered Sosa, lighting a smoke. ‘Told stupid Anglo it all about weather pattern.’

A Hino truck came at them, trying to come down the Indonesian

‘third lane’, and Sosa pulled onto the dirt shoulder to let it through the middle.

‘Oh well, champ,’ said Mac, his heart rate now at normal, ‘maybe all those eights will be lucky for everyone in the region, huh?’

Sosa wasn’t buying it. The Chinese had held back the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics till the eighth of August – two weeks after the date designated in the IOC’s contract. The new start date of 8.8.08 gave the Chinese three ‘eights’, which augured most auspiciously in feng shui. Most Australians thought it was funny, but other nations in Asia hated that sort of Chinese arrogance.

Mac swigged from a big bottle of Vittel and felt a sharp pain in his sternum. He had planned two days of R amp;R on a small island off Flores and then it was back to Manila to do a handover to his replacement before joining the Land of the Long Lunch for the next twelve months.

Mac had been seconded to United Nations headquarters in New York, where he’d be liaising between New York and Canberra and paying close attention to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacifi c in Bangers. He’d been doing his briefi ngs with diplomats and ASIS operatives at the UN for the past two months, getting to know the people who were fl eecing the ESCAP aid programs, and those at CNTBTO who wanted to shut down Australia’s uranium exports. He had good form for CNTBTO because of former rotations.

In Mac’s world the UN was a joke for its wastage, corruption and its lack of action on the things it should act on. For spy organisations the UN was a famous point of intelligence leakage. It had become a global grease trap for malcontents and runners-up – politicians who couldn’t keep their pants on, majors who couldn’t become colonels, diplomats lost to the grog and technically excellent bureaucrats without the leadership credentials to take them to the top of a government department. People long on hubris and short on achievement who would vie for Top Dog status in every conversation by proving greater insider knowledge than the next guy. Those people were dangerous to the national interest, which was why the UN and its agencies were overrun with spies posing as UN hacks, listening in as big-noters showed off their knowledge of where the radar arrays were really hidden, which Saddam companies were still operating in California, and how much gold was being stockpiled by a country’s central bank long after the offi cial change to a fl oated currency.

Mac blocked his concerns about Akbar and Samir by focusing on the UN gig. It was what Mac had been trained for, what he had dreamed of when he joined ASIS from the University of Queensland with an honours degree in history. That is, high-level espionage where you got to wear a suit and not carry a sidearm. Instead, Mac had been earmarked for paramilitary training on entering ASIS and he was sent to the UK to undergo the Royal Marines Commando training at Devon and intel sections at Chicksands. He’d found it a little insulting at the time, since he had an excellent degree, but the suits in Canberra had taken one look at him and seen only a boy from Rockhampton with a footballer’s build.

Once in the Royal Marines he’d become competitive and was selected to do the Swimmer-Canoeist program with the Special Boat Service, culminating in a survival run in the jungles of Brunei – an event that had pushed Mac right to the edge, to the point where he thought he might be going mad.

And that had been that. After Mac’s intake, ASIS had switched tack and tried to train selected Aussie SAS soldiers for intel duties. Neither way was entirely successful because the soldier and the spy, in the end, were complementary yet disparate professions. They had to work together but they weren’t the same thing. Mac was now thirty-two and he’d spent the past decade either in the boonies of South-East Asia or in war zones like Timor, Iraq and Bosnia. There hadn’t been much in the way of canasta and beautiful girls in ball gowns. He hoped the UN and New York would change that.

They got to the airfi eld outside Reo in a shade under two hours. There was an Indonesian plainclothes aircrew waiting at a briefi ng table in the hangar and an old twin-engine Fokker Friendship waiting outside.

Sosa drove into the World War II-era hangar, sprang from the van and barked an order. The BAIS guys dragged Akbar from the van and Mac noticed there was a gurney with an IV pole beside the table. Akbar was walking – disoriented but walking – and they led him to the Fokker, which sat in the thirty-six-degree heat.

Sosa moved to a small offi ce area, unlocked the door, and retrieved Mac’s backpack. Then he waved towards the van. ‘Charles can take you where you want, or you can come with us, McQueen.’

Mac took the pack, jerked his thumb at the van. ‘Might stick with Charles. No offence – just like his aftershave.’

Sosa smirked, put out his hand. ‘Been a pleasure, maate.’

Indonesians could never quite get the Aussie drawl going on mate, but Mac appreciated the effort. Returning the shake, he started towards the van, then stopped. ‘Know something, Sosey?’ he asked, trying to keep it casual.

Sosa shrugged, sucked on his cigarette.

‘I can’t remember what happened to Samir. Abu Samir…’

‘Yeah, yeah, McQueen. I know who he is.’

‘He still in Malaysia?’ asked Mac.

Sosa gave a big Javanese shrug. ‘Why, what you got?’

Mac hadn’t wanted the conversation to go like this. ‘Nothing, mate. Just that we’re snatching Akbar and we’ve still got someone like Samir running around the shop, see what I mean?’

‘Samir’s the Malaysians’ problem – they’re all over him, what I know,’ said Sosa.

Mac nodded slow, slugged the last of the Vittel, threw the empty bottle at a rubbish bin. It hit the lip, bounced on the old concrete fl oor. Mac looked for wood to touch.

‘Like I said, McQueen – what you got?’

Mac shook his head. ‘Nothing, mate, just thought I overheard those sailors mentioning Samir.’

Mac didn’t want BAIS boarding Penang Princess and turning it over looking for someone he might have been imagining. He guarded his missions jealously, and the key to actions like Operation Handmaiden was Moro outfi ts like Abu Sayyaf believing an al-Qaeda operative was ratting them out. A full-on raid by BAIS and the Indon Navy would scuttle that.

‘Just so long as he’s still in Malaysia,’ mumbled Sosa, looking over Mac’s shoulder at the Fokker. ‘Because if he’s moving around, we got trouble.’

Mac stood at the kerb in his black baseball cap and sunnies, watching Charles drive away. He’d been dropped two blocks from his hotel in Labuan Bajo. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Charles, it was just that it was none of BAIS’s business where he was going. Mac moved south along the waterfront, savouring the late afternoon tropical breeze on his chest. Across the strait was the famous Komodo Islands where the giant monitor – the Komodo Dragon – created a cash fl ow for Indonesia’s tourism industry. Walking slowly like a tourist he looked for eyes, for pursed mouths and creased foreheads and non-leisure activities like reading a newspaper.