Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

‘Kuta?’ said Atkins. ‘That was Amrozi and Muchlas and Ali Amron

– all of those guys, McQueen. Where did you get Hassan from? Isn’t he the Dr Khan bloke?’

‘Yeah, but he was in Kuta the night of the bombings. Mossad and BAIS were on him. Didn’t you read my report?’

‘Oh, Macca!’ said Atkins, as if he was talking to a puppy that wasn’t properly house-trained.

‘What?’

‘When you say your report, do you mean the debrief you had to rewrite twice?’

There was a difference between a report and debrief. A report was a defi nitive version of events, whereas a debrief was merely a short summary of what a bloke had been doing with his time. And Joe had asked Mac to resubmit that debrief twice – he didn’t want Mac being ridiculed, not after the word had got around that McQueen was asking about nuclear stuff at the AFP’s Kuta forward command post.

‘Yep,’ said Mac, ‘that one. I think he’s back and planning the same thing he did last time.’

‘Which was?’

Mac paused; he didn’t know if he had the time to stuff around and he didn’t know if Atkins was having the call traced. International mobile calls were hard to track, but someone could be put on it.

‘Which was, Marty, the Sari Club blast.’

‘That was JI, McQueen,’ hissed Atkins.

‘That was a six-foot crater, twenty-three feet across.’

‘Shit, mate,’ said Atkins, derisive. ‘Your reasoning works like this: Hassan has worked for a rogue nukes guy. Hassan is in Kuta on the night of the bombings. Ergo, Hassan did the Sari Club with a nuke. It doesn’t work as an argument, mate, and the forensics don’t support your theory.’

‘Forensic said there was tritium.’

‘No, McQueen, forensic said it was a potassium chlorate bomb.

A thousand kilos, actually. I can read!’

‘Okay, so it was a shade over one US ton,’ conceded Mac, not wanting to get into the minute difference between the tonne and the ton. ‘But let’s talk about the explosive: fi rst it was anfo, then it was RDX, then it was potassium chlorate and then it was all in a report that went to the Indonesian government but that we can’t see. I mean, did you see the fi nal report to the Indonesians?’

‘Whatever, McQueen,’ Atkins sighed.

‘It’s worth getting this right, Marty. A twenty-three-foot hole needs one ton of TNT – that’s what the bomb engineers say, right?

Even if we knew it was a potassium chlorate bomb, a one-tonner is half the power of TNT.’

‘Really? Where did you get that from, McQueen?’

‘Demo section at Holsworthy,’ said Mac, hoping Atkins would drop it. The only thing Mac had ever got out of the demolition section at Holsworthy army base was shaky hands and a dislike of sudden noise.

‘Bullshit!’ said Atkins. ‘I’ve done Holsworthy twice and I never heard that!’

The air crackled between them. Mac could envisage the embassy’s intel section at night, overworked ASIS people squinting at screens, washed out by the fl uorescent lighting, craving a hot shower and a cold beer, pondering the fact that just because your salary was now called a package, it didn’t mean your pay went any further.

‘I’m just saying that it was a big hole for an IED. Oklahoma City had the same size crater from four and half tons of anfo.’

‘So?’ snarled Atkins.

‘Well, think about it. If Sari Club only involved one ton, why did it make a hole the same size as four and half tons? And remembering, Marty, that anfo is a lot more powerful than potassium chlorate.’

There was a pause and Mac wondered if Atkins was reading a note from Garvs.

‘McQueen, there was no mini-nuke, there was no pro crew, Hassan Ali did not dupe a whole contingent of Aussie cops, soldiers and intel guys – not to mention forensics – so just drop it.’

Mac didn’t have many other shots. ‘So what were BAIS and Mossad chasing?’ he asked, still unsure why his counterparts were so certain.

‘I don’t know, mate,’ whined Atkins. ‘You know what the Indons and the Jews are like: they’ll chase a conspiracy like a dog chases its tail.’

Mac signed off quickly and hung up. He thought about Atkins’ comment. That was exactly how Mossad and BAIS did not operate.

Freddi’s phone went straight to voicemail and Mac didn’t leave a message. It was almost nine-thirty which meant ten-thirty in Jakkers, and Freddi was getting some shut-eye. Mac felt stressed but not exhausted and he could do with a couple of beers to send him to sleep. Benny had asked him down to the Raffl es for a drink with him and an employee, which now sounded like a plan.

He removed the moustache and carefully stored it back in its case. As he wiped his face down, he thought about how Atkins had been both sarcastic and condescending. In the ongoing war between the fi eld guys and the bench-warmers, condescension and fl ip dismissals were the preferred weapons of the offi ce dwellers. It gave them credibility with other offi ce guys while undermining people like Mac. But the cult of management was a dangerous game: in the wash-up of 9/11, the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recommended the CIA stop its habit of reallocating operations funding into more management, which had been happening for more than twenty years. By the time the US invaded Iraq in ‘03, the CIA had only eleven Arabic-speaking fi eld people, while back at Langley they had so many managers that they had to fi nd more space to house them.

His face now clean, Mac eyeballed himself in the mirror. Atkins had used the word conspiracy, which in itself was an admission of ignorance. Way back in 1957, the old Joint Intelligence Service – forerunner of ASIO and ASIS – had commissioned one of its analysts to assess the probability of nuclear terrorism. That report, The Likelihood of Clandestine Introduction of Nuclear Weapons into Australia, was the world’s fi rst discussion of a terror campaign using a nuclear device, and the device it named was ‘a plutonium device the size of a cricket ball’.

A mini-nuke. Atkins and his ilk had taken the wrong turn by putting the idea of a mini-nuke in the crazy department – it was very real.

Mac understood why Atkins didn’t want to deal with it. If you were born in the 1960s, and grew up with the Cold War, you wanted to think that the chance of a nuclear nightmare had ended when the Berlin Wall came down. But Israel’s entire nuclear weapons program at the Dimona facility was about developing mini-nukes – devices that could be carried in a backpack. In the same year that Israel’s IDF bombed the Iraqi fast-breeder reactor at Osirak, they tested a joint-venture mini-nuke in the Indian Ocean. It was 1979 and the partner was South Africa.

So Mac wasn’t going mad – not yet, anyway. And Atkins’ own words had confi rmed it. He’d mistakenly admitted that Hassan was in Kuta before and during the bomb blasts, a fact that the Atkins lobby had previously contested. It wasn’t ringing alarm bells, but it was starting to niggle. Why did the fi rm want him out of Jakarta?

Eight minutes later, Mac walked into the courtyard bar of the Raffl es. The air was alive with soft jazz and raucous crickets and he saw Benny at a glass-topped table beside the fountain, drinking with a pretty Chinese woman in a pale blue blouse and navy blue Andrews Sisters skirt.

Benny introduced Suzi and ordered a round of drinks, a Tiger for Mac.

‘Mr McQueen is just up from Australia,’ Benny told Suzi. ‘Very smart fellow.’

‘What do you do?’ she asked in smooth English.

‘Due diligence for the government,’ shrugged Mac, wanting to get on to something else.

‘Due diligence on what?’ asked Suzi, her demeanour disproving the theory that intellect is in inverse proportion to looks.