Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Flores, Indonesia, 12 October 2002

They sat like surfers waiting for a wave, the four of them dressed in thin black wetsuits facing south-west into the Indian Ocean. Huge blue-black and purple cloud formations loomed above as if declaring an end to the dry season and signalling the start of the monsoons.

The swell lapped into Mac’s rebreather harness as his eyes scanned the horizon for signs of the target through the salty humidity. Behind him the sounds of bird life and monkeys occasionally drifted from the remote southern shores of Flores.

Alan McQueen looked at his G-Shock: just past 2.07 pm. Thirty-seven minutes past schedule for the start of Operation Handmaiden, and the crew were getting restless.

‘Anything, Maddo?’ asked Mac softly.

The man to his left shook his head, not taking his eyes off the horizon. ‘Want me to call it in?’ he mumbled, lips hardly moving.

‘No,’ said Mac. ‘Sosa knows what he’s doing. If the target’s there, then we’ll know about it.’ Mac didn’t mind incoming calls, but he wanted to avoid the potential locating beacon you put up every time you keyed the mic on a radio.

The Combat Diver Team providing Mac’s escort was known as Team 4. All of them navy special forces based out of Western Australia, they’d fl own in two days ago to perform a frogman snatch at sea. It was the most diffi cult naval commando mission, which suited Team 4 just fi ne. They sat astride a partially submerged infl atable vessel known in the Royal Australian Navy as a sled and as a skimmer by the British, each man strapped into his own seat. When the sled was fully submerged it became a battery-powered diver-propulsion vehicle capable of carrying fi ve combat divers for about thirty kilometres, though there were only three combat divers with Mac on this job.

In the bow of the sled was a blond guy, Smithee, and to Mac’s right was a huge Aussie-Leb they called Pharaoh, one of the largest combat divers Mac had ever seen. The divers were usually built like gymnasts or boxers, but Pharaoh looked more like The World’s Strongest Man, as if he should be lifting balls of stone onto oil barrels. There was a large V-shaped object on Pharaoh’s back, strapped over his rebreather pack and pointing over the level of his head.

Sitting in front of Mac was the team leader, Doug Madden, known simply as Maddo. He was a medium-height, dark-haired Kalgoorlie boy who, like most special forces blokes, conserved his energy until sudden outbursts of critical violence were required.

The spare seat was for a bloke named Ahmed al Akbar. A Saudi banker and accountant, Akbar used a legitimate trade fi nance program in South-East Asia to oversee Osama bin Laden’s investments in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Following the September 11 bombings in New York and Washington, the Americans had hit back with an Allied invasion of Afghanistan that had broken the Taliban. But the invasion had also created a diaspora of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban fi gures who’d fl ed the al Farouq camp outside Kandahar and spread out through South-East Asia. Now, intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad, MI6 and Mac’s employer – the Australian Secret Intelligence Service – were focusing on what were known as deceptions and provocations. That is, getting the bad guys to go after one another, with a little help from your friendly neighbourhood spook.

Akbar was making his monthly tour of terror camps, and intelligence had him using a regular sea route that started in Surabaya, hooked under Bali and Flores before heading north for Sulawesi and then Mindanao. The point of Operation Handmaiden was to snatch the fi nancier from the vessel he was in and feed a rumour back to the tango community that he’d fl ed his Jemaah Islamiyah minders and cut a deal where he ratted out the Moro separatists. There were few organisations in the world that were game enough to go after OBL, but the Muslim gangs of the southern Philippines were up there with the White House, Downing Street and the PLA generals, as outfi ts with the stones to try and hit Osama where he lived. It was a simple plan that hinged on snatching Akbar without signs of a struggle.

Mac checked his gear for the twenty-third time: face mask, hoses, harness, handgun, knife, duct tape, a bag fi lled with goodies, a hard plastic syringe case and a foil of Xanax. Breathing deep, pain fl ared in his chest. He’d joined the combat divers only a day before, straight from the Bali Sevens, a seven-a-side rugby tournament held each year at Kuta Beach. In one of the group matches he’d been tackled ball-and-all by a big Yaapie mining foreman playing for a Malaysian team and could barely breathe after the hit. He’d backed up for another match against the Darwin Dreadnoughts an hour later, playing in agony. He suspected a cracked or bruised sternum but hadn’t gone to Denpasar Hospital because his team, the Manila Marauders, had a no-piker policy: that is, you played and drank, played and drank for the whole week – no pikers.

The RAN rebreather rigs required deep and regular breathing by the divers, and Mac had no idea how he’d manage or how he might justify failure to Joe Imbruglia, the ASIS station chief in Manila who’d wanted Mac to fl ag the sevens and do the snatch. Well, mate, at least I didn’t pike on the boys, eh? wasn’t likely to go down too well.

The call came from Sosa at 2.11 pm saying he now had eyes on the target from his recon point on the headland. Maddo relayed the update to Team 4 and they fell silent as they waited for the ship.

Mac used the rising adrenaline to run through every last detail of the Akbar snatch in his mind. He visualised it, breaking it into pieces like scenes in a movie. He forced himself to imagine three different disaster scenarios and his exact response to each. The third contingency was a white fl ag – abandon the snatch and pull an ‘escape and evade’, an E amp;E, to a predetermined point.

This last option wasn’t defeatist. During Mac’s stint in the Royal Marines Commandos the chief instructor, Banger Jordan, had told them there was no such thing as a mission without an exit.

‘In a professional outfi t there’re no heroes and no cowards, only alive guys and dead guys,’ Banger had growled. ‘The alive guy knows where the exits are.’

‘Macca, your eleven o’clock,’ called Smithee.

Mac saw it immediately. A faint plume of diesel exhaust signalled the arrival of their quarry. By the look of it, the small ship would be on them in fi ve minutes. Mac looked at the others – the boys were ready.

‘Your call Maddo,’ said Mac. ‘I’m good.’

Smithee locked in on the target and Pharaoh pulled his face mask up, winking at Mac. There was a small pause as they all breathed out and in and then Maddo called the mission.

Seating their masks, they twisted their regulators to the settings Maddo called and did three tests on the mixture from the bottles on their backs. Mac tasted rubber, triggering a fl eeting memory of using a rebreather for the fi rst time, his heart going crazy, freaking out at the icy English water near Devon.

Maddo tested the comms and all three of them did thumbs-up.

When Maddo was set he gave thumbs-up to Smithee. A whining sound accompanied the slow sinking of the sled as the motors sucked water ballast into the infl atable skin, using the weight of the batteries along the keel to pull it under. Mac controlled his breathing and felt the sea water fi lling up his kit, muting all sounds except for the rasp of his own breathing.

Settling at four metres under the surface, Maddo gave Smithee a heading. The whining sound began again and a pair of enclosed props started spinning on either end of the bar that ran across the width of the sled’s bow. Pharaoh and Mac lay down on their stomachs in the rear part of the sled, while Smithee knelt behind the driving controls at the front. Kneeling behind Smithee, Maddo called the heading from a compass built into the sled. The props angled slightly to the right