Mark Abernethy: Golden Serpent

Ward lay beside him, binos to his eyes. They did a traditional sweep.

‘What are we looking for, Macca?’ asked Ward.

‘Stand-by for a cammo tarp, some sort of covering.’

‘You kidding?’ muttered Ward. ‘Not exactly using spotties here, mate.’

‘Plan B – fi nd the perimeter,’ said Mac. ‘They’d have at least two blokes on the wall.’

The group scanned the desert darkness for the next ten minutes.

It was boring, mentally draining work.

Then one of the troopers saw something.

Ward moved down, followed by Mac. They lay on either side of the SAS trooper, who kept his head still and talked softly. ‘My eleven o’clock. Two fi ngers below the horizon. I saw a puff of smoke. Could be a ciggie.’

Mac peered through his Leicas. Found the sentry. ‘Out-fucking-standing,’ he muttered.

The sentry was well-hidden in a hollow one hundred and fi fty metres from the dune, sitting against a rock in a dark pea jacket and khaki pants. On his lap was what looked like a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 machine pistol, the kind used by counter-terrorism forces. One hell of a thing. Mac had once seen a demo of what an MP5 on full auto could do to a cow carcass. He didn’t eat a hamburger for three whole days.

The guard dragged on a cigarette and let out another plume of smoke. A light breeze carried it south.

‘Got him?’ asked Mac.

‘Roger that,’ said Ward. ‘See that round his neck?’

Mac looked again. ‘Yep.’

‘Night vision,’ said Ward. ‘They’ve got some toys.’

The camp was fi fty metres behind the sentry, built in a channel with tarps running for about eighty metres north-south, and cammo webbing over the tarps. No way to see it from the air, unless someone was looking for it. It was a terrorist training camp, the kind of structure usually found in Libya or Afghanistan.

It appeared that food and power were at one end of the camp, sleeping at the other, operations and stores in the centre. There were a couple of rough timber latrines to the east of the camp, not far from where the sentry was sitting.

Mac reckoned the camp would hold up to thirty men, and if his snitch in Jakarta wasn’t telling him pork pies, one of them was Ali Samrazi – an Indonesian double agent who had dropped from the radar eigtheen months ago and had reappeared with a mob called Moro Jihad. Moro Jihad was a middle-class outfi t that focused its activities on economic and maritime terror. If you could drive up the price of shipping through the Malacca Straits and South China Sea by even fi ve per cent, you were eating into the Western world’s profi t margins. The modern tangos could read spreadsheets as well as al-Qaeda propaganda.

‘Wardie, can you fi nd the other sentries? I need to know where they are,’ said Mac.

Ward had already found them; they were in a triangle arrangement around the camp.

‘Any ideas?’ asked Mac.

Ward took his eyes away from the binos. ‘No worries. There’s three sentries but they’re not overlapped. We take out Mr Ashtray and the others won’t know about it. It’s a free run to the try line.’

The group slid down through the spinifex, gathering behind a rock at the base of the dune. Mac’s adrenaline was pumping, his breath short.

He looked back up the dune to where Foxy was hidden in the scrub.

Ward tapped his G-Shock and held up both hands.

Mac nodded. Ten minutes to knock the sentries out, then the mission would begin.

Ward gave thumbs-up and went south with one man while a trooper named Jones took two troopers north. Manistas – a tough western Sydney kid they called Manny – remained with Mac. Manny was about fi ve-nine and powerful but lithe. Like a stuntman or a gymnast.

As an added bonus, he spoke Farsi, Bahasa Indonesian and some other languages favoured by tangos. That’s why he was with Mac.

They got on their bellies and crawled. The advance was slow and painful. The earth of the Australian outback looks like red talc from a distance, but get amongst it and it’s fi lled with gravel, rocks and insects.

Mac followed the SAS trooper into a channel where they could stand in a crouch and they followed the dry bed slightly to the north and around a bend for forty metres. That brought them north-east of the sentry. Manny stopped as they heard the low hum of what was probably a power generator in the camp.

Manny leaned on the wall of the channel, stuck his scarfed head up slowly, pulled back, nodded at Mac. Then he checked his M4, looked down the sights at the ground.

Mac unholstered the Heckler, checked for load, checked for safety.

With the suppressor screwed on, the handgun was more than twice its normal length. He found a smaller creek bed that fed into the channel and crawled into it on his elbows, the Heckler in his right hand. The creek bed was perfect: shallow enough to be able to keep eyes on Mr Ashtray but deep enough to move undetected through the dark. He moved quickly, his breath coming dry and shallow.

Mac was just about to take another look at the countdown on his watch when he realised he was face to face with what looked like an eastern brown snake. He froze, watching as the diamond head and darting tongue came out from behind the scrub which was half a foot from his face. The snake moved out into the creek bed, its black eyes like onyx, its body glistening in the moonlight.

Mac backed up across the sand, gulping hard. The venom from a brown snake wouldn’t necessarily kill you, but twelve hours of delirium was not Mac’s ideal platform for a mission. The snake’s gaze was steady, the tongue glowing as it fl icked. Mac kept reversing through the dust, trying not to breathe on the thing for fear of annoying it.

As the snake focused on him, Mac fought the panic urge.

The snake raised its head, lifted a whole section of itself off the ground.

Mac back-pedalled like a politician.

The snake pulled its head back on its body, ready to strike. Mac had no choice but to roll sideways out of the shallow depression, into the open. He rolled onto his stomach, looked up at the sentry who was now only twenty metres away. Mac was close enough to smell his Marlboros.

The snake kept coming, Mac could see it slithering fast across the ground. He rolled again and the sentry raised his head. Panicking now, Mac steadied himself on the rocky ground, took a cup-and-saucer grip on the Heckler, aimed it at the sentry and squeezed. The gun spat – the round missed.

Now the sentry was off his perch, MP5 in his hands. Clueless, but alert. The snake didn’t stop. Mac looked down and fi red at the animal, but only grazed it. The snake was as confused as the guard who was now walking towards him.

The snake fi nally made a move, came in fast and struck at Mac’s Hi-Tec boot. As the fangs sank into the black rubber sole, Mac prayed they wouldn’t hit fl esh.

The sentry was fi fteen metres away and carrying a weapon that could cut a man to ribbons. A couple more steps and he would see Mac. The sentry put his free hand to the night vision goggles and lifted them.

Shit!

Mac had to drop the guy.

He forced his eyes away from the snake and aimed again: two shots in succession. They sounded like a man spitting grapefruit pips.

One shot hit the sentry in the chest. His eyes went wide, his legs folded. Mac should have been on his feet and halfway to the sentry by now, but he turned back immediately to the snake, kicking his legs like a child. He muttered, a clear sign he was on the verge of doing something really stupid.

Pointing the elongated Heckler at the snake on his foot, Mac heard a voice in his head say he’d probably shoot his foot, and what a joke that would make him in Townsville’s SAS barracks for the next six months.

Before he could do it, a knife glinted in the moonlight and the snake’s head was severed.