Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac stepped up, put down his passport. ‘Some morning you’re having, huh?’

She smiled. Tired, late thirties, smart. Once pretty, she was now just sexy. Her shift would have started at midnight and she’d be getting all the crazies, the ones who hadn’t slept, or who had fl own in from the West and had no idea what was happening to their circadians.

‘Bloody Austrians,’ said Mac. ‘How rude can you get?’

‘They were Dutch,’ said the girl.

‘Germans, Dutch. All look the same to me, mate,’ said Mac, winking.

She smiled as if she really shouldn’t.

‘You’re not the girl, are you? You know, with the parasol and the geese?’ asked Mac.

She looked confused, then suddenly got it. Smiled big, looked at her screen too intently, looked back. ‘No – I’m not her.’

Mac asked for a one-way to Surabaya.

She asked, ‘Economy?’

Mac nodded.

She shook her head. ‘Economy’s sold out on the 7.35 fl ight.

I can get you on the evening fl ight in economy.’

Mac shook his head. ‘How much is fi rst class?’ he asked, fanning out his Singapore dollars on the counter.

She looked back at the screen, chewed her bottom lip. Said,

‘I think we can do this.’

Mac fl ew fi rst class on an upgrade. The food was great, the leg room was even better, the brand new Airbus was out-fucking-standing. He grabbed a cold orange juice, reclined and had a think about what the hell he was doing. Five days ago he’d had a soul-weary feeling about this profession – just wanted it to be over, get into uni life. He could have walked away that morning, jumped the south-bound fl ight for Sydney, sunk a few cheeky ones, then stretched out in business class and slept all the way into Kingsford Smith. The Service apartment was valid until the end of January so he could have spent some time working out how a mortgage was going to happen. Could have booked into the Coogee Bay Hotel for a couple of nights, lain on the beach, knocked back cold beers, inspected the insides of the eyelids.

Could have spent Christmas with his mum and dad at their retirement home in Airlie; taken up some pressies for his nieces, spoiled them rotten, annoying Virginia big-time.

But Mac wasn’t going home. He was heading back into a potentially ugly situation, partially blind on info and with no Commonwealth backup. A regular boy scout running into a snake pit.

He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. At some point every bloke turns into his father.

Mac remembered the summer of his last year at UQ. Virginia had just started uni. She came home with a bloke called Miles who she’d been seeing. Mac had seen Miles too. He wore John Lennon glasses and got around in bare feet, beret and a rat’s tail of hair down his back.

He had a ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt and a Mao lapel badge on his WWII great coat. Mac had fi rst seen Miles with a megaphone in his face on the vice-chancellor’s steps at the St Lucia campus, banging on about Palestine or Guatemala and saying things like ‘fascist’ and ‘pigs’.

Then Virginia turned up with the bloke, who sat there at Sunday lunch telling Frank how it was with human rights and the corrupt pigs and the brutality against protestors. Frank didn’t say a word.

Finally, Miles challenged him, said, ‘Okay – so why are you a cop?’

Frank looked around, put down his fork, said, ‘Because it needs to get done. ‘Cos most people can’t.’

If Mac was honest about why he ended up in public service when he could have done a lot of other things, it had a lot to do with what Frank had told Miles.

But it hadn’t helped Frank much. The last time Mac had been in Airlie, the federal election was on and Mac was amazed that his father had become a silent voter – a good man trying to disappear beneath the radar while the criminals who would harass him roamed free.

Frank had looked at Mac a bit sheepish after he told Mac. ‘Things sure changed, didn’t they, mate?’ said Frank.

They sure did.

And people like Mac just kept stepping up for it.

They touched down at Juanda airport mid morning. Mac hired a Honda Civic from Avis with the Orion Visa card. If anything was going to come up strange on a neural-net system, it was going to be a car rented on a Visa card that had been issued fi ve years before and never been used. But someone would have to be looking for that. They’d have to realise that the only way for Mac to slip off everyone’s radar would be that he’d assumed a new identity. And when they couldn’t fi nd any fl ags on the IDs they knew of, they’d have to backtrack and go looking for new ones. That’s what Mac would do, but a lot wouldn’t.

And he hoped that the people who were now following him were as hopeless as he used to think they were.

He pulled out of the enormous Juanda rental car parking lot, hit the air-con as the heat started to grip and took the direct feeder on to the Trans-Java Highway.

Then he headed west, for Jakarta.

Mac hit the fi rst toll road, to Mojokerto, paid in cash, keeping off the databases. There were toll roads all the way west to Jakarta and he could have used the e-tag on the rental car to speed straight through and be billed when he took the Civic back. But if Matt found a one-off credit card usage, he could cross check it with the toll road databases and the rego of the rental car. He’d have the time and everything.

He stuck to the speed limit while trucks fl ashed past him. No excuses for the POLRI to pull him over. A white Commodore followed him for a while so he pulled over, let them pass, got right in behind them. The Commodore took an off-ramp fourteen minutes later.

He pulled into a shopping area, bought water, fruit, cotton buds and nail polish remover. Sat in the car park, removed his mo. He did it slow. If you looked after those things you could get three uses out of them – maybe four if you weren’t getting into fi ghts.

He found a local band on the AM radio dial playing covers of Billy Joel, Phil Collins and Olivia Newton-John. Hard to tell if they were in Bahasa or bad English. He’d re-strapped his wrist but the worst seemed to be over. The swelling was on its way down and the lump behind his ear was much better. He felt okay and kept his spirits up by slugging water from a large bottle on the seat beside him. And tried to sort himself out.

Garvs had said, ‘It’s over.’ It was far from that for Mac. He’d been through this before, in East Timor. The politicians and Service lunchers had wanted him out, but Mac had gone back in. That had been a clearer scenario and he’d been vindicated, made the offi ce guys look good. This wasn’t clear, and Mac was confused about his next move. He didn’t know what Garrison was up to, didn’t know what his connection might be to someone in the Service. He needed to know more about Eighty and where he fi tted. He also had no backup in the embassy, since there’d be a general low-level alert out for him.

Mac’s main role at the Service was in trade, banking and fi nance.

It wasn’t what they’d sent him to the Royal Marines for all those years before but it’s what he’d spent most of his time doing. That’s where Mac overlapped with Judith Hannah. She was tailing the Chinese intelligence blokes who were working on a maritime security system to protect Chinese trade. Indonesia was the key to it, given it had the world’s worst piracy problem in the world’s most valuable shipping lanes: the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

Mac and others – including many people in the US State Department – knew that the Chinese approach to maritime security was ultimately the establishment of a Chinese naval base in Singapore.

They’d been hinting at it, enlisting cocktail drinkers to it and generally seeding the idea for most of the 1990s. It was a simple piece of arithmetic: if your booming economy relied on making lots of stuff really cheaply, then you had to be able to transport lots of stuff really cheaply. Every time there was another act of piracy in the South China Sea, another maritime terrorist warning in the Malacca Strait, or another bluewater heist in the Java Sea, you added more slices of a per cent to the costs of your goods. Once those slices rose too high, either your profi t margins eroded or your buyers in Italy, Bahrain, Malaysia or Australia had an excuse to buy elsewhere.