Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac nodded. He’d seen the circulars about Zamboanga City and the old school site being prepped by US Army engineers. Now he was looking at a plain piece of foolscap with a few simple lines of typeface printed on it. It mentioned a thing called Operation Enduring Freedom and listed a bunch of names as South-East Asia’s most wanted terrorists.

Abu Sabaya was Number One, ahead of Khadaffy Janjalani, Azahari Husin, Noordin Mohammed Top, Radulan Sahiron, Abu Sulaiman and Hamsiraji Sali. The remaining names included two CIA agents and a plant from Pakistani intelligence.

Davidson said, ‘I saw that name at the top, and it rang a bell. Asked around and someone told me you were on top of this bloke.’

‘I wouldn’t say on top. I met him once. But I deal with his people,’ said Mac.

‘Yeah, Alan, but there’s no intel bloke I’ve heard of who would know how to get to this guy. I mean, other than you. Right?’

Mac had looked from Davidson’s smiling face to his Service lackeys, and to Imbruglia. What Davidson was saying was, There’s no AFP or CIA person infi ltrated to the extent you are. Davidson saw a chance to win back relevance in the Prime Minister’s offi ce. And Mac was getting the tap on the shoulder.

He was used to these conversations. He’d had them in the East Timor thing, in the Kosovo shit, even the Samrazi snatch where at the last minute he’d been fi tted up with the missile-homing devices.

It was always the same. Mac was never asked directly to do what they wanted him to do. Davidson had fl own up from Canberra on short notice to get Mac to kill Abu Sabaya, but he wasn’t going to ask him.

Not in a taped and logged ASIS meeting room. They never did.

Davidson smiled, leaned forward again, said, ‘It’s actually quite fortuitous, wouldn’t you say?’

Mac said nothing.

Davidson got quieter. ‘I mean, given your background and everything.’

Mac became an expert on Abu Sabaya, studying his fi le, following his MO, doing endless face-to-faces with Mindanao villagers, small business people and cops. He enlisted where he could.

The overall impression of Sabaya? Too smart to catch, too tough to kill. Aldam Tilao wasn’t purely a terrorist, he was more a businessman who had seen the level of money fl ooding in from Saudi, Syria and Iran in the early 1990s and made a commercial decision. Sure, he was a Moro – which was what southern Philippine Muslims were called.

But his business was stealing stuff, the same business that entire families and villages around the South China Sea had been doing for a thousand years. Piracy, banditry, kidnap, protection. He’d simply switched to jihadist rhetoric and put his hand out for some of that Middle Eastern cash.

The cash had fl owed, and with it his gang and their equipment levels had fl ourished. At one point, the CIA had the gang at two hundred strong. Which, if you wanted to get technical, was a private army. He gave them a name too: Abu Sayyaf. And with the name came a political goal to make Mindanao a separate Moro state, much to the annoyance of the two existing Marxist-based Moro separatist organisations.

Everything about Sabaya was clever and ambitious. He didn’t just kidnap Westerners and ransom them. He rode boatloads of his soldiers into coastal resorts on huge speedboats and took off with twenty tourists at a time. In one year – between mid 2001 and 2002 -

Sabaya’s crew abducted more than one hundred foreigners, beheading several. He taunted the Americans, and the Filipino commandos who were working with them. It was classic stuff, such as offering to buy the Philippine soldiers’ brand-new American-provided M16 A3s and M4 carbines, or making an offer for the Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile systems. Offer these poor soldiers so much money that they couldn’t say no. So when John Sawtell’s boys – or the US Rangers or SEALs – had to storm Abu Sayyaf fortresses like Basilan Island, they were facing the latest American ordnance coming straight back at them.

Abu Sabaya went to ground as soon as the Americans arrived in Zam. He moved around in his trademark black T-shirt, jeans, sunnies and black backpack. He was generous and charming. The poor folk of Mindanao loved him. But the main thing going for him was the incredible support of the womenfolk. On Abu Sabaya’s patch, there was no sex slavery, no sex tourism, no freak shows with mothers and their kids. Mac had once seen a bloke crawling around a village in the boonies behind Cotabato, with no hands and no feet. He’d asked what was up and a local told him that the crawler had tried to set up a child sex freak show for Australian paedophiles. Abu Sabaya had used his own keris – a short, South-East Asian sword.

He loved money and he loved pizza.

Mac’s digging fi nally nailed down Abu Subaya’s favourite pizza joint in Sibuco and he found that Sabaya would have his pizza delivered when he was in the area.

Mac had co-opted a worker in the pizzeria, Davey, and given him a couple of the tiny microdot locators just starting to be introduced by the Americans for shipping. Mac had some false starts – hot pizza grease wasn’t great for the microdots. Davey also tried to run away. He was scared of what would happen to him if a microdot was found or someone saw him trying to insert it into the cardboard box.

Mac had found Davey and talked him round – even though the bloke had every right to be scared.

When the deal fi nally went down, the Americans had fl own Mac into Zam, dropped him on the quay with Sawtell’s boys and the Philippine Navy commandos, the SWAGs. It was a lynching party: no cops, no fl exi cuffs, no spare boat to transport prisoners, no evidence bags. No one brought a notebook. The only camera was the Coolpix in Mac’s breast pocket.

They closed on Sabaya’s pump-boat at speed. A pump-boat is a daggy wooden, high-sided harbour vessel. They’re old, slow, running on tiny diesels that give them a top speed of ten knots, if they’re running downwind. Mac had watched Sawtell stand in impatience as Arroy made the request for the pump-boat to shut down power and prepare to be boarded.

But the way it happened was this: the Philippine Navy commandos hit the spotties, yelling obscenities, and the gunfi ght started immediately. The Americans had lost a guy they called Jacko to an Abu Sayyaf bomb a couple of months earlier, and they weren’t going to screw around that night. The Philippine commandos had lost their own people.

Having worked with many special forces outfi ts over the years, Mac knew they always engaged in gunfi ghts with their assault rifl es set to ‘three-shot’ mode. But that night, Mac didn’t hear the tap-dancing of three-shot. He heard a roar of lead and felt the air shake with full-auto. The Green Berets and the SWAGs put so much lead into the pump-boat that it listed to port, dipping its gunwale into the diesel-slick waters. Mac remembered the heat and the metallic smell of human plasma, diesel and tropical salt water biting into the back of his throat.

Mac had to ask Sawtell to stop the fi ring. Arroy overheard the request on the headset, shut it down himself. Then the whoops started up.

Mac grabbed the CIA guy they called Pencil Neck and tried to get him onto the pump-boat. ‘Come on, champ, time to go to work,’ he’d urged, but Pencil Neck couldn’t move. He was vomiting, crying. A bit of human scalp had stuck to the sleeve of his pressed battle fatigues.

Mac fl icked it off, ruffl ed the guy’s hair. But Pencil Neck was frozen to the seat.

Mac, Sawtell and a couple of Yank troopers went instead, slipping on the blood-covered decks of the listing pump-boat. They turned over bodies, Mac insisting that a semi-submerged corpse be brought to the surface.

Mac photographed faces, some of them torn off by gunfi re. One had lost an arm. He found it near the prow, fake gold Rolex glinting under the SWAGs’ spotties. They found a black backpack fl oating, black sunnies inside.