Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Bingo! thought Mac. ‘My guess is it was on a ship in the Macassar Strait this morning. It was met by Sabaya and Garrison.’

Mac sensed eyes, looked up: saw a face peering in the van window.

He freaked, grabbed the Browning, loosed three rounds. The glass imploded and the noise woke the forest. Mac rose, Browning in a cup-and-saucer, his wrist aching from making a grip. He opened the side door and switched off the interior light. It was pitch-black outside and, changing the Browning to his left hand, he dropped to the ground. He walked a few paces away from the van, ears rushing, heart palpitating and unable to see a thing. Then he tripped on something.

Looking down he saw it and let his gun arm drop. It was a macaque, minus a head and right arm.

‘Sorry, champ. Not your night.’

He’d always liked the macaque for its intelligence and soulfulness and the way it could wink. It saddened him to know that the animal was the preferred test-bed for the type of people who had created VX nerve agent. Didn’t seem right: bunch of psychos in lab coats standing around, seeing how fast one of the magnifi cent animals lost bowel control. His sister Virginia had always teased him about liking animals more than people. Didn’t seem so strange to Mac.

He wandered back to the van, sat down and heard the phone going haywire. Grabbed it, said, ‘Yep?’

‘That you, McQueen?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Holy shit, son, you okay?’

Mac tried to say something, but it wouldn’t come. ‘Umm, yeah,’ he said eventually.

‘Talk to me, son,’ said Hatfi eld.

‘Yeah. Fuck. Just killed a monkey.’ There was something in the air choking him up. Fucking pollen.

Hatfi eld talked him back into the game, talking about long nights, tough missions and the need to focus to overcome disappointment.

‘Gotcha. I’m good. Yep, good to go,’ said Mac.

Hatfi eld had more questions. ‘Captain Sawtell said something about CL-20?’

‘They have about twenty cases of the stuff,’ said Mac.

‘Twenty cases!’

‘Yep.’

‘That’s a lot of ordnance for something that was supposed to be experimental.’

‘That’s Sabaya for you. He’s a piece of work.’

‘Any ideas?’

Mac thought about it. Didn’t want to throw up a false alarm. ‘If I had to bet on it, I’d say they were heading south, across the Java Sea.

For Surabaya, maybe Fremantle.’

‘You know what that much CL-20 would do to a container load of VX?’ said Hatfi eld, almost whispering.

‘Aerosol effect?’

‘Damned right, son. Damned right.’

Mac made good time to the Pantai, then drove up and down the road on the main entrance, looking for cars and eyes. There was a white Commodore with two men in it. Australian by the look of it.

He parked at the front doors on the far side of the drop-off area, positioning the HiAce side on to give him some cover when he got out. Leaving the motor running, he went in through the front lobby, hoping it would look like a trade delivery. He slapped down his Richard Davis passport at the front desk. The girl behind the desk was reading Vanity Fair. She got up in a hurry, smoothed her skirt.

Mac winked. ‘About that story on me – don’t believe a word of it.’

The girl rolled her eyes and Mac showed his deposit box key. ‘Like to make this fast. Got a plane to catch.’

They made their way down into the security basement and Mac walked up to the box behind the desk girl. They opened it and Mac simply piled everything from the box into his backpack, zipped it up, shut the deposit box and left the basement.

He got to the van and pulled out into the street, keeping an eye on the white Commodore in his mirror. It pulled out, followed.

Mac had choices: lose them or confront them.

He sped up, slowed down, waiting to see if they’d make a move.

It was two am in Makassar and the two cars had the roads largely to themselves. He sped up and slowed down, ran a red light and made the tail come with him. There was a line of taxis outside the Kios Semarang, an upstairs nightclub haunt of the expat community.

Across the road from it was a narrow Dutch-built alley.

He drove around the block again and, fi nding the other end of the alley, pulled in beside it so the HiAce blocked it lengthwise. He leapt from the van and took off down the alley. The Commodore pulled up behind him and he could hear a door open and a bloke say ‘Fuck it’ in an Aussie accent as he realised he couldn’t get by the van to get into the alley. The door shut again and Mac heard the V6 scream off round the block.

Mac stopped and sprinted straight back to the HiAce, leapt in and swung around, making a dogleg exit from Makassar with as many illogical turns as he could. He drove conservatively, not wanting POLRI asking questions about the monkey window. On the outskirts of the city it was dark with no street lighting. Mac swung onto the road to Hasanuddin and fl oored it.

He had a fl ight to catch.

Mac waited under the trees over the road from the fl oodlit security gate at Hasanuddin Air Base. He’d left the joint hours ago with no worries because Cookie had arranged it. But he wasn’t game to stand there at two-thirty am and tell some MP and his dog that he should be allowed back in. He didn’t want to test his luck in the early hours.

He was back in his blue overalls, the Walther. 38 in a hip rig beneath the ovies. He wore his black Adidas cap. Everything else he might need was in the pack.

Lying down, he looked at the stars. Conserving his energy, he tried to map out exactly what he was doing. Boo and his boys had obviously escaped from the Pantai, where Mac had left them in their fl exi cuffs. The spook who called himself Paul and claimed to be MI6 seemed to have slipped out without anyone noticing and the four hundred dollars would get him from Hasanuddin to Manila. Maybe.

Where Mac went from here was a bit of a guess. He was as surprised as Hatfi eld when he came up with his Surabaya scenario.

He hadn’t been planning to say it. Didn’t want to sound like a nutter, but that’s what it had sounded like: a container ship carrying what amounted to a VX bomb would sail into a major South-East Asian port and detonate.

The impact would be incredible. If you could get the right winds behind you, and get the VX to erupt far enough into the atmosphere, the body count could be huge. Mac had said Surabaya because he was thinking about a ship sailing south-bound from Manila down the Macassar Strait. Where was the biggest city? Across the Java Sea in Surabaya, where the city of three million people was totally built around the ports and most of the citizens lived in densely populated shanty towns. Surabaya was also built at sea level – low enough to have fl ooding problems. A nerve gas vapour would have no problems descending to where lungs were inhaling.

Mac had no idea what Hatfi eld and his CBNRE team were going to do. They had the weight of the White House and Pentagon behind them. But how would you search every ship? And if the ship was already in port, wouldn’t an interdiction by the US Army just get the bomb detonated?

The Madura Strait that passed by Surabaya was a busy shipping lane – one of the world’s busiest for oil supertankers. And Surabaya’s port was as busy as Jakarta’s. The shipping world measured container movements by the shortest containers – the twenty-footers – even though many of the containers were thirty and forty feet. So all movements were listed as TEUs, or Twenty-foot Equivalent Units.

Surabaya’s major port, Tanjung Perak, had a throughput of about seven thousand TEUs every day. The three hundred ships that went through Surabaya each month had a pre-paid schedule for berthing and loading/offl oading. The commercial disincentive for the port master to shut down the port and allow the docked vessels and those standing off to be searched was substantial. If the request came from a Yankee and the substance they were searching for was odourless and colourless, Mac couldn’t see how that was going to work. Indonesia’s path to full economic development would be predicated on its maritime importance and it could not afford to be seen as a dangerous or money-losing shipping destination. A container ship had to carry a stowage plan showing exactly which container was in which bay, row and pier. They were all numbered, sure, but when you had a ship with eight thousand containers on board you’d be looking at three or four days to search it. And what if the ship with the VX wasn’t going to Surabaya? What if it was bound for Lombok or Denpasar? That was turning into a shitload of containers to be searched – and when?