Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

The soldiers leapt to it. Through the gap behind the airliner seats, the guys in their Level-A kit were having what looked like white, plastic car-vacuum cleaners slung over their shoulders. Mac knew they weren’t vacuum cleaners. He’d spent enough time on the docks with customs guys to know he was looking at explosives detectors.

Mac thought he’d make a small point to Hatfi eld.

‘General, I thought the point of CL-20 was that it’s very hard to detect. Could be impossible through a steel container wall.’

Hatfi eld had the phone to his ear again and was distracted. ‘Didn’t I tell you, son?’

Don could sense something awry and he cleared his throat too loud.

Hatfi eld ploughed on. ‘We’ll be detecting the VX shipment.’

Looking away, he mumbled ‘Thank you’ into the phone.

Don was now a little pained, trying to physically get between Mac and Hatfi eld.

‘But, General, VX is odourless. We can’t detect it,’ said Mac.

‘I know,’ said Hatfi eld with a smile as he looked back from the handset. ‘But the bomb casements they’re in have a nice big signature, believe me.’

Hokkaido Spirit was a ten-year-old container ship with a capacity of four thousand containers. A mid-sized carrier working a line from Yokohama to Kaohsiung, to Manila, Surabaya and Fremantle, and then back again, once a week.

Sawtell’s Black Hawk hovered over the starboard side of the ship while men in bio-hazard suits roped to the decks.

In the Chinook, the soldiers fi nished zipping Mac into a white OSHA Level-A, velcroed the collars and the ankle-ties and handed him a hard hat. Underneath he wore long woollen underwear, chemical-resistant overalls and a supplied-air NIOSH respirator with a full-face glass breathing mask. He felt totally uncomfortable and tried again to get Hatfi eld to see it his way.

‘Know what, General, I could be more use up here in the helo.

More of an advisory role,’ he said.

Hatfi eld laughed. ‘You’re in good hands, son. Captain Alden here will walk you through it. Just no sudden movements, okay?’

The loadmaster threw back the large sliding doors on the side of the Chinook, and Alden and Mac stepped up.

Mac came down the winch lift onto the fo’c’sle deck, the Chinook’s downwash so strong that the men could barely stand up under the pressure.

Brine smashed into the bow of the ship fi ve storeys below, and the ship slopped around, swayed side to side. Sawtell’s boys met him, unhitched him, told Alden to come on down. They were wired but the din of the Chinook’s tandem rotors was so loud that communication was done with hand signals.

Alden landed and the Chinook moved away. They joined the fi ve Special Forces troopers and Mac saw Sawtell smiling behind his mask.

‘Let’s go to work,’ said Alden into the radio system.

Mac’s breath rasped and wheezed into the respirator. The entire Level-A suit added ten degrees of temperature and about fi fteen kilos of weight. The boots alone – chemical-resistant, steel-toe jobs – must have weighed as much as a medium-sized dog.

Alden asked Mac to join him to question the skipper, and then ordered Sawtell’s boys to fan out.

‘Mate, if they’re on this ship, then at least some of the crew is on their side. See what I mean? This is Abu Sabaya we’re talking about.

Major league terrorist,’ said Mac.

‘Any ideas?’ asked the captain.

Mac suggested the Green Berets and Mac go to the bridge, search the quarters and communal areas for people and make their move on any VX nerve agent from there. ‘If the captain’s not kosher, we’ll know pretty quick.’

He recommended that Alden get moving on the detection systems with his guys. Hatfi eld had been ahead of Mac on that one.

Had already determined that since you couldn’t remotely detect for VX agent, they’d have to test for high explosive.

Fucking great!

Mac had assumed the VX was in forty-gallon drums or sealed canisters. But they had to store the stuff in warheads bolted to the front of one-hundred-pound bombs. The whole thing clicked into place: the secrecy when the stuff was discovered at Clark, the involvement of DIA, Don’s shit-scared paranoia, the sight of an experienced army general gulping down the stress.

Sabaya had picked well. Those VX devices had been designed in the 1960s to spread the VX nerve agent as far as possible and the CL-20 was going to give that a boost. The scenario had got even uglier.

He forced himself to stay calm and focused. The captain had his blokes with their explosive detectors. Problem was you had to be virtually on top of the stuff to get a signal. Through the high-tensile steel of a shipping container, it could be pushing shit uphill. And looking up at the mountain of containers rising fi fty feet in the air like a multicoloured Mayan temple, it seemed ridiculous.

The party split. Four went with Sawtell and Mac down the starboard inspection gantry. The captain and two guys from the Twentieth went down the port side.

They got to the deckhouse. It was the high-rise of the container ship that had the engine room at its base, the accommodation quarters and communal areas in the middle levels, and the bridge and comms rooms at the top.

A Japanese man called Tokada met them. He wore a white shirt with merchant marine pips on the shoulder. He greeted Sawtell in good English and then took a look at the rest of the suited-up crew.

Got green around the gills, wide-eyed, like Holy shit!

His look of fright, complete lack of comprehension, told Mac this guy wasn’t part of anything.

Mac and Sawtell got into the elevator with Tokada; all that could fi t.

As the lift got going, Mac reached his breaking point, whipped off the hood and respirator mask and took a deep breath. Everything around him was white: white lino, white formica walls, white ceiling.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Tokada.

‘We’ll tell you if we fi nd it,’ said Mac.

Sawtell took off his head gear too, said to Tokada, ‘This is Mac.

Don’t worry about his manners. He’s Australian.’

Mac sat in the bridge and Captain Nagai helped him operate the computerised stowage system. You could run down the containers on board by any number of searches: port of offl oad, port of loading, twenty-foot containers, thirty-foot containers, and reefers that kept goods cool.

Mac was looking at the stowage map that allowed you to click on a position of a container on deck and bring up the details. He called Brown on the radio but there were still no clues out of Manila International.

Sawtell was searching the quarters and the engine bay and kitchen/ living areas. Mac doubted they’d fi nd Garrison or Sabaya, or Diane.

Sabaya’s MO never put him with the stolen containers or the actual crime. Hokkaido Spirit might be carrying a VX bomb without knowing it. In that case there’d still be one or two crew who were in on it.

Mac clicked on the container locations and the fi les came up with port of loading, manifest, port of destination. Most of the containers originated in Kaohsiung and Yokohama and the main port of destination was Fremantle. Nothing obvious was coming up. Mac stuck to the outside piers of the container stack. If Sabaya was going to do this, he’d try to do a good job and he’d want access to his little bomb factory. The layout of a container ship made it very hard to open up a container at sea. The lashing systems that held the stowage in place were one-inch steel bars that ran across the small ends of the containers, preventing doors being opened.

The stacks themselves were so closed up that you could barely get a person between them. Mac asked the captain for a heads-up on which containers could be opened. Nagai called over the XO and they conferred. If these people were friends with Sabaya or being threatened by him, they were incredibly relaxed about it. Mac was sure they were wasting their time.