Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Someone belted him in the face and one of the guys in charge – the Filipino – said something like, “Don’t damage the goods, I don’t want him useless for the next leg.” I thought it was a strange thing to say

– the next leg – like it was a tour or something.’

‘Irvine?’ asked Mac.

‘Yes, Peter Irvine. Canadian. Highly experienced in these waters.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not that I can recall.’

‘How did they leave the ship?’

‘By tender. Rigid infl atable thing. Might have been from Brani Terminal.’

‘Which way did they go?’

Wylie pointed over the port side, across the channel to Brani Island.

Mac nodded. ‘Three of them, huh?’

Jeremy leapt in. ‘And the woman helming the tender makes four.’

‘Sorry?’ said Mac.

‘The woman,’ said Jeremy. ‘I went out on the deck when they left, had a look. There was a blonde woman driving the tender.’

Mac’s ears fi lled with blood, heart pumping behind his eyeballs.

‘Woman?’

‘Yeah. Mid thirties, very attractive professional type. Couldn’t work out what she was doing with these scum.’

‘How was she dressed, mate?’

‘Jeans and a shirt. Pale-blue polo shirt thing.’

Jeremy moved closer, as if something had occurred to him.

‘Umm.’

‘What else, mate? Could be important,’ said Mac.

‘Nothing really. It’s nothing.’

‘Come on.’

‘Well, she looked up and saw me watching.’

‘Yes?’

‘And didn’t tell the blokes.’

Mac and Paul came off the gangway, onto the quay, holding newspapers over their faces to stop any unfriendlies identifying them on TV. Don and his sidekick from the Chinook swooped on them and another pair of men in bio-hazards walked past them towards Wylie and Jeremy.

They made straight for Hatfi eld’s Chinook and sat in the aft freight area. Hatfi eld’s voice boomed clearly through the bulkhead.

Don thanked Mac and Paul for the work, and Paul asked if he could use the Chinook’s radio-telephone. He called Weenie and requested the Gazelle.

Mac briefed Don. ‘Mate, you can get this to your guys: the container’s at twelve eleven eight six. It’s about halfway between deckhouse and bow, on our side – starboard – and it’s high up. The eighty-six position is two or three from the top of the stack.’

Don touched his throat mic. Relayed the information exactly.

‘Was anyone exposed?’ asked Don.

Mac shook his head. ‘Not that we know of.’

‘Did these guys remove any of the VX?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, mate,’ said Mac.

Don mulled it over. ‘Where are Garrison and Sabaya now?’

‘We’ve got an idea. Might need some of your special forces,’ said Paul.

Don looked sideways at Paul. Clocked the muscles, the broken nose, the steady eyes. Looked back at Mac. ‘Worked with Sawtell’s unit before?’

Mac nodded. ‘Good outfi t.’

‘They’re not needed here. But we’d like a chat with the thieves.

Understand?’

Mac nodded at that. ‘We get access to the comms stuff?’

‘Depends what it is, McQueen, you know that.’

‘How about a lock on a satellite phone?’

‘Can do.’

‘What do you need, Don?’

‘I need Garrison and Sabaya. Can do?’

‘We’ll try.’

They swept south-east at one hundred and seventy miles per hour, Gazelle in the lead, US Army Black Hawk taking the sweep. Mac and Paul spoke with Sawtell over the radio system as they headed for Jakarta.

Sawtell wasn’t buying it. ‘I don’t get this – must be some mistake, Mac.’

‘You saw the lock. It came from your guys,’ said Mac.

When they’d been jogging across Brani Island that morning, Mac had wondered if the bank account number he’d retrieved from Mister Turquoise in Makassar wasn’t in fact a sat phone number. A sat phone belonging to Garrison. Back at the EOC Mac had phoned the number stored in his Nokia – just given it a blip – and that had been long enough for Brown to get a lock on it from space.

Mac had the coordinates of the phone on a sheet on his lap. They pointed to a part of north Jakarta, near the port and Soekarno-Hatta airport. It was home to warehouses, industrial parks and huge freight forwarding depots.

Sawtell crackled in again. ‘Why would they head back to Jakarta?

What’s there?’

Paul cut over. ‘Could be where they’re hiding the hostages.’

Paul was now running the op. Whatever he’d been in a previous life, he sure knew his stuff on the basics of hostage rescue, what people like Mac called a snatch. Paul had also made sure POLRI were in the loop. The British had a liaison bloke clearing the way and the Indons were offering backup.

Sawtell and Paul had decided that the way to approach the Garrison clubhouse was from the Java Sea end of Jakarta, coming in via the reservoirs, water retention tanks and canals that criss-cross that part of the city. Staying low would keep them hidden and would confuse any noise.

They’d picked a spot, a wooded area on the banks of a large reservoir. The reservoir was joined to the sea by a canal. About ten blocks south of the wooded area was the last lock on Garrison’s position: a warehouse complex.

Mac looked at the map on his lap, directed the pilot into the land ing zone. They dipped, found the canal and hovered along the water way between one-and two-level warehouses. Lifting slightly over a lock, they came down again and then they were hovering over the wooded area. It was four pm, humidity building, skies becoming overcast.

Picnickers stood up, held onto hats and scarpered as the down draught from the helos tore leaves off trees.

They hovered to the park between the trees, touched down.

De-powered.

Sawtell’s four-man unit spilled out of the Black Hawk in their in-country clothing: olive drab overalls, bullet-proof vests underneath.

Mac saw Spikey. They greeted, thumb shake.

”Zit going, champ?’

‘Man! That you in the window?’ asked Spikey.

‘That’s me.’

‘Man! No wonder you’re called Chalks.’

Paul walked over from the Gazelle with two white kevlar vests.

Pulling down their ovies, they strapped the vests in place.

Crouched beneath a banyan tree, they peered at Mac’s map. Paul put down the pictures of Rachel, Fiona and Karen, made sure he said their names. The Special Forces guys soaked up the images like they were drinking. Mac knew the kind of exercises these boys would be doing day after day on their base: rego numbers, photos, phone numbers, website addresses, email addresses, log-ons, PINs. Seven photos of the same person in different disguises over a fi fteen-year period. Information fed to you in fl ashes, information that in the fi eld could be the difference between life and death. Exercises under extreme pressure where you had to force your mind to resemble a photographic memory.

Sawtell and Paul talked in military acronyms and short cuts.

Mac was relieved they wanted to take a stealth approach rather than a ‘dynamic’. Dynamics could work when you had intelligence, via thermo sensors, listening posts and fi bre optic eyes, but if you didn’t have that intel, and you were rushing, the dynamic approach was riskier for the hostages than the hostage-takers.

The two agreed on everything except the closing scene. Sawtell’s mission was to render Garrison and Sabaya. Paul made it clear that if something made him jumpy, he’d shoot it. ‘I’ll give myself plenty of time to fi gure out which way to point his arse.’

Sawtell eyeballed him, laughed. ‘They teach you that shit too?’

‘Bear jerk off in the woods?’

They jogged the nine blocks to the target carrying Beretta handguns, no rifl es. With the bullet-proofs, they all sweated heavily.