Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

The wheel had come off in his hands.

They all looked at each other. And then the muffl ed laughter started.

They couldn’t help it, with Spikey standing there holding the wheel in his hands like a fucking river boat captain. Sawtell was laughing so hard from the belly that he had to lean on Spikey for balance.

People spluttered into their hands, laughed through their nostrils, tears pouring down cheeks, chests heaving. Mac could barely control himself.

It sounded like a bunch of kids in a tent after one had farted – though stifl ed as if they didn’t want to alert an adult that they were awake after lights out.

It took fi ve minutes for everyone to get composed. Then Sawtell put his hands on his hips, wondering what to do with the freaking door. He touched it. And it swung open.

Light fl ooded in to reveal peeling white paint on curved concrete walls. Adrenaline started pumping and the M4s came up again. Sawtell motioned Fitzy who did the old back and forth hoo-ha with his head a couple of times before putting his head out into the main tunnel.

He stepped through. Shouldering the M4, he scanned back and forth and beckoned Sawtell out, who stepped over the bulwark into the light.

When they were all in the tunnel, Spikey pulled the blast door shut and extracted some chewy from his mouth, making enough of a seal to stop it swinging back. Then he reached into his kit bag and came out with the texta, leaving a small red cross over the door.

To their right was a section of tunnel partially closed in, like a room of some sort, with the main tunnel going past it. To their left, the tunnel curved round. Truck tyre marks could be seen on the concrete fl oor. The gold – and hopefully the VX – would be stored further in.

Sawtell motioned for the group to split. He wanted Gordie’s men to go back up to the partitioned areas to clean up, and then catch up.

They looked at their G-Shocks. Sawtell made a cutthroat gesture.

The cut and run time was six o’clock, meaning six o’clock back at this door, giving them about forty-fi ve minutes.

Mac wasn’t expecting to wait that long. It was a tunnel. What had to be decided would be decided pretty quickly.

Mac and Paul jogged ahead with Sawtell’s team, breathing increasingly jagged. The tunnel seemed to go deeper on a huge left-hand spiral. You couldn’t see round the corner more than fi fty metres. They stopped after ten minutes in front of a large blast door on their right. It ran on ceiling-mounted rails and wheels and it was pulled back as far as it could go. Fitzy and Jansen stepped up. Heads out, heads back, heads out. They walked in slow, M4s shouldered.

Sawtell and Mac came in second, Mac’s heart pumping big time, sweat running freely under his bullet-proof vest. All Mac could think of was how this environment lent itself to shoot-outs, not arrests.

The room was large – about forty metres deep and twenty wide – and fi lled with pallets stacked with four hundred troy ounce gold bricks. One of the soldiers whistled low from behind Mac.

Sawtell ordered a search for the VX bomb. ‘You see it – don’t touch it. Got that?’ he whispered, and stood back while a posse of Maglites moved through the bullion room, the beams bouncing off gold.

Sawtell radioed Gordie’s team that they’d found a storage room.

He asked them to deal silently with the voices they’d heard.

There was no VX in the room. They kept going, rounded a corner and found a crossroad, both arms of it unlit and tyre tracks down the centre.

Sawtell looked at Paul, then Mac. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Let’s duck in here, wait for this vehicle to go past,’ said Mac.

Sawtell deadpanned him, then he heard it too. It was coming from further in the tunnel and was getting closer.

‘Wanna take it out?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell nodded, said to Jansen, ‘You’re up.’

They ducked onto opposite sides of the crossroads, an alloy suppressor about fourteen inches long in Jansen’s hand. Mac had never seen anything like it. Unlike Mac’s suppressor, Jansen’s went on in two twists.

Jansen wrapped the M4 strap around his left wrist, shouldered the rifl e like it was part of him, brought his eye down to the sights and steadied himself like a rock. Perfect standing marksman pose.

The vehicle noise got louder, travelling at some speed. Mac wondered how fast this Jansen was. He was in a trance. A killer’s trance.

Headlights splashed the walls, the noise deafening as the vehicle came into view.

Mac didn’t hear the M4. The LandCruiser tore past, Sawtell and the boys running out of their hiding and sprinting after it. Suddenly the LandCruiser piled into the concrete wall. It ground and twisted, the engine whined, someone’s foot heavy on the gas. Fitzy was fi rst there. He leapt to the footplate, Beretta in hand, leaned in the window, killed the engine. The rest got to the LandCruiser and Sawtell wrenched the driver’s door. A Filipino man in jeans and T-shirt fell out onto the concrete, a single bullet between the eyes.

The lads picked him up and put him on the LandCruiser’s fl atbed.

Spikey got in the driver’s seat, started it up and reversed out. Fitzy opened the passenger door and fi reman-lifted the other body to the fl atbed. Mac couldn’t see a mark on him, then realised the M4’s round had gone through his right eyeball.

Mac and Paul went through pockets, looked at labels, checked out footwear and dental work. Though soldiers found it distasteful, for a spook it was their trained reaction.

Paul found some money and Mac retrieved a wedding ring on a neck chain. The dead men were both heavy-set, early thirties. Southern Filipino was Paul’s verdict.

Mac asked Paul how he knew.

‘Teeth like a Maori or Samoan,’ said Paul, smiling and tapping on his own front teeth. ‘Like all the best-looking blokes.’

Spikey drove and Jansen rode shotgun, the suppressor still on his M4.

They backed up to the crossroad and reversed into the right arm.

Dumped the bodies in the dark.

Sawtell keyed Gordie again. Gordie’s guys had nailed a couple of the thugs, and had three of them bound and gagged in the quarters they’d found them in. Mac hadn’t heard a thing.

Sawtell asked Gordie to secure the tunnel all the way up to the entrance and see if there was a way to open the front gates of the thing. Then he stood on the back of the LandCruiser and said to Mac,

‘Might have to split up if this place divides into different sections.

You’ll take Paul and Fitzy, okay?’

Mac nodded. ‘What’s the VX look like?’

‘Know it when you see it. Olive drab, hundred-pound bomb.

Three fi ns. Oh, and McQueen, no shoot-outs round the nerve agent, huh?’

Mac nodded. He’d prefer no shoot-outs at all.

Sawtell hit the driver’s roof and Spikey gunned the diesel, turning right and accelerating further into the tunnel system. After two minutes they drove up to another large door on the right side of the tunnel and Spikey killed the engine, rolling it to a stop short of the door.

Sawtell hit the concrete, fi nger to his lips. The men followed.

Fitzy circled round behind Sawtell to his left and took point, walking through the door with the M4 shouldered. Advancing like that had the practical advantage of being able to pick off tangos as you walked.

But it was also psychological; any adversary with even basic training would know this was a guy who knew what he was doing.

Fitzy’s gun spat. A three-shot burst at one angle. Then he changed angle like a robot and let blast another three-shot. He leapt back behind the doorframe as a barrage of assault rifl e fi re burst through the door, taking chunks of concrete out of the opposite wall. Sawtell was on his wrong side, left-hand fi ring. He called up Manz, a leftie.