to a Sydney-bound fl ight. But he reacted like anyone would. He gave chase. Mac pretended to run for three strides and saw the ASIS bird start to react towards him. Mac suddenly stopped and turned. Matt was caught unawares, couldn’t stop his momentum. Mac grabbed him by the front of the polo shirt and the forearm, pulled the young bloke down on him.
They went to the white lino. Matt struggled, but he was on top of Mac and couldn’t get off.
Mac smiled in the youngster’s face. Said, ‘Steady there, fella. Steady!’
To Samo it would look like Matt was attacking.
‘Fuck you, McQueen. Fuck you!’ said Matt as he grimaced with the effort of the struggle.
Mac made sure he couldn’t move. The ASIS bird made it to the two men and didn’t know what to do, so Mac grabbed her ankle with his free hand. Made it look like she was stomping him as she struggled for balance.
‘Help!’ yelled Mac, and Samo’s team moved in.
The fi rst one to hit was a female called Suzi. She had a ten-inch snout and a set of teeth like a wolf. She had something personal against Matt’s rib cage, thought Mac. The boob-talking thing must have done the rounds.
CHAPTER 21
Mac sat at the front of the 737, which he didn’t like. But he did his breathing exercises and attempted to relax, analyse everything, see if there was something about his life he hadn’t completely screwed up in the past fi ve days. The Soekarno-Hatta madness had worked out but in the excitement he didn’t have enough rupiah to buy the ticket so he’d paid with the DBS Visa card.
The Service and the CIA and anyone else who had been taking an interest in Mac over the last few days would now have a known alias and an electronic funds trail. Which meant he was probably travelling into a welcoming committee in Makassar without a weapon – he’d dumped the Heckler rig in a concourse bin at Soekarno-Hatta after the kerfuffl e made the security bulls move in.
Sometime during the next twenty-four hours he’d be going back to the Pantai. An option with its own problems.
Mac munched on fresh fruit, drank bad coffee. Thought about where Sabaya might fi t.
Mac had started with the Service at the end of the Cold War, and in those days the emphasis had been on trade, fi nance, technology and political infl uence. It was clever, intricate espionage, and it was what Mac was really trained for: infi ltration, surveillance, covert ops, snatches, provocations, bribes and blackmail. Mac’s mentors were Cold Warriors
– people like Rod Scott – and their craft was the subtle stuff. Finding key infl uencers in South-East Asia and turning them, fi nding the bad guys and making them doubles, manipulating the media as much as possible
– pretty simple when you could ‘leak’ the inside story to journalists at the Jakarta Marriott, see it turn up in print the next day.
The Service would fi nd where the illegal technology transfers were taking place, and why a rival nation might want a certain microprocessor or titanium self-sealing O-ring. In those days, discovering why the Chinese or Koreans were trying to infl uence a certain Indonesian political or bureaucratic fi gure was almost as informative as if you had one of your people inside their organisation.
The main mission was to secure South-East Asia against Chinese political, military and economic hegemony.
That was during the 1990s. The Chinese economy was in double-digit growth and their MSS people were stealing as much mid-level technology as they could from the US, Germany, Japan, the UK and France. The Chinese became brazen but they were stealing ‘secrets’ that were well behind the cutting edge – sometimes three or four years out of date. Mac remembered the time a group of Chinese posing as scientists had followed a photographic and imaging trade show around the South-East Asian circuit, stealing as much as they could.
The scientists were going down to the Agfa booth, pretending to be looking at something and dipping their ties in an improved fi xing solution. The Service lost interest in technology transfers when Mac and others realised that the technology companies were employing Indonesian and Malaysian go-betweens to fence illegal technology transfers. The companies were making money from the Chinese by selling them old rope. It took the fun out of it.
Mac had two main identities during this era: textbooks executive and forestry consultant. Textbooks allowed you cover for just about any trade show or discussion with a government offi cial. And forestry gave you access to the interior of countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines while creating an excuse to be around ports, rail yards and trucking depots. In the embassy, he was Alan McQueen, second assistant trade attache. He was plain old Macca with a face that blended in the crowd.
But when September 11 happened, ASIS hit a snag. The Prime Minister’s offi ce needed a ton of intel and analysis, and they needed it yesterday. They needed counter-terrorism intelligence, what was known as CT. Australia was camped on the doorstep of the world’s largest Muslim nation, which meant some fast re-aligning of regional interaction. It meant knowing what the hell was going on. And the people with the CT answers weren’t the spy agencies of ASIS or ASIO or the military intel operations. The organisation with both the intelligence and operations reach into Muslim South-East Asia was the Australian Federal Police. Which is why Mac had found himself hunting Abu Sabaya. The Service needed to win back some infl uence and favour in Canberra by proving it could partake in America’s ‘War on Terror’. And the Service dreamed up an adventure.
Mac was in the middle of a dangerous infi ltration of a Chinese front company called Mindanao Forest Products when he was called into a meeting at the embassy in Manila one afternoon. Sitting in the embassy intel section meeting room when Mac walked in was Tony Davidson, director of the Asia-Pacifi c region. A large grey- haired bloke with jowls who had once opened the bowling for Western Australia, Davidson was the spook who controlled the spooks across India, China and South-East Asia – Australia’s most important region. The ASIS station chief for the Philippines, Joe Imbruglia, leapt up to greet Mac, who was dusty, sweaty. Imbruglia had one of those smiles Mac’s mother used to give him when friends popped over unannounced. It said, ‘Please be nice?’
Mac had liked Tony Davidson immediately. He had a soft handshake, oozed power and confi dence, and he was one of the few intel chiefs left in the Western world who actually had some operational experience. Davidson had ignored his lackeys, leaned his large forearms on his thighs, and spoke like it was just Mac in the room.
‘Tell me about Sabaya,’ he said.
Mindanao Forest Products had started as a name on Mac’s to-do list.
It was a known front company for the Chinese government’s attempt to control its offshore primary produce sources, timber being one of them. At some stage Mac was going to fi nd a way to infi ltrate some of these organisations, maybe see how far Filipino offi cials were implicated. Mindanao Forest Products wasn’t special in his list. But before he could infi ltrate the company, Mac took a phone call which led straight to Abu Sabaya’s people.
In one of those weird twists of the intel world, Mac had got a call for Thomas Winton, Goanna Forestry Consulting. It was a Service front company. You gave out the card, you played the part but you never expected to be taken seriously as a professional. Now, a representative of Mindanao Forest Products had asked to meet him. Someone wanted his forestry expertise. He would get to invoice and everything.
The fronts for Mindanao Forest Products met Mac at the Peninsula Hotel in Manila. Mac had taken Kleinwitz, the accountant. The fronts had a problem. They had a forestry concession for Mindanao – the Muslim-dominated island of southern Philippines – but they couldn’t log the place.
Mac was confused. ‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘Because they stole our machinery.’
‘They’, as it turned out, were Abu Sabaya’s crew: Abu Sayyaf.
The Chinese had got their wires crossed, had thought that some casual baksheesh in Manila would carry weight in the boonies of Mindanao.
It didn’t.
Sabaya was an economic force. He was known to the world as a terrorist who ordered bombings, kidnappings and beheadings as a way of securing Mindanao as a Muslim state separate from Manila.
But Sabaya also operated a traditional protection service – he was a person who did for foreign loggers and
