‘Damned right, son. Damned right.’
CHAPTER 28
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?
Tonight? Dawn? All at once?
His other concern was that last sighting in Makassar. Just because Sabaya, Garrison and Diane were seen speeding westward from the dock, it didn’t mean they intended to board the ship with the VX on it. They could have been planning something totally different. Sabaya’s chosen MO had always been to travel separately from any heisted cargo.
The VX could be going in the opposite direction, up to Shanghai or Yokohama, or across the Pacifi c to Oakland or Long Beach. Garrison might have spotted a tail, decided to put everyone off the track.
That’s what Mac would do.
Intelligence people didn’t work on ‘cases’ like cops. Spooks built a picture, synthesised information, had an area of specialty. The only reason Mac’s specialty had any currency with the US Army’s Twentieth was that his covert work had a regular overlap with Special Forces.
He couldn’t afford to screw this up. He needed some shuteye to deal with it properly. Lying down and using all the meditation tricks he’d been taught in the Royal Marines – as well as being chosen for their ability to deal with extreme pressure they’d been shown a trick or two – he slipped into a restless sleep.
Mac awoke to his phone vibrating in his breast pocket.
‘McQueen, Hatfi eld. Twentieth. How you doing, son?’
Mac croaked something out. He still felt rooted. Could have slept for another day.
‘We’ll touch down in about fi ve. Refuel. I’ll send someone over to the main gate. Still up for this?’
‘Sure am, sir.’
There were a few mis-cues between the men. Mac made to start a sentence a couple of times and then stopped.
‘Everything okay, son?’
‘I was just wondering what Jakarta had to say, sir. About me, I mean.’
‘I have a request in for a secondment of Alan McQueen, aiding the United States Army in a crucial CT operation,’ said Hatfi eld.
