what I mean?’
CHAPTER 34
They made it to the top of Sentosa Island in three and a half minutes, through the golf course and skirting the buildings on the top of Serapong Hill. No one from the golf club stopped them. In their ovies they looked like contractors or tradesmen, which was why the British military trained intel and special forces to wear them. They took the shape away from a man, made it harder to see gait, and created a sense that the person must be where he was for a reason. More importantly, the block-colour of the overall took all the observer’s attention, making the face retreat. Add a cap and you became the grey man. For people like Mac and Paul ovies were about the cheapest and most basic building block of fading into the background.
They edged through trees to reach the top of the hill. To their right they looked down fi ve hundred metres to a new canal residential subdivision. In front of them was Brani Island, sitting in the harbour channel. Beyond that was Keppel Terminal on the main island of Singapore.
They perched behind a fallen spruce, panting. Paul pulled out the binos, had a quick look. Handed them to Mac. ‘You know what we’re looking for, mate. I’ll get Weenie working for his dough,’ said Paul.
As Paul keyed the radio and spoke to Weenie, Mac put his eyes to the rubber-coated Leicas. He touched the auto focus a couple of times to make sure there wasn’t a sharper position, then he looked.
The fi rst impression was total stillness. Port of Singapore was a 24/7 business and Keppel Terminal was never still. Mac swept from left to right, moving from the massive truck/rail freight interchange depot on the far side of Keppel Road to the end of the terminal beside Keppel, Tanjong Pajar. At Pajar the apron squared off and suddenly fell into open sea and the Singapore Strait.
No movement.
He dipped the binos to the foreground. In front of him, on Brani Island, the activity on the container terminal had stopped too.
To the left of Brani Island Mac saw the causeway that linked Sentosa and Brani islands to the main island. It was chocka, all the vehicles heading in one direction.
A blast of noise behind them caused Paul and Mac to duck refl exively. It was the Singapore cops telling people to get the hell out of the buildings and the car parks and move across the Gateway Avenue causeway.
They listened to a man in the car park at the top of the hill argue with the cop. A tense police offi cer snapped back, ‘Get in the car, get across Gateway, and there’s no right turns into downtown today, sir.
Get on the Ayer Rajah Expressway and go to Malaysia for the day.’
The cop car moved off down the drive towards the golf club, and Mac heard the man whining to his family, heard the wife say, ‘Let’s just do what he says.’
Paul continued on the radio while Mac went looking for Golden Serpent through the Leicas. It was a red- hulled vessel, perhaps three years old, with its deckhouse two-thirds of the way down the ship from the bow. It belonged to a Korean shipping company, Golden Dragon Line. All of their ships started with ‘Golden’.
Mac had her as a nine-thousand-container ship, what they called a Post-PanaMax because it was too big to fi t through the Panama Canal’s locks. It looked fully laden, an absolute shitload of containers to search.
He scanned back and forth. No movement. Sitting stock still he scanned for any refl ections from inside the bridge. The cloud cover hadn’t arrived yet so there was every chance he might catch a glint.
Nothing.
He switched to the cargo decks, looking for any sign of the VX bomb. It had been shipped in a forty-foot red container box that looked completely standard, except for a smart box on one end. A smart box would stick out like a household fusebox about halfway up the height of the container. Mac knew what to look for, but couldn’t see it.
He gave the Leicas back to Paul, who said into the mic: ‘Yeah, mate, get back to me in ten, huh? Cheers, mate.’
Weenie had jammed into the radio chatter on the Singaporean side, said Paul. ‘Something called the EOC?’
‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘That’s the Emergency Operations Centre. I’m betting it’s down at Tanjong Pajar. It’ll be in the MPA ops centre.’
Paul shook his head. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Mate, while you were running around with Aldam Tilao, I was pretending to be all sorts of things. Don’t you worry about that.’
‘Okay, well they’re fully panicked. Weenie says there’s lots of scream ing and blame mongering,’ said Paul.
‘Glad to hear it. Any word on what they’re doing?’
‘Evacuating the whole city. Apparently there’s no safe levels of this stuff. You can’t have people wandering around. There’s arguments about that, but a fi re chief has stepped in.’
‘That’d be right.’
‘Weenie wasn’t sure. He thought the word was Hazmar, or something. Said it sounded Arabic.’
Mac laughed. ‘It’s HAZMAT.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’
‘The arguments are jurisdictional. In most EOPs -‘
‘Speak English, mate.’
‘In most Emergency Operations Plans there’s a command and control chart for who makes the fi nal call. But once it goes to HAZMAT, the fi re chief – in most countries – has control of the ground.’
‘Thought you said the Yanks had brought in some classifi ed cavalry? Yanks going to let a fi re chief run the show?’
Mac didn’t know quite how to explain it. ‘Mate, the bottom line in emergency management is who runs the cops. You can’t run an evacuation without them. And when things get stressed, and people are talking about nerve agent and evacuations, the cops will work with who they know and trust. And that would be the fi re department, not some American general.’
Paul nodded. Made sense.
‘Has Weenie heard anything about what Garrison and Sabaya want? We need to work out where this is going, maybe get there before them,’ said Mac.
‘I’ll get back to it.’
‘Mate, didn’t bring any tucker did you?’ asked Mac.
Paul pulled out a couple of protein bars from his breast pocket, chucked one. ‘What, they can’t feed you?’
‘Mate, I thought the Australian Air Force was going to personally attend to me. Till you turned up.’
Munching on the protein bar, Mac looked down on Golden Serpent and, seeing Brani Island between themselves and the ship, made a decision.
Paul got off the phone. ‘Weenie says he picked up a conversation between a cop and a politician. Something about prisoners? The politician told him he had no jurisdiction over Philippines prisons, let alone over Moro separatists. Weenie’s still on it.’
Mac stood, looked down at Brani Island. ‘Moros, huh?’
‘It’s what he’s hearing,’ said Paul.
‘You believe that?’
‘Mate, looks like you saw a ghost.’
Mac nodded. ‘I don’t buy it.’
‘What?’
‘You know these guys are pretty smart. They heist a couple of rare birds: VX and CL-20. They hijack a huge container ship and sail it into Keppel Terminal. Right beside the city that’s alongside the busiest port in the world.’
‘Pretty smart, I guess.’