‘McQueen – this is Major Benni Sudarto. We’re on his fl ight this morning.’
Mac put out his hand. ‘Thanks for the ride, Major,’ he said, all smiles.
Surdarto hesitated briefl y and then shook Mac’s hand. ‘I know you?’ he asked in mechanical English. He had a face that looked like it had been put together out of brown Lego, rectangular slabs of fl esh and bone composed his cheekbones, jaw and forehead.
Mac shrugged, looked out the window at the hangar. Benni Sudarto hadn’t changed. He was still built like a brick shithouse, was still suspicious and ill-mannered like he’d been back in ‘99, in East Timor.
Sudarto barked an order down the plane then took a pew in the facing seats on the other side of the aisle. ‘I do, don’t I?’ said Sudarto, not giving up.
There was a certain kind of Indonesian man made of muscle and bone and nothing else, and Benni Sudarto was such a bloke. It looked like if you punched him you’d break your hand. His neck started under his ears and the rolled-up sleeves of his camo shirt revealed enormous arms.
Mac shrugged. ‘Nah, Major. Anglos, mate – we all look alike.’
Sudarto forced a laugh, then looked away.
Mac caught Freddi’s eye; the other man’s expression said, Be careful. Mac was going to be very, very careful. When he’d last seen Benni Sudarto, the Indonesian was a captain in Group 4, the Kopassus plainclothes hit squad. Back then Mac was an elusive Aussie spy in East Timor, known to the Indonesians as Kakatua, the Indon name for Timor’s cockatoo. Sudarto had hunted and Mac had evaded.
Careful didn’t get close.
They took off seven minutes later. Soon after, the crew dimmed the cabin lights and Mac eased back his seat, fl icked on his overhead reading light, reached into his pack and pulled out the stapled printouts that Garvs had organised for him. It was a ‘brief’ fi le on Hassan Ali. The covering photo showed a handsome man with intelligent, smiling eyes. The caption said Hassan was twenty-fi ve when the photo was taken in 1986.
Mac fl ipped to the second sheet of paper: Hassan was born in 1960 in Islamabad, father a lawyer, mother from a local moneyed family.
Educated in Islamabad, he’d done his master’s at the London School of Economics before returning home to Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI. Hassan had started at the political rather than military level and had postings in Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Paris.
He’d made his name in scientifi c espionage and covert procurement.
Then, after a secondment to KRL – A.Q. Khan’s nuclear laboratory – in 1997, the fi le noted that he’d fallen off the offi cial spy map.
After ‘97 Hassan was suspected of being a full-time covert operative for KRL. A note added to the bottom of the bio mentioned that the Israeli government had been building a case for the Americans to stop protecting Pakistan and Khan because Hassan Ali had been forging friendships with terror outfi ts, including those linked with Libya and Iran.
Putting the fi le back in his pack, Mac tried to put the nuke puzzle together in a way that relied on facts rather than speculation. The nuclear connections Ari had been insisting on weren’t concrete enough for Mac to accept lightly.
In the late 1990s, Mac had spent two months in the UN’s Iraq Nuclear Verifi cation Offi ce. INVO was supposed to verify a nuclear program in Iraq but it was really a bunch of MI6 and CIA true-believers bullying the nuclear engineers into verifying that old tractor parts were really part of a clandestine enrichment centrifuge.
INVO was a mess, but it had shown Mac how easily a situation could be distorted by intelligence offi cers.
Still, it had to be said that there was something compelling about Ari’s theories. The Israelis and Russians knew that Dr Khan was selling enriched uranium and centrifuge cascades; Hassan Ali was a Khan lieutenant and one of the blokes the Indian intelligence services wanted shut down. Also, Ari was putting Hassan, Akbar and Samir together in Bali on the eve of the Sari and Paddy’s bombings. Which connected a rogue nuclear program with JI and al-Qaeda.
Ari was right about one thing, thought Mac as he felt sleep coming on: a bunch of farm labourers in sarungs may have needed a general like Samir to plan a conventional bombing, but they wouldn’t need a nuclear weapons broker from Pakistan or an al-Qaeda bagman.
He wondered where they were now heading. Something told him it was right behind Ari.
CHAPTER 13
Shouts woke Mac and as he came to he felt the F28 descending.
Outside, the fi rst light of dawn was poking through the smoky blue haze of Sumatra. Glancing to his left he saw Benni Sudarto laughing with the two other soldiers. They were looking down the aisle to where someone was crying out. Mac guessed one of the prisoners had woken from a drug-induced sleep to fi nd himself hooded, and was panicking about where he was.
Sudarto’s face darkened as he yelled something down the plane.
The crying immediately dropped to a whimper. Mac looked at Freddi, who whispered, ‘The major just say to the guy, “If I have to plug your mouth I’ll do it with a size-eleven lace-up.”’
Sudarto rattled off more Bahasa, which Freddi interpreted for Mac. ‘A free service from Indonesian Army.’
The Kopassus guys slapped their thighs and Mac caught Benni Sudarto’s eye. The major winked.
Looking out the window again, Mac reckoned they were landing in Pekanbaru, which was on the east coast of Sumatra and closer to Singapore and Malaysia than to Jakarta. The haze had suggested the east coast of Sumatra but it was the F-5E Tiger fi ghter jets with the forward-sweeping wings that sealed it; Pekanbaru was the only military base on Sumatra with Tiger jets.
Freddi gestured for Mac to remain seated as the Kopassus soldiers and their prisoners disembarked and made for a large blue van.
While the F28 was being refuelled, Purni and Mac watched Freddi remonstrate with Benni Sudarto on the tarmac. After a few minutes, Freddi peeled away and came back to the F28, talking excitedly into his phone. Running to the top of the stairs, he knocked on the pilot door and barked an order. A reply came back in Bahasa, but it was a universal, Yeah, yeah.
One of the fl ight crew pulled the cabin door shut, locked it in place and asked the three of them to fasten their seatbelts as he slipped back into the cockpit. Almost immediately the revs came up and they started moving forward.
‘So, Freddi, what’s up?’ asked Mac.
‘Police from Medan chased off a plane trying to land at an old Jap airfi eld, inland from Binjai up near the national park,’ said Freddi, eyes already mad for the chase. ‘A party of eight or nine were on the ground before the landing was aborted. Now they’re on the run – two vehicles, lots of fi repower.’
The F28’s rear engines screamed and it raced down the runway as Freddi got on the phone again. Medan suited Mac – it was where his friend, Johnny Hukapa, was based.
They fl ew for twenty-fi ve minutes, talking things through on the way. It looked as if the Hassan-Akbar team was travelling as a single unit. And although the Medan POLRI had lost them, they’d done the next best thing and stopped them leaving the country. For now, anyway, they were trapped in the wild west of Sumatra.
‘When you say fi repower, Freddi, what are we looking at?’ asked Mac.
‘Police reckon American assault rifl es, look like M16 A2s, maybe M4s. One offi cer thought there was a fi fty-cal in there somewhere, but it’s not confi rmed.’
‘Any licence plates?’
‘Yep – we’ve got all that.’
‘Positive IDs?’ asked Mac. ‘I mean, are we sure it’s them?’
‘Hundred per cent on Samir, eighty per cent on Akbar. No one recognised Hassan – they wouldn’t know who he was, but the police guys said it was a Pakistani crew.’
‘That obvious?’
