Jim.
‘Shit, man,’ said Simon, smiling grimly. ‘The Koreans have been hounded for decades because of their Ethno-Bomb research, but you two aren’t scientists, you have no spirit of curiosity, no purity of -’
‘Ethno?’ said Mac. ‘What’s -’
‘Look at you, Jimbo! You’re just a spook, a spy! You tear everything down to the worst human motivations, but Saddam was trying to build some -’
‘Saddam?!’ interrupted Jim, his hands lowering. ‘You little cocksucker – it was you! You got me barred from that team in Iraq!’
‘We needed a scientist, Jimbo – UNSCOM did fine without you.’
‘You little -’ snarled Jim as he moved at Simon, fists clenched.
A shot fired and a lump of plasterboard leapt out of the wall behind Jim.
‘Don’t get confused, Jimbo,’ said Simon as Jim froze. ‘You might be the tough guy, but I have the gun.’
The glass of the entry door caved in with an explosion of glass, and Bongo Morales emerged in his tradesman’s overalls, swinging the A4 from his hip. As Mac saw the gun aimed at Jim, he realised Bongo had been prepped to go for the wrong guy.
‘No, Bongo,’ yelled Mac, trying to cross in front of Jim.
In the moment of hesitation, Simon turned and shot at Bongo, the first one missing, the second one hitting him in the throat. The A4 spewed bullets as Bongo keeled over and Mac dived for cover as Jim took a bullet in the thigh from the A4 jammed on full auto. Crawling under the cordite and smoke, Mac made his way into Jim’s open office, gunshots from Simon following him.
Crawling to Jim’s desk, Mac stood and fumbled manically at the drawers till he found a hip rig hiding beneath a bunch of files.
Wrenching the Beretta from Jim’s holster, Mac turned and found Jim standing in front of him, Simon’s handgun pushed into the back of his skull.
‘Drop it, McQueen,’ said Simon.
The safe door swung shut, plunging the three of them into darkness. Around Mac, Jim and Bongo, shelves reached to the ceiling, packed with American files, photo satchels and state secrets.
‘Reckon we’ve got three or four hours of oxygen in here before it gets grim,’ said Jim, his teeth chattering from the shock of his bullet wound.
‘Got a lighter?’ asked Bongo, still holding the bleeding graze on the side of his neck. ‘Left mine in the van.’
Jim pulled a lighter from his chinos and lit it. Standing, Mac looked around the tiny room, hoping for an air vent or trapdoor in the ceiling that they could use to attract attention. The ceiling of the safe was sealed but Mac noticed a red marker pen attached by string to the shelving. Grabbing a piece of paper from a file, he wrote Help, we’re in here on it and slipped it under the door.
The lighter grew too hot for Jim’s hand and they went back into darkness, Mac and Bongo tearing up Jim’s chinos to put a bandage on his leg.
‘So,’ said Mac, as Bongo tied off the light tourniquet above Jim’s wound, ‘is someone going to tell me what that fruitcake was on about?’
‘What part?’ asked Jim.
‘Did Simon say Haryono’s program was an “Ethno-Bomb”? What is that?’
‘Shit,’ said Jim, as he moved into a better position.
‘Well?’ asked Mac in the darkness.
‘Okay,’ sighed Jim, reluctant. ‘But I was going to tell you, okay?’
‘Okay, Jim – tell.’
‘The Ethno-Bomb was probably conceived by the Israelis after the Six-Day War, back in the late sixties,’ said Jim. ‘The IDF wanted an “Ultimate Contingency” – that is, if the Arab states finally got organised and attacked Israel simultaneously, what was the contingency for being overrun?’
‘There was an answer to that?’ asked Mac.
‘The ultimate contingency is that you destroy yourself to beat your attackers – you burn down your town on top of them. The enemy dies but the price of victory is ashes in your own mouth.’
‘So, the Ethno-Bomb?’
‘Well, in those days the ultra-right wing of the Israeli military was known as the Haganah. Heard of them?’
‘They were the old tough guys from the forties, weren’t they?’ asked Mac. ‘Assassinations and bombings against the Arabs?’
‘That’s them. Known to each other as “the Guild”. They were the hard old Russian and Polish Jews who had no time for the intellectual ideas of the German and French settlers. The Haganah was formally disbanded when the IDF was formed, in ’48 or ’49.’
‘So the Guild was still around in the late sixties?’
‘Small but influential, and they instigated a crazy project where an overrun Israel could trigger bio-weapons in its cities. This theoretical device would kill Arabs but not Jews.’
‘You having a lend?’ asked Mac.
‘They were nervous times in Israel, paranoia was rife and the ultra-right found the means to give it a shot.’
‘And?’ asked Mac.
‘The project went nowhere – officially at least. The government of the day wouldn’t buy into it and it’s rumoured the results were embarrassing. Apparently, Arabs and Jews have similar genetics – the Ethno-Bomb would have killed the lot of them.’
‘Enter Lee Wa Dae,’ said Mac.
‘Well, enter North Korea in the late 1980s,’ said Jim. ‘Kim Il Sung was ailing, his son Kim Jong Il was a lunatic with an obsession about magic shows, and a bunch of shady scientists – one of them from the Guild’s original project – talked Little Kim into reviving the Ethno-Bomb.’
‘Who was this one aimed at?’ asked Mac.
‘Easy. Which race would the Kim family annihilate if you gave them a button to push?’
‘The Japs, of course,’ said Mac. ‘So what happened to that Ethno-Bomb?’
‘Clinton happened. You remember that warming period, five years ago, when Daddy Kim was dying and Jimmy Carter got the North Koreans to shut down the spent-fuel extraction and the uranium enrichment, in exchange for the United States trading with them again?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac.
‘Well the Commies were required to shut down their bio-weapons research at the same time.’
‘But they didn’t?’ asked Mac.
‘Technically they did. The bio-weapons projects left North Korea, but an enterprising Korean found a country willing to host the Ethno-Bomb program, keep it going, for a nice fee, paid for by heroin money.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Mac.
‘No, McQueen – the person was Lee Wa Dae, and in Indonesia he found a man who ran spurious research projects to line his own pockets.’
‘Ishy Haryono,’ said Mac, painful images from Lombok AgriCorp filling his mind. ‘Why Timor?’ he croaked.
‘It’s isolated, it’s poor, it’s run like a medieval fiefdom,’ said Jim. ‘And the Western media doesn’t give a shit about it. It’s the way it seems to go in South-East Asia – you wouldn’t believe some of the wacko shit happening in northern Burma.’
‘So what’s the ethnic divide in -’
Mac trailed off, suddenly recalling that the native Timorese – the Maubere – were Melanesian, unlike the Malay ethnicity of the Javanese.
‘Shit,’ he mumbled. ‘Operasi Boa wipes out the Melanesians, but not the rest?’
‘Seems to be what they’re working on,’ said Jim. ‘Europeans and Asians get a bad cold from this weaponised SARS, but the Melanesians have no defence. They last two days, tops.’
