Counter Attack

Chapter 13

Emerging from the double doors of the Grand at 7.28 am, Mac turned sharp right and walked up Dong Khoi Street. The one-way traffic came towards him in the first trickles of what would be a deluge in half an hour; Mac was hoping to make any vehicle tails show themselves by having to turn against the traffic or make a box-loop to catch him at an intersection.

Before he could get to the next intersection, Mac crossed the street to the cover of trees on the other side, and ducked up the side street to a cafe where he ordered coffee and an omelette and watched for unwanted interest.

The coffee was dark and strong and he picked up a day-old Jakarta Post from a pile of newspapers by the cutlery and flipped it as he surveyed the street. The anchor story along the bottom of the Post’s front page carried the headline missile tests provocative: clinton, and was followed by the regular Asian media obsession with the North Korean missile tests, predicting whether they would fly over Japan and their boosters fall in Japanese waters. While few countries in the western Pacific were friendly with North Korea, the region held its breath for the day Japan had an excuse to abandon its self-defence force and start rebuilding its military. Mac chuckled grimly as he read the US Secretary of State’s careful words: they reflected the delicate situation America found itself in whenever it stood between the two Koreas, Japan and China. If diplomacy in the Middle East took place over a gunpowder factory, North Asian rapport was built on a thermonuclear trigger.

Across the road two youths tried to strap a large sofa onto the roof of a tiny Suzuki van as all around them people came out of doorways and started motorbikes or clipped their trousers before they got on bicycles. Pretty soon the flow of motorbikes, carts and vans would hit full force as the locals went in search of a living.

Even though he considered himself an experienced traveller, Mac was always confused by Saigon. How did Ho Chi Minh ever think he was going to make the people of the Mekong Delta adopt communism? Or even aggressive socialism? Like most Aussies of his generation, Mac had been raised on post-1975 Vietnam as a story of ‘reunification’ in the face of imperialist France and the United States. Yet most people living in the south of Vietnam saw 1975 as a Communist invasion and subsequent occupation.

Convinced he wasn’t being tailed, Mac keyed the phone and gave Tranh the okay to pick him up.

Climbing into the silver van four minutes later, Mac kept looking through the back window until they’d turned right and accelerated for Le Loi.

‘Where to, boss?’ asked Tranh, who Mac noticed was now wearing a small silver crucifix.

‘BP compound, An Puh,’ said Mac, grabbing the water that Tranh had left for him on the floor. ‘I think it’s called APSC now.’

Crossing the Saigon Bridge heading north, they stuck with the flow of the traffic on Hanoi Highway for a few minutes and took a left turn into Tao Dhien Road, a quiet residential street that looked more like a suburb in Brisbane than Saigon.

On their right loomed a supermarket, indicating the beginning of the huge expat residential compound that extended to the river. Mac asked Tranh to keep driving as if going to the end of the street.

Doing a u-turn and pulling in at the kerbside a hundred metres short of the compound entrance gate, they stopped the van and rolled down the windows as the heat rose.

Tranh lit a cigarette. ‘We going to follow?’

‘Just establish his route,’ said Mac, pulling field-glasses from the glove box and getting eyes on the gate. ‘I want to get a feel for his day.’

At 8.08 am, a red Corolla stuck its nose out of the compound’s gate and Mac lifted the glasses. It was Jim Quirk.

‘Okay, Mr Tranh,’ said Mac, ‘let’s see your field craft.’

Following Quirk at between three and ten car lengths, Tranh was an excellent tail, sometimes letting the Corolla get a long way ahead, and at other times pulling up near to it but in another lane. The best tailers broke the pattern that people like Mac looked for.

Crossing to the west side of Saigon Bridge, Quirk went into the massive roundabout and made a looping left turn onto Nguyen Huru and drove south past the water treatment plant, following the river. As they drew parallel with the shipyards on their left, Mac lost interest in Quirk and turned in his seat to see who was behind them.

‘Shit,’ said Mac. ‘See that white Toyota?’

‘Cong An,’ said Tranh with a shrug. ‘They found us after we crossed the bridge.’

Mac saw a coffee cart ahead, just past the Buddhist pagoda. ‘Pull in here,’ he said.

Watching the white Camry sail past, Mac lifted his field-glasses and focused on the registration plate. It was the same car that had followed him to the market.

Mac pointed. ‘Okay, let’s find Apricot again.’

They wound southwards, through the heavy traffic, but Mac and Tranh had to stop at the lights where Nguyen turned left into the riverside drive, and they lost the red Corolla.

‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging on the water, ‘let’s do a box, come around to the Landmark building the wrong way.’

Tranh took a secondary street running parallel to Quirk. Then they turned and went with the traffic down Dong Khoi Street, hooked left and drove north up the riverside road towards the consulate.

‘All okay, boss?’ said Tranh as they drove clear of the Landmark.

‘Depends what you mean by okay,’ said Mac as they passed the white Camry, parked and waiting beyond the consulate. ‘If we need the Cong An to help us follow Quirk, then we’re great.’

Shortly before midday, James Quirk walked out of the consulate and headed for the bus stop. Keeping a good distance behind the Cong An, Mac and Tranh followed Quirk’s bus into Cholon — the world’s largest Chinatown. Situated about a ten-minute drive from Mac’s hotel in downtown, Cholon had a reputation for harbouring some of the hardest criminals and canniest entrepreneurs in South-East Asia. Whether you wanted your husband murdered or to shift massive amounts of cash to another country, you could get it done in Cholon. Mac’s overwhelming memory of Cholon was of a place with a million bookmakers. Fancy a bet on a cockfight in a storeroom, a bare-knuckle fight on a local gangster’s rooftop, a girl fight in a warehouse, or a horse race at the Puh To track? Cholon was where you found the odds. Cholon was an exporter of its culture: after the arrival of the Communists in 1975, it was harder for the Cholon tongs — the crime families — to make a living, and the South Vietnamese diaspora included a lot of Cholon criminals. By the 1980s, the kidnap gangs of Hong Kong, the casinos of Macao and the cage fighting in Bangkok and Manila were all run and protected by the spitting patriarchs of Cholon — old men who lived humbly above shoe-repair shops and controlled rivers of cash around the South China Sea.

Jumping off at a bus stop, Quirk — in a light charcoal suit and no tie — hit the pavement and kept walking, scything through the milling locals, around a corner and into a side street.

‘Quick,’ said Mac, as the watcher Mac had met on the motorbike got out of the Camry and followed Quirk. ‘Right here, and head him off at the pass.’

Accelerating down a parallel side street, Tranh slowed at the mangle of cyclos and motorbikes at the next intersection and turned left. As the streetscape opened up, Mac watched Quirk dart across the street and disappear into a club called Mekong Saloon. But it was the action around the club that Mac noticed. Frantically, Mac looked around him: one man sat at a bus stop bench; he folded his paper as Quirk entered the building, turned and walked away.

‘Keep moving,’ snapped Mac, his breath coming shallow and fast. ‘Don’t look around.’

Tranh sped north, down Hau Giang and out of Cholon.

‘You get that third item Paragon would have mentioned?’ said Mac, when they were almost back at the riverfront.

‘Yes, Mr Richard.’

‘Good. Show me.’

Parking in an alley north of the Landmark building, Tranh led Mac down to a series of small private jetties on the river.

‘What happened back there?’ said Tranh.

‘I’m trying to work it out,’ said Mac, thinking about the men around that nightclub: not Cong An and not Aussie intel.

At the end of the jetty, Tranh stopped at a powerboat with a large black outboard motor on the back. Climbing into the cockpit after Tranh, Mac watched him unlock the small hatchway to the space under the bow deck. Climbing down, Tranh grabbed a steel box off the small mattress and slid it across the cockpit. Picking up a stainless-steel Ruger handgun from the box, Mac weighed one of the two 9mm clips that came with it and then slipped it into the handgrip and slammed it home.

Mac looked around the small marina. ‘No Hecklers, eh?’ He usually used a Heckler & Koch P9s.

‘No, boss — but Ruger is okay, right?’

‘Ruger is great,’ said Mac, stashing the handgun in its box.

Having established his regular meeting places with Tranh — a rotation of four cafes around Dong Khoi Street at nine each morning — Mac asked Tranh to time Quirk’s return to the consulate. If his trips were regular, it made things easier and faster.

Walking along the riverside boulevard, Mac tried to recall everything about the man he’d seen waiting outside the Mekong Saloon. Euro in looks, but not in dress: 1980s sunnies, the Sansabelt trousers and the shoes just short of nerdy. As if someone had tried too hard to dress down, or had never lived with a woman.

And it wasn’t just that man: Mac had seen another two, just the same, acting casual around the Mekong. They weren’t cops and they weren’t Asian.

Mac wandered into the shade of the Cyclo Cafe and slumped in a wicker armchair. He needed a cold beer, and then he needed to work out why another team was tailing Jim Quirk.