Counter Attack

Chapter 51

Mac squinted in the mid-morning sun, limping behind the soldier through the compound. There were no signs of the Chinese mown down by Bongo’s firing practice in the Little Bird and the place had a feeling of calm. It was being shut down.

The soldiers carried standard Chinese AK-47 rifles and no side arms. Thinking about the chances of taking one soldier, disarming him and turning on the other, Mac decided to wait for a better opportunity. With Dozsa now possessing two Aussie hostages, the dynamic had changed, and Mac was not moving easily on his shot calf.

Dozsa waited for him, sitting on the hood of a white LandCruiser in the machinery shed, peeling another orange.

‘I have given this some thought,’ said the Israeli as Mac got out of the sun. ‘I don’t want to kill you, McQueen.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ said Dozsa, popping a segment of the fruit in his mouth. ‘I think you can be of some use.’

‘Really?’ said Mac. He was exhausted, but he still had enough energy to kill this person.

‘You’ll deliver a message to Grimshaw.’

‘Why would I do that?’ said Mac.

‘Because you’re going to tell him to get out of Indochina, or these Aussies will die.’

‘You think I’m a messenger?’

‘I think you’re an Australian spy, Mr McQueen, and you would not want it being said in Canberra that you could have saved your countrymen but chose not to.’

Smiling, Dozsa lifted a mobile phone from the pack and Mac could see from its red light that their conversation was being recorded. Dozsa was an intel lifer, and he knew this was one interaction Mac did not want emailed to the ASIS brass.

‘If it’s about saving Australians,’ said Mac, ‘give me the keys and I’ll take the lads now.’

‘No, I’d prefer they keep me company on the next stage of our adventure.’

Breathing out, Mac eyed the orange; Dozsa split off a chunk and threw it to him.

‘I deliver a message — that’s it?’ said Mac, wolfing down the juicy morsel. ‘Why wouldn’t I grab a crew of hard boys and come back at you?’

‘Who says I’d be here?’

‘Why not just call Grimshaw?’ said Mac.

‘An annoying unmanned aircraft has been circling us all night, Mr McQueen, and I don’t feel like pinpointing myself just yet,’ said Dozsa, observing Mac with eyes that seemed to have no pupils. ‘Unless you’d like to use my phone, provide some target practice for the US Navy?’

‘I’ll pass,’ said Mac. ‘So Grimshaw leaves Cambodia, and you release Lance and Urquhart — that’s the deal?’

‘Not quite,’ said Dozsa. ‘Grimshaw has some property of mine and I want it back.’

‘Find a FedEx office.’

‘No, McQueen — you will put it in my hand, and with no funny business, no conversations with people I don’t like.’

‘This property involved with your counterfeiting?’

‘You should stop this word, counterfeit,’ said Dozsa. ‘I produce currency with real paper and ink; real printing techniques and the crowning glory…’

‘Yes?’

‘Actual serial numbers and security features.’

‘That’s the SN and SF,’ said Mac, almost to himself. ‘Shit, Dozsa — you’re producing US hundred-dollar notes with authentic serial numbers?’

‘That’s the US Treasury’s nightmare,’ said Dozsa, laughing. ‘When a glut of notes hits the street and their own people can’t tell the good from the bad.’

‘You’re a lunatic, Dozsa,’ said Mac. ‘You trigger a currency collapse that hurts China and you have no idea where that leads.’

‘I guess a strong man has to step in and stabilise the situation?’

‘General Pao Peng? He’ll destabilise this region with his Greater China fantasies,’ said Mac. ‘A hundred years of war is the price China will pay for grabbing its cheap coal and oil.’

‘You’d be surprised how many American corporations would love to deal with a China that doesn’t have to negotiate for its fuel.’

‘Spare me the conspiracies, Dozsa,’ said Mac, annoyed.

Lighting a cigarette, Dozsa feigned boredom. ‘I’m busy, McQueen — will you do it?’

Mac’s calf ached. ‘What’s this property I’m retrieving?’

‘A memory chip,’ said Dozsa. ‘It’s white.’

Mac was confused. ‘I thought you guys had that?’

‘We did,’ said Dozsa. ‘But the Americans took it.’

‘If they took it, wouldn’t Grimshaw have sent it to DC by now?’

‘If he knew he had it, he’d have sent it on.’ A smile creased the side of Dozsa’s mouth.

‘What does that mean? How do I retrieve a memory chip from Charles Grimshaw when he doesn’t know he has it?’

‘You steal it from him, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, exhaling a plume. ‘You’re good at that, I hear.’

‘From where?’

‘It was on Tranh,’ said Dozsa, eyes boring into Mac’s. ‘I believe Grimshaw now has it.’

‘Tranh?’ said Mac, blindsided. ‘Tranh Loh Han?’

‘Your driver. He’s an assassin.’

‘An assassin?’ said Mac.

‘For the Loh Han Tong,’ said Dozsa.

‘He had this chip?’ said Mac, reeling.

‘We think he stole the chip from your hotel room.’

Rubbing his temples, Mac tried to rewind the last few days and be clear about the events. It didn’t add up.

‘But you killed Tranh,’ said Mac. ‘Why didn’t you take the memory chip?’

‘Who said I killed Tranh?’

‘Well…’

‘I think it was your American friends,’ said Dozsa. ‘We were in the basement car park when the shooting started.’

‘What are you saying?’ said Mac. ‘The Americans killed Tranh and grabbed the chip from him, but they don’t know they have it?’

Dozsa smiled. ‘In the shootout Tranh dropped his mobile phone and the Americans retrieved it.’

‘You know this?’

‘The property manager played me the security tape from the lobby.’

‘Tranh dropped his phone. So what?’ said Mac, irritated.

‘So, the chip is an SD,’ said Dozsa. ‘It fits into Nokias. I have good reason to believe that Tranh stole the chip from your room and was carrying it in his Nokia — it’s how a lot of Asian criminals courier information from one place to another.’

‘You had good reason?’

‘If Tranh had given that chip to his real employers, McQueen, I’d have been contacted very quickly and we’d be negotiating a price,’ said Dozsa. ‘The chip isn’t in Tranh’s luggage and it’s not with his employers. So it’s in that phone.’

Mac’s head was spinning. ‘If you’d lost track of it, how did you know the chip was in the hotel room?’

‘That piss-ant of yours — his name’s Lars?’

‘Something like that,’ said Mac.

‘Our pretty operative put a little device on his shirt, and —’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Mac, knowing about the micro-transmitter. ‘So how did you print all this currency without the protocols on that chip?’

‘Without?’ said the Israeli, confused.

‘The chip — the BEP protocols,’ said Mac. ‘That’s the memory card, right?’

‘Oh, you don’t know?’ said Dozsa, his eyes losing their hard- ness and warming to laughter. ‘Ha — those Americans are funny, aren’t they?’

‘What are you —?’

‘They didn’t tell you about the girl?’

‘McHugh?’

‘Yes, her,’ said Dozsa, covering his mouth as his laughter triggered a smoker’s cough. ‘I like you, McQueen, but you sure missed that one.’

‘What one?’

‘Geraldine McHugh,’ said Dozsa. ‘She was the currency protocols.’

Climbing to the bushy saddle that led out of the valley, Mac stopped the LandCruiser, looked back and saw a white Falcon corporate jet flattening out and preparing to land on the compound’s airstrip. The place was clearing out and the currency had already flown — Mac felt exhausted and beaten. He’d spent the past week chasing Geraldine McHugh only to learn that she was a spy rather than a hostage.

Which left the memory chip and Jim Quirk. If the memory card didn’t have the currency protocols, what was on the chip and what was Quirk working on?

And where were the hundreds of billions in US currency?

The drive took almost as long as the footpad they’d followed Tani across the night before. It was barely wide enough to allow a vehicle through and was punctuated by boggy creek crossings and deep wash-outs. A two-wheel-drive vehicle would not have made it.

Mac listened to a rural Cambodian radio service that played cover versions of Debbie Boone and Anne Murray and he tried to come up with a plan. He felt snookered in one sense — Aussie hostages always changed the approach. But there were other ways forwards, perhaps. The memory chip was a plus, if he could find it without Grimshaw knowing. Also, McHugh was alive and she could be debriefed, as could Sammy Chan; he didn’t know how he was going to make use of Sammy, but the American knew more than he was telling and he’d have to be questioned. If he turned up.

After two hours of driving, Mac had left the highlands and come down to the warmer, monkey-infested climbs of the Mekong river flats. Easing through the dappled light of the jungle, he found the thick bush area near where they’d stowed the Silverado and motorbikes.

Turning up the radio, Mac eased quietly from the idling LandCruiser and limped downhill to the creek bed where they’d left the vehicles.

Eyeing the Silverado through the foliage, Mac cased the area and walked slowly around it for ten minutes, looking for people, smelling for cigarettes and aftershave, and keeping his eyes open for trip wires and other nasties.

Moving forwards, wincing at every cracking twig and annoyed at the constant hubbub of monkeys talking to birds, Mac finally got to the Yamaha he’d been riding the night before. Kneeling, he looked for IEDs, opened sumps, drained gas tanks — all the standard sabotages designed to either kill or frustrate the enemy. It looked clean and the keys were still in the ignition, where he’d left them. Pulling the seat up on its sideways hinge, Mac found the Nokia, also where he’d left it.

Approaching the Silverado’s king cab he looked in the tinted windows. It was unoccupied. Lying under the cab, Mac checked for unwanted wires and packages, and checked the brake lines. The light-bulb bomb was still fresh in his mind and he was hypersensitive to the idea of an IED exploding in his face.

The new-car smell wafted as Mac sat in the driver’s seat and rummaged in the centre console and the glove box, and had an extended look around the ignition assembly and under the steering column, looking for tampering. The keys were on the sunshade and there was a stash of US twenty-dollar notes in the console, which he trousered. But Mac couldn’t find what he was looking for: Tranh’s red phone and a first-aid kit.

The rear seats of the king cab were clean too, except for several discarded water bottles. Reaching back he pulled down the rear seat’s centre console and found the green nylon bag with a white cross on the cover. Riffling through it he found the T3s and popped two of the painkillers in his mouth, noting the saline vials and the iodine wash that would come in handy when he re-dressed his bullet wound. There was also a plastic bag on the floor of the crew cab containing a change of clothes. Pulling them out and checking the sizes, Mac stripped out of his possibly bugged clothing and changed into the new fatigues.

Grabbing the keys, Mac headed for the rear of the pick-up truck.

He needn’t have bothered with the keys — the closed-in rear section of the Chev was open and as he pushed up the tinted window door, he noticed two things at once: Sammy had packed enough ordnance to take down a mid-sized military base; and the handgun aimed at his nose was cocked before his eyes could widen in surprise.

‘Halt,’ said the girl, her grip steady and eyes levelled.

‘Tani?’ said Mac, his heart bouncing as he raised his arms.

‘That you, mister?’ said the girl. ‘Where my fifty dollar?’