Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 21

Mac sat at the front of the 737, which he didn’t like. But he did his breathing exercises and attempted to relax, analyse everything, see if there was something about his life he hadn’t completely screwed up in the past fi ve days. The Soekarno-Hatta madness had worked out but in the excitement he didn’t have enough rupiah to buy the ticket so he’d paid with the DBS Visa card.

The Service and the CIA and anyone else who had been taking an interest in Mac over the last few days would now have a known alias and an electronic funds trail. Which meant he was probably travelling into a welcoming committee in Makassar without a weapon – he’d dumped the Heckler rig in a concourse bin at Soekarno-Hatta after the kerfuffl e made the security bulls move in.

Sometime during the next twenty-four hours he’d be going back to the Pantai. An option with its own problems.

Mac munched on fresh fruit, drank bad coffee. Thought about where Sabaya might fi t.

Mac had started with the Service at the end of the Cold War, and in those days the emphasis had been on trade, fi nance, technology and political infl uence. It was clever, intricate espionage, and it was what Mac was really trained for: infi ltration, surveillance, covert ops, snatches, provocations, bribes and blackmail. Mac’s mentors were Cold Warriors

– people like Rod Scott – and their craft was the subtle stuff. Finding key infl uencers in South-East Asia and turning them, fi nding the bad guys and making them doubles, manipulating the media as much as possible

– pretty simple when you could ‘leak’ the inside story to journalists at the Jakarta Marriott, see it turn up in print the next day.

The Service would fi nd where the illegal technology transfers were taking place, and why a rival nation might want a certain microprocessor or titanium self-sealing O-ring. In those days, discovering why the Chinese or Koreans were trying to infl uence a certain Indonesian political or bureaucratic fi gure was almost as informative as if you had one of your people inside their organisation.

The main mission was to secure South-East Asia against Chinese political, military and economic hegemony.

That was during the 1990s. The Chinese economy was in double-digit growth and their MSS people were stealing as much mid-level technology as they could from the US, Germany, Japan, the UK and France. The Chinese became brazen but they were stealing ‘secrets’ that were well behind the cutting edge – sometimes three or four years out of date. Mac remembered the time a group of Chinese posing as scientists had followed a photographic and imaging trade show around the South-East Asian circuit, stealing as much as they could.

The scientists were going down to the Agfa booth, pretending to be looking at something and dipping their ties in an improved fi xing solution. The Service lost interest in technology transfers when Mac and others realised that the technology companies were employing Indonesian and Malaysian go-betweens to fence illegal technology transfers. The companies were making money from the Chinese by selling them old rope. It took the fun out of it.

Mac had two main identities during this era: textbooks executive and forestry consultant. Textbooks allowed you cover for just about any trade show or discussion with a government offi cial. And forestry gave you access to the interior of countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines while creating an excuse to be around ports, rail yards and trucking depots. In the embassy, he was Alan McQueen, second assistant trade attache. He was plain old Macca with a face that blended in the crowd.

But when September 11 happened, ASIS hit a snag. The Prime Minister’s offi ce needed a ton of intel and analysis, and they needed it yesterday. They needed counter-terrorism intelligence, what was known as CT. Australia was camped on the doorstep of the world’s largest Muslim nation, which meant some fast re-aligning of regional interaction. It meant knowing what the hell was going on. And the people with the CT answers weren’t the spy agencies of ASIS or ASIO or the military intel operations. The organisation with both the intelligence and operations reach into Muslim South-East Asia was the Australian Federal Police. Which is why Mac had found himself hunting Abu Sabaya. The Service needed to win back some infl uence and favour in Canberra by proving it could partake in America’s ‘War on Terror’. And the Service dreamed up an adventure.

Mac was in the middle of a dangerous infi ltration of a Chinese front company called Mindanao Forest Products when he was called into a meeting at the embassy in Manila one afternoon. Sitting in the embassy intel section meeting room when Mac walked in was Tony Davidson, director of the Asia-Pacifi c region. A large grey-haired bloke with jowls who had once opened the bowling for Western Australia, Davidson was the spook who controlled the spooks across India, China and South-East Asia – Australia’s most important region. The ASIS station chief for the Philippines, Joe Imbruglia, leapt up to greet Mac, who was dusty, sweaty. Imbruglia had one of those smiles Mac’s mother used to give him when friends popped over unannounced. It said, ‘Please be nice?’

Mac had liked Tony Davidson immediately. He had a soft handshake, oozed power and confi dence, and he was one of the few intel chiefs left in the Western world who actually had some operational experience. Davidson had ignored his lackeys, leaned his large forearms on his thighs, and spoke like it was just Mac in the room.

‘Tell me about Sabaya,’ he said.

Mindanao Forest Products had started as a name on Mac’s to-do list.

It was a known front company for the Chinese government’s attempt to control its offshore primary produce sources, timber being one of them. At some stage Mac was going to fi nd a way to infi ltrate some of these organisations, maybe see how far Filipino offi cials were implicated. Mindanao Forest Products wasn’t special in his list. But before he could infi ltrate the company, Mac took a phone call which led straight to Abu Sabaya’s people.

In one of those weird twists of the intel world, Mac had got a call for Thomas Winton, Goanna Forestry Consulting. It was a Service front company. You gave out the card, you played the part but you never expected to be taken seriously as a professional. Now, a representative of Mindanao Forest Products had asked to meet him. Someone wanted his forestry expertise. He would get to invoice and everything.

The fronts for Mindanao Forest Products met Mac at the Peninsula Hotel in Manila. Mac had taken Kleinwitz, the accountant. The fronts had a problem. They had a forestry concession for Mindanao – the Muslim-dominated island of southern Philippines – but they couldn’t log the place.

Mac was confused. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because they stole our machinery.’

‘They’, as it turned out, were Abu Sabaya’s crew: Abu Sayyaf.

The Chinese had got their wires crossed, had thought that some casual baksheesh in Manila would carry weight in the boonies of Mindanao.

It didn’t.

Sabaya was an economic force. He was known to the world as a terrorist who ordered bombings, kidnappings and beheadings as a way of securing Mindanao as a Muslim state separate from Manila.

But Sabaya also operated a traditional protection service – he was a person who did for foreign loggers and miners in Mindanao what Cookie Banderjong did for those people in Sulawesi. You didn’t pay the man, you didn’t get protected.

‘So why don’t you pay him?’ Mac had asked.

The head guy had shrugged. ‘Don’t know where these people are.’

Abu Sabaya was no dummy. The shareholders and CEO of the forestry company were no names he’d ever heard of. His bankers and accountants ran the databases, did the numbers. Couldn’t get to the bottom of who ran Mindanao Forest Products. So Sabaya stole all the logging and hauling equipment shipped in for use in the Malaybalay region. Then he sat on US$10 million worth of plant and machinery and waited for the Chinese to come to him.

‘That’s what the Chinese wanted me to do,’ Mac told Davidson.

‘Find Sabaya, broker an agreement, get the machinery back and get the logging started.’

Davidson looked at him. ‘How you doing?’

‘Logging’s started. First invoice was paid,’ said Mac, then winked.

Davidson laughed, pulled back and looked at a very nervous Imbruglia. ‘An intelligence offi cer out there making money – the accountants are going to love that, eh Joe?’

Imbruglia was sweating, nervous, not a man who understood how fi eld people preferred to interact. All he knew was that one of the most powerful men in Australian intelligence was in his meeting room, having a laugh with his most independent-minded offi cer. An offi ce guy’s nightmare.

Davidson’s face slackened. He turned to an offsider who handed him a piece of paper. Davidson looked at the paper, handed it to Mac.

Mac, on high alert, looked at it, whistled low.

‘Had a meeting last night with some people from the American side,’ said Davidson, leaning back and sliding down in the Aussie hardwood chair. ‘They’re going in hard in Mindanao – already in build-up mode.’

Mac nodded. He’d seen the circulars about Zamboanga City and the old school site being prepped by US Army engineers. Now he was looking at a plain piece of foolscap with a few simple lines of typeface printed on it. It mentioned a thing called Operation Enduring Freedom and listed a bunch of names as South-East Asia’s most wanted terrorists.

Abu Sabaya was Number One, ahead of Khadaffy Janjalani, Azahari Husin, Noordin Mohammed Top, Radulan Sahiron, Abu Sulaiman and Hamsiraji Sali. The remaining names included two CIA agents and a plant from Pakistani intelligence.

Davidson said, ‘I saw that name at the top, and it rang a bell. Asked around and someone told me you were on top of this bloke.’

‘I wouldn’t say on top. I met him once. But I deal with his people,’ said Mac.

‘Yeah, Alan, but there’s no intel bloke I’ve heard of who would know how to get to this guy. I mean, other than you. Right?’

Mac had looked from Davidson’s smiling face to his Service lackeys, and to Imbruglia. What Davidson was saying was, There’s no AFP or CIA person infi ltrated to the extent you are. Davidson saw a chance to win back relevance in the Prime Minister’s offi ce. And Mac was getting the tap on the shoulder.

He was used to these conversations. He’d had them in the East Timor thing, in the Kosovo shit, even the Samrazi snatch where at the last minute he’d been fi tted up with the missile-homing devices.

It was always the same. Mac was never asked directly to do what they wanted him to do. Davidson had fl own up from Canberra on short notice to get Mac to kill Abu Sabaya, but he wasn’t going to ask him.

Not in a taped and logged ASIS meeting room. They never did.

Davidson smiled, leaned forward again, said, ‘It’s actually quite fortuitous, wouldn’t you say?’

Mac said nothing.

Davidson got quieter. ‘I mean, given your background and everything.’

Mac became an expert on Abu Sabaya, studying his fi le, following his MO, doing endless face-to-faces with Mindanao villagers, small business people and cops. He enlisted where he could.

The overall impression of Sabaya? Too smart to catch, too tough to kill. Aldam Tilao wasn’t purely a terrorist, he was more a businessman who had seen the level of money fl ooding in from Saudi, Syria and Iran in the early 1990s and made a commercial decision. Sure, he was a Moro – which was what southern Philippine Muslims were called.

But his business was stealing stuff, the same business that entire families and villages around the South China Sea had been doing for a thousand years. Piracy, banditry, kidnap, protection. He’d simply switched to jihadist rhetoric and put his hand out for some of that Middle Eastern cash.

The cash had fl owed, and with it his gang and their equipment levels had fl ourished. At one point, the CIA had the gang at two hundred strong. Which, if you wanted to get technical, was a private army. He gave them a name too: Abu Sayyaf. And with the name came a political goal to make Mindanao a separate Moro state, much to the annoyance of the two existing Marxist-based Moro separatist organisations.

Everything about Sabaya was clever and ambitious. He didn’t just kidnap Westerners and ransom them. He rode boatloads of his soldiers into coastal resorts on huge speedboats and took off with twenty tourists at a time. In one year – between mid 2001 and 2002 -

Sabaya’s crew abducted more than one hundred foreigners, beheading several. He taunted the Americans, and the Filipino commandos who were working with them. It was classic stuff, such as offering to buy the Philippine soldiers’ brand-new American-provided M16 A3s and M4 carbines, or making an offer for the Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile systems. Offer these poor soldiers so much money that they couldn’t say no. So when John Sawtell’s boys – or the US Rangers or SEALs – had to storm Abu Sayyaf fortresses like Basilan Island, they were facing the latest American ordnance coming straight back at them.

Abu Sabaya went to ground as soon as the Americans arrived in Zam. He moved around in his trademark black T-shirt, jeans, sunnies and black backpack. He was generous and charming. The poor folk of Mindanao loved him. But the main thing going for him was the incredible support of the womenfolk. On Abu Sabaya’s patch, there was no sex slavery, no sex tourism, no freak shows with mothers and their kids. Mac had once seen a bloke crawling around a village in the boonies behind Cotabato, with no hands and no feet. He’d asked what was up and a local told him that the crawler had tried to set up a child sex freak show for Australian paedophiles. Abu Sabaya had used his own keris – a short, South-East Asian sword.

He loved money and he loved pizza.

Mac’s digging fi nally nailed down Abu Subaya’s favourite pizza joint in Sibuco and he found that Sabaya would have his pizza delivered when he was in the area.

Mac had co-opted a worker in the pizzeria, Davey, and given him a couple of the tiny microdot locators just starting to be introduced by the Americans for shipping. Mac had some false starts – hot pizza grease wasn’t great for the microdots. Davey also tried to run away. He was scared of what would happen to him if a microdot was found or someone saw him trying to insert it into the cardboard box.

Mac had found Davey and talked him round – even though the bloke had every right to be scared.

When the deal fi nally went down, the Americans had fl own Mac into Zam, dropped him on the quay with Sawtell’s boys and the Philippine Navy commandos, the SWAGs. It was a lynching party: no cops, no fl exi cuffs, no spare boat to transport prisoners, no evidence bags. No one brought a notebook. The only camera was the Coolpix in Mac’s breast pocket.

They closed on Sabaya’s pump-boat at speed. A pump-boat is a daggy wooden, high-sided harbour vessel. They’re old, slow, running on tiny diesels that give them a top speed of ten knots, if they’re running downwind. Mac had watched Sawtell stand in impatience as Arroy made the request for the pump-boat to shut down power and prepare to be boarded.

But the way it happened was this: the Philippine Navy commandos hit the spotties, yelling obscenities, and the gunfi ght started immediately. The Americans had lost a guy they called Jacko to an Abu Sayyaf bomb a couple of months earlier, and they weren’t going to screw around that night. The Philippine commandos had lost their own people.

Having worked with many special forces outfi ts over the years, Mac knew they always engaged in gunfi ghts with their assault rifl es set to ‘three-shot’ mode. But that night, Mac didn’t hear the tap-dancing of three-shot. He heard a roar of lead and felt the air shake with full-auto. The Green Berets and the SWAGs put so much lead into the pump-boat that it listed to port, dipping its gunwale into the diesel-slick waters. Mac remembered the heat and the metallic smell of human plasma, diesel and tropical salt water biting into the back of his throat.

Mac had to ask Sawtell to stop the fi ring. Arroy overheard the request on the headset, shut it down himself. Then the whoops started up.

Mac grabbed the CIA guy they called Pencil Neck and tried to get him onto the pump-boat. ‘Come on, champ, time to go to work,’ he’d urged, but Pencil Neck couldn’t move. He was vomiting, crying. A bit of human scalp had stuck to the sleeve of his pressed battle fatigues.

Mac fl icked it off, ruffl ed the guy’s hair. But Pencil Neck was frozen to the seat.

Mac, Sawtell and a couple of Yank troopers went instead, slipping on the blood-covered decks of the listing pump-boat. They turned over bodies, Mac insisting that a semi-submerged corpse be brought to the surface.

Mac photographed faces, some of them torn off by gunfi re. One had lost an arm. He found it near the prow, fake gold Rolex glinting under the SWAGs’ spotties. They found a black backpack fl oating, black sunnies inside.

He remembered getting increasingly agitated. Mac had two corpses on the foredeck of the pump-boat, but neither of them was Abu Sabaya. They searched the area for an hour. Mac asked the SWAGs commander, Mig Arroy, to get a frogman down there. He sent down two with their marine spotlights. Sawtell wanted to know what they were looking for.

‘I told you – a body,’ said Mac.

‘We got ‘em, ain’t we?’

‘How many were we shooting at?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell called Arroy to his boat where they confabbed. Pencil Neck joined them.

Mac said, ‘I’ve got two bodies.’

‘There were fi ve on the pump-boat,’ said Sawtell.

‘I saw four,’ countered Arroy.

‘There’s a couple of bodies down there,’ said Sawtell. ‘They’re just not fl oaters. One of them’s Sabaya.’

‘You know this?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell nodded, unsure.

Arroy said, ‘There’s no way we’re going to retrieve all the bodies out here. No way.’

One of Sawtell’s guys leaned out of the pump-boat’s wheelhouse, waved a blood-splattered pizza box. ‘Mmm – Hawaiian Surprise. My favourite.’

Pencil Neck vomited again.

Mac leaned back in his seat as the 737 dipped slightly and headed into Makassar. He churned over the Abu Sabaya story. It had been the turning point of his career in more ways than one. He’d done more positive work in East Timor, but the Abu Sabaya thing had got him a name among the Americans and British as well as the Filipinos and Indons. It had given him an aura he hadn’t wanted, a reputation he’d never asked for. He hadn’t killed a major terrorist – he’d stood there and watched a bunch of soldiers cut a bunch of bandits to ribbons.

He wasn’t ashamed, but he wasn’t proud. To Mac’s mind, if you wanted to wage war on terror you had to stand for something a bit better.

It didn’t mean that Catholicism should win out, or that Islam should lose. His mother used to say that being Catholic didn’t mean you were always right – just that you’d always try to do the right thing.

The offi cial US-Philippines statement said Sabaya had been killed in a gunfi ght along with two others, and that four people had been captured. Actually, no one had been captured. It hadn’t been that kind of mission. It was the kind of rubbish intel people leaked into the media to make other terrorists nervous, to fl ush out traitorous types who might be ready to squeal before the supposed prisoners started to sing.

Mac was debriefed but not asked for a report. It wasn’t going to be logged, at least not as an assassination. Davidson phoned, congratulated him on the whole thing, laughing at the pizza delivery aspect. Then he’d asked Mac for an informal report.

Mac’s report was written on a piece of white printer paper, with a blue ballpoint. It had been pouched to Canberra. It was short. It said, We killed two Abu Sayyaf people. Abu Sabaya was not among them. He planted a black backpack containing a pair of sunglasses – he wanted me to fi nd it. His death is a hoax.

As the Lion Air fl ight descended, Mac wondered back to his paranoia about there being a mole in the Service. He mulled, making connections and wondering who else in the Service had seen that note.