Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 46

They found the other Chinese soldiers in the far corner of the sub-level. All three of them had been shot in the head with suppressed handguns. Paul reckoned standard 9 mm loads – NATO Nines. Mac knelt, had a look at the assault rifl es that were on them or scattered around: Type 95s, the standard PLA assault rifl e. They were standing in a People’s Liberation Army facility.

There were no containers on this level and Mac could see this was where most of the recent vehicular movement had come from. There were tyre tracks around the sub-level and up the ramp and a diesel tug sat where it had been turned off. Big steel trolleys were in various states of use. They had collapsible sides and large-diameter rubber tyres. In other places there were steel pallets designed for forklifts.

The troopers ambled around as if in a trance. On a dozen or so of the pallets that had been left abandoned there were stacks of gold bars. Huge bricks of the stuff. The four hundred troy ounce monsters that alone were worth about US$160,000 a piece. Spikey tried to pick one up with one hand and failed.

On one of the transport trolleys there were at least eighty of the bricks. As if they’d been loaded up but then they couldn’t quite fi t them in the ship.

Mac was getting very, very paranoid. The amount of wealth that had walked out of this facility in one go was beginning to feel like an astronomical number that would have to be countered. One of those cosmic actions that needed a reaction. And the Chinese military was a big enough pendulum to swing back and create the counter-force.

Based simply on what he was looking at, there was US$50 million in leftovers. What had Cookie Banderjong asked him in Sulawesi?

Where did the gold always go? The Chinese! Well done, Mr Macca!

Looking over at Paul, Mac could see fear there too.

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Mac.

‘I’m thinking that this is a PLA facility,’ said Paul. ‘I’m thinking someone stole a shitload from here. And I’m thinking that the last thing any of us need in our lives is to have the PLA believe that we are the thieves.’

‘Bingo.’

Paul shook his head. ‘How much is here?’

‘I reckon about fi fty million, US.’

‘If they left fi fty million as the crumbs, what the fuck did they take?’ said Sawtell, joining them.

They all looked at each other. Enormity dawning.

‘Well?’ said Sawtell.

Mac didn’t want to exaggerate the haul. ‘Well if they took twenty bars for every one they left…’

‘You saying Garrison and Sabaya are fl oating around out there with a billion dollars in the hold?’ interrupted Paul, clearly alarmed.

Mac shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What I do know is I don’t want to be standing here when the Chinese generals turn up.’

Sawtell and Paul nodded at each other.

‘I need my teeth pulled,’ said Mac, ‘I’ll see my dentist.’

The headsets crackled with urgent yells from topside. They ran up the ramp, troopers leading the way, emerging with M4s at the shoulder, covering one another.

Swivelling to the left they saw three Asian men in suits with their hands up in front of the Black Hawk. The Green Beret who’d been left to guard the helo was yelling at them to get to their knees. The pilot had an M4 at his shoulder too. The guys in suits were reluctant to drop.

Mac and Paul jogged behind, nervous, breathless. The troopers went straight up to the suits. Spikey butted the fi rst one he saw, swinging and landing the black rifl e butt square behind the fi rst guy’s left ear. The guy dropped like a sand bag.

The leader of the men said, ‘Okay, okay,’ and got to his knees.

Mac was panting when he got in front of them. He scanned the area to see where the rest were coming from. Sawtell was already checking that.

The suits were Chinese. Paul jabbered in Mandarin. Their leader

– about forty-fi ve, solid build, charcoal suit – jabbered back, forceful.

Paul asked him something. The guy shrugged, spook-style.

Paul turned to Mac. ‘They speak English. Not saying who they work for.’

Mac leaned into Paul’s ear. ‘MSS?’

‘I’d say General Staff intelligence,’ mumbled Paul.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said the head guy, shaking his head at his friend. ‘He needs an ambulance.’

‘Who are you?’ said Mac.

‘Who are you, might be a more appropriate question,’ the guy replied.

‘Really, champ?’

‘Ah. So we have the Australian,’ said the head guy with a knowing smile. ‘You must be McQueen?’

Mac didn’t like that. In the intel world, it was plain rude. ‘Don’t worry about the Australian, mate. Didn’t someone tell you never to creep up on the US Army? Might get the whole wrong idea.’

‘Can we get up now?’ the guy said, almost haughty.

Mac nodded and the Chinese bloke stood, brushed off his pants, held his suit jacket open. Sawtell sent off Spikey and Jansen, who came back with a couple of handguns.

The Chinese bloke held his hands open.

‘What’s your name?’ said Mac.

‘Call me Wang.’

‘I’ll call you wanker, you keep on like this,’ said Mac, moving his Heckler up a fraction. ‘What are you doing here?’

Wang chewed gum, arrogant, not in the least intimidated. ‘I’m the managing director of Kaohsiung Holdings – the owner of this facility,’ he said, hands on hips.

Mac was getting the creeps. Big time. He turned to Paul. ‘Mate, can you run that with Don, at the Chinook? Kaohsiung Holdings.’

Paul got straight on it.

Mac turned back to Wang. ‘Where you registered, Wang?’

‘Singapore, of course,’ said Wang, looking at the open roller door.

‘So you broke into my company’s premises?’

Mac could see how this guy got his start in life. He’d bet it was secret police. The whole answerin-aquestion thing.

‘Just needed to take a shit, actually,’ he said. ‘Found a great little dunny. Red car. Nice leather, comfy little throne room.’

‘I suppose you realise that this is technically a diplomatic zone?’ countered Wang, smirking.

‘I suppose you realise this is technically a crime scene?’ Mac snapped back.

Wang rolled his eyes, like he was tired of these games. ‘You are not going to like the diplomatic consequences of what you are doing, Mr McQueen.’

‘Really? The orange ovies and paper slippers might not suit you either when the United States government fi ngers you for thieving their nerve agent.’

‘What?!’

‘This is the last known transit point for a consignment of VX nerve agent that was stolen from the Department of Defense yesterday.

I’m just running your bona fi des through DIA right now.’

‘Oh, come on. We just got here,’ said Wang.

‘I have eyewitnesses who will swear that you turned up and took responsibility for the whole show.’

Paul interrupted, got in Mac’s ear. ‘Kaohsiung Holdings is a front company for the PLA General Staff. DIA have them as primarily an arms dealing group.’

Mac glanced at Wang, who was starting to look frazzled.

‘Look, McQueen, I’m under time constraints. What do you want?’ said Wang.

‘I want to know what connection your company has with the Golden Serpent terrorists,’ said Mac, unsmiling.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

He was too pompous too quickly. A liar’s tell. An honest man would have answered with confusion, slightly mystifi ed. Wang had been ready for it.

‘Okay, Wang. Tell me. There’s a bunch of PLA lads down there.

Dead. They’ve been shot at close range. Why would they have allowed their killers to get so close? Maybe they knew them, huh?’

Wang was confused now. ‘Dead?’

‘Sure. Young lads too.’

Wang rabbited something at his offsider. The bloke shrugged.

‘What’s happened in there?’ asked Wang.

‘Well, put it this way, Wang. There’s a lot of open spaces where the gold bars used to be.’

Wang’s chest seemed to defl ate in front of their eyes, his breath catching like a man with angina. He just managed to stop gulping long enough to croak at Mac, ‘The gold?’

‘There’s about two hundred bars left.’

Wang turned pale, looked like he might keel over. He shook his head absent-mindedly, possibly wondering how quickly he could get his immediate family to a new country. Fixing Mac with a stare which was no longer arrogant, he said, ‘Um, how? How did they -?’

‘Well that’s what we have to talk about, Wang. See, we need to fi nd your ship too,’ said Mac.

Wang spun on his heel and looked back at the quayside as if to say, I knew something large should have been there. He gabbled at his offsider, who shrugged again.

Wang turned back, totally panicked now.

Mac winked. ‘Now we’re in the diplomacy zone, champ.’

Mac and Paul spelled it out very clearly to Mr Wang and his associate: the VX was non-negotiable.

Sitting on the side of the Black Hawk they watched Sawtell’s boys get the butted Chinese suit on his feet again, vomit all down his jacket.

Wang was still in a state of shock. They’d taken him into the building, shown him around. Mac was disappointed with his priorities.

He’d winced at the dead boys upstairs, but when he got down the ramp and saw the space almost empty, Wang put his face in his hands as if he was going to cry.

So they’d talked it through. Mac wanted the name and codes and IDs for the ro-ro ship. He wanted them quick so he could get DIA tracking the thing.

‘What do we get? Where’s the gold?’ argued Wang.

‘Mate, the gold’s on the ship. Take the frigging gold – we don’t care. We have a couple of very bad blokes running around out there and they’re armed with VX nerve agent. You want that being detonated in Shangers?’

Wang shook his head.

‘So let’s hear it.’

Wang stammered, made a few false-starts – classic liar stuff. ‘Um, the ship is called Hainan Star.’

He looked pained.

‘Come on, mate,’ said Paul. ‘Time is money.’

‘I can’t talk about these matters,’ stammered Wang.

‘You’d rather I ask than you tell?’ asked Mac.

Wang nodded quickly.

‘ Hainan Star got all the satellite tracking gear on it?’ asked Mac.

‘No comment.’

‘ Hainan Star linked into that AIS maritime broadcast band?’

‘No comment.’

‘Any of that gold come from Burma, Iran, Syria, North Korea or al-Qaeda?’ said Mac.

Embarrassed, Wang whispered, ‘None of your business.’

Wang was right about one thing. The south end of Brani was a diplomatic zone. By the time Mac and Paul were out of the Black Hawk and hauling Wang in to meet Don and Hatfi eld, the Singaporeans and Chinese had a posse of chiefs doing their rain dance on the Keppel Terminal apron.

Mac couldn’t believe what he was seeing: it was classic offi ce guy stuff. There was an emergency with stolen nerve agent, but a certain type of man could always fi nd the time to make his little offi ce empire the priority. Mac and Paul twigged early: the Kaohsiung Holdings property was a clearing house and repository for the PLA General Staff. Singapore had the security, had the huge throughput that would hide an ‘invisible’ ship, and it had small armies of brokers, bankers, solicitors and accountants who could turn gold into all sorts of legitimate assets. Singapore was set up to do business, and the amount of business Kaohsiung Holdings did in the city was probably too great to allow legalities to get in the way.

There was another reason for Singapore’s pre-eminence as a gold and cash repository for the Chinese. It was the global centre of an underground gold-clearance and banking system called fi e chen. Similar to the Muslim hawala that operated in the Middle East, fi e chen was outside government or regulatory control and operated on a transnational basis of trust. It was racially exclusive, too, and family-delineated. You couldn’t partake in fi e chen unless you could show a multigeneration connection to it. One of the worst arguments Mac had ever had with Jenny had been about fi e chen. He’d said it was like the freemasons. She’d said bullshit, that secret transnational banking systems were one of the reasons slavers got away with it so easily.

Mac and Paul watched as Wang was caught by his people as he was trying to get into Hatfi eld’s Chinook. Don came out, but he was powerless. The People’s Republic of China was reclaiming the bloke, and the Singaporeans were backing that.

Mac gave Wang the wink. ‘There goes the gold, mate. Looks like it’s going to get split seven ways, huh?’

Wang tried to say something with his eyes, but the MSS thugs dragged him away for one of those dentist appointments where you never have to wait.

Mac followed Don into the Chinook. Hatfi eld was laid out snoring on one of the airline seats. Like spooks, army blokes had to take sleep where they could fi nd it.

Don sat down at the map table. ‘Want coffee?’

Mac shook. Paul nodded. Don asked Brown’s sidekick for coffee.

Brown turned, said hi to Mac.

Don looked like shit. Pale, drawn, unhappy. ‘So, what have we got?’

Mac felt sorry for him. All his DIA guys were probably on Golden Serpent or with the naval SONAR birds. Mac and Paul were still a sideshow – although the briefi ng they’d given Don over the radio was bringing Kaohsiung Holdings and the PLA further to the centre.

‘Mate, we’ve had an idea,’ said Mac. ‘The PLA General Staff have been running this ghost ship around Asia for years. Probably got others too.’

‘It’s highly illegal,’ said Don. ‘Not to mention incredibly unsafe.’

‘Not so different to the unmarkeds that go out to Johnston.’

‘That’s different, and you know it,’ said Don.

Mac was glad Jenny wasn’t present.

‘Anyway, the idea,’ continued Mac. ‘Let’s say we can’t get any satellite bounces off this tub. It’s not on the AIS, so we can’t trig a position, right?’

Don nodded. As the coffee came, Paul reached forward.

‘But we still have imaging, right?’

Don nodded.

Mac looked over at Brown, who was in front of his panel of screens and keyboards. ‘That right, Brownie? We can fi nd an image of Hainan Star?’

Brown turned and looked at Don, who said, ‘Go ahead.’

‘Can I get a better idea of what you want?’ asked Brown.

Mac got up, walked over to the panel. ‘Okay, so once there was a terrorist emergency in Singapore, the satellite cameras would have been going overtime, right?’

Brown nodded, looked at Mac with a dawning smile.

‘And it was in the morning, clear morning, right?’

Brown broke in, lightbulb going on in his head. ‘So there’s going to be a shot of Hainan Star logged somewhere.’

‘Bingo, Brownie.’

Brownie tapped on keys, mumbled things into his headset. He scrolled databases, input searches, manipulated dates. He played multiple keyboards like Rick Wakeman. Finally, the big black SGI screen came up with an astonishing image: Port of Singapore with a time and date log on the bottom right. On the top right were coordinates in the nautical format. A ghosted cross-cursor fl oated in the middle of the screen and the imagery was amazingly clear.

‘Shit. Guess they dropped the Polaroids, huh? Got some new gear?’ said Mac, impressed.

Brownie laughed. ‘It’s pretty good stuff.’

Mac took a seat, pulled it up close. Paul and Don leaned over the back of both of them. Mac asked for a closer pull on Brani. Brownie shifted the cross, double-clicked on his mouse. The image got closer over Brani.

‘Again, mate.’

Brownie brought them in close, then Mac asked him to go further south. They zeroed in over the Kaohsiung Holdings building and Hainan Star.

The time code said they were looking at an image from seven-thirty am, the day before.

‘Can we take the time series forward, say ten minutes at a time?’

Brownie brought a smaller box up on the screen, changed a setting and got rid of the box, then took the time series of images forward by ten-minute increments by hitting an arrow key on the SGI keyboard.

The men watched the tailgate come down at eight am, watched the tug from the facility drive into the ship’s hold at 8.10. Brownie stopped the series. Let real time run. You could see the tug moving into the ship, with no trailers.

Mac smiled at Paul and Don. ‘It was being offl oaded.’

The time series jumped forward again. Tug taking trailers out of the hold, soldiers in plain clothes lounging on the quayside with assault rifl es over their shoulders.

At eight-thirty, the emergency started. Brownie ran the real time.

People out of the building, looking around. Pointing into the building.

People up and down the gangway of the ship. Confusion.

Brownie took it forward in jumps again. At 8.50, a tender boat arrived at the quay. Brownie took it back to real time. A group of people walked up to the Kaohsiung building. Two peeled off, placing a large bag on the quay beside the ship’s gangway. Then one went up the gangway, the other joining a group of people. They went into the building and about three minutes later the tug was moving trailers again, this time out of the building and into the ship.

Paul laughed. ‘Holy shit, Mac. Ever get the feeling you’re in the wrong line of business?’

Mac was quietly astonished at what he was watching. ‘Tell ya what, if we fi nd these blokes we’d better bring the cavalry. Know what I mean?’

Don and Paul nodded.

Brownie took the time series forward again. At 9.20 am, a person who looked to be in charge suddenly walked onto the quay. The tug reversed into the ship and soldiers disappeared into the building.

They waited. And waited. Mac was about to ask Brownie to go back to the time series, but then there it was. A naked man – Mac – emerged on the quayside, right behind Hainan Star, holding a black box to his chest. A smaller bag was on his back. He paused, looked around.

Mac turned to Brown. ‘Beautiful one day. Perfect the next.’

Another man appeared on the quay, carrying the same accessories as the fi rst man. Also naked. Paul.

Mac winked at Brown. ‘Not true what they say about Asian blokes.’

Mac made a sign like he was awarding a goal at the MCG. Felt a clip over the ear.

Onscreen the men moved to a position beside the building, dressed in overalls. One walked out of the picture. The other stood there, maybe making a call. The other man came back, they stowed their stuff and jogged away.

About forty seconds later, the loading operation began again.

Mac looked at Brown. ‘Now what we need is to get a still shot of Hainan Star, load it into that tricky NSA neural net stuff, and run a real-time matching exercise. All ships have distinctive dimensions and features. If we can fi nd the same size, same shape, we’ve got a target.’

He turned. ‘Right, Don?’

Don looked at the SGI screen. ‘I like it.’