Second Strike

CHAPTER 12

It was a clear night as the Indonesian Huey chugged north-west. The host military had a choice whether to tell their foreign intelligence partners where they were going, and the Indon navy had decided not to.

Mac, Freddi and Purni all tried to sleep in the throbbing racket of the Huey, a Vietnam-era helo now made under licence in Indonesia.

The reliability record of the air frame and the familiar thromp of the turbo-shaft were reassuring to Mac, but it was still the loudest and most uncomfortable way to get around, even with the doors shut fast and all the high-tech damping materials they were lined with. After twenty minutes aloft Mac gave up on sleeping and saw the telltale sign of the Madura Strait, crowded with humanity on both sides, narrowing down to the huge city.

At Surabaya Naval Base an operator in pale-blue overalls and an aviator helmet escorted them across the tarmac to a white LandCruiser Prado. They were then driven across the runway to a hangar on the other side of the air wing apron, all wincing as they shot into the glare of the internal fl oodies which illuminated an air force F28. Mac’s G-Shock said it was 3.37 am.

They walked to the stairs and Freddi excused himself to go to the gents, so Purni and Mac climbed into the plane and grabbed the seats that faced each other at the front. There was a faint whining sound and the smell of avgas and institutional air freshener. The decor looked like 1986 was never going to go away and Mac briefl y worried about all those incidents in the early 1980s when Garuda seemed to kill so many people in F28s. He told himself he’d fl own safely in F28s on Ansett Airlines, and that seemed to balance the paranoia.

‘So, Purn,’ said Mac, yawning. ‘Can we talk about a destination now?’

Purni gave him a blank look and shook his head. He was well-dressed, and Mac knew from Freddi that he’d been educated at Monash University in Melbourne. Wherever you went in the world, the spy agencies were crammed with educated middle-class men trapped between the ride of their lives and the drudgery of procedure; between the fl ash of adrenaline and The Rules.

Mac fi shed in his pack and turned off both of his mobiles. If he wasn’t allowed to know where he was going then no other bastard was going to fi nd out vicariously. Freddi bounced up the stairs and sat next to Purni so that the two BAIS boys were rear-facing while Mac looked forward.

Mac settled into his seat as a loud shaking sound rattled around the cabin. Then a couple of soldiers in red berets appeared at the cabin door and waited while someone thumped up the aluminium trolley stairs behind them. Another soldier appeared holding a chain in his hand. Turning, the soldier pulled on the chain and two men in black hoods and grey pyjamas jerked in behind him, the fi rst prisoner chained to the second. The soldier leading the prisoners started down the aircraft pulling the hooded men behind him. The second prisoner had blood splashed down the front of his pyjama legs. It looked fresh and Mac thought immediately of Ari’s colleague.

The other two soldiers moved towards where Mac’s party was seated, their distinctive triangle patches with the vertical red dagger indicating they were Kopassus, Indonesian Army Special Forces.

Kopassus was one of the most-mentioned government agencies in any Amnesty International fi le-search.

Freddi smiled and chatted to the soldiers, then gestured at Mac.

‘McQueen – this is Major Benni Sudarto. We’re on his fl ight this morning.’

Mac put out his hand. ‘Thanks for the ride, Major,’ he said, all smiles.

Surdarto hesitated briefl y and then shook Mac’s hand. ‘I know you?’ he asked in mechanical English. He had a face that looked like it had been put together out of brown Lego, rectangular slabs of fl esh and bone composed his cheekbones, jaw and forehead.

Mac shrugged, looked out the window at the hangar. Benni Sudarto hadn’t changed. He was still built like a brick shithouse, was still suspicious and ill-mannered like he’d been back in ‘99, in East Timor.

Sudarto barked an order down the plane then took a pew in the facing seats on the other side of the aisle. ‘I do, don’t I?’ said Sudarto, not giving up.

There was a certain kind of Indonesian man made of muscle and bone and nothing else, and Benni Sudarto was such a bloke. It looked like if you punched him you’d break your hand. His neck started under his ears and the rolled-up sleeves of his camo shirt revealed enormous arms.

Mac shrugged. ‘Nah, Major. Anglos, mate – we all look alike.’

Sudarto forced a laugh, then looked away.

Mac caught Freddi’s eye; the other man’s expression said, Be careful. Mac was going to be very, very careful. When he’d last seen Benni Sudarto, the Indonesian was a captain in Group 4, the Kopassus plainclothes hit squad. Back then Mac was an elusive Aussie spy in East Timor, known to the Indonesians as Kakatua, the Indon name for Timor’s cockatoo. Sudarto had hunted and Mac had evaded.

Careful didn’t get close.

They took off seven minutes later. Soon after, the crew dimmed the cabin lights and Mac eased back his seat, fl icked on his overhead reading light, reached into his pack and pulled out the stapled printouts that Garvs had organised for him. It was a ‘brief’ fi le on Hassan Ali. The covering photo showed a handsome man with intelligent, smiling eyes. The caption said Hassan was twenty-fi ve when the photo was taken in 1986.

Mac fl ipped to the second sheet of paper: Hassan was born in 1960 in Islamabad, father a lawyer, mother from a local moneyed family.

Educated in Islamabad, he’d done his master’s at the London School of Economics before returning home to Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI. Hassan had started at the political rather than military level and had postings in Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Paris.

He’d made his name in scientifi c espionage and covert procurement.

Then, after a secondment to KRL – A.Q. Khan’s nuclear laboratory – in 1997, the fi le noted that he’d fallen off the offi cial spy map.

After ‘97 Hassan was suspected of being a full-time covert operative for KRL. A note added to the bottom of the bio mentioned that the Israeli government had been building a case for the Americans to stop protecting Pakistan and Khan because Hassan Ali had been forging friendships with terror outfi ts, including those linked with Libya and Iran.

Putting the fi le back in his pack, Mac tried to put the nuke puzzle together in a way that relied on facts rather than speculation. The nuclear connections Ari had been insisting on weren’t concrete enough for Mac to accept lightly.

In the late 1990s, Mac had spent two months in the UN’s Iraq Nuclear Verifi cation Offi ce. INVO was supposed to verify a nuclear program in Iraq but it was really a bunch of MI6 and CIA true-believers bullying the nuclear engineers into verifying that old tractor parts were really part of a clandestine enrichment centrifuge.

INVO was a mess, but it had shown Mac how easily a situation could be distorted by intelligence offi cers.

Still, it had to be said that there was something compelling about Ari’s theories. The Israelis and Russians knew that Dr Khan was selling enriched uranium and centrifuge cascades; Hassan Ali was a Khan lieutenant and one of the blokes the Indian intelligence services wanted shut down. Also, Ari was putting Hassan, Akbar and Samir together in Bali on the eve of the Sari and Paddy’s bombings. Which connected a rogue nuclear program with JI and al-Qaeda.

Ari was right about one thing, thought Mac as he felt sleep coming on: a bunch of farm labourers in sarungs may have needed a general like Samir to plan a conventional bombing, but they wouldn’t need a nuclear weapons broker from Pakistan or an al-Qaeda bagman.

He wondered where they were now heading. Something told him it was right behind Ari.