They drove into Denpasar with a number of theories but no solid plan. Only one man could have been American intelligence’s inside guy on Operasi Boa, and that was Jim. Mac had seen some things with the American spook that didn’t always add up, such as his insistence that he travel with Mac to Dili, the incomplete briefing on Lombok AgriCorp and the washed file on Lee Wa Dae, which concealed his true role.
Mac now had to face the American, expose him and get him to stop Boa, turn the helos around.
‘Okay, so let’s run it through,’ said Mac as he drove and tried to perfect their arrival at DIA. ‘Give me four minutes, and then ring that number, ask for Champion and say -’
‘I say, “Champion, we’ve found another copy of Operasi Boa – the owner is threatening to send it to the Washington Post,”’ said Bongo, looking at the phone number Haryono’s captain had given them.
‘So you already had this number?’ asked Bongo. ‘Where from?’
‘Isolated it last night,’ said Mac, his mind racing. ‘It was the number that called Augusto Da Silva yesterday morning, right after he got the call from Atkins.’
‘So whoever called Da Silva that morning also asked him to burn the Operasi Boa file?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ said Mac. ‘I should have seen it last night – that number is an inactive satellite number and it’s linked to the classic US intelligence fronts.’
‘Which are?’ said Bongo.
‘Delaware trustee, bank in the BVI and registered company care of the Singapore branch of an international law firm, Baxter & Menzies,’ said Mac, pulling into a parking space down the street from the DIA offices.
Casing the street for eyes, they slowed their breathing as they sat in the van.
‘This office is a little piece of the Pentagon,’ said Mac as he pulled off his cable-guy overalls. ‘I don’t want you storming the ramparts, doing that Filipino macho shit, okay?’
‘Okay, boss,’ said Bongo, as Mac called Jim on his Nokia and was invited up.
Walking into Jim’s office, Mac got a friendly welcome and the offer of coffee. CNN’s footage of total anarchy in East Timor blasted on the TV in Jim’s office and they watched in silence. The ballot result had been announced and the reprisals had already begun.
‘I’m sorry we couldn’t stop Boa,’ said Jim through his teeth. ‘What a dog of thing!’
‘I need to talk to you about that,’ said Mac.
‘Yeah?’ asked Jim, watching the images on TV.
‘Yeah, mate,’ said Mac. ‘You know the Indonesian military calls you D-Dua Puluh?’
‘What’s that?’ asked Jim.
‘Translated, it’s D20,’ said Mac, ruing the opportunity lost when the Canadian reported the generals talking about Deetupelo. ‘It’s an intelligence joke.’
Taking a black texta, Mac wrote ‘XX’ on the white board. ‘Latin for twenty, right?’
‘I guess,’ said Jim.
‘The Bahasa Indonesia for twenty is dua puluh. To Anglo ears it sounds like Tupelo.’
‘So?’
‘So, it’s two crosses – a double-cross. In the Second World War, British intelligence ran double agents in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the committee running them was called the Twenty.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about, McQueen?’ snapped the American.
‘The generals, in Dili, called you D-Dua Puluh – D20. At first I thought it meant a double agent in Dili, but half an hour ago I realised it was Haryono’s double agent in Denpasar.’
‘McQueen, you need some fresh air!’ said Jim, coffee mug poised an inch from his lips.
‘You’re the inside guy for the Koreans. I just came from Haryono’s 2IC.’
‘Are you drunk?’ said Jim.
‘You heard from ASIS that I thought the Boa file was at the Resende, so you called Augusto Da Silva as fast as you could. Next thing I know, the Operasi Boa file is being burned.’
‘McQueen, slow down -’
‘You had him destroy the Boa file.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yeah, really, Jim. DIA has been bugging Atkins’ office for months – he knew it and was worried about it. You got the control codes for Cedar Rail’s agents, right?’
Jim shook his head, looked away.
‘Look me in the eye, Jim, and tell me you guys don’t spy on us.’
‘Don’t Pollyanna me, McQueen,’ snapped Jim. ‘Why don’t you look me in the eye and tell me how the Aussie media knew we were siphoning data out of Larkswood?’
They both stared at images of women running down a street in Maliana. Larkswood was a huge facility in Darwin that intercepted radio, telephone and satellite communications across South-East Asia – the Americans had hacked its systems and found a way to get the feed before it went through Canberra, and the firm had found out by spying on the Yanks in Jakarta.
‘So what was in Boa that linked the Pentagon to the bio-weapons program?’ asked Mac.
‘You are drunk, aren’t you?’ said Jim.
‘You whacked the Korean, Chloe, Moerpati and then Augusto – just as he was going to spill, and then, hey presto, there’s an unmarked US gunboat to take us off the beach.’
‘They were shadowing us all morning, McQueen,’ said Jim, eyes rolling. ‘You can’t take a shit at the Pentagon anymore without three HR forms – that boat was SOP.’
‘How did you know about the Korean money coming across into Lombok?’ asked Mac, praying for Bongo’s call to come through to one of Jim’s sat phones so he could nail this shut. ‘Come to think of it,’ taunted Mac, ‘how did you guys know so much about Lombok AgriCorp?’
‘We’re DIA – we cut our teeth in UNSCOM and the Twentieth Support Command. This is what we do, mate. The Korean money? We have agents at their casinos in Poi Pet – we trace that cash from source, okay?’
‘You have to trace it?’ said Mac. ‘I thought Lee Wa Dae was your agent?’
‘Not ours, McQueen,’ said Jim. ‘Langley once used him as a banking front and a conduit for their black funding, especially around Korea. He created the money-laundering schemes for heroin money through those banks in Macao – remember?’
Mac nodded. A bunch of North Korean military accounts were found disguised in apparently legitimate banks in Macao.
‘When the CIA realised that Wa Dae was putting the North Koreans’ drug money and the Agency’s corporate fronts through the same banking scams, they cut him loose,’ said Jim. ‘So, he was a US intelligence asset, but not now and never DIA.’
The sat phone trilled on a table by the door. Mac smirked, waiting for Jim to pick it up and hear someone call him ‘Champion’. He wanted to see Jim’s reaction, the reaction of a liar.
Standing, Jim looked at the ringing sat phone and leaned out his door. ‘Simon – your phone, buddy!’
Mac watched, stunned, as Simon picked up his sat phone and turned away.
‘Uh-huh,’ said the DIA analyst, stress in his voice. ‘Um, yeah, so I think… can I just… I’ll call you… and, yeah, so…’
Looking at Jim, Mac said, ‘D20.’
Turning first to Mac, then to Jim, Simon’s face was a study in guilt as he hung up and folded the aerial.
‘Who was that?’ asked Jim, furious.
‘Umm, I don’t know -’ started the analyst.
‘So why’d you answer to Champion?’ asked Mac.
‘Look, you don’t know -’ stuttered Simon, the yuppieish know-it-all act crumbling like a sandcastle.
‘Answer the question, buddy,’ said Jim, very softly. ‘Why would you answer to Champion?’
Simon kicked at the carpet, face reddening.
‘Why wouldn’t you express surprise when a stranger tells you that another copy of Operasi Boa has turned up?’ asked Mac, feeling the anger well in him.
Lurching sideways, Simon fumbled in the coat rack and came out with a black Beretta 9mm handgun, which he waved back and forth between them while backing up for the door.
‘Don’t try anything,’ he spluttered, nervous but quite steady with the gun.
‘I don’t want to try anything,’ said Mac. ‘I came here to get you to reverse the green light on Operasi Boa. You have to stop this madness.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, buddy,’ said Jim. ‘You can’t go killing civilians just to prove a concept. Is that what you’re involved in, Simon, a clinical trial that got out of hand?’
‘Stop!’ Simon yelled at Jim. ‘You never understood, man!’
‘Understood what?’ asked Jim, trying to keep his voice calm.
‘The importance of the science! What else?!’ he yelled.
‘When the science is a disease falling from a chopper, believe me, buddy, I know the importance,’ said Jim.
‘Shit, man,’ said Simon, smiling grimly. ‘The Koreans have been hounded for decades because of their Ethno-Bomb research, but you two aren’t scientists, you have no spirit of curiosity, no purity of -’
‘Ethno?’ said Mac. ‘What’s -’
‘Look at you, Jimbo! You’re just a spook, a spy! You tear everything down to the worst human motivations, but Saddam was trying to build some -’
‘Saddam?!’ interrupted Jim, his hands lowering. ‘You little cocksucker – it was you! You got me barred from that team in Iraq!’
‘We needed a scientist, Jimbo – UNSCOM did fine without you.’
‘You little -’ snarled Jim as he moved at Simon, fists clenched.
A shot fired and a lump of plasterboard leapt out of the wall behind Jim.
‘Don’t get confused, Jimbo,’ said Simon as Jim froze. ‘You might be the tough guy, but I have the gun.’
The glass of the entry door caved in with an explosion of glass, and Bongo Morales emerged in his tradesman’s overalls, swinging the A4 from his hip. As Mac saw the gun aimed at Jim, he realised Bongo had been prepped to go for the wrong guy.
‘No, Bongo,’ yelled Mac, trying to cross in front of Jim.
In the moment of hesitation, Simon turned and shot at Bongo, the first one missing, the second one hitting him in the throat. The A4 spewed bullets as Bongo keeled over and Mac dived for cover as Jim took a bullet in the thigh from the A4 jammed on full auto. Crawling under the cordite and smoke, Mac made his way into Jim’s open office, gunshots from Simon following him.
Crawling to Jim’s desk, Mac stood and fumbled manically at the drawers till he found a hip rig hiding beneath a bunch of files.
Wrenching the Beretta from Jim’s holster, Mac turned and found Jim standing in front of him, Simon’s handgun pushed into the back of his skull.
‘Drop it, McQueen,’ said Simon.
The safe door swung shut, plunging the three of them into darkness. Around Mac, Jim and Bongo, shelves reached to the ceiling, packed with American files, photo satchels and state secrets.
‘Reckon we’ve got three or four hours of oxygen in here before it gets grim,’ said Jim, his teeth chattering from the shock of his bullet wound.
‘Got a lighter?’ asked Bongo, still holding the bleeding graze on the side of his neck. ‘Left mine in the van.’
Jim pulled a lighter from his chinos and lit it. Standing, Mac looked around the tiny room, hoping for an air vent or trapdoor in the ceiling that they could use to attract attention. The ceiling of the safe was sealed but Mac noticed a red marker pen attached by string to the shelving. Grabbing a piece of paper from a file, he wrote Help, we’re in here on it and slipped it under the door.
The lighter grew too hot for Jim’s hand and they went back into darkness, Mac and Bongo tearing up Jim’s chinos to put a bandage on his leg.
‘So,’ said Mac, as Bongo tied off the light tourniquet above Jim’s wound, ‘is someone going to tell me what that fruitcake was on about?’
‘What part?’ asked Jim.
‘Did Simon say Haryono’s program was an “Ethno-Bomb”? What is that?’
‘Shit,’ said Jim, as he moved into a better position.
‘Well?’ asked Mac in the darkness.
‘Okay,’ sighed Jim, reluctant. ‘But I was going to tell you, okay?’
‘Okay, Jim – tell.’
‘The Ethno-Bomb was probably conceived by the Israelis after the Six-Day War, back in the late sixties,’ said Jim. ‘The IDF wanted an “Ultimate Contingency” – that is, if the Arab states finally got organised and attacked Israel simultaneously, what was the contingency for being overrun?’
‘There was an answer to that?’ asked Mac.
‘The ultimate contingency is that you destroy yourself to beat your attackers – you burn down your town on top of them. The enemy dies but the price of victory is ashes in your own mouth.’
‘So, the Ethno-Bomb?’
‘Well, in those days the ultra-right wing of the Israeli military was known as the Haganah. Heard of them?’
‘They were the old tough guys from the forties, weren’t they?’ asked Mac. ‘Assassinations and bombings against the Arabs?’
‘That’s them. Known to each other as “the Guild”. They were the hard old Russian and Polish Jews who had no time for the intellectual ideas of the German and French settlers. The Haganah was formally disbanded when the IDF was formed, in ’48 or ’49.’
‘So the Guild was still around in the late sixties?’
‘Small but influential, and they instigated a crazy project where an overrun Israel could trigger bio-weapons in its cities. This theoretical device would kill Arabs but not Jews.’
‘You having a lend?’ asked Mac.
‘They were nervous times in Israel, paranoia was rife and the ultra-right found the means to give it a shot.’
‘And?’ asked Mac.
‘The project went nowhere – officially at least. The government of the day wouldn’t buy into it and it’s rumoured the results were embarrassing. Apparently, Arabs and Jews have similar genetics – the Ethno-Bomb would have killed the lot of them.’
‘Enter Lee Wa Dae,’ said Mac.
‘Well, enter North Korea in the late 1980s,’ said Jim. ‘Kim Il Sung was ailing, his son Kim Jong Il was a lunatic with an obsession about magic shows, and a bunch of shady scientists – one of them from the Guild’s original project – talked Little Kim into reviving the Ethno-Bomb.’
‘Who was this one aimed at?’ asked Mac.
‘Easy. Which race would the Kim family annihilate if you gave them a button to push?’
‘The Japs, of course,’ said Mac. ‘So what happened to that Ethno-Bomb?’
‘Clinton happened. You remember that warming period, five years ago, when Daddy Kim was dying and Jimmy Carter got the North Koreans to shut down the spent-fuel extraction and the uranium enrichment, in exchange for the United States trading with them again?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac.
‘Well the Commies were required to shut down their bio-weapons research at the same time.’
‘But they didn’t?’ asked Mac.
‘Technically they did. The bio-weapons projects left North Korea, but an enterprising Korean found a country willing to host the Ethno-Bomb program, keep it going, for a nice fee, paid for by heroin money.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Mac.
‘No, McQueen – the person was Lee Wa Dae, and in Indonesia he found a man who ran spurious research projects to line his own pockets.’
‘Ishy Haryono,’ said Mac, painful images from Lombok AgriCorp filling his mind. ‘Why Timor?’ he croaked.
‘It’s isolated, it’s poor, it’s run like a medieval fiefdom,’ said Jim. ‘And the Western media doesn’t give a shit about it. It’s the way it seems to go in South-East Asia – you wouldn’t believe some of the wacko shit happening in northern Burma.’
‘So what’s the ethnic divide in -’
Mac trailed off, suddenly recalling that the native Timorese – the Maubere – were Melanesian, unlike the Malay ethnicity of the Javanese.
‘Shit,’ he mumbled. ‘Operasi Boa wipes out the Melanesians, but not the rest?’
‘Seems to be what they’re working on,’ said Jim. ‘Europeans and Asians get a bad cold from this weaponised SARS, but the Melanesians have no defence. They last two days, tops.’