Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 48
Sammy Chan leapt sideways behind a tree as Didge fired back at the American. Getting in behind Bongo and McHugh, Mac slipped off the porch, using Didge’s covering fire to escape along the lee side of the barracks building.
Stopping at the corner of the barracks, Mac aimed at the tree and let off three-shot bursts at the trunk as Sammy tried for a sighting around it.
‘Didge, your turn,’ said Mac, pausing from firing as soldiers ran towards them from the long factory building a hundred metres away.
As Didge ran around the corner, Sammy reappeared from his hide and let go a long burst from the M4 carbine, dropping Mac flat to the ground as the building’s corner exploded in splinters of wood.
Finding his feet as Didge grabbed him by the collar, Mac accelerated towards Bongo and McHugh, who were inside the machinery shed. Sprinting after them, still struggling to comprehend what was happening, Mac watched the greenish lights come on in the Little Bird’s cockpit – Bongo was going to fly out.
‘No,’ said Mac, knowing where this was going to end.
Didge stopped and turned back the way they’d come, knelt and fired several three-shot bursts as Mac continued running.
The whine of a helo starter motor began, its beeping alarm piercing the night, and Mac heard the slow whoosh of a rotor turning as he stopped and covered Didge. Through the partially lit stand of trees that separated the barracks from the machinery shed, Mac could see the compact form of Sammy Chan tucked in behind a tree trunk; a magazine dropped on the ground and the click of a new one being rammed home sounded.
‘Go,’ said Mac, turning and running up behind Didge as Sammy’s full-auto assault ripped through the trees in a right-to-left scything of foliage. Grunting, Didge twisted in the upper body and dropped his rifle as a bullet whipped through the top of his outer bicep, one of the areas not covered by the Kevlar vest.
‘Okay?’ asked Mac, dropping to his knees to reclaim the rifle as Didge backed up behind a tree, his left hand clutching the wound.
‘I’ll live,’ said Didge, bloody hand outstretched for the rifle.
Handing it over as he crawled behind the tree, Mac found Sammy’s muzzle flashes and shot back at them. From the machinery shed, the whooshing of helo rotors intensified as the aircraft prepared to launch.
‘You go,’ said Mac, barely believing what had happened to this mission yet also feeling responsible for Sammy. ‘I’ll cover.’
‘We both stay,’ said Didge.
‘No, I’ll deal with this prick,’ said Mac. ‘He’s my problem, not yours.’
Turning to look back, Didge shot at Sammy as the American broke cover. Taking at least two shots in the bulletproof vest, Sammy was knocked off his feet to land on his side, winded.
‘Like I said,’ said Didge, grabbing Mac by the scruff of the neck and throwing him towards the helo with a huge paw.
As they approached the shed, the Little Bird was at full revs and Mac could see Bongo’s illuminated face, the same face he wore whether making a difficult shot on the pool table or escaping from a rogue PLA camp in the middle of the Cambodian wilderness. Shots pinged and thudded around them and one put a star high in the cockpit glass of the helo.
Looking back, Mac could see Sammy had dragged himself behind an old bulldozer and the PLA cadres were now closing on Sammy’s position and the shed.
The pitch of the Little Bird’s turbine changed and Bongo gestured for Mac and Didge to get out of the way as the deadly helo hovered off the dirt and eased forwards in a storm of dust and debris.
‘Shit,’ said Mac, as the six barrels of the Gatling gun hanging off the helo’s skids spun silently in their warm-up revolutions. Throwing himself sideways to the ground in sync with Didge, he watched as the darkness was lit up by the full force of the Gatling gun – known as a Minigun – cycling at three thousand rounds per minute. The air filled with lead as branches fell and trees collapsed; arms and legs wheeled in crazy arcs as the approaching Chinese soldiers were mowed down.
His hands over his head as the helo downwash hit him with incredible force, Mac watched the Little Bird skew slightly and then the Gatling gun was trained on the bulldozer, opening up with five rounds of 7.62 ammo per second – a rate of fire so high that the predominant sound was a demonic whistling amid a thousand hammer strikes. The yellow Kohmatsu looked grey within six seconds and Mac could smell the blast of lead on steel. Even when the Minigun was shooting the bad guys, it was a terrifying weapon that made a man’s heart stop.
Standing, Didge waved for Mac to follow and ran to the side door of the Little Bird, throwing his rifle in ahead of his leap. Following the big Aussie, Mac ran to the hovering helo, the blast of noise and wind overwhelming his senses.
As he made to jump on, he saw her from the right side of his vision: crouched behind the tree, hands over her ears and looking like a scared child. It was Tani.
‘Fuck,’ said Mac, pausing. His mind roared with the choices as Didge’s hand reached out of the helo and Bongo yelled from behind his glass bubble. The girl turned to look at him and he saw she was crying – frozen with fear, and Mac didn’t blame her.
‘Jesus wept,’ he said, wanting to turn and jump in that helo, but knowing he wasn’t going to.
As he reached the Cambodian girl, a new sound started – the unmistakable thump of a .50-cal machine gun. Looking over his shoulder as he crouched beside the girl and tried to get her on her feet, Mac saw the muzzle flash of the .50 cal through the trees, coming from the back of an approaching Nissan Patrol.
‘Come on,’ said Mac, grabbing Tani by the upper arm and judging his run to the helo. As he started out, one of the incoming bullets pinged off the rotors and another went straight through the cockpit, causing a flash of sparks and smoke somewhere under the spinning blades.
The Little Bird lifted into the air as Mac dragged the girl across the open ground. He was within twenty paces of a fast ride home when Didge yelled at him and pointed. Turning, Mac saw Sammy appear from behind Tani’s hide. He’d dropped his rifle and was using a handgun.
‘McQueen,’ yelled the American. ‘Just let me have –’
But his voice was lost in the din.
Didge laid covering fire from the helo door, forcing Sammy behind a stump from where he shot at the aircraft.
It was too hot for Bongo – he had to get the aircraft moving or it’d be shot down.
As Mac watched the Little Bird rise into the night sky, close enough to see Geraldine McHugh staring at him with saucers for eyes, he felt a knock in his left calf muscle, as if someone had kicked a hot poker into his flesh, right down to the bone. At first there was nothing but the pain and Mac thought he could make it to the machinery shed, grab one of those LandCruisers and blow town.
But the pain turned numb, as if he had no left leg. Tani darted from his grip as his leg folded, and then the ground rushed up to meet his face.
Chapter 49
Birdsong filled the room as Mac opened his eyes. Morning sunlight came through the raised louvre windows into a large factory building.
To his left was a line of interior windows around office space and to his right was the aluminium mezzanine railing to which he was manacled.
Groaning with pain as he tried to sit up, Mac noticed his chinos had been cut at his left knee and the bullet wound bandaged. It ached, but the bleeding had stopped and someone had taken some care.
Using the manacle to get upright, he looked down from the mezzanine onto the long factory floor where a series of high-tech machines were linked before turning into a long printing press. At the end of the building were more high-tech machines and then a loading bay with its large roller door raised.
Stacks of paper held together with mustard-coloured straps fluttered in the morning breeze and pieces of the paper broken loose from the bale-like stacks sitting on pallets had floated down to Mac’s end of the building. Looking down, he saw US hundred-dollar notes moving around in the draft like litter after a party. The mustard straps denoted hundred-thousand-dollar bundles and there were thousands of them in each bale.
‘Christ,’ he said. He was only looking at the leftovers.
‘Nice, huh?’ came the American voice from behind him.
Jumping a little, Mac turned and saw a face that had been thoroughly bashed.
‘Sammy Chan,’ said Mac as if he was meeting someone at the pub. ‘Since you’re sitting behind me, why not give me another stab in the back?’
‘Screw you, McQueen,’ said Sammy, who had both his wrists handcuffed to the aluminium uprights. ‘You’ve already said enough to last me a lifetime.’
‘Screw me?’ Mac eyeballed the American. ‘You already did that, remember?’
‘I wasn’t after you, okay, McQueen?’
‘Oh really? I guess my leg doesn’t count.’
‘I was trying to stop Bongo taking the girl – honest.’
‘You hired Bongo,’ said Mac.
‘No, McQueen, that was Grimshaw – Bongo’s company is on the pre-approved list for NSA managers.’
‘Grimshaw didn’t check who Bongo was really working for?’
‘He needed someone fast, and Bongo was in town with that big Aussie.’
‘So how was it supposed to work?’ asked Mac, needing a glass of water. ‘The dumb Aussie and a couple of mercs lead you to Geraldine McHugh, and then you snatch her, drop whoever gets in your way. That it?’
Shaking his head slowly, Sammy looked away. ‘I tried to get to her first, then I turn around and see Bongo’s already got her. After that, I was just reacting – sorry about the leg.’
‘You’re not Secret Service, are you?’ said Mac, watching the American’s eyes flinch slightly. ‘Not exactly an accountant who’s done his proficiency on the shooting range.’
‘Don’t give me the Pollyanna,’ said Sammy, his puffy eyes screwing up with pain. ‘I’ve read your file – the
full
NSA file – and as an intelligence officer you make a great undertaker.’
Mac pretended not to hear. ‘Why is McHugh so important?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘Read the file again,’ said Mac. ‘My business is minding your business.’
‘Shut up, McQueen,’ said Sammy with a wince, a big split evident in his bottom lip. ‘I need a handful of Percodans just to survive that frigging awful accent right now.’
‘You going to tell me what this is all about?’ said Mac, wanting to keep him talking. ‘What is this place? A counterfeiting operation?’
‘It’s a bit beyond that, buddy.’
‘So?’
‘You didn’t read between the lines when Charles was briefing you? Christ, he went way too far in my opinion.’
‘He said General Pao Peng was funding an economic destabilisation strategy, but I don’t –’ Mac stopped; the question had answered itself as he spoke.
He remembered his first gig after the Royal Marines, in 1991, when the Firm sent him to the tail end of Desert Storm to learn his trade from Rod Scott. He’d patched through Ramstein Air Base on his way from the UK to Basrah and spent a night in Kaiserslautern on the booze with a bunch of US Air Force intel blokes. Mac remembered the bars and oompah of K-town, but mostly he remembered the fact that the locals had stopped taking American fifty- and twenty-dollar bills. A cell of economic agents from the soon-to-be defunct KGB had gambled some massive currency trades hedged in US dollars and had released container loads of bad US currency into Germany, in the hope of creating large profits when they closed their currency positions.
Mac couldn’t remember if the Communists had got away with it but he certainly recalled how quickly the local merchants reduced a symbol of economic strength to worthless pieces of paper. Currency, so they said, wasn’t money – it was an idea. And as soon as householders and small business owners no longer accepted the idea created by governments and banks, the currency became worthless.
‘They’re diluting the greenback?’ said Mac. ‘That’s what those boxes of notes were doing in your car?’
‘Gee, you’re a regular Einstein, McQueen.’
‘Is it possible?’ said Mac, thinking about the scale. ‘Can the Chinese do that?’
Sammy tried to get comfortable. ‘You’re not cleared for this stuff.’
‘I’d bet each of these bales holds – what – a billion dollars, US?’
‘So?’ said Sammy.
‘So they were shipping the bales out all night and this was only one shipment – I’m thinking this has been a huge effort.’
‘Okay,’ said Sammy, ‘this is how it works. There’s about eight hundred and fifty billion US dollars in circulation but about four hundred and fifty billion of that is outside the US.’
‘More than half is in foreign use?’ said Mac, surprised.
‘Yeah – and that’s important. Because, of the greenbacks in foreign circulation, Asia has about seventy per cent.’
‘So almost half the US currency in existence is being used somewhere between Pakistan and Japan?’
‘Sure,’ said Sammy. ‘Asia not only has this massive circulation of US currency but it uses that money at a street level – hand-to-hand commerce.’
‘Which means when the streets are flooded with new currency, the Asian economies notice it?’
‘Sure do,’ said Sammy. ‘After last night’s effort, I’d say this facility has produced about two hundred of those bales,’ said Sammy.
‘Well, that’s half of –’
Sammy snickered.
‘That’s serious,’ said Mac.
‘An extra fifty per cent of the circulating currency is suddenly dumped into the market? That’s more than serious, McQueen – that’s a currency four billion Asians are about to stop using.’
‘And the US dollar devalues? Is that it?’ said Mac.
‘That’s it.’
‘But the US Treasury has stop-loss tactics for these situations, doesn’t it?’ said Mac, trying to remember some of his old briefings.
‘Yes, there’re programs but they focus on correcting the capital markets.’
‘But they can’t stop street sentiment in Asia?’ said Mac.
‘You’re smart for a man who drinks rum when he doesn’t have to.’
‘Shit,’ said Mac.
Sammy paused before deciding to go on. ‘The big problem is the Chinese economy – Beijing holds about a trillion dollars of US government debt and their currency is pegged to the US dollar.’
‘And if the US dollar takes a dive,’ said Mac,‘that hurts the Chinese, the leadership gets shaky and Pao Peng gets his shot. Is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Sammy, turning away.
Thinking back to that night in Phnom Penh, Mac remembered how struck he was by the smell in the boot of Sammy’s car – the smell of all that new money. He was smelling it now, in this printing factory.
Burying his free hand in his pocket, Mac pulled out the slip of paper that he’d found in Sammy’s box of cash.
‘What’s that?’ said Sammy, craning his neck as Mac flattened the note.
‘I found it in your car. It seemed cryptic, but now I’m not so sure.’
‘Give me that,’ said Sammy, jerking forwards but restrained by the cuffs.
‘I’m betting that
P
means paper and
I
translates as ink, right? All genuine?’
‘No comment, McQueen.’
‘But what’s this?’ said Mac, concentrating. ‘
SN
and
SF
?’
‘Yes, Sammy,’ said a heavy Hungarian accent, ‘what’s this
SN
and
SF
?’
Turning, Mac found himself looking up at Joel Dozsa, dressed in a dark trop shirt and grey slacks.
‘You’re making a big mistake, Dozsa,’ said Sammy, sounding both desperate and angry, which was probably a mistake. ‘You don’t mess with the US government like this and live to talk about it.’
‘Don’t you love Americans, Mr McQueen?’ said Dozsa, his dark eyes mocking and dangerous. ‘Always threatening.’
‘Nice place you have here, Dozsa,’ said Mac. ‘But I’ve seen enough – you can send up the porter now.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the ex-Mossad man, eyeing Mac like a specimen. ‘You were on the right track with the ink and paper.’
‘Genuine?’ said Mac.
‘I’m proud of that,’ said Dozsa, glancing at his watch. ‘Now Mr Chan is going to tell us what those other initials stand for.’
‘Fuck you, Dozsa,’ said Sammy.
Dozsa drew a handgun from his waistband and shot Sammy in the right calf muscle. The screams of agony bounced around the high roof, competing with the echo of the gunshot. Replacing his gun, Dozsa leaned against the office windows, fishing out a cigarette and lighter.
Grabbing at the railings, Sammy gasped for breath, saliva dripping off his lip.
‘That’s fair, right, McQueen?’ said Dozsa, taking a deep drag on the Camel. ‘Now you both have holes in your legs.’
‘Seems only right that you get one too,’ said Mac as blood poured across the concrete floor. ‘Lend us the piece for a sec, Dozsa, and I’ll get you sorted.’
Dozsa smiled. ‘Always the joker – it’s a pity we never worked together.’
‘I prefer to work against criminals,’ said Mac. ‘Not with them.’
‘You may have seen the worst of me lately,’ said the Israeli, his voice losing the mocking edge. ‘But when it came down to it, I showed you the courtesy due to a professional.’
‘What? Shooting at me and my driver, trying to run me over in Saigon?’
‘If I wanted you dead, McQueen, it would have happened long before Saigon.’
‘What’s that?’ said Mac.
‘I could have shot you in that hotel corridor, but I hit you over the head instead – remember?’
Mac’s ears screamed with the shock of it. ‘You?’
‘Professional courtesy,’ said Dozsa, standing straight as he checked his watch. ‘Old-fashioned, perhaps, but never out of style.’
A shot sounded and Dozsa ducked his head into his shoulders as the window beside him splintered.