Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 50
Forcing himself to the concrete as gunshots rang out, Mac looked up and saw the source of the incoming fire. Two men crouched on the mezzanine gantry that encircled the printing works, shooting at Joel Dozsa with assault rifles.
Leaping backwards through a shattered glass door, Dozsa disappeared into the office area.
‘Oh, no,’ said Mac, his hopes falling as he caught a better look at the shooters. Out of the shadows the grim faces of Lance Kendrick and David Urquhart loomed as they ran along the gantry.
‘No,’ said Mac, trying to project his voice at Lance.
He’d give the lad nine out of ten for balls but he hated the way he carried the rifle like an extra from
Scarface
. Urquhart looked even worse – he wielded his M16 with as much authority as Frank McQueen handled a vacuum cleaner.
Mac waved them away with his free hand. ‘Get out.’
‘The fuck?’ said Sammy, covered in broken glass and surrounded by his own blood. ‘These are your guys?’
Continuing to fire into the office area, Lance and Urquhart moved forwards at a fast walk but were thrown to their knees as Dozsa found a rifle and hammered out eight or nine seconds of fire on full auto.
‘No!’ said Mac over the cacophony, as the remaining glass in the windows shattered and holes appeared in the iron roof. ‘Get back!’
His putative rescuers hadn’t properly thought out their ground and had trapped Sammy and Mac under a dangerous hail of crossfire. They held their weapons at hip height and waved them, but the cycling rates of modern assault rifles were so great that if you didn’t have a proper shoulder on your weapon, you were simply spray-painting.
‘You okay, McQueen?’ said Lance, as he got off the wall-mounted gantry and duck-walked to Mac.
Mac was incredulous. ‘You going to stand there?’
‘Umm . . .’ said Lance, looking for Dozsa over the windowsill.
‘He means you’re drawing fire,’ said Sammy. ‘We’re not armed.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Lance, scurrying down the mezzanine landing where he stood up and fired a burst into the office area.
‘Think we’re clear,’ said Lance.
‘Get these off,’ said Sammy. ‘Got more guns? Ammo?’
‘Got a plan?’ said Mac. ‘An exit?’
‘Not really,’ said Urquhart, moving to Sammy. ‘Chan, can you walk?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ said the American. ‘Get these off.’
Holding out his cuffed wrists, Sammy winced as Urquhart shot away the cuff chains with four rounds more than he should have used.
Turning to Mac, Lance raised his rifle at the cuffs.
‘One shot should –’ said Mac, but he was interrupted as the door at the end of the mezzanine landing flew open and Chinese soldiers poured in.
Grabbing the M16 off Urquhart, Sammy fired at the doorway, forcing the soldiers back.
‘Mag,’ said Sammy, clicking his fingers at Urquhart as he released the spent mag from the rifle.
‘Can someone –’ Mac pointed at his manacled wrist.
Sammy took a quick look at Mac then turned back to Urquhart who’d pulled out his handgun.
They were going to leave him, thought Mac.
The mezzanine door opened again and Sammy was ready, dropping one of the Chinese soldiers with a three-shot burst before swinging his stance into the office area where Lance was shooting again.
The sound of jabbering Chinese voices echoed around them as the shots ceased into a quiet lull, gun smoke hanging in the air.
‘Sammy, for Christ’s sake,’ said Mac, trying to stay flat as he braced for the inevitable full assault by the Chinese. ‘Unlock me.’
‘Sorry, McQueen – gotta ride.’
Straddling the railing, Sammy made a perfect paratrooper leap to the concrete floor below as the doors on either end of the walkway opened and the Chinese poured through.
‘Davo, drop the fucking thing,’ said Mac.
Realising it was over, Urquhart froze and dropped his weapon, his hands raised as if he’d get burned if he lifted them too high.
Lance swung at the door to his right and the muzzles opened up in a roar of sound as Mac clung to the concrete, pushing his face as flat as it could go. Lance’s body hit the railing with a thudding bounce, the M16 clattered and the young Aussie’s confused eyes were staring at Mac’s chin, his blood running along the floor, feeling warm under Mac’s cheek.
‘Lance?’ said Mac, as the shooting stopped. The kid had been hit in the neck and the shoulder area.
‘Dozsa?’ said Mac as loud as he could, his ears feeling tinny from all the gunshots. ‘Dozsa – man down, man down. Get a medic for Christ’s sake.’
Looking away, Mac tried to stay calm. He’d never liked the kid, but Lance had done his best where a lot of careerists would have packed their bags and headed back to Canberra. He’d had a go.
‘Don’t touch that,’ said Mac, as he saw Urquhart eyeing the discarded M16. ‘Don’t even look at it.’
The Chinese ran up, yelling their commands as the lead soldier slapped Urquhart with his rifle stock, dropping him to the floor. The shattered door into the office swung open and Joel Dozsa clicked his fingers, directing the soldier with the medic’s kit towards Lance.
‘Well, well,’ said the Israeli, a small smile appearing. ‘A real little Aussie reunion, eh, McQueen?’
‘It’s over, Dozsa,’ said Urquhart, his voice slurring through his busted lip. ‘You know it.’
Dozsa’s cigarette was still smouldering and he sucked on it. ‘What I know is that you should wear a pad before you go into a gunfight.’
One of the Chinese translated for the others and they laughed as Urquhart sat upright and looked down at the wet patch around his groin.
‘Pissed myself,’ he said, and passed out.
‘What were you thinking, Davo?’ said Mac, hissing slightly as they watched a Chinese medic working on Lance. ‘You run into a building, shooting at everyone? That was the plan?’
Urquhart patted the mouse-sized lump under his left eye. ‘I agree – but Lance felt he couldn’t just walk away.’
‘How’d you get here?’ said Mac, keeping his voice low in front of the Chinese. At the other side of the destroyed office quarters, Dozsa spoke into a radio headset.
‘Came in on Luc’s plane,’ said Urquhart. ‘Followed Bongo and Didge to the North Air offices and decided to wait for Luc to return and see if we couldn’t pay for a ride.’
‘So?’
‘So we’ve been here most of the night, trying to work out how to do something useful, especially after Bongo took off with McHugh,’ said Urquhart. ‘We were waiting for the soldiers to go and we thought they’d all been flown out – then we came in through the roof, saw Dozsa shoot Sammy, and decided we’d better do something before he shot you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mac. ‘I don’t think he’s going to kill me.’
‘No?’
‘No, mate,’ said Mac. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think the currency is the end of it.’
‘Look, I –’ started Urquhart.
‘Don’t tell me another lie, Davo,’ said Mac, staring him in the eye. ‘You know where all these US dollars are going?’
‘We’re trying to track them, but –’
‘But you’re not going to tell me?’ said Mac. ‘Jesus, you people are amazing – are you seeing this shit? Are you seeing where these little secrets end up?’
‘Don’t take it personally, Macca,’ said Urquhart, looking sincere. ‘Most of Canberra is out of the loop on this.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mac spat. ‘We don’t know if China’s going to democracy or military dictatorship, so the Prime Minister’s office just makes sure we’re buddies with all of them?’
‘What can I say?’ Urquhart smirked. ‘I’m just a poor Queensland boy who loves his cheap plasma screens.’
‘What was the point of withholding this from
me
?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be you,’ said Urquhart. ‘I came up here on instruction from the Prime Minister – no one from the intel community was to be indoctrinated.’
‘So how did I end up here?’
‘You mentioned working with the Cong An . . . on the McHugh issue.’
‘What’s so secret about that?’
‘Because it’s about currency – vast amounts of US currency in our neighbourhood – and the less people who know about it the better,’ said Urquhart. ‘Currency responds to sentiment, you know that.’
‘I could have been more use if I’d been brought into it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Urquhart. ‘But there was an embarrassment factor . . .’
‘Embarrassment?’ asked Mac.
‘Catching up, I see,’ said Dozsa, approaching the two Australians as he peeled an orange. ‘But we might have to cut it short – we have a plane to catch.’
‘To where?’ said Mac.
‘Not so fast,’ said Dozsa, popping a piece of the fruit in his mouth.
Two Chinese soldiers uncuffed Mac and Urquhart and lifted them to their feet. Tottering slightly on his shot leg, Mac was steadied by the soldier’s grip on his shirt.
‘I think we might talk alone,’ said Dozsa, guiding Mac by the arm.
‘I want to check on Lance first,’ said Mac. ‘Let me give him something to eat at least?’
Dozsa paused for two seconds. Mac’s request was cheeky, but Dozsa knew it was a professional courtesy to allow a bleeding man to get some sustenance.
Handing over the peeled orange to Mac, Dozsa turned to Urquhart. ‘The only reason you’re alive is that you followed his instructions, you know that?’
Gulping, Urquhart nodded. ‘Yep – I know that.’
‘Good, because I’ll kill you if you disappoint me. Understand?’
Urquhart stammered as Dozsa turned away.
The medic had a drip into Lance, who’d been stripped to his waist. Bandaged dressings seemed to hold his arm to his body and there was a thick pad bandaged to his neck, the dried blood caked on the scalp beneath his dark hair.
‘You know, Dozsa,’ said Mac, as Lance’s eyes opened, ‘the thing to do would be to get him out of here, fly him into Phnom or even Saigon.’
‘That’s not going to happen, McQueen. I’ll keep him alive, that’s my best offer.’
Mac looked at Lance. ‘Bad news is that you lost a lot of blood, mate. Good news? There’s nothing left to bleed out.’
A small smile creased Lance’s pale face and he nodded very slightly.
‘I want you to have something to eat, mate. You’re going on a plane ride and in your state you need something in your belly, okay? Your body needs all the help it can get right now to replenish the blood.’
Mac offered a segment of orange to the young Aussie. ‘Your mind will play tricks on you, telling you you’re not hungry, but that’s just the metabolism wanting to shut down. Instead, you must eat and the easiest thing to digest is fruit, okay?’
Nodding again, Lance opened his white lips as Mac put the segment in his mouth.
‘Don’t waste your strength chewing – just swallow it,’ said Mac.
Lance swallowed it down.
Responding to another radio call, Dozsa squeezed the button on his headset and wandered to the other end of the office.
‘So?’ said Mac, feeding Lance the orange but looking at Urquhart, who had wandered over. ‘Embarrassment?’
‘Yeah,’ said Urquhart, squirming.
‘McHugh’s a spy, so the Yanks decide to drop her?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Urquhart, returning to his slippery Canberra persona.
‘You want me to issue a CX saying David Urquhart pissed himself when the bullets flew?’
‘Fuck off, McQueen.’
‘Then talk.’
Looking at a place on the nylon-carpeted floor, Urquhart took a breath. ‘McHugh was part of a sting – a joint operation between US Treasury and the Australian Prime Minister’s office.’
‘Sting? Who was being lured?’
‘The Chinese. The Yanks had logged a number of highly sophisticated firewall and VPN attacks on their Treasury servers. The attacks were coming out of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region where the MSS have their cyber teams.’
An attack from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was bad news – those MSS teams rarely failed.
Mac thought about it. ‘Are the US Treasury’s servers linked to any other system?’
‘No, but the Chinks didn’t need to enter through a connection to the outside world,’ said Urquhart. ‘They were trying to listen to signatures created by data going through the Treasury’s internal routers.’
Mac had more questions but Urquhart glanced over his shoulder then continued.
‘McHugh was supposed to masquerade as a visiting Aussie Treasury wonk with vaguely left-wing views . . . a full US Treasury visiting fellowship, access to the US Eyes Only stuff. You know – the Yanks letting the junior partner into the liquor cabinet. Grimshaw called it a honey pot.’
‘Grimshaw designed this?’
‘Yes,’ said Urquhart. ‘He called McHugh the “bait”.’
‘Hoping the MSS would try to turn her?’
‘That was the plan,’ said Urquhart. ‘Then we’d be inside their camp and, right when we can do most political damage, we brief the
Journal
, the
FT
and the
Shimbun
in Tokyo, and expose the Chinks for the rogues they are.’
‘But?’
‘But,’ said Urquhart, lightly fingering his split face, ‘Joel Dozsa turned up in Washington.’
‘And?’
‘And turned her for real,’ said Urquhart, avoiding Mac’s eyes.
Blood roared through Mac’s temples; if he’d previously been equivocal about Bongo retrieving McHugh, he was now entirely focused on getting her to Canberra and doing a very long debriefing. Once someone had crossed the line, you either had to forcibly retrieve them, or drop them. The Aussie intel community was small – small enough that when one person went bad, the effect on many covers, assets and networks could be fatal.
‘That’s not good,’ said Mac, grinding it out like he was chewing rocks. Urquhart recoiled slightly.
‘Look, it was supposed to be run by Grimshaw and –’
‘I know, I know,’ said Mac, holding his hand parallel to the floor to indicate he’d like less volume. ‘So why Dozsa – why did he turn up?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Urquhart, his eyes refocusing. ‘You don’t know, of course.’
‘Know what?’ said Mac.
‘Dozsa was refused a tenured position at Duntroon, almost twenty years ago.’
‘Actually, I did know that,’ said Mac, glad he knew at least one part of the McHugh screw-up. ‘Just don’t know why.’