Authors: Mark Abernethy
‘Sammy, what are you doing?’
The Korean technician, on hearing Mac’s tone, turned and yelled at Sammy, tears in his eyes. He wore a third eye before he hit the floor.
‘You,’ said Sammy, at another technician with his arms raised.
The technician ran to replace his dead colleague, and the cross continued moving, out of the North Pacific to Japan.
‘No, Sammy,’ said Mac, moving towards the American before facing the barrel of the handgun.
‘I like you, McQueen,’ said the American. ‘But I
will
shoot you.’
‘What the hell are you doing, Sammy?’ said Mac, raising his hands further as Sammy’s gun steadied between his eyes. ‘You can’t target Tokyo – who the hell do you work for?’
One of the major themes of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service since Mac had joined was the emphasis on stability in the region. Mac was watching that come undone in front of him.
‘I’d never bomb Tokyo,’ said Sammy, smiling. ‘Watch this, McQueen.’
As the technician shook his head and the first tears rolled down his face, Mac saw why. The small white cross wasn’t stopping on the Japanese capital – it continued westwards, across the Sea of Japan and the Korean Peninsula until it came to rest on a thick black circle.
Beijing.
Chapter 69
‘No, Sammy,’ said Mac, not believing what he was seeing. ‘Not this.’
‘Why not?’ said Sammy. ‘There’s only one way to deal with North Korea and that’s to have the Chinese do it.’
‘A missile bearing down on Beijing?’ said Mac. ‘The Chinese won’t deal with North Korea, they’ll turn it into a car park.’
‘I agree,’ said a voice, and looking up, Mac saw Joel Dozsa at a small observation window looking down on the control room. A shot cracked from Dozsa’s rifle and as Mac turned to dive under a desk, he saw Sammy collapsing on the floor, a bloody cavity in his chest.
Three more shots thwacked into the lino floor, spraying Mac with blood and concrete dust. It was obvious Dozsa didn’t want to put holes in his control room, and looking across the floor Mac saw Sammy was bleeding out over his M4.
Putting his foot out, Mac dragged at Sammy’s body, trying to retrieve the rifle, but Dozsa shot at him.
The harsh screech of Korean filled the hallways as Dozsa yelled a command, unable to leave his window to walk around and enter the control room.
One of the technicians walked behind the console, bending to pick up Mac’s discarded rifle. Seeing a limited opportunity, Mac accelerated in a running crouch from behind the desk, hitting the Korean in a ball-and-all tackle as a bullet pinged off the floor from Dozsa’s rifle. Taking the Korean in a twisting grapple tackle, Mac hid behind the man’s profile as they sailed through the air.
Landing as the Heckler bounced free, Mac realised the Korean was dead, two shots in his chest intended for Mac. Grabbing at the rifle’s stock, Mac managed to pull it back without getting one of Dozsa’s bullets in his hand.
Checking for load and safety, the lino now slick with blood and stinking of cordite and burnt circuitry, Mac took two deep breaths and turned, firing at the mezzanine window with the Heckler. Panes of glass splintered and the bullets peppered the walls around it. But Dozsa was gone.
Keying the radio, Mac saw it was not responding in the sealed room. Outside, the gunfight raged on, getting closer now.
Looking at his watch, he saw it was 4.42 pm – in eight minutes the real control room in North Korea would lock in its final settings, giving telemetry commands to several hundred different aspects of a ballistic missile launch. At ten minutes before launch, the general in charge of the program would turn his key and the mission controller would turn his, and the final countdown to ignition and firing would begin.
In this case, however, the final countdown wouldn’t commence on North Korea’s terms – it would prepare to launch according to the override coming from this control room. The systems in the North Korean control room wouldn’t register the change; their system would be simply operating in a vacuum while Dozsa’s control room gave the real commands. The North Koreans would be unable to change the launch until they looked out the window and saw their T2 missile arcing due west towards China rather than east, into the Pacific.
Standing, Mac looked at the map on the big screen. Waving at it, he tried to tell the Koreans to change the target but the two surviving technicians were hiding, not wanting to come out.
Checking the upstairs window and the door for signs of Dozsa or his soldiers, Mac pulled the C4 charges from his backpack and eyed the framework on which the mainframes and junction boxes were built. Crawling under the frames – essentially heavy-duty Meccano scaffolds – Mac planted a charge on the side of the server stacks and set the timer for five minutes.
Turning, he crawled back to the control room, noticing a hollow clap under his knees as he passed over, and slapped the other charge on a metal upright and set the timer for five minutes. Standing as he picked up the Heckler, he saw a commotion at the door.
Levelling the rifle, he readied to fight it out – whatever happened from here, Mac wanted those charges detonating.
Lance stumbled in, wide-eyed, and Mac lowered his rifle.
‘Lance,’ said Mac, thinking there was now some hope of finding the file before he blew the control room. He was going to blow it regardless, but he’d like to tell Canberra that he’d retrieved the file.
Lance stumbled forwards, holding his arm awkwardly, and Dozsa slithered in behind him, blood running down from a cut on his tanned bald head.
‘McQueen, drop the gun and listen to me,’ said Dozsa, pointing his rifle at the back of Lance’s head. ‘That missile can’t land in Beijing.’
‘You’re telling me,’ said Mac, letting his rifle slip to the floor.
‘Yes, you, McQueen. You brought that crazy American in here.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Mac.
‘Chan,’ said Dozsa, locking the door behind him. ‘You don’t know who he is?’
‘DIA or Agency,’ said Mac. ‘Ex-Marines forecon.’
‘Emphasis on “ex”,’ said Dozsa, moving to the Korean technicians while he covered Mac and Lance.
Barking orders in Korean, Dozsa kept his eyes on Mac while the small white cross was changed again, this time to Tokyo.
Dozsa stole a quick look at his watch and Mac looked at the screen: in forty-five seconds the North Koreans would lock the Taepodong-2 into its ten-minute launch sequence, not knowing where it was really heading.
‘Why emphasis on ex?’ said Mac, noticing blood dripping from Lance’s crippled arm.
‘Sammy’s private,’ said Dozsa. ‘He’s as official as I am, but he’s sanctioned.’
‘By whom?’ said Mac, calculating whether to tell Dozsa about the charges or try an escape.
‘Heard of the Syracuse Unit?’ said Dozsa. ‘Bunch of Pentagon brass, intel parasites and defence contractors who met in Sicily in the late nineties.’
‘I’ve heard conspiracy wackos talk about these guys,’ said Mac, glancing at his watch – three minutes till the charges blew.
‘It’s not a theory,’ said Dozsa. ‘With the impending election of George W Bush, they met to discuss how the defence and intelligence budgets could be kept at Cold War levels under George W, and they decided that North Asia tearing itself apart was the logical choice.’
‘Sounds like Mossad bullshit to me, Joel – no offence,’ said Mac. ‘Sounds like the kind of thing your secret service keeps telling the politicians so everyone seems worse than the Mossad.’
‘We were inside,’ said Dozsa, smiling. ‘We had eyes.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Mac. ‘Grimshaw is old school – a true believer. He’s ex-Phoenix, for Christ’s sake.’
Dozsa gestured for Lance to approach. ‘Not Grimshaw, he’s been stalking me for two years. He wants my head on a plate.’
‘So?’
‘So, Sammy Chan – planted by the Syracuse Unit – has been courting me while pretending to work for Grimshaw.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Why d’you think Sammy went running down that hill and tried to assassinate Geraldine McHugh that night?’
‘He said he was stopping her being debriefed by Canberra – blamed it on Grimshaw.’
‘And now it is you bullshitting, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, dark eyes glinting like a shark’s. ‘Sammy was cleaning up the mess: Phil, then McHugh – they knew too much, and people knowing too much disturbs the Syracuse gang.’
‘What?’ asked Mac.
‘They tried to turn me, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, reaching for a keyboard. ‘When I wouldn’t, they had to wipe the slate before they took over my little operation.’
‘Phil?’ said Mac, head roaring. ‘What’re you talking about?’
‘That night on the docks in Phnom Penh, you see where the RPG came from?’
‘You,’ said Mac.
‘Think again, my Aussie friend,’ said Dozsa, mouth hardening. ‘It came from the river. My guy on the boat was shot and then there’s an RPG sailing over our heads into that truck.’
‘You’re grasping, Dozsa,’ said Mac.
‘I’m winning, not grasping,’ said Dozsa, in that irritating Hungarian accent. ‘Phil had been with Sammy when they tried to turn me – he knew too much, so Sammy killed him in a way that was plausible to Grimshaw.’
Shaking his head, Mac watched Lance being lured to the PC below the screen banks.
‘Run a test on the HARPAC file,’ said Dozsa to Lance, but not taking his eyes off Mac. ‘I want to make sure we don’t lose comms at the crucial point.’
Lance was stiff with fear, his face white with shock and blood loss. The youngster wasn’t going to be much good in the next ninety seconds.
‘And don’t screw around with it, okay, boy?’ Dozsa held the barrel of his rifle to Lance’s temple.
A faint beeping sound started in the control room, and looking up at the display monitors Mac could see a red panel blinking in the top right-hand corner of each monitor. ‘That’s the ignition phase,’ said Dozsa. The North Korean missile launch was locked in.
Watching Lance’s shaking hand go to the PC, Mac winced. He had only one way to go, and that was to make a run for it – which meant leaving Lance.
The PC screen opened what looked like thousands of lines of code and Lance’s fingers danced lightly over the keyboard.
‘What?’ said Dozsa, distracted by something on the screen. ‘What the hell are you doing?!’
The PC screen was scrolling up at a hundred miles an hour, a box flashing over the data. Mac couldn’t see what the box said, but it blinked yellow. Shit – was Lance deleting the HARPAC file?
Pushing Lance from the PC, Dozsa moved to the keyboard and Lance lunged at the Israeli, pulling the rifle around in Dozsa’s grip and pushing it upwards.
As Mac moved on the two, Dozsa swung the stock of the gun at Lance and crushed his nose, making the Australian stagger backwards in a bloody mess. Mac got to Dozsa as the gun came around and a shot passed his head as he threw a flying elbow at Dozsa’s mouth.
Staggering backwards from the blow, Dozsa lost his balance over the back of a chair; the Koreans scattered out of his way, Dozsa’s gun firing into the ceiling as he fell on his head.
Retrieving his rifle, Mac let two shots go as Dozsa clambered under the computer monitor desks. Boots kicked at the control room door and faces stared through the security glass – Israeli faces.
‘Let’s go,’ said Mac, grabbing Lance, throwing him under the computer frames as automatic weapons tore into the security door.
Crawling under the load of hard drives and monitors, Mac grabbed Lance by the ankle as they moved over the hollow-sounding floor.
‘Here,’ said Mac. ‘You okay?’
‘No.’ Lance was hyperventilating. ‘But I can move.’
Feeling around the hollow area, Mac found the trapdoor with his fingers. Opening it, he stuck his head under and saw a service tunnel that contained a thick rope of wires and fibre-optic cables, carried six feet above the concrete into the middle distance.
The door caved in and boots tattooed across the room as Mac pushed Lance into the hole and watched him drop to the floor below. Mac followed as automatic gunfire rattled under the frames, causing one to collapse. Looking to his right as he ducked down, Mac saw Joel Dozsa, also under the framework and aiming at Mac’s head.
‘You’re dead, McQueen,’ said Dozsa as the gun spat fire.
Mac dropped into the tunnel, his right forearm spewing blood from a bullet nick. ‘This way,’ he said, limping along the dimly lit tunnel, dragging Lance by the arm.
The tunnel ended in a door. Pushing on it, they descended into a loading bay. Gunfire sounded sporadically, and Mac turned, raising the Heckler. An Israeli head popped down through the trapdoor and Mac opened fire at it until the gun seized – no more loads.
‘Red Dog, Red Dog,’ said Mac into the radio mouthpiece as he looked around the deserted loading area. ‘Red Dog, this is Blue Boy – need a ride.’
Bongo’s voice crackled a few seconds later. ‘Gotcha, Blue Boy – meet me at the driveway.’
Emerging into the first light of dawn, Mac jumped to the ground from the loading bay and gasped at the pain in his calf. Lance jogged behind him as they skirted the house for the driveway, Mac feeling naked without firearms.
There were dead bodies at the main entrance to the house and it looked as though Bongo had blown a hole in the main entrance. An eerie silence enveloped the area, broken by the thump of helo rotors. Like a giant black beast, the Little Bird rose out of the valley in front of Dozsa’s house, Tranh’s head lolling unnaturally in the co-pilot seat and Bongo’s gum-chewing face expressionless behind the tinted visor on his helmet.
‘Let’s make this quick, Blue Boy,’ said Bongo over the headset. ‘The Chinese accounted for – Dozsa and some Israelis still active.’
Staggering to the place where Bongo was landing the helo, Mac felt the nausea of pain blurring inwards from the periphery of his vision. He panted his encouragement to Lance as he limped down the driveway.
A loud noise erupted and the Little Bird’s cockpit dome turned to stars. Dropping to the driveway Mac saw Dozsa and the other Israeli emerge at the main entrance, Dozsa holding the .50-cal and the other man shooting an M4.
Trying to bury his head in the gravel as they were caught in the crossfire, Mac heard the helo’s Gatling gun spin and then it was spitting death.
The Israeli soldier was torn apart instantly, leaving Dozsa facing the Gatling gun.
It hardly mattered. As Dozsa got a better grip on the heavy belt-fed gun, the house expanded in a fireball of orange and red, the roof blowing off and the main tunnel doors flying fifty feet into the bush as the C4 was detonated. The noise sounded like a massive train crash, forcing hot air out like a hurricane and spewing thousands of pieces of computer, monitor, concrete and steel into the air and across the driveway like high-tech tumbleweeds. A piece of computer flew at Mac’s elbow and Lance was hit on the head by a lump of concrete the size of a cricket ball, knocking him out.
Debris rained for another twenty seconds as Mac tried to sit up.
‘Watch it, McQueen,’ said Bongo, getting out of the helo and pointing.
Turning, Mac saw Dozsa, about thirty feet from where he’d last been standing, his chinos hanging in tatters, flaps of skin hanging off him like bloody gills.
Looking around for his machine-gun, the ex-Mossad man realised it was back on the front veranda and instead he faced Mac and pulled a mini Ka-bar from his ankle sheath.
‘I told you to steal the SD chip, McQueen,’ said Dozsa, looking drunk with the shock of the explosion. ‘Your job was to take the chip and go home to Kangaroo-land, you fucking imbecile.’