Eating from the buffet and downing two beers, Mac relaxed as he looked out the big windows and saw players teeing off at one and holing out at eighteen — the low-scorers obvious by how quickly they reached for their cards.
They talked quietly, pulling up some of the memories from their first gig together in Iraq, at the finish of the first Gulf War.
‘See those AWB blokes are finally coming up for court,’ said Scotty, tapping his newspaper with his beer glass. ‘Poor bastards.’
‘Yeah — seems that Saddam was too pure to invade but too evil to do business with,’ said Mac.
The Australian Wheat Board had secured some enormous supply contracts with Saddam’s Iraq in the late 1990s, which included side contracts to pay for in-country freighting of the wheat using a Jordanian trucking company. The trucking charge was paid from a UN escrow account which released otherwise-embargoed Iraqi oil revenues to pay for essential and humanitarian services — of which distributing wheat to Iraqis was one. It was just that the Jordanian trucking company was an Iraqi front, a way for Saddam’s regime to collect hard currency through the UN under false pretences. Now the AWB executives who paid the Iraqi trucking fee were turning up in court — a move that had surprised people in Mac’s world, given how relentlessly Australia’s diplomatic, trade and intelligence outfits had worked to ensure the success of Aussie wheat against that of Canada, the US and Russia.
His first live operation was a wheat gig: four in the morning, riffling through the files of the state-owned freight forwarders in Umm Qasr, flashlight between his teeth, looking for the paperwork on Iraq’s wheat imports from Canada and the US. He was in a rush because the Canadian SIS operative who’d been masquerading as a journalist had been locked in an underground garage by Scotty. And at nine that morning the US and Australian naval clearance teams were going to declare the Umm Qasr port area ‘open’ and free of live ordnance and booby-traps. Mac had infiltrated the building at the Bulk Grain Terminal, found the files and got them out by secreting them in an Australian Navy air-compressor unit used for the clearance divers. When the port had been reopened and the Canadians had rushed in to secure the freight-landing records of several decades, they found the filing cabinets empty. While they gnashed their teeth and looked for a scapegoat, the files were en route to HMAS Kanimbla.
‘Makes you wonder why we were getting all that intel on North American wheat when the blokes who could use it were just going to get shit-canned,’ said Scotty.
‘Yeah, well the Canadians got their payback,’ sniggered Mac, referring to the fact that Canadian SIS had ensured that the Australian media was put on the trail of the AWB arrangements with Saddam.
Iraq seemed like a lifetime ago, right back at the start of it all. Mac had moved quickly from being a teenage rugby league player in Rockhampton to a rugby scholarship boy at Nudgee. He’d gone to the University of Queensland and then into the DFAT campus recruitment process. In those days, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service didn’t advertise. It was a part of DFAT, sharing the stables with diplomats and trade commissioners, and the Firm didn’t let you know you were being considered for the spy game until they thought you might have the stuff. Times had changed, but back in 1990 the Firm essentially recruited from four universities and a group of about thirty schools. Nudgee College and UQ were part of the matrix.
When Mac had realised what he was being offered, he’d had visions of dinner suits and glamorous women hanging around the baccarat tables. It was all he knew about the intelligence world. But after six weeks of the ASIS field-craft program, he’d been whipped away to do basic training with the UK’s Royal Marines and follow-up with their Commandos program — a challenge he probably took too far when he completed the brutal swimmer — canoeist course in Brunei and qualified for selection in an SBS squad.
It had been a whirl, and one in which few medium-term consequences were spelled out to a young inductee: namely, that the intelligence assignments involving paramilitary elements were carried out by a very small band of officers, and that the true nature of this work would often not be known to colleagues. He’d gone into ASIS feeling educated and special, only to get ten years down the track and realise he was never going to gasbag at a whiteboard, or sit in meetings all day trying to put the blame on someone who wasn’t in the room. Mac was isolated: he’d always be that Rockhampton footy player who did the dirty work.
‘So, you’re back?’ Scotty asked, after an awkward pause.
‘They pushed me up a grade and let me live in Queensland,’ said Mac. ‘Couldn’t argue.’
‘I’m going to be running you for a while, you okay with that?’ said Scotty, levelling his gaze.
‘Not like the Firm to give me a choice.’
‘Not a choice — just courtesy.’ Scotty held up two fingers to the waitress. ‘You’re old school, mate. Not many of us left.’
Scotty had been seconded into the Firm after a stint in the Australian Army’s Intelligence Corps. He could inveigle himself under a corporate cover along with the best, but he also had big forearms and hands that could hurt.
Mac scanned the room for eyes and self-conscious newspaper-reading. ‘So, what’s the gig?’
‘One of ours — from Trade — logging a lot of unaccompanied hours,’ said Scotty, eyes lighting up as the next round of beers arrived. ‘Long lunches, early departures, vague diary — that sort of thing.’
‘Surveillance?’
‘Nothing yet. I’ve had a look at the notes, and had a chat on the phone with the consulate.’
‘Where?’
‘Saigon,’ said Scotty. ‘We need to design an approach, get eyes on this guy, write an initial report.’
‘And if something’s cooking, get close?’
‘That’s why I like you, mate,’ said Scotty, sipping on the beer. ‘You’re faster than a robber’s dog.’
‘Why me?’ said Mac, watching the husband and wife from the practice fairway making their way onto the first tee. ‘Joe’s in Manila and Terry’s in Honkers — they can’t do this?’
‘Greg wants an outside team.’
‘Outside team? Thought I was back in?’
‘Special Projects,’ said Scotty, looking at his hands. ‘Welcome aboard.’
‘Even after Singers?’
‘Sure,’ said Scotty. ‘I looked at the report — you did it by the book. Who’s to know where Lao was leaking? I’m betting his wife.’
‘You think?’ said Mac.
Scotty shrugged. ‘The wife might have been the real boss and she went straight to the MSS when she knew he was going to Singapore.’
‘You couldn’t have hooked Garvs for this?’ said Mac, trying to figure out how Jen would react to him leaving again.
‘Garvs?!’ said Scotty with a smile. ‘I remember that gig in Manila. I had to go in there and find the silly prick.’
‘That wasn’t his fault, was it?’ said Mac, chuckling.
‘Shit, mate — I found him in a bar in Angeles City, so pissed he couldn’t work out why these ping-pong balls were flying round his fucking head!’
Beer spurted out of Mac’s nose as he laughed. ‘Shit, Scotty. You’re a worry.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Scotty, mischief in his eyes, ‘I need an opera- tion going down the toilet, I’ll call Anton Garvey. But I want this done right.’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, recovering. ‘Who’s the target?’
Scotty and Mac looked out at the first tee, where the wife was readying herself with a three-wood.
‘Jim Quirk,’ said Scotty from the side of his mouth, as the woman swung like a cheap robot and topped her ball for a first shot of about seventeen inches.
Mac paused. ‘Mate, I know Jim — you aware of that?’