‘Joel, it’s your favourite Australian,’ said Mac.
‘Ah, Mr McQueen — such a surprise.’
‘Where the bloody hell are ya?’ said Mac. ‘We had a date, remember?’
‘Um, yes,’ said Dozsa.
Mac noted the hesitation. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘I’m at the Stung Treng wharf and I’ve got your memory card.’
Dozsa laughed. ‘Have you really, Mr McQueen?’
‘So where are you?’
‘I’m precisely where I need to be, my friend,’ said Dozsa. ‘I hope you didn’t swallow the river water — there’s cholera about right now.’
The line went dead, and Mac stared at the phone.
‘Dozsa?’ said Scotty, exhaling a plume.
‘Yeah,’ said Mac.
‘Knows he’s lost the hostages?’
‘Yep,’ said Mac.
‘If we have the hostages and Sandy’s got the memory card,’ said Scotty, ‘I’m ready to fold the tent.’
‘What about McHugh?’
‘I’m debriefing tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know then. It might be a matter for the federal cops.’
‘Okay, boss,’ said Mac, gasping slightly as he stood and stretched. ‘Time to inspect the back of my eyelids.’
‘Don’t want another beer?’
‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac as he reached the door. ‘You’re doing the job of two men.’
The nightmare pushed him up and up, faster and faster, towards the light at the top of the mine shaft and then he was exploding out into the daylight and he yelled slightly as he realised his Nokia’s screen was blasting out an orange light, the phone buzzing around on the bedside table.
Feeling his heart thump against his sternum, Mac lay back on the pillows as he grabbed the phone.
‘Yep?’ he said, throat dry. His G-Shock on the table said 4.12 am.
‘Hi, honey, it’s me,’ said his wife. ‘I need your help on that ship.’
‘Ah, yeah,’ said Mac, rubbing sore eyes. ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning.’
‘What was the name of the ship?’ said Jenny.
‘No name,’ said Mac, disoriented. ‘A number.’
‘What was it?’ said Jenny.
He hated it when she was like this.
‘Um, I think it was… K 4217, or 4217 K. Something like that.’ Mac gently massaged his temples. Being pestered for small details took him back to his military days when special forces people were forced to recall every detail, from a hotel room and cell phone number to a map coordinate and an aircraft rego. Ninety per cent of special ops were for reconnaissance and an operator who couldn’t make a detailed report was virtually useless.
‘Macca, what was the number?’
‘Shit, mate,’ said Mac, lured into a fight. ‘It’s four-thirty in the morning and I’m tanked on Percodan.’
‘Sorry, hon,’ she said. ‘It’s important.’
‘Right,’ said Mac. ‘It was K 4217. Where are you?’
‘Don’t worry — get back to sleep.’
‘You’re not going after them?’ said Mac, sitting up. ‘Who’s with you?’
‘Got given two local cops,’ said Jen, voice cracking up.
‘What?’ asked Mac, the connection dying.
‘Local cops,’ said Jen through the static.
‘There’s soldiers on board that ship,’ said Mac, but the connection had been lost.
Limping into the kitchen of the suite, Mac grabbed a bottle of Vittel. Drinking it down, he looked out the window over the sink, saw the insects flying around the streetlight. They circled so fast that they ended up chasing themselves.
He didn’t think he would ever be able to tame his wife. She got something in her head and she moved like a locomotive. Mac had first met her in the Aussie embassy colony in Manila, where she was the ice queen of the group; good-looking, funny, smart and confident, but aloof and distrusting. She worked in the federal police intelligence taskforces but her specialty was tracking Australian paedophiles into South-East Asia and busting the brothels and trafficking rackets that supported the child-molesting industry. Jenny was relentless and she wasn’t scared of men, didn’t back down from them, and, being a country girl, was better at blokes’ humour and fast retorts than most men.
Certain kinds of men didn’t like her lack of respect and she constantly clashed with the police and consular hierarchies, accusing them of being soft on sex slavery. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the Indonesian-American-Australian teams chasing the sex slavers were mostly female, which had Jenny and her crew known as the ‘Dyke Squad’ among men in the embassy colonies.
Mac had fallen in love and then married her. He hadn’t taken the easy way by being with Jen, but he had followed his heart.
Letting himself breathe, Mac focused on the swirling insects as he tried to put Jenny out of his mind. He realised what had annoyed him about Dozsa’s attitude on the phone. He showed no interest in the card; didn’t demand it, didn’t try to threaten or renegotiate.
Why not?
The insects chased themselves around and around and he realised that he, Grimshaw and Sandy had been doing the same thing.
Moving out into the hallway, Mac knocked on Scotty’s door.
He waited forty seconds before the slurred voice asked what the fuck he wanted.
‘Scotty, it’s me — open up.’ Pushing into the smoky room, Mac shut the door and turned to his old mentor. ‘Mate, it’s still on — we’re not going anywhere.’
‘What?’ said Scotty, half asleep but fully annoyed.
‘It doesn’t matter if Sandy or Grimshaw has a card that can gain them access to the North Korean C and C systems,’ said Mac. ‘Dozsa has a backup copy sitting somewhere.’
‘What?’ asked Scotty again. ‘Then why have we been chasing this fucking thing?’
‘Quirk had accessed it through his Top Secret clearance, and downloaded it onto an SD card,’ said Mac. ‘We assumed there was one copy, one chip.’
‘Yeah?’
‘But when I rang Dozsa tonight, it didn’t worry him that we’d retrieved Lance and Urquhart, that he wasn’t going to get the card,’ said Mac. ‘In fact, the hostages weren’t at the Stung Treng wharf — they were nowhere near it.’
‘Dozsa never intended to do a swap?’
‘No,’ said Mac, trying to work it out. ‘He did what we’d do — created a diversion and let the good guys chase that.’
‘That’s a very Mossad trick,’ said Scotty.
‘By way of deception — one of the craft skills you develop when you want your neighbourhood enemies hating each other, not you.’
Scotty focused. ‘You’re saying Dozsa wanted you to steal the chip from Grimshaw, and he probably knew Sandy Beech was around?’
‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘Or he thought Grimshaw would bust me and there’d be a big blue between the Yanks and Aussies.’
‘Which there sort of is,’ said Scotty.
‘While we fight among ourselves for the memory card, Dozsa is somewhere else and getting another copy, or even the original. And if we think it’s over, and there’s no more UAVs in the air or tracks on mobile phones, Dozsa disappears off the map.’
‘So where’s Dozsa?’ said Scotty, puffing beer fumes.
‘That’s the other thing about the call,’ said Mac. ‘Dozsa’s on a satellite phone, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When you call a sat phone from a cell phone, it takes about twenty seconds to get a connection.’
‘It’s going through the satellite system as well as the ground stations,’ said Scotty. ‘And there’s a propagation delay.’
‘But when you call a sat phone that’s in your local area, what happens?’
‘It connects straight through,’ said Scotty. ‘Sat-phone accounts link to local cell towers and charge back to your account — that’s why they’re so expensive.’