Mark Abernethy
Counter Attack
For Natasha, Georgette and Luke
Chapter 1
There were three of them in the fifteenth-floor suite of the Hotel Pan Pacific, waiting for the radio to confirm the quarry was on its way. Alan McQueen stood at the large windows of the suite, looking over the oily waters of Singapore’s Marina Bay.
Draining his coffee, Mac thought about the plan. His job was to trap a Chinese spy and persuade him to work for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. If Mac was successful, the doubled spy would be reporting to the Firm while pretending to take his orders from Beijing.
Looking into his empty cup, Mac pondered the eternal question of why hotel crockery was so small.
‘Any real mugs back there, Matty?’ he asked Matt Johnson, his comms man.
‘That’s the biggest I could find,’ said Johnson, an operative in his early thirties who sat at a laptop computer beneath a street map of Singapore. Mac saw his younger self in Matt, an athletic field guy who was probably starting to wonder if being good at tails and infiltrations was a clever career move in Aussie intel.
‘Might have to use one of those tumblers,’ said Mac, seeing the rows of glasses in the kitchenette.
‘Bring out the inner-city tosser in you, eh, Macca?’ said Johnson, smirking behind the mic in front of his mouth.
A raw snort came from the sofa on the other side of the room, where Raymond Hu’s face had set in the serious rictus of sleep.
‘Ray!’ said Mac, raising his voice at the native of Yangzhou. ‘Wake up, sunshine!’
Hu’s lips vibrated in a rattling snore.
Johnson threw a peanut. ‘Ray.’
The first nut missed but a second landed on the sleeping man’s left eyelid.
‘Wah?’ said Hu, sitting up.
‘It’s four o’clock, old boy,’ said Mac. ‘Ready for your close-up?’
Groaning, Hu pushed himself off the sofa and walked stiff-legged to the bathroom.
‘Fricking Sing’pore,’ said Hu, his thick Chinese accent echoing out of the bathroom as he relieved himself. ‘What point in a free world if I can’t have a smoke?’
Dressed in his four-thousand-dollar suit and Spanish shoes, Hu slipped out to attend the five o’clock meet-and-greet function of the Asia-Pacific Naval Contractors Convention. Hu could blend into a bar or a cocktail party and be gathering information before anyone had even noticed that he’d joined the conversation. The plan hinged on the grumpy financier and Mac trusted him to perform.
The radio speakers crackled to life on Johnson’s desk as the door shut behind Hu. It was the voice of Cam Bailey, an Aussie SIS operator who had started his career at naval intelligence.
Mac listened as Bailey and his Changi Airport-based team got visual identification of the target — code-named Kava — and followed him from the T2 taxi rank. One of Mac’s agents was in a cab behind Kava’s while Bailey and a driver brought up the rear in another cab, ensuring there was no Chinese counter-surveillance.
Mac raised the field-glasses on the windowsill to his eyes and idly checked Raffles Boulevard. He was looking for tradie vans with no tradies, men on park benches reading upside-down newspapers and ‘tourists’ walking about aimlessly pretending to look at maps. Singapore was a modern republic but it was in South-East Asia, which meant it was crawling with Chinese spies.
‘We’re on,’ said Johnson, fiddling with the laptop that showed him the location of the agents’ cell phones.
‘We’re on when Kava is sitting in a puddle of his own piss, begging me to make him a double agent,’ murmured Mac, eyeing two SingTel workers on the street who didn’t seem to be working.
Kava was a Brisbane-based scientist, Dr Xiang Lao, who worked for the defence contractors Raytheon Australia. His main responsibility was making sure the electronic networks in the Royal Australian Navy’s SEA 4000 Air Warfare Destroyer program would issue the commands they were supposed to, even when under attack. SEA 4000 AWD was Australia’s new destroyer-based defence against anti-shipping missiles, the most likely of which were China’s old but reliable Silkworms and their recently upgraded ballistic series, the Dong Fengs.
Sitting back on the sofa, Mac picked up the file: Lao had come to Australia as a sixteen-year-old prodigy to study avionics engineering at the University of New South Wales; he completed his doctorate at RMIT and then landed a plum job at Raytheon in Brisbane. Several weeks later, Raytheon won the contract to supply the Navy’s SEA 4000 upgrades.
A photograph of Lao had surfaced ten months later, taken by a police narcotics squad watching the Colmslie Beach Reserve on the Brisbane River.
Queensland Police supplied the surveillance file to the Australian Federal Police, who claimed no interest in Dr Lao. But the biggest bounce from Lao’s photo had come from the Defence Security Authority, the internal vetting and security office under the Defence Intelligence Organisation. The DSA had issued Lao a ‘Top Secret’ clearance to work at Raytheon, but had flagged him because he applied for clearance only a few weeks after his first ten years’ residency in Australia had elapsed. To receive any of the higher security clearances in government or at defence contractors, applicants had to have lived in Australia for at least a decade, and DSA had him flagged as a ‘watch’. Now he was hanging around in Brisbane parks being photographed by the police.
By the time Mac had been pulled into a taskforce of ASIO, AFP, ASIS and DIO, a team of operatives had been watching Lao walk every Monday lunchtime to a park bench at Colmslie Reserve, eat his lunch, and then carefully put his garbage in the bin. It was Lao’s drop box and it was traced back to a person who cleared it, and then back to Lao’s controller, a mortgage broker in Logan City named Donny Koh.
Mac was supposed to be sitting in on the taskforce, as passive eyes and ears for Aussie SIS. Almost forty, he was semi-retired from the Firm and was sent up to Brisbane because he lived on the Gold Coast and sending him was easier than taking a staffer from a desk.
As the drops were intercepted, it became apparent Dr Lao was an enthusiastic seller of Australian naval secrets. There was pressure from Canberra to pounce and put on a show trial — a sort of return to glory for Aussie intelligence after the apparently bungled Dr Haneef case.
Mac had made the mistake of suggesting another way forwards: let the traitor run, see what advantage Australia might gain from it. Dr Lao seemed to be a good fit as a double agent — he was selling naval secrets direct to Chinese military intelligence, he had a young family and Aussie intel had identified his controller.
Someone high up in the bureausphere — perhaps even in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — had read the minutes of that taskforce meeting and Mac had felt the tap on his shoulder.
So Mac was back: back in South-East Asia, back in SIS and back in a world of gut-churning worry.
‘They’re five minutes away,’ said Johnson, breaking into Mac’s thoughts. ‘You want Yellow team alerted?’
Nodding, Mac reached for the room’s phone and dialled reception. He’d sent Hu in clean in case the Chinese had any of their fancy electronic eavesdropping devices at the convention.
‘Could you page Mr Chan — Johnny Chan — please?’ he said into the phone. ‘I think he’s in the bar.’
Walking to the big windows with the phone in one hand and the handset in the other, Mac looked down on what had been ‘turn six’ at the F1 Grand Prix two weeks earlier. The traffic seemed normal on Raffles Boulevard and it was late enough that the cops were starting to clear parked traffic — surveillance cars would either be moved on or would stand out to a trained observer. Nothing looked amiss, which didn’t mean it wasn’t.