‘Know what the trouble is with a hotelier who can be bought off, Ari?’
Ari smirked, shook his head.
‘They can be bought off.’
Ari laughed and they wandered out into the heat of Singapore and strolled towards the bay.
Ari gave his mobile number and Mac input it into his Nokia.
They talked about Kuta, had a few laughs about the old days, and Ari admitted he was now a controller, running fi eld people. That explained Mac’s mild confusion with the tail team. They looked Euro but the woman had that Israeli habit of heavy American make-up
– the whole liquid foundation and full gloss lipstick effect.
They stopped by a fountain in the park – a good place to defeat long-range listening devices – and Ari pulled out his smokes, lit one, looking serious.
‘So, McQueen, what is happening?’
‘Great weather we’re having.’
Ari laughed, his big-boned face lighting up.
‘Mate,’ said Mac. ‘You’re after something, right?’
Ari nodded, clearly eager to get on with the job.
‘So just ask it and I’ll tell you if I can help,’ said Mac.
‘Okay – what did you think about these documents?’ asked Ari.
Mac deadpanned him.
‘You know,’ said Ari. ‘These Bennelong fi les. In iDisk.’
Mac smiled. The Israelis weren’t too bad when they got going. It’s just that they weren’t as good as Benny – didn’t know what to do with those sale documents and acquisition manifests.
‘We might have to swap some information, yeah Ari?’ said Mac, raising the expected quid pro quo at the heart of all inter-agency cooperation.
‘Sure,’ said Ari, fl icking his ciggie as he looked around for eyes. An old Chinese lady in a black tracksuit was doing tai chi poses under a tree and Ari stared at her as he torched another smoke.
‘I’ll tell you what I made of those documents, mate,’ smiled Mac.
‘But I need to know something from you that is in the past. Can’t hurt you now.’
Ari shrugged, chewed his gum. His sandy hair was still cut the way it had been in the Soviet and then Russian military. Mac had searched the fi les on Ari and found that before he moved to Israel and Mossad he had been GRU Spetsnaz – a special forces operator within the Russian military intelligence organisation. GRU Spetsnaz infi ltrated their own people into President Amin’s bodyguard before they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. GRU Spetsnaz operators were crafty, dangerous people and Mac had to remind himself of that even when Ari was horsing around.
‘Remember Kuta in ‘02, how you knew that Hassan had brought a mini-nuke to town? You were certain it had been used in the Sari Club, right?’
Ari shrugged and looked away in the international sign for yes.
Mac thought about his next question. ‘So how did you know that Hassan had a second device?’
Ari sucked on his smoke. ‘Okay, but then we talking about iDisk, yeah?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac.
‘We know the fucking Pakistanis had two mini-nuke,’ he snarled, fl icking his smoke into the fountain, ‘because maybe they are thieves, fuck their mothers.’
Mac stared at him, astonished. ‘Hassan stole two nukes from Israel?!’
Ari kicked a stone that wasn’t there.
‘Fuck’s sake, Ari,’ said Mac.
‘I know,’ sneered Ari, the smoke slowly drifting out of his mouth.
‘I am saying this same words exact.’
CHAPTER 44
The Piper Navajo hugged the Malaysian coastline as they fl ew north.
Benny had arranged to get Mac to Idi, and Mac was using the down time to think through what was going on. Ari’s revelations had made sense but they still came as a shock to Mac. It was now clear why Ari had been so adamant back in ‘02 that there was another device somewhere in Indonesia. He also now had a better understanding of why Ari – working for the most paranoid and uncooperative intelligence organisation outside of the Chinese MSS – had been so keen to work with Mac. Ari had needed to stay close to the BAIS pursuit of Hassan, but the Israelis couldn’t operate in Indonesia or Malaysia, and consequently they had no in-country intelligence cooperation agreements in those countries. ASIS did, though, and that’s where Ari had successfully tried to pitch himself, riding on Mac’s Aussie back.
Mac thought through the wider ramifi cations. The Pakistanis, led by Hassan – a former ISI spook – had heisted two Dimona mini-nukes? It was hugely audacious stuff and explained why Mossad hadn’t simply put hits on the Pakistanis. Killing Hassan and Gorilla wouldn’t lead them to the second device. It had to be a search and seizure, almost like a police action. There might have been something else at play. Was Mossad treading carefully because the Pakistanis were still being protected by US intelligence? If the CIA had any hand in this it was going to end in tears. It always did when the Yanks played God.
Ari’s admission had increased Mac’s paranoia but it had also vindicated him in front of someone like Atkins. Not only were mini-nukes real, but starting in the mid-1960s they’d seen action as
US military SADMs, or Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, all the way through till the end of the Cold War. The SADM was a seventy-two kilogram cylinder, not much different to a mid-sized fi re extinguisher bottle, and while the full yield was slightly less than one kiloton, it could be dialled down to 0.01.
Far from being the stuff of conspiracy theories, mini-nukes were actually highly practical weapons that had been developed so soldiers and frogmen could deploy them with little training. They had code-keys on them and an anti-tamper protocol called a Limited Try Lock.
But as long as you had a code, anyone who could operate a Nokia phone could deploy a mini-nuke. They were so useful that the Israeli Dimona facility had been producing plutonium ‘pits’ since the 1980s and had stockpiled about four hundred of their own mini-nukes.
One of the things playing on Mac’s mind since establishing there was defi nitely a second device was the devastation it could wreak.
A mini-nuke was so portable, so easy to deploy and so powerful that there were few places it couldn’t be used. Kuta in ‘02 may have been a proof-of-concept – the real attack could be on Jakarta, KL or Singapore.
Or a city in Australia. As Suzi had said, Australia was already on JI’s hit list, under the auspices of Mantiqi Four.
The scientists at Dimona made standard plutonium pits for their mini-nukes but used differing sizes and mixes of the booster fuel. This allowed a special forces frogman to dial up to a full three-kiloton yield, or dial down to a localised blast that would fl atten a small building. The booster fuel was a mix of tritium and deuterium which allowed a very small amount of Plutonium 239 to be rendered incredibly powerful and ‘clean’ by nuclear standards. In one round of declassifi cations, the US Department of Defense admitted to developing an MRR, or a Minimal Residual Radiation weapon, which left almost no trace of the radiation that shows up on Geiger counters.
Looking down on the Malacca Straits from the Piper, Mac saw the shadow of the plane on the green sea, and thought how a shadow was exactly what Mossad had become to BAIS. The Israelis and Indonesians both wanted to fi nd that second mini-nuke, but for very different reasons. The Indonesians just wanted the damned thing, after what happened at Kuta. And the Israelis? Mac chuckled darkly. The last thing they wanted was the world’s largest Muslim nation getting hold of a mini-nuke, especially one made in the Negev Desert.
Mac pondered how far Ari would go to stop that happening.
They fl ew north for half an hour and then the pilot, a Malay bloke in his twenties called Samson, pointed to a fl at shape sticking out into the water to their left.