Double Back (25 page)

The army trucks continued transporting people out of the facility as Mac cased the campus from behind the middle ventilator. After the flare-up about vaccines and diseases, Mac was leaving the topic alone with Didge. Mac harboured his own fears about scientists playing with diseases, but his objective was to infiltrate the underground section of Lombok – the fact that it could be a drug lab was only very small comfort.

The paddock area had been dog-free for twenty minutes thanks to the Xanax baits and the five floodlights around the paddock were weak enough to create darkness around the ventilators.

After a concerted effort, Didge loosened the final screw on the circular vent cover and he and Mac lifted it off in silence, placing it quietly on the grass beside the vent.

‘Cap off, Blue Leader. How we doing on the circuit boards?’ asked Mac over the headset.

‘Standing by, Albion,’ said Robbo, cool but professional. ‘We’re in – gonna use a bio-suit to infiltrate.’

Heart thumping, Mac listened for any out-of-place sounds as the crickets started up and the birds died down. Bats flapped and monkeys chattered as the last line of orange-red glow evaporated on the horizon. And then night came like a black velvet cloak had been thrown over the day.

Checking their handguns and controlling their breathing, they concentrated on saving their energy for the real work. Johnno was supposed to be a good operator, but Mac always got nervous when someone was going into enemy territory.

‘Stand by, Albion,’ came Robbo over the headset.

‘Standing by, Blue Leader.’

Looking at each other, Mac and Didge got the okay forty seconds later.

‘Green for go, Albion. Repeat – green for go.’

‘Roger that Blue Leader. Albion out.’

Tapping Didge on the shoulder, Mac held out one of the biohazard masks. When they both had the helmets in place, he handed Didge a pair of gloves.

Looking over, Didge peered down the open shaft and then brought a flashlight up and into the shaft, turning it on and cupping a gloved hand over the lens to stop it shining too brightly below.

The light reflected on a circular shaft that dropped for fifteen metres, ending in a sealed fan unit which blocked the shaft.

‘Shit,’ hissed Mac, his voice bouncing within the confines of the biohazard mask.

‘You okay, Albion?’ asked Robbo over the headset.

‘Affirmative, Blue Leader,’ said Mac, watching as Didge looped his rope, strained at the knot and then put a slip-knot at the base of a tree next to the vent. ‘Fan unit blocking entry. It’s sealed, but working on it. Out.’

Didge picked up a new set of wrenches and screwdrivers from his B &E kit, clambered over the edge of the vent shaft and rappelled into it, disappearing quickly.

From above, Mac shone the flashlight at the sides of the shiny steel, letting the light bounce around long enough for Didge to release the screws. Standing on the far corners of the fan unit, Didge undid his rappel harness and attached it to the metre-wide fan.

Climbing out of the shaft, Didge jumped down, then turned and tried to pull the fan out with the rope. Mac joined him, the two of them straining until a groaning sound came from the shaft, followed by the fan unit coming loose as Mac and Didge fell back on the grass.

Shining the flashlight down the shaft again, Mac saw that it ended in a right-angle intersection with a box-section air shaft that ran parallel to the ground. Pulling a small cloth bag from his breast pocket, Didge put his fingers in and sprinkled a substance that looked like talc. As it drifted downwards through the light, Mac guessed he was looking for motion-sensing beams. Mac had already told him that there was no wiring for such a system, but he liked that Didge was thorough.

Packing his B &E kit, Didge dropped down first. Touching on the parallel shaft, he pulled himself into it head-first and started crawling forwards. Mac stood on the bottom of the shaft, removed his rucksack, and pushed it ahead of him behind Didge as he followed into the dark hole.

Lying behind Didge’s boots, with all lights killed, Mac listened to himself breathing in the biohazard mask and tried not to think about the enclosed space and his fear of being trapped. It was hot in the shaft and even hotter in his mask.

A faint clink sounded and Didge moved forward. Up ahead, Mac could make out the talc floating, then the rope they’d dragged through went taut beside Mac’s head as Didge disappeared through a new hole in the shaft.

The radio headset crackled and Didge gave a sit-rep. Mac crawled forwards, pushed head-first into the hole and looked around. Didge stood on the floor of a large laboratory, machine and equipment hidden by vinyl covers, beakers, pipettes and test tubes standing upside down on racks, cleaned and sterilised.

After sliding down the rope, Mac stood beside Didge, squinting at the room. Red engineer’s lights were placed at intervals in the walls and the surveillance cameras looked to be down.

‘Clear,’ came Didge’s voice, muffled through his mask’s breathers.

‘Let’s make this fast, mate,’ said Mac, pulling the Nikon from his rucksack and setting off.

The underground component of Lombok was huge, about three times the size of the official facility. As he took pictures of the labs – largely decommissioned or mothballed by the looks of it – the camera’s flash lit the area in eerie glimpses of the rooms, the strangeness intensified by the sounds of Didge and Mac breathing through the biohazard masks.

The labs led through double air-lock doors into a sterilisation area, complete with autoclave pressure cookers. Whatever they did in here, they were thorough. Walking into another long room, Mac photographed eight fermentation vats which could be used for many purposes, from making beer and MDMA, to making vaccines and bioweapons.

Pushing a stepladder up to the line of vats, Mac took wipes from three of them, before sealing the samples and moving on. Sweat rolled down his temples as he kept the Nikon’s shutter going. The air-conditioning had been switched off and the combination of the stuffiness and the glow of the engineer’s lights was making him queasy.

They’d just passed through another double air-lock doorway when the radio crackled to life and then crackled out again. Didge knocked at the receiver on his belt and then pressed through the helmet’s material to shake the headset. Nothing. The radio crackled and then it died, possibly something to do with the negative pressure lock most of these facilities had, thought Mac, fear rising.

The next room got Mac’s heart pumping. Along both walls were large cabinets made of grey painted steel and glass which Mac identified as spray driers and freeze driers – machines that could take agent from the fermentation vats, dry it, then reduce it to particles of less than ten microns. It could also reduce heroin and cocaine to desirable grains.

His hands swimming in the gloves, Mac tried to manhandle the wipes and the sample vials. Tapping on Mac’s shoulder, Didge pointed to a door on their left with a large skull-and-crossbones in the middle, something written in Bahasa below. The word Bahaya rang a bell. Pushing through the double doors, the thick rubber seal-flaps in the middle made a grinding sound that gave both of them a start. After passing through the next air-lock door, they surveyed the scene that confronted them. There were fourteen glass panels on fourteen grey steel doors. Walking up and peering through one, Mac opened the door to a room which was the size of a small prison cell. There were four cages on each wall, their bars rising to the ceiling. Mac took a photo, knowing that DIA would want to see this. These were animal rooms – or ‘inhalation chambers’ – in which monkeys, dogs and cats were sealed and forced to inhale various agents to see how they reacted.

Turning, Mac saw that Didge’s eyes were like saucers through the mask.

‘You okay?’ barked Mac through his breather cylinders.

‘Yep,’ came the rasped reply, unconvincing.

Mac wasn’t feeling too flash either.

Mac followed Didge’s gaze and saw they were standing on what looked like an internal road on the pale green lino, the car-width tyre tracks clearly marked in dull black on the pale background.

Pushing through the next doors – these ones twice as wide as the side entrance to the room – they followed the indoor ‘road’ down a long corridor with intermittent engineer’s lights. Turning his flashlight on again, Didge led the way for fifty metres before coming to an internal loading-bay area with a truck parked in the dark. The entire far wall was a steel door with a set of electric controls at the side as well as a chain-loop manual function.

‘Loading bay,’ rasped Mac, looking at the twenty-tonne Hino flatbed with the Lombok AgriCorp signage on the side.

The radio crackled again, and both of them heard a couple of snippets of what sounded like Robbo yelling. Then it was dead air again. Mac decided to hurry it along, but he wanted more from this facility.

Hurriedly stowing his SIG Sauer, Didge pulled the chain loop hand-over-hand and the door started to inch up slowly.

Switching off the flashlight, Mac ducked to the side of the door as it slowly rose. When the door had gone up twelve centimetres, Mac motioned for Didge to stop it and got his head into a position where he could peer through to the other side. There was a conveyor belt four metres wide, which led upwards at a thirty-degree angle to another door at the top of the belt, the same as the one they’d just opened.

As Mac tried to get the camera in line to take a shot, a beeping sounded and the door at the top of the conveyor belt chute started to rise.

‘Fuck,’ said Mac, ducking back instinctively. Slowly putting his head around the corner again, the opening door revealed another set of steel doors, these ones side-opening with manually operated levers. A person in a white biohazard suit walked past at the top of the conveyor belt, and as the door opened further, Mac realised the second door also had warning signage on it.

‘What’s that?’ asked Didge, kneeling behind him. ‘That fire?’

‘Sure is,’ whispered Mac.

A roaring noise was followed by a thump, and the area above them shook as the roaring built to a crescendo.

‘That a furnace?’ asked Didge, raising his voice.

Looking down at his G-Shock, visible through the rubber gloves, Mac saw it was 6.51 pm. ‘Getting ready for the evening burn,’ said Mac. ‘We’ve found the incinerator.’

Suddenly the lights flickered and went on. Diving to the side of the conveyor-belt door, Mac scanned the tunnel and loading-bay area, both now flooded with light.

‘Let’s move,’ said Didge, as the conveyor-belt door started moving up.

Heart thumping, Mac jogged out of the loading bay and along the tunnel, sweat running down the backs of his legs as he struggled to keep up with the soldier. His breathing was becoming ragged and hot.

Didge slowed down and waited for Mac when he reached the air-lock door they’d come through two minutes ago. Stealthing through they stopped, turned back and cased the tunnel through a gap. Four figures in white biohazard suits walked through a door into the loading bay, one yelling something up the conveyor-belt chute before scrambling into the crew-cab truck with the other three. The truck took off and then it was heading towards Mac and Didge.

Pulling back into the room, Mac raced after Didge through the next set of doors and into the space filled with inhalation chambers. Didge crept towards the door leading back into the labs, but Mac stopped him. He wanted to see where the truck was going and to check if there was an easy way to get samples from the incinerator.

‘Gotta get outa here,’ crackled Didge through the breather cylinders as the double air-lock doors automatically opened, allowing the truck to drive through.

‘Back to the labs,’ said Mac, heading for the doors that would allow them to escape through the venting system.

The air-lock doors to the lab area did not contain glass panels, and Mac held back to observe where the truck was going and what the workers were doing. The point of a recon exercise was to see or hear what was going on.

‘Mate – no glass,’ said Mac, pointing at the door. ‘I need to take some snaps, okay?’

Reluctantly, Didge followed Mac across the internal lino road and they made for one of the inhalation chambers where the internal lights had not been activated. Pulling the grey steel door back on themselves, they stood in the shadows of the inhalation chamber, breathing hard. The throb of the truck’s diesel engine sounded outside the area, and then intensified as the doors were opened. Craning his neck, Mac saw another double air-lock door at the end of the chambers which was also being opened.

Struggling for air, Mac realised they’d stumbled into the heart of the operation. Whatever was burned in that incinerator at such high heats, on a daily basis, was probably waiting on the other side of those doors. What was it, he wondered. Bad vaccines? Killer heroin? Monkeys who didn’t like what they were inhaling?

‘We’ve got to get in there, okay?’ rasped Mac, pointing towards the truck as it slipped through the opened air-lock doors.

Didge nodded, though his face was grim and his breathing was laboured.

‘You okay, mate?’ asked Mac as the Hino moved on, bringing some quiet again to the inhalation chambers.

‘Yeah, bra,’ said Didge.

‘Let’s get our breathing right, okay?’ said Mac.

Working together, they brought each other down to long deep breathing and then Mac pushed back the door to the inhalation chamber and they snuck out. Didge went in front with his SIG Sauer and they crept along the wall of inhalation chambers until they got to the door the Hino had just disappeared through. Sticking his head around the corner of the opened door, Didge checked their situation, hesitating a split second.

‘Okay, mate?’ asked Mac, as Didge groaned and sagged against the wall.

‘Holy shit,’ he hissed, staring into the mid-distance.

Mac angled himself around Didge and peeked around the corner to see for himself.

Taking it in, Mac’s breathing seized. The Hino was fifty metres away at the end of a long room, with people in biohazard suits moving around like ants in a colony. Large, glass-sided inhalation chambers ran the length of the space, all of them filled with naked humans. Most looked dead, but some of them were still alive.

Pulling back, stunned, Mac thought fast – he needed to manage Didge out of the situation without both of them being made.

‘Okay, we’re gonna do the gig and get out, right, mate?’ said Mac, who used his body to block Didge from walking into the room of inhalation chambers.

‘But, there’s people -’ started Didge, his eyes far away.

‘Don’t worry about that, mate,’ said Mac, feeling quite nauseous himself. ‘Let’s just focus on the gig, okay?’

‘Robbo – let’s call Robbo,’ said Didge, sounding as if he might be in shock.

Things balanced on a knife’s edge as Mac tried to catch the soldier’s eye. Didge was bigger and stronger than him, and by the way the other 4RAR commandos treated the big Cape Yorker, Mac suspected he was their wet-work guy: the one who took out the sentries, who slit the throats and made stealth entries possible. If Didge decided on a certain course of action, it would be hard to stop him.

‘C’mon, Didge – there’s nothing we can really do here,’ said Mac, trying to get Didge beyond his immediate desire to walk into that hall of horrors and start killing bad guys.

‘Let ’em go,’ said Didge, pushing at Mac.

‘Go where?’ asked Mac, gripping Didge’s elbows. ‘Out into the open? If we raise the alarm with the soldiers, the poor bastards will be shot anyway.’

Now Didge’s head and body were shaking and Mac suspected he was hyperventilating.

‘Or let ’em go so they can run around screaming and get us made?’ Mac continued. ‘We’ve still got a job to do in Maliana, mate.’

‘We gotta get them outa here,’ whispered Didge. ‘Can’t walk away, McQueen.’

‘Not walking away, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Trying to keep us alive and get the gig done. Maybe we save more lives with these photos and samples than by whacking a few soldiers, okay?’

Giving Didge another shake of the elbows, Mac tried to lock eyes with him, even as he lost his own cool about this place.

‘Okay, Didge?’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Didge, face stony.

Mac watched as the workers in biohazard suits threw body after body onto the back of the Hino. They seemed to be taking corpses from the right-hand inhalation chambers while the Timorese on the left were banging on the glass sides of their inhalation chambers.

Shouts rang out before the Hino beeped as it reversed. The next thing, the workers in the biohazard suits were walking back towards Mac and Didge.

Retreating back into their hide in the inhalation chamber, Mac and Didge waited in the dark as the truck drove past. After a few minutes the noise of the truck faded and then voices echoed from the loading bay as bodies were loaded onto the conveyor belt.

After a while the noises faded to silence and the entire area was plunged into darkness again as the lights were killed. Venturing out, Mac and Didge stealthed back to the large hall of inhalation chambers, pushed through the doors and entered the area where they’d just witnessed the horrifying scenes.

‘We’ll do this fast, okay, Didge?’ asked Mac as they walked quietly down the dim corridor between the chambers. A rustling noise started up, followed by voices and then thumping on the glass. It was overwhelming but Mac was determined to gather the intelligence that would see the operators of this place prosecuted.

Mac raised the Nikon and took a shot of the long chamber with the people in it. The bursting flash revealed the creepy sight of at least eighty people, staring out of the glass like living ghosts – naked, skinny and distressed. Realising that Mac and Didge were not the normal workers, the prisoners – or whatever they were – swarmed to the glass.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Didge, his voice shocked and disbelieving.

Turning, Mac gently took Didge’s arm and reminded him that they needed to keep going in order to save these folks’ lives. He took several shots of the empty chamber on the other side before walking to its sealed door. As he opened it, Mac heard the sigh of air pressure as he broke the seal. Didge joined him and they stepped into the chamber, which reeked of urine and faeces. Noticing a patch of wetness near the rear of the chamber, Mac knelt and took several wipes which he put in the sample jars.

Standing again, Mac saw Didge double over and then heave, his mask filling with vomit.

‘Shit,’ said Mac, grabbing at Didge as his own stomach turned.

‘Can’t take it off, mate,’ yelled Mac as Didge grabbed at the mask. ‘Don’t want to catch what these guys have got.’

Didge heaved again, then stood with his head down as he tried to pull himself together.

‘Mate, we’re out of here, okay?’ said Mac, helping Didge through the chamber door and into the clear space between the lines of inhalation chambers.

Stopping, Didge put both hands on the sides of his biohazard helmet and moved his head around inside, trying to find a better way to breathe with the vomit.

Sweat dripped into Mac’s shoes and, making a huge effort to block out the anguish around him, he aimed the Nikon at the chamber filled with people. Some of them still had the energy to slap their hands on the glass. Flashing off a final picture, he froze. Caught in his mind was an image that was too familiar, too recent. An image he couldn’t ignore by creating professional distance.

Taking a closer look at the inhalation chamber, Mac stared at a face that served him cold beer a week earlier.

‘Mickey, that you?’ shouted Mac.

The man slapped at the glass, his thin old body somehow dignified in the glow of the engineer’s light.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ snarled Mac, feeling the gig going pear-shaped. ‘Mickey Costa!’