Sensitive New Age Spy (4 page)

‘If she won’t hold gas because of shonky construction,’ I said, ‘what the hell is she doing tied up here with anti-personnel mines hanging off the side and anti-aircraft missiles on deck, scaring the brown out of everyone?’

‘It could be a decoy,’ Julie suggested. ‘Or maybe a distraction.’

‘Distraction from what?’ Lonergan asked. ‘This would have taken a lot of money and time to organise. What kind of operation would justify a distraction on this scale?’

Even as he said it I saw a strange look on his face – part comprehension and part fear. He spun around and stared across the water towards the American cruiser moored at the dock, and that was when the shooting started.

It was hard to place where the gunfire was coming from. When I looked around the guys on the tower had taken cover behind the parapet, Lonergan and Julie were down flat on the ground with me, Peter Sturdee was in a half-crouch with one hand on his still-holstered police-issue Glock, and the uniformed cop by the jetty was looking about in confusion. I had my Sauer 38H out and cocked, Lonergan was gripping a Khar K9, and Julie had a black, Teflon-coated ASP. No question about it, Julie had the coolest gun.

The cop by the jetty was staring in our direction now, probably trying to figure out why the bloke from the press, the girl with the coffee, and the Yank in the loud shirt were so well tooled up. I was trying to figure out where Julie had managed to put her hands on that nifty little ASP, and where the hell she’d had it hidden in the outfit she was wearing.

The firing picked up – M16s, I reckoned – but nothing in
the form of hot lead seemed to be coming our way, so I stood up. I could see muzzle flashes on the stern of the American cruiser. There was the sound of a helicopter lifting off at full revs, and the firing suddenly stopped. Seconds later, I was surrounded by people yelling into two-way radios. Everyone was looking towards the cruiser, except for the young walloper who was pointing at the top of the LNG tanker and shouting.

Two men, dressed in black and wearing ski masks, were clambering up a metal stairway on the front dome. It looked like one hell of a tricky climb to the top of that thing, with a bastard of a drop down to the steel deck if you missed your footing.

Suddenly the wash from a US Navy Seahawk was lifting dust from the ground at our feet, and there was heat and a strong smell of burnt jet fuel. The helicopter went into a hover over the front LNG dome, its massive rotor blades thrashing the air. A masked, black-clad figure in the chopper’s open doorway was pointing an M16 down in our direction. We had absolutely no cover, but luckily no one on our side was stupid enough to point a firearm back.

The noise from the engines was deafening. Lonergan was shouting into his mobile and Sturdee was yelling in my ear.

‘We’ve got police snipers stationed on top of the bridge pylons and on the Opera House,’ he screamed. ‘What do you reckon we should do? It’s your show now, Alby, and you’re bloody welcome to it. I’m sure as hell not about to tell
anyone to open fire.’

Good idea. It would be an almost impossible shot from either position, but bringing down a US Navy Seahawk in a friendly port in front of a CNN live-satellite feed couldn’t possibly be good for US-Australia relations, and would definitely put a serious crimp in the Free Trade Agreement. And a six-tonne aircraft chock-full of fuel dropping onto the fort would put a serious crimp in us.

‘Everyone holds their fire until we figure out what’s happening,’ I yelled. Sturdee nodded and put his radio to his ear.

Above us, the pilot manoeuvered in close to the top of the dome, and the first of the waiting men leapt the narrow gap between the dome and the chopper and scrambled into the cabin. I dropped my pistol into my camera bag, grabbed my Nikon, and rattled off a burst of twenty or so frames of the hovering aircraft. The pilot swung away from the ship momentarily and then eased back in, but the gap was wider this time and the second man jumped too soon. He hit the metal cargo deck of the chopper with a thud you could almost feel, the lower half of his body hanging out the doorway, legs kicking. A black-clad arm grabbed him by the belt and hauled him inside.

Lonergan stopped shouting into his phone, covered his other ear with his hand to block out the chopper noise, and listened intently. Then, swear to God, he turned as white as a sheet. You think it’s just an expression until you see the
blood drain right out of a man’s face like that. Suddenly he was yelling, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ with an urgency that got everyone’s attention.

The chopper lifted away from the tanker, and with both engines screaming started a run up the harbour. In sixty seconds the Seahawk was out of sight and it was suddenly very, very quiet. There was only the sound of waves lapping against the fort. Then came the wail of sirens in the distance.

‘Peter,’ I yelled, breaking the stunned silence around me. ‘Get the OAT guys on board
now
! We need prisoners, information, anything.’

We could see frantic activity on the
Altoona
’s empty chopper deck, and ambulances were screaming onto the wharf.

‘You were right on the money, Jules,’ I said. ‘That tanker was an 80 000 tonne distraction. We were set up, and I bloody fell for it.’

Two Army Blackhawks roared overhead as we jumped aboard the Yank Navy inflatable with Lonergan and the American officers. The coxswain had the engines screaming and the nose up as soon as we left the dock, and we bounced off every damn wave between the island and the cruiser, the bitter salt spray soaking everyone on board. No one spoke a word on the three-minute journey. Looking back at Fort Denison, I could see the assault teams rappelling down onto the tanker from the hovering choppers.

Sturdee, Lonergan and I clambered awkwardly onto the dock near the stern of the
Altoona
. Julie and the officers were a lot more graceful about it. As we ran towards the cruiser, a bunch of nervous-looking American sailors in helmets and flak vests, members of the ship’s Security Alert Team, pointed combat shotguns and M16s in our direction. They lowered their weapons when they saw the US officers. There was a neat row of plastic body bags, or what the Americans now like to call human remains pouches, near the gangway. So we had three dead already.

On the dockside, Navy medics and local ambulance officers were working frantically on the injured. A motorcycle paramedic with his helmet still on was doing vigorous chest compressions on a sailor who had a hole in his thigh you could drive a bus through. He was desperately chanting, ‘Breathe, you bastard, breathe, you bastard,’ as he pushed down. More ambulances were speeding onto the dock with lights and sirens going full tilt, and I could see a TV news crew setting up out in the street just past Harry’s Café de Wheels. A bunch of press photographers were milling about the dock gate, held back by a couple of cops and some Naval Police. Diego Vega, a new member of the WorldPix team, was elbowing his way to the front of the pack.

I was keeping well back, trying to stay out of everybody’s way. Lonergan joined me after a brief conversation with a group of American officers. He was confused and angry, which he had every right to be since, as local CIA chief, the
fallout from all this would land at his feet.

‘Maybe we should go talk to the captain,’ I said.

Lonergan thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘He’s on the helicopter deck with some medics. Got a bullet through the shoulder.’

Lonergan led Julie and me up the gangway to the helicopter deck. Deep gouges from close-range bullet hits scored the sides of the empty hangar. The usual post-gunfight stink of cordite hung in the air, and the deck was spattered with blood and littered with empty cartridge cases.

A medical officer was bandaging the captain’s right shoulder. The captain waved the medic away when he saw Lonergan and they had a brief conversation, most of which involved the captain shaking his head. Finally he relented, and Lonergan called Julie and me over and did the introductions. The captain glanced warily at Julie, then at Lonergan.

‘Ms Danko knows more about my job than I do,’ I said, ‘and she’s cleared to hear everything I am.’

‘You know I can’t tell you much,’ the captain said.

‘Maybe I should just guess, then. Had a bit of trouble and lost a helicopter?’

He looked at Lonergan again, who nodded. ‘We have three men dead,’ the captain said after a long pause, ‘God knows how many wounded, eight men AWOL, and a missing Seahawk.’

‘Lose anything else, Captain?’ I said. There aren’t too many things that can make a career CIA operative like
Carter Lonergan turn white, so I took a punt. ‘Like a nuclear warhead, for instance?’

The captain’s jaw was clenched so tight I expected to hear the sound of exploding molars. ‘You know that I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on my vessel.’

The way he said ‘my vessel’ told me he understood it wasn’t going to be his ship for very much longer. If there’s a constant in navies worldwide – besides the predilection for grey paint, buggery and bell-bottom trousers – it’s that no one gets away with a major screw-up. This poor bastard’s next command would probably be a desk, if he was bloody lucky.

‘So I guess, Captain,’ I said, ‘that means you can neither confirm nor deny the absence of a nuclear warhead?’

Again he glanced at Lonergan, who shrugged, nodded and looked down at his shoes.

‘Hell, Mr Murdoch,’ the captain said quietly, ‘I couldn’t even confirm or deny the absence of
two
nuclear warheads.’

At that he turned and vomited over the side of the ship, into the sun-kissed, pale-blue waters of Sydney Harbour. I knew exactly how he felt.

The
Altoona
’s captain insisted on walking off his ship rather than being carried. He paused momentarily on the dock beside the body bags, shook his head slowly, then turned and walked to the waiting ambulance.

Carter Lonergan was in conference with a group of Navy officers. He broke away from them and walked across the deck to where Julie and I were standing.

‘Ship’s executive officer wants to put out a press release,’ he said. ‘Saying there was a small electrical explosion in one of the galley storage bays.’

I looked at the body bags and the TV crews and the ambulance carrying the captain roaring out of the main gate, siren wailing. ‘Exploding baked beans? That should work,’ I said. ‘Especially if you redirect the wounded to the emergency department at Saint Stupid’s Hospital and have them examined by a bunch of legally blind medical students.’

Lonergan’s right eye twitched and the scar on his cheek tightened.

‘This isn’t the kind of situation you can spin away with a press release and your fingers crossed, Lonergan. This is two missing nuclear warheads, for God’s sake!’

‘So what the fuck do you suggest?’ he snapped.

‘Well, for starters, how about you don’t bring nuclear weapons into our front parlour. And if you do bring the bloody things in, at least have a responsible adult keep an eye on them.’

I figured Lonergan’s fist was just about to start on an anger-fuelled, upward trajectory towards my jaw when a khaki-clad US Navy lieutenant joined us. The lieutenant had been sitting on the helicopter deck when we boarded, leaning back on a bulkhead looking totally exhausted. A less evolved person than myself might have noted that this particular sailor had rather perky breasts under her neatly pressed shirt. She was tall, with tawny-blond hair and dark brown eyes and was wearing a blue baseball cap with
NAVY
in big yellow letters on the front. The whole package was accented by a webbing belt and a pistol in a holster on her right hip. I have to admit I’m a sucker for a girl in uniform, especially when she’s packing a gun.

‘I’m Lieutenant Clare Kingston,’ she said, ‘and I would like to point out, without confirming or denying the existence of fissile armaments, that our security systems for transport, storage, sterile containment and safe disbursement of said armaments are second to none.’

‘Bully for you,’ I said. ‘But right now your security systems are looking a bit shabby, so let’s cut to the chase. What’s missing exactly, who took them, and why? We can leave the
how
to the secret commission of inquiry down the track.’

There was a Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol in that holster on her hip, and I could see she was very tempted to take it out and use it. If looks could kill I’d already be pushing up gerberas. The M9 is a bit of a hefty gun, but the lieutenant looked like she could handle it. Right about then I noticed some red spatters on the left shoulder of her shirt.

‘That looks like blood,’ I said. ‘You get injured in the gunfight?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not mine. I was next to the captain when they fired back at us from the helicopter.’

‘Sorry, must have been a bit grim out here. But your skipper looks like he’s going to be okay.’

Lieutenant Kingston seemed to soften a little.

‘And I’m sorry if I was short with you,’ I went on, ‘but I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee this morning and someone played me for a sucker with that tanker out there, and things like that tend to put me in a bad mood.’ I held out my hand. ‘My name’s Alby Murdoch, and to all intents and purposes I’m a member of the local press. But I’m covert ops with D.E.D., I’m the senior Australian operative on the ground this morning, and I have clearance at the highest level, which Mr Lonergan here can confirm. So let’s see what we can do about getting your missing, non-confirmable, non-deniable items back.’

The lieutenant glanced at Lonergan, who nodded, then she shook my hand. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said.

‘Great. Now, while everything’s still fresh in everyone’s mind, why don’t we have a debrief.’

The lieutenant looked at Julie.

‘This is my associate, Julie Danko,’ I said. ‘She has clearance to hear whatever I hear, which Mr Lonergan can also confirm.’

‘I’m limited in what I can tell you,’ the lieutenant said. ‘However, it would seem that eight members of our ship’s crew conspired to illegally obtain two items of United States government property and remove them from the USS
Altoona
by helicopter.’