No Man's Land - A Russell Carter Thriller (25 page)

1

Sydney, Australia, early morning, 31 December

Three days later and nearly four thousand miles from Batak Island, the sharp
beep beep
of his phone jolted Carter awake, signaling the arrival of a text message.

He turned toward the sideboard. The large numbers on the digital clock radio read 5.40 a.m. It took him a few moments to register where he was – the living room of the serviced apartment they had rented in Sydney’s historic Rocks district. The Rosemount Apartments complex was on the edge of the CBD and a short walk from Sydney’s picturesque harbor, which made it the ideal platform from which to mount a response to Samudra’s expected attack.

According to a previous text from Djoran, who was somewhere in the city with Samudra’s team of mujaheddin, either the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Sydney Opera House was the likely target.

Carter sat up in the fold-out sofa bed and stretched his arms above him. He and Erina had flown into Sydney from Jakarta on false passports at 10 p.m. the night before.

She was asleep in the main bedroom.

His phone beeped a second time and he grabbed it off the glass coffee table beside the sofa.

The caller ID was blocked; there was no number. The message read:
Confirming 2nite. SH Bridge primary target. Details later. D

Carter wasn’t surprised. He and Erina had done their research and gone through various possible attack scenarios, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge seemed the most likely target.

The bridge was the focal point for the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Half a million people would gather on the harbor and its foreshore that evening to watch five million dollars’ worth of fireworks go up in smoke. It was high summer in Sydney, and the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations were bigger than those held in Paris, London, Berlin and New York. The images would be broadcast around the world.

It was hard to think how Samudra could pick a better target.

Carter reached for the file Erina had put together on the bridge. He was hoping Djoran would give him the exact location of the attack later that day, but they’d already started preparing themselves. The more information they had, the better.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was the tallest steel arch bridge in the world. Its highest point was more than four hundred feet above sea level and the arch spanned over one thousand six hundred feet. The total weight of the steelwork was over fifty thousand tons. The deck was about a hundred and fifty feet wide and carried rail, car, bicycle and foot traffic between the CBD and the north shore.

Carter tried to put himself into the mind of Samudra. He figured the most likely place to mount an attack would be from one of the bridge’s four pylons. The clan members could remain hidden in one of them and, from there, plant and detonate their explosives.

Two pylons stood at the northern and southern ends of the bridge and all were identical in design inside and out. The south-east pylon at the city end contained a museum and tourist center, with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree observation deck at the top. The south-west pylon, also at the city end, was run by the New South Wales Roads and Maritime Services and its CCTV cameras overlooked the bridge and surrounding roads. The pylons at the northern end incorporated venting chimneys used to extract traffic fumes from the Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

If he were Samudra, he’d choose the south-west pylon because of its access to surveillance cameras and proximity to the city – and because it was closed for business on New Year’s Eve, unlike the south-east pylon, which was open to the public until 5 p.m.

He lay back down on the sofa and stared at a Sidney Nolan print, a Ned Kelly, hanging on the wall above him, which he’d failed to notice the night before. The lonesome outlaw sat on a red horse with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, staring back at him.

It wasn’t enough simply to snuff out Samudra’s planned attack for that night. Samudra and his organization needed to be destroyed or they’d simply regroup and strike another day.

Having a specific target was a good start.

That evening provided the best opportunity they’d ever have to stop Samudra and the Sungkar clan in their tracks. The chance might not come again for a long time, if at all, and Carter meant to take it. It wouldn’t bring Wayan, Muklas and Jacko back, but it’d give their death meaning.

Maybe it’d do the same for his own life.

2

Carter pushed himself off the sofa bed and pulled on a pair of navy blue boxer shorts. His thoughts turned to Erina, still asleep in the bedroom. So close, yet so far away.

The night before, she’d made her position very clear, quoting the order’s unwritten principle:
No emotional attachments on the job
. He’d retreated to the sofa, knowing better than to push her.

He’d wait another hour or so before waking her, he decided. She could do with the rest. In the meantime he switched on the television, hit mute and scrolled through to the weather channel. A synoptic chart filled the screen. Digital data streamed across the bottom.

SYDNEY. Hot and humid conditions throughout the day. Top temp 30 degrees Celsius. Humidity 87 percent.

Southerly change forecast at 7 p.m. Strong wind warning for coastal regions. Up to 30 knots from the south-east.

Heavy rain expected tonight. Rough seas. Swell 3 metres and building.

The New Year’s Eve fireworks on the Sydney Harbour Bridge will go ahead, regardless of weather conditions.

The first round at 9 p.m.

The final extravaganza on the stroke of midnight.

He turned the television off, then walked across the thick beige carpet toward the heavy curtains over the windows and drew them back. The floor-to-ceiling glazing revealed a spectacular view. The rising sun threw a pale pink and yellow dawn over the battleship-grey bridge and the glistening wavelike white sails of the Sydney Opera House.

As far as cities went, Sydney was close to his favorite. The beauty of the sparkling blue harbor and its emerald foreshores provided a soothing counterbalance to the close, crowded city with its cement, brick, concrete and sandstone.

As he looked out over the awakening harbor toward the open sea, footsteps padded behind him.

He turned.

Erina walked toward him from the bedroom wearing a long grey T-shirt and, from what he could see, little else. Her silky dark hair fell over her shoulders.

A rush of energy feathered up and down his spine.

“Any news from Djoran?” she asked.

He held the phone in front of her.

They stood in silence while Erina digested the information.

He forced his gaze from the swell of her breasts to the window and noticed three outside-broadcast vans parked under the bridge.

Sydney, eleven hours ahead of London and sixteen hours ahead of New York, was the first major city in the world to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and the party was televised live, globally. By midmorning a whole fleet of media vehicles would descend on the glittering harbor and set up their cameras to capture the explosive magic of the evening’s fireworks.

“So what’s first on the agenda?” Erina asked.

“You’re lining up the gear we need and I’ve got my meeting with Watto at 8.15 a.m.”

Last night he’d organized a meeting with John “Watto” Watson, an old friend from the Australian Federal Police. They needed backup, and Watto was one of the few government agents he trusted.

“You really want to involve the AFP?”

“I have to at least talk to him.”

“You know it’ll be their way or the highway.”

“We need a fallback position.”

“We’re not going to fail, Carter.”

“I agree. But to quote Djoran, I have faith in us and God, but it never hurts to hitch up the camel. You never know how things will play out.”

She looked at him but said nothing.

He turned to the window and watched a green and yellow ferry chug past the Opera House and gently dock at Circular Quay, the city’s bustling ferry terminal.

Erina moved to stand next to him, and their shoulders brushed.

After a few moments of silence she said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

He turned to face her. “About what? The camel?”

“You can never be sure how things will play out,” she said.

“True.”

After everything they’d been through in the last few days and the uncertainty of what lay ahead that evening, he’d never felt so drawn to another human being in his life. He sensed the same electric charge running through her. It was like an invisible force field drawing them together, the current becoming stronger with each passing moment.

But it wasn’t his place to make the first move.

She reached out her hand and caressed his bare shoulders. Her lips were moist and slightly parted.

“Remember what I said last night?” she asked.

“About what?”

“No emotional attachments on the job.”

She ran her hand over his chest, caressing the three-inch scar from an old knife wound above his right nipple.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve been thinking.”

He held his breath. “Uh huh.”

Her fingers slid down toward his stomach. “I’m beginning to see it as more of a guideline than a rule.”

3

Shortly after dawn Alex Botha, aka Abdul-Aleem, stood alone on the narrow open-air observation deck on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s south-west pylon, nearly three hundred feet above sea level. He was waiting for his phone to ring.

Inside the pylon he’d set up an electronic blocking device that jammed any telecommunications transmissions, ensuring there’d be no breaches of security. If Carter or anyone who came with him entered the pylon, they’d be unable to call for help. He’d turn the device off when he needed to contact Samudra.

The incoming call would confirm two things: whether Samudra was laying out the trap for Carter and Erina they’d agreed on, and whether Alex would have the bank check for the $250,000 owed to him when they met later that night on board Samudra’s boat.

He looked out across the harbor, feeling the excitement rise in his chest. The start of a hunt always stirred up his fighting juices. And this was personal, promising the sweetness of revenge.

Part of the reason he’d hung around Samudra for so long was his deep longing to see the order, and Carter and Thomas in particular, pay for their sins. He’d reached out to them for help in his darkest hour and they’d left him rotting in that stinking Indonesian prison, facing execution.

The order was full of self-righteous arseholes who’d used him and then discarded him, just because he’d needed to earn a little extra money to pay for his drugs. They’d cut him no slack whatsoever.

He patted down the dark grey T-shirt and black trousers he wore for the occasion. A jihadist cell with affiliations to the bikie gang Soldiers for Allah had supplied him and his men with the uniforms worn by the Australian Tactical Response Unit.

The uniform’s jacket and body armor were hanging in the storeroom behind him, where Putu and Zaheed, his two best men, were resting.

Three members of the bikie gang and a clan member living in Sydney had smuggled them in at midnight the previous evening. Their contacts within harbor security had proved invaluable.

He extracted a cigarette from his coat pocket, clicked his silver zippo lighter and inhaled, drawing the warm vapor deep into his lungs.

His idea of prayer and meditation.

A martyr’s death wouldn’t be his fate that day or any other. That dubious reward belonged to the Putus and Zaheeds of the world. Later that night they’d be wired with explosives, guarding the pylon with their lives until their scheduled date with oblivion at midnight. Theirs was a crucial role. When the explosives they wore were detonated, it would set off a chain reaction, triggering the charges they had laid on the bridge.

To Alex it seemed a complete waste of resources to expend such highly trained and experienced mujaheddin on a suicide bombing. They’d been blooded in the battlefields of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but now they were on a mission from which there’d be no return.

As far as Samudra was concerned, of course, there were a million more where they came from. And for the two fanatical mujaheddin, jihad would be the defining act of their lives.

Naive fools.

That anyone would want to kill themselves or anyone else in the name of God made no sense to him whatsoever.

Never had, never would.

Fortunately for him, as a westerner with elite training in the order, Samudra considered him too valuable to sacrifice or doublecross. Though his commitment to jihad had been nothing more than a means to escape execution and exact revenge on Carter and Thomas, there was only one Alex Botha, only one Abdul-Aleem, and even though Samudra despised him, he also recognized his great value to his cause.

The two of them would witness the results of their carefully prepared plan together, sharing the rewards of all the work they’d put in. At 11.30 p.m. he’d use the hang-glider already in position on the gun deck above him to join Samudra on his launch moored in the harbor, ten minutes away. They’d detonate the bombs from there on the stroke of midnight before making their escape. It’d be a sweet moment.

His phone vibrated in his trouser pocket.

Samudra’s familiar voice sounded over the line. “Is everything ready?”

“Of course,” Alex said. “We placed twenty-seven charges at the crucial structural points on the bridge late last night. That’s nearly ninety pounds of high explosive. I don’t know if it’ll bring the bridge down, but it’ll create an almighty mess.”

“Excellent. God is indeed great.”

“Has the truck for the tunnel been prepared for the secondary attack?”

“I said it will be done and so it shall.”

“What about the trap for Carter and Erina? Is that being laid as arranged?” Alex asked.

Alex knew Samudra hated being questioned, but he believed in checking and rechecking every detail. It was what would bring them success that night. He didn’t want to give Samudra any reason not to pay him.

“It shall come to pass,” Samudra said. “But remember, we kill our enemies to exact God’s vengeance, not our own. There is a difference between divine justice and man’s.”

“Of course,” Alex said, happy to let Samudra occupy the moral high ground.

“We’ll talk again in two hours,” Samudra told him.

There was a pause over the line.

“There’s one more thing,” Alex said. “You have my check as promised?”

“I said you shall receive what you are owed when the job is done. I am a man of my word. Allah akbar.”

Alex smiled. “Allah akbar.”

The phone went dead.

He flicked the remnants of his cigarette over the side of the pylon.

It was all proving too easy.