Redback (8 page)

Jesse-Jay saw the orange fog-lights reflecting all spooky-like off what was left of the misty
morning, and then the small convoy crested the rise on the road at the border of his land.

He hit the Star Brigade icon to save Level 8 of his
Global WarTek
game and switched off
his TekBox. It was time for the real game to begin.

'Wake up Kero,' he said, slapping the guy on the chest. 'We got important company. The Colonel's
here.'

Tokyo, Japan
Tuesday 8.20 pm

Scott had squeezed behind 11 noodle-eaters arrayed along the inside counter,
avoided a knife-waving chef and his 'you no go that way' and collided with a kid hauling a box of
fish - and he was still about 20 feet from the back door which had just slammed shut in front of
him. He apologised in several languages - none of them Japanese - to the two old women still
startled by the previous invader of their back room, then wrenched open the door and threw himself
into a badly lit laneway.

There was no sign of Kaisha. There
was
a faulty flickering light; of course. Scott swore in frustration.

So, it's dark
. He waited.

Light, dark, light. And it's confined, dark, light and cluttered and dark
.

Scott turned away from the nearest dead-end and headed for the only obvious way out.

Man! Forget the bald gaijin on blades. Sumo-sized Yakuza dudes are gonna get you here, you moron.

And then, 50 feet from the neon-lit safety of a crowded wet Tokyo street, they did just that.

A strong hand grabbed him by the scruff of his suede jacket and yanked him backwards through a
doorway, into the very dark, and onto his arse.

Kingston Club, London
Tuesday 12.10 pm

This is exactly what I'm talking about,' Edward 'Teddy' Drake announced waving at
the muted television. 'This situation in the Pacific is a perfect example of how a truly
international, highly-mobile armed force, given the right mandate, could be deployed to rescue
hostages or take out insurgents.'

The breaking news banner:
Laui Island, 36 hostages, 9th day, PRA rebels, high-level meeting in
New Zealand
was streaming across the bottom of the screen. The attention of Britain's new
Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had been caught by the promo for an impending live
update.

Drake turned to his companions in the Club's Tudor Room. 'A multi-national force with
international jurisdiction could deal with specific terrorist threats like that one, wherever they
occur.'

'You mean like NATO?' Ministerial Advisor Peter Ebrey said.

'No. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is not really much use in the South Pacific, Peter.'

'He said
like
NATO, Teddy, and you know bloody well what he means,' said Richard Thorpe.

As head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, Thorpe was technically
Edward Drake's subordinate, but there no disrespect in his tone. The two men had been friends for 30
years - in as much as spies from rival departments could ever make that claim. Besides, here in the
exclusive Kingston Club, position held no sway, especially a position that was only a week old. And
while both Thorpe and Drake had been contenders, the latter's confirmation as JIC Chairman had been
a forgone conclusion. He'd been 'acting' in the top job since his predecessor's strange and untimely
death.

'But who would actually sign up for this international force?'

'Any country, you know, that we approve. Oh, now here's an idea,' Drake said. 'This force could
be open for direct recruitment.'

'Isn't that how the French Foreign Legion works?' said Adam Lyall, the only American in the
group. 'Great idea, Teddy, let's train jilted criminals to fight terrorists.'

Drake smiled and shook his head at the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State. 'I meant direct
recruitment from other armed forces, not straight off the street, Adam.'

'So, back to Peter's question,' Lyall said. 'Who would agree to have their own jurisdiction
trampled by an armed force that could arbitrarily cross borders on the pretext of routing out a few
terrorists?'

'You Americans do that kind of trampling all the time,' Thorpe said and allowed himself a brief
laugh.

'Well yeah,' Lyall agreed, 'but, just like you guys, we cross those borders in secret, at night.
And we try to do it without noticeably compromising anyone's sovereignty or hurting anyone's damn
feelings.'

'What about the United Nations?' It was Ebrey again.

Lyall and Thorpe exchanged amused glances. 'He is young,' Thorpe observed.

Ebrey ignored the dig, 'I just don't get why you're trying to reinvent the wheel.'

'You are aware that we're just shooting the breeze here, Peter?' Thorpe said.

'Speak for yourself, Richard. I'm serious about this,' Drake stated. 'Ever since those Titan
Guards luckily, but accidentally, saved the Australian, Indian and Canadian Prime Ministers from
being snipered at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting last year, I've been mulling over the
creation of an international kind of SAS troop or police force.'

'But why create a new army,' Ebrey said. 'Isn't that what the UN peacekeeping forces already
do?'

'Only in their wet dreams,' Drake said. 'Sending little packs of soldiers to stand around in
foreign trouble spots and not engage the enemy, unless it lobs a grenade at their feet, is not what
I'm talking about. Peacekeepers are only useful after the fact. What's more, as you well know, UN
forces only get convened from whichever country wants to volunteer a couple of soldiers for duty in
that place, at that time, for that mission.'

A derisive snort accompanied Lyall's cigar smoke. 'That's assuming the UN can make up its
collective mind to do anything at all.'

'Forget the UN,' Drake insisted. 'I'm not talking about keeping the peace. I mean, how can you
keep something that simply doesn't exist in a war zone? And, as we all know, terrorists do not
confine their acts to war zones. What I'm talking about here is instant action, perhaps even
pre-emptive ball-busting.'

Drake's companions laughed; partly because his fighting words matched neither his placid tone nor
his chubby school-boy appearance, but mostly because they were at odds with his usual position.

'Since when are you in favour of the guns-blazing form of diplomacy?' Thorpe asked.

'Despite malicious rumours to the contrary,' Drake said, acknowledging their reaction with good
humour, 'every now and then I do get the urge to take the fight to their front door.'

'You Teddy?' Thorpe mocked. 'You've always been fervidly opposed to any overseas commitment.'

'And I will forever argue against wasting our troops, en masse, overseas if it compromises our
domestic safety,' Drake said. 'But imagine having a small, specifically-trained force that could be
aimed at the heart of the problem, one that could be dispatched to cut off the head of that damn
regenerating serpent whenever, or wherever, it emerges from its bolt hole.'

'Now who's dreaming,' Thorpe remarked. 'You'd never get that level of international cooperation.'

'Isn't it time we worked to change that, instead of assuming it's impossible?' Drake said. 'I
tell you, my friends, our own bureaucracy is the greatest unintentional ally these terrorists have.
While we sit twiddling our proverbials, they're out there ready to blow theirs clean off just to get
the job done. We don't have a chance against them until we can find a way to play their game. Isn't
that so Adam?'

As much as Lyall agreed with the idea, it was too soon to go too public against his own Commander
in Chief's sorry alternative. So, resisting the urge to concur with Drake's apparently-sudden
innovative solution to fighting terrorism, he trotted out his usual, 'I've been saying for years we
need a dedicated force to deal with those bastards.'

'But that is not what your boss is advocating, is it?' Thorpe baited the lanky Virginian. 'Tell
us again what the POTUS will be putting to the PM tomorrow?'

'Dick,' Lyall said, 'you know perfectly well that Garner is still flogging that dead-horse of
his. He's got a new name for it, but it's the same massive and unwieldy concept of a full-time but
high-rotation Coalition army - to be headed by us, naturally.'

'Which is why it won't happen,' Ebrey said. 'We're over agreeing to everything your big guy
wants.'

Lyall nodded. 'Problem is, my guy doesn't seem to get it that no one - especially in the
already-free world - likes being told what to do by someone who just thinks he knows best.'

'On top of which,' Thorpe said, 'having thousands of troops holed- up in permanent forts located
only in the world's so-called hot spots is akin to offering them up for terrorist target practice.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the bastards will simply attack everywhere there are no troops.'

'Hey, why not start with those Titan Guards,' Lyall suggested. 'A British-American company
employing the best ex-enlisted from Australia, Canada and South Africa, means they're already multi-
national. They proved their, I suppose you'd call it honour, by acting decisively and beyond the
call of money when they saved those Prime Ministers in Delhi last June, which I gather they did,
just because they could. That in itself was amazing for a bunch of mercenaries. Let's turn them into
your army.'

'Now you are being ridiculous,' Thorpe said, nodding thanks to the waiter who'd arrived with
fresh drinks. 'Those ex-soldiers - ex being the operative word - are no different to the countless
other security firms that have been operating in Iraq over the last too-many years. Granted many of
those private armies, personal protection firms, special-forces units and spies for hire - like
Acorn, Carrington, Black- water, Aegis, Greystone, HarkerFleet and the Titan Guards - have been
doing the work no one else can, or wants to do. But so many others like them, or unlike them, have
been working under the radar in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and the Gulf States, running drugs, selling
arms, and getting very rich.'

'Yes, yes; they've been doing the same in Morocco, Somalia, Central America, Colombia, you name
it,' Drake said, distracted by a new image on the BBC World channel. 'That's why we'd need to start
our Inter-Force from scratch.'

'Inter-Force, Teddy? You've even named it,' Ebrey noted.

'Can we have the sound up on the tele please, Robert?' Drake asked the waiter. 'And the lunch
menu.'

The much touted live hostage update involved a split-screen showing a correspondent on a beach,
somewhere, and the TV anchor in a studio somewhere else. The reporter was talking about the ongoing
discussions in Wellington while waving pointlessly at the dark Pacific horizon, allegedly in the
direction of Laui Island where 'the PLA was still holding 36 hostages'.

Oh yeah, thought US Deputy Secretary of State Lyall, who knew otherwise. So much for the latest
news. He, and the one man in the room he'd told about Kelman and the scheduled SEAL raid on Laui,
knew that as of two hours ago the situation on that tiny spec in the Pacific Ocean would have to be
quite different to the 'no end in sight' claimed by the reporter.

Adam Lyall also knew that the fallout from that mission would change everything, though not
exactly in the way he'd imagined.

HMAS Harris, Pacific Ocean
Tuesday 11.30 pm

'Can you describe this foreign soldier?'

'They were all bloody foreign,' Alan said. 'It was a Polynesian Island, not a Barrier Reef
resort.'

'The stray foreigner - amongst the
locals
,' Jana stressed, 'was a white guy with cropped
red hair. He was maybe six-two and wearing neat black fatigues, but not an army-type uniform. It
looked more like SWAT gear.'

'I didn't see anyone,' Alan stated.

'You were too busy asserting your - self, Alan.'

Alan glared at Jana before turning back to the studious-looking ASIS agent, John Brand. 'I did
hear Ifran talking just before we entered but when we did, the guy was alone.'

Agent Brand nodded. 'Tell me about the equipment.'

'Let me think. He had a TV, a video recorder with the Sky News tape he wanted us to watch, a
laptop.' Alan waggled his head, as if trying to shake more information loose, then shrugged.

Jana wondered, and not for the first time, how a person as unobservant as Alan had ever got
beyond copyboy, let alone become host of a top current affairs show.

'There were several laptops,' she corrected, hesitating as the cabin door opened to admit
Commander Gideon. Brand took no notice of her entrance and Alan didn't notice she had, so Jana
continued.

'At least one laptop had a camera, you know so someone elsewhere could see Ifran, or whoever, on
Laui. The image on its screen was a room somewhere but it was static or maybe it was online, but
empty. There was a variety of other seriously high-tech gear, none of which I could name. And it was
all new, which struck me as very odd.'

'I dare say,' Brand agreed.

Alan simply stared at Jana as if he had no idea what she was on about, or on.

'I don't think the island itself was under their camera surveillance though,' Jana frowned.
'Which, in retrospect, is also quite strange.'

'He had his horde of ratbag soldiers for that, sweetheart.'

'True, Alan,' Jana agreed. 'But they can be taken out without raising the alarm. Cameras however,
would've given Ifran warning of any rescue attempt, even if his men had been killed or disabled.'

'Interesting,' Brand noted. 'Did you hear what Ifran and this red- haired soldier were talking
about?'

'I said I heard Ifran,' Alan interjected. 'I didn't mention any…'

'I was talking to Dr Rossi.'

'Oh.'

'What red-haired soldier?' Gideon asked.

The next moments of Alan's life proved to Jana something she'd only suspected: that some men are
too ridiculous to live.