Sword of Allah (33 page)

Federal Agent Jenny Tadzic knew something majorly wrong was going on. The reports from the various state police forces up and down the east coast were deeply concerning. There was a large batch of killer heroin on the streets and people were dropping like flies – schoolteachers, solicitors, executives. It was times like this that Tadzic could see just how pervasive heroin was. It had infiltrated all levels of society, from the top down and the bottom up. She rifled through the folders, picked one at random and skimmed it. Two women dead in a photographer’s studio. The women were well off, pretty, everything going for them. Why? Why get hooked into mainlining smack? Doctors, builders, journalists were dying from hotshots alongside the homeless and other long-time users. And Tadzic had absolutely nothing with which to counter the menace. Her department – the whole organisation – was out-gunned and outmanoeuvred. Eventually the supply would dry up and the deaths would stop, but in the meantime the drug was cutting a swath through the community as effectively as a new virus. She closed the reports and sat back in her chair, overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness.

And then there was the whole Angie thing. The girl had seemingly disappeared off the planet, as had her boyfriend. The DEA still hadn’t found their man either. The world was a shitful place.

The
Sword of Allah
waited at the end of the runway. Hendra had calculated that the runway itself was too short for the drone, when fully loaded with its payload and fuel, to gain enough ground speed for takeoff unless the breeze was fresh and exactly onshore. That, Hendra had warned, would be a rare occurrence indeed, due to a number of factors he’d learned since becoming a meteorological expert. But Hendra also promised those factors were a minor setback.

Duat took him at his word. Had the man not developed an electronic brain for the drone that made it fly as if an invisible pilot was at the controls? That in itself was miraculous. Duat cast his eye over the aircraft as Hendra and his young assistant wheeled it from the hangar. The
Sword of Allah
was considerably larger than any of the aircraft Hendra had been testing to date. And it was certainly in far better shape now than when it had arrived in a box crate from Latakia, Syria. It had been delivered in pieces, the whole roughly cut up with a saw. Looking at it now, that was difficult to believe. What had Hendra said? He’d used carbon fibre and Kevlar obtained from shipwrights in Denpasar to rebuild the wing’s mainspar and fuselage.
He said he’d avoided using aircraft technology so as to keep the questions to a minimum.

Duat ran his fingertips lightly over a wing. He could barely feel the join. ‘Hendra, you are a wizard,’ he said. ‘Babu Islam owes you a great debt.’

‘Thank you, Emir.’

‘May Allah reward you amply.’

Hendra smiled. For the moment, appreciation from Duat was reward enough.

A catapult had been rigged up using a spare outboard motor and it had yet to be tested on the drone itself. A sleigh on skids had been used to determine the loads it was capable of dragging and that had certainly been promising. But a test with the
Sword of Allah
itself? That had had to be postponed a number of times due to monsoonal activity, but a break in the weather saw the morning dawn with a grey slate sky that turned blue as the orange ball of the sun climbed out of the sea.

The test Hendra was conducting, he’d explained, would not provide all the answers because the
Sword of Allah
would not be weighed down with its payload or full fuel tanks. If it took off fully loaded, Hendra calculated that it would not then have enough runway on which to land before ploughing into the rocks at the far end. The test was merely to investigate the effectiveness of the catapult, and the drone’s stability as it accelerated down the runway.

Duat had listened to all this and his appreciation transformed into impatience. The suicide squads were trained, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim had prepared the canisters for insertion in the drone and all, except for the drone itself, was ready. How much more time would Hendra
need? And there was a worrisome development within the encampment. A sickness was spreading. Duat himself was having trouble keeping food down. Rahim was no longer capable of work, and his assistant had taken to bed. Indeed, Rahim had become a slave to the white powder and it was doubtful that he would live beyond another two weeks, a race underway between the drug and the cancers that had spread throughout his body, each vying to end his life. But most disturbing of all was the growing certainty that it was only a matter of time before the authorities discovered the location of the encampment.

It had been a couple of weeks since the news media in Australia and the US had announced that the CIA had hunted down the man suspected of being the principal planner behind the US Embassy bombing, Kadar Al-Jahani. Duat thanked Allah that Kadar had been killed rather than taken prisoner and interrogated. But then Duat had seen his own face on news broadcasts linking him with Kadar and the embassy bombing. Duat had laughed at the likeness, making light of his notoriety for the benefit of the men but, privately, he was more than a little concerned. Time was running out. The question was, did they have weeks, days or hours? He’d checked the bank accounts via the Internet. If the infidels were close, they would be frozen. To Duat’s relief, he still had access to them, although there appeared to be considerably less money in them than he’d thought. The money from the heroin sales was being deposited. Perhaps their banker in Sydney was getting greedy. If so, he would have to be killed and a replacement found.

The sound of the outboard motor screaming at full
power and the noisy spooling of the cable onto a drum brought Duat abruptly back to the present. He looked down the runway. The
Sword of Allah
was accelerating quickly and then, suddenly, it appeared to go almost straight up like a missile. The cable fizzed as it snaked through a metal guide and, when the drone was overhead, Hendra yelled, ‘Now!’ Unang flicked a lever that set the motor’s gearbox to neutral. The sudden release of tension on the cable allowed its hook to release from the drone. The aircraft’s Rotax engine was now on its own. Through a remote control box, Hendra set the aircraft on a slow turn over the water and lined it up on the runway. The test was a success.

‘Hendra, we launch in two weeks. Pray for a break in the weather,’ Duat said, turning away. Convulsions gripped his stomach. He stumbled into the scrub and vomited.

‘Well, how does the seed grow, my friend?’

‘(static)…a sapling that grows daily. Soon it will be a large tree that bears fruit…(static)’

‘(static)…heard all this before…(static)…will be edible? There have been attempts in the past to cultivate this area profitably…(static)’

‘(static)…and so is the climate today. Also, as you know, caring for the tree as it grows takes money…(static)’

‘Allah be praised.’

‘As I said, there would be a lot of money to be made…(static)…expert banker in Sydney…’

Ferallo read through the transcript from Kadar Al-Jahani’s meeting in Rome. It was redolent with double meaning, especially now with the benefit of hindsight. But a trail to the terrorists’ encampment still eluded them. Where were these bastards hiding? The men Kadar had met with at the coffee shop had all died in the battle in which Kadar had been captured. The phone on Ferallo’s desk rang. She picked it up impatiently. ‘I’m sorry but didn’t I ask to have my calls held?…I know, everyone says they’re important…Okay, okay, put her through. Sorry, before you go, what’s her name? Skye Reinhardt? And she’s from the Manila bureau, you say?’

Jenny Tadzic’s internal alarm bells were ringing loud and clear. Angie was now long overdue. Foreign Affairs confirmed that she had entered Thailand – which Tadzic knew anyway because of the postcards – but could not confirm that she had departed Thailand. Tadzic’s suspicion that Angie had crossed illegally into Myanmar via one of the innumerable drug trails and trekked to General Trip’s fields had hardened into firm belief. If she was right, Angie was dead.

But that was not her only worry. Reports were still coming in from police forces up and down the east coast that even more of the killer heroin had flooded the market. The death toll from it was frighteningly high, and increasing.
Word on the street was that the heroin had been dumped in Australia, which also brought the cost of a hit way down and increased the market penetration. Someone obviously wanted to make a quick buck. Tests revealed that this heroin had unbelievably high levels of purity, up around seventy to eighty percent compared to the usual twenty percent. This made it lethal, addicts unwittingly giving themselves massive, deadly doses. Customs had no idea how the drug was getting in because, as one particularly testy agent had told her, ‘If we knew how it was getting in, we’d bloody stop it, wouldn’t we?’ Tadzic had to admit, she was getting desperate. The phone rang. ‘Hello, Jenny Tadzic, T triple C.’ The voice down the line was unfamiliar.

‘Hello, Jenny. We’ve met. Gia Ferallo, CIA,’ said the voice through the phone.

‘Yes, Ms Ferallo. I remember. How goes it?’

‘Good. Call me Gia. I hate the “Miz” thing – sounds like it’s short for “miserable”. What are you doing tomorrow morning? Care to spend the day up in Sydney?’

Tadzic listened intently for the next five minutes, without saying a word. When she finally hung up, her palms were sweating and her heart was beating against her ribs. This was the break they’d been praying for.

The royal suite at the Shangri-La on Sydney Harbour suited Jeff Kalas’s idea of the idyllic lifestyle: luxury,
exclusivity, and service. The bedroom was vast, three times the size of any he had slept in before, and beautifully furnished in the modern, comfortable style. A huge plate-glass window filled with the golden light of the sun’s first rays, and it framed the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge rearing up like a rampant steel monster. He lay on the vast bed and stretched out, feeling like a king.

The suite was deliciously quiet. No screaming at recalcitrant teenagers to get up and get dressed. No mutt to walk. No wife to avoid. Being single was absolute bliss. The blast of a horn from a large cruise ship departing the quay below managed to penetrate the room’s soundproofing.

Kalas had walked out on his family after eighteen years of marriage, taking nothing. What did he care? He could buy anything he wanted now, anyway. Just to reassure himself that his life had finally changed for the better, Kalas reached under his bed, pulled out the PowerBook, and pressed the on button. He had configured the laptop to automatically connect to the Internet. This new wireless chip set was worth it, he told himself. And then he laughed out loud.
Worth it?
The vast sums of money he had recently acquired had utterly repositioned his sense of worth. Hardship was a thing of the past.

The appropriate icon began flashing, indicating connection. He keyed in the site he wanted to visit: First Lucerne. A few more keystrokes and Kalas was reviewing his account balance. He started to quietly hum a children’s song, one he used to sing to his when they were little:
The king was in the counting-house counting out his money. The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey
…He gave a sigh of satisfaction when all those beautiful zeros
materialised. He flipped the lid down on the laptop, sending the computer to sleep, and slid it back under the bed.

His bag was packed. All he had to do was shower, have breakfast and then catch the Philippine Airlines flight to Manila. He closed his eyes and conjured a picture of Skye in a state of suitable undress. He smiled to himself. Life and love were now as one. He was the luckiest man he knew.

The doorbell rang. It was loud, installed to be responded to rather than ignored. The sound ripped him out of his daydream. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, annoyed. He swung his legs off the bed and put his arms into the thick terry towelling robe provided. Somehow, they’d managed to embroider his initials – what did they call that, his ‘monogram’? – onto the pocket. The doorbell rang again, impatiently. ‘Coming, coming,’ he said as he walked past the grand piano and ran his finger down the keys.

Kalas looked through the peephole. He saw a young, Italian-looking woman in a maid’s outfit. She was standing behind a tray covered with various silver domes.

‘Room service,’ she said.

Kalas hadn’t ordered anything, but he shrugged that off. Perhaps breakfast came with the room and he hadn’t been told. ‘Okay, hang on,’ he said. He tied the robe to cover his nakedness. If the waitress was pretty – and he suspected she was but the lens in the peephole distorted the view – perhaps he’d ask her to have breakfast with him? In the jacuzzi. He smiled at his own bravado. It was amazing what five mill’ and counting could do for a man’s confidence, he told himself.

He turned the handle slightly, clicking off the lock, and
suddenly the door rushed at him like a runaway refrigerator. The impact smashed his nose and catapulted him back into the room, where he landed with a thud on the floor. The air was punched out of his lungs and he clutched at his throat, choking for breath. Kalas opened his eyes and blinked at the collection of black-masked bug-eyes hovering over him. Muzzles and underslung torches of Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine pistols waved small circles above the bleeding mass of his nose. Knees firmly planted on his chest were making it impossible for him to recover his breath. Another three black-clad soldiers jumped over him and quickly checked the suite.

‘Clear!’ The call was repeated as each room was found to be empty.

‘Area secured,’ said the leader of the squad, the black muzzles remaining trained on Kalas’s frightened, bloody face.

Gia Ferallo stepped through the door. She removed the French maid’s bonnet from her hair and loosened the belt cinched tight around her narrow waist. While the antiterrorist squad was AFP, Federal Agent Tadzic’s men, the official arrest was made by a couple of ASIO agents gladly provided by the D-G himself, Peter Meyer. ASIO, the agency charged with handling terror threats inside Australia, had been given the power to hold people thought to have links to terrorists or terrorist organisations for up to seven days without charging them. They’d need that time to sort out exactly what Kalas was up to, and take him out of circulation. The ASIO men came through the door and slapped the cuffs on the financier. ‘Jeff Kalas, you are held on suspicion of having terrorist
links. You will be detained for a period of no greater than seven days pending the laying of charges. You may have a lawyer present and so…’

Yadda, yadda, thought Ferallo. What counted was that they had the bastard. He was the best lead, perhaps their only lead, to Duat and the weapon.

Federal Agent Tadzic, the officer in charge, stepped through the door behind Ferallo. ‘So this is what a financier of terrorism looks like?’ she said. Kalas lay at their feet, the robe up around his waist, white buttocks sitting in a puddle of yellow urine.

Annabelle was alone in her apartment, having a night at home. She had a shower and sat on her couch with a glass of wine and turned on the TV. The prime minister’s department had rung the network in the morning and requested time for an urgent broadcast. The time they requested was six o’clock. Prime time. News time. No one knew what it was about, although the network head of news had been ferreting about all day checking sources in Canberra, trying to find out. The best he could manage was that the news was going to be bad. But that was a given. A PM never made an all-station broadcast out of the blue unless an unbelievable sporting milestone had been achieved, or something dire was in the wind.

It was unseasonably cold and rainy outside. Annabelle sat on the couch in her dressing gown with her drink and waited for a mindless quiz show to come to an end. The unspoken fear within her was that the PM was about to announce a military catastrophe, and that somehow Tom
would be amongst the victims. Her imagination had been playing with that thought all day. She went home early, sick. How had she allowed her relationship with Tom to implode? The engagement was off, she’d terminated it, handed back the ring. She’d told him that it was his job she couldn’t cope with. She’d also told him she didn’t want to go to Sydney. And that was a lie. In fact, she did want to go. Was that the real reason for the end of their relationship? Her selfishness? How quickly the emptiness of that choice had hit her. Was the career – he
r
career – so important it transcended everything else? Was reading the news in Sydney such a pinnacle that she was prepared to sacrifice everything – even the man she loved – to gain it? Or did she just miss Tom so much she was blaming herself for the break-up?

And then there was Saunders. They had been on their way to a charity benefit when Saunders stopped at his apartment, claiming he wanted to dash up and get his chequebook. He asked her to come up rather than remain in the car. A thunderstorm was about to break and Annabelle hadn’t wanted to sit alone in the car in an innercity neighbourhood she knew nothing about. Big mistake. She should have taken her chances with the weather and the muggers. She’d used the bathroom and when she came out, Saunders was sitting on the couch, naked, with his erection in hand. She’d laughed at him and asked simply, ‘What are you doing?’ To which he’d said, ‘What does it look like, sweetie? Time to pay your dues.’
Sweetie?!
Annabelle had laughed at him again, picked up her coat and walked out. Things had been strained at the station ever since. She’d even heard Saunders refer to her as a ‘hick’.
Rumours about their evening together had swept the station and it was only then that Annabelle realised how truly unpopular Saunders was. He’d tried the same stunt with most of the women at the network at one time or another.

‘Don’t worry, honey,’ said one of the other women Saunders had failed to score with. ‘There’ll be a new female employee along next week and he’ll forget about you the moment she walks through the front door. And besides, his ego’s so big that in a month he’ll remember the incident differently – that
you’d
come across and that
he
was awesome.’ They’d both laughed about that. Apparently, being cornered by Saunders was something of an initiation rite. The women in the office had been waiting to see how she’d handle it before warming to her, and she’d come through with flying colours. Sydney was one tough town.

On the television set in front of her, the game show host flashed an impossibly white set of teeth at the camera as the plump contestant, who looked like she was smuggling pillows under her tight sweater, bounced up on stage and squeezed into the new car she’d just won. The credits rolled, the theme music played, and then a cut was made to the network’s logo. A voice said, ‘The six o’clock news will be presented after the prime minister’s address to the nation.’ The logo remained on screen for several pregnant seconds before being replaced by the head and shoulders of Prime Minister William Blight.

Annabelle Gilbert wasn’t sure what she thought about Blight. He was a larrikin, a former heavy drinker who had, at one time, been a union boss on the waterfront. She
hadn’t heard any off-putting rumours about him, which was unusual for a politician, but she didn’t trust him – not wholly, anyway. Was it possible for a truly good man to become the prime minister in modern politics when so much of their personality was manufactured and moulded by spin doctors? Answer: no. Blight seemed to buck that belief to some extent, but when it came down to it, Annabelle guessed she just didn’t trust politicians.

She examined his face. It was deeply lined. He was a harried man and looked like he’d aged ten years since coming to power at the last election, only a year ago. It was an honest face, though – craggy and avuncular at the same time. Annabelle turned the volume up and prepared herself for the worst.

‘People of Australia,’ he began. ‘Recent intelligence has come to light indicating a threat to our country and our way of life. This intelligence is not by any means certain but my government – in all good conscience – could not take the risk of keeping it quiet for reasons that will quickly become apparent.

‘A terrorist group known as Babu Islam, hiding within the Indonesian archipelago, has in its possession an unknown quantity of a deadly nerve agent called VX. They also, according to our sources, have a drone – an unmanned plane – capable of delivering this weapon of mass destruction to a target that – again – is unknown to us at this time.

‘We believe it is quite possible, however, that the terrorists are capable of reaching our northern population centres. As such, we have declared a state of emergency and have instructed the legislature of the Northern Territory,
along with the Australian Defence Force, to begin the evacuation of Darwin forthwith.’

Annabelle Gilbert, like the overwhelming majority of Australians watching their TV sets, listened in utter disbelief. She realised her mouth was open, literally gaping. There had to be some mistake. Surely it was a hoax?

‘…Indonesia is also at risk, with several population centres – including Jakarta, a city of ten million souls – a possible target, and the president of that country is making a similar broadcast to his people at this time.

‘Again, I stress to you, our knowledge of the precise details of the terrorists’ cowardly and brutal plans are uncertain. What is certain, however, is that action must be taken immediately to prevent what could be a human tragedy on a monumental scale.

‘I urge those of you in the southern regions of Australia who have friends or relatives in Darwin to open your house to them. We are calling now on the true Australian spirit of helping one another. Those of you who do not have friends or relatives in Darwin but would like to assist, we will, within the next few hours, have a billeting register set up.

‘The Australian Defence Force, in conjunction with our American allies, will be distributing limited numbers of protective clothing called NBC suits, at several dispersal sites in and around Darwin. The location of those sites will be announced within the hour. The people of Darwin, you are already seeing an increased presence of the ADF on your streets. The soldiers will be there to set up field hospitals and decontamination centres, as well as assisting the police to keep the evacuation orderly.

‘I will also take this opportunity to ask all people who are current members of the Army Reserve to report to your units.

‘If, for whatever reason, you are unable to leave Darwin, there are a number of preventative measures you can take to protect yourself against VX, and over the course of the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be relying on the television networks and newspapers to provide this information.’

The remainder of the prime minister’s address only dimly penetrated Annabelle Gilbert’s shock. The network’s normal programming returned and the anchor, whom she’d only met once, appeared to be visibly shaken. Producers and researchers would be on the phones and the Internet, frantically chasing down further information on VX gas, Babu Islam, unmanned drones and, of course, the reaction of the people in Darwin and Jakarta to the news of this latest terrorist threat. Annabelle stared at the television as her home phone, mobile and pager rang and beeped away in the background. Eventually, she picked up the mobile.

‘Annabelle, hi. Steve Saunders,’ said the voice down the line.

‘Steve,’ she said distantly, her mind still grappling with the prime minister’s words.

‘Are you watching TV?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you saw the prime minister’s speech?’