Redback (39 page)

Jana stared at Ruth in astonishment. 'Your Redbacks?'

'Yes dear, my very own wonderful, talented, highly-skilled, team of professional retrieval
agents.'

'Do you recall what happened to Ruth's husband; to Jacob Rankin in the Philippines?' Triko
asked.

'Um, yes of course,' Jana frowned. 'He and two other men were kidnapped and held for ransom for
ages; for over a month.' She glanced sadly at Ruth, 'He didn't survive.'

'No, he did not. The only survivor was his friend, a Canadian expat by the name of Michael
Rafferty. Do you remember who rescued him?'

'The Canadians?' Jana suggested.

'Oh no; neither his government nor ours lifted a finger to get them back. There was a great deal
of diplomatic chin-wagging, huffing, puffing and chest beating, all of which added up to useless hot
air.'

'But, Jacob was ex-army; SASR to be precise,' Gideon explained. 'He served in Vietnam, and he had
a lot of friends.'

'And
we
had a lot of money,' Ruth said. 'So I called in favours from everywhere. From the
ranks of his old comrades-in-arms I found more than enough men who were willing to mount a rescue.
From the army and SAS itself, we secured equipment; and, as you know, we own our own airline.

'Despite our best efforts, however, the rescue party found them two days too late for my precious
Jacob; and only an hour too late for the other man with them, Harry Auburn. But they brought Michael
home safely. Although he returned to Canada, he couldn't settle. He felt both guilty to have
survived and blessed to have been rescued.'

'So,' Triko interjected, pouring another round of tea and coffee, 'this charming and
obscenely-wealthy Canadian comes back to Australia with a proposition for our Ms Jardine.'

'Thank you Triko,' Ruth said accepting the tea. 'Michael and I joined forces and set up a Trust
to finance what we thought would be the occasional need to rescue lost or stolen businesspeople,
tourists, or whoever, from foreign places.

'But you've no idea, Jana,' she threw up her hands, 'how many retrievals we organised in the
first two years alone. We confine our activities to Australians, Canadians and the rare Kiwi but,
even so, it seems there's no end to the trouble that our citizens get into abroad. Some of it is
self-induced. You know, travellers straying into remote areas they shouldn't; and then getting taken
hostage by Central American rebels or Peruvian paramilitary units who simply don't want their
whereabouts known.

'Most of our clients, however, are executives, engineers, construction workers and the like,
working in foreign countries - usually, but not always third world nations - who are specifically
kidnapped for ransom.'

'So you pay the ransom to collect them?'

'Sometimes,' Triko said. 'Sometimes we just collect them.'

'Like we did with you.' Gideon twirled her finger to speed things up. 'And, to cut a 15-year-long
story short…'

'Patience child,' Ruth reprimanded.

For the first time in nearly an hour, Jana wanted to laugh.
Child? Gideon?

'Our only full-time employee was Jacob's oldest friend, Eric Ryder; the man who had led the
unsuccessful bid to rescue him. At first Eric simply recruited personnel for each task and sent them
off to do it with whatever they needed.

'After two years, however, the dear man started to get positively demanding, claiming he needed
this, that and the other. You know, things like a permanent headquarters with all sorts of high-tech
equipment like GPS, intelligence-gathering systems, monitoring and communication devices. He wanted
dedicated aircraft and other vehicles, permanent overseas posts from which to supply and operate
missions, full time personnel, the works.' Ruth waved her hand back and forth as she spoke.

'Yeah, full-timers,' Triko waved, indicating his fellow Redbacks. 'And his key must-have recruit
was a certain Lieutenant Bryn Gideon, the first woman to come this close,' he squeezed his thumb and
index finger tightly together, 'to selection in the Special Air Services Regiment.'

Gideon gave a 'who'd have thought' shrug when Jana glanced her way.

'So before we knew it, an obscenely-wealthy Canadian and a ridiculously-rich Australian had an
enterprise on their hands that required nearly as much subterfuge as Her Majesty's Secret Service to
keep it functional.'

'By which she means, more artifice than employed by ASIO or ASIS,' Coop grinned.

Ruth spread her arms. 'The Redbacks came into being, Back Door was born, and the Helix Foundation
was created to cover the very existence of both. Back Door became our passion, Michael's and mine,
and it is still the one part of my vast empire that allows me to sleep peacefully at night. Helix,
however, soon took on a valid and valuable life of its own, of which I am also very proud.'

There was silence for a moment while everyone waited for Jana to speak, or leave.

'Well, I for one think that's a great story,' Coop finally said.

'So, I'm to do what - exactly?' Jana finally asked.

'Exactly what we talked about in Melbourne, Jana,' Ruth explained. 'Precisely what you and Lawan
Terat discussed yesterday. And sometimes - if you would like to join the team - some negotiating
tasks for the newly and specially-created position of Forward Scout with my Redbacks.'

'Oh,' Jana said. 'Okay.'

Peshawar, Pakistan
Monday 11.50 am

'Now there's a dopey bloody sport, if ever there was one,' Mudge said, as he and
Brody drove west on Khyber Road in slow pursuit, yet again, of Ashraf Majid and Bashir Kali. The
terrorist boys had been out early this morning: out and back, out and back again, to and from their
hotel as though they were connected to it with a super-long bungee cord. They'd visited friends, or
fellow conspirators, or aged uncles, or the Peshawar under 16s cricket team - the Australians had no
way of finding out, without giving themselves away. All they could do was follow, take photos,
follow and wait.

Kennedy had volunteered to check Ashraf's room at the Hotel Marhaba today. He'd been in twice so
far, and was probably there again right now.

'What's a dopey sport?' Brody asked, taking his eyes of the road for a moment - never a good idea
when driving anywhere on the subcontinent. He had to swerve to avoid the bejewelled Bedford truck
that wandered into his lane, and didn't get to see what Mudge was pointing at anyway.

'Polo,' Mudge replied. 'There's a bunch of Pakistani soldiers in that field back there, poncing
around on horses and chasing a ball with a long stick.'

'I wouldn't ever call those guys poncy. Way back in the dim dark, real men in this neck of the
woods played polo with the heads of their conquered enemies.'

'They're turning left again,' Mudge said pointing. He squirmed around on the front seat so he
could put his big feet up on the dash-board. 'I knew that, Spud, about the heads, I mean. Genghis
Khan's crew used to do that too.'

'Yeah? Well did you know,' Brody asked, taking the turn into Tariq Road, 'that the world's
highest polo ground is only a 12-hour drive from here? It's up on Shandur Pass in the Hindu Kush.
Every year they have this festival and a freestyle polo match that has almost no rules, Mudge. It's
an eternal grudge match apparently, between teams from Chitral and Gilgit; a bit like the Carlton
and Collingwood rivalry, only way older. Anyway Shandur is at 3700 metres and so bloody hard to get
to - if you're not rich or the President, and can just fly in - that a few of the
thousands
of people who trek in to watch it, die just trying to get there.' Brody slowed the car to a crawl
behind a horse-drawn cart but could see that Kali's motorbike was also held up.

'Where do you get all this info from?' Mudge asked.

'Books, Mudge. You should try them sometime. Like I read somewhere that Shandur Pass is on the
ridge between Heaven and the drop to Hell.'

'Yeah? Well you better hurry the hell up and hang a right between that corner and the truck, or
we'll lose these guys down Khalid Road. Not that we can't guess where they're bloody going, they've
only gone there 53 times already.'

Two minutes later Ashraf and Kali pulled the bike into a space, about 25 metres ahead, near the
same chai vendor's cart they'd already visited twice today; and hopped off to partake of yet more
tea. Brody backed their car in amongst others in front of Ali-Ali's Shoe Repair shop, also
again.

The attraction with the area was obvious, if Mudge and Brody were right about the American
Consulate being Atarsa Kára's probable objective. It was two blocks up Hospital Road on the
corner of Qasim. Although Brody was beginning to wonder if these blokes actually had a target, or a
plot, a plan or a clue. If, in fact, they were even in Peshawar to do anything besides play computer
games and drink chai.

'I'm getting attached to this street,' Mudge said. 'I might look for an apartment here.'

'Tell me about it,' Brody said. 'No don't.'

Brody was over it. Ever since last Wednesday, when they'd given Bamm-Bamm, and therefore the CIA,
the heads-up about the most-likely terrorist target, someone - from either their own Aussie Recon
Unit or the US Special Forces detachment - had been trawling this street looking for signs of
anything amiss. Their joint mission, Operation Northern Arrow, had gone on high alert, and security
at the Consulate itself had been quadrupled.

And then bugger-all out of the ordinary had happened. Except that he and Mudge spent a couple of
hours, twice a day, every day for nearly a week, dressed in tribal-type clothes, sitting in hot and
smelly car scratching their balls and talking shit.

Sometimes they had practised new ways to tie their turbans, sometimes they got out to stretch
their legs and watch Ali-Ali fix his footwear. But all that while, Ashraf and Kali simply, and
innocently, played chess at a table set up beside the chai cart.

Bamm-Bamm's boss, CIA Agent O'Leary, had passed on their intel about Ashraf and Kali and the
Atarsa Kára connection to the local Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence honcho. But
nothing, nada, zip and zilch had come of it. It seemed rumours about the questionable allegiance of
many of the ISI officers in this region were still true. That many were in league with the Taliban
and others was entirely possible; though they might claim any connection was 'open to
interpretation'.

In a historically violent, volatile and dangerous region, which shared a 2640 km border with
war-torn Afghanistan, and where the Pakistani government or military itself had virtually no
control, it was almost impossible to tell just who was who, let alone with whom they were
playing.

The wild, mountainous tribal regions of the frontier provinces provided safe havens and training
grounds for all the new enemies of the West, including any number of insurgents, militants,
warlords, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Northern Jihad, Atarsa Kára, and countless variations of
individuals like Ashraf and Kali.

One good and peaceful man in Peshawar who, say, spent his days mending people's shoes, might also
have a militant brother, a warlord cousin, a chai-selling father
and
a son in the
military.

'Um, what's he doing?' Mudge said from inside the car. 'He's never done that before. Spud! Are
you paying attention?'

'Yes, fool. He's crossing the road that's all…oh. Uh-oh. Shit!' Brody who'd been standing
on the road, leapt onto the bonnet of the car to get a better look at what Ashraf was up to.

Yes he was crossing the road, but he was also walking diagonally up it as he crossed. It looked
as though he was trying to lose himself in a sudden surge of traffic. Kali, meanwhile, had
kick-started the Yamaha and was doing a quick u-turn to follow him.

Brody dropped and slid off the bonnet. 'Start the car and follow me,' he said to Mudge, and then
took off across the road after Ashraf. In the same moment that he noticed that Kali had done another
u-turn - after only 20 metres - he also saw that Ashraf was running back and…

The American Consulate exploded onto Hospital Road.

Windows along the street shattered as an enormous whomp of air reached out and rolled cars and
trucks, flung bikes and carts, and knocked people and animals clean off their feet. And the noise -
the noise was like hell opening its great maw to scream bile at the world.

Brody sat down on the footpath and covered his head with his arms as debris, made of bits of
building and vehicles and people began raining around him. For too many seconds he couldn't hear a
thing, then his brain was ringing, and then he heard…

'Spud, Spud, where the bloody hell are you?'

'Here, I'm here,' he called out. Or he would have if his mouth hadn't been full of dust and who
knows what. He spat and tried again, by which time his best mate had not only been able to find him
amidst the devastation, but could tell him apart from all the other filthy-grey people in local
garb.

Mudge hauled him up from the ground. 'We gotta go, Spud,' he said, half-dragging him back down
the road away from the destruction, away from the fires that had started, away from the screaming
people. 'Bastards went that way,' Mudge pointed, as he dumped Brody into the passenger seat and ran
back around to take the wheel. 'They had to push the bike through all this crap, so they won't have
gotten far yet.'

Brody searched through their stake-out garbage on the floor
for the canteen. He tipped half the water over his face, rinsed
his mouth and spat it out a few times, and then drank the rest.

'Shit mate, you look like that Rock-man dude from The Fantastic Four.'

'I feel like that Rock-man dude punched me in the head, and the chest; oh fuck, and the head
again.' Brody pointed up the road. 'Ah, there they are, turning into Saddar,' he said as his mobile
started ringing. He fought with his shirt-dress, to get to the pocket in his baggy pants, but as he
yanked the phone out, it fell apart in his hand. 'Weird,' he said. 'How'd that even ring?'