The inside man, p.26
The Inside Man, page 26
Recruited by ASIO from the Australian Special Forces (Special Operations Command, or SOC), they’d been told only that their country needed them for a highly classified six-month assignment. Their units thought they’d been sent to undergo a new kind of survival training in the New Guinea Highlands. But, in fact, they’d never left New South Wales.
Clarke called his special-forces hit squad ‘the Ronin’, the Japanese word for former Samurai turned hitmen for hire. All clad in black and wearing balaclavas, they were indistinguishable – simply anonymous parts of a well-oiled machine, which Clarke controlled.
He put down the radio that he used to talk to the Ronin and picked up the one that connected him to command. ‘All in place,’ he said. ‘I repeat: Ronin in place. Do we have permission to proceed?’
A sharp squelch of static followed by a voice: ‘Ronin are good to go.’
Clarke picked up the other radio and issued the order: ‘Ronin are green.’
JAX was on his feet and in a defensive stance he’d learned in his combat training within seconds of his cell door bursting open. The snap of the lock had jolted him awake and he’d reacted without pause. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could make out a shape in the small amount of moonlight coming through the open cell door. He’d been waiting for something like this for three nights. Since he’d delivered the last of the phones.
‘Fuck,’ he exclaimed, as he was suddenly blinded by a blast of light. He knew immediately that whoever was behind the intrusion was both military trained and equipped. While a standard LED torch produced about 100 lumens, some military flashlights could put out 4000 lumens – enough to set fire to paper. Still unable to open his eyes, he knew he had been hit with the fire-starting type. He also knew the light would be attached to an assault rifle, strapped to its barrel, which would now be aimed at the middle of his forehead.
‘What the—’
His question was cut off by the intruder, a hard hand suddenly smothering his mouth. The man wore a tactical glove – Jax could feel the toughened plastic on the fingertips.
Army. Infantry.
He resisted his animalistic urge to fight. The man was only using enough force to subdue him and wasn’t trying to hurt him.
With the flashlight now lowered, Jax was able to open his eyes. He blinked hard, still temporarily blinded by the earlier scorching. He wanted to see his attacker’s face, search it for more information.
Gradually the spots of light in his eyes dimmed, details emerged and the scene began to take shape. The man was wearing black and his face was covered by a balaclava. Jax’s eyes were drawn to his outstretched arm, the one that wasn’t holding him down. It was raised high and pulled into a fist.
Jax nodded.
The man then unclenched his fist, opened his hand and pressed his index finger to the tip of his thumb, forming a circle: OK.
Jax nodded again, raised his own hand, made a fist and extended his thumb.
Now it was the man in the balaclava nodding, acknowledging that Jax had just given him the military hand signal for ‘I understand’.
He made a final hand signal after removing his hand from Jax’s mouth.
Hold.
Jax gave him another thumbs-up.
Eyes fast adjusting to the dark, Jax saw that the man was carrying a Colt M4A1 assault rifle and was night-vision equipped, his googles flipped up and sitting on the top of his head. He also saw the other man, dressed in black, carrying a Colt M4A1, and standing over the top of Khalil.
The man over Jax turned towards his partner. Towards Khalil. Moving like lightning, the men in black had Khalil gagged and bound before he even woke up. Jax remained silent and still as they peeled him off the bed and whisked him towards the door. Khalil could do nothing to resist except groan. The man that Jax had been conversing with in military sign language stopped and turned just before leaving the cell.
He nodded at Jax.
Jax nodded back.
And then they were gone.
Click!
Jax jumped, the sound of the lock snapping shut startling him even though he’d expected it. He looked around his cell: dark, quiet and empty. Like nothing had just happened. The whole episode, from door-opening to door-shutting had taken sixteen seconds. Jax hadn’t even realised he’d been counting, but he also knew he was right. Sixteen seconds. Bound, gagged and gone. In and out.
In sixteen seconds? They weren’t just military. They were Special Forces. They were SOC. The brand of NGVs and the types of weapons they had on them confirmed his suspicion. While regular army used Steyr AUGs, the SOCs opted for the M4, a US weapon and America’s response to the game-changing AK-47.
Jax was sure that Khalil wouldn’t be the only one they’d taken – they would have grabbed all of the Terror Twelve, minus one after Halim’s sudden heart attack, plus newcomer Mahmud the Mufti.
Jax estimated there would have been a battle group of eight in the wing, operating in bricks, two men for each cell. There would have been another battle group conducting a simultaneous raid in the other block, of a size Jax couldn’t estimate because he didn’t know how the inmates were arranged in their cells. No doubt they had also sent a team into Supermax, Hammad being the ultimate prize.
Jax wondered who had brought them undone.
Was it Bashir, the shady Sheik perhaps talking of the plot while using his contraband mobile phone?
Was it Hammad, as he ordered the cell into action from Supermax?
Was its Khalil, the simpleton maybe shooting his mouth off during a meeting in the Kent brothers’ cell?
Or was it none of them?
Clarke had looked completely frazzled that last time they’d spoken. To the point of recklessness, even. Jax wouldn’t be surprised if the prisoners were being sped towards an abandoned warehouse with hoods over their heads. He really didn’t know what Clarke was capable of.
CHAPTER 39
Punchbowl, NSW, Australia
SAMI and Mav had been watching them for three days. The fitted-out milk van was fully equipped, but not the most comfortable place to hole up. They slept in shifts, but didn’t exit the vehicle – it had an operational fridge and microwave, though the food supplied wasn’t exactly gourmet. The less said about the cassette toilet, the better. It had been a while since Sami had done this kind of gruelling surveillance work himself – he was more used to sitting behind a desk in a bureau. He’d never take the coffee machine in the office for granted again.
The four men who were living in the rented unit they were staking out had done very little in the last seventy-two hours. Aside from a group visit to the local mosque for prayer, only two of them had left the building.
An ASIO agent had followed the first of the suspects to an electronics store, a hidden camera recording the man as he purchased a radio frequency transmitter and its matching receiver. A second ASIO spook picked up the tail and followed him as he drove his rusted Toyota, registered to a construction company owned by the Halims, to a different electronics store in another suburb. There, he bought a roll of speaker wire. A third agent followed him as he made a third stop, at another electronics store, where he bought a soldering iron, fuses, switches and parts.
He could have been making a stereo. But the fact that he travelled to three different stores when all the components were available at the first store suggested he was making something else.
A bomb.
A separate team had followed the second suspect. An agent had sat at the opposite end of the carriage of train, eyes on the target for the entire trip to the city. He remained seated when the suspect got up.
‘Target alighting the train,’ he whispered into the microphone attached to the underside of his collar.
The five other agents on the train, all on separate carriages, disembarked with the target at St James Station, a small but busy underground stop near Sydney’s centre.
‘Got him,’ the agent taking lead of the trail said.
Sami wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Witnessing first-hand the efficiency of Clarke and his team, he’d had something of a wake-up call. Now, he was operating with a level of focus and precision he hadn’t experienced for years, if not a decade. There was no way he and Mav were going to be the weak link.
Sami immediately passed the coordinates of St James Station to the drone operator who was on standby. On loan from the US, the state-of-the-art military drone was on the suspect almost as fast the sunlight, its million-dollar camera picking him up the moment he emerged from the station and set foot on the street. Even though the drone flew at an altitude of 20,000 feet, the image it provided was so good that Sami felt like he could reach out and touch the top of the target’s head.
Six separate feeds were being delivered to Sami and Mav in the van by the time the target reached St Mary’s Cathedral, the drone pictures still the clearest. Sami watched as the suspect cased the historic cathedral. To any passer-by, he probably looked as if he were simply admiring the church, standing out the front with his paper and pen, making a sketch then taking some pictures.
But it was clear to Sami that wasn’t what he was doing. The phone call he’d made to an inmate at Goulburn jail revealed he was using his pen and paper to list exit points and count the crowd, while the pictures would likely be used to identify points of vulnerability in the cathedral’s structure.
AFTER that, while tempted to make an immediate move, both Sami and Clarke had agreed they needed to watch, listen and learn – just a little longer.
Now, Sami was almost certain these were their men. The information they had gathered, much of it resulting from the work of an intriguing inside asset named Riley Jax, suggested there were going to be two more attacks. One this month, on 25 November, and another the following month, on 25 December. That made sense. A Christmas Day finale. No better date to put an exclamation mark on the biggest attack on Christian Churches since the Holy Wars.
The four men in the flat, paid for by an already convicted terrorist named Halim, had all spent time in Goulburn jail. That made sense too.
So Sami was almost certain that he had his men. Ideally, he preferred to be completely certain, and doubts remained. While confident they were set to scoop up a cell – plotters and soldiers alike – he couldn’t be sure it was the entire cell. But now, in the early hours of 24 November, ‘fairly certain’ would have to suffice.
It was on.
‘Copy,’ Sami said when Clarke informed him that the extraction was done and the raid was to commence.
Sami put down the radio, gave Mav a nod and spoke into the microphone to the commander of the NSW Police Special Protection Group (SPG), who was waiting on the ground with his team.
‘We are green,’ Sami said.
The SPG was unleashed.
ASIO was required by law to use the NSW Police unit for public arrests. Though the SPG weren’t as highly trained as Clarke’s commandos, Sami was impressed nonetheless. He and Mav watched the body-cam footage from their van as the spear of the SPG battle-group stormed towards the terrorists’ apartment block. The battering ram known as the ‘big red key’ made easy work of the entrance door, and the team moved swiftly and smoothly up the stairs, everything seemingly going like clockwork.
Sami heard the explosion before his screens went dead, a thundering blast. He dived to the floor, pulling Mav with him, as the two-tonne van rocked back and forth in the shockwaves and shrapnel fell from the sky, a hailstorm of smashed glass and shattered bricks.
When the aerial assault ceased, Sami pulled his hands from his head and got up on his knees.
‘You right?’ he asked Mav, who had a look on his face like he’d just had the smug knocked right out of him.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,’ he replied, rising gingerly.
Sami reefed open the van door and stumbled onto the sidewalk. Mav tumbled out after him. The apartment they had been looking at for the last three days was gone. So were the ones under it, above it and next to it. Flames licked the shell that remained.
CHAPTER 40
Goulburn Correctional Centre, Goulburn, NSW, Australia
The guard burst into Jax’s open cell. ‘Visit,’ he barked.
Finally, Jax thought. He’d been expecting a visit from Clarke since the day before. Following the 2 am extraction, he’d sat alone on his bed in the dark, waiting for an explanation. He’d had then watched the sun rise, figuring answers would come with the morning. They didn’t.
Jax had gone to muster and listened hard, not for the numbers that were being called, but the ones that weren’t. The wing was suddenly down five men. The guard either didn’t notice or knew that they were gone. Either way, there was no explanation.
He passed the day in the gym and then went back to his solitary cell after dinner and watched the sun set, the night bringing only darkness – no mail, no messages. He barely slept, tossed and turned, a million scenarios running through his head.
But now a guard was here. ‘Come on,’ he urged Jax. ‘Let’s go.’
Jax looked at his watch before getting to his feet.
10 am, 25 NOV.
BRIEFCASE closed, arms folded and wearing a smile, Clarke was already in the room when he arrived. The transformation in Clarke’s face was remarkable: his eyes were clear, his skin flushed with a healthy daub of pink, and there were none of the previous physiological signs of stress. Jax did note, however, that Clarke appeared to have been particularly busy: his crushed clothing, face stubble and scent of body odour smothered by too much deodorant were sure signs that the agent had not been home.
‘Good news, I take it?’ Jax asked as he sat down.
‘Yes,’ Clarke replied.
Jax listened and Clarke spoke, the agent telling him the Terror Twelve were the group behind the six international attacks known as the Church Bombings. That a joint CIA/ASIO task force had tracked and destroyed the Terror Twelve’s two remaining cells and moved all surviving members of the organisation to a secure location for questioning.
Jax had a million questions. So much didn’t yet make sense. Not without all the details.
But he knew better than to ask.
JUST after lights-out, he made sure the corridor was empty then pulled out his smartphone. The prison was quiet, not yet asleep. But that didn’t matter. Not now. He wasn’t a suspect. They had the men responsible.
Or so they thought.
He smiled, delighted with himself. He tapped his way across the screen.
Username: mahdi_93/241. Password: Hewillrise_85/159.
He raised his brows when he was denied. Wrong password. He was so excited that he’d been typing too fast. The prospect of the live feed had his heart racing and his stomach full of scampering bugs. His hands were shaking. He took a deep breath and this time used only his index finger to type.
Username: Mahdi_93/241. Password: Hewillrise_85/159.
A capped M, not an uncapped m. Got it.
He would not be denied. Not now. Not ever. Only the disbelievers would be denied. He would be the first to touch His outstretched hand.
He opened his internet browser and logged into a fake but secure WhatsApp account created specifically for that night. He had already activated the cell, sending the deposits: $0.61, $4.04, $5.55 and $9.82. He’d also given them their instructions when they called: where to obtain the gun, what to do with the seller and, finally, what time they needed to be in place to make the final call.
His burner phone flashed at 10 pm +44 7346 984 325 appearing on the screen. It was 11 am, 25 November, in Salisbury, England.
‘Greetings, my child,’ said the Mahdi. ‘Are you in place?’
He listened to the reply.
‘Good,’ the Mahdi said. ‘Good. And how about the phone? Are you all set to record?’
The Mahdi smiled when he got his reply.
‘Excellent,’ the Mahdi said. ‘I am proud of you, my son. Proud of both of you. Now do as I have instructed. Everything exactly to plan. I will be watching, as will He. You go with God. You do this for His glory.’
This time the Mahdi would not have to imagine the rest. He had instructed one of the former Goulburn jail inmates to record the attack on his mobile phone and live-stream it on another WhatsApp account – the world would see it unfold through the eyes of the attacker wearing the bomb and guarding the door at the back of the cathedral. The Mahdi had been too cautious to attempt anything like this during the first six attacks, but now, following the recent developments, he felt it was a risk he could take.
The Mahdi had suspected that the Goulburn link would be exposed. Having established that both Charlie Haddad and Mike Evans had been inmates there, the investigators would probably also work out that the dead Australian found decapitated in a suitcase in Russia was part of the St Petersburg plot. Three of the attackers coming from the same place was too much of a coincidence.
So, knowing that the prison would be put under surveillance and swarming with spies, he’d enacted his backup plan. He’d instructed Mahmud, his co-conspirator and recruiter, to lead the copycats on – to plant the idea with the freshly convicted terrorists, still hungry for jihad, and give them the blueprint. He knew that would get them talking about the plot, in meetings and on their ASIO-issued mobile phones, make them the obvious suspects. And all had gone to plan – the dummy cell even blowing themselves up as ordered.
The Mahdi could take more risks now, as the men in custody would be blamed for whatever came next. Their denials would mean nothing. The authorities would assume the cell was still running autonomously. The only one who knew what was really going on was Mahmud, and he would die before saying a word. In fact, he would kill himself as soon as he got the chance.
And even if the authorities thought the mastermind was still at large, which wasn’t likely, they couldn’t look any harder at the jail than they already had. They’d given it their all – bugs, phones, secret agents – and he was still there. And now, for the first time, he was about to witness the terror he’d sown, the carnage and the deaths, the glory of his plan.
