Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Mac had been pegged for paramilitary duties almost the minute he joined the Australian Secret Intelligence Service from university. He’d played rugby in Queensland and he guessed that to a desk jockey in Canberra he’d looked the part. He couldn’t recall any huge desire for the military direction.
    So they’d shipped him to the United Kingdom and into the loving arms of the Royal Marines and their infamous commando training in Devon. He was part of an intake of other British and Commonwealth intel recruits sent for a crash course in elite soldiering.
    For seven months he was ‘hardened’ as only the Royal Marines believe a man can be hardened. It was brutal. Straight out of an honours degree in history, suddenly Mac was getting his head shaved in the quartermaster’s yard at Lympstone Barracks. The early days were still a blur. He remembered the fi ghts, the cold, the hunger. He remembered purple-faced men with Geordie accents screaming, ‘You silly-looking cunt.’
    The Marines built you up physically and then taunted you psychologically. The airborne course was a good example. High-altitude, low-opening jumps weren’t that bad if you’d trained properly.
    The killer was the three am test: getting pulled out of a warm bed -
    ‘wakey-wakey, hands off snakey’ - to go HALO jumping in the dark.
    Mac went on to the Special Boat Service course, which involved a survival route in the Borneo jungle. The course, known in British military circles simply as ‘Brunei’, entailed hunger, thirst, loneliness, confusion, trench foot, fatigue, malaria, deadly wildlife and madness.
    There were swarms of mosquitoes so aggressive he’d been bitten on the inside of his throat.
    There was one guy Mac particularly remembered: Lane, the Canadian. Though Mac’s height, Lane was a bulging gym bunny and a black belt in something. Lane had never missed an opportunity to behave like a wanker, bringing new meaning to the concept of self-belief.
    In Brunei, Lane’s macho act fell apart in spectacular fashion. On the SBS survival section - the last test in a six-month course - the candidates were placed in four-man teams. Three days into the hike Lane lost it - dehydrated, fatigued, disoriented and completely spooked by the Borneo wildlife that included spiders the size of dinner plates. Lane’s breaking point came when the Malaysian candidate in their team caught a fat snake one afternoon and prepared it as an early dinner. They were so hungry that three of them seized on the snake meat, but not Lane. He was fi nished. The martial artist was in an advanced stage of mental collapse by the time he took a seat by the river and started babbling.
    Mac couldn’t even get him to stand - all the bloke could do was cry.
    Mac fi nished Brunei with a small piece of his psyche gone forever. When the successful candidates were all out of hospital, they were called out to the parade ground in searing tropical heat.
    Five instructors walked the line, ritually roughing the hair of their successful candidates and muttering reluctant praise. Non-violent physical contact was too much for some of the guys.
    Mac kept it tight, looked the chief instructor, Mark ‘Banger’ Jordan, in the eye. He’d completed, and he was out. But he’d be a Royal Marine forever.
    Mac walked down from the university knoll and north-east towards Chinatown. Happy. Sydney in early summer was all jacaranda blossoms and the smell of frangipani buds. He had a letter of offer in his pocket and a lunch date with Diane.
    Diane Ellison had lured him from his single status about six months before. They’d met at an Aussie trade function in Jakarta where he’d introduced himself as Richard Davis, a sales executive from Southern Scholastic Books. It was a lie he hadn’t yet undone.
    Mac had been instantly taken with her. She was beautiful and smart, blue-eyed, blonde, tall and curvy. The daughter of a British diplomat, she worked as an IT maven for a global outfi t. She