‘So what about this ballot?’ came an American voice from directly behind Mac as they moved out of the terminal area onto the notoriously dangerous road into Dili. ‘There’s a lot of soldiers around, Raoul – we expecting trouble?’
Despite the concentration required to dodge carts and motor-cyclists while trying to go down the Indonesian ‘third lane’, Raoul nodded. ‘My family has food, mister, and no crime, okay?’
‘Yeah,’ sneered the American, as only the peace-blessed Anglos of the world could sneer. ‘But you’re gonna vote for independence, right, Raoul? You look like a freedom-loving guy to me.’
Watching the driver’s shoulders slump as they slowed behind a 1950s-era truck loaded with large green leaves, Mac turned to face the American.
‘Right now it suits me that Raoul’s a life-loving guy – with me, sport?’ said Mac, smiling at the middle-aged Yank. ‘Old Indonesian proverb – driving and politics don’t mix.’
Some of the other passengers chuckled with relief and the American’s travelling companion dug his elbow into the man’s ribs. ‘You heard him, Keith. Let the guy drive.’
‘Richard Davis – sandalwood,’ said Mac, putting out his hand to the American.
‘Keith Wilson – telecoms,’ said the American, friendly but annoyed.
Turning back to face the windscreen, Mac caught Raoul’s eye in the rear-vision mirror for a split second. He’d seen that quietly thankful look in Bosnia, Iraq and Cambodia and, for the second time since the Atkins meeting, Mac longed for a firearm on his right hip.
***
Mac’s usual room at the Turismo was small and uncomplicated. He’d stayed in the Turismo several times and room 10 gave him a view over the Esplanada – Dili’s main thoroughfare – whereas most of the rooms either looked over the rear beer garden or had no outlook at all. The lack of in-room phone meant one less surveillance tool for unfriendlies, and the placement of the TV on top of the mini-fridge was a nice feature.
Opening a pack of Doublemint, Mac pulled a stick one centimetre out of the packet, and placed it gently in the inside pocket of his wheelie suitcase, at the same time taking a piece of chalk the size of a stock cube from the same pocket. Placing the chalk cube under the hinge end of the door, Mac let himself out and moved down to the lobby.
The manager – Mrs Soares – was friendly but couldn’t help Mac with faxing. ‘No allowed no more,’ she said with a smile and a shrug. ‘For the security.’
The Indon military commanders had removed every fax machine from Dili, leaving only one for public use at the Dili Telkom office. Given the way the Indonesian Army operated, thought Mac, word would have gone out and every fax machine in the province would have been ostentatiously sitting on top of the garbage bins the next morning.
Buying a Bintang from the woman, Mac wandered out to the famous tropical beer garden at the rear of the Turismo, nabbing a seat in the shade of a banyan. Chained to the branch of the tree was a macaque, miming something. Mac sat back, slurped on the beer and did his mental work-up for the day. He’d start with the largest of the sandalwood traders – the one owned by the generals – and make a big to-do about new orders, Australian growth markets and suggestions for new products. There were spies who thought their job was to blend into the background and not make too much noise, but business people in South-East Asia who weren’t trying to make money attracted attention. Mac wanted the Indonesian spies and soldiers talking about the Australian with the big plan for making money, not the quiet Aussie ‘businessman’ hiding out at the Turismo asking about fax machines.
‘Bad luck about fax, eh?’ came a voice from behind him, and Mac spun around slightly too quickly, coming face to face with the bloke from Raoul’s bus, the one with the Malaysia Airlines tags all over his bags.
‘But, you know, I have fax in my room. Just need to ask, okay?’ said the bloke, smiling conspiratorially and extending his hand.
‘Rahmid Ali,’ he said, the big Malay face creasing at the sides and bursting with the brightness of a lot of white teeth. ‘I saw you this morning, yes?’
‘Sure,’ smiled Mac, standing and accepting the shake. ‘Richard Davis.’
‘You tell off the American, right?’
‘You never really tell off an American, Rahmid,’ said Mac. ‘You just get ignored rather than bombed.’
Rahmid Ali laughed so heartily that Mac could see his pink tonsils. Gesturing to the spare seat beside him, Mac watched as the Malay sat with a small bottle of Perrier and a glass. He was impeccably dressed in cream linens, glowing with fresh grooming and still smelling of Polo. He was also Indonesian intelligence – BAKIN, probably, decided Mac. Since Anglo visitors had a reputation for thinking all Asians looked alike, Indonesian spooks often posed as Malaysians to get closer to their targets, hence Rahmid Ali’s display of Malaysia Air paraphernalia. In KL, the Malaysian spooks pretended to be Thai, in Manila the Filipinos masqueraded as Indonesian and in Phnom Penh the Cambodians acted Thai or Vietnamese.
‘You really got a fax in your room?’ asked Mac.
‘Sure,’ winked his new friend. ‘I got sat phone, right, and it plugs into mini-fax. If you need to receive fax, just give them my number – I won’t tell.’
Nodding, Mac took the Andromeda IT Services business card from Ali, on which the satellite phone and fax numbers had helpfully been underlined.
Above them, on the first-floor interior balcony of the hotel, a man was shouting. Looking up, Mac and Ali saw a short, badly dressed Korean yell into a mobile phone while remonstrating with his cigarette hand.
‘I no care – I no care ’bout that!’ the bloke yelled, punctuated by awkward and frequent drags on his smoke. ‘Why you think I care? That your probrem, okay? I no care.’
Hearing the tone, Mac’s hackles went up. All over Asia, Korean businesspeople spoke to their associates and customers as if they were the lowest form of life, and every time Mac had to infiltrate a business and charm people like the one yelling on the balcony, he’d sworn it’d be his last.
Turning back to Rahmid Ali, Mac shared a quick laugh with him. The Koreans were something else.
‘I don’t know about the fax,’ said Mac. ‘Where did you say you were from?’
‘Kuala Lumpur,’ smiled Ali.
‘Well, in KL it may be okay to break the law, but you know something?’
‘What?’
‘The Indonesians have the fairest laws in South-East Asia and I’m happy to support them in their efforts to maintain a civil society.’
Rahmid Ali’s face slowly sank from its top-marketing smile to a contemptuous curiosity. ‘Yes, Mr Davis,’ he finally managed. ‘I think I see your point.’
Draining the Bintang, Mac stood to go. ‘Nice meeting you, Rahmid,’ he said, shaking the spy’s hand.
‘I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ said Ali, already recovering his professional demeanour.
Rahmid Ali was going to stand off for a while, thought Mac, but as he walked out of the garden he could feel the other man’s eyes burning into his back.
CHAPTER 10
The offices of PT Watu Selatan were two blocks from the Turismo, so Mac decided to walk it. He noticed that the locals shrank back into the darkness of shops and alleys as he moved through the dusty colonial streets, probably scared off by the rising violence from the pro-Indonesian militias. In many of the poorer parts of South-East Asia, visiting Westerners were the ones fearing violence or crime. In Dili, the fear was something endured by the citizens – a dull acceptance of terror, the likes of which Mac had experienced in Phnom Penh at the start of his career.
Mac hadn’t been in Dili for a couple of years, but it seemed to be the same old story: locals who talked to a Westerner or laughed with a Westerner were harassed so badly by the cops or spooks that they learned to behave in a purely perfunctory way towards foreigners. There were daily reminders of the ramifications of breaking with this code floating in the harbour or washed up on the city beaches, minus their heads and hands.
Even Mac’s mobile phone made him feel slightly guilty. There was a Telkom Indonesia cellular network in East Timor, but it was mainly used by Indonesians and visitors. Any local found with a mobile phone had a good chance of enjoying a few nights’ stay in the Brimob compound, where calls to their mother might be interpreted as aiding the Falintil guerrillas.
As a blue Land Rover Discovery slipped past, Mac noticed the expensively dressed Westerners behind the tinted glass and the white UN letters on the door. He had them as UNAMET scrutineers, the United Nations team that was going to oversee the independence ballot in two weeks. The UNAMET mission had divided opinion in DFAT. People like Mac couldn’t see the point in sending a ballot-scrutiny team into a place as repressed as East Timor where pro-independence figures and their families were already being tortured and killed by the Indonesian Army and its militias. What East Timor needed was an armed UN peacekeeping mission to allow everyone to vote, and Mac’s chance meeting with Sandy Beech at Parliament House had simply confirmed his opinion. The other view in DFAT – supported by the Australian government – was that the Indonesian military’s harassment of pro-independence Timorese was having a calming effect on the province and it was premature to talk about UN peacekeepers.
The picture was made more complex by the history of Falintil, the Timorese guerrilla army that had been fighting the Indonesian invaders since 1975. As Mac had pointed out to the National Security Committee members, Falintil had Marxist-Leninist roots, and many Indonesians and Australians dismissed them as ‘commies’, which diluted their credibility.
Turning right into a wide avenue, Mac saw the PT Watu Selatan building right across the road from its real owners, the Indonesian Army. Olive-green jeeps called kijangs and trucks were parked on the street in front of the army headquarters, the large red and white flag of the Republic flying over the modest front steps. Regular soldiers wearing what looked like badges of the 744 Battalion lounged in the shade, leaning on their M16 straps and eyeballing the locals who, like Mac, walked on the other side of the street.
Stopping at the swinging glass doors of the Watu Selatan office, Mac noticed a white recent-model Toyota Camry parked in front of the military headquarters. Three Javanese men sat in the car, a fourth leaning into the front passenger window, his large forearms across the roof of the Toyota. The standing man’s head came up and then the other faces turned as one to stare at Mac, their black sunglasses creating a comical look, like a 1960s press photo of the Rat Pack in Vegas. Mac had them as SGI – an intelligence taskforce that was working on the ‘East Timor problem’. It was supposed to consist of the various intelligence outfits from the armed forces but in reality it was dominated by Kopassus intel. While Kopassus was the special forces group within the army, its intelligence arm was virtually a secret society: they wore plainclothes and were distrusted by all arms of the military, the police and intelligence agencies.
Attempting a smile but failing, Mac pushed into the air-conditioning of the Watu Selatan office, glad to be out of the tropical heat and away from the glare of the boys from intel.
A middle-aged receptionist with a beehive hairdo asked Mac to take a seat when he introduced himself, then picked up a phone and pushed a button. As she rattled off a reminder, Mac pushed the white gauze curtains back slightly and observed the Kopassus spooks at the Camry. The standing one said his goodbyes and walked into the military building as two of the men in the car opened their doors and got out to stretch on the footpath, their SIG Sauer handguns obvious beneath their trop shirts. The driver leaned out his window and said something, and the two standing on the footpath looked up and started across the street towards the Watu Selatan building.
Releasing the curtain, Mac exhaled in a hiss of tension. This was not how the first contact of an assignment was supposed to go. He had an entire three weeks to be tailed, tricked, trapped and interrogated. They hadn’t even got him drunk or sent him the pretty girl, and the Kopassus spooks were already coming at him like a scene from a spaghetti western.
A short Javanese man swept into the reception area, the long sleeves of his batik shirt unusual for Dili. ‘Mr Richard!’ he gushed as he held out a business card. ‘Adam Moerpati – manager – so nice to meet.’
Responding with his own card and gushy greeting, Mac took in the guy’s expensive dental work, which was the kind the Jakarta elites had done in Singapore. As they moved down a cool hallway and into Moerpati’s office, his new best friend asked about the flight and the hotel.
‘Turismo?!’ said Moerpati, with a theatrical Javanese shrug, gesturing for Mac to take the sofa. ‘For a man of your success, not the Resende?’
Mac loved the way the Javanese wrapped an insult in a compliment.
‘Well, you know, Mr Moerpati – they book me where they book me,’ said Mac.
‘Adam, please,’ said Moerpati, offering a box of cheroots and putting one in his own mouth. ‘I get you good rate at Resende,’ he winked. ‘No worries.’
Taking Moerpati through the costs and freight charges with the Panamanian and Mexican icon-makers, Mac explained that his company wanted to dominate the Australasian icon trade and that if they could get better margins from East Timor along with the better shipping rates, he’d like to talk about a deal.
Mac used his basic technique of mixing vagueness with specificity to draw the man closer. Businesspeople felt their souls were appreciated when you could recite a few basic unit volume and margin figures about their trade and allow them to embroider the general comments with their own insights. By the time the receptionist brought the coffee, Mac knew Watu Selatan intended to keep trading after the independence ballot and that the Jakarta elites believed East Timor would not be allowed to entirely secede from the Republic.
Finishing his second cheroot, Moerpati admitted that Mac’s visit was well timed. ‘We had Canadian here, wanting to deal,’ he confided.
‘So where is he?’ asked Mac. ‘Should I be speaking with this guy?’
‘No, no,’ laughed Moerpati. ‘He gone, right? Now you here!’
‘So – he’s gone,’ smiled Mac, keeping it light. ‘To Kupang? Denpasar?’
‘I not know,’ the other man said. ‘The peoples come – the peoples go. Who know, right?’
The Kopassus spooks were waiting for Mac outside the building as he emerged into the heat of the afternoon. The larger of the two asked Mac’s name, confirmed that he was staying at the Turismo, and asked him to follow.
There was little chance of escape; Mac might have been able to disarm the one to his left, shoot both of his escorts, drop the Camry driver – who was still behind the wheel – and make his getaway in the heisted car. But to where? Timor was an island under military guard, with one soldier for every forty occupants. There were three roads out of Dili and military roadblocks everywhere. So, keeping a smile on his face, Mac decided to bluff it out, even as his gut churned with fear. When Canberra know-it-alls pushed their arguments for appeasing the Indonesian government, they never quite grasped reality. They weren’t the bastards getting their feet broken or having quick-lime rubbed in their eyes – the appeasers were never going to physically suffer from their own strategy.
As they got to the entrance of the headquarters across the road, the driver of the Camry got out and followed them into the building. They climbed a set of stairs – one spook in front, two behind – and emerged on the first floor. To Mac’s left was an admin section staffed by women and for a split second Mac feared that he was being brought to confront Blackbird in her workplace. This was where ASIS had been gleaning some of its best intelligence on the Indonesian Army’s intentions for East Timor.
But they turned right, walked silently down a long hall with several windowed doors and stopped at the one marked M AJ -G EN. A NWAR D AMAJAT. Mac tried to remember Damajat’s role from Atkins’ work-up. He couldn’t be certain, but thought the Kopassus commander was the head of the intelligence taskforce in East Timor.
As Mac was wondering who he had to
kill to get a large glass of Pepto-Bismol, the door swung back and his escorts waved him through. Inside the large office a fit-looking military man in his mid-fifties leapt up from behind his desk, listened as a spook whispered in his ear, and then came at Mac with an oily eagerness.
‘Mr Richard – Anwar Damajat, at your service, sir. Welcome to Dili and sit please,’ he said, smiling and gesturing Mac towards a leather club chair in front of his desk.
Mac’s heart beat in his temples as he became aware of a large man sitting on a sofa against the rear wall. He fought with his fear, telling himself to breathe slowly, just like they’d been taught in the Royal Marines all those years ago. It had been drummed into them over and over: if you could control nothing else in your environment, then control your breathing. It could be the difference between life and death.
‘Firstly, Mr Richard, let me ask you a question,’ said Damajat, sitting behind his desk once more. ‘You look like a smart man.’
‘Thanks,’ smiled Mac, his stomach doing somersaults.
‘So why you doing business with those idiots at Watu Selatan?’
There was a pause and Mac focused on Damajat’s thumb, which was gesturing back over his shoulder. Then Damajat’s face broke into a big smile and he and the spooks started laughing. Heart thumping, Mac managed a smirk as Damajat came around the desk and slapped him on the left bicep. ‘Don’t tell me, Mr Richard – that old thief offered you free nights at the Resende, right?’
Allowing the tension to wash out of him, Mac played along with the joking. Damajat didn’t want to torture him – Damajat represented Watu Selatan’s rival, the Anak-Poco Group, which specialised in construction and had such a brutal hold on the local workforce that Anak-Poco guaranteed project completion on time and on budget – an unheard of event in the Indonesian construction game.
‘You forget about sandalwood toys, Mr Richard,’ said Damajat, handing Mac a glossy Anak-Poco brochure. ‘You tell your people in Australia to bring the money up here to Timor, right? This like new Surfer Paradise, okay? Like a Noosa, yeah?’
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