Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Why don’t they want Indonesia disintegrating?’ asked Jessica, puzzled. ‘I thought everyone was out to destroy Indonesia?’

  ‘Well, that’s a nice theory in a leftie classroom,’ said Mac, swapping a smile with Bongo. ‘But Indonesia sits across sea lanes that bring LNG, iron ore and coal to Japan and China, and crude through the Madura Straits for the California refineries. If Indonesia fell apart it would hurt the super-economies – the Chinese wouldn’t let it happen. And that’s before we get to the Yanks.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘One theory says that if East Timor and Aceh separated, then Mindanao would follow and so might southern Thailand and Ambon. Pakistan and Iran would aid the Muslim separatists, and there’d be pressure on nations like the Philippines and Australia to help the Christians in the South Moluccas. As far as trade is concerned, it would be a mess.’

  When Jessica left for the ladies, Bongo cleared his throat. ‘Something you should know, McQueen.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah – I agreed to do some basic bodyguarding of our princess here,’ said Bongo, gesturing with his thumb. ‘She shouldn’t be here, but since she is, she needs protection.’

  Mac looked Bongo in the eye. Locals protecting foreigners was not unusual in South-East Asia. ‘So long as it doesn’t get in the way of our arrangement, that’s okay,’ he said.

  Bongo stood and messed Mac’s hair. ‘Don’t need you in my room tonight, sweetheart – you snore too loud.’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac, blushing a little. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Try telling her that,’ said Bongo, winking and making for his room. ‘Oh, and by the way -’ He stopped as something occurred to him.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Mac.

  ‘Be careful of Damajat tomorrow, but pay extra attention to your new friend, okay?’

  ‘Who, Amir?’ said Mac.

  ‘He’s out to prove himself to his big brother,’ said Bongo. ‘So stay cool and none of the smart mouth, okay, brother?’

  With Bongo gone, Mac repeated his concerns to Jessica about a pretty white girl wandering around East Timor asking questions about her missing father. ‘But if you really have to be here,’ he said, ‘I’m glad Manny’s looking out for you.’

  ‘I’m trying to be careful,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to create any trouble. But, you know, he is my father. I can’t just sit back in LA and wait for a phone call.’

  Mac nodded his understanding.

  Then, with a flash of her blue eyes, Jessica asked unexpectedly, ‘So are you gay?’

  ‘What made you ask me that?’ asked Mac, laughing.

  ‘Well…’ she said, indicating a pair of shapely tanned legs sticking out of her shorts.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Mac. ‘So?’

  ‘You spend two days with me and don’t even flirt?’

  ‘What was that first night, in the dining room? That didn’t count?’

  ‘Nice warm-up,’ teased Jessica, sipping her beer, ‘but no follow through.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Mac to the night sky. ‘I’ve been busy, okay? We’re not in high school here.’

  ‘I wasn’t that interested anyway,’ said Jessica.

  They looked at each other for a moment and then beer spurt out of Jessica’s mouth as she laughed along with Mac, an emotional release from an unhappy, stressed woman.

  ‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ she accused, looking down at the beer on her blouse.

  ‘That’ll teach you to keep your shirt on when you drink beer with me.’

  As their laughter subsided, Jessica tucked her feet under her bum and fixed Mac with a look. She was so beautiful, thought Mac: high cheekbones, large blue eyes and thick blonde hair falling to her shoulders. Her political views were not as irritating as he pretended – they were similar to the opinions held by many Australians who worked in Canberra and dabbled in Indonesian politics.

  ‘Manny gone to bed?’ she asked.

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac.

  ‘Shame to wake him.’

  ‘What I thought,’ said Mac, holding her stare.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ said Jessica, putting the empty Tiger bottle on the ground. ‘Yesterday, when I was asking around, showing pictures of Dad, I ended up at a hotel called the Resende – heard of it?’

  ‘Sure,’ nodded Mac.

  ‘The manager wasn’t around and I went down this hallway, looking for him.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, trying to sound neutral but not liking the idea of Jessica interrogating people in a hotel owned by the Indonesian Army.

  ‘I got talking with this Timorese woman – I think she was a housemaid or cleaner.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac.

  ‘I showed her the picture of Dad, and she recognised him instantly, even said Canadian when she pointed at the photo.’

  ‘So she knew something?’ asked Mac, alert.

  ‘She said Dad used to have lunch twice a week with the military, at the hotel,’ said Jessica, clearly confused. ‘What do you think that’s about?’

  Mac shook his head and said he’d have a think about it. ‘Could mean his import-export work was with the army’s companies. You know they own most of the trade concessions in East Timor? That’s one of the reasons they don’t want to let this place go.’

  Silence fell between them for a while until Jessica yawned, rose from her chair, then stretched and bent over Mac, putting her hands on the top of the lawn chair on either side of his head. The kiss lingered and Mac didn’t lay a glove on her – he was tired and let himself enjoy the kiss and the smell of her hair.

  ‘I’m off to bed, Mr Richard,’ she said as she surfaced. ‘Wanna tuck me in?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘Be with you in a minute.’

  Sitting back, Mac thought about how Jessica’s conversation at the Resende fitted in with the last page of the papers recovered from Rahmid Ali’s room. It was a memo saying the bills of loading and the freight contracts were written through a freight forwarder in Surabaya called Millennium Freight Inc. The last sentence of the short memo had read: Millennium has offices in Fremantle, Surabaya, Manila, Hong Kong and Osaka. Its head office is in Vancouver.

  Mac exhaled and wondered how he could have missed it. Bill Yarrow wasn’t some random fool selected by the firm to risk his neck in Dili. He was more than likely the import-export arm of Damajat’s business interests. If you were a Dili-based import-export guy like Yarrow, you were doing business with the generals, and Mac should have seen that from the beginning – it should have formed part of Atkins’ work-up on the Canadian.

  Jessica’s dad hadn’t wandered innocently into something he didn’t understand, thought Mac. The Canadian had known too much.

  CHAPTER 18

  They set off before dawn and drove north, Bongo regaling Mac and Jessica with tales of the impact his rather difficult Javanese mother had on his childhood in Manila.

  ‘The whole neighbourhood was scared of my mum,’ said Bongo, lighting his first cigarette for the day. ‘They wondered what kind of Catholic tells off the priest for his Easter service.’

  ‘Sounds like my mum,’ said Mac, laughing. ‘At least, what she sounded like in the car on the way home.’

  ‘No, brother – my mum is telling him off when we’re filing out. Everyone called her “Java”, and Java was never wrong about anything.’

  Approaching the crossroad at Zumalai, Bongo turned left and drove straight into the first roadblock of the day – a white wooden boom lowered across the dirt track with a hut on the side of the road surrounded by sloppy sandbags.

  Waiting in the Camry, the engine humming, the tension built in Mac’s stomach as the soldiers failed to show. Finally, a guard in the flashings of the 745 Battalion emerged, squinting at the car, his gait unsteady.

  Bongo lowered his window as the soldier pointed his M16 and looked in at the occupants of the car. The reek of stale booze floated into the Toyota as another soldier skulked out of
the hut, squinting like a vampire.

  As Bongo chatted with the first soldier, Mac picked up enough Bahasa Indonesia to sense a shakedown in progress: a car full of foreigners was going to attract a toll. But when Bongo produced Damajat’s letter, the soldier’s bleary eyes widened, then he staggered backwards and passed the letter to his colleague.

  Keeping his cheery demeanour, Bongo continued his patter. Mac’s fear made the morning coffee rise in the back of his throat and he felt the Beretta with his fingertips, under his seat.

  The two soldiers suddenly shouldered their rifles and pointed at Bongo, who put his hands in the air. Then, just as quickly, the two men laughed, Bongo laughing along with them.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, mate,’ muttered Mac as they accelerated away from the post, carefully folding the Damajat letter. ‘The sense of humour isn’t working for me.’

  As they rounded the first corner they encountered a scene on the side of the road.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ said Mac, as they approached and saw a small crowd of women and kids huddled in front of a bunch of militias who were throwing baskets in the back of a Toyota pick-up. One old woman was struggling with a youth, not letting him take two chickens she was holding in a bamboo cage.

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Jessica as Bongo drove past with a brief wave to the armed youths.

  Twisting to look behind, her voice rose. ‘They’re robbing those women!’

  Mac and Bongo exchanged a look and breathed out.

  ‘Look to the front, Jess,’ said Mac firmly.

  ‘I’ll look where I want, thank you,’ she said, leaning over the front seats. ‘Why don’t you two do something?’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Mac, happy that Bongo was keeping his foot on the gas. ‘And don’t look back – it might be misconstrued.’

  ‘You!’ said Jessica, hitting Bongo on the arm. ‘You’re my bodyguard – I want you to go back and stop that!’

  ‘Are they following?’ Mac murmured to Bongo.

  ‘Not yet,’ breathed Bongo. ‘Just standing and looking.’

  As they rounded the corner, Mac turned to face Jessica. ‘You gotta watch how you look at armed men in this part of the world,’ he said quietly. ‘Those women will be lucky if they just get robbed. If we stop it could easily turn into a massacre, and we’d be part of it, understand?’

  ‘I can’t sit in a car and watch an old woman be robbed!’ said Jessica, furious.

  ‘Better to be ashamed and alive,’ said Mac.

  ‘That old woman back there didn’t agree,’ said Jessica. ‘At least she’s standing up to those thugs.’

  ‘She could be lying down too,’ retorted Bongo. ‘With a bullet in her.’

  As Bongo checked his side mirror, Mac watched Jessica’s middle finger rise and point at Bongo.

  ‘Saw that,’ smiled Bongo.

  ‘But didn’t see that back there?’ snapped Jessica.

  Mac let the argument go and settled back in his seat for the ride up to Bobonaro, his breakfast churning with worry.

  The second roadblock was placed on the major spur out of Lepo, before the descent into the town of Bobonaro. This time the roadblock was deserted.

  Getting out of the Camry, Mac and Bongo checked in the guard house and found it abandoned, a portable CD player with Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits playing at half-volume. Looking more closely, Mac saw that the player was on ‘loop’, giving him no idea of how long the soldiers might have been gone. Fifty metres along the road was a yellow Toyota pick-up, with no sign of passengers.

  Shrugging, Mac lifted the boom gate and they were heading back to the car when they heard whimpering noises coming from behind the guard house. Mac nodded at Bongo and they both retrieved their handguns from the Camry as quietly as they could.

  ‘Stay here, Jessica,’ said Mac, then closed the door softly.

  Following Bongo into the bush, Mac swung the Beretta in arcs, looking for soldiers or militiamen. Several metres into the jungle, Mac ran into the back of Bongo. Sitting in front of him, against a tree, were five local children aged roughly four to nine, huddled together and scared.

  Bongo started talking gently and once one of the kids was at least nodding or shaking her head, he squatted in front of them. Hearing his calm voice, and watching the kids respond with more expression at every question, Mac realised Bongo must have worked with distressed kids before.

  As the kids pointed further into the jungle, some wide-eyed and crying, Bongo stood and turned around, fury in his eyes.

  ‘Their mothers and sisters are down there, in the creek bed,’ he hissed. ‘The soldiers and militia too.’

  Gulping, Mac wondered how he could deter Bongo from a take-down. Mac’s identity was a cover and he didn’t want a shoot-out ruining it.

  ‘How many?’ he asked, hoping Bongo would be prepared to walk away from the bad odds: be alive and ashamed.

  ‘Five militia, three soldiers,’ muttered Bongo, clearly fighting the inner argument between being realistic about the odds and wanting to engage with the enemy.

  ‘Let’s get to Bobonaro, mate,’ said Mac, hating the words even as they came out of his mouth, but knowing it was the right choice. ‘It’s not our fight.’

  ‘Timor your fight, McQueen? Jessica your fight?’

  ‘Come on, Bongo,’ said Mac.

  ‘I heard about that village in Mindanao – you didn’t have to do it that way, brother, ’cos it wasn’t your fight, right?’

  Shrugging, Mac kicked at a leaf. The Mindanao job was a lapse in judgment, a risk he’d taken to help some women and their kids.

  ‘In the army, we had a rule,’ said Bongo. ‘We all matter or none of us do.’

  ‘About time,’ came a female voice from behind Mac, and he spun around to face Jessica.

  ‘Shit, Jess!’ said Mac, annoyed at the danger she was putting herself in and embarrassed at his role in the conversation with Bongo. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here?!’

  ‘What are those?’ asked Bongo. Jessica carried an M16 in each hand.

  ‘They were in that pick-up,’ she shrugged. ‘Thought maybe we could use them?’

  ‘There’s no we, Jessica,’ said Mac, reaching for the weapons. ‘You stay here with the kids – we’ll go have a look, okay?’

  Checking the M16s, Mac ejected the mags and weighed them in his hand; they were thirty-rounders and felt almost full. The kids cuddled into one another as Bongo handed Jessica his Desert Eagle and gave her basic directions on how to use it. Then Bongo and Mac stealthed in the direction the kids had indicated, making good time through the thin-undergrowth/high-canopy jungle.

  They heard the soldiers before they saw them. Shouts, drunken laughter, aggressive lewdness, and wafts of Tuaka – an incredibly powerful Timorese palm wine.

  ‘We do this,’ whispered Mac as they crept forward, ‘and we’ll be fighting these pricks for the next two weeks.’

  ‘Then we’ll make it clean,’ whispered Bongo.

  Feeling the mission sliding out of control, Mac tried one last time. ‘This isn’t the gig, mate. We should be back in the car.’

  ‘Tell that to the kids,’ said Bongo, turning to look Mac in the eye.

  It was a while before Mac broke Bongo’s stare. ‘Guess we’re not talking about prisoners?’

  ‘Who’s talking?’ said Bongo.

  Gesturing Mac to stay behind a tree and move in one minute, Bongo shouldered his rifle and arced away to the left. Mac checked his G-Shock and shouldered his own weapon, steeled himself and prepared to count down the rounds from the twenty-five he suspected were left in the thirty-rounder mag.

  His G-Shock showed thirty seconds till ‘go’ and Mac set the firing mechanism to ‘single’, cocked the M16’s slide and started moving forwards through the light scrub, downhill towards the creek bed. Coming over a small spur, he walked up behind a hide created by a low bush and ducked down in kneeling-marksman pose as the scene opened before him: militiamen and soldiers, wandering around drinking, wom
en’s clothing across the ground, a set of knickers dangling from a tree branch and men standing around a naked girl – no more than fifteen – egging on another soldier who was having sex with her. Several women’s bodies lay about the place with what looked like shots to the head. Obviously the brave ones who fought back, thought Mac.

  Beading up on the nearest rapist, Mac took a quick look at his G-Shock as his heartbeat amplified. It was ‘go’ and he waited for the first shot, which came almost instantaneously from across the copse, taking out a soldier’s head as he leaned back to swig from a bottle. Mac drilled his first target in the back, his second in the side of the ribs and then the head. The third target was a young militia member in a khaki T-shirt. Mac missed with his first two shots but then shot him twice in the upper chest as he bent for his rifle. The opening round was over in ten seconds. As the cordite cleared, the rapist lying on the girl was caught alone in the copse, unsure whether to go for his pants or his rifle. As his victim rolled away across the leaves, then looked for something to cover herself with, Bongo walked out of his hide, M16 shouldered, and executed the youth with two shots to the face.

  Stalking out, adrenaline pumping, Mac saw seven or eight women moving in the undergrowth, looking for clothes, dazed, split lips, broken noses and black eyes. As Bongo murmured to them, Mac vomited, the rape and the blood too much for him. Surfacing from his retching, he was about to call Deavers at UNAMET and get him up to the scene, when the sound of Jessica’s voice rang out through the jungle, followed by the Desert Eagle’s distinctive boom.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Mac, then ran across the creek bed and up the slope from where they’d come. He’d not gone ten strides before the boom of the Desert Eagle was responded to with the clatter of M16s and the crack of branches.

  His heart pounding in his chest, Mac sprinted back to where they’d left Jessica and the kids, but as they got closer, Bongo came up from behind and grabbed Mac by the arm, gesturing for him to stop and look around. Militia members were now obvious through the trees to their right, distinctive in their khaki T-shirts. They were not close enough to have overrun Jessica’s position, although they were now heading that way.