‘Save the girl,’ said Bongo. ‘How’s your Beretta?’
‘Full load,’ Mac replied, looking at Joao. ‘You really want to pick a fight with the Indonesian Army? In the middle of Bobonaro?’
Slamming a new mag into his G3 and then letting the mag fall out of his Browning into his hand, Joao shrugged. ‘Did it last night to help an Aussie out of the Ginasio – now we do it to save a girl.’
‘I’m not saying it like that,’ said Mac, blushing, aware that Australians could easily sound racist to Asians.
‘No?’ asked Joao.
‘No, mate, it’s just that it would be nice to report this place to the UN or the Australians without tipping off the Indonesians, right?’
Bongo and Joao exchanged words in Bahasa Indonesia.
‘What’s up?’ asked Mac.
‘Just saying, Yeah, first we tell UN, then we tell our teacher,’ said Joao, then set off.
As he readied himself to follow, Mac caught Bongo’s eye.
‘Don’t say it again, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Don’t even start.’
‘Wasn’t gonna,’ said Bongo, close behind Mac as they followed Joao to the corner of the building they were hiding behind.
‘Besides,’ said Mac, feeling guilty about his reluctance. ‘That phrase? That thing you said before we shot those rapists? We used to say that in the marines too, but it referred to the whole troop – not to every damsel who needs saving.’
‘Must have got it wrong then,’ whispered Bongo.
‘She’s crawling,’ said Joao, pointing at the shelter. ‘Cover me.’
Moving out from behind the camp building, still in the remainder of pre-dawn darkness, they crouched as they watched the LandCruiser and dozer transport about three hundred metres away and in no hurry.
Crouching in the kneeling-marksman position, Bongo and Mac beaded up on the approaching vehicles as Joao crawled through the bodies, his rifle across his shoulder blades. Mac could now see the girl, about eight years old, dark shoulder-length hair, in a white cotton dress, obviously dazed and trying to crawl away from the bodies. He watched as Joao got to the girl and gently levered her down, stopped her moving around.
‘I don’t know about this,’ snapped Mac, a bad feeling about the whole venture. ‘How many spooks in the LandCruiser?’
‘We’ll be fine – and Benni’s mine, if he’s here. Okay?’ said Bongo.
‘That what this is?’ hissed Mac, not believing what he was hearing. ‘This is still payback on Sudarto?!’
‘That’s our deal, remember, McQueen?’ said Bongo, squinting down the G3’s barrel.
Shaking his head, Mac focused on the approaching vehicles, two hundred metres away. ‘Don’t be disappointed if you can only find Amir – you were right about Benni, he’s not coming into the open.’
Glancing back towards the girl, Mac saw her nodding at Joao, then both were crawling back, staying low. Joao and the girl were now no more than ten metres away and making good time. They might make it, thought Mac. If they worked it properly, they could stealth back behind the camp building, get the girl over the wall and just hope the spooks didn’t want to have a look around.
Suddenly, the girl looked up, saw Mac and Bongo, and shook her head. As Joao reached up to pull her back down, she whipped her arm away and started running out into the camp yard.
‘No!’ yelled Bongo, before running after the girl.
As Mac rose from his crouch, Joao dashed after Bongo and the LandCruiser slid to a halt in the dirt as the transporter slid past it on the far side, crushing corpses as it went.
Everything unfolded like a nightmare as Mac stood transfixed: the spook who he’d headbutted the day before leapt from the driver’s door of the Cruiser with his SIG Sauer and, unsure who to shoot first, shot at the girl as she ran through the spill of the 4?4’s headlights. Missing with the first shot, he lined up for another but his head disintegrated as Bongo’s G3 shuddered and spat a casing.
As the spook with the fat lip fell to the dirt, Joao opened up on full auto into the open door of the Cruiser, knocking the passenger out the other side of the vehicle, shattering the glass and tearing up the interior.
Jogging into the open, Mac saw Bongo drop the G3 and draw the SIG from under his trop shirt. Then Bongo took three running strides past the girl and leapt up onto the running board of the Mercedes-Benz transporter cab, where he tore the door open and looked in. All Mac saw was four puffs of powder and the spent casings glinting in the pre-dawn as they tumbled to the dirt.
Swinging the Beretta in panicked arcs, Mac got to the middle of the yard and saw that Joao had secured the girl. Running around the other side of the LandCruiser, he closed on the spook who’d been in the passenger seat, the same one who’d assisted Amir Sudarto in Mac’s interrogation. Mac threw himself to his right and rolled across the dirt as the injured spook got off a shot. Coming up in a cup-and-saucer stance, Mac squeezed the trigger and hit the bloke in the right shoulder, knocking him onto his back and throwing the gun five metres.
Standing, Mac advanced as the spook held on to his shoulder wound. Shutting down the Benz transporter, Bongo jumped from the cab and came to Mac as Joao picked up the girl, put her on his hip and walked her to the shelter.
Standing over the injured spook, Mac gestured with his Beretta. ‘Phone?’
The bloke nodded.
Waving his gun, Mac said, ‘Just show me, don’t touch it – you know the drill.’
Grimacing with pain, the spook pointed with his left hand.
‘In the Cruiser?’ asked Mac.
The spook nodded before passing out.
‘Fuck!’ muttered Mac, moving to the 4?4.
‘What’s up?’ asked Bongo.
‘I wanted a chat,’ said Mac, looking into the interior of the LandCruiser, which was now plastered with blood and hair. ‘But a bloke in shock might not be very talkative.’
Reaching over to the centre console, Mac pulled out half a Motorola phone.
‘Won’t be getting much out of that, brother,’ said Bongo, kicking the spook’s face.
Climbing into the cab, Mac took a closer look in the console and glove box, but there was nothing of interest. The dozer made it obvious why they were up here but there were no written orders to confirm it.
The other three Falintil guerrillas jogged through the gates, wide-eyed and breathless. Seeing Mac and Bongo, they peeled away to Joao and the girl under the shelter.
Gulping down the adrenaline and the stress, Mac’s face pulsed where he’d been hit by Amir Sudarto. His left jaw still ached. Checking his Beretta, he spoke softly to Bongo.
‘I was cool to go along with this, but now I have to get back to Denpasar, okay, mate?’
Nodding, Bongo looked around forlornly as the sun strengthened behind the horizon. ‘Guess cross-country with Falintil is going to be too slow, right?’
‘Yeah, and after this,’ said Mac, gesturing around him with the gun, ‘it may be too dangerous.’
‘What about the UN?’ asked Bongo. ‘They got a helo in Maliana.’
‘I’m not going back to Maliana, and I’m not trusting my life to the UN,’ said Mac.
‘Okay,’ nodded Bongo. ‘So, the Cruiser or the truck?’
‘The Cruiser’s an intel vehicle – draw too much attention,’ said Mac. ‘Have to be the truck.’
‘Okay, McQueen,’ smiled Bongo. ‘I got an idea, but we gotta move fast, okay?’
Joao and his guerrillas had surrounded the spook and were lashing out at the man with kicks as Bongo and Mac moved for the truck.
‘Don’t interrupt,’ whispered Bongo, as Mac slowed.
‘I need to ask him something,’ whispered Mac as they got to the cab of the truck and Bongo unbuttoned his shirt.
‘We need to get going before the sun comes up,’ said Bongo.
‘Can we take him with us?’ asked Mac.
‘No, brother – this is Falintil’s kill, not ours.’
Mac decided not to argue. The spo
ok might know every last secret about Blackbird, but he wouldn’t tell Mac in a hurry.
‘So what are they saying?’ asked Mac, unnerved by the ferocity of Joao’s anger.
‘He’s saying, Who are you to betray your fellow human? ’ said Bongo, a little reticent as he pulled off his slacks and folded them. Mac noticed a Conquistador crucifix tattooed on his left shoulder blade, the legend INRI inscribed inside the cross piece.
Spittle flew off Joao’s lips as he reached down, picked up one of the stolen shoes and threw it at the spook’s face.
‘What’s he saying now?’ asked Mac.
‘Now he’s saying, You kill hundreds of my people, and then you steal their shoes? What kind of man are you? ’ said Bongo, pulling on the truck driver’s fatigue pants and buttoning the army shirt.
Walking over to the Falintil leader, Mac offered his hand.
‘Thanks, Joao,’ said Mac. ‘If you can get any intel on what was happening here, please let me know?’ He handed over his Arafura business card with his mobile phone number on it.
‘When I know, you’ll know, okay?’ said Joao, tears welling in his eyes. ‘Your friend has my phone number.’
‘I won’t forget what you guys did for me, okay?’ said Mac.
‘You better not,’ said Joao, ‘because you gotta tell Australia what you saw up here.’
Striding in, Bongo gave the lot of them hugs, then turned for the truck and pushed at Mac’s shoulder.
‘Time to get you out of here, McQueen,’ he said, lighting a smoke and reaching for the cab door.
Climbing in the other side, Mac looked back at the spook with the Falintil guerrillas.
‘What happens now?’ asked Mac, as the truck went into first and Bongo released the handbrake.
‘That intel guy – he gonna die the local way.’
‘The local way?’ asked Mac, confused.
‘See those machetes?’
Mac nodded. Most rural Timorese carried machetes that they sharpened fastidiously.
‘They gonna take his skin off and hang it on the fence, brother, and his scalp gonna hang above it, like a halo,’ said Bongo, continuing the truck’s long arc around the Falintil group and then reaching for third gear as they accelerated through the camp gates.
‘Pretty heavy punishment for a guy just doing his job,’ said Mac, finding a full bottle of water in the console.
Snorting, Bongo reached forward to the radio dial.
‘What!’ demanded Mac.
‘Well, I left out something that Joao was saying.’
‘Like?’ asked Mac.
‘Like, he’s saying to the intel guy, How were you going to make us vote against independence, by having sex with our children? ’
‘I see,’ said Mac, feeling sick.
‘Not like Australia, brother,’ said Bongo. ‘This the local way.’
CHAPTER 25
They made fast time north in the transporter before the sun came up. Indonesia may have possessed one of the world’s largest standing armies but it wasn’t one that rose with the day.
Sitting in the half-cab behind Bongo, Mac stayed out of sight and allowed Bongo to play the cheery army truck driver, delivering a bulldozer to another part of the island. Heading north from Memo, then taking the triangle road that would allow them to avoid Maliana, they hit the main road to Balibo at 5.41 am and had it to themselves.
‘Won’t be like this in ninety minutes,’ said Bongo, lighting a smoke. ‘Be Timor rush hour.’
‘What does that look like?’ asked Mac from his rear perch.
‘Horses, buffalo and women walking,’ said Bongo. ‘Some militia too,’ he added, more serious.
‘Speaking of militia,’ said Mac, ‘is Jessica safe?’
‘Hope so, brother. The Falintil women gonna walk her down to Zumalai, get her into a UN convoy.’
‘You think she’ll go?’ asked Mac.
‘Well, you know her, right?’ grimaced Bongo. ‘I told her she had to go now – being raped and killed is not a good way to find her father.’
‘What did she say?’
Bongo took his time answering. ‘She said, I worry about my father – you worry about Richard. ’
‘She said that?’ asked Mac, a smile breaking out involuntarily.
‘Yeah. She like you, that one. Like you a lot.’
Bongo kept the big rig at an even sixty kilometres per hour, not getting past fourth gear. Even the main thoroughfares of East Timor were unsealed and winding, and frequently punctuated by washouts from beneath or landslides from above.
Slowing for a washout that had been filled in and paved over in a big uneven dip, Mac had to get out of the cab and signal Bongo through the gap to avoid falling in the gorge while not bogging in the roadside ditch.
‘How long have the roads been like this?’ asked Mac, getting back into the half-cab.
‘Twenty, thirty years,’ shrugged Bongo, getting the transporter moving again. ‘The locals just fix it themselves. Some rocks, some trees.’
‘Jesus, Bongo,’ said Mac. ‘We’re in a forty-tonne vehicle, driving over washouts that have a few rocks laid over the top of them?’
‘Now you mention it,’ said Bongo.
After half an hour of driving, Bongo broke the silence. ‘So, we’re getting you to an airport, but we got a plan?’
‘ I have a plan, mate,’ said Mac. ‘You’ve done all I’ve asked. Get me near to Dili or Baucau and I’ll cut you loose.’
‘What’s the plan?’ asked Bongo, looking for Mac in the rear-vision mirror.
There wasn’t much to tell. Mac needed to get back to Denpasar, regroup and perhaps rethink the assignment. He’d been blown by Kopassus intelligence, which was all-powerful in the hills of Bobonaro, and if Blackbird was up there, it was not sensible for Mac to be operating covertly. If Aussie intelligence really needed to debrief Blackbird, they’d have to send in some poor bastards from special forces to get her.
‘Plan is to get out of Dodge,’ said Mac. ‘I was hoping to have more information before I left – a nice secret document that fell off the back of a truck, or a phone.’
‘Damajat’s?’ asked Bongo.
‘I thought Damajat’s phone logs would lead me to Blackbird, maybe even tell me more about Lombok AgriCorp.’
‘What about Rahmid’s sat phone?’
‘I’d like to have a look at that too – see who he’s been speaking to.’
‘So where’s the phone?’ asked Bongo.
‘It’s either in his room -’
‘No it ain’t,’ said Bongo.
‘- or it’s in his car.’
‘Rahmid had a car?’ asked Bongo.
‘Yeah.’
‘Didn’t find no keys in his room,’ said Bongo.
‘Then…’ said Mac, hoping Bongo would offer.
The Mercedes-Benz engine wasn’t enough to drown the Tagalog cursing. Then Bongo caught Mac’s eye in the mirror and held it.
‘Okay,’ snarled Bongo, his dark Ray-Bans barely able to contain the malice in his eyes. ‘But I’m not touching him, right?’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, breathing out.
‘I’ll show you the place, but I don’t rat a man once he’s buried, okay?’
As the sun came over the hills, they slowed and stopped for their first military checkpoint. Ducking down into the bench seat of the Mercedes’ half-cab, Mac listened to Bongo bullshit his way through it like a seasoned pro. Even without enough Bahasa Indonesia to follow all the conversation, it was clear to Mac that Bongo was regaling the guards with tales of a colonel’s halitosis or the crap food the 744 had to endure while those lazy 745 bastards in Dili got to eat anything they stole.
Handing out the cigarettes he’d found in the truck cab, Bongo got the rig moving again.
‘Don’t know what you said, but it sounded masterful,’ said Mac, coming out of hiding.
‘Pretending to be soldier is not hard in South-East Asia,’ said Bongo. ‘Just talk about how the brass don’t kn
ow what they doing, how politician are thieves and every base has a cook who can’t cook.’
Relieved, Mac mused on how fate had brought him together with one of the legends of spying in this part of the world. Bongo was allegedly so smooth in his covers that he sometimes found himself in tricky situations. Although known for his lisping blond concierge and his campy first-class steward covers, there was a rumour he’d once flown a Garuda 747 from Jakarta to Nagoya after his work-up had slightly oversold his experience.
‘Is that jumbo jet rumour true?’ asked Mac. ‘You know, the one about you flying to Japan?’
‘You kidding me?’ laughed Bongo. ‘You think they’d let me fly a 747?’
‘Guess not,’ said Mac.
‘Nah, brother. It was a 737 and it was only to Denpasar. The Indonesians are crazy, but they’re not stupid.’
The radio crackled to life as they crested a hill and Bongo keyed the handpiece. The conversation went back and forth, with Bongo maintaining the same sort of patter he’d managed with the checkpoint guards.
Hanging up, Bongo sighed as he fished for his cigarettes. ‘Time to find a new ride.’
‘What’s up?’ asked Mac.
‘Colonel in the engineers corps, reminding me that we have to be nice for our visitor and make it look like we busy and disciplined,’ smiled Bongo.
‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Mac.
‘They’re expecting the visitor at the camp at 0900 hours,’ said Bongo, lighting the smoke.
Mac looked at his G-Shock: 6.16 am.
‘And his name’s Captain Sudarto,’ added Bongo.
The next checkpoint was on a natural rise, and as the Mercedes-Benz slowed to a halt with a hiss of air brakes, Mac and Bongo still had the road to themselves.
Peeking from behind the driver’s seat, Mac saw a guard house with a green kijang parked beside it. A couple of bleary-eyed guards followed a more erect, more awake soldier out of the hut.
‘Why is there never a suppressor when you need one?’ muttered Bongo as the guard with the sergeant chevrons came around the front of the truck, ostentatiously noting the army rego plate on his clipboard as he passed.
His heartbeat ramping up, Mac waited behind the driver’s seat, his Beretta swimming in his hand as he waited for the imminent outburst of violence. Bongo wanted to dump the truck and he wanted to do it fast and clean. But having to drop someone created anxiety for Mac in the build-up and the aftermath; with his military training he could sleepwalk the actual assassination but controlling his fear and his guilt were the parts he had to work at.
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