Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Sure,’ said Freddi, smiling. ‘But we’re all on edge, yeah?’

  Mac keyed his Nokia, got through to Ari in the tailing car. ‘Sorry about that, mate. Had a brain-snap.’

  ‘You hit like boxer – all Australians punch like this?’

  ‘All Russians have iron heads like this?’ said Mac shaking his left hand out the window.

  Ari boomed laughter into the phone.

  ‘Listen, Ari,’ said Mac. ‘I’ve got a bunch of US dollars – can I buy you all lunch?’ He looked around and Freddi and Purni nodded.

  ‘Too the fucking right, mite,’ shouted Ari.

  There was a riverside fi sh stand on the road back inland from Belawan to Medan. Freddi, Ari and Purni sat at the table, talking about Hassan and Gorilla, while Mac tried to fi nd some beers. The woman behind the stand pulled a green curtain aside and opened a dark blue esky on the fl oor behind it, pulling three Tigers from the ice. In northern Sumatra the conservative Muslims were not insulted by alcohol consumption so long as it wasn’t prominently displayed at the counter. A big glass fridge of booze might be construed as tempting the believers.

  Mac put the beers on the table, with Purni the only one not to reach for a bottle.

  ‘That wasn’t the other device – no way,’ Freddi was saying to Ari.

  ‘You are right,’ said Ari, gulping at the cold beer. ‘Not enough blast, no incendiary phase.’

  Mac wanted more on the Port Authority blast. ‘So what happened back there?’

  ‘Stored anfo,’ said Freddi. ‘That’s my guess. Microwaves can spark the fumes, we all know that.’

  ‘So Hassan’s still got the other device?’

  Ari and Freddi were silent, naturally cagey.

  ‘Or it’s stored, yes?’ asked Ari. ‘And Hassan and his camel-fuckers are trying to get off this island.’

  While Mac wolfed down the grilled fi sh chunks, he thought about how he was going to get either Ari or Freddi to come clean on what had destroyed the Sari Club.

  ‘So, one of you two going to tell me what this other device is?’

  They both did their shrugs, the Javanese and Russian versions almost a parody of each other.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Nothing to say, McQueen,’ said Freddi, washing his food down with beer. ‘It’s small, it has a huge yield, it was brought in by the Pakistanis. And we are ninety-nine per cent sure they brought in two of them.’

  A thromp sounded in the distance and as it got louder Freddi stood with his portable radio handset and walked out of the courtyard into the sun. Looking over, Mac saw three Indonesian Army Hueys about half a mile away, heading north up the coast at full speed.

  Keying the radio, Freddi demanded something, and after a few seconds an adrenaline-charged voice yelled down the airwaves in raucous outbursts. Mac recognised the shortness of breath and the nervous excitement – it was the way he’d felt for the last three days.

  Freddi barked into the radio as he strode back towards the fi sh shack. Mac noticed a change in the noise of the helos and that one of the Hueys had doubled back towards them.

  ‘Only room for two,’ snapped Freddi, then pointed at Purni and rattled an order.

  ‘It’s still Handmaiden, McQueen. Okay?’ said Freddi as Purni ran out to the Cruiser.

  Mac’s heart sank. He just wanted to eat and sleep properly and go to New York.

  Ari stood beside Mac, annoyed. ‘So where is this? Where are we going?’

  Freddi looked back at them, smiling. ‘This could be it.’

  As they walked outside, the Huey was landing in the grassed forecourt area putting up a blanket of dust, leaves and insects. The traffi c on the road to Medan slowed to a crawl as Purni brought over two M4s, two vests and a black Cordura bag fi lled with what Mac assumed were spare magazines, replacement radio handsets and the interrogation kit Indonesian intelligence operatives travelled around with. Mac threw his Oakley backpack over his left shoulder and took the Cordura bag, a vest and an M4. The dust drove past Mac’s sunnies and into his eyes as they moved towards where the loadmaster had his arm extended out of the army helo. Mac got into the cabin, took a hammock seat, then looked out and saw Freddi yelling something into Purni’s ear and giving him the radio, before jogging to the Huey with his vest and assault rifl e. Freddi got in and sat beside Mac, facing forward with his back against the rear bulkhead.

  The revs came up and the loadmaster slid home the side door.

  As the helo rose Mac noticed two things simultaneously: the person sitting beside the pilot was Major Benni Sudarto. And outside on the grass apron, Purni was looking at the rising helo… but Ari was looking at Purni with a look Mac couldn’t quite decipher.

  CHAPTER 21

  They landed about ten miles north of a pirate town called Idi, on the Malaccan coast. Deplaning onto the dirt pan of a coastal airfi eld, Mac let two of the Kopassus troopers go in front of him as the dust fl ew in the mid-afternoon heat haze of northern Sumatra. Sudarto’s intel had the Hassan gang planning to use this long-abandoned airfi eld, and from Freddi’s comments Mac guessed that Kopassus and BAIS were intercepting signals. The Indonesian military, police and intelligence agencies were confi dent they had shut down Northern Sumatra and were about to trap the Kuta bombers.

  Sudarto led the boys to the edges of the dirt pan where palms and wild pineapples created a natural cover. Then the helos powered up and got airborne, their loadmasters setting up. 50-cal door-mounted guns for possible air support. Mac wore a borrowed Kevlar special forces helmet but he’d missed out on a headset. He wouldn’t have been able to follow the Bahasa anyway, but he’d have liked to stay connected with Freddi.

  Sudarto split them into three groups. Two went opposite ways around the perimeter of the airfi eld. Their job was to fl ush out any tangos who might be hiding, and if they couldn’t fi nd any, to dig in, create a hide and wait for orders. Sudarto was taking Freddi, Mac and three Kopassus troopers to check the array of old buildings that sat behind the concrete control tower, its black-and-white chequered paint job telling Mac that this had been a military installation at some point, probably during Konfrontasi – a dispute from the early 1960s when Indonesia tried to stop the creation of the modern Malaysia by making military incursions into the new country.

  They jogged along together, Mac’s vest weighing on his shoulders.

  He was glad he’d swapped his boat shoes for the Hi-Tecs when they took a shortcut through a stand of palms with wild pineapples spread like a carpet through the undergrowth. They were young plants that would have cut his feet apart in anything less than his boots. Pausing at the edge of the undergrowth, they looked out over a derelict square that would once have been the administration and barracks area of a military post. There was no one there now – no vehicles, no planes, no sign of life.

  They knelt in the shade and Sudarto whispered with his sergeant.

  Then Sudarto looked back and snapped something at Freddi, the only part of which Mac understood to be terowong. Mac hoped he’d got the translation wrong. Then Freddi turned to him with a shit happens look and Mac knew there was a tunnel complex around somewhere and Sudarto wanted to check it out.

  ‘Fuck, Freddi,’ hissed Mac, his hands sliding all over the M4 in the heat of the afternoon. ‘It’s gonna be an ambush – swear to God.’

  Freddi yelled something at Sudarto and the major replied with a huge grin and, smiling at Mac, said, ‘We’re just going to check the entrances, McQueen. That okay with you?’

  As the soldiers laughed, Mac said, ‘Cheers, thanks, Major.’

  Mac had an internal tension between bravery and caution. He could make himself do things he didn’t want to do, but he wasn’t gung-ho. Back in the Royal Marines, he’d once asked Banger Jordan why he’d been put up for the SBS Swimmer-Canoeist course. ‘You know I can’t stand frogging in muddy water,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve seen the state of me before a night jump.’

  Banger had laughed at him. ‘The thing about the
best special forces guys is that they feel fear and make themselves overcome it.’

  Now they were looking for Hassan, Samir and Gorilla in a deserted military base which stood over what Mac assumed was a bunker system. Mac didn’t like it and he didn’t believe they were just going to check for anything. Kopassus were many things, but they weren’t inspectors.

  Mac moved second to last in a duck line, a trooper doing the sweep behind him as they moved across the edges of an old parade ground. Some of the buildings had been destroyed, some had been picked up off their foundations and moved to other bases, others were sagging.

  They stayed in the shadows and the duck line stretched out. Mac looked for trip wires, pressure pads, tyre marks, boot prints – anything to get a sense of where the enemy might be. They moved beyond the parade ground and further into the foliage that had encroached on the base over the years. Sweat ran down Mac’s back, swimming under the vest and soaking down the back of his pants.

  They got to a shape in the bushes that rose to the height of a man and was covered in vines and other greenery. Sudarto sent a trooper forward to look for booby traps while the rest of them fanned out around the structure and stood guard. Once Mac got into position he could see the shape in the foliage was a concrete entranceway that framed an iron door. The trooper called for Sudarto to come over and the major moved to the door, looked at it, pushed vines away with his M4 and shook his head. No one had gone in that entrance.

  The minutes ticked by, the afternoon temp building to what Mac reckoned was thirty-nine degrees. It would have been bearable half a mile away on the beach, but in the palms, pineapples and rainforest it was soaking-humid and Mac had left his backpack and water on the helo. They checked the other three bunker entrances, which were arranged in a rectangle in which the long sides were fi fty metres apart and the short sides about twenty metres.

  They found a hide in behind one of the runway buildings that had a large vine overhang, but with sight lines to the airfi eld. Sudarto got the water distributed and moved off to a private area where he worked a Harris fi eld radio from a trooper’s pack, looking far from happy.

  Freddi and Mac stood where they could see over the airfi eld.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Mac, slugging at the water.

  ‘Major’s annoyed with the SIGINT,’ said Freddi, looking over at Sudarto as if he didn’t want the soldier to hear him. ‘Maybe he thinks this is set-up?’

  Freddi took off his helmet, poured some water into his hand and wiped it back through his hair. Mac did the same; it felt good.

  ‘So, what’s the set-up?’ asked Mac, knowing that SIGINT – or signals intelligence – was not always as scientifi c as it sounded.

  Freddi shrugged. ‘If Hassan knows we’re intercepting his pilots, he could tell them to make false signals, and we wait in wrong place while he is doing exfi l.’

  ‘Or,’ said Mac, who was paranoid about such things, ‘we’re in the right place but we’ve been lured into an ambush?’

  Freddi slugged water without taking his eyes off Mac. ‘Well, McQueen,’ he said evenly, ‘that would require that Hassan’s crew knew where we were an hour ago, because ambushes have a timing component, right?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Fred,’ snapped Mac, way too on edge for polite chit-chat. ‘I was dropped into this – I want these fuckers on a pole, believe me.’

  ‘Wasn’t pointing at you. What about our Mossad friend?’

  ‘Ari?’ Mac was surprised at that. ‘He wants these blokes too.

  Samir’s people killed his partner in Java two nights ago.’

  Mac let it rest for a few seconds, then realised what Freddi was actually saying. ‘You mean, Ari’s part of this crew?’ he said, jigging his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘Not saying anything, McQueen – just that the major is nervous about the SIGINT that got us here. And he’s a good soldier.’

  Mac needed a slash so he crabbed along the building and moved quickly across a short open area and into more vines and undergrowth.

  Looking around nervously, he tried to get his senses together amid the din of insects and birds. He thought about Sudarto’s anxiety – special forces paranoia was a security device, not a mental health problem.

  But something troubled Mac. If the SIGINT was really contaminated then Purni was a more logical candidate for being a double agent than Ari. Purni had been left behind with the radio set. Purni could listen in. Purni, now unsupervised, could be in unlimited communications with Hassan or Gorilla.

  As he shook off, Mac thought he heard a sound. Picking up his M4, he moved slowly forward, wishing he still had his helmet. Peeking through a curtain of vines, he saw a couple of local kids playing in a clearing. The girl and boy, about ten and nine, were teasing a young macaque in a tree with a bunch of green and purple fi gs on a long branch. The macaque was trying to get lower to grab the fi gs but the kids kept pulling them away. Mac watched as the macaque worked out what was going on and pretended to look away, as if uninterested, before lunging at the fruit. Mac had seen kids entertain themselves like this for hours in the Archipelago, child and macaque each sure they would outsmart the other.

  The macaque turned its back on the kids and made to climb the tree, so the kids touched its back with the fi gs. The macaque suddenly spun and grabbed at the fi gs, but lost its balance in the process and fell out of the tree, scaring the kids into running off screaming.

  Frightened, the macaque skedaddled straight back up the tree. The kids ran towards the vine curtain Mac was hiding behind, recoiling when they saw him. They stood and took him in, their eyes huge and mouths turned down.

  Mac threw the M4 away into the vines, hoping they hadn’t seen it.

  ‘Hey gang,’ he smiled. ‘Catchee monkey?’

  The girl smiled, and Mac saw she was the older of the two. ‘No catchee, mister. Monkey smart today.’

  Mac nodded with understanding. Sometimes those darned macaques were too good at the old triple-bluff, double-reverse logic thing. A girl needed to be on her game.

  ‘I’m Mac,’ he pointed at his chest. ‘What’s your name?’

  The girl just stared at him, so Mac smiled, pretended to be shy.

  ‘Merpati,’ she said, ‘and Santo – Santoso.’

  ‘Brother?’

  Merpati nodded. ‘Santo, brother.’

  Mac thought about it, and said, ‘Merpati, I’m with my friends, at airfi eld, yes?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘But there might be big trouble, so you should go back to beach, yes?’ He pointed away from the airfi eld towards the coast which was about a kilometre east.

  Merpati shook her head like a teacher’s pet. ‘The men there.’

  Mac’s breath caught. ‘Men, on beach?’

  ‘In trees, at beach, yes,’ she said, nodding.

  Hot air steamed in Mac’s throat as he tried to keep his breathing regular.

  ‘Trouble there too,’ she added.

  ‘Man?’ asked Mac, pretending to be calm. ‘Man like me?’

  The girl shook her head, big eyes serious, then wiped her hand down her face, which in Indonesia meant normal looks like mine, not like yours.

  ‘Men tall?’ asked Mac.

  Merpati pointed at Mac. Then she remembered something and her face lit up. ‘Man like, like… gorilla?’

  Mac gulped and sensed movement through the leaves. A monkey yelled and a hornbill jumped off a branch as his brain screamed fucking ambush. Reaching for the kids’ hands to drag them out of the fi ring zone, he tried to pull them back towards the airfi eld with him, but Santo panicked and wriggled out of Mac’s grip and ran back into the clearing where they’d been playing with the monkey.

  ‘Stay here!’ Mac snapped at Merpati, and ran after the boy.

  As he reached the clearing, Mac saw that Santo had already crossed the open space and was heading back towards Hassan’s people. Mac put on a sprint, trying to stay quiet, tackling the boy about ten metres past the clearing and
slapping his hand over the kid’s mouth.

  The jungle had turned so quiet they could hear the macaque muttering to itself in the tree. Santo’s little heart raced against Mac’s arm and tiny twig-breaks and footfalls were obvious now that Mac had his ear on the jungle fl oor. He pulled Santo under a log, the boy’s hair swishing forward and revealing a triangular birthmark that ran up behind his left ear and under his hair. Turning Santo over to face him, Mac pointed ahead, put a hush-hush fi nger to his lips and pleaded with his eyes. The boy seemed to get it. He was scared but he trusted Mac.

  Mac felt a huge burden of responsibility and made a quick pact with God: If this boy does everything I say, can you let him live?

  CHAPTER 22

  Putting his head up very slowly, Mac took a look over the parapet of the log. There was no movement, but the small noise he’d heard had come from an area at about a forty-fi ve degree angle to their hide.

  Mac needed to get back to his M4 and Merpati, and get the two kids the hell out of there. Looking at Santo, he made a crawling motion with his fi ngers in the direction of Merpati. Santo nodded, scared but brave.

  Mac and Santo lay on their stomachs and crawled, Mac’s left hand grasping the back of the boy’s T-shirt so there’d no more runners. The ground behind the log dipped slightly, hiding them from sight, and they moved quickly on their bellies into the clearing with the monkey tree. Behind the tree, Mac stood in a crouch, his heart going crazy.

  He looked back and waited, wanting to locate the Hassan soldiers.

  Stealthing across the clearing to where Merpati’s legs were visible, they all crouched behind the vine. Mac collected the M4, his eyes darting around in the eerie quiet of the jungle.

  Mac wanted to move the kids but he didn’t want to lead Hassan’s people to Freddi and the Kopassus soldiers, which would benefi t no one.

  He turned the kids, and aimed them on an angle forty-fi ve degrees away from where the last footfalls had come from. As they started to move, there was a solid click of steel and an eerie pause. Then the air tore open with the sound of automatic weapons.