Mark Abernethy - Double back

Darkness closed in from the sides of his vision and a warm, safe sleepiness engulfed him. After nine years of pushing them into people’s mouths, he finally knew what Mogadon felt like.

The onshore wind felt beautiful on Mac’s face as he opened his eyes, becoming aware of the crashing surf and the night sky through the swishing palms.

Leaning over him, Beast peered and waved his hand from side to side. ‘Awake, Macca?’ he asked, squinting.

‘Think so,’ croaked Mac, his voice sounding like it was coming from a thousand miles away.

Robbo appeared beside Beast and they pulled him up into a sitting position, Mac’s brain swirling like a top.

‘Sorry, boys…’ he started, and then leaned to the side and vomited as Beast jumped back to keep his pants clean.

He felt foggy in the brain and hungry in the stomach, but mostly Mac was confused. ‘What’s up, guys?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with his shirt front.

‘You lost the girl,’ said Robbo, pushing up Mac’s eyeballs and shining his flashlight in them. ‘You were out to it, mate – girl drugged you. Mogadon by the looks of it.’

Shaking some clarity into his brain, Mac recalled some of the morning’s events and moaned as he realised he’d been duped.

‘She gone?’ he slurred.

‘No, we caught her,’ said Robbo. ‘But we had to move, and you have to get on the net, re-call the exfil.’

‘ I do?’ asked Mac, still waking up.

Behind Robbo, Blackbird’s hair blew in the sea breeze. Locking eyes with Mac, she gave a shrug that might have been an apology.

‘Our position was blown,’ said Robbo. ‘And you’re the one with the exfil call signs – we’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’

‘We’ve been made?’ said Mac.

‘No, mate – we moved before that,’ said Robbo, offering him another banana.

‘How did you know we were blown?’ asked Mac, confused.

‘The girl took off with your sat phone.’

‘Bitch,’ sighed Mac, despite some begrudging admiration.

‘Something like that,’ said Robbo.

It was past midday when Mac awoke to the trilling of the Nokia on his beside table. Scrambling for the phone in the dimness of his room at the Natour Bali he listened before hanging up and rolling out of the bed with a groan. The debrief location had been changed from Atkins’ offices to DIA’s headquarters in Denpasar.

As the shower water pelted his head, Mac willed himself to wake up and get his thoughts together. After delaying the Blackbird exfil by a day, during which he got almost no sleep, he’d then spent another day and night on boats, ships and a helo before hitting his pillow just ten hours earlier. Putting the exhaustion to one side, he thought about what he would say at the debrief and, more importantly, what he wouldn’t say. Having spent four days in East Timor on Operation Totem, he could claim that he and the 4RAR Commandos nailed two of the three objectives: Blackbird snatched and exfiltrated to a secret location for debriefing by Australian SIS and the Pentagon, and Lombok AgriCorp’s secret facility infiltrated, photographed and sampled.

It was a difficult tasking, and Mac was proud of the Aussies for punching above their weight.

The secret airfield was not so successful, but Mac wasn’t concerned. It looked like Haryono’s administration offices for his various interests, one of which was making illegal drugs for sale to middle-class fools in Australia and Japan. The actual set-up was obviously an agricultural spraying depot, probably for mosquitos. If the Indonesians wanted to conduct secret DDT programs in contravention of the UN’s ban on outdoor spraying, then it was fine with Mac – DDT being the cheapest and most powerful enhancer of quality of life for anyone who lived in malarial zones, regardless of what non-malarial greenies in London and San Francisco said about it.

There were loose ends that niggled at Mac’s mind, but they weren’t enough to ruin his morning. The underground facility at Lombok, for instance, didn’t strike him as being a drug lab. Mac had never seen a methamphetamine factory, or a cocaine lab, but he’d heard they smelled of powerful solvents and he assumed they didn’t include live testing programs. After his debrief, he would be eased out of Totem, but he might ask around – see how others interpreted that strange underground world.

Making a cup of green tea, he found himself thinking about Blackbird. She was no longer his problem – he’d been sent to find Australia’s hottest spy and he’d done it. But it was an anticlimax to risk so much only to discover that she was ambivalent at best, treacherous at worst.

Seeing the time, Mac stood to go and noticed his rucksack. The American courier at the base behind Denpasar’s Ngurah Rai Airport had been so insistent about getting Mac’s samples as soon he stepped off the helo that she hadn’t asked for the return of DIA’s digital Nikon.

Lifting it from the bag, Mac inspected the camera’s damaged data-jack area and had an idea.

Scanning the street outside the Natour, Mac grabbed the fourth cab, waving the first three away as soon as they stopped.

Giving an address four blocks south of Puputan Square, Mac settled in the back seat of the air-conditioned Camry and sat directly behind the driver so he could clock the bloke’s face in the rear-vision mirror.

‘Still the dry weather – good for you, sir,’ said the driver, a well-presented man in his early thirties.

‘Better than the monsoon?’ asked Mac, smiling.

‘No good for tourist,’ said the bloke, shaking his head slowly. ‘They get wet and crazy, then go home and say Bali is wet and crazy.’

‘That’s about right,’ said Mac, chuckling as the street stalls and crowds flashed by in his window.

Flipping the driver a US fifty-dollar note as they stopped, Mac asked him to drive to the Golden Lantern and wait outside for ten minutes.

‘For sure, sir,’ said the driver, eyes looking at a week’s profit in one fare. ‘I wait an hour for you.’

‘Ten minutes is fine, thanks, champ,’ said Mac, alighting with his businessman’s satchel and casing the street.

Walking back along the market street, he used the profusion of traders and locals to find a tail. Deciding he was clear, Mac ducked down an alley connecting the market street with a more sedate avenue, and counted seven shops before slipping into Bali Vision World, an inconspicuous camera store.

At the counter, a small Javanese man with neat features looked over his half-glasses and frowned.

‘You not meant to be here, Mr Richard,’ he said, whipping off his glasses and walking around the counter to meet Mac in front of the camera bag section. ‘I not do any of that no more.’

‘Calm down, Set,’ said Mac, modulating his voice. ‘I had no idea this was your shop, mate – just needed some images transferred.’

‘You are bad liar, Mr Richard,’ said Setawan Posi, one of the best electronic-surveillance technicians Mac had ever worked with.

‘It’ll take five minutes,’ said Mac, rustling a US hundred-dollar note in his hand. ‘Swear to God.’

Set put Mac’s Nikon on his work bench behind the counter area and, with some difficulty, opened the hatch that held the memory card.

‘You should not drop camera, Mr Richard,’ said Set as he pulled out the card. ‘They do not like it.’

Inserting the card into another identical Nikon, Set asked for the device they were going to download into.

Handing over his laptop, Mac watched as Set searched along his junk-covered workshop walls for a cable that would marry the Nikon to the laptop. Coming back with a beige connector, Set declared it a success and powered up the computer.