Mark Abernethy - Double back

The doors didn’t budge.

‘Here,’ hissed Chloe, picking up a steel bar.

Grabbing it, Mac levered it under the padlock, opening the doors in one attempt. Chloe gasped as the searchlight beam swept closer and several rounds of gunfire whacked into the wall above them.

There was a brief lull in gunfire as the male voices chattered at each other. The light was aimed over Mac and Chloe’s heads as they crawled from the alley through the open doors. As Mac went to stand, he found himself falling down a chute, landing in a stinking puddle of slime at the bottom. Chloe joined him half a second later, and as they searched for an escape route in the inky darkness, a volley of machine-gun fire ricocheted into the delivery chute.

Walking along the cellar floor, hands stretched out in front of him, Mac tripped in the blackness, falling forward and hitting his head on concrete steps.

‘Are you okay?’ whispered Chloe, voice panicked.

‘Good as gold,’ said Mac, pushing himself onto his knees then leading Chloe up the steps.

They emerged in the ground floor of what looked like an old warehouse space. Moving to the most obvious exit, Mac cursed as he found it bolted. Creeping along the wall with Chloe in front of him, they slipped behind a pile of wooden crates.

Mac pulled out his Nokia as they heard their pursuers sliding down the delivery chute.

‘Bongo, I need a hand, mate,’ rasped Mac. Describing their location as clearly as he could, Mac asked him to hurry.

‘There yesterday, brother,’ said Bongo, whose apartment was two blocks away.

The rays of searchlight beams winked from the cellar entry. Mac considered ambushing the shooters as they came up the stairs, but decided against it. Clearly pros, they’d stagger the ascent of those stairs, precisely to catch an ambusher in the support fire. Besides, he couldn’t leave Chloe, who was shaking like a leaf and looked as if she might collapse at any moment.

Moving further around the wall, Mac found a place where he could see the top of the cellar stairs. Torches now off, the first shooter emerged and cased the warehouse in distinct quartiles: east-west, high-low.

The second shooter joined him and they split, the taller of the two moving towards the crate they were hiding behind.

‘Okay,’ whispered Mac. ‘We’re going to move along this wall, see if we can stay one step ahead, okay?’

There was no reply and then Mac felt her slump against him.

‘You okay?’ asked Mac.

Looking down he saw her back was a shiny black mess of blood – she’d taken a bullet on the street.

‘Fuck!’ said Mac.

Looking up Mac saw a mezzanine about ten metres above the floor. Doorways and skylights led out of the area and he realised that this was their best escape route. As he plotted his course to get up to the mezzanine, he saw the short gunman racing at the stairs and charge up them three at a time. Reaching the mezzanine level, the shooter hit the power on his halogen searchlight and strobed the ground-floor area with the intense illumination.

‘Hang in there,’ said Mac as Chloe clung to him. ‘I’m going to get us out of here.’

Up ahead was a partially unloaded crate with a panel missing. Steering Chloe into it, Mac whispered for her to stay put until he gave the okay. Though scared and injured, she looked him in the eye and nodded.

Moving back along the wall, Mac saw a pile of sacks on a filing cabinet. Picking one up, he undid his boat shoes, put them in a sack and waited for the tall shooter to come down the corridor of crates. Mac ducked back from the sweeping glare of the halogen and waited for ten seconds. The tall shooter turned right, and waved a hand over his head, his searchlight exposing a scuttling rat. Mac pulled back behind the crate as the shooter kept coming.

Taking two steps to his right, away from the corridor, Mac swung the sack into the darkness. The tall shooter swivelled around to face the sound and Mac lunged at him, kicking the shooter’s groin, whipping a right elbow across his nose, and ripping the A4 counter clockwise from the shooter’s right hand, breaking the fingers so that the machine pistol dropped into Mac’s hand.

Getting his finger on the trigger, Mac swung the gun at the shooter who was lying in the foetal position, clutching at his wrist. Suddenly Mac was bathed in light as he squinted into the harshness of another searchlight, virtually paralysing in its intensity.

‘Drop the weapon,’ came the mechanical English of an Indonesian. ‘You’re in my sights.’

Heaving for breath and blinded, Mac felt the beam of light move off him. Then there were two shots and a weight hit Mac from the side.

Turning, he found Chloe sagged against his leg.

‘Ask for George,’ she whispered. ‘In Singapore, okay?’

‘What?’ asked Mac, barely able to see.

‘George – find the traitor,’ said Chloe, then the air was torn with the hellish racket of gunfire. Mac fell and scrambled back to his hide between the crates.

Full-auto fire bellowed as Mac lay in his alcove, scared shitless and effectively blind.

The gunfire raged for ten seconds and Mac lay there, panting in the dark, the acrid smell of cordite and gunpowder wafting into his hide. Feeling for the breech slide and the safety of the A4, Mac pushed himself around on his elbows so he was sitting up against the crate, and looking down the narrow confines of his hide, gun pointing to where the attack would come from.

Mumbling his Hail Marys, thinking about the good things in his life, and trying to reassure himself that he’d tried his hardest with the whole Operasi Boa snafu, Mac listened to the floorboards creak with approaching footfalls.

Pulling the A4 up, Mac tried to control his breathing as the footsteps came closer, stopping short of Mac’s hide.

‘McQueen!’ came the Filipino-English. ‘It’s me!’

‘Bongo, in here, mate,’ said Mac, fading fast.

As Bongo peered around the corner, Mac felt the warmth under his armpit from the bullet he’d taken in the arm.

‘You okay, McQueen?’ asked Bongo.

‘No,’ said Mac as his chin sagged to his chest.

Drinking from a bottle of water, Mac was vaguely aware of the early-morning traffic noises of Denpasar as Bongo finished a conversation on the phone. Mac’s throbbing arm looked worse than it really was – a graze that had been cleaned and dressed by the local hospital.

‘The hospital will hold the death notification for twelve hours,’ said Bongo, lighting a cigarette as he sat on the sofa. ‘But if this Chloe is from the President’s office, the local cops don’t want the hassle of covering it up too long. We’d better find someone to take her back to Jakarta before the Sudartos find out about her, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Mac. ‘Twelve hours. We got that flight?’

‘Locked and loaded, bro.’

‘Give me an hour,’ said Mac, ‘and then we roll.’

Atkins picked up the whole coffee plunger and headed for his office, Mac following with two mugs and the milk. Shutting the door, Atkins gestured Mac to a seat.

‘So, mate – this another telling off?’ asked Atkins, pouring the coffees.

‘No tellings off,’ said Mac. ‘A number of people have been shot and killed around me in the past week, and as my controller, I need to bring you in on it.’

‘Sure, Macca – and I’m sorry about how things went the other day. It’s not… I mean, you get to the management side and it’s a juggle, okay?’

‘I understand,’ said Mac, sipping his coffee. ‘And normally, I’d let it slide – move to the next gig, go to the Banda Sea, spy on Dutchies.’

‘Sure,’ laughed Atkins.