Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Sudarto’s face darkened as he yelled something down the plane.

The crying immediately dropped to a whimper. Mac looked at Freddi, who whispered, ‘The major just say to the guy, “If I have to plug your mouth I’ll do it with a size-eleven lace-up.”’

Sudarto rattled off more Bahasa, which Freddi interpreted for Mac. ‘A free service from Indonesian Army.’

The Kopassus guys slapped their thighs and Mac caught Benni Sudarto’s eye. The major winked.

Looking out the window again, Mac reckoned they were landing in Pekanbaru, which was on the east coast of Sumatra and closer to Singapore and Malaysia than to Jakarta. The haze had suggested the east coast of Sumatra but it was the F-5E Tiger fi ghter jets with the forward-sweeping wings that sealed it; Pekanbaru was the only military base on Sumatra with Tiger jets.

Freddi gestured for Mac to remain seated as the Kopassus soldiers and their prisoners disembarked and made for a large blue van.

While the F28 was being refuelled, Purni and Mac watched Freddi remonstrate with Benni Sudarto on the tarmac. After a few minutes, Freddi peeled away and came back to the F28, talking excitedly into his phone. Running to the top of the stairs, he knocked on the pilot door and barked an order. A reply came back in Bahasa, but it was a universal, Yeah, yeah.

One of the fl ight crew pulled the cabin door shut, locked it in place and asked the three of them to fasten their seatbelts as he slipped back into the cockpit. Almost immediately the revs came up and they started moving forward.

‘So, Freddi, what’s up?’ asked Mac.

‘Police from Medan chased off a plane trying to land at an old Jap airfi eld, inland from Binjai up near the national park,’ said Freddi, eyes already mad for the chase. ‘A party of eight or nine were on the ground before the landing was aborted. Now they’re on the run – two vehicles, lots of fi repower.’

The F28’s rear engines screamed and it raced down the runway as Freddi got on the phone again. Medan suited Mac – it was where his friend, Johnny Hukapa, was based.

They fl ew for twenty-fi ve minutes, talking things through on the way. It looked as if the Hassan-Akbar team was travelling as a single unit. And although the Medan POLRI had lost them, they’d done the next best thing and stopped them leaving the country. For now, anyway, they were trapped in the wild west of Sumatra.

‘When you say fi repower, Freddi, what are we looking at?’ asked Mac.

‘Police reckon American assault rifl es, look like M16 A2s, maybe M4s. One offi cer thought there was a fi fty-cal in there somewhere, but it’s not confi rmed.’

‘Any licence plates?’

‘Yep – we’ve got all that.’

‘Positive IDs?’ asked Mac. ‘I mean, are we sure it’s them?’

‘Hundred per cent on Samir, eighty per cent on Akbar. No one recognised Hassan – they wouldn’t know who he was, but the police guys said it was a Pakistani crew.’

‘That obvious?’

Freddi smiled. ‘Around here it is. Besides, their military guy already has a nickname and it’s the same as the one we had for him in Kuta.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, they call him Gorilla. He walks like an ape, you remember the guy?’

Mac nodded as he remembered ducking down in Ari’s car outside the Puri. The last thing he’d seen was that helmet hair on a big wide man with a big wide gait.

‘We’re trying to get a name on him, but we think he’s Hassan’s tough guy. Former Pakistani special forces, something like that.’

Mac thought about it. ‘Any other airfi elds they might use? A Plan B?’

Freddi shook his head, smiled. ‘This is Sumatra, McQueen – we got old airfi elds like we got trees.’

A black LandCruiser was waiting at the airport when they landed and Purni took the wheel. They left Medan behind and swept inland at a hundred and fi fty K an hour, locals pulling off on to the shoulder of the narrow roads as the Cruiser approached.

Freddi sat in the front with a police radio and Mac sat in the rear, his Oakley pack beside him. He hoped there was a spare assault rifl e in the weapons bags stowed behind him. The thought of a shoot-out with Gorilla’s boys, armed only with the Heckler, was not comforting.

The terrain undulated through lots of green, the heat and the haze giving the country a haunted feel. The radio crackled constantly and Freddi spoke into it while looking at a plastic-covered map on his lap. Occasionally he’d make an entry in a small detective’s notebook, turning around sometimes to confi rm a landmark called from a helo team. Mac didn’t know how you’d fi nd a landmark in that country with its miles of green scrub, palm-oil plantations, market gardens and small farms, punctuated by stands of jungle that looked like they’d been allowed to remain around the creeks and rivers.

A Huey painted in army camo colours buzzed the Cruiser and Freddi looked up through the sunroof at the ID numbers, then yelled something into the radio. The excitement almost reached screaming levels from the radio speakers as Freddi tapped Purni on the left arm and pointed, then tapped him again, Mac’s adrenaline squirting as they screeched into a four-wheel hand-brake stop.

Purni brought the revs up again and gunned the Cruiser into a hard-right turn as they aimed into an impossibly narrow jungle track and fl ew into it like a train into a tunnel. In seconds the bright light of the open Sumatran country was replaced with a darker, dappled drive down a trail close enough for the trees to brush and bang the sides of the Cruiser. Mac reached for his seatbelt as he looked over Purni’s shoulder and saw the speedo nudge one-seventy, the spring-mounted aerials whiplashing around the vehicle.

They screamed through the tunnel of green at breakneck speed, Mac suddenly feeling very seasick. Without warning they were travelling uphill, Purni struggling to keep the Cruiser on the track as it bucked and whined against the rough ground, the overworked engine screaming every time all four wheels got airborne. As the terrain got even steeper Mac grabbed the handrail in the ceiling and heard himself say, Oh shit, as the Cruiser hit the crest of the blind rise at one sixty-fi ve and leapt into the air.

They sailed for four seconds and when they descended they had run out of track and the LandCruiser was about ten metres into the jungle. Mac yelled as they bounced, small trees falling like bowling pins and thumping the undercarriage of the vehicle as Purni kept his foot on the gas. Then – as they hit a stump large enough to upend most vehicles – they were dropping nose down into a small river.

Mac leaned back and prayed as the LandCruiser buried its grille into the shallow water at such a speed that water and mud rose over the vehicle like a wave. Purni kept the revs going as the Cruiser, barely losing momentum, lurched across the twenty-metre-wide creek, muddy water pouring across the bonnet. Grabbing onto the gentler slope of the opposite bank, Purni slowly got enough purchase to start bowling trees again. Mac put his feet up on the back of Freddi’s seat as the engine screamed in pain. They got their speed up again so that the thumpa-thumpa of the jungle under and above the vehicle quickly reached a drum-like rhythm. With one fi nal lurch they were out of the jungle and back onto the track, bouncing up and down like a ball.

Sweat poured off Mac’s forehead. He’d seen lots of bad driving in his life, mostly teenagers in Rockie who’d save every penny for their fi rst ute and then see whether the rear tyres or the clutch-plate would burn out fi rst if you took it to seven grand and dropped the clutch.

But Purni was a whole new league. He was sober, for starters.

Purni gunned the accelerator again and the souped V8 screamed into line and raised a cloud of dust as the Cruiser’s speedo climbed back into three digits. Freddi worked the radio and then looked back.