Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

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.’