Mark Abernethy: Second Strike

After going round the block, passing all the non-offi cial tourism operators’ booths, nasi goreng stalls, restaurants setting up for the evening trade and T-shirt emporia, he came back around to the Bajo Hotel on Harbour Street. British backpackers milled in the lime-washed lobby, conspicuous in their lobster-red suntans and Bintang T-shirts. Moving through them to the front desk, Mac caught the eye of the young concierge, Davie.

‘Hello, Mr Richard, are you with us tonight?’ asked the smiling Indonesian.

‘Yep – same room,’ said Mac, forking over some rupiah as Davie got his board and pencil out.

‘And, mate, what’s the name of that bloke on the waterfront?

Does the private boat charters?’ added Mac.

Davie lit up. Indonesians loved being helpful to outsiders. ‘Rayah

– he has the red cutter beside the Komodo Tours ship. Rayah my friend. You tell him and he give you good price.’

Mac chuckled at that and fl icked Davie a handful of rupiah for his troubles, then he headed for the stairs that wound around the liftwell.

Davie was now attending to a Scottish girl who wanted a doctor, so Mac passed the foot of the stairs and went straight through a side exit, down a corridor and out into a service lane. He doubled behind the Bajo Hotel and down to the port, found Rayah on the fi rst loop and cased him: watched for signs that he was expecting someone. Was he looking up and down the wharf? At his watch or mobile phone?

Circling back to a payphone bolted against a chandler’s store, Mac put his TI card in the slot and phoned a mate of his called Philip who owned the beach cottages at Seraya Island – so close to Komodo yet so overlooked by European experience-seekers. He booked a cottage, circled back to a bar on the wharf and bought a case of Tiger. The price of the beers was exorbitant but not as bad as the prices charged on Seraya for Bintang. As the sun got close to the horizon, Mac walked up to Rayah and asked him how much to Seraya. Rayah threw out bunches of ten fi ngers several times, till Mac said, ‘Davie sent me.’ The bloke slumped and Mac handed him the beers, but kept his backpack.

Mac lay on his back in the gentle swell off Seraya Beach as the orange of the Flores sunset slowly gave way to the diamond-studded velvet of the evening sky. He heard the generator start and the lights go on in the restaurant block. Letting his head dip under the water, Mac spouted sea water through his mouth; despite an evening meal of ginger chicken and beer, he could still taste the rubber of the rebreather mouthpiece.

Relaxing his entire body he thought about the UN, thought about Ahmed Akbar. Thought about all the things he’d got slightly wrong on Penang Princess and how they might come back to haunt him. Images from that pantry fl ickered through his mind. Was it really the face of Abu Samir, the JI mastermind behind the Jakarta Stock Exchange bombing? He couldn’t be sure. He’d been so focused on getting Akbar out in one piece that the fl ash he’d had of a face in the dark could really have been anyone.

Abu Samir did not have the same profi le on the FBI and CIA computers as Hambali or Mohammad Noordin Top – both of them JI operatives who hid out in Malaysia while Suharto went on a turkey shoot of Jihadists in the late 1990s. But if you asked any military intel or special forces person about the tangos they wanted to put away, Samir outranked everyone except Abu Sabaya. Samir was similar to Sabaya in that he didn’t think like some Baader-Meinhof dickhead trying to outrage Daddy. He thought like a guerrilla general: how to cause the utmost pain and injury to the enemy. How to demoralise.

Mac emerged from the tepid water and walked up the beach, trying to breathe shallow to protect his aching chest, the white sand squeaking under his feet.

What looked like Sri Lankan newlyweds wandered towards him hand-in-hand. They said hi, and Mac smiled, nodded.

Outside his cottage Mac fi lled a white plastic pail with water from an outdoor tap and poured it through his hair and over his body.

There were only ten cottages on Seraya Beach, and because they had outdoor concrete lavs that had to be fl ushed manually, and you could only get fresh water when they turned on the pumps between six and nine pm, ninety-nine per cent of the Anglo world avoided them.

Which was fi ne with Mac.

He drank half a beer, and felt fatigue take over. Hitting the hay shortly after nine, he thought about the UN and then about Jenny Toohey, his casual-yet-serious girlfriend who worked with the Australian Federal Police in Jakarta. Manila felt far enough away from Jen and he wondered how far New York would feel. What did she really think about him going and would she try to join him? He fell asleep thinking about shooting that sailor on Penang Princess and mumbling a prayer that the face he had seen wasn’t Abu Samir’s.

The door rattled, jolting Mac out of a deep sleep. Grabbing his pack, he threw himself off the bed, rolled across the bare teak fl oor, pulled the Heckler from the pack and aimed it. It was dark, no moon, and the breeze wafted through the windowless frames, fl apping the white curtains over Mac’s head as he steadied himself and got his breathing under control.

He sat naked on the fl oor like that for eight seconds, his heart pounding in his head. Then he heard it again; a rattling at the bamboo door. And then, ‘Mr Richard, please, sorry, sir. Mr Richard, please…’

It was Philip.

Mac took a deep breath and winced as his sternum fl ared, making lights appear at the edges of his vision.

‘What is it?’ said Mac, looking at his G-Shock: 3.12 am local.

‘I have phone for you, Mr Richard.’

Moving to the bamboo wall, Mac peered out the side window.

‘You alone, mate?’ Mac rasped.

‘Yes, I alone, Mr Richard. It the phone for you, sir.’

Mac leaned against the front wall of the cottage, looked around the corner and cased the beach. It was deserted. He pulled on a pair of undies and put one foot through the windowless space and then the other.

‘Be right with you, champ!’ he yelled, throwing himself to the sand twelve feet below. He doubled around the front of the raised cottage in cup-and-saucer mode, and up the side path to the back door. Holding his breath, he levelled the Heckler as he peeked around the corner, expecting to fi nd Philip with a gun to his head. But Philip was alone.

‘Nice this time of evening, eh?’ said Mac, having slipped his gun into the back of his undies.

Philip jumped out of his skin, yelped slightly, and Mac regretted surprising him. A few years older than Mac, Philip was a former high school teacher. He and his wife had taken over Seraya Beach from her father and uncles a few years earlier.

Mac and Philip chatted as they strolled back to the offi ce at the southern end of the beach.

‘I thought you were a ghost,’ laughed Philip.

‘Indonesian ghosts are white?’

‘Sure,’ said Philip. ‘But often they friendly,’ he added quickly, realising he may have caused offence.

The phone handpiece sat on the front desk of the offi ce area – really just a porch at the entry to Philip’s house. Philip pointed at it and Mac picked it up and said, ‘Davis.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ yelled the unmistakable voice of Joe Imbruglia, ASIS station chief in Manila, ‘where the fuck are you?’

‘Up early, Joe. You shit the bed?’

A hiss of breath came through the phone. Joe had been one of the fi rm’s best-ever operatives in Beijing, with a special talent for East Asian languages and a good feel for the weird political and cultural problems between Japan, Korea and China. But now he was a reluctant offi ce guy expected to run Mac, and while they respected one another they also clashed.