Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

As the tall sidekick made to strip the seal from one of the bottles of Red Label, Mac used the opportunity to score some points. ‘That for the boss,’ he said, winking at Anwar.

Anwar screamed and the tall one put the whisky back in the bag, snatching his hands away like the thing had got hot. Anwar took a seat in the front passenger seat and another sidekick pulled out a Marlboro and lit it for the boss.

Ducking his head into a sleeve of his overalls, Mac tried to stem his bleeding. The mix of blood and briny humidity was a potent smell. There was some fear in there too, and Mac didn’t want the boss smelling it.

Anwar took a huge hit on the smoke and pointed at Mac with his cigarette hand. ‘So, Mr Mac, where you going?’

‘Sumatra,’ said Mac, too freaked to bullshit the bloke.

‘What in Sumatera?’ said Anwar, a thick cloud of smoke fl owing from his mouth and nostrils.

Mac shrugged, not wanting to provoke. ‘Meeting a friend.’

Anwar nodded, serious. ‘Where in Sumatera?’

‘Idi. I’m going to Idi,’ said Mac, looking Anwar in the eye.

Like a line manager listening to some lame excuse for low production outputs, Anwar made a point of thinking through what Mac was telling him. In this part of the world, every social interaction was theatre; people played their parts and participants had to walk away with some kind of respect, even if only small or token. Anwar had demanded to be the boss and because Mac had instantly given him that respect, he was now attempting to show that he was worthy and could return it, as a professional boss of pirates should.

‘Okay, Mr Mac – I tell you what,’ said Anwar, sucking on his ciggie like it was Mum’s own breakfast of champions. ‘I gonna look for the cash, right?’

Mac nodded, wiped his forehead again, feeling the blood smear back into his hairline. His legs were getting sore standing in the one place – at least that was his excuse for why his left thigh had the shakes.

‘If there no cash on boat, you go Idi, the boss keep boat, right?’

‘Okay,’ said Mac, breathing out slow, trying to control the fear.

‘If I fi nd cash, you swimming, right?’

Mac gulped and nodded. Benny Haskell had just made his top-ten list of People Who Must Get Slapped.

Anwar’s crew spent ten minutes going over every inch of the cockpit area and the engine bays, while Mac shook with nerves, wondering if he’d ever see Rachel or Jenny again. He tried not to feel sorry for himself, but he pondered the cruelty of discovering a daughter, but never getting to meet her.

Mac watched the thorough approach to the search and Anwar’s management of his crew. It was a team of professionals. When they got to Mac’s backpack, jammed under the transom seats, the tall pirate with the blue sarung smiled with victory as he found something.

In went this hand and out came Mac’s folder with the relics of the Kuta bombing and the Hassan chase. And then the folder was fl ying casually over the bloke’s shoulder, the contents fanning out and slowly fl oating to the oily surface of the water.

‘Shit!’ muttered Mac and then saw the source of the excitement: the Glock he’d borrowed from Benny.

Mac thought quickly. ‘Hey, boss?’

Anwar turned, sucked on a smoke.

‘Take the gun, but I need my phone, yeah?’

Anwar rattled off something and the tall pirate just shrugged, dropped the backpack and showed off his new Glock to the others.

‘No cash on boat, Mr Mac,’ said Anwar.

Mac nodded, trying to quell the shakes.

‘So, I leave you two guy, yeah?’ said Anwar. ‘Take you Idi, okay?’

Mac breathed out long. ‘Okay, boss, thanks.’

Anwar yelled at the pirates. The driver waiting in the white boat hit the throttle and raced away into the distance. One of the pirates clambered into the red boat with the boss and there was a screaming of outboard motors as the craft surged up out of the water, fl ooding Mac and the remaining pirates with the pungent smell of Evinrude exhaust.

Anwar’s boat quickly became a speck on the horizon and the tall pirate moved to the front passenger seat, took the boss’s seat.

An offsider who looked like Anwar’s brother walked straight to the driver’s chair and stepped on the dead-man’s brake.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Mac, pointing at where several sheets of white paper fl oated on the slick swell. ‘I need my fi les.’

‘ Oop oop swim?’ asked the tall pirate with a sneer, and Anwar’s brother joined the giggling. Mac looked at the fl oating paper, realised he probably had two or three minutes before they were ruined. ‘Sure,’ he smiled, just some crazy Anglo who’d been in the sun too long.

The tall one shrugged, and as he did so his head moved sideways in a whiplash movement, his hair fl ying up at an angle, bits of fl esh and bone fl ying at the shattered windscreen, before he sagged to the dashboard. A bullet had been fi red. Instinctively ducking, Mac heard two more shots which hit Anwar’s brother in the face and then in the throat. Blood and skin fl ew and Mac jumped back slightly as the pirate fell into him and hit the teak deck like a bag of cement.

Hearing a noise, Mac spun around to see Mano climbing over the transom with the Browning Hi-Power in his right hand. He was soaked and blood ran heavily from his right thigh into his Cat boot. Mano looked at Mac with an odd expression. ‘Thought they’d never leave,’ he said, confused, and then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed.

The last fi le – the burnt piece of paper with N W on it – was thirty metres from the boat by the time Mac got to it. He carefully folded it into eighths and put it between his teeth with some other papers, and turned for the boat which was now drifting in the current.

Pulling himself over the transom, Mac hit the deck dressed only in his undies and felt the heat of the dark wood cook his feet. Mano was alive and in shock, lying on his back in the cockpit with a rescue blanket over him, shivering in the middle of the day just one hundred miles north of the Equator.

There was a green cross on a fold-down door in the cockpit bulkhead. Mac opened it and pulled out the fi rst-aid kit, fumbling slightly from the pumping adrenaline. He pulled out gauze bandages and two packs of QuikClots, one of fi eld dressings and the other of wound sponges. Looking sideways, Mac saw Mano’s lips going white, mumbling something.

‘Hold on, mate,’ Mac muttered, tearing at the sponge pack with his teeth. ‘We’re gonna make it.’

Pulling up the grey blanket, Mac used the fi rst-aid scissors to tear away the right leg of Mano’s shorts. The bullet had gone straight through the outside thigh muscle and missed the bone. But the blood was fl owing freely. He squirted the sterile water on the wound, noticing how the skin around the entry hole had already turned dark. He wiped the wound with the blanket and pushed the fl at QuikClot sponge onto and into the hole as blood started to run again. Mano tensed and shrieked as Mac applied pressure.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Mac, his throat thick with stress and the taste of plasma. He didn’t smell blood – he tasted it, way back in his throat.

He repeated the exercise in the exit hole, which was even bigger than the entry. Pushing two QuikClot sponges into the hole, he put a big dressing across the top of it. Then he bandaged the thigh as lightly as he could to keep the sponges and dressings in place without jamming an artery. He didn’t want Mano to lose a leg to some bad triage.

Making sure the mercenary was comfortable, Mac gave him a bottle of water from his backpack and then spread his rescued papers on the deck, holding them down with bits and pieces from the fi rst-aid kit. He took the helm, stepped on the brake and brought the revs up to a moderate level and they motored at a comfortable thirty-fi ve knots, Mano giving him landmarks to look for through his chat tering teeth.