Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

They were silent while they thought it through. Mac, frowning, was fi rst to raise the obvious. ‘So where are we now?’

‘Don’t look at me like that, McQueen,’ said Freddi, angry again.

‘There are bad people in your intelligence and army too.’

Mac nodded agreement. Freddi was right. There were ASIS people in Jakarta right now trying to work out how to stop him taking the Hassan matter any further. He half expected his own director of operations to appear at any moment. But he had to push things forward. ‘So, Freddi, I can work with you?’

Freddi looked away. ‘There are people in this country who want bombings, to bring more money from America and Australia and Saudi Arabia and Egypt,’ he said, fuming. ‘It make them rich. But that is not for me, or any of those guy you see in basement yesterday morning. Do we look rich?!’

Shaking his head, Mac remembered that the former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid had told journalists that he feared the Bali bombings had been paid for by elements of the Indonesian police and military who wanted to keep the money fl owing from the Americans for the War on Terror.

He sighed. ‘Look, sorry mate, okay? I’m trying to work this out myself and after the shootings at the Lar…’ he trailed off.

Freddi nodded but he was clearly struggling to stay calm. ‘Now we have the new problem.’

‘Second device?’

‘Yep,’ said Freddi. ‘It had nothing to do with Purni – he was surprised to get call fi ve year later.’

‘So it’s… what?’

‘So it Hassan and nuke device,’ said Freddi, numbering the points off his left hand. ‘And it for other client.’

‘Client?’ asked Mac.

Shrugging, Freddi nodded. ‘This Hassan is not jihadi or com-munist, right? He all business.’

Mac got that. ‘And so we’ve lucked out here, right?’

‘Right,’ said Freddi grimly. ‘And no more Purni to ask.’

They turned to go back to the Kopassus troops and the Hueys, where Mac wanted to check on Mano and get him back to Penang.

But Freddi stopped him.

‘Um, McQueen? When I found you with that girl over there, remember?’

Mac nodded.

‘You were empty, like body is here but man is not.’

Mac looked at the sand.

‘Well, mite, that girl and her brother are Indonesian and I was responsible for them,’ said Freddi, his chest heaving. ‘And that girl got her arm shot away and a boy was taken, I think about this every day of my life and sometimes when I see my own kids being happy, I feel like crying.’

Mac nodded, head down, not wanting to look at the bloke.

‘So please do not be the judge of me, okay?’

A monkey screeched and Mac mouthed sorry as Freddi walked away.

Mano was sitting up, pale and slack in the face but drinking water, when Mac got back to the Hueys.

‘That was a long piss,’ Mano quipped as Mac got to the side of the helo.

‘You’re feeling better, I see,’ said Mac. He liked Mano even if he didn’t like what he did for a living.

‘Checking out the old avgas bunkers, yeah?’ said Mano.

‘Yeah,’ smiled Mac, making to get onboard the helo. ‘Just seeing what’s left in the magazine.’

Freddi was getting Malaysian permission to fl y Mano into Penang and if that wasn’t allowed then Freddi was going to drop him at Gleneagles Hospital in Medan.

Mano looked at Mac strangely. ‘That’s not the magazine,’ he said, pointing towards where Mac had just been with Freddi. ‘Magazine’s up this way.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the bush north of the airfi eld, where Merpati had been shot.

Confused, Mac looked out of the helo he’d just clambered into.

‘We were just down there, mate. It’s an underground bunker, right?’

‘Yeah, but there’s one north too. It’s deeper and has a secret entrance,’ said Mano.

‘Another one?’

‘Well, would you store the gasoline with the munitions, if this was your base?’

‘No. No I wouldn’t,’ said Mac, trying to stay clear through his fatigue. ‘You’re saying that there’s two underground storage areas?’

Mano nodded. ‘Japs were thorough.’

‘And the one just over here is for fuel, but the one north of the fi eld is the magazine?’

‘Yeah, sure. About a hundred metres north of these buildings, on the ocean side,’ said Mano.

Mac slid off the helo deck, muttering darkly. There was nothing better than local knowledge, except a smuggler’s local knowledge.

‘It’s well hidden, low to the ground,’ added Mano, ‘and it had a big military warning on it – a TNI seal.’

‘I bet it did,’ growled Mac as he walked away.

The magazine entrance was almost hidden in the undergrowth, but when they found it, Mac and Freddi both realised why Santo was kidnapped and Merpati putatively executed. The entrance to the magazine was just fi fty metres away from where Mac had stashed the kids under that fallen tree. Looking at the landscape, Mac wondered if after the Hassan thugs had secured the device and made their escape, they’d seen Merpati and one of them had shot her, maybe by mistake.

Then, when Santo had made a run for it, they would have seen he was just a kid and snatched him rather than make a scene with more gunfi re.

Someone had decided Merpati was dead. Which she almost was.

Freddi stood in front of the ramp that went down into the magazine. The big iron swing doors were open and the red and white skull and crossbones TNI seal – a diagonal crossing of locking bars that declared this the property of the Indonesian generals – was discarded in the thick undergrowth. Freddi muttered an order at four of the soldiers and they walked down slowly, looking for booby traps. The soldiers found two plastique charges and then Freddi turned on his Maglite and led them down the ramp into the gloom.

A series of chambers branched off the main underground avenue, one of which had a new fi re door that had been left open. Freddi and the soldiers shone their torches into the chamber, illuminating four chains hanging from the ceiling with a table suspended on the end of them. It had been designed to keep something dry and Mac guessed it had survived the Boxing Day tsunami that had devastated the region in ‘04, judging by the lack of water damage in the chamber.

‘That it, guys. Nothing,’ muttered Freddi, walking out.

Mac and Freddi found a trail around the entrance – about six men, in boots, fi ve to seven hours old, depending on what the morning dew had been like. They walked the footpad and it terminated at the north end of the dirt runway in a swirl of boot tracks and aircraft tyres. Mac and Freddi agreed on a scenario: the plane had taxied to the north head of the runway, turned to face the south, maybe not even bothering to depower. The Hassan crew had retrieved the device from its hide, boobied the magazine, walked back to the plane and fl own away.

Crouching, Mac had a closer look. The boots were mostly Hi-Tecs and one US Army desert issue. The aircraft had tricycle landing gear, single tyre at the nose and double tyres at the two underwing points, suggesting a plane the size of a King Air 200 – a twin-engine, twelve-seater.

‘King Air 200,’ mumbled Mac. ‘Get fi fteen-hundred miles out of the right one, with the right tank set-up.’

‘Could go north to Thailand, east to Singapore, west to Sri Lanka,’ mused Freddi. And then, shrugging facetiously, ‘Could maybe get to Darwin.’

Mac’s pulse banged so hard in his head that it felt like his wound was going to split open. Then everything became clear.

‘Oh shit,’ said Mac, breaking into a run. ‘ Fuck! ‘

He hit full pace as he scythed through the bush, through the palms and the undergrowth and the dry creek beds that he’d walked through years ago. He retraced them now, but at a headlong sprint.