Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Closing her window, Julie squealed out of the forecourt as a couple of Anglos wandered out of the lobby.

‘Hi, darling. Hard day?’ came a voice near Mac.

Turning, Mac came face to face with Anton Garvey, who’d been in Mac’s ASIS intake in 1990. More heavily set than he once was and a chrome-dome to boot, Garvs was going to be the declared Service operative in the AFP-led operation.

‘Garvs,’ said Mac, shaking hands as he tried to place the tallish, skinny bloke next to him.

‘Macca, this is Chez Delaney – Foreign Affairs, Jakarta.’

Mac shook the bloke’s hand, uneasy at the fl oppy fi sh effect. Mac didn’t like his cricket club tie either.

‘Actually, Mr McQueen, it’s Chester,’ said the bloke through mean lips.

‘Actually, Chez, it’s Macca,’ smiled Mac, ‘but you can call me sir.’

They walked the blocks to Bemo Corner, turned left and walked north up Legian Street to the site of the fi rst blast outside Paddy’s nightclub.

It felt ominous, bathed in the temporary fl oodlights. On their right were hundreds of locals carrying bodies, parts of bodies, shoes and clothes, and directing cranes and other heavy lifting equipment to pieces of roofi ng, walls, rubble. Mac smelled acrid, scorched material as if bamboo or wood had been torched with gasoline.

Mac didn’t want to be a bystander – he wanted to get in there and help. But he didn’t have the shoes or clothing to go into the mess that had once been Paddy’s Bar, a place he’d been very drunk in only a week ago during the Bali Sevens. They kept moving and it suddenly occurred to Mac that some of the Manila Marauders he’d played with might have been caught up in it.

They were challenged by POLRI as they tried to move across the street towards where the Sari Club had once stood. Garvs fl ashed ID and babbled something in Bahasa, and then the three of them stopped spontaneously, shocked. The Sari Club had been completely annihilated, and a number of buildings around it were fl attened and still smouldering. Firefi ghters were pumping water over torn-apart buildings behind where the Sari had been, and forty or fi fty police and fi refi ghters crawled over the site, trying to get cranes and front-end loaders over to move slabs of concrete and debris. Voices moaned and screamed above the generators and fi re pumps, and Mac’s knees went rubbery for a split second, nausea rising at the sight of total carnage.

In front of them was a crater in the road that looked to be six or seven feet deep and about twenty, maybe twenty-fi ve feet across.

‘What’s that?’ asked Mac, quite aware what it was but not expressing himself clearly. He was so tired.

‘Ground zero,’ said Garvey, but he said it like a question.

‘What’s the early mail?’ said Mac.

Chester piped up, with a high-pitched squeak, ‘Terror bombing

– a lot of Australians, I’m afraid.’

‘Few locals as well, eh Chez?’ muttered Mac.

Chester sobered up fast as he realised what he’d said. ‘Well, yes.

Umm, yep, you’re right.’

The fi rst tendrils of dawn were just starting to ease into the darkness when they got back to the Hard Rock. Mac had heard that Chester was waiting on fi nal confi rmation from Canberra that DFAT would have overall carriage of the Australian effort. The Prime Minister felt comfortable with the Australian Federal Police in general and the commissioner in particular, and a number of arguments were being mounted to ensure that the AFP didn’t actually end up running the show – an outcome considered unthinkable by Foreign Affairs. Mac’s cop girlfriend, Jenny, had always suspected this was the way people like Chester operated, and Mac had never had the heart to tell her she was damned right.

Garvs smiled as he pulled his buzzing Nokia from his pocket.

‘Network’s up again,’ he said and then turned away, took the call.

Mac walked into the lobby where American, British, New Zealand and Australian accents were all vying with each other. Phones were ringing, voices arguing. An American touched his chest with both hands and then pushed them away at an Australian, saying, ‘No, you see, I have to get the okay from your guys before I get the okay from my guys. Okay?’

Mac grabbed his overnight bag from the porter’s trolley and moved to the lift banks with Chester. He needed a shower and some nosebag and then he’d be into the day. Taking the lift to the third fl oor, he made small talk with Chez. It wasn’t till he got to his door that the two of them realised they were room-mates. They looked at each other, cleared their throats, then both looked at the folders holding their security cards, willing the numbers to change. Neither knew quite how to articulate his annoyance, so Mac pushed into the room, threw his bag on the bed closest to the window, kicked off his shoes and made for the bathroom.

‘It’ll be fi ne, Chezza,’ Mac yelled as he turned on the shower.

‘I only snore when I’m drunk. Really, really drunk.’

Mac slept till after nine, nightmares of craters and exploding buildings disturbing his sleep. When he woke to a background of sirens and helicopters Chester wasn’t around. He checked his bag for signs of entry, checked his phone for dialled calls, then changed into his blue overalls and Hi-Tec boots.

The hotel restaurant was packed with people shouting at each other, shouting into phones, yelling at people like Julie who were circulating with clipboards, shoving phones into people’s faces, getting signatures and waiting for the okay to go and do what they had to do. Watching Julie, Mac mused that if the Commonwealth ever ran out of bright young female organisers like her to get the lunchers into formation, the wheels would fall off the whole show.

Grabbing scrambled eggs, tomatoes and sausages, Mac poured a cup of coffee and walked over to Garvey’s table.

‘How’s it going, boys?’ asked Mac as he sat.

Chester looked him up and down very quickly, his long face and thin brown hair making him look like a Puritan.

Garvey gave Mac a quick look, sipped on his tea. ‘Job interview, mate?’

Mac poured milk into his coffee, refusing to be baited by the swipe at his clothes. ‘Thought I’d get amongst it.’

Garvey shook his head. He’d always been the more bureaucratically astute of the two of them. ‘I don’t know what your brief is, Macca, but they didn’t bring you in from Manila to shift rubble. Know what I mean, sport?’

Mac knew precisely what he meant, but before the Aussie cavalry arrived from Darwin he wanted to examine the bomb sites more closely. And he wanted to keep his media dickhead clothes clean.

‘Morning, gentlemen,’ Julie said, arriving at the table.

They murmured greetings back.

‘Mr Delaney, Jakarta,’ she said, handing Chester a Nokia, two more phones on her right hip.

As Chester put his left index fi nger in his left ear and leaned away from the table, Garvey looked at Mac and said, ‘So what is your role, champ?’

‘Public affairs for DFAT,’ said Mac, trying to eavesdrop on Chester.

‘Quality control – that shit.’

Mac stood on the edge of the crater in front of the Sari Club on Legian Street, one of the main streets of Kuta. Around him, the job of fi nding the injured was still going at fever pitch, even as the Indonesians bagged and tagged body parts, gently placing them in refrigerated trucks that had been backed into the blast sites. The smell was strengthening with the rising temperature and soon they’d have a rat problem.

A POLRI offi cer in pale blue overalls approached Mac, right hand on his holster. Mac held out the plastic-sheathed ID Julie had given him before he ventured out and the cop nodded and walked on.