Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Midday turned into two-thirty real fast.

He dipped into a series of dime stores of the type that blanket Asia: the ones that sell cigarettes, incense and cigarette lighters where the girl’s bikini drops when you turn it upside down. They sell the local rags as well as Tempo, the Straits Times and the Jakarta Post. Mac bought plain Nokias and pre-paid cellular network cards for a Philippines telco called EastCall. He ducked in, he ducked out. He bought phones from different shops and bought a packet of wet-wipes. He ate goreng at a street stand, sitting back in the shadows where Grandma wrapped spring rolls. He didn’t let his eyes leave the street or his hand leave his right hip, and he cleaned Minky’s vomit off his pants.

He did numbers: six shots left in the Heckler, but it would have to be dumped. He didn’t want to go back to the Pantai for the Walther – too risky now. He should have taken the goon’s Glock with him, but now he’d have to pick up a gun when he RV’d with Sawtell.

Would they have a spare? How many more did Garrison have coming for him? And who or what was Minky talking about when he said

‘Eighty’?

He walked some more, looking for a car hire place that wasn’t a big American brand – the CIA data-tapped those franchises quick-smart. And the Americans were starting to look like being part of the problem rather than the solution. Minky was an Agency contractor and the hit squad was probably the same. But whether the ambush was American or Australian, Mac felt relieved that he’d changed the RV with Sawtell from Makassar to Ralla, up the coast. Mac hadn’t been thinking about double-crossings when he’d done that at the last minute. He’d just wanted to keep a posse of highly conspicuous special forces soldiers out of town until he needed them. Now it might give him a day’s head start on whoever was after him.

He asked around and headed inland to a place called Paradise Holiday Hire Cars. A couple of locals had said it was cheap and reliable.

And they took cash.

He passed by the Golden Hotel on the waterfront and watched a bunch of Anglo and Asian junketeers milling around, waiting to get on a tour bus. They looked like IT consultants or telecom engineers.

Local police lolly-gagged with their assault rifl es. Mac slid in amongst the junketeers, smiling and making quippish non sequiturs to no one in particular.

Hoo-fucking-rah!

The junket-lovers were putting their day luggage into a pile to be loaded into the luxury coach. Mac wandered among them with his wheelie case. No one challenged him, probably because he was Anglo. One of the great weaknesses of the coalition of the willing’s War on Terror was its inherent ethnic bias. Something was wrong when a pale-eyed white man could wander through the world’s largest Muslim country and receive less attention than a local.

Mac bent down, pulled his blue Service Nokia from his wheelie and put it in the side pocket of a carry-all. The name tag on the bag said Richard Taylor, accompanied by a Melbourne address. The ASIS listening post would track the junketeers for hours, maybe days, before it sounded all wrong.

Mac walked another three blocks, found his rental car place and hired a white Toyota Vienta. He paid in cash for ten days and coughed up for an insurance policy which was worth more as emergency bog paper in Sulawesi than as something that would save him from being sued.

Driving to the outskirts of Makassar, he pulled over into an elevated tourist lookout and tried to collect himself. Rummaging in his safari suit pocket Mac gasped a little at his right wrist as it caught on the fabric. The wrist was now swelling from the kick he’d taken from the goon. He fi shed out the pink dry-cleaner label. It had a serial number under the name SUNDA LAUNDRY – PALOPO. Palopo was a mid-sized coastal town a day’s drive north. If those fl ash slacks had been recently pressed, then Mac was prepared to bet that Garrison – probably Judith Hannah and Minky’s daughter too – were somewhere in the vicinity.

It was all he had to go on. With Minky dead, it would have to do.

Mac grabbed a set of spare socks from the wheelie bag, tied them together in a knot and pulled the lever to open the gas tank fl ap. He found a stick on the ground, about three feet long, and moved to the back of the Vienta. Pushing the socks into the gas tank with the stick, he held the other end and waited for a few seconds before pulling the petrol-soaked socks out. Unclipping the entire hip rig and Heckler from his belt he knelt and wiped down the gun until the whole thing was shiny with gasoline. He dumped it in a rest area bin and went back to the Toyota, grabbed the Winchester loads and the spare mag, wiped them down with the socks and then dumped them too, along with the socks.

Then he got on the road for Ralla, where he was meeting Sawtell the following morning.

He was exhausted. Adrenaline does that to you.

As he drove he thought back to what he had done with that Service phone. It was only the second time in his career that he’d deliberately slipped Canberra’s internal bugging and tracking.

And that time he had also suspected the Service had a mole.

Mac’s need to win was not a recent development. At Nudgee College in Brisbane, they drafted him into the fi rst XV as a fi fteen-year-old.

They put him at half-back and the theory was that if he couldn’t handle the knocks they’d pull him out.

Near the end of that year, Nudgee played Churchie in the annual grudge match: Micks vs Prods. Mac’s mum and dad and sister Virginia came down for the occasion. Mac could tell they were intimidated by the school’s Renaissance architecture and pillared buildings as they took their seats in the bleachers.

The half-back from Churchie was their captain, a senior and full of lip. The guy wasn’t tall but he was built like a brick one. He got in Mac’s face, sledged him something terrible from the start and didn’t exclude Virginia from his abuse. Mac did it the Nudgee way, with a stiff upper lip.

At half-time, Mac was in the middle of the fi eld listening to the coach when he became aware of a red-faced, pale-eyed maniac on the sidelines calling his name. In front of the high-society set of Brisbane, Frank yelled in his broadest North Queensland accent: ‘Do something about this wanker – he’s a fl amin’ ponce.’

His father was right. If the match had been played in Rockie, Mac’s opposing half-back would have copped a slapping quick-smart.

No more sledging.

Mac gave Frank the nod. His father walked back up to the bleachers where Mac’s mother whacked him on the forearm, rolled her eyes.

Virginia stared at Mac, winked.

At the second half’s fi rst scrum, Mac had the feed. The sledger got too close, trying to edge Mac off his mark. So Mac shifted his weight, lifted his right foot, drove his heel down on the bloke’s foot, putting all his weight on that heel. Wind rushed from the sledger’s lungs, the alloy studs creating agony.

The sledger screamed, stood back, eyes rolling in his head. Mac winked at him, blew a kiss. The sledger threw a haymaker, wide-eyed with rage. Mac rolled slightly and copped it above the left ear. Felt like a bowl of ice-cream. The sledger threw another that completely missed. The ref stepped in, sent the bloke off. He had to be escorted by his team-mates.

Nudgee won and Mac wore the taunts about having the Mad Dad for the rest of his schooling. Mac learned this about himself: he could play the Nudgee game, but he preferred Rockie rules. Which didn’t mean he was right to kill Minky. In golf you didn’t get to choose how your ball lay, and in the intelligence game you often had to work with what you had. Mac’s job now, simply, was to get Judith Hannah and, hopefully, Minky’s girl too.