Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

There were no guarantees on that second one. Mac was now cut off from Canberra and pretty sure there was a mole in the organisation, either in Jakarta or Australia. Something had gone wrong in Makassar but it had gone wrong in a way that felt basically out of step. In his profession there was a structure to every type of assignment, and small but badly placed elements could make it all feel wrong. It was like hearing a pop tune on the radio thirty times and on the thirty-fi rst time you hear it, you hear the live version and someone changes a few tiny notes. Your brain still hears the song, and you can adapt, but you know instinctively that a pattern has been broken. That’s where Mac was focusing: you didn’t get a last-minute tasking to go to Jakarta from the Asia-Pacifi c director, and then a late-night briefi ng from a combined ASIS-CIA team to go into Sulawesi, and then on the fi rst and only contact you are given, the bad guys are waiting for you. It didn’t happen like that.

Someone had set it up.

It came down to a case of who: Tobin? Garvey? Urquhart? That Agency wanker with the He-Man handshake?

Mac drove all night. He wanted to beat the heat, avoid taking a rest, stay ahead of anyone chasing him.

The Vienta wheezed up the hills, dying every time Mac needed extra grunt to overtake the hundreds of overloaded freight trucks that populated Indonesian roads by night. The driver’s seat had no cushioning left and most of the asphalt on the blacktop had washed away. Every turn of the tyres was a new jolt that threatened to break the suspension and Mac was constantly throwing the Vienta onto the shoulder of the road as oncoming trucks used the ‘third lane’ to overtake straight down the middle. A nightmare, but negotiating it kept him awake.

He chewed gum, drank bottled water, plotted scenarios, babbled to himself, sang Beatles songs. The air-conditioning was rooted so he stank up the car with BO as he sweltered in the safari suit pants and shirt. Mostly, he lived in the rear-vision mirror. There was a silver Accord out there somewhere and he knew they wouldn’t stop looking.

By midnight his right wrist was puffi ng like a stonefi sh and ached something chronic. He was getting to the point where he wouldn’t be able to hold a weapon, let alone be effi cient with it, and although Mac didn’t much like guns, he disliked even more being injured in his gun hand. Especially when he was in the backblocks of Sulawesi with a hit squad on his tail.

That assumed he could get another weapon. He felt vulnerable without the Heckler, but it was lying in a rest stop garbage bin for the most practical of reasons. White men sweeping into town and killing the locals meant the police were going to be coming at you. All that rubbish about South-East Asian cops not caring was bullshit. Mac knew Indonesian detectives who would do anything to bag a pale-eye, particularly on something legit. The last thing he needed was to be picked up for questioning and have a warm gun sitting in the back seat. It would mean the local lock-up for two weeks while some fruit salad-endowed chief tried to work out how rich an Australian textbook executive might be. The dream that there was some all-knowing super-spook from Canberra who could appear in a Sulawesi police cell, fl ash a badge and get someone like Mac cut loose never came true. People like Mac were what they called an ‘undeclared’ – they had no diplomatic status and if they were caught doing something illegal, their fate was that of the criminal.

Having wiped and dumped the Heckler, Mac felt the POLRI were going to have a tough time nailing him for the Minky murder.

But he still had work to do with the Americans. In his experience, soldiers hated being pushed around on mad missions by intel types. And this was going to be a doozy: the main contact – a CIA contractor – was dead. There were Javanese thugs in pursuit and they didn’t look like amateurs. And Mac hadn’t even got the drum on Hannah.

It was a complete fuck-up. Worst of all, the dry-cleaner’s ticket pointed towards Palopo. It signalled a shift into central and northern Sulawesi. Southern Sulawesi had a cosmopolitan city like Makassar, as big as Brisbane. The north had a whole galaxy of shit-holes and pirate haunts. It could even mean dealing with the chief pirate and strongman of the north, Cookie Banderjong.

Cookie could be highly problematic, and Mac was not looking forward to selling that proposition to Captain John Sawtell.

The sun was just hitting the horizon as Mac pulled into the Motel Davi, near the ocean side of Ralla. Kids stood by a stand of trees, fl ying kites in the early morning half-light. There were fi sh hooks on the tails of the kites and they were trying to hook fruit bats. Get Mum to cook it up for lunch.

The town was a fi shing village with pretensions to being a tourist trap. But it wasn’t making it. It had a few restaurants, a wharf and a Pertamina gas station. It also had a motel where the management was discreet, or as discreet as you’d ever get in the archipelago.

Mac parked the Vienta, walked the line of thirty rooms arranged in a horseshoe, dragging his wheelie case across red dirt. He was looking for a marker, like a playing card or restaurant menu sticking out from under a door. It would mark the RV.

He didn’t have to worry. The door to room 17 opened quietly and John Sawtell beckoned him in.

‘You look like shit,’ said the American as Mac entered.

Sawtell was showered and shaved, dressed in Levis and a black T-shirt, black Hi-Tec Magnums on his feet. The right-hand bed had been slept in, but it was perfectly made. There was one Cordura bag.

Packed. One set of toiletries in a perfect line on the bag.

Mac threw his bag on the unused bed. He wanted to lie on that thing for seven hundred hours but it wasn’t going to happen.

‘There’s an alteration,’ said Mac as he undid his stinking business shirt. He kicked his shoes off, dropped his trousers, picked up the threadbare white towel on his bed. Wrapping it around him he pulled his toilet bag from the wheelie.

‘Like what?’ said Sawtell, eyeballing him, hands on hips like he was hearing some lame excuse from a private.

Mac didn’t want the military-intel thing to start. Not here, not when he could barely think straight from fatigue.

‘Like we’re going north. Girl’s up north.’

Sawtell didn’t move. ‘That the mission?’

‘Is now.’

A big pause gaped between them.

‘Snitch told you that?’ said Sawtell, referring to Minky.

‘Something like that.’

‘Something?’

‘Near as.’

‘The mission is south.’

‘Mission is the girl, John.’

‘Mission is don’t die, McQueen.’

The whole thing happened in low tones. Mac knew that Sawtell put the safety of his guys above all else and that going north represented new risk. After the Abu Sabaya thing in Sibuco, Sawtell and Mac had sunk a few cold beers and they’d been frank about the tension between soldier and spook. The intel guy would get the senior rank, but the military bloke really ran the show. It was what special forces soldiers called a ‘bullshit rank’, when you seconded an Agency geek into a military mission and ranked him as a major so he could trump a captain like Sawtell.

Mac turned to the bed and pulled a handful of Nokias from the bag. ‘We need those charged,’ said Mac as he headed off to fi nd the communal shower block.

Sawtell sighed, looked at the carpet and shook his head in resignation.

Mac took Sawtell and his three men to breakfast at a place on stilts over the river. Just along the bank from the restaurant there was a young male macaque monkey chained to a spike in the river bank.

They ordered omelettes and coffee. Mac asked for a fruit bowl and the owner’s daughter brought out a basket of mangos and pineapples. He asked her if there was a laundry in the town and she shook her head, but took Mac’s clothes bag anyway, held up two fi ngers, like ‘peace’.