Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

The owner didn’t look convinced.

‘Ask him about Sabulu,’ Mac said to Spikey. ‘I want to know what we’re looking for.’

The road to Sabulu was even worse than the general store guy had warned. From Tenteno, the road rose up into the highlands in steep, muddy switchbacks. It had been a bad, tropical road to start with and the logging traffi c after the afternoon monsoon showers had torn it apart.

Mac asked Limo to drive. He was good, which was a change.

Most Yanks couldn’t handle that sort of terrain. At one point the Patrol slid across the track and threatened to slide off into a thousand-foot ravine. Limo kept his foot on the gas, counter-intuitively, and the Patrol came right.

‘Not from South-Central, are you?’ said Mac.

Limo smiled. ‘Costa Rica.’

It was drizzling and everyone remained quiet as the Patrol’s turbo squealed and cried its way up one ridge after another. The dark of the tropical night pressed in. The only universe was the one that the headlights illuminated, occasionally fl ashing on macaques at the side of the track, which had obviously seen a similar vehicle across several hours before. Mac could see off-road tyre tracks in the mud.

They were looking for a ‘depot’, which the store owner said was about seventy miles into the interior. Depots were sometimes shacks, sometimes compounds. Loggers and miners lived in them and the natives – the Toraja – collected weekly or monthly deliveries from them. The store owner reckoned they should be on the lookout for a depot called ‘thirteen’.

They pressed on, the Patrol rolling and sliding. They got higher, past the mist-line where it was clearer and colder. Limo hit the heat.

They glugged water from bottles and ate the fruit that Mac had known the soldiers would stash. They got to the top of a switchback and Mac asked for a toilet stop.

The stars shone huge and plush in the blackness above. A monkey argued with a bird somewhere in the rainforest canopy. It crossed Mac’s mind that the next time he came through here it might all be felled. Instead it would be sitting in a backyard in Perth or Melbourne as garden furniture. He started pissing and Sawtell came alongside.

‘You know that dude with the store is as good as dead?’ said Sawtell, not pissing but staring.

‘Hopefully we get to the bad guys fi rst, huh?’ said Mac.

Mac shook off early. Didn’t like where Sawtell was standing. If Mac was going to poleaxe someone, that’s where he would stand. At a bloke’s four o’clock while he had his hands full.

Sawtell must have sensed the vibe. He moved around in front. They both felt the cold. Plumes of mist came out of their mouths.

‘My boys weren’t happy about the Bani thing.’

‘I wasn’t over the moon myself. But it’s a good school,’ said Mac.

‘That was nice. What does he say to his folks?’

Mac didn’t want to go into all the details. He’d had a chat with Bani’s dad that morning before they went down to the dry-cleaners.

The dad had thanked Mac profusely for the opportunity. Education in Sulawesi was not like it was in the United States. Wasn’t a birthright, wasn’t an entitlement. Parents with the smartest kids watched all that potential go to waste most of the time. But there was no point in telling that to Sawtell. He was a good man, but he was an American good man.

Mac changed the subject. ‘Mate, I don’t know what to expect up here. Can we tool up now?’

Sawtell gave him a disappointed look. He stepped back, tapped on the roof of the Patrol, and the boys spilled out.

It was almost daybreak when they fi nally hit Depot 13. They were high enough to watch the sun come up over the Pacifi c. An amazing sight. The primordial rainforest started up like a soundtrack. In the space of twenty minutes it was deafening.

The depot was signalled by a couple of lamp posts dug into the ground, thirty feet apart. A track ran between them with a sign with the number thirteen strung above. They killed the lights. Mac handed off to Sawtell, who ordered Hard-on and Spikey to run a point. Then Sawtell got out of the Patrol and took a stance behind the rear fender; Limo did the same thing behind the front hood. Mac sat in the back seat with the Beretta on his lap, yawning, dreaming of some nosebag.

They waited for the all-clear and Mac asked Sawtell if Enduring Freedom was a success yet.

‘Ha!’ Sawtell snorted.

‘I take that as a no,’ said Mac.

‘Holy shit! Oh man!’ Sawtell seemed genuinely amused. So did Limo, who smiled his way.

‘It’s the wrong mission, in the wrong part of the world, for the wrong reasons with the wrong tactics,’ drawled Sawtell. ‘Oh, and the wrong leadership – political and brass.’

‘We got Sabaya, didn’t we?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell was out of view, behind the Patrol. He didn’t answer.

Half an hour later, Hard-on fl ashed three times through the trees in the dawn gloom. Limo drove the Patrol through the gates, Sawtell walked behind on the verge of the track. They drove like that for fi ve minutes and came out into a clearing. There were six or seven mid-sized wooden buildings that looked like they’d been built a decade ago and then abandoned. Hard-on put his fi nger to his lips and beckoned Mac and Limo out of the vehicle. They walked behind him, guns ready, heading between two of the buildings and coming into another clearing, a courtyard with three accommodation-style buildings around it. It was a barracks of sorts. The place looked deserted, except for the white LandCruiser that dominated the courtyard.

Sawtell looked at Hard-on, who said, ‘All clear, sir, far as we can tell.’

Sawtell looked around. Pointed at the LandCruiser. Hard-on shook his head. ‘Haven’t checked it. Waiting for you, sir.’

Sawtell nodded. Hard-on went to work on debugging the LandCruiser. Spikey jogged back into the courtyard to give him a hand.

Sawtell was distracted. He looked off into the distance and looked around very, very slowly, his face completely impassive. Mac had seen career soldiers do this before, and it usually meant the shit was on the doorstep. They just knew something was up.

Mac realised they were standing in the middle of a natural ambush.

Surrounded by buildings, surrounded by jungle.

Sawtell slowly put his fi nger in the air. ‘Hear that?’

‘Helo,’ said Limo.

They looked at each other and tried to fi nd the source. Mac couldn’t hear a thing.

‘Ain’t military,’ mumbled Limo. ‘That Euro piece of shit?’

One of the fi rst things special forces soldiers learned to do was identify aircraft and vehicles by their sound. Much of what they did they did in the dark, without fl ashlights or open comms. The tales of tired soldiers piling onto the enemy’s helo or onto the bad guys’ boat were as legion as they were apocryphal. But the lesson was the same: know your hardware.

Sawtell indicated its position with his fi nger. Then shook his head. ‘Gone.’

‘Probably a logging scout,’ said Mac.

They ignored him.

Hard-on and Spikey cleared the LandCruiser of booby traps.

Mac found a map in the glove box, and more Bartook Special Mint wrappers. Torn thin.

The map was in relief, of the highlands. It showed broken lines in red, which meant dirt roads. And it had another series of thin blue lines, which Mac assumed were horse tracks, or whatever they used up here.

It wasn’t that much use. Mac threw it back in the LandCruiser, slammed the door, moved to the rear. Then he had another idea. In the Royal Marines there had been an absolute ban on touching any map with a pen or a pencil. Anything that could possibly mark it. You put a map in a plastic sleeve, you pointed at it, you used bearings and you used coordinates so that everyone knew what everyone else was talking about. But if you marked a map in the British military someone was going to get in your face and accuse you of defacing Her Majesty’s personal property. It was a ‘back to base’ offence.