Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac went back to the front seat, unfolded the map and had a good look. If these guys did not have that basic training, they might have absent-mindedly drawn on the thing. Even just touched it. Which was the universal human instinct.

He found what he was looking for on one of the central panels. A defi nite depression with a blue ballpoint at the end of one of the blue lines. A slight blue squiggle a couple of centimetres away – someone trying to navigate with the thing on his lap.

He called Sawtell over, showed him. Sawtell picked up the map and, without hesitating, turned due north, pointed into thick jungle and said, ‘That way, nine or ten clicks.’

They tooled up. Sawtell was serious about this one, just like Mac had seen him in the Sibuco take-down; a bit nervy and controlling it with glacial calm. The lads sensed it. They checked guns and cammed their faces without saying a thing. When the Old Man went like that, it was time to get serious.

The boys took US Army fatigues out of Cordura bags. The guns were M4s – short, black assault rifl es favoured by the US Army Special Forces.

They pilfered the rat packs and the stashed fruit. Ate up large.

Then they headed into the jungle, Hard-on walking point.

The heat came up fast. The noise of the forest was thunderous and screeching at the same time, crowding in on the senses, enveloping the party with humidity, bugs and noise. They tabbed for an hour.

The horse track they were on was a steep climb. It was agony.

Mac made a mental note: more running to balance the gym and boxing fi tness.

Sawtell was a conservative campaigner. Mac wanted to stride out, get some blood going. But Sawtell stopped, peered, backtracked and did all the special forces hand-signal stuff. He was the jungle version of how Mac moved around a city: with total paranoia.

They maintained silence and walked Mac in the middle of their set-up. The tension was heavy. Every time Mac looked at Sawtell, he saw more concern. Concern that the American would not share. John Sawtell may have been a bleeding-heart boy scout but he kept it tight when the shit was hovering. There was a maelstrom of worry and contingency-mongering going on in that square head, but Mac knew he wouldn’t spook his boys. Not a squeak.

Five clicks into the hike, they took a rest in a clearing. Limo produced water bottles from his pack. Mac checked a moss-covered log for snakes and spiders, and lowered himself.

There was a crack, a soft warm feeling in his head.

Then it all went black.

Mac came to with the kind of head pain he’d experienced once during a bout of malaria. A sensation so powerful that you hit your head against a wall to make it go away.

He could hear something. People’s voices. Then something else, humming like a machine. He took his time opening his eyes, let his right eyelid go up slightly. The rush of light was like an explosion in his brain. He groaned. His mouth was dry, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He could barely think straight. Was he drugged? Drunk?

More voices. He tried again to crack an eyelid but the light shut him down just as quick. Sparklers behind his eyes. The noise got louder and he felt hands under his armpits. Hands on his feet. Then he was going up, like when he was a kid and his dad picked him up off the sofa where he’d fallen asleep watching television.

The noise got louder. It thromped and whacked and whined.

It was fucking with his mind.

Mac thought: a helo.

Then he blacked out.

The patch was wet. Very wet. Mac shifted his head slightly and felt it cold and damp on his cheek. He must have been dribbling something chronic.

He opened his eyes. No pain in the eyeballs but a ton of it behind his right ear. He was lying on his side. There was a white sheet on him. A white pillow, white mosquito net over him that smelled of pyrethrum. He was naked except for his red briefs. He rolled over so he was looking at the white ceiling, fan turning.

He breathed, wiggled his toes, fl exed his fi sts. The right hand was still swollen and painful. But he was alive and in one piece – for the moment.

He wondered who it was. Garrison’s thugs? The Chinese? He prayed it wasn’t the boys from Beijing. When intel hacks got gossiping they inevitably came to the Chinese torture scenarios: the drugs, the hypno, the implants, the beatings, the surgery.

There were no restraints. Whoever it was, they didn’t see him as a threat.

He sensed movement. A face looked down on him. Large, round, male.

Maori. Fuck!

‘How’s the head, chalks?’

The guy smiled. A big, confi dent smile. Mac didn’t know what to say.

‘Sonny?’

The big Maori laughed, a high-pitched chortling giggle. ‘You remember me, eh Chalks?’

Mac was a stunned mullet. He was looking at a ghost from his past: Sonny Makatoa.

Mac carried something on his CV that he reckoned he shouldn’t. He was a veteran of Desert Shield/Storm. Technically. Straight from the Royal Marines he’d rotated into Basra in ‘91. The fi rst Iraq war was winding down, the wells were burning, Bush Senior was pulling the boys out and novices like Mac were being sent into a war zone to see how intelligence worked in the shit. It was the only way to get that experience. The only way for the spy masters to know if this was your thing.

It was Mac’s thing.

He deployed with a couple of older Australians, one of whom was Rod Scott. They were doing lots of sweeps for hidden missile silos and bio-warfare factories. There were loads of snitches and turncoats coming out of the woodwork in those fi nal days. Saddam military wanting US dollars. Saddam military wanting Australian visas. Saddam military planted by his intel people as doubles and provocateurs.

Mac worked the ‘show-me’ detail, as in, So this is the Brucellosis weaponisation program you were telling us about? Show me!

The Australian SAS was in demand elsewhere, so in one of the last factory-checks the spooks were doing for bio-warfare manufacture, the New Zealand SAS stepped in as the escort. It was scary work: mines in walls, snipers on the peaks, everything booby trapped. They were into the cave systems of southern Iraq where the turncoat colonels reckoned the bio-labs were.

That’s where Mac had met Sonny Makatoa. Sonny was only six years older than Mac but already leading his own unit. Senior ranks deferred to him, lesser ranks were shit-scared. His boys loved him.

He stood fi ve-eleven and was built like a tree stump. It was hard to imagine who or what could intimidate him. Sonny was tough in the strangest way. Tough like he was born to be in a war zone. Careful and professional but not nervous. Almost as if he liked it.

He remembered Sonny because on his fi rst day Mac had turned up with a different kind of hat to the rest of the spooks and soldiers.

They all wore khaki boonies while somehow Mac had ended up with a blue one.

Sonny had thrown him a spare hat at breakfast. Told him to put it on. Mac had hesitated. Sonny eyeballed him. Mac put it on.

It wasn’t till late morning when they were waiting – and for some reason, war is all about waiting – that Mac had got talking to one of the Kiwi SAS. Asked him about the hat.

‘Corporal’s saving your lily-white,’ said the Kiwi. ‘Snipers round here fi x on anything out of the pattern. Assume it’s a commanding offi cer, or someone important. He likes you.’

So Mac had remembered Sonny. And Sonny had remembered too, probably for other reasons.

Mac swung his feet to the fl oor. He was in a demountable and from the decor and size of the room, he assumed it was the sick bay. The room was air-conned but that wasn’t helping with his head. He had a dizzy spell, thought he would chuck. Put his hand to his mouth.