Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

‘You did the right thing, telling Sonny about Lastri,’ said Cookie, changing tack.

‘Who?’

‘Minky’s girl. Her name’s Lastri.’

Mac looked away. He hadn’t fi gured he’d have to do this conversation again.

‘Look, Mr B…’

‘Cookie. Call me Cookie.’

Mac paused. He wasn’t going to rush in with the racism disclaimer again. ‘Um, it’s been quite a few days, you know…’

Cookie leaned forward, poured the tea. ‘You don’t have to explain. The important thing is you told Sonny and that American before they went in. That’s the part that counts. That’s why Sonny let it go. Can you imagine if Mosie was running around with this girl he pulled out of the fi re, and you’re going, “Oh, yeah – her “?

You think Sonny would let that go?’

Mac had always backed his ability in the blueing stakes, but Sonny and Sawtell deciding to teach him a lesson at the same time? That wouldn’t work well for Mac.

Cookie chuckled. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Mac. Thing is…’

Cookie exhaled, looked at his smoke. ‘Her mother’s dead too. Made some calls this morning. Makassar cops all over it.’

‘Shit, sorry.’

Cookie waved him away again. ‘Problem’s gone. You’ll be allowed to leave Sulawesi, then the investigation will start again. For now, guess we have a new girl in the family.’

In Indonesia, families took in orphans. It was informal; it was the culture.

Cookie fi xed him with a look. ‘This business is hard enough on you already without beating yourself up. You know, I once did things the other way round from you. I mean, I really fucked it up.’

Cookie moved forward on the sofa, fl icked his smoke at the ashtray.

‘We’d lost this computer programmer guy from our air defence program. There was all this evidence left around that he’d gone on holiday, but we tracked him down in a house at Kuta. The fucking Koreans had him. It was a tough one. We didn’t want him dead – we needed to debrief him – but we didn’t want him explaining launch algorithms and all that shit to the Koreans.’

Mac nodded.

‘So it was like your one last night. We fl ew in the Kopassus boys, and they pulled an early am raid. Went great, everyone happy.

Except the eleven-year-old daughter of our scientist who got shot in the leg.’

‘What was she doing there?’

Cookie shrugged. ‘Koreans had snatched the bloke’s two girls as well. So there I am in the debrief and this intel idiot from Jakarta has turned up with the full fi le!’

Mac looked at him. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Deadset.’

‘Where’d they fi nd that genius?’

‘Dunno where they scraped him up from, but he’s working presidential liaison now – briefs SBY on intel matters.’

They both laughed. There had never been any military commander of any rank who’d ever been given the full fi le on anything from intel.

Soldiers were considered to be the ‘operational’ end of the gig; spooks saw themselves as the brains.

‘So there I am sinking further under the table. I’m not kidding.

I’ve got this Kopassus colonel, this damned gorilla, right beside me and he’s reading my comms logs.’

Mac made the eek face. The comms logs were all the minutes made from phone calls and recorded meetings. They’d include all of the internal BAKIN briefi ngs that Cookie had been giving his own controller, all the requests for Kopassus involvement and the reasons.

They’d include the full rundown of who was in the house.

‘So this Kopassus gorilla is looking at dates and times and my comments and who else is present – he’s never seen anything like it.

He’s got eyes like goggles, and he’s looking at me and saying, “So you knew those girls were in there when you called us in? You knew they were in there when you briefed me?” ‘

Mac could hardly believe what he was hearing.

‘What could I say? It was all there. Anyway, about an hour later I’m getting out of my rental car at the airport and I’m snatched, right out of the fucking Denpasar airport car park. Off to the police barracks.

I’m bashed by these Kopassus goons, and down comes Colonel Gorilla for a word in the shell-like.’

Mac couldn’t help himself, he was laughing.

‘Gorilla gets in my face, says, “I don’t care who you are or who you know, no one does that to my boys.” ‘

Cookie pulled up the hair over his left ear. Mac saw only half an ear, ending in a ragged horizontal line. ‘So then he takes a souvenir cuts off the top of my ear, holds it in front of my face and says, “Be happy the girl didn’t die. You pull shit like that again, and I’ll take your heart.”

‘Then he walks off… with my fucking ear! ‘

They laughed, slapped their legs. Then they both sat back, realising it wasn’t that funny.

‘So the lesson was that soldiers are damned superstitious. You ask a lot, and they’ll deliver. But they don’t do kids. They won’t cop that,’ said Cookie.

Mac hesitated, then asked Cookie outright. ‘Can someone fl y me down to Sabulu? I need another look.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Cookie, getting up.

They fl ew in over the site of the battle. The place was still smoking. Mac could smell the charred wood and the burned rainforest from a hundred metres up. Not a great advertisement for Cookie’s protection service.

They walked down from the landing site, into the courtyard, armed with M16s. Billy walked point, Mac swept. Cookie was in the middle, dressed in olive ovies of the aviation jumpsuit style, sleeves rolled up to just under the elbows.

They strolled through the smoking wreck of building three, which was burned to the ground. Some of the foundations were still sticking up out of the ground.

Buzzards erupted into the humid air as they came upon bodies and charred boots. Mac smelled burned hair and toasted fl esh. Cookie kicked a corpse onto its back, crouched down. Looked up at Mac, said, ‘Look at that – Filipino, or Polynesian. Not local, anyway.’

Mac looked at where Cookie was pointing. The dead man’s body had been burned down the back, but he’d fallen on his arm and the fl esh was intact. There was a tattoo on the bloke’s forearm, a scimitar and stars, done with the long curves of the Polynesian tats.

‘Moro shit,’ said Cookie.

They walked up to building fi ve, where Garrison’s extra boys had appeared from. It was still intact. They entered in a staggered formation, weapons at eye line. Billy went into the main room fi rst, checked for wires and sensor pads, then waved the others through.

The walls boasted holes the size of large pancakes. The impact of the. 50 cal gun had taken whole sections of the wooden walls off their studs. It smelled of old cordite and there were brass shells scattered on the fl oor amidst the rubble. Mac looked it over, still not really sure what he was looking for.

They cased all the buildings. In one of them, there was evidence of people having slept there. It had much better security and the beds were proper mattress jobs. There were two of them and they had their own rooms. The showers had been done right and Mac noticed that the power cable from the generator room ran underground, not over it. In the rooms, there were trapdoors in the fl oor. Someone had been worried about security and escape.

In the vestibule was a room with camp stretchers. The place was set up so intruders would have to go through the guards. Under one of the beds Mac found a torn strip of foil. It smelled of Bartook Special Mint.

Mac went back into the VIP rooms, had a quick look down the trapdoor of the one in the right. Nothing.

Looked down the left room’s trapdoor.

A face looked back at him.