Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (12 page)

‘Is there anything there? Anything they’ve left?’

The sounds of Sawtell snapping at Hard-on and Spikey echoed from the background. Sawtell came back on the air. ‘A few things.’

‘Get ‘em,’ said Mac, ‘and ask the manager what they were driving.’

Sawtell came back, said, ‘Silver Accord.’

‘How many?’ asked Mac.

There was a pause, then, ‘Three. Anything else, McQueen?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘I want the phone logs from that room.’

‘Got it. See you soon.’

The Berets got to the Patrol at a canter. They piled in, Mac pulled out quickly and drove north, out of town. No music now, adrenaline retreating. After twenty minutes they pulled into a bushy wayside area.

Hard-on pulled out a bed sheet, put it on the ground and opened it.

First impressions: Mac could smell the Old Spice wafting off the sheet. He saw several empty steel bandage containers and a ripped-up chewing gum wrapper, shredded thin and purposefully, bits of loose foil everywhere. A surviving piece of green paper said BARTOOK

SPECIAL MINT. There was a paperback book in Tagalog. Not much.

Sawtell had the phone logs. There were fi fteen outbound calls, made in the last nine days. One number wasn’t like the others.

Mac looked at it. Couldn’t get the picture. He grabbed his Nokia, dialled a number in Jakarta, Telekom Indonesia.

No connection.

Mac swore. He’d forgotten the state of the Indonesian phone system. Telekom Indonesia installed cellular towers where the tourists were starting to come, but the locals had no coverage even a few clicks out of the towns.

They drove back towards Palopo. Mac used a pay phone on the outskirts. Called an old mate at TI, an engineer called Dougie Foster.

They swapped greetings, then Mac said, ‘Mate, I’ve got some numbers.

Can you run them?’

‘Shoot.’

Mac read the numbers. The lone wrong ‘un was a Manila area code. A silent address. Mac asked for as much info as he could get and Dougie told him to hang on. After a few minutes he came back. ‘Got a pen?’

Mac wrote it down. He had the telecom exchange that the number would have been connected to, and Dougie gave him an area: Intramuros, a suburb on Manila Bay that Mac knew well.

The other fourteen numbers were closer to home. Dougie said,

‘You’re in luck, Mac - there’s only eight numbers on that series.’

Mac wrote it down. They were heading north again, for Tenteno.

They made good time on the road to Tenteno. Limo drove the Patrol, Hard-on rode shotgun. Spikey was in the middle of the back seat, Mac and Sawtell either side. Mac’s wrist was now bandaged and Limo had slipped him some anti-infl ammatories. But he agreed with Mac - a chipped bone in there somewhere, and the only cure was going to be resting the thing, something that was not going to happen on this trip.

They’d be arriving in Tenteno after dark and Mac wanted to case the place, have a chat to whoever was around. He wasn’t expecting miracles.

This was Sulawesi, the world’s eleventh largest island and basically unpopulated. Fishing villages dotted the coastline and highland tribes did their thing in the interior. It was all rainforest and mountains, and people trying to win forestry and mining concessions. If the trail went dead in Tenteno, Mac would give the intel guys in Jakarta a chance to come up with some piece of genius. That would set the hounds running.

If the mole was in Jakarta, he or she would make a move. Which would give Mac a chance to pull a counter-ambush.

But the trail didn’t go dead.

Mac and Spikey went into the general store on Tenteno’s main road as soon as they’d driven around the small lakeside town. The store owner was helpful, but didn’t know anything. Spikey kept it calm, doing small talk. Mac watched the owner clench and unclench his left fi st. He only did it once but it betrayed nerves.

Mac strolled out of the store, motioned to Limo and the others to drive round the back. He walked down an alley between the store and another wooden building, and came out in a rear yard.

There was a lean-to on his left. Boxes and drums of cooking oil were stacked to obscure what was in the structure. Mac walked around the makeshift wall, saw a tarp covering a large shape and whipped it off, revealing a silver Accord. Same rego as the one behind Minky’s.

Coming in through the store’s back entrance, Mac took the owner by surprise. The bloke’s eyes widened as Mac said to Spikey, ‘He stays there, he doesn’t move, right?’

It was near to closing time anyway so Mac fastened the front door and pulled the blinds. ‘Tell him this,’ said Mac to Spikey, not taking his eyes off the owner. ‘Tell him he’s harbouring a vehicle known to have been used in the terror bombings around Tenteno.’

Spikey rattled it off and the owner gulped, shook his head, gabbled something back at Spikey.

‘He says it couldn’t be,’ said Spikey.

‘Tell him if I’m wrong I can get my friends at the POLRI or Kopassus to come up here and check it out for us. Might all be a huge mistake,’ said Mac, winking at the store owner.

The owner shook his head, fear in his eyes.

Mac pressed for the breaking point. ‘Tell this guy that it might even warrant a visit from the boys from the BIN. And tell him, Spikey, that those boys will get to the bottom of it real fast by getting his wife and kids into the cells and helping him to remember. Memory is a funny thing.’

When Spikey had translated, the owner went quiet, looked at the fl oor.

Breaking point.

Mac started again, Spikey interpreting. Yes, the store owner knew the blokes in the silver Accord. They had been going out on the remote road to Sabulu. They’d made the trip several times and yes, they’d headed out that morning.

Mac got Spikey to ask what kind of people were travelling. The owner said two Javanese and one pale person.

‘Yankee?’ said Mac.

The owner nodded, said something to Spikey: a tall American.

Could be Garrison, thought Mac.

The three men had been travelling in a white LandCruiser, said the store owner. Mac’s attempts to get deeper information met with shrugs. Yes, there may have been more than three and yes, one may have been a woman. The bloke had been paid to mind his own business, and that’s what he had done. Mac believed him. He sliced the telephone lead with Spikey’s Ka-bar and moved outside.

It was dark but some light from the back of the shop spilled on to the Accord, a 2002 model. Mac tried the doors. Locked. After putting a rock through the driver’s side, Mac fl ipped the hood, and unplugged the howling alarm. That brought Sawtell and the others to the party.

‘This it?’ asked Sawtell.

Mac nodded, reached for the door handle, pulled on it.

Sawtell’s mouth fl ew open, wide-eyed, his hand reaching out.

Limo covered his eyes. Hard-on turned away.

Spikey stared at him like he was an honest-to-God dumb-ass honky motherfucker.

‘Shit, McQueen! Holy fucking shit!’ said Spikey.

‘Maybe to you that’s a car, McQueen!’ gasped Sawtell. ‘But to us, that’s a fucking bomb!’

Mac looked down at the open door, looked back. Limo was peeking from behind his hands. Sawtell looked at the sky. Spikey still stared.

‘Sorry, boys,’ said Mac.

Mac stood back, let Spikey check the vehicle for pressure plates, wires and anything tricky on the ignition column. Then Mac had his turn. He went into the boot, the glove box, the centre console, the spare wheel bay, the centre armrest of the back seat, the tool box, the ashtrays, the radio and the storage compartments. Not much.

Chewing gum wrapper again, Bartook Special Mint. Someone liked to get close to the ladies without scaring them off. Someone liked to rip it open in really thin strips.

He asked for a fl ashlight and got under the car. Positioned himself right beneath the windscreen washer reservoir and shone his torch straight up through the transparent plastic. It was a classic place to hide stuff and some people still thought the old places were best.

Nothing.

Then he started on the carpets and before he got far he found something under the driver’s seat. He fi shed out a key and shone the fl ashlight in again to see if there was anything else. He quickly went over the rest of the car’s interior.

Coming up empty-handed, he turned his attention back to the key. Hard-on asked what it was. The other soldiers groaned as one, as if to say,
What does it look like, lame?

It had a diamond-shaped, black plastic key ring with the letters MPS stamped on it in silver. The key was big, German, expensive and made of forged alloys suggesting a serious lock. The number was 46. Someone had lost a key. He wondered if they would come back for it.

Mac trousered it.

He turned back to the owner of the place, who was looking unsettled about what Mac had done to the Accord.

‘Don’t worry, sport,’ he said to the bloke. ‘I bet it’s overinsured.’

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.