Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (18 page)

Mac remembered his mother telling Frank that he should have locked that bullying prick up years ago.

Frank didn’t tell her to shut up. Just wore it.

Mac thought about it.

Then he breathed again. It felt like the fi rst time in days.

Mac woke later in the morning in the air-conned men’s quarters.

He dressed in his blue ovies, which had already been washed, dried, folded and left on a tallboy in his room. On the ovies was the black diamond key ring with the MPS logo and the big German key.

He looked at it again. Put it in his breast pocket and moved down to the mess.

After he’d fi nished eating, Hemi came over with a mug of coffee.

‘Some shit last night, huh?’

Mac nodded. He’d never been shot at that much for that long.

He was still a little jangled and deafened by the experience.

‘Yeah, wouldn’t want to go to a party up there,’ said Mac. ‘If that’s what they’re like on a week night, imagine them on a Saturday when they’re really on the piss.’

Hemi laughed. ‘Like some of the pubs back home, eh?’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Fucking Gisborne. Heard of it?’

Mac shook his head.

‘Fucking hard case.’ Hemi shook his head.

Mac asked him about the girls.

‘They’re doing all right,’ said Hemi. ‘The little one is fi ne but the Aussie girl’s still asleep. Don’t know what they were feeding her.’

Mac’s job had been to snatch Judith Hannah, but not interrogate her. That had been made plain by Garvey back in Jakkers. They’d given him nothing to go on, no reason to talk with her. Even in his initial briefi ng with Sawtell back in Jakarta, the whole emphasis had been on Garrison, not Hannah.

But Mac didn’t give a shit now about what he was supposed to do.

Minky was dead, Limo was dead, Hard-on had half his arm shot off, Hannah was in some kind of coma - probably drug-induced - and there was a little girl, now without a dad, who might or might not have been subject to unwanted sexual attention.

So Mac didn’t give a rats about what Jakarta wanted.

He poured another cup of tea from the silver pot. ‘Hem, tell me, who was doing the shooting last night?’

Hemi shrugged. ‘Dunno, really. Looked like locals, I suppose.

Organised though. Trained, I reckon. All kitted-up. No sarungs - that what you mean?’

Mac nodded. ‘Well, yeah. Any Anglos in there?’

Hemi did the theatrical frown. Shook his head. ‘Mate, it was dark, eh? All I know is they knew what they were doing - didn’t run, kept fi ghting. Not a bad outfi t really.’

Mac thanked him and got up to go. Then turned and asked if there were any special handshakes he needed to know in order to get in and see Cookie. Hemi said he’d handle it. He went to a wall-mounted phone, spoke briefl y. Put his fi nger on the hook, let it go, called someone else. Came back.

‘Mosie will meet you at the gate.’

Mac breathed the steamy equatorial air as he wound his way up the drive to the mansion. He had this place as Dutch-built. It was elevated and Sonny was right, it had been built precisely in the right rise of the valley to get both the breeze from the west off the Macassar Strait and the southerly that came up from the Sunda Sea and Flores. The rainforest came right to the edge of the driveway. Amazingly coloured hornbills strained the breaking point of branches as they gnawed at the fruit. There were also piping crows and cicadabirds, and the racket they made, along with all the insects, made the air vibrate.

By the time he got to the gate, the back of his ovies were wet with sweat. The black iron-work gate was at least two storeys high and wide enough for three trucks to pass through abreast. Those Dutch must have been a paranoid bunch. A bored-looking local made no attempt to leave the glassed-in guardhouse. Probably orders from Sonny. Moses appeared on the other side of the gate, said something to the guard, and the small walkway gate next to the guardhouse swung open silently. Mac walked through and the two men greeted each other with a thumb-grip handshake.

‘Set, brother. Nice work last night,’ said Mac.

Moses grinned big. ‘Set, brother. Set.’

Moses wore olive fatigue shorts, Hi-Tec Magnums and a black polo shirt. He’d dumped the webbing and the SIG and now had on a hip rig with a large handgun in it.

Behind Moses three children were playing on a groomed and irrigated lawn. It extended all the way to the swimming pool area and the four-storey white mansion.

He recognised one of the kids as Minky’s girl. She ran with the other kids, laughing. She wore a new white linen dress. She and another girl about her age teased a younger boy with a ball. Piggy-in-the-middle stuff, and the boy was about to lose it.

Moses turned and snapped something. The girls gave him a cheeky look. Minky’s girl held the ball out to the boy, and when he went to grab it, she pulled it back. The girls ran up the lawn, shrieking with delight.

The boy lost it.

Moses rolled his eyes and they walked across the lawn. He put a friendly hand on the crying boy’s shoulder and the boy leaned into the Fijian, walked alongside muttering something, probably about girls.

In the wealthy Indonesian families, they had a word for people like Moses that translated loosely as ‘house boy’. Moses’ job was to ensure that the family was safe from bandits, kidnappers, slavers, thieves and assassins. He was a hell of a thing to look at: about six-four, one hundred and twenty-fi ve kilos and all muscle. According to Hemi, Moses was part of the same clan that included General Sitiveni Rabuka, the military strongman of Fiji. Mac remembered a bunch of journalists once asking Rabuka about his boxing and football prowess, and the general had laughingly remarked that he was the small one of the tribe.

Moses kind of explained that.

When Mac asked about Hannah, Moses led him behind the mansion to a modern annexe that at fi rst glance looked like a guest wing. But when they walked into the air-con comfort, Mac realised it was a small hospital the size of a large vet clinic.

They got to a door. Moses knocked, opened it and Mac saw a nurse - a young local woman - wiping Judith Hannah’s forehead with a wet towel, talking low and sweet to the girl. Hannah had a drip in her arm and her eyes were still shut. Pale, sickly.

‘Billy don’t want her talking,’ said Moses. ‘She gotta rest, brother.’

Mac looked at Mosie, thought about arguing. Thought again. Mac had a good idea what was wrong with Judith Hannah. A fast and clumsy way to get people talking was to hit them up with overdoses of scopolamine, which was a truth serum of sorts. Trouble was, it was derived from the Datura family of plants which also had hallucino-genic properties. It was a dangerous way to mess with someone’s biochemistry. When you’d got the story you wanted, you administered a ‘hot shot’ of scopolamine and morphine which induced amnesia in the short term. Secret police used it more than spooks.

They headed for the house, running into Hard-on and Billy, who were on the way out. Hard-on’s arm was now totally strapped and in a sling.

Mac gave a wink. ”Zit going, boys?’

They went through the tradies’ entrance into the mansion and both men kicked off their boots. Mrs Cookie demanded it and Sonny had warned Mac that ‘the missus of the house is a real piece of work’.

Mac had grown up in a house where the missus was a piece of work and he knew the secret was to do it
her
way.

Moses took them through. Cookie stood from the desk, asked how the girl was going. Moses said, ‘Real good, Mr B. She a happy one, that one.’

‘All that screaming?’

‘That lil’ Santo, Mr B. Girls gang up. Two on one, not fair.’

Cookie put his hand up, like
Yeah, yeah
.

Moses was dismissed. He gave Mac the wink as he shut the door behind him.

Mac and Cookie sat on the white leather sofas. A housemaid came in with green tea and left. Cookie lit a smoke and they did small talk about Australia and big boarding schools. Cookie had been schooled at Xavier College in Melbourne, where he’d acquired the accent and the ockerisms. ‘The culture of that place was “fi t in or fuck off”, so I went local.’

They talked about Australian politics, the problems with Melbourne Football Club and Aussie-Indon relations. Cookie was well read, smart.

‘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.’