Double Back (2 page)

‘Got a grenade?’ asked Kaui from his crouched position at the back door as the demountable became a blur of splinters.

Handing it over, Mac whispered, ‘How many?’

Kaui indicated two with his fingers. He pulled the pin on the small green canister and simply threw it left around the corner of the door without looking. The babble of panicked men sounded from the rear of the demountable and then the explosion tore through the forest and smashed a window in the quarters.

Yelling for the other OPM lads, Kaui leaned through the back door and scoped the area with his rifle. The OPM thugs ran through in a crouch, one of them leaking blood from a wound above his left eye. Kaui yelled a command at the taller one – Albert – who led the other two operators out the back door towards the rainforest.

Dropping to his stomach on the floor as the bullets whistled and slapped, Mac followed Kaui on his elbows into the common room, the walls coming apart in pieces the size of VHS cassettes. Bound and gagged hostages stared at Mac and Kaui from their position near the front windows of the destroyed common room – it had once been the social centre of the mine and was now a mess of smashed glass, ruined TV screens and spilled whisky. Several mine workers were injured where they sat huddled on the floor and Mac could hear moans and tape-muffled screams as the door-gunner stopped shooting.

‘They’re coming in,’ said Kaui, slithering to one of the RPG boxes as both mercenary helos advanced. He handed Mac the rocket-propelled grenade launcher, with its big ugly knob of explosive on the tip of the rocket. As the Papuan crawled to the next RPG box, the door-gunners opened up again, making Mac and Kaui dive flat to the floor.

‘Time to ride,’ muttered Kaui, giving up on a second RPG.

Crawling back to Mac, he took the RPG, flipped up the back-sights, hit the safety and rose to a classic kneeling marksman stance, the RPG across his right shoulder, its sights lined up with his cocked head. One of the Korean maintenance engineers sobbed with terror as Kaui rose slowly to the level of the windowsill so he could see the helo. After a split second of mutual recognition between himself and the door-gunner, Kaui squeezed the RPG trigger and the rocket whooshed out of the common room and through the truck flames, leaving a wispy trail of vapour for fifty metres before hitting Berger’s Hawk just behind the engine bulkhead. The twin sounds of the engine depowering and the expanding fireball filled the mine crater, and then pieces of the helo were raining on the demountable roof.

Mac followed Kaui at a run as a grenade sailed through the air and bounced off the frame of the common-room window onto the claypan outside. They leapt through the back door and kept running into the jungle as the grenade lifted a section of the roof and automatic rifle fire ripped into the building.

Sprinting across a sand and clay track, through a boggy creek bed, they reached one of the mine’s outlying service buildings. The massive sliding door was open, revealing a two-storey gas-powered turbine that created the electrical power for the Lok Kok mine. Idling in front of the building was a silver Nissan Patrol 4×4, Albert behind the wheel gunning the engine impatiently.

Kaui jumped into the front passenger seat and they lurched into the rainforest, the Patrol bouncing and screaming for grip on the goat track that passed for a road in West Papua. Beside Mac, the OPM operator with the head wound sagged sideways as he lost consciousness. Kaui fumbled around for the first-aid kit that most mine vehicles carry and found it in the centre console. The fourth Papuan held up his friend and Mac tore open the first-aid pack and went to work on the wound, getting it cleaned out and then patching and bandaging the whole thing. When Mac had finished on the Papuan’s injury, Kaui gestured for his friend to work on Mac’s scorched face, which was hurting like hell. There was a burns lotion in the kit and it stung as the Papuan applied it, then slowly it dulled the pain.

Taking turns looking out the windows, they tried to find the second helo, unable to hear anything above the scream of the Nissan’s engine and the cacophony of birds and monkeys in the rainforest. Mac figured that when the mercs secured the mine site, they’d find the trail of the Patrol and come looking.

‘Got a plan?’ asked Mac as water bottles were handed out, the humidity of the tropics now filling the cabin.

‘Plan was to annoy the mine owners, make them think that OPM was too costly,’ smiled Kaui. ‘Right, McQueen?’

‘Well, it worked with those Brazilians,’ shrugged Mac, sipping at the water. ‘Trust the Koreans to find a bunch of hard-ons like this lot.’

The four-wheel drive crested a ridge and started into a steep incline down the road connecting the Papuan highlands with the coastal plain. Mac instinctively pulled back into his seat and put his foot on the back of the driver’s seat, the sensation like the downhill section of a rollercoaster.

The road went down the side of a large spur for what looked like fifteen or twenty k and Mac knew immediately they’d be spotted from the air. Before he could warn Kaui, the second Black Hawk appeared, about a kilometre across the valley, its ‘9V’ registration marking it as a Singapore-registered aircraft.

‘Got company,’ muttered Mac, and all heads swivelled to the right side of the Nissan. ‘Options, Kaui?’

Keeping his eyes on the Hawk’s door-gunner in the opened fuselage, Kaui said something in Papuan to Albert, who replied to his boss then hesitated, glancing at Mac. Mac suspected they’d decided on a plan but were worried about freaking out the Anglo.

Ordering the driver to pull over under the cover of the forest canopy, Kaui looked mischievous. ‘Got an idea,’ he said, opening his door and sliding off the seat.

‘Okay,’ snapped Mac. ‘But none of that wacky Papuan shit, all right?’

The five of them jogged along the forest floor, the altitude and humidity almost choking Mac’s breath out of him as he struggled to keep up with the Papuans. In his days with the Royal Marines Commandos, he’d ended up doing the SBS swimmer-canoeist course which culminated in a survival run in the Brunei jungle. It had almost killed him, and he had a lasting memory of the way a Malaysian candidate had taken the whole thing in his stride, as if eating snakes and scraping leeches in an environment where you could barely breathe was the most natural thing in the world. Mac felt that now – the Papuans loping along in board shorts, talking with one another, while Mac stumbled along in the Saffa fatigues and military boots. In front of him, Albert and the Papuan who’d dressed his burn each carried a piece of the Patrol’s back seat, though Mac wasn’t totally sure why.

Kaui ran point, slowing every so often to get a sighting of the mercenaries’ helo through the high canopy. After ten minutes, Mac saw the Papuans waiting ahead and walked the last fifty metres to them, his legs rubbery, lungs empty.

‘Water, fellers,’ he gasped as he put a hand on a tree for support. ‘Need a drink.’

The OPM boys chuckled and Kaui pointed down to a steeply inclined water race. It consisted of a half-pipe that was at least three metres across, set in concrete braces. Water half-filled the race and it was moving at speed. Climbing one of the concrete braces of the structure, Mac dipped his cupped hand into the manmade rapid and drank greedily. Looking up, he saw that although the forest had been cleared to build the water race, that had been probably ten years ago, and the canopy had almost joined over the half-pipe again.

His thirst sated, Mac turned to find Kaui and the other OPM operators beside him on the large concrete brace, still carrying the Patrol’s back seats.

‘What are they for?’ asked Mac, as Albert laid the foam and fabric back seat on the surface of the rapids, making water rise up and over it.

‘Get on,’ said Kaui, smiling broadly.

‘Get on what?’ demanded Mac.

‘Your raft,’ winked Kaui.

Mac stared at him. He’d first met Kaui at UQ, when Mac was a solid centre for the university rugby club and Kaui was a flashy winger. They’d shared a sense of humour and an understanding of bending the rules as far as they had to be bent in order to win. He liked the man and trusted him, but Kaui also liked to make Anglos uncomfortable when they came into his world.

‘This is a wind-up, right?’ laughed Mac. ‘I’m not getting on that thing!’

Kaui deadpanned him and the sound of the mercs’ helo thromped above the screech of birds and the rush of the water race.

‘Fuck, mate,’ spat Mac, not wanting to lose face. ‘What is this?’

‘Slurry flume – it’s how they get the copper ore from Lok Kok to the loading terminal at the coast.’

‘Slurry?’ asked Mac, sceptical.

‘Yeah, but when the mine’s shut down for maintenance, they just run overflow from the reservoir down it,’ said Kaui.

‘Where does it go? How far does it drop like this?’ said Mac.

Shrugging, Kaui said, ‘Well, it drops like this to the coastal plain, then it goes through pumping stations to the port at Amamapare.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Kaui,’ said Mac, certain that the other Papuans were finding this highly amusing.

‘We need to get off the road,’ Kaui pointed out. ‘Less you want to run through the jungle all day?’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ grumbled Mac as he leaned forward onto the Patrol’s foam seat, water immediately rushing up the back of his shirt and through the Steyr. Mac had performed HALO jumps from planes and nocturnal combat-diving missions. But just standing at the top of the big slide at Wet ’n’ Wild on the Gold Coast gave him sweaty palms.

‘See you down there, Mac,’ shouted Kaui, suddenly pushing the foam seat into the rapid. Before Mac could protest, Albert was landing on his back. The makeshift raft took off like a bullet out of a gun and as they accelerated Mac wondered how his youthful visions of being a gentleman spy had turned into tobogganing down a mine slurry pipe in West Papua, being held down by a large local called Albert.

Sensing Mac’s fear, Albert whispered into his ear that it was all going to be okay, that it was a cakewalk the whole way down. Then they crested a ridge and the half-pipe turned into a full pipe as it went almost vertical.

Mac’s screams echoed for thousands of metres as they free-fell into the darkness.

Mac lay on the floor of the Hino minibus with Kaui as Albert drove through the outskirts of Amamapare, the port on the south coast of West Papua which serviced the major mines in the highlands. The South African mercs would be looking for payback regardless of whether the Korean mining company was still paying them. They’d be staking out the airports in the southern part of West Papua, and if they had connections in Jakarta, the Indonesian military might help them look for Mac and Kaui.

They found a small copying and business centre and Albert went in, opened Mac’s mail box and returned with his emergency pack of passports, credit cards and a change of clothes. Driving in silence through Amamapare, the eventual grinding sounds of conveyor belts and ore spreaders indicated they were probably in Portsite, where ships were loaded with what was dug out of the Lok Kok mine.

‘Sounds like your stop, Mac,’ said Kaui in the darkness.

Still recovering from his terror-ride down the slurry pipe, Mac wanted to be grateful to Kaui but he’d lost his sense of humour. People often misunderstood his special forces background: to succeed in that world was not about reckless risks, it was all about calculated, controlled execution. And free-falling into a slurry pipe was not his idea of control.

The minibus stopped and Mac lifted the tarpaulin he’d been lying under. Through the window he could see the giant gantry and spreader spewing an ore concentrate into a bulker, the whole vision lit up by floodlights which stretched down the wharf and along the decks of the ship.

‘Stay cool, brother,’ said Kaui as Mac made to go.

Despite his irritation, Mac reluctantly accepted a hug from his old rugby team-mate.

‘One hell of a performance in that pipe,’ smiled Kaui. ‘Was that a scream or a yodel?’

‘You’ll get a slap one of these days, mate,’ said Mac, shaking his head. ‘Swear to God.’

After thanking Albert, Mac padded down the steps of the Hino onto the weed-infested wharf apron. Then he walked under the conveyorbelt loader towards the rear of the Java Princess in his fresh chinos and shirt. The first officer, a Singaporean Chinese, was expecting him and showed him to a small stateroom.

‘We sail at o-one hundred,’ said the officer. ‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Mac.

‘Need someone to look at that?’ said the officer, gesturing towards Mac’s facial burn.

‘Nah, I’m sweet,’ Mac replied. ‘But a cold beer might help.’

Smiling and pointing to the fridge, the officer left the room.

Kicking off his shoes, Mac grabbed a can of Tiger, turned down the lights and fiddled with the TV remote as he eased back on the bed. CNN was running footage of chaos in and around Dili – the capital of East Timor – as the Indonesia-backed militias attempted to bully the locals out of voting for independence from Jakarta in the ballot scheduled to start in two weeks. Increasingly, the militias were intimidating the United Nations ballot scrutineers, most of whom were Australians. There was an Australian military operation called Spitfire, which was an emergency extraction of Australian and UN personnel from the troubled island at the southern tip of Indonesia. But commanders in the Australian Defence Force would tell you that they weren’t allowed to know the operational planning behind Spitfire – it was being kept a secret in Canberra – so the individual commands were having to plan their own logistics based on rumour.

As sleep crept up on him the chaotic images flashed across the screen and Mac felt for the poor bastard from the firm who was working in East Timor. Then his eyelids dropped and sleep finally took him.

They were steaming north for the Davao Gulf underneath the Philippines when the Australian Royal Navy Seahawk helo came into sight and asked permission to land on the Java Princess’s helipad. Finishing his breakfast, Mac thanked the officers in the wardroom and headed down the rear companionways to the stern decks.

Inside the helo Mac was given a flight suit and left alone. They made it to HMAS Adelaide in fourteen minutes and Mac spoke with the ship’s intelligence officer while the rest of the officers wiped egg yolk off their plates with their toast. They were going to steam north for another two hours and then fly Mac into Zamboanga City in Mindanao.

‘And then?’ asked Mac, sipping on a mug of coffee.

‘Beats me – we’re just the delivery boys, right?’ shrugged the intel officer, though Mac sensed he knew more than he was saying.

The navy landed Mac at the air base in Zamboanga just before eleven in the morning, where he was met by a local asset known to Western intelligence as Cubby. The friendly thirty-five-year-old shook Mac’s hand on the tarmac.

‘Got a charter for you, Mr Jeffries,’ said Cubby, whose ability to make things happen with minimum fuss was valuable to foreign intelligence services.

‘Nice,’ said Mac. He didn’t like to give too much away to people whose loyalty was based on a cheque.

‘Yes, Mr Jeffries,’ said the Filipino. ‘Two and quarter hour to Jakarta with government charter flight. Everything good for you, sir.’

Jakarta was the wrong direction and Mac mulled on it all the way into Halim air base on the outskirts of the vast capital of Indonesia. For the past eight months he’d been working covertly out of Lombok as Don Jeffries, consultant to foreign logging and mining companies, making sure they were greasing the right palms. One of the big problems with trying to exploit the natural resources of places like Borneo, West Papua and Sulawesi was inadvertently channelling your kickback to the wrong person, the other governor, the chief of police rather than the minister for policing.

Mac’s mission had been to infiltrate the companies, the provincial governments and Jakarta’s military and political structures, and gather intelligence of the type that could never be gained from cocktail parties and Red Cross receptions. He could only do that from a genuine business position, embedded somewhere away from the Aussie Embassy, and his recall to Jakarta meant a big change of some sort. It might even mean a reassignment, and he fantasised that it was a northern hemisphere posting, perhaps even as a ‘declared’ SIS officer in a big embassy. Such postings could be thunderously boring and highly PC – especially in contrast to South-East Asia – but they were where you had to go to earn your management credits and move upwards.

As Mac followed the other passengers into the air-con of Halim’s military-consular terminal he spotted a woman in her late twenties waiting on the other side of the immigration gate. Using his Alan McQueen passport, Mac eyed the woman while the perfunctory check was made, and concluded she must be there for him: the white blouse, blonde ponytail and blue pencil skirt basically spelled Employee of the Australian Commonwealth.

‘G’day,’ said Mac to the woman as he walked through.

‘Mr McQueen?’ she asked, putting her hand out to shake and clutching a clipboard with the other. ‘Kate Innes – DFAT.’

They made small talk as she led him to a red Holden Commodore at the rear of the terminal. ‘So, what’ve you got for me?’ he smiled, buckling up. ‘London? Tokyo?’

‘Actually,’ she said, pulling out of the park, ‘further south, I believe.’

Warming to the mystery, Mac took the envelope she offered and opened it. The Qantas tickets had him flying into Brisbane with a connection to Canberra.

‘Must be promotion time, eh Kate?’ he joked as they headed for the freeway.

‘Umm,’ she muttered, and Mac saw a blush under her sunnies.

‘Not so good?’ said Mac.

‘I’m sorry, Mr McQueen – my job was to give you the tickets and drive you to Hatta,’ she said, referring to Jakarta’s international airport, Soekarno-Hatta. ‘I don’t really know anything.’

‘Be careful with that kind of talk,’ said Mac, trying to make the girl feel better. ‘They’ll make you director-general.’

She started chuckling and then blushed at the career-limiting nature of the humour. ‘You trying to get me into trouble?’

‘I won’t tell a soul,’ said Mac, relaxing into the seat with a sigh, yearning for an armchair in the Qantas Club lounge and three or four very cold beers.