can go to hell?’
Mac swallowed hard. This wasn’t going the way he wanted it.
‘That it, McQueen? You know that if a bunch of black and brown men know there’s a little brown girl up there, they might just give her equal priority?’
‘Look, John -‘
‘So you get the black man to make peace with the angry brown man?’
‘Umm…’
‘Five minutes before go?’
Sawtell was looking at him like he was a different species. ‘What is it with you intel guys?’
‘John, it’s not like -‘
‘Fuck you, McQueen.’ He hissed it. ‘I’ll tell Sonny. We’ll do what we have to do. But fuck you.’
Sawtell moved off, shaking his head.
Silence in Mac’s head. Like a drum.
CHAPTER 12
Mac lay on the ridge, behind a log under a low-hanging canopy of branches. Hard-on lay beside him. Below them was a compound of eight oldish wooden buildings, like pre-war public schoolhouses.
A generator drove a fl oodlight system that illuminated a courtyard.
The place had been built with little evidence of permanence and the main buildings were arranged in no particular order or angle, except that they surrounded the courtyard.
Thirty metres up a scree and clay slope Mac could see why the compound had been built: there was a mine entry with a small railway coming out of it. During the Second World War the Japanese had exploited the mine for mica, the prime ingredient in silica gels.
They took turns with Hard-on’s binos, looking for the main residence and a lock-up – diffi cult given that the buildings looked so similar to one another.
Mac had to think it through: he was either going to stealth into the right building, or he was going to stealth into the wrong building and start a shooting match.
There wasn’t one girl, there were two. What if they weren’t in the same area? Mac would bet they were. This was hardly a prison set-up and criminals were usually lazy when it came to managing incarceration.
His mate Jenny Toohey from the AFP once told him about a raid she’d led on a child sex-slave ring in Semarang. They stealthed in to fi nd the boys and girls watching TV in their pyjamas while the kidnappers slept off an opium bender.
So Mac was going to take a calculated gamble. All he needed was a good odds-on pick on which building the girls were in. He didn’t want to be wandering in and out of barracks at three in the morning, saying, ‘Sorry, fellas, wrong building.’
According to Sonny’s local intel, there were ten or twelve people in the camp. A dozen was doable.
The fi rst part of the exercise was sacking the perimeter security.
Sonny and Hemi had taken that job. There were two guards, as far as they could tell, and Mac wanted them both totally out of the picture before he wandered across that fl oodlit courtyard.
The radio system crackled. Hemi’s voice: ‘Blue team this is Red.
Good to go. On your signal.’
The sentries were down. A good start.
The plan now was old and simple: Mac and Hard-on would break into their building and search as far as they could without starting the shit. If they couldn’t go further, and needed a distraction or cover, they’d call in the Red team, who would come in with a lot more noise from the other side of the compound. The way these things worked, when they worked well, was highly effective. The louder distraction usually triggered the human instinct to protect; the enemy would hopefully race out of the place leaving the intruders and the abductees inside and unaccompanied.
Or, it could all go to shit. Like when the distraction didn’t work, or you trod on a cat or someone was simply lying awake, helping himself to a bit of self-love in the dark. That’s when it was close-range gunfi re, which made even professionals rethink their career. It was scary, and someone usually died.
When Mac did these things, he liked to work with a military athlete, and with Hard-on he’d got lucky – a good operator with soft feet, a calm brain and a killer’s body. Someone who kept their head still and their heart rate down.
He liked special forces blokes because they thrived under pressure.
That was something the intel guy needed when he was trying to think things through. Like when you get to a cell and there’s no one in there. Or there’s someone in the cell, but they’re hostile – don’t want to go anywhere.
Hard-on and Mac mumbled to one another. They settled on the larger of the buildings as the most likely residential. It had a large three painted on it in black, faded but still visible. They could make out a clearly worn path through the clay courtyard to the steps which went up into the building. They couldn’t see similar paths to the other buildings.
Sawtell agreed over the earpiece, told them he could see a cable from the generator room going into building three, but not going anywhere else.
The last thing they looked for was a security system. With two perimeter guards, Mac doubted it. Not out in the highlands of Sulawesi. But they did the grid-scans with the binos: started with the foreground, worked to and fro. Moved to the next grid, to and fro. They each did it once over, looking for small white plastic boxes mounted on the wall of a building or on a stick, hip-high to a man.
Nothing.
They checked each other. Mac had the SIG 9 mm. The silencer wasn’t the best but it might give him a slight edge. SIGs had the fi fteen-round mags which Mac hated. On a job like this, however, it was welcome.
Hard-on had his Beretta in his webbing and an M4 carbine lying in front of him. But he was going in with a Ka-bar as his primary weapon. Also in his webbing was a sealed plastic bag fi lled with a length of muslin soaked in the US military version of chloroform. If Garrison was inside, Mac had some questions for him and he didn’t want the bloke dead. There was also the issue of female hysteria: a woman being woken in the early hours by one bloke in overalls and another in a black ski mask might not think she was being rescued.
Hard-on pulled black gloves over his fi sts. Clenched them. He pulled a black ski mask from inside his shirt, put it on.
Mac rubbed his right wrist against his face, hoping it would hold out. He could have sat back and let the soldiers do their thing, used his wrist as an excuse. But Judith Hannah was his responsibility, his mission.
He thought about Minky’s girl and what Sawtell had said. He hadn’t deprioritised her because she had brown skin; he’d done so to keep his mind focused on the mission. Still, it didn’t look good.
He admitted that. He just couldn’t admit it to them.
His heartbeat rose in his throat. He took a couple of deep breaths, then held down an acrid sensation in the back of his mouth. Nerves rising, Mac pulled down his black cap, looked at Hard-on and nodded.
‘Red team, this is Blue,’ said Hard-on into the throat mic.
‘Approaching.’
Mac’s ears roared with nerves as he scooted along the south wall of building three. He was in shadows but still vulnerable. The moon was out and while that was good for his general vision it was also good for an enemy who might be watching.
He battled to control his breathing. Hard-on crouched in front of him. Before them was the expanse of the courtyard – about thirty metres across and fl ooded with artifi cial light. They’d spent the last fi fteen minutes circling round behind building number three, now they were tucked in behind it, under the window line.
Hard-on took his time. Mac watched the soldier’s back heaving through fatigues and webbing. You couldn’t stop the nerves, but you could breathe with it. They waited. Listened for the slightest sound.
Nothing. Except the sound of heartbeats roaring in Mac’s ears.
