Sulawesi lock-up any more than Mac did. So Ray-Bans would set an ambush, do it the easy way.
And Mac would try to make the bloke show himself.
Mac ducked into a side street. One of the old Dutch lanes built in the 1700s. It was narrow, fi lled with tourists and local traders. It smelled of cloves, of incense and dirt. He found a fi sh shop, sat back in the shadows and watched American tourists around him.
The owner approached and Mac pointed at the cook in his bolt-hole, saying, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’
The woman bowed, smiled and yelled something at the bloke in the tiny open-sided kitchen. The bloke looked at Mac. Mac gave thumbs-up. The bloke smiled. Nodded.
Turning his eyes back to the street, he saw what he was looking for. A bloke in a bright turquoise trop shirt with a bulge under the right hip made two passes, looking sideways into the restaurant. The passenger from the red Liberty was late twenties, about fi ve-eight and ninety kilos with a strong upper body but maybe not athletic.
Mac thought he detected fl at feet. He had a cop haircut and fl at cheekbones.
The meal came quick. Swordfi sh chunks stir-fried in a coriander and chilli sauce, goreng and an assortment of vegies. He asked the woman for a cold Bintang and hooked into the sword.
The cook brought the Bintang out himself.
‘Thanks, champ. This is some great tucker,’ said Mac.
The cook was chuffed. He smiled and tried to get through the language barrier. ‘Merry Carn?’ he asked.
Mac shook his head. ‘Nah, champ. Skippy.’ Mac did his bush-roo impersonation, paws up under his chin.
The bloke laughed out loud, put his hand on Mac’s shoulder before making his way back to the woks and gas rings. Javanese social interaction had two speeds: serious appraisal verging on suspicion, and outright joyous laughter. Laughter got you closer to the gods, so if you could get a laugh out of a Javanese, they owed you.
Mac fi nished the meal and dawdled with his beer, turning it round and sipping at it. Something nagged at him – some chatter he’d picked up a couple of years ago when he was posted in Manila. His barber, Ramon, had been a National Police intelligence offi cer during the Marcos era. Ramon cut hair for all the Customs guys, cops and the Port Authority bulls. He was like a clearing house for all the good chatter, all the stuff you couldn’t get from an embassy cocktail party or a keyhole satellite feed.
Which was why Mac had got his hair cut there.
He tried to get his memory working. Ramon had once told him about a discovery at Clark, the old US Air Force base about twenty minutes’ drive north of Manila. Apparently, in their haste to decommission the joint in 1992, an entire cache of hush-hush materiel had been left behind by the Yanks. There were huge underground systems at Clark. You could drive all day around the base and never see daylight. Someone forgot about an underground storage garage, and ten years later the Philippines government had demanded that the Department of Defense come back and pick it up.
Mac had remembered the last part of the conversation because Ramon had said, ‘It’s going out to Johnston – all being handled by the spooks now.’
Mac had remembered the Johnston bit only because he was dating a Canadian girl called Bethany Johnstone at the time. She was Canadian Customs intel – gorgeous, but a little on the bossy side.
Mac had chuckled at the thought of a bunch of hush-hush hazardous materiel being shipped to Beth.
He’d never taken it further. Conspiracies weren’t his thing and in truth the Filipinos loved nothing more than tales of forgotten caches of precious stuff. The story of Yamashita’s gold was a classic example.
During the Pacifi c War, the Japanese military under General Yamashita had looted gold reserves from wherever they invaded throughout South-East Asia, and they had hidden the vast caches in secret caves around the Philippines and northern Indonesia. Filipinos had grown up on stories of where the Yamashita Gold might be hidden.
The reference to spooks at Clark linked it for Mac. He wondered if the US cache at Clark was the same stuff that had now gone missing in Manila Bay. He wanted to get on the phone to Jakarta and just ask Jen to look it up. He wanted to have a serious conversation with Garvs
– cut through the bullshit. But it wasn’t going to work that way. He wasn’t going to get Jen in the shit and he wasn’t going to give Garvs a chance to order him home.
He wolfed the beer, fl attened some rupiah and stood to go.
Suddenly he had a fl ash: when he’d brokered the logging deal with Sabaya’s business negotiators, one of the entourage had been a tallish Eurasian-looking Filipino with a huge chromed handgun. He’d never said a word, just sat in the background and stared.
Mindanao ‘02 – the guy was Ray-Bans.
CHAPTER 23
Mac let himself out the back of the shop and walked to the end of the rear alley. He paused, poked his head out. Looked left and right down the cross street and couldn’t see a red Liberty or men sitting in cars.
He walked west with the other pedestrians, the streets buzzing with large tourist buses and Malaysians and Americans in tour groups.
There was no sign of Mr Turquoise. Mac assumed he was around the corner, waiting in the street the restaurant fronted on to. He slowed as he approached the corner where an old man sold newspapers and magazines. A monkey sat on the guy’s cart, chain attached to his collar. He walked wider, stopped, put his hand in his pocket, pointed at a Straits Times, came out with rupiah. The guy fl ipped the newspaper into four, held it out and cupped the same hand for some brass. Mac hit him with some dough, leaned over and around and clocked the street. Mr Turquoise had moved on from the restaurant. Mac took his change, tossed one of the 500 rupiah coins to the monkey, who caught it and put it in his little canvas pouch, gave Mac a wink.
Mac looked round the corner again and saw Mr Turquoise staring into a shop window. There was no sign of Ray-Bans.
Mac walked out from the corner, exposing his position to Mr Turquoise, who was forty metres away. Turquoise stood up, turned around slow, clocked the street. Clocked Mac. Did a double take. Mac pretended to see him for the fi rst time too and, feigning surprise, turned and moved away. He kept going back down the cross street, though not as fast as he could.
Turquoise followed Mac around the corner with his hand under his trop shirt; Mac kept moving away, down the cross street. Turquoise hesitated, probably warned to be careful. Then he came after Mac.
Game on.
Mac knew that fl at-footed guys tired quickly, especially in the legs. That’s why regular army never took them. A fl at-foot who tried to join the Royal Marines, the paras or a diggers’ infantry outfi t would be carried out on a stretcher. Everything was speed marches, every day was a route. There were no stragglers, no excuses.
Mac assumed that if Ray-Bans wasn’t with Turquoise, he’d be covering the Pantai. So Mac was luring Turquoise north, away from his support, diluting the numerical advantage. If things turned out Mac’s way, he’d even up the fi repower equation.
Mac got to a pedestrian crossing and waited. Turquoise closed as the light went green – he was already puffi ng and Mac moved off again, through the strollers, keeping a distance of about fi fty metres, keeping it straight. He wanted the tail at his six o’clock, giving the guy confi dence. They crossed another street. Mac paused at the light, turned and had a look; Turquoise was purple in the face, shirt getting wet. Mac wondered if he smoked. They came to a street behind the Sedona.
Mac stopped, looked around as if he was confused. He wanted Turquoise to think he had the upper hand. Wanted him overeager to end it.
Mac turned left into a cross street and slowed. They weaved between other pedestrians, Turquoise closing, wheezing, and Mac pretending to be scared and tired. He let Turquoise get within fi fteen metres and then ducked into one of the alleys, stopped, dropped the newspaper, ran straight back the way he’d come. As he fl ew out of the alley, Turquoise looked up in surprise, his right hand under the shirt, on his right hip.
Mac slapped his left hand down on Turquoise’s gun wrist, at the same time throwing a heavy open-hand strike into the guy’s throat.
