After three minutes a blue Commodore wagon raced onto the front apron area, a POLRI light truck behind it.
The Commodore stopped beside Mac, Jenny in the front passenger seat. Mac just said, ‘Sub-level, you can drive down.’
‘You okay?’ said Jenny.
Mac shook his head, pointed into the building.
They squealed off, the POLRI truck following. A third vehicle parked on the apron. It was a mid-sized, unmarked bus. Empty.
Two POLRI women got out and opened the side storage areas, pulling out piles of blankets, white towels, portable shower stands and large blue plastic bags. One bag fell over, spilling children’s gear on the concrete apron. There were dresses, undies, sandals.
Soft toys.
Mac waited for the ambulance and directed it down to the sub-level.
As he walked down he felt his pulse increasing again. He gagged on the smell, fl inched at the screaming noise, feeling the fear and pain in the people down there.
The door was almost off when Mac arrived. Sawtell stood behind his team, eyes huge, a mix of fear and rage, his body poised like a professional wrestler about to clinch.
A POLRI woman videotaped the proceedings, while Jenny yelled into a radio handset, one fi nger in her left ear. After she got off the radio she conferred with her POLRI colleagues.
A decision apparently made, she walked over to Sawtell, who turned to her. For a second Mac saw a scared boy under that machine-like exterior.
The angle grinder suddenly free-revved for a split second and Jansen shut it down. Smoke hung, mixing with the container smell.
Hideous.
The kids started up again as Jansen’s offsider pulled back on a pinch bar. Metal twisted and ground against itself, and the right-hand door swung open like the scene in a ghost movie.
Mac felt bile coming up as the stench fl ooded the enclosed space.
A small dark fi gure was the fi rst out. Cambodian. Five years old.
Big eyes. Naked. Shit all over her.
Looked around. Confused.
‘Maa?’ she said.
CHAPTER 42
Mac, Sawtell and Paul sat speechless outside the offi ce section of the warehouse.
Paul had been cleaned, stitched and given a morphine needle.
He didn’t want to be in the ambulance. Wanted the more critically ill kids in it.
Sawtell was blanked out. Thousand-yard stare into nothing. Even his own men were leaving him alone.
Mac had cordoned off the far-end ramp to the sub-level, hoping the POLRI might fi nd some Garrison blood samples down there. He wondered what was happening in Singapore and tried to understand the situation now that he’d actually seen Garrison and Diane together in a getaway car.
Mac was so tired he could barely keep his eyelids up, even with the circus that had descended around them.
To their left, the POLRI women scrubbed down the healthier children in the portable showers, dried them off, photographed them, booked them. Then they dressed them and put them in the bus with an orange number tag on their new clothes.
Aged about four to ten, there were about seventy of them, boys and girls.
Beside the bus Jenny spoke into a mobile phone, her offsider beside her with a clipboard. Every few seconds Jenny leaned over to read out numbers: probably relaying container ID to someone at United States Customs and Border Control or the Jakarta Container Port.
A POLRI Criminal Investigation Division team dealt with the two dead Garrison guards upstairs. Another team processed the rescued hostages from a POLRI van by the helos. Jeremy’s kids stayed inside, but Wylie’s missus emerged and sat on the step box, lit a smoke, inhaled deep, lucky to be alive.
More teams from POLRI, FBI, Scotland Yard and AFP appeared ready to box-scan every container to see if there were more kids down there. They could do it with heartbeat detectors or thermo imagers.
Mac found it shaming that while sexual-servitude traffi cking was a crime that happened mostly in South-East Asia, it was driven by demand and money from Western countries.
Apart from the sheer horror of what he’d witnessed, Mac had never realised what a logistical nightmare the whole thing was. Now he could see why Jenny was gone for days and weeks at a time, working herself to a standstill. Once you found a container like this, you had to work back to the ship, back to the freight company, back through the terminal gate-logs, back to the trucking companies and the clients in order to see where it came from and whether there might be more like it. And then you had to work forwards, too, try to fi nd where other containers from the same source might be going, where another box full of children might be sitting, waiting for the paedophile industry to hand over the money.
It was a harrowing detail for cops and Mac knew it chewed them up at a hell of a rate. Not only did they have to make arrests and have an evidence bag at the end of the process, they also had child victims in the most appalling and distressed states. There were only so many hours in the day; only so many resources. Only so many containers you could search.
In front of Mac the liaison people from various embassies attempted to straighten out the in-country cooperation angle with the POLRI. The way it usually worked was the police had a job to do and wanted to take statements from those involved in, or witness to, the incidents, regardless of their nationality. The liaisons’ job was to insist that that was not in the spirit or the letter of the agreement between the countries.
The Yanks had no interest in allowing a Special Forces captain to make a statement to Indon police. And the British weren’t even acknowledging Paul. A Pommie liaison woman’s voice rose over the pack. ‘If there was a British national involved in this incident – and I’m not confi rming there was…’
Mac saw a Javanese BAIS operative he knew, Edi Sitepu. He was listening in on the diplomatic hoo-ha. He caught Mac’s eye and came over.
They shook and Edi sat down. ‘Can’t work this one out,’ said Edi to Mac. ‘Lots of talking about Abu Sabaya, but was he here?’
Mac shook his head, sipped some water. He hoped at some stage during his lifetime that smell was going to get out of his mouth.
‘Garrison and Sabaya must have split. Don’t know where either of them are.’
‘That Peter Garrison. Bad news that one,’ said Edi, shaking his head. ‘You know we tipped off the Americans about him last year?’
Mac didn’t know.
‘But it turned into this.’ Edi nodded at the British and American embassy folks doing their thing.
Mac remained silent, exhausted, over it.
‘The thing to do was to get us in a loop, hey Mac?’ said Edi.
Normally Mac loved the way Indons got Western phrases slightly wrong, but his mood was too bleak. ‘Would have been great before Bali, too, eh Edi?’
Mac shouldn’t have said it.
Edi’s face darkened. He and Mac hadn’t always seen eye to eye.
The Timor thing and Mac’s involvement in some aspects of it had created a stand-offi shness between them, even though they could have shared some more basic operational chatter over the years. Thing was, Mac’s legacy in Timor saw him gravitate closer to the old President-controlled BAKIN – now BIN – at the expense of the armed forces-controlled intelligence organisation, BAIS. So it was hard for Mac to simply make a call to Edi and get him in the loop on something like Garrison and Sabaya, even though he wanted the Indon perspective.
