mirror and they stopped thirty metres short of the pillbox.
‘Your boyfriend’s here,’ said Freddi, leaning down to look at his own side mirror, his hand reaching for the black SIG Sauer on his right hip.
Ari walked along the passenger side of the LandCruiser, hands up, keeping a good distance from Freddi’s door. The Russian lifted his trop shirt to show a bare belly and no holster-bag. Smart guy, thought Mac. Been in South-East Asia long enough to learn some manners.
Freddi released his gun and smiled out of his open window. ‘Ari!
What can I do for you?’
‘I am needing to speak with McQueen, please,’ he said, pointing at Mac’s door.
Freddi turned to Mac. ‘Want to speak? Don’t have to.’
Mac lifted the door latch and joined Ari. They shook and the Russian moved further from the Cruiser.
‘You ever sleep, Ari?’ asked Mac.
‘Only when I am with woman,’ Ari chuckled. ‘Timing no good.’
‘Heard anything on Hassan?’
Ari did the Russian shrug, a less dramatic version than the Javanese but more dismissive. ‘I am leaving tonight, but I feel we must stay
– how you say it – in the touch.’
‘I told you, Ari, I’ve never been on Hassan – not my end.’
‘Yes, but still you were with Atomic Energy Agency when this Khan was stopped, yes?’ said Ari. ‘And the Indonesians are using you, so this is now Samir as well, yes?’
Mac gave him the look and raised his eyebrow.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Ari, knowing he was pushing the friendship too far. ‘But too many of the secrets when we are working for same thing?
Not so good, yes?’
‘Where are you headed, Ari?’
The Russian shrugged.
‘Come on, mate, too many secrets, yes?’
Ari put his hands on his hips, looked over Mac’s shoulder, nodded slightly, and then looked back. ‘Okay. Sumatra.’
‘Not Java?’
‘No, McQueen. Sumatra.’
‘Where in Sumatra? It’s a big place.’
‘I can’t say this, you know that.’
‘Heard anything more about your colleague?’ asked Mac, thinking Ari looked a little washed out.
‘No – he is dead or he is being, umm, held,’ said Ari, slumping a little. In the spy game it was unusual for anyone to use the word torture, in the same way soldiers didn’t like directly referring to death, but Mac saw the stress in the Russian’s eyes and knew what he was saying.
Deciding if he relinquished some information it might bring some other revelations back his way, Mac said, ‘Okay, Ari. We had eyes on Samir, yesterday.’
Ari nodded.
‘It was me – I saw him,’ said Mac.
‘You were there?’ said Ari, tensing. ‘On this JI ship?’
‘Yeah, mate. Thing is, Ahmed al Akbar was with him.’
Ari went completely still for a couple of seconds, looked Mac in the eye. ‘These people are al-Qaeda, yes? And you are letting these fuckers go?’
‘Mate, I’ve said too much. Your turn.’
As Ari tried to fi nd the right words and correct level of illumination, Mac turned and saw Freddi tap his G- Shock.
‘I let him go now, Freddi – Tuhan memberkati,’ said Ari.
Freddi looked away. If you wished God’s blessings on a Javanese, it wasn’t good manners for him to reply with grumpiness.
‘I think we are looking for the same crew, yes?’ said Ari. ‘Hassan and Samir.’
Mac was getting irritated. ‘Hassan and Samir, yes. But Akbar?
Akbar is Osama’s bagman -‘
The words fell off the end of his sentence as Mac realised what he was saying.
‘You see,’ said Ari, ‘why Samir and Akbar are on same ship?’
Mac nodded, things becoming clearer.
‘It very expensive,’ said Ari, ‘for nuclear device.’
CHAPTER 12
It was a clear night as the Indonesian Huey chugged north-west. The host military had a choice whether to tell their foreign intelligence partners where they were going, and the Indon navy had decided not to.
Mac, Freddi and Purni all tried to sleep in the throbbing racket of the Huey, a Vietnam-era helo now made under licence in Indonesia.
The reliability record of the air frame and the familiar thromp of the turbo-shaft were reassuring to Mac, but it was still the loudest and most uncomfortable way to get around, even with the doors shut fast and all the high-tech damping materials they were lined with. After twenty minutes aloft Mac gave up on sleeping and saw the telltale sign of the Madura Strait, crowded with humanity on both sides, narrowing down to the huge city.
At Surabaya Naval Base an operator in pale-blue overalls and an aviator helmet escorted them across the tarmac to a white LandCruiser Prado. They were then driven across the runway to a hangar on the other side of the air wing apron, all wincing as they shot into the glare of the internal fl oodies which illuminated an air force F28. Mac’s G-Shock said it was 3.37 am.
They walked to the stairs and Freddi excused himself to go to the gents, so Purni and Mac climbed into the plane and grabbed the seats that faced each other at the front. There was a faint whining sound and the smell of avgas and institutional air freshener. The decor looked like 1986 was never going to go away and Mac briefl y worried about all those incidents in the early 1980s when Garuda seemed to kill so many people in F28s. He told himself he’d fl own safely in F28s on Ansett Airlines, and that seemed to balance the paranoia.
‘So, Purn,’ said Mac, yawning. ‘Can we talk about a destination now?’
Purni gave him a blank look and shook his head. He was well-dressed, and Mac knew from Freddi that he’d been educated at Monash University in Melbourne. Wherever you went in the world, the spy agencies were crammed with educated middle-class men trapped between the ride of their lives and the drudgery of procedure; between the fl ash of adrenaline and The Rules.
Mac fi shed in his pack and turned off both of his mobiles. If he wasn’t allowed to know where he was going then no other bastard was going to fi nd out vicariously. Freddi bounced up the stairs and sat next to Purni so that the two BAIS boys were rear-facing while Mac looked forward.
Mac settled into his seat as a loud shaking sound rattled around the cabin. Then a couple of soldiers in red berets appeared at the cabin door and waited while someone thumped up the aluminium trolley stairs behind them. Another soldier appeared holding a chain in his hand. Turning, the soldier pulled on the chain and two men in black hoods and grey pyjamas jerked in behind him, the fi rst prisoner chained to the second. The soldier leading the prisoners started down the aircraft pulling the hooded men behind him. The second prisoner had blood splashed down the front of his pyjama legs. It looked fresh and Mac thought immediately of Ari’s colleague.
The other two soldiers moved towards where Mac’s party was seated, their distinctive triangle patches with the vertical red dagger indicating they were Kopassus, Indonesian Army Special Forces.
Kopassus was one of the most-mentioned government agencies in any Amnesty International fi le- search.
Freddi smiled and chatted to the soldiers, then gestured at Mac.
