looking for trip lines. They searched exhaustively for signs of landmines and tree-mounted Claymores, taking so long that, while they searched, a buzzard landed on the Cruiser’s roof, stuck its head down and into the vehicle, its bald neck looking like a garden hose fi lled with earthworms.
Up close the BAIS vehicle had been cut to ribbons, hole by hole, the rear almost unrecognisable. Mac fi gured that a decoy bunch of shooters at the corner sixty metres up the track would probably have made the BAIS operators slow, and then the crew with the. 50-cal gun would have emerged from behind the LandCruiser and done the damage Mac was staring at.
Purni pulled out a small black tool kit and ran an IED check on the Cruiser, taking up another half-hour. There were seventy or eighty ways to booby trap a vehicle and you needed to let one guy do the whole thing to ensure a proper job. Purni couldn’t give a ‘clear’ call on the Cruiser – he suspected there was something jammed in the locking device of the rear right door and it had some kind of circuit in it. So Freddi carefully put his hand up to a rear-door pillar and dug out an object with his penknife. He brought it over and as they looked at the small dark- grey projectile, Freddi shook his head thoughtfully and tutted. ‘A fi fty-cal with tungsten loads. Armour- piercing.’
Mac forced himself to look at the blood and hair-splattered interior of the Cruiser, the pools of dark dried blood in the dirt below. The fl ies were swarming and now it was Purni’s turn to vomit, which he did quietly at the side of the track, hands on his knees, legs straight.
Freddi ignored him. ‘Who has tungsten loads in their fi fty-cal, McQueen?’
Mac shook his head. ‘Military, intel…’
Freddi nodded vaguely, his mind somewhere else. ‘I was right about the pro crew,’ he mused, looking up at the buzzards, ‘but they might be a lot more pro than I thought.’
CHAPTER 15
Freddi walked Mac to the desk of the Polonia Hotel in the Medan business district, gave the desk staff the nod and left to see some people about a certain piece of human cargo whose memory was malfunctioning. Mac checked in courtesy of the Indonesian Republic but when the woman gave him the door card he took one look at the cardboard sleeve and smiled, shook his head.
‘Mr Freddi never books me in a room with a nine,’ he said, shrugging like it was a misunderstanding. ‘I must be in the other one
– must have got them switched.’
The woman got fl ustered, touched her nose and then called the manager. He was a local with the name-tag of MASON, his face going stony as the girl babbled something in his ear. All Mac heard was Gardjito.
‘This sometimes happens, eh Mason?’ said Mac.
Mason couldn’t come up with anything plausible, so he spluttered,
‘I am sorry Mr McQueen, but 509 was defi nitely booked as your room.’
Mac kept smiling but insisted that his room must have been 510, and to sort it out he should call Freddi. Mason called Freddi and then handed over the phone, his forehead creased like corrugated iron.
‘Fred! You don’t phone, you don’t write,’ said Mac with a grin as he took the phone.
‘McQueen, you are lending yourself!’ snapped Freddi.
‘What can I say, mate, you know how I am with nines.’
Three minutes later Mac was throwing himself on the king-size bed of 510, happy to be in a room without listening posts.
He plugged in his Nokias for more charge, did fi fty push-ups, a hundred crunches and some basic shadow- boxing, up on his toes, making his breath rasp and his glutes burn. Then he had a quick shower and paced the large, neo-Baroque room with a cold Bintang, trying to get really clear on what was going on. First, he’d snatched Akbar from the Penang Princess as his last bit of paramilitary work before heading for New York and the Land of the Long Lunch. Then he was called into Kuta to organise public affairs in the aftermath of the Kuta bombings, only to fi nd the Feds bristling at that. Then he’d been rotated out again and back into Operation Handmaiden because Akbar had been sprung from one of Indonesia’s secret detention facilities, apparently by serious pros. Akbar may have been one of Osama bin Laden’s bagmen but it was the people he was fi nancing who were the real focus. Abu Samir and Hassan Ali, both of them incredibly dangerous in their chosen professions and both with a timing overlap for the bombings.
The weird twist was Akbar being sprung from detention only to be shot by one of his minders rather than letting him be caught by BAIS. Now why would you have to drop the bagman if the operation was already complete?
Mac sat on the bed and looked out the window as fatigue settled on him. He was so tired and he had the mildest of shakes in his hands and face. He looked at his G-Shock: 10.18 am, yet it felt like the middle of the night. He pulled the curtains, depowered the Nokias and hit the hay. Sleep crept up fast and he let it come.
The light on the bedside phone was blinking red when Mac came to.
Lifting his head so he could see the clock-radio, he groaned at the time: 12.43. Less than two and a half hours since he’d fallen asleep.
Rolling out of bed, he checked the hotel message system. Freddi was at the BAIS interrogation into the tree-bound shooter and wanted Mac to check in. Mac dressed in clean civvies but kept his sweaty Hi-Tecs. Detouring into the business centre, he spent fi ve minutes on one of the computers setting up an email account, then did some quick counter-surveillance on the lobby.
There was a light breeze taking the edge off the thirty-seven-degree heat as Mac walked out of the lobby and into the glare, feeling woozy, like he was jet-lagged. He pulled his sunnies down and powered up the Nokias as he walked north through the business district of Medan, a city of 1.5 million, many of whom regarded themselves as Malays rather than Indons. The clean Nokia had no messages but the Service handset did and he dialled in as he checked for eyes, swapped street sides, stopped to look in the abundant mirror glass of Medan’s CBD to check for tails and doubled back on people who happened to be walking behind him. Medan was the Dallas of Indonesia, and as soon as the Black Gold started fl owing, the newly wealthy liked nothing more than a ton of mirrors around the burg.
The message was from Ari: short of breath, panicking and wanting to talk. Mac called him as he found the street mentioned in the Polonia’s brochure as having several rental car yards. Ari’s phone went straight to voicemail, so Mac left a short message with no specifi cs. Just one rotation at the telecoms end of counter- espionage was enough to never again leave a detailed voice mail on a cellular service. It was like nailing your intentions to a lamp-post.
The big-brand rental-car companies were out of four-wheel drives. ‘You should book in advance, at least one week,’ said one of the clerks.
He wasn’t game to hire a people-mover or a sedan given the state of some of the roads in the interior of Sumatra, so he kept walking, down to the Deli River, the largest of three that ran through the city.
There was a riverside coffee shack on a boardwalk and Mac dipped in out of the sun and ordered a coffee. In Indonesia, it didn’t matter what kind of coffee you ordered – latte, espresso, short, long – they’d just bring it black, strong and hot along with a glass of water so you could adjust it to the strength you wanted it.
The shack had both river and side frontage and Mac positioned himself where he could see people approaching from both the boardwalk and the street. The ambush scene on that jungle road was haunting him. Those kinds of set-ups were only dreamed up by people who knew exactly what they were doing and those kind of people were usually special forces. These were serious people, operating with an intel component. If Mac wanted to take the conspiracy theory to its logical extreme, he would conclude there was government-level participation in Hassan’s work.
A middle-aged local woman with a happy round face brought the coffee and Mac ordered three fi sh skewers with a curry sauce.
One of the things that irritated Westerners about Indonesia was the frequency with which restaurants and cafes were all out of certain foods. But Mac liked that, because the Indons only served fi sh from the morning’s catch, and when it was gone, it was gone.
