a green curtain aside and opened a dark blue esky on the fl oor behind it, pulling three Tigers from the ice. In northern Sumatra the conservative Muslims were not insulted by alcohol consumption so long as it wasn’t prominently displayed at the counter. A big glass fridge of booze might be construed as tempting the believers.
Mac put the beers on the table, with Purni the only one not to reach for a bottle.
‘That wasn’t the other device – no way,’ Freddi was saying to Ari.
‘You are right,’ said Ari, gulping at the cold beer. ‘Not enough blast, no incendiary phase.’
Mac wanted more on the Port Authority blast. ‘So what happened back there?’
‘Stored anfo,’ said Freddi. ‘That’s my guess. Microwaves can spark the fumes, we all know that.’
‘So Hassan’s still got the other device?’
Ari and Freddi were silent, naturally cagey.
‘Or it’s stored, yes?’ asked Ari. ‘And Hassan and his camel-fuckers are trying to get off this island.’
While Mac wolfed down the grilled fi sh chunks, he thought about how he was going to get either Ari or Freddi to come clean on what had destroyed the Sari Club.
‘So, one of you two going to tell me what this other device is?’
They both did their shrugs, the Javanese and Russian versions almost a parody of each other.
‘Well?’ asked Mac.
‘Nothing to say, McQueen,’ said Freddi, washing his food down with beer. ‘It’s small, it has a huge yield, it was brought in by the Pakistanis. And we are ninety-nine per cent sure they brought in two of them.’
A thromp sounded in the distance and as it got louder Freddi stood with his portable radio handset and walked out of the courtyard into the sun. Looking over, Mac saw three Indonesian Army Hueys about half a mile away, heading north up the coast at full speed.
Keying the radio, Freddi demanded something, and after a few seconds an adrenaline-charged voice yelled down the airwaves in raucous outbursts. Mac recognised the shortness of breath and the nervous excitement – it was the way he’d felt for the last three days.
Freddi barked into the radio as he strode back towards the fi sh shack. Mac noticed a change in the noise of the helos and that one of the Hueys had doubled back towards them.
‘Only room for two,’ snapped Freddi, then pointed at Purni and rattled an order.
‘It’s still Handmaiden, McQueen. Okay?’ said Freddi as Purni ran out to the Cruiser.
Mac’s heart sank. He just wanted to eat and sleep properly and go to New York.
Ari stood beside Mac, annoyed. ‘So where is this? Where are we going?’
Freddi looked back at them, smiling. ‘This could be it.’
As they walked outside, the Huey was landing in the grassed forecourt area putting up a blanket of dust, leaves and insects. The traffi c on the road to Medan slowed to a crawl as Purni brought over two M4s, two vests and a black Cordura bag fi lled with what Mac assumed were spare magazines, replacement radio handsets and the interrogation kit Indonesian intelligence operatives travelled around with. Mac threw his Oakley backpack over his left shoulder and took the Cordura bag, a vest and an M4. The dust drove past Mac’s sunnies and into his eyes as they moved towards where the loadmaster had his arm extended out of the army helo. Mac got into the cabin, took a hammock seat, then looked out and saw Freddi yelling something into Purni’s ear and giving him the radio, before jogging to the Huey with his vest and assault rifl e. Freddi got in and sat beside Mac, facing forward with his back against the rear bulkhead.
The revs came up and the loadmaster slid home the side door.
As the helo rose Mac noticed two things simultaneously: the person sitting beside the pilot was Major Benni Sudarto. And outside on the grass apron, Purni was looking at the rising helo… but Ari was looking at Purni with a look Mac couldn’t quite decipher.
CHAPTER 21
They landed about ten miles north of a pirate town called Idi, on the Malaccan coast. Deplaning onto the dirt pan of a coastal airfi eld, Mac let two of the Kopassus troopers go in front of him as the dust fl ew in the mid- afternoon heat haze of northern Sumatra. Sudarto’s intel had the Hassan gang planning to use this long-abandoned airfi eld, and from Freddi’s comments Mac guessed that Kopassus and BAIS were intercepting signals. The Indonesian military, police and intelligence agencies were confi dent they had shut down Northern Sumatra and were about to trap the Kuta bombers.
Sudarto led the boys to the edges of the dirt pan where palms and wild pineapples created a natural cover. Then the helos powered up and got airborne, their loadmasters setting up. 50-cal door-mounted guns for possible air support. Mac wore a borrowed Kevlar special forces helmet but he’d missed out on a headset. He wouldn’t have been able to follow the Bahasa anyway, but he’d have liked to stay connected with Freddi.
Sudarto split them into three groups. Two went opposite ways around the perimeter of the airfi eld. Their job was to fl ush out any tangos who might be hiding, and if they couldn’t fi nd any, to dig in, create a hide and wait for orders. Sudarto was taking Freddi, Mac and three Kopassus troopers to check the array of old buildings that sat behind the concrete control tower, its black-and-white chequered paint job telling Mac that this had been a military installation at some point, probably during Konfrontasi – a dispute from the early 1960s when Indonesia tried to stop the creation of the modern Malaysia by making military incursions into the new country.
They jogged along together, Mac’s vest weighing on his shoulders.
He was glad he’d swapped his boat shoes for the Hi-Tecs when they took a shortcut through a stand of palms with wild pineapples spread like a carpet through the undergrowth. They were young plants that would have cut his feet apart in anything less than his boots. Pausing at the edge of the undergrowth, they looked out over a derelict square that would once have been the administration and barracks area of a military post. There was no one there now – no vehicles, no planes, no sign of life.
They knelt in the shade and Sudarto whispered with his sergeant.
Then Sudarto looked back and snapped something at Freddi, the only part of which Mac understood to be terowong. Mac hoped he’d got the translation wrong. Then Freddi turned to him with a shit happens look and Mac knew there was a tunnel complex around somewhere and Sudarto wanted to check it out.
‘Fuck, Freddi,’ hissed Mac, his hands sliding all over the M4 in the heat of the afternoon. ‘It’s gonna be an ambush – swear to God.’
Freddi yelled something at Sudarto and the major replied with a huge grin and, smiling at Mac, said, ‘We’re just going to check the entrances, McQueen. That okay with you?’
As the soldiers laughed, Mac said, ‘Cheers, thanks, Major.’
Mac had an internal tension between bravery and caution. He could make himself do things he didn’t want to do, but he wasn’t gung-ho. Back in the Royal Marines, he’d once asked Banger Jordan why he’d been put up for the SBS Swimmer-Canoeist course. ‘You know I can’t stand frogging in muddy water,’ he’d said. ‘You’ve seen the state of me before a night jump.’
Banger had laughed at him. ‘The thing about the best special forces guys is that they feel fear and make themselves overcome it.’
Now they were looking for Hassan, Samir and Gorilla in a deserted military base which stood over what Mac assumed was a bunker system. Mac didn’t like it and he didn’t believe they were just going to check for anything. Kopassus were many things, but they weren’t inspectors.
Mac moved second to last in a duck line, a trooper doing the sweep behind him as they moved across the edges of an old parade ground. Some of the buildings had been destroyed, some had been picked up off their foundations and moved to other bases, others were sagging.
They stayed in the shadows and the duck line stretched out. Mac looked for trip wires, pressure pads, tyre marks, boot prints – anything to get a sense of where the enemy might be. They moved beyond the parade ground and further into the foliage that had encroached on the base over the years. Sweat ran down Mac’s back, swimming under the vest and soaking down the back of his pants.
They got to a shape in the bushes that rose to the height of a man and was covered in vines and other greenery. Sudarto sent a trooper forward to look for booby traps while the rest of them fanned out around the
