He saw the tree and lunged at it, pulling away the vine curtain and looking in. Merpati lay crumpled on the ground, eyes staring at the tree. As Mac went to touch her she turned and, fl inching, shook her head. Mac saw why as he leaned over. She’d been shot in the shoulder and blood had soaked down her right side, leaving her entire arm and upper body in a total mess.
Mumbling prayers to himself, Mac tried to lift her out but Merpati screamed and fainted. He pulled her into his arms, whipped off his vest and tore off his polo shirt to staunch the bleeding in her upper arm. The whole shoulder was mangled, the bones shattered, her arm hanging by a few tendons. Mac screamed for help, his yells echoing eerily in his own head.
Merpati was stirred back to consciousness by Mac’s screaming, her lips pale and her eyes sleepy.
‘Shit, I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, wiping her brow. ‘Merpati, I’m so sorry.’
He heard voices and yelled again, hysteria creeping into his voice.
He felt like a stranger in his own body.
‘Where’s Santo?’ he said to Merpati. ‘Come on, darling, where’s your brother?’
She shook her head very slightly. ‘They take him, Mr Mac.’
‘Take him?! What do you mean, they took him?’
‘Take Santo,’ she cried, tears rolling out of her eyes.
The Kopassus guys ran up.
‘Who took Santo?’ Mac asked Merpati. He felt almost at the end of his tether, his voice sounding like it was coming from a tinny transistor radio three miles away.
Merpati’s bottom lip quivered. ‘Gorilla and tall one, they took Santo,’ she wailed, then fainted again.
One of the Kopassus troopers tore his medico pack off his webbing, the one behind him radioing with a screaming urgency. Then Freddi jogged up, out of breath, as the soldiers gently dragged the little girl off Mac’s lap, trying to keep her arm in place but not succeeding.
‘McQueen, what happened?’ Freddi panted, hands on knees.
Mac sagged back on the carpet of leaves, close to collapse – guilt and fatigue and stress making his brain feel like it was shutting down.
‘Shot the girl, took the boy,’ he mumbled.
‘Shit!’ said Freddi.
Mac nodded. ‘Fucking Purni!’
CHAPTER 23
Six years later
Johnny Hukapa came in hard, leading with a right roundhouse kick at Mac’s left thigh. Mac lifted his left leg slightly and covered up his face, drifting beyond the big Maori’s left hooks. Shifting his weight to the left foot, Mac left-jabbed twice at Johnny’s jaw and followed with a straight right, connecting fl ush with Johnny’s mouth, before skipping away.
‘Fuck!’ yelled Johnny through his mouthguard, annoyed at being tagged for the third time. He was slightly bigger than Mac but his strengths were in hand-to-hand combat and ground fi ghting, perfected in the Aussie SAS.
Watching Johnny’s face and eyes through the headgear, Mac threw out a few lefts and followed with a stamp kick into Johnny’s groin protector. Johnny tucked his chin down and came straight at Mac with a fl urry of punches to the headgear, pushing Mac backwards into the ropes of the Gold Coast PCYC boxing ring. Mac covered up and put in a short uppercut to Johnny’s chin, ducked and bobbed and came up on Johnny’s right, threw a cheeky left hook into the side of Johnny’s face before fading to his left and watching Johnny fall into the ropes where Mac had just been.
‘Shit!’ spat Johnny as the timer tinged.
After showering, Mac and Johnny walked down Monaco Street towards Gold Coast Highway, the early December sun hot on their backs and heating up their baseball caps. Johnny had been working in Sumatra but when his girlfriend became pregnant and put the hard word on him, the result was marriage and a move back to Australia.
Now Johnny had a fourteen-month-old son called James, while Mac’s nine-month-old, Rachel, was at home with Jenny.
‘So,’ said Mac, trying not to pry, ‘you said no again, huh? Boss’s orders?’
Johnny shrugged, put a piece of Juicy Fruit in his mouth and offered the pack to Mac. ‘Nah, mate, Arti’s cool. I’m just not ready for that shit again, know what I mean?’
Mac did know what Johnny meant. The mercenary outfi ts made the work in Iraq and Afghanistan sound great with your basic US$180,000 for a twelve-month contract, plus full medical and a whacking great life insurance policy. But once you were a parent and you’d been out of the action for a few years, it was hard to just switch on your instincts and appetite for that life all over again. Johnny had been approached three times in as many months for his old SAS expertise of infrastructure security. Some of the contracts out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Brunei and even Peru were too good to totally ignore.
‘You know how it is, mate,’ said Johnny, who had always made assumptions about Mac’s past, ‘you put yourself in a gunfi ght and you need to be in the zone. I mean, totally in the zone. I went up there now? I’d freak out or maybe I’d have no instincts. Either way, mate, I’d take a bullet and I’m too old for that.’
Mac listened intently. They were both in their late thirties, fi rst-time dads who had left dangerous professional lives behind them to go straight and forge futures without the physical risk. Mac was lecturing and tutoring two days a week at the University of Sydney. Johnny had a long-term contract with Movie World Studios, bodyguarding visiting actors – a gig whose chief danger was getting shot by the paparazzi.
But while Johnny found it easy to send the private army guys packing, for the past month Mac had been talking with one of his mentors from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Mac had realised Tony Davidson, now semi-retired, was trying to enlist him as soon as he played that fi rst voicemail on his mobile phone, but he’d called him back anyway. Davidson was the former director of operations for an ASIS jurisdiction stretching from India to Japan and down to Indonesia. He was the last genuine fi eld guy in the Service to have risen to any prominence. These days all the top jobs went to people who boasted about their time at INSEAD or Harvard rather than what they did to get Imelda to open the secret exit behind the mirror in her shoe-room.
Davidson wanted Mac back in. The former chief of spies was putting together an ‘outer circle’ of intel professionals to pick up a lot of the fi nance and trade espionage that had been overlooked as Australia focused almost exclusively on counter-terrorism. The result of Canberra’s de-prioritising of economic counter-espionage in favour of following the Yanks was a wholesale infl ux of Chinese money into Indonesia via legitimate-looking and commercial-acting companies backed either by the rich power bases of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a counterpart of the KGB.
Mac had been following it vaguely, especially the quite brazen economic infi ltration of East Timor and West Irian by MSS front companies. There was also the fi nancial blandishments being offered by PLA General Staff companies in Aceh province, where they were fl attening Sumatra and putting in palm-oil plantations, the largest the world had ever seen. Palm oil was the best and cheapest feedstock for bio-diesel, an industry the Chinese would basically own in the west Pacifi c within twenty years.
These were only a few of the issues that Davidson was worried about. There were Russian gangsters on the Gold Coast, Khmer Rouge gangs in regional slavery rackets and the Burmese Junta engaging in quite conspicuous heroin production and distribution.
They got to Gold Coast Highway and Johnny peeled right to walk towards Mermaid.
‘Take it easy, brother,’ said Johnny, slapping a big thumb handshake on Mac, who was heading on to Broadbeach. ‘And next week we’re on the mats, mate. See if you’re so cheeky then.’
‘Don’t know, Johnny. It’s me knee, mate – playing up again,’ laughed Mac, hamming a knee injury.
