that ASIS spent as much time spying on their own people as they did trying to gain information advantages over other nationalities. To preserve that internal security capacity, ASIS offi cers working within a cover in the embassy were not usually declared to other Australians in the embassy. The ambassador might know and the ASIS station chief would know, but there wouldn’t be many outside that circle.
Now Joe Imbruglia was sending in Mac under embassy cover, and doing so from Manila rather than Jakarta, further complicating the situation. Mac had about forty-fi ve minutes to work up his cover, get himself back into his normal role, which at most Australian embassies in South-East Asia was assistant third secretary – political, a position that conveniently had partial oversight of the public affairs and media functions. The ASIS cover role had once been assistant counsellor public affairs, but the public affairs section of the Australian diplomatic mission was being gutted and dismantled because some genius in Canberra had decided it wasn’t a specialist discipline. Mac had a view on that: if the Americans and the Chinese said public propaganda was a specialist diplomatic discipline then that’s precisely what it was.
They landed in the military section behind Denpasar Airport at quarter to fi ve. A young woman from the embassy in Jakarta met Mac and led him to a white Holden Commodore. Julie had honey-blonde hair pulled back and a gold chain-and-bar necklace. Mac had her as a landed Queensland girl who’d gone to a Protestant boarding school and then UQ.
On the front passenger seat was Mac’s overnight bag from his locker at the Jakarta embassy. Always packed, it contained two sets of chinos, two polo shirts, undies, socks, a tropical sports jacket, a pair of overalls, and two pairs of Hi-Tecs and boat shoes. A set of IDs and Nokias were in the side pocket.
They drove past the civilian terminal of Ngurah Rai Airport, better known to Westerners as Bali International Airport, where what looked like the entire tourist population of the island was trying to get into the terminal. Buses and taxis stood in long queues on the apron under the shimmering orange fl oodlights as worried-looking Anglos tried to push through the doors into the crowded terminal.
They accelerated past a long line of traffi c and a phalanx of traffi c cops as they headed towards Kuta Beach. Mac was still trying to adjust to his rude awakening ninety minutes before and he could feel a hunger stirring.
‘So what happened here?’ he asked, yawning, as Julie sped past thousands of locals and tourists walking around in a daze.
‘Two bomb blasts outside a couple of nightclubs at Kuta, down on Legian Street,’ said Julie mechanically. ‘Aussie tourist places. There’s a lot of dead – maybe in the hundreds. US Consulate had a small one go off too.’
An ambulance screamed past in the opposite direction as they got closer to the beach. Soon after, they hit a roadblock manned by POLRI and some plainclothes, and Julie stopped, handed over her ID. Mac went for the bag between his legs and immediately felt guns coming up. He raised his hands, opened the door and let the POLRI guy with the M16 see what he was doing with his hands. Mac reached down, pulled his diplomatic passport from the pocket in the black Cordura bag and handed to it the POLRI with the German shepherd.
The plainclothes came around to Mac’s side, eyeballed him, took the passport and smirked.
‘Bit early for you, eh McQueen? You’d be sleeping off the booze this time of the morning, wouldn’t you?’
‘Bloke’s not a camel, Bongo, you know how it is.’
Bongo Sitepu, a peer of Mac’s from Indonesian intelligence, snorted, fl icked the passport to the dog-handler without looking at it and walked off.
Julie spoke with the uniform POLRI. She spoke good Bahasa and Mac picked up that she was saying they were Australian Embassy staff, going straight to the Hard Rock Hotel. They were waved through as Mac watched the police carbines being lifted and aimed at an old pale blue HiAce van pulling up behind them.
They hit another roadblock forty metres from the Hard Rock.
Concrete sleds were arranged in an overlap, with a dozen riot squad POLRI inside and outside the perimeter to the hotel. Julie showed the ID and a POLRI bloke with a bum-fl uff mo fl ashed a torch in Mac’s face and then waved them through to the hotel.
As Mac got out and stretched he was hit by the noise: trucks, fi re appliances, generators powering fl oodies, shouts from panicked men.
He could see the lights originating from three blocks away. Buses fi lled with locals in white overalls fi led past; morgue trucks and cranes, police rescue, fi re rescue, ambulances – hundreds of people, running around with injured locals, yelling at one another. As he pulled his overnight bag from the Commodore, Julie came round the front and handed Mac a white envelope.
‘Room key – and you’re sharing, till all the paying guests are gone.’
Mac wanted to argue about the sharing thing but Julie was already back in the car, putting it in gear. She made to go then stopped, leaned out the window. ‘By the way, Joe wants you to call him as soon as you check in. Indons have shut down the cellular system so you’ll have to fi nd a payphone.’
Closing her window, Julie squealed out of the forecourt as a couple of Anglos wandered out of the lobby.
‘Hi, darling. Hard day?’ came a voice near Mac.
Turning, Mac came face to face with Anton Garvey, who’d been in Mac’s ASIS intake in 1990. More heavily set than he once was and a chrome-dome to boot, Garvs was going to be the declared Service operative in the AFP-led operation.
‘Garvs,’ said Mac, shaking hands as he tried to place the tallish, skinny bloke next to him.
‘Macca, this is Chez Delaney – Foreign Affairs, Jakarta.’
Mac shook the bloke’s hand, uneasy at the fl oppy fi sh effect. Mac didn’t like his cricket club tie either.
‘Actually, Mr McQueen, it’s Chester,’ said the bloke through mean lips.
‘Actually, Chez, it’s Macca,’ smiled Mac, ‘but you can call me sir.’
They walked the blocks to Bemo Corner, turned left and walked north up Legian Street to the site of the fi rst blast outside Paddy’s nightclub.
It felt ominous, bathed in the temporary fl oodlights. On their right were hundreds of locals carrying bodies, parts of bodies, shoes and clothes, and directing cranes and other heavy lifting equipment to pieces of roofi ng, walls, rubble. Mac smelled acrid, scorched material as if bamboo or wood had been torched with gasoline.
Mac didn’t want to be a bystander – he wanted to get in there and help. But he didn’t have the shoes or clothing to go into the mess that had once been Paddy’s Bar, a place he’d been very drunk in only a week ago during the Bali Sevens. They kept moving and it suddenly occurred to Mac that some of the Manila Marauders he’d played with might have been caught up in it.
They were challenged by POLRI as they tried to move across the street towards where the Sari Club had once stood. Garvs fl ashed ID and babbled something in Bahasa, and then the three of them stopped spontaneously, shocked. The Sari Club had been completely annihilated, and a number of buildings around it were fl attened and still smouldering. Firefi ghters were pumping water over torn-apart buildings behind where the Sari had been, and forty or fi fty police and fi refi ghters crawled over the site, trying to get cranes and front-end loaders over to move slabs of concrete and debris. Voices moaned and screamed above the generators and fi re pumps, and Mac’s knees went rubbery for a split second, nausea rising at the sight of total carnage.
In front of them was a crater in the road that looked to be six or seven feet deep and about twenty, maybe twenty-fi ve feet across.
‘What’s that?’ asked Mac, quite aware what it was but not expressing himself clearly. He was so tired.
‘Ground zero,’ said Garvey, but he said it like a question.
‘What’s the early mail?’ said Mac.
Chester piped up, with a high-pitched squeak, ‘Terror bombing
– a lot of Australians, I’m afraid.’
‘Few locals as well, eh Chez?’ muttered Mac.
Chester sobered up fast as he realised what he’d said. ‘Well, yes.
Umm, yep, you’re right.’
The fi rst tendrils of dawn were just starting to ease into the darkness when they got back to the Hard Rock. Mac had heard that Chester was waiting on fi nal confi rmation from Canberra that DFAT would have overall carriage of the Australian effort. The Prime Minister felt comfortable with the Australian Federal Police in general and the commissioner in particular, and a number of arguments were being mounted to ensure that the AFP didn’t actually end up running the show – an outcome considered unthinkable by Foreign Affairs. Mac’s cop girlfriend, Jenny, had always suspected this was the way people like Chester operated, and Mac had never had the heart to
