‘She gone,’ said Mrs Soares.
‘When?’ asked Mac.
‘Hour ago,’ shrugged Mrs Soares. ‘Two hour?’
Mac hissed as he looked at his G-Shock, which said 8.06 am.
The road south wasn’t as bad as Mac remembered it, but as Bongo aimed the Camry at the mountain road it fast turned into a classic South-East Asian jungle track – ruts, one-lane corners, trucks and tractors trying to share the road with horse carts and women carrying baskets on their heads. They climbed steadily, the steep road bumpy and washed out in parts, smooth and winding in others. Monkey and birdcalls filled the air, the thick foliage that loomed over the road seemingly alive with animals.
‘You still think this Ali was the real thing?’ asked Bongo.
‘Well, there was something about what he was saying – it fits with some of the problems I’m having with my government.’
Bongo sniggered, and Mac gave him a look. What Mac wasn’t going to tell Bongo was that the defection two months earlier of Tomas Goncalves had vindicated Ali’s suspicions about Australian foreign affairs and intelligence. Goncalves was a long-time Soeharto confrere who’d established his own militia in the Emera region of East Timor in 1998. But after the generals had ordered the killing of pro-independence organisers, and then delivered three pick- up trucks filled with automatic weapons to the Emera militia, Goncalves defected. He was taken by ASIS to Macao, and was debriefed at ASIS’s Hong Kong station. The Goncalves case was assigned away from Jakarta, which meant Goncalves could not be run as an agent and his subsequent debriefings were discredited in Canberra. It was a wasted opportunity, and illustrated a certain amount of policy blow-back in Canberra, where intelligence assessments are crafted to please the government of the day. That’s what Rahmid Ali had been hinting at in wanting to speak directly with Mac.
‘Okay, so you think Ali was telling the truth – why?’ said Bongo, lighting a smoke.
‘First, Rudi Habibie is a reforming president and that means the generals are against him. He’s also from Sulawesi – he’s not Javanese – which is a problem in Golkar. So it makes sense for Habibie to have his own intel operation.’
‘He’ll get killed for it,’ smiled Bongo. ‘But a new president, isolated from the military, would probably need his own spies?’
‘Precisely,’ said Mac. ‘Secondly, BAKIN wouldn’t try a provocation like that – sending Ali out to bait me – it’s not their style. And the miliary intelligence guys? Why would they go dropping a document like that on me? What would that achieve?’
‘Running in the wrong direction, McQueen – you know how that works.’
‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘But Ali said Operation Extermination might be an internal false flag, a cover for something worse.’
‘Like the CIA leaks an eyes-only dossier on one thing, to keep the desk guys happy,’ said Bongo, leaning on the horn behind a horse and cart, ‘but the hard-ons are using it as cover for the real bad stuff? The black bag shit?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac, aware that the Agency used that trick primarily as a funding mechanism. ‘Ali wasn’t trying to cover that – he alerted me to it. That’s a bit too deep to be a simple deception.’
‘So what’s with the paperwork?’ said Bongo, peering over at Mac’s lap. ‘What was he holding back?’
Shuffling the eight pages of A4 that Bongo had retrieved from Ali’s luggage – all of them photocopied and initialled on the top right-hand corner – Mac thought about it.
‘Well, Ali was collecting invoices and dockets from two companies which, judging by his notes, he believed were owned by the generals.’
‘What do they do?’ said Bongo. ‘The companies?’
‘Sumba Scientific calls itself a biochemical research company,’ said Mac, flipping to a new page, ‘and Lombok AgriCorp – Ali has a note that they claim to be coffee exporters and also developing agricultural technologies.’
‘So why’s Ali so interested?’
Mac looked back at the papers: Lombok AgriCorp had a Maliana address, but seemed to be out of town. Maliana was near the border with West Timor, in the militia-dominated Bobonaro region – a wild-west part of the world in which US spy satellites kept finding mass graves and NGOs no longer allowed their operatives to enter. Mac knew that the Red Cross had made Bobonaro a no-go area after the Indonesian Army was accused of chasing Falintil guerrillas using assault helicopters painted white and boasting a large red cross.
‘What’s that one?’ asked Bongo, one eye on the road and the other on the papers.
Mac read the Bahasa Indonesia aloud with Bongo translating. The single-page, one-paragraph document was headed DEVELOPMENT REFORM CABINET – EYES ONLY: TIMOR TIMUR TRANSMIGRATION SOLUTION.
As they climbed higher into the mountains, Bongo translated a memo from early April which recorded a new policy being pushed by military elements in Habibie’s cabinet. It advocated a new transmigration of families from Sulawesi and Java to East Timor, known as ‘Tim-Tim’ in Jakarta. The cabinet members wanted the government to support the migration policy with land, bonuses and an infrastructure build-out in the poorest of Indonesia’s provinces. The Indonesian Army would supply logistics support.
‘Sounds serious,’ said Bongo.
‘There’s a final sentence,’ said Mac, reading it aloud.
‘What it says,’ Bongo explained after a pause, ‘is that the policy should aim to have one million migrants from Java and Sulawesi settled in Tim-Tim by 2009.’
There were just over seven hundred thousand East Timorese in the province, which was essentially a subsistence economy subsidised by Jakarta. The one million settlers would not be additional – they would have to be a replacement population.
‘Shit, Bongo – what do they do with the Timorese?’
Before Bongo could respond, they rounded a tight corner and almost ran into the rear of a blue Land Rover Discovery belonging to the UN. Pulling over into the weeds, they waited as two UNAMET police in sky-blue shirts and UN baseball caps approached and motioned for Bongo to wind down the window.
‘There’s been a militia attack a hundred metres up the road,’ said the Aussie officer. ‘We’re just clearing it for safe passage – if you could give us five minutes?’
Nodding, Mac could see a group of UNAMET police – civilian cops from Australia and Japan – walking back to the convoy. As Bongo pulled his Desert Eagle from beneath his seat and Mac touched his own Beretta for luck, the group reached their vehicles but one of them kept walking to the Camry.
‘Any Australians in here?’ asked a flushed ocker as he leaned in Bongo’s window.
Mac opened the door and followed his fellow intel operator, Grant Deavers, around the back of a truck.
‘Fuck’s sake, McQueen!’ snapped Deavers as they stopped. ‘What the fuck are you doing up here?’
‘Nice to see you too, Devo.’
‘And please tell me, please assure me – that is not Bongo Morales with the hairdo?’ said Deavers, fumbling for a smoke from his UN shirt pocket.
‘Well, you know, Devo -’
‘He still working the airlines?’ asked Deavers, referring to Bongo’s cover as a peroxide-haired first-class steward on Singapore Airlines, entrapping adulterers, homosexuals and paedophiles, then blackmailing them on behalf of Philippines intelligence.
‘He’s helping out,’ said Mac sheepishly.
‘He’s with us?!’ screeched Deavers, exhaling the smoke through his ginger moustache. ‘Bongo’s working for Aussie intel?’
‘Mate!’ said Mac, looking around. ‘Do you mind? And by the way, it’s Davis – Richard Davis, okay?’
Sucking on his smoke, Deavers shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate, but this is getting on top of me. Dead set, Macca – Richard – this whole place is out of control.’
Grant Deavers headed the civilian police component of the UNAMET scrutineers but the cops had been denied the use of firearms during their mission in East Timor. He was from the intelligence arm of the Australian Federal Police and he had a military background. So the Indonesian generals played chicken with Canberra: your spook can run UNAMET’s police, but there’ll be no firearms. Before Deavers and his lieutenants knew what was happening, they were going to the new Killing Fields without so much as a six-shooter on their belts – not a happy scenario when the militias were using M16s.
