of stale booze floated into the Toyota as another soldier skulked out of the hut, squinting like a vampire.
As Bongo chatted with the first soldier, Mac picked up enough Bahasa Indonesia to sense a shakedown in progress: a car full of foreigners was going to attract a toll. But when Bongo produced Damajat’s letter, the soldier’s bleary eyes widened, then he staggered backwards and passed the letter to his colleague.
Keeping his cheery demeanour, Bongo continued his patter. Mac’s fear made the morning coffee rise in the back of his throat and he felt the Beretta with his fingertips, under his seat.
The two soldiers suddenly shouldered their rifles and pointed at Bongo, who put his hands in the air. Then, just as quickly, the two men laughed, Bongo laughing along with them.
‘Fuck’s sake, mate,’ muttered Mac as they accelerated away from the post, carefully folding the Damajat letter. ‘The sense of humour isn’t working for me.’
As they rounded the first corner they encountered a scene on the side of the road.
‘Don’t stop,’ said Mac, as they approached and saw a small crowd of women and kids huddled in front of a bunch of militias who were throwing baskets in the back of a Toyota pick-up. One old woman was struggling with a youth, not letting him take two chickens she was holding in a bamboo cage.
‘What are they doing?’ asked Jessica as Bongo drove past with a brief wave to the armed youths.
Twisting to look behind, her voice rose. ‘They’re robbing those women!’
Mac and Bongo exchanged a look and breathed out.
‘Look to the front, Jess,’ said Mac firmly.
‘I’ll look where I want, thank you,’ she said, leaning over the front seats. ‘Why don’t you two do something?’
‘Like what?’ asked Mac, happy that Bongo was keeping his foot on the gas. ‘And don’t look back – it might be misconstrued.’
‘You!’ said Jessica, hitting Bongo on the arm. ‘You’re my bodyguard – I want you to go back and stop that!’
‘Are they following?’ Mac murmured to Bongo.
‘Not yet,’ breathed Bongo. ‘Just standing and looking.’
As they rounded the corner, Mac turned to face Jessica. ‘You gotta watch how you look at armed men in this part of the world,’ he said quietly. ‘Those women will be lucky if they just get robbed. If we stop it could easily turn into a massacre, and we’d be part of it, understand?’
‘I can’t sit in a car and watch an old woman be robbed!’ said Jessica, furious.
‘Better to be ashamed and alive,’ said Mac.
‘That old woman back there didn’t agree,’ said Jessica. ‘At least she’s standing up to those thugs.’
‘She could be lying down too,’ retorted Bongo. ‘With a bullet in her.’
As Bongo checked his side mirror, Mac watched Jessica’s middle finger rise and point at Bongo.
‘Saw that,’ smiled Bongo.
‘But didn’t see that back there?’ snapped Jessica.
Mac let the argument go and settled back in his seat for the ride up to Bobonaro, his breakfast churning with worry.
The second roadblock was placed on the major spur out of Lepo, before the descent into the town of Bobonaro. This time the roadblock was deserted.
Getting out of the Camry, Mac and Bongo checked in the guard house and found it abandoned, a portable CD player with Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits playing at half-volume. Looking more closely, Mac saw that the player was on ‘loop’, giving him no idea of how long the soldiers might have been gone. Fifty metres along the road was a yellow Toyota pick-up, with no sign of passengers.
Shrugging, Mac lifted the boom gate and they were heading back to the car when they heard whimpering noises coming from behind the guard house. Mac nodded at Bongo and they both retrieved their handguns from the Camry as quietly as they could.
‘Stay here, Jessica,’ said Mac, then closed the door softly.
Following Bongo into the bush, Mac swung the Beretta in arcs, looking for soldiers or militiamen. Several metres into the jungle, Mac ran into the back of Bongo. Sitting in front of him, against a tree, were five local children aged roughly four to nine, huddled together and scared.
Bongo started talking gently and once one of the kids was at least nodding or shaking her head, he squatted in front of them. Hearing his calm voice, and watching the kids respond with more expression at every question, Mac realised Bongo must have worked with distressed kids before.
As the kids pointed further into the jungle, some wide-eyed and crying, Bongo stood and turned around, fury in his eyes.
‘Their mothers and sisters are down there, in the creek bed,’ he hissed. ‘The soldiers and militia too.’
Gulping, Mac wondered how he could deter Bongo from a take-down. Mac’s identity was a cover and he didn’t want a shoot-out ruining it.
‘How many?’ he asked, hoping Bongo would be prepared to walk away from the bad odds: be alive and ashamed.
‘Five militia, three soldiers,’ muttered Bongo, clearly fighting the inner argument between being realistic about the odds and wanting to engage with the enemy.
‘Let’s get to Bobonaro, mate,’ said Mac, hating the words even as they came out of his mouth, but knowing it was the right choice. ‘It’s not our fight.’
‘Timor your fight, McQueen? Jessica your fight?’
‘Come on, Bongo,’ said Mac.
‘I heard about that village in Mindanao – you didn’t have to do it that way, brother, ’cos it wasn’t your fight, right?’
Shrugging, Mac kicked at a leaf. The Mindanao job was a lapse in judgment, a risk he’d taken to help some women and their kids.
‘In the army, we had a rule,’ said Bongo. ‘We all matter or none of us do.’
‘About time,’ came a female voice from behind Mac, and he spun around to face Jessica.
‘Shit, Jess!’ said Mac, annoyed at the danger she was putting herself in and embarrassed at his role in the conversation with Bongo. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here?!’
‘What are those?’ asked Bongo. Jessica carried an M16 in each hand.
‘They were in that pick-up,’ she shrugged. ‘Thought maybe we could use them?’
‘There’s no we, Jessica,’ said Mac, reaching for the weapons. ‘You stay here with the kids – we’ll go have a look, okay?’
Checking the M16s, Mac ejected the mags and weighed them in his hand; they were thirty-rounders and felt almost full. The kids cuddled into one another as Bongo handed Jessica his Desert Eagle and gave her basic directions on how to use it. Then Bongo and Mac stealthed in the direction the kids had indicated, making good time through the thin-undergrowth/high-canopy jungle.
They heard the soldiers before they saw them. Shouts, drunken laughter, aggressive lewdness, and wafts of Tuaka – an incredibly powerful Timorese palm wine.
‘We do this,’ whispered Mac as they crept forward, ‘and we’ll be fighting these pricks for the next two weeks.’
‘Then we’ll make it clean,’ whispered Bongo.
Feeling the mission sliding out of control, Mac tried one last time. ‘This isn’t the gig, mate. We should be back in the car.’
‘Tell that to the kids,’ said Bongo, turning to look Mac in the eye.
It was a while before Mac broke Bongo’s stare. ‘Guess we’re not talking about prisoners?’
‘Who’s talking?’ said Bongo.
Gesturing Mac to stay behind a tree and move in one minute, Bongo shouldered his rifle and arced away to the left. Mac checked his G-Shock and shouldered his own weapon, steeled himself and prepared to count down the rounds from the twenty-five he suspected were left in the thirty-rounder mag.
His G-Shock showed thirty seconds till ‘go’ and Mac set the firing mechanism to ‘single’, cocked the M16’s slide and started moving forwards through the light scrub, downhill towards the creek bed. Coming over a small spur, he walked up behind a hide created by a low bush and ducked down in kneeling-marksman pose as the scene
