They watched and waited, but the log didn’t resurface.
‘Fucked that up good and proper,’ mumbled Robbo.
‘Have to think of something else,’ said Mac. ‘Just don’t want the Indonesian Army chasing us for their money.’
As they took turns on the water bottles, Robbo and Mac looked at the map and decided on the safest way into the Lombok facility.
Panting, Didge and Johnno came down from the peak.
‘More helos heading for that airfield,’ said Didge. ‘Four of them.’
‘No interest in us?’ asked Robbo. ‘Shooters hanging out the doors?’
‘Couldn’t see,’ said Didge. ‘Too far away and they were gone before we got the binos on them.’
‘Okay,’ said Robbo, nodding. ‘Let’s move.’
Mac pulled the rucksack over his shoulders onto his wet back, letting out the straps slightly. He was now carrying what he estimated was two hundred thousand US dollars through the Timor bush.
Didge led them out, and as he did, he looked over the escarpment. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘That looks like the kid.’
Looking over, Mac saw the 49ers T-shirt floating with the other logs in the river eddy. It looked like a body and, with any luck, the people looking for their money might think that the boys had been whacked.
CHAPTER 43
Pillars of smoke rose into the sky as Robbo stopped them on the outskirts of Maliana.
They had camped in a hide overnight and travelled carefully but slowly through the well-populated countryside during the day, avoiding contact with the locals or military. It was now Saturday afternoon and they’d have about ten hours of darkness in which to infiltrate Lombok and then snatch Blackbird, before heading back across the island to the Sunday RV with the Royal Australian Navy. On Monday the ballot would open and by then Mac and the 63 Recon Troop were supposed to be out of harm’s way.
‘Shit,’ said Robbo, before passing the field-glasses to Mac. ‘How many more houses can they burn?’
Making his own sweep with the binos, Mac saw thick smoke erupting from one of Maliana’s satellite hamlets about eight kilometres in the distance.
‘Got a pain-free route to Saturn?’ asked Mac, referring to Lombok by its operational code name. ‘Lot of open ground out there.’
‘If we go to the west of this village, we can tab down that river valley to the target,’ said Robbo, pointing.
The sound of distant assault-rifle fire drifted to their position and Mac felt nervous reflux threatening. He wanted to say something about Rodrigo, who’d been sulking since they’d picked him up and had then descended into hysterical tears once he’d seen the smoke around Maliana. But the time wasn’t right.
‘Can you give me eyes on this valley over here, boys?’ Robbo asked Mitch and Toolie. ‘We’ll RV in thirty minutes at the head of the valley. Can do?’
‘Can do, Sarge,’ said Toolie, before the two of them moved off in a crouch.
Back with the main group, Mac drank from a water bottle and saw Didge sitting and talking with Rodrigo. The kid wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, his bottom lip puffy. For Mac, the two kids were still an unwanted complication, impairing the troop’s ability to saddle up and move quickly and silently through the countryside. The militias and soldiers around Maliana had scared him shitless the first time around. Mac just wanted to do his job without ending up on his knees in the changing sheds of the Ginasio.
As Robbo signalled for the group to get moving, there was a familiar sound.
Searching for the source, Mac’s eyes settled on Didge, who was puffing into his cupped hands, fingers fanning over the top, making an improvised didgeridoo. The music quacked out of Didge’s hands, making the two boys smile and laugh.
‘Here come the brolga,’ said Didge quickly, creating a squeaking sound above the hum of the didgeridoo.
‘And then along come goanna,’ he smiled, adding a hiss to the orchestra of sounds as the boys started clapping with joy.
Mac slugged at his water and decided to relax and enjoy Didge’s performance. Robbo took a seat beside him as Didge added the croc to his story.
‘We were in Bougainville for BEL-ISI last year and Didge starts up with this stuff in the bar,’ said Robbo, shaking his head. ‘Ten minutes later the whole boozer’s crying like a bunch of girls.’
‘Homesick?’ asked Mac.
‘Something bad,’ said Robbo.
‘When I was growing up in Rockie, they didn’t let the blackfellas play their didge in town,’ said Mac. ‘But it still sounds like home.’
‘I’m from out Narrabri,’ said Robbo, ‘and I’ll tell ya, mate, no blackfella would have dared come into my dad’s pub and do the didge. Would have got bashed for that.’
‘Kids seem to like it,’ said Mac, lost in the sounds of Cape York.
‘Yeah, and Didge isn’t just an entertainer,’ said Robbo. ‘When the shit starts, he’s the bloke you want beside you.’
It was late afternoon when Robbo signalled for them to establish base in the uplands surrounding the Lombok facility. After they’d set up, Robbo called Didge, Johnno and Mac to have a recce. From a stand of trees overlooking the Lombok AgriCorp car park, they saw about a hundred people milling in the same place where Amir Sudarto had apprehended Mac a few days earlier. The incinerator stack was not operating but the six ventilator outlets were visible in their stands of shrubs, line abreast down the middle of the otherwise empty paddock.
‘Four sentries at the gate house,’ mumbled Robbo as he looked through the field-glasses.
Army trucks were idling, waiting to leave the facility, their drivers handing over clipboards which were checked by the sentries. The people in the car park were lining up, suitcases in hand, and were being escorted into the back of army trucks. It wasn’t what Mac had been expecting.
Mac took the field-glasses from Robbo. Looking through them, he saw a bunch of women close up: hair pulled back in tight buns, glasses, middle-class blouses and expensive rings. They were laughing as their suitcases were loaded by soldiers. If Mac had to guess, he’d say the technical staff at the facility had finished their contracts and were heading home.
Sweeping the glasses around towards the other end of the compound, Mac concentrated on the pillbox guard tower in the middle of the far fence line, where DIA suspected there was an underground facility. There were no soldiers in the tower and Mac decided that if the ventilator outlets weren’t too tricky to open, they could be the best way into the hidden part of Lombok.
‘Well?’ asked Robbo.
‘Can you see any unfriendlies in that far sentry box?’ asked Mac, handing the field-glasses back to Robbo. ‘I think they might be shutting down the facility, and reducing the security – that might give us our way in.’
‘We talking about those ventilators?’ asked Robbo, adjusting the focus ring.
‘I reckon we stealth to them and break in,’ said Mac. ‘I can’t see anything easier.’
‘Roger that,’ said Robbo, ‘but check the K-9, your eleven.’
Mac turned slightly and clocked them immediately: two MPs, one of them with a German shepherd straining on a chain leash. ‘Fuck!’ muttered Mac.
As the sun set Mac knelt and pushed caps of Xanax out of the foil while Didge created slits in the chunks of cuscus flesh and pushed the capsules into the meat.
Beside them, Robbo averted his eyes and his nose.
‘That’s disgusting,’ he mumbled.
‘Nah, boss,’ said Didge, chuckling as he pushed another Xanax capsule into a chunk of cuscus. ‘Good eating, him,’ he said, playing up the Cape York talk. ‘Feed a whole mob on him, there.’
‘Your mob from down Barmaga, down there?’ aped Mac.
‘Watch it, bra,’ growled Didge, reverting to Strine. ‘Don’t get cheeky.’
