It was past midday when Mac awoke to the trilling of the Nokia on his beside table. Scrambling for the phone in the dimness of his room at the Natour Bali he listened before hanging up and rolling out of the bed with a groan. The debrief location had been changed from Atkins’ offices to DIA’s headquarters in Denpasar.
As the shower water pelted his head, Mac willed himself to wake up and get his thoughts together. After delaying the Blackbird exfil by a day, during which he got almost no sleep, he’d then spent another day and night on boats, ships and a helo before hitting his pillow just ten hours earlier. Putting the exhaustion to one side, he thought about what he would say at the debrief and, more importantly, what he wouldn’t say. Having spent four days in East Timor on Operation Totem, he could claim that he and the 4RAR Commandos nailed two of the three objectives: Blackbird snatched and exfiltrated to a secret location for debriefing by Australian SIS and the Pentagon, and Lombok AgriCorp’s secret facility infiltrated, photographed and sampled.
It was a difficult tasking, and Mac was proud of the Aussies for punching above their weight.
The secret airfield was not so successful, but Mac wasn’t concerned. It looked like Haryono’s administration offices for his various interests, one of which was making illegal drugs for sale to middle-class fools in Australia and Japan. The actual set-up was obviously an agricultural spraying depot, probably for mosquitos. If the Indonesians wanted to conduct secret DDT programs in contravention of the UN’s ban on outdoor spraying, then it was fine with Mac – DDT being the cheapest and most powerful enhancer of quality of life for anyone who lived in malarial zones, regardless of what non-malarial greenies in London and San Francisco said about it.
There were loose ends that niggled at Mac’s mind, but they weren’t enough to ruin his morning. The underground facility at Lombok, for instance, didn’t strike him as being a drug lab. Mac had never seen a methamphetamine factory, or a cocaine lab, but he’d heard they smelled of powerful solvents and he assumed they didn’t include live testing programs. After his debrief, he would be eased out of Totem, but he might ask around – see how others interpreted that strange underground world.
Making a cup of green tea, he found himself thinking about Blackbird. She was no longer his problem – he’d been sent to find Australia’s hottest spy and he’d done it. But it was an anticlimax to risk so much only to discover that she was ambivalent at best, treacherous at worst.
Seeing the time, Mac stood to go and noticed his rucksack. The American courier at the base behind Denpasar’s Ngurah Rai Airport had been so insistent about getting Mac’s samples as soon he stepped off the helo that she hadn’t asked for the return of DIA’s digital Nikon.
Lifting it from the bag, Mac inspected the camera’s damaged data-jack area and had an idea.
Scanning the street outside the Natour, Mac grabbed the fourth cab, waving the first three away as soon as they stopped.
Giving an address four blocks south of Puputan Square, Mac settled in the back seat of the air-conditioned Camry and sat directly behind the driver so he could clock the bloke’s face in the rear-vision mirror.
‘Still the dry weather – good for you, sir,’ said the driver, a well-presented man in his early thirties.
‘Better than the monsoon?’ asked Mac, smiling.
‘No good for tourist,’ said the bloke, shaking his head slowly. ‘They get wet and crazy, then go home and say Bali is wet and crazy.’
‘That’s about right,’ said Mac, chuckling as the street stalls and crowds flashed by in his window.
Flipping the driver a US fifty-dollar note as they stopped, Mac asked him to drive to the Golden Lantern and wait outside for ten minutes.
‘For sure, sir,’ said the driver, eyes looking at a week’s profit in one fare. ‘I wait an hour for you.’
‘Ten minutes is fine, thanks, champ,’ said Mac, alighting with his businessman’s satchel and casing the street.
Walking back along the market street, he used the profusion of traders and locals to find a tail. Deciding he was clear, Mac ducked down an alley connecting the market street with a more sedate avenue, and counted seven shops before slipping into Bali Vision World, an inconspicuous camera store.
At the counter, a small Javanese man with neat features looked over his half-glasses and frowned.
‘You not meant to be here, Mr Richard,’ he said, whipping off his glasses and walking around the counter to meet Mac in front of the camera bag section. ‘I not do any of that no more.’
‘Calm down, Set,’ said Mac, modulating his voice. ‘I had no idea this was your shop, mate – just needed some images transferred.’
‘You are bad liar, Mr Richard,’ said Setawan Posi, one of the best electronic-surveillance technicians Mac had ever worked with.
‘It’ll take five minutes,’ said Mac, rustling a US hundred-dollar note in his hand. ‘Swear to God.’
Set put Mac’s Nikon on his work bench behind the counter area and, with some difficulty, opened the hatch that held the memory card.
‘You should not drop camera, Mr Richard,’ said Set as he pulled out the card. ‘They do not like it.’
Inserting the card into another identical Nikon, Set asked for the device they were going to download into.
Handing over his laptop, Mac watched as Set searched along his junk-covered workshop walls for a cable that would marry the Nikon to the laptop. Coming back with a beige connector, Set declared it a success and powered up the computer.
‘We put it on the hard drive, okay?’ he said, opening a file. ‘What you want to call it?’
‘Call it “Mickey”,’ said Mac.
The downloads took twenty minutes and as Mac watched the images from Operation Totem flash up while the on-screen bar showed them being downloaded, Set made tea.
‘How’s business?’ asked Mac, sipping jasmine tea.
‘Better than the other one,’ said Set, lifting his mangled left hand. The smallest three fingers had been badly broken at some point and Set could no longer make a fist with them.
‘What happened?’ asked Mac.
‘I was working for the BAKIN in Jakarta, right?’ said Set. ‘I put camera and bug in this Korean bank, but then I am caught, right?’
‘Caught by who?’ asked Mac.
‘By army intelligence,’ sighed Set. ‘They tell me the generals own this bank with the Koreans, and they… well, you know, okay?’
An image on the laptop screen caught Mac’s eye as it downloaded. Focusing on it, his breath caught slightly. It was one of his shots of the airfield where the spraying booms were stored, where they’d seen Haryono getting out of his helicopter. The glare that had made it impossible to see the registrations of the Black Hawk helicopters parked in front of the admin building was clear through the Nikon lens.
Peering at the screen, Mac found himself smiling. The Black Hawks’ registrations all started with ‘9V’ – the sign for Singapore.
‘Can we zoom in on that one?’ asked Mac, as the image downloaded and was replaced by another.
Set grabbed the laptop, found the stored image and enlarged it.
‘The tail section of that helo in the front,’ said Mac, watching as the registration came to life.
‘That’s as far it goes,’ said Set, as it zoomed to the point where the image quality degraded.
‘It’s okay,’ said Mac, slumping a little in his chair and wondering what it meant. The full registration was 9V 1124F – Pik Berger’s surviving gunship.
The coffee machine was working overtime in DIA’s front office in Denpasar as Mac was ushered through the security checks. Grabbing a mug of black coffee, he made for the briefing room and was taken aback as he found Tony Davidson and Jim sitting at a table, looking morose.
‘Thought you guys would be debriefing Blackbird right now?’ said Mac, sliding his satchel onto the table and taking a seat as Simon joined them.
‘We were,’ said Jim, sheepish.
‘In Australia or Singapore – but not here,’ said Mac.
‘Tony?’ said Jim, deflecting the question.
