about the volcano logo on their bright yellow T-shirts.
These twenty-first-century missionaries didn’t seem to realize that their message was going to fall on deaf ears. One press of the Google button would have told them that Islam had taken root here from the Middle East before it grew anywhere else. More than a thousand years ago Banda Aceh was known as the Port of Mecca.
Our problem was that these jokers moved around the city pretty much at will. Some of them even went out deliberately to get shot at by the army so they could blog home about how heroic they were. They could do what they wanted as far as I was concerned. But eyes and ears in the city were the last things we needed while we did what we were here to do.
Arnie and the American were still going at it hammer and tongs.
‘What is it with these lads? They’d go to war over a brew.’
Our very own Mongo was following their argument with as much bemusement as I was. He jabbed a finger at the lump in the sleeping-bag. ‘Why don’t you ask Body Beautiful? They’re all a few bricks short of a load. All loners. The only thing that brings them together is this sort of shit.’
BB sat bolt upright. ‘How many times, for fuck’s sake? I’m just as good as you cunts. What have I done that’s different? I’ll tell you. I didn’t fuck about on a drill square for ten years, that’s all. I passed Selection, all my training’s the same. The only things you can do that I can’t are polish your boots and square a blanket. Big fucking deal.’
‘You’re right.’ Mong didn’t bother getting up. ‘And to be fair, I wouldn’t have a clue how to sell someone a mobile phone.’
‘Bin the fucking sarcasm. What does all that fucking trade training you’re so proud of add up to? Nothing. You think life stands still on Civvy Street, but listen up. All the time you two were getting wet, cold and hungry playing squaddie, I was learning how the real world works. I’m in this because I want to be. You’re in it because you can’t do anything else.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘All those nights you were wet and cold, I was tucked up warm and shagging. So fuck the both of you. When we get back I’m going to find a job and run it myself.’
He turned away and pulled his sleeping-bag over his head.
I resisted the temptation to go over and wring his perfectly toned neck. ‘Be my guest. But until then I’m the boss and you will do what I say. You got it?’
BB’s mumbled reply was drowned by Mong’s snort of laughter and comment: ‘Fucking great! I feel well and truly bedded in now. We’re behaving just like real MONGOs.’
We had three hours left until last light. Then we were going to move into the city to deliver our own special brand of humanitarian aid. We were going to use the confusion of the disaster to recover or destroy a bunch of confidential documents from an office in the city centre. If they fell into the wrong hands, the energy company we were working for would be well and truly fucked. The last thing our employers wanted was the government and the military discovering that they were cutting deals with the separatists over future oil and gas concessions.
8
Banda Aceh had been Ground Zero on 26 December. Only 250K from the earthquake’s epicentre, a twenty- metre-high wall of water had hit it within minutes. A third of the city, twenty-five-kilometres square, was totally destroyed. All that remained of it was a tangled mass of rubble, furniture, cars, fridges and bodies — thirty thousand of them. Many were children, who hadn’t been strong enough to resist the force of the wave. There were almost no dead animals. They’d seemed to know what was coming, and fled for high ground before the tsunami arrived.
The camp was about six K from the Krueng Aceh River, which split the city in half. It was sited so close to the sea because the roads hadn’t been that well cleared further inland. Our target building was in Kuta Raja, one of the nine districts on the city’s west side.
The NGOs had warned us not to make the trip. Looters were picking through the debris, carrying off household goods, towing away cars, loading up stereos and TVs on motorbikes. If they thought we were about to report them, things could turn into a gangfuck.
To make things worse, the political conflict had also resurfaced. There’d been a firefight a couple of days ago between the army and the separatists. The separatists had hijacked relief workers and kidnapped doctors to look after their own people.
As we drove through a maze of crushed breezeblock and wriggly tin buildings and their scattered contents, we didn’t see any other 4?4s. Anyone in Aceh who owned or had managed to steal one had driven it straight to the airport the day after the wave hit. The NGOs and MONGOs streaming in from the four corners of the globe snapped them up for top dollar, especially if they boasted air-con.
There was no air-con in the last of the Toyota 4?4s that had been lined up on the airport forecourt. We left the windows open instead, but with the temperature in the high twenties and 80 per cent humidity I wasn’t sure it was worth it. Our skin was covered with sweat, and the breeze filled the car with the smell of sewage and decomposing flesh.
The power cables were down. Globes of light flickered among the devastation as far as the eye could see. Survivors huddled around cooking fires under plastic sheeting, boiling up whatever scraps the army had sold them. They had to use the wood from their own buildings to keep the fires burning.
We zigzagged through a random collection of sofas strewn across the road. The tsunami had wiped whole fishing villages off the map. Large steel vessels and flimsy wooden skiffs alike had been picked up by the wave and flung down again far inland. Two twin-engine Cessnas were flattened against a wall, nose cones pointing skywards. Big Xs had been spray-painted on cars and buildings to show there were bodies inside. There hadn’t been time to move them.
The army was on the prowl to try and stop the looting, but probably only so they could do some of their own. It didn’t matter where in the world you were at a time like this: if you’d never had a bean now was your time. My elder brother had been on
9
There was a curfew in place, but people were moving in the darkness.
BB was at the wheel. I was on his right. Mong was tucked away in the back. We all had our nice MONGO cargoes and khaki shirts on, with brassards on our right arm emblazoned with our very own logo — a Union flag on a big white circle, with Aid 4 Tsunami proudly displayed beneath it. We wanted to look the part.
BB pointed out of his window.
Mong craned his neck between the front seats to get a better view.
‘Shit!’
Ahead of us, across a sea of bright blue tin roofs, a fishing boat rested on a mound of corrugated iron and breezeblocks. It was a traditionally built narrow wooden vessel with a modern cockpit and an engine sticking out of the back.
Mong’s arms windmilled like a madman’s. ‘Stop, BB!
BB spotted it before I did. ‘He’s dead. Must be.’
A skinny brown leg, bent at the knee, dangled out of a smashed window at the side of the cockpit.
Mong lunged from his seat. His hand shot forward and grabbed the wheel. ‘We don’t know that. No cross …’
‘For fuck’s sake, look at it …’
Mong gripped the wheel harder. ‘Nick, it won’t take a minute. Let me check. It’s a kid, mate.’
‘BB, pull in. If he’s alive, we’ll sort him out and pick him up on the way back. All those lads back at the camp
