contact with the family.
He had a point. It was monsoon season and rained for a couple of hours every day. The mosquitoes were out in force, raising the risk of dengue fever and worse. Thousands of corpses, hanging in trees or washed up on beaches, were rotting in the tropical heat. With open wounds and no food or clean water, the survivors wouldn’t survive for long.
‘Shit!’ BB slammed on the brakes.
Our headlights had picked out a pair of Saracen APCs, six-wheeled monsters that had probably been bought off the Brits. BB kept us tight in to the right as they rumbled across the bridge towards us.
Mong and I exchanged a glance. As young infantrymen we’d both done too many tours of Northern Ireland stuck in the back of those fuckers.
‘Three times I was blown up in one of those, Mong. Three IEDs in two years. You?’
BB’s knuckles went white as he clenched the wheel. ‘Fucking hell.’ He swung his head round. ‘Shut up, both of you. I don’t want to hear your old war stories. I’ve had enough of that shit.’
‘Calm down, mate. It wasn’t a dig.’
Mong looked as though he was about to join in but I shook my head. We had to cut away from this shit. I was glad BB was going to bin it after this. With luck I’d never have to share a vehicle with him again.
The Saracens were closing. They bristled with 40mm grenade launchers and.50 cal machine-guns, Tannoy systems and searchlights. Lads in olive green stuck out of the mortar hatches, armed with M16s. In this part of the world they would have been Singapore-made, under licence from Colt. The searchlights burst into life and played across us.
We waved and smiled in the blinding light. I pointed at my armband. ‘British! Aid workers!’
I knew that wouldn’t necessarily guarantee us membership of the Good Lads Club. The West had criticized the Indonesian government heavily for how they’d been prosecuting their war, while at the same time selling them the weapons to fight it with. Now the tsunami had made their lives twice as hard. They had looters to deal with as well as a resistance movement, and a massive influx of foreigners looking over their shoulders. Rumour had it they wanted the airlines to stop bringing us in. They certainly weren’t on the streets to provide aid. Their aim was to kill as many separatists as they could while confusion reigned. The last thing they wanted was Western witnesses.
The searchlights stayed on us but the wagons passed by. I couldn’t see the faces behind them. But I saw the M16s swing away.
13
We carried on to the other side of the bridge and headed into the darkness of the Kuta Raja district. We wanted the fruit market, straight along the road, first junction left, less than half a kilometre away. In an office block next to it somebody had been negotiating oil and gas concessions with GAM.
We didn’t know who our employer was. It didn’t work like that, and it wasn’t as if I wanted to. That sort of knowledge doesn’t give you power, it gets you dead. Crazy Dave was the broker; we never got to meet the organ- grinder. But whoever it was, they weren’t taking any chances. The separatist movement wasn’t all about power to the people: it was about taking control of the fossil fuels.
In the aftermath of the tsunami, there was a strong chance the deal could be exposed. Our client would be screwed; maybe our government too. Big business and politics tended to be one and the same in this part of the world.
The job was sold to us as a straight destruction of documents — and proof that we’d done so. We’d make a video, save the SD card, and take it back. We were getting ?50,000 each.
The market was deserted. It probably had been since the drama. On the recce, we’d seen nothing much more than a series of steel-framed stalls covered by bright blue tarpaulins.
The wagon stopped in the thoroughfare between two lines of stalls. We sat and listened.
A shot rang out in the distance. Then the bark of a Tannoy and some rapid, pissed-off chatter. The lads with M16s were probably telling someone with a TV in their hands to stay right where they were.
We tuned in and checked for any drama before we got to work. Mong lifted his wrist. His watch said it was nearly one thirty.
14
Making entry into the office block was going to be easy enough. We’d seen the boarded-up windows. The hard bit would be finding the documents if they weren’t where they should be.
I powered up my window. ‘All right, lads. Time to go.’
We grabbed our day sacks. They contained everything we’d need on-target, including holdalls to carry the docs if we had to destroy them elsewhere.
BB shoved the key under the nearside rear wheel. All movement from now on would be in slow-time and without light so we could watch and listen. The sophisticated infrastructure of electricity and comms was all down for now, which suited us just fine.
The whole area was pitch black, the atmosphere almost apocalyptic. Fires still flickered in the darkness. I expected a massive pterodactyl to fly in any minute and grab a few civvies for dinner.
There was more Tannoy action on the other side of the river, accompanied by a burst of gunfire. Two rounds were tracer. We watched as they ricocheted off something and spiralled into the sky. Then the propellant burnt out and the light disappeared.
We moved carefully through the market. Crates were stacked precariously. Rotten fruit, two weeks old, littered the ground. The two-storey office block was just ahead on the riverbank, a big square chunk of concrete and blue-tinted glass. The glass had taken a beating in the earthquake, but the structure had stood up well.
Still in slow-time, we climbed a rusty, sagging chain-link fence and landed on the solid new tarmac that surrounded the building. There was no landscape gardening here: this was a place of work. There were car-park signs and allocated spaces but no cars. The offices were rented to about twenty different companies. The one we wanted housed the Kareng Development Corp on the first floor. Room 2-17.
We walked around the building. It wasn’t a tactical move. We just needed to get in and out as fast as we could, and there was a chance a new opening might have been created by the aftershocks that had followed the recce.
Large sheets of plywood had been nailed to the window frames on the ground floor to replace broken glass. Some had been loosened by looters. I gripped a sheet on the corner facing the river and pulled it out far enough to create a gap. There was no reason to waffle. We knew what we were doing.
Mong ducked his head inside and had a quick look and listen. He climbed in and BB followed. The two of them then pushed out the sheeting for me.
15
We stood on thick carpet, listening for any noise above that of our own breathing, and tuned in to the new environment. I gave it a full minute before I dug my Maglite head-torch out of my day sack. The other two followed my lead. Our beams swept across an open-plan office, maybe twenty metres long. Dozens of desks stood in neat rows. Bare wires stuck out of conduits where PCs should have been. Some computers were still in position but had been smashed. Drawers had been pulled out and papers strewn all over the place. It looked like there’d been a revolution. But the looters were looking for stuff to sell, I hoped, not read.
I headed towards the door and Mong and BB followed. It looked half open. When we got there we found out
