Golden Serpent am-1

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Then he walks off… with my fucking ear! ‘

  They laughed, slapped their legs. Then they both sat back, realising it wasn’t that funny.

  ‘So the lesson was that soldiers are damned superstitious. You ask a lot, and they’ll deliver. But they don’t do kids. They won’t cop that,’ said Cookie.

  Mac hesitated, then asked Cookie outright. ‘Can someone fl y me down to Sabulu? I need another look.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Cookie, getting up.

  They fl ew in over the site of the battle. The place was still smoking. Mac could smell the charred wood and the burned rainforest from a hundred metres up. Not a great advertisement for Cookie’s protection service.

  They walked down from the landing site, into the courtyard, armed with M16s. Billy walked point, Mac swept. Cookie was in the middle, dressed in olive ovies of the aviation jumpsuit style, sleeves rolled up to just under the elbows.

  They strolled through the smoking wreck of building three, which was burned to the ground. Some of the foundations were still sticking up out of the ground.

  Buzzards erupted into the humid air as they came upon bodies and charred boots. Mac smelled burned hair and toasted fl esh. Cookie kicked a corpse onto its back, crouched down. Looked up at Mac, said, ‘Look at that – Filipino, or Polynesian. Not local, anyway.’

  Mac looked at where Cookie was pointing. The dead man’s body had been burned down the back, but he’d fallen on his arm and the fl esh was intact. There was a tattoo on the bloke’s forearm, a scimitar and stars, done with the long curves of the Polynesian tats.

  ‘Moro shit,’ said Cookie.

  They walked up to building fi ve, where Garrison’s extra boys had appeared from. It was still intact. They entered in a staggered formation, weapons at eye line. Billy went into the main room fi rst, checked for wires and sensor pads, then waved the others through.

  The walls boasted holes the size of large pancakes. The impact of the. 50 cal gun had taken whole sections of the wooden walls off their studs. It smelled of old cordite and there were brass shells scattered on the fl oor amidst the rubble. Mac looked it over, still not really sure what he was looking for.

  They cased all the buildings. In one of them, there was evidence of people having slept there. It had much better security and the beds were proper mattress jobs. There were two of them and they had their own rooms. The showers had been done right and Mac noticed that the power cable from the generator room ran underground, not over it. In the rooms, there were trapdoors in the fl oor. Someone had been worried about security and escape.

  In the vestibule was a room with camp stretchers. The place was set up so intruders would have to go through the guards. Under one of the beds Mac found a torn strip of foil. It smelled of Bartook Special Mint.

  Mac went back into the VIP rooms, had a quick look down the trapdoor of the one in the right. Nothing.

  Looked down the left room’s trapdoor.

  A face looked back at him.

  Mac leapt back, yelped. The trapdoor dropped and bounced on its wrong side. Mac tried to get his M16 around as fast he could.

  Flustered, jerky, he pointed it at the hole in the fl oor.

  ‘Shit!’

  He struggled to control his breathing as Billy and Cookie came through, guns ready.

  Mac put a hand out. ‘Watch it – someone’s in there.’ He nodded at the trap hole, breathing fast.

  ‘Who?’ asked Cookie.

  ‘A kid. Looks like a kid.’

  He swallowed hard, the adrenaline bursting through him from the fright. Cookie spoke to Billy without looking at him. ‘Cover the escape will you, mate?’

  Billy scooted out while Cookie and Mac trained their guns on the hole. Cookie started talking. Low, smooth, cooing. Mac couldn’t make out all of what he was saying but it sounded good. He talked and talked, then sang something.

  Mac was getting sweaty palms on the M16 – Sulawesi in summer was so hot. There was movement around the trap hole. First one hand and then another came out. Two slender hands up in the air – international sign of surrender. A mop of black hair came up. It was a boy, maybe seventeen, eighteen. He turned to Cookie, pleaded for his life. Mac didn’t need a degree in Bahasa to get that.

  Cookie snapped something at him and the boy stood totally still.

  He asked the boy something. The boy answered. Cookie cocked the M16, aimed up. The boy pleaded. Without taking his eyes off the boy, Cookie yelled, ‘Billy, get under the building – see if this kid’s standing on anything.’

  Mac looked sideways. Cookie said, ‘Could be standing on a mine or a grenade. That’s what these pricks do, make a kid stand on a mine and then piss off. The kid has to wait till the cavalry arrives. Boom. We all go up.’

  Billy’s voice came back. ‘He looks okay, Mr B.’

  Cookie motioned the boy to come out. He stood, skinny and scared.

  The boy’s name was Setiawan, but friends called him Seti. He’d come along with his cousin because there was work up at the mine. He didn’t know it would involve working with thugs. He’d been given a gun but when the shooting started he’d become scared and hid in the remotest building. This one.

  Cookie was good. He kept the guy going, offered him cigarettes, then got Billy to get some water for the guy. Classic enlistment technique – the hard stuff could always come later.

  Seti had no names. Yes, there were two white men – one of them a tall Yankee. And there was a broader Aussie. There was another man too. Asian, maybe southern Philippines, maybe Polynesian even.

  After half an hour of the smiling act, Cookie turned to Mac.

  ‘I reckon he’s spilled. But I’ll shake him down if you want.’

  Mac looked at the kid, winked. The kid smiled big. Mac wished he had some rupiah to sling around. But it wouldn’t have helped.

  ‘Ask him about the Aussie.’

  Cookie asked him and turned to Mac. ‘Didn’t see him – only heard. He only came up here once.’

  ‘Ask him if there was a place called “Eighty” mentioned. Or maybe a person?’

  Cookie asked and the kid became animated. Yes, the Asian dude was called Eighty. Mac asked through Cookie and got the answers.

  Eighty was about fi ve-nine, good-looking, clean shaven, happy, well dressed in black T-shirts and Aussie board shorts. Had some business in the mine.

  Then, said Seti, the other guys had said there was a white girl in the camp. They wanted to have their turn but Seti was brought up right, didn’t want any of that.

  Mac looked at the kid. Boy averted his eyes. Fucking liar.

  Mac turned to Cookie. ‘Does he have any idea what Eighty is, what it means?’

  The kid shook his head.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘I’m done. That’s good stuff.’

  Cookie gave him a suspicious look.

  ‘He’s going to be helpful, Mr B. Honest.’

  Mac shouldn’t have said that last bit. Cookie laughed. ‘I wasn’t going to whack him. Honest! ‘

  The buzzards rose like angels as the helo came down. The clearing where Limo had bought it was the size of a tennis court – just large enough for the Euro to land. Billy didn’t like it but Cookie wanted it.

  So they landed.

  Limo’s eyes and tongue were gone and the buzzards had started on his rear end, but Mac reckoned Sawtell and his boys would be happy to have something pretty much intact to ship back to Limo’s mum.

  Mac must have been getting better – he was sad watching this kid’s face disappear into darkness as Billy zipped the navy blue body bag, but he wasn’t as emotional as he’d been the last day or so. He was tight again, and it felt good.

  Billy and Mac lifted Limo into the Euro, strapped him to the cargo cleats behind the last row of seats.

  Billy moved to the cockpit. Mac looked out and saw Cookie sitting on the same log where he’d been butted a day earlier. Cookie beckoned him and offered him one of his smokes as he sat. Mac declined. Cookie too
k a swig of water, offered it. Mac took the bottle and fi nished it.

  Sulawesi was a steam room.

  Mac had been waiting for this chat. The chances of Cookie Banderjong being this helpful and this involved without wanting something in return were between nothing and zilch.

  Cookie looked down at his legs, fl icked a piece of ash off the ovies. ‘You run a database on Garrison lately?’

  Mac hadn’t, only read the fi le that Garvey gave him that night in Jakkers. Big oversight.

  ‘Let’s work it backwards,’ said Cookie. ‘Garrison’s trade is drugs for guns for gold, right?’

  Mac nodded. Cookie sucked on his smoke.

  ‘He’s good at it – making someone a shitload of money. He’s doing his thing in northern Pakistan, right? He goes too far, bombs the police compound, and rather than being kicked out or dragged back to DC, he’s suddenly in northern Burma.’ Cookie turned his palms to the sky. ‘And ‘cos it’s Burma, we’re straight back into drugs, guns and gold.’

  Mac kept nodding. One part of his mind wanted to get to Cookie’s insights, while the other was on high alert for where Cookie felt Mac fi tted.

  Cookie continued, a man used to having the fl oor. ‘So who benefi ts?’

  Mac thought it was a trick question. It was obvious to anyone who had worked this area for any length of time. ‘The Chinese.’

  ‘Right – they’ve got the weapons, they want the gold. Burmese have the drugs, they want the Silkworms and radar arrays. All the good shit.’

  Mac nodded. ‘All they need is the middle guy who can turn drugs into weapons and gold.’

  ‘Garrison,’ said Cookie.

  ‘Too right.’

  Cookie paused, fl icked the butt of his smoke into the forest, brushed ash from the leg of his ovies. ‘So Garrison snatches your girl.

  Why?’

  Mac’s professional life rarely worked with this level of discussion.

  He had to keep his paramilitary missions secret from his colleagues, most of whom had no idea he was an S-2 operative. It didn’t make him feel elite – it isolated him, put him in a position of being unable to swap information and talk things through with workmates. In a world of cellular information, Mac was usually in a cell of two or three people. So he was warming to the openness of Cookie’s conversation.

  ‘Dunno. An affair that went wrong?’ Mac guessed.

  Cookie shook his head. ‘Garrisons don’t think with the little head. Ever.’

  Mac tried again. ‘She was on to something – Garrison wanted that info.’

  ‘I think that’s more like it,’ said Cookie, and changed tack again.

  ‘Judith Hannah was a regular visitor to Sulawesi, did you know that?’

  Mac didn’t.

  ‘Know her expertise?’

  ‘China,’ sighed Mac, the pieces slowly tumbling into place.

  ‘Know what she was doing in Sulawesi?’ Cookie was taunting, smiling. He didn’t wait for Mac to shake his head. ‘Counter-surveillance.’

  Mac turned. ‘Of what?’

  ‘The Chinese maritime security team.’

  Cookie laughed at the look on Mac’s face, then said, ‘Your girl is one of the world’s experts on how the Chinese military intend to secure their shipping lanes for the next twenty years.’

  Cookie smiled like the cat who got the cream, put his hand on the back of Mac’s neck. Massaged it. ‘Cut off from Canberra, mate?’

  ‘Maybe,’ rasped Mac.

  Cookie laughed. Then paused. ‘Let’s work on this together, huh?’

  Mac let a long slow breath out. It hissed between his lips. He looked back at Cookie, looked down at Cookie’s extended hand, looked into Cookie’s eyes. Cookie had guessed, correctly, that Mac wanted to know the truth behind the Judith Hannah rescue, and that the truth would bring Mac back to Sulawesi. Cookie was saying We can all help each other, or I can make life unbearable for you in Sulawesi. Mac didn’t really have a choice.

  Cookie winked.

  Mac shook his hand and looked away.

  CHAPTER 15

  Sawtell’s boys and Mac fl ew direct from Cookie’s compound to Hasanuddin military base in Makassar in an unmarked Black Hawk.

  There they refuelled and ate, and then helo’d into Halim Air Base on the outskirts of Jakarta just after seven pm.

  Mac was rooted. His back didn’t agree with the Black Hawk seating systems, which basically entailed a canvas hammock that folded down from the rear and centre bulwarks. Judith Hannah slept lengthwise in a medic’s litter, still zonked out. Hard-on and Mac sat with Sawtell and Spikey in the load space. Limo was strapped to the outside of the aircraft.

  The Black Hawk was the loudest and most uncomfortable way to travel in the US military. When it had come into sight at Cookie’s compound, Hard-on had groaned. ‘Fuck that – just once you’d think they could send a Chinook out, huh? Would it kill them?’

  Mac said his farewells under the tarmac fl oodlights, in the stinking heat. He clapped hands with the men, thumb-grip style. Sawtell was last. His eyes were rheumy and Mac could smell the booze on him.

  ‘Well mate,’ the American joked, trying to ape the Strine accent.

  ‘Mission completed. We got the girl.’

  ‘Nah, mate. We got both girls.’

  Sawtell looked at the tarmac, shook his head, kicked at something that wasn’t there. Embarrassed. ‘Sorry ‘bout all that. It got a bit loose out there, huh?’

  Mac watched another American crew in black ovies pull Limo’s body bag from the Black Hawk’s external cargo rack and carry it off to a Dodge Voyager with no side windows.

  ‘Sorry ‘bout Limo. I liked the guy,’ said Mac.

  Sawtell nodded. ‘He was good people.’ Then he looked up with a slight smile. ‘By the way, the boys have a new name for you.’

  ‘Well I guess old Sonny had to be good for something,’ said Mac, smiling.

  Sawtell laughed. They shook.

  The Americans stowed their Cordura bags and walked towards an unmarked Hino minibus where a couple of CIA guys waited. The way the US Army worked, Sawtell was going to be piloting a laptop for the next two days.

  Mac’s own debrief was leaning against a white Holden Commodore, which had turned orange under the glare of the fl oodies.

  Garvey.

  Beside the Commodore was a white Mercedes-Benz ambulance, a local behind the wheel. Three Anglo men – two of them from the Service, the other the chief medical offi cer of the Australian diplomatic mission – hurried into the Black Hawk as the rotors came to a standstill. The driver got out slower, walked round the back, grabbed a gurney. By the time the most self-important Anglo realised he needed a gurney, the local ambo was right behind him. The others raced to get Judith Hannah onto the gurney, but the ambo had to stop them because they were messing it up. Within fi ve seconds the ambo was running the show.

  Mac snorted. He turned back and Garvs was beside him. His tanned bald head glistening in the lights. The big tanned forearms stuck out from his hips like wings.

  ‘Buy you a drink?’ asked Garvey.

  ‘Buy me ten and I’ll let you get into my pants.’

  Garvs pointed at Mac’s strapped wrist. ‘Got a girlfriend for that?’

  Mac deadpanned him. ‘I’m ambidextrous.’

  Mac showered, shaved and got dressed in chinos and a short-sleeved business shirt before heading for the Lagerhaus with Garvey for a feed. Around them Anglos were getting pissed and yelling at the big screens. Mac saw a highlights package that featured Victoria smashing New South Wales in the cricket. Someone yelled out, ‘You fucking bee-utey!’

  Garvs, through a mouthful of tuna, yelled back, ‘Yeah, yeah – put it away, ya fucking poof.’

  When they drank together, it was always the same. Garvs was the loud one who started the fi ghts. Mac made the peace.

  The cricket fan stopped, wandered over, big stein of Becks in his hand.

  Mac caught the bloke’s eye, winked. ”Zit going, champ?’
/>   He was Mac’s size but dark haired with dark features and a cop haircut. About six foot, big in the shoulders and arms, thick in the legs.

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ the bloke was sizing up Garvs, steaming. He had a group of four blokes behind him looking on. One called, ‘Leave it, Keith, fuck’s sake.’

  Garvs looked Keith up and down. Snorted.

  Mac came in fast. ‘That was some shit you guys pulled in KL, huh, champ?’

  Keith tore his eyes off Garvs to look at Mac.

  ‘Don’t know how you keep doing it.’ Mac shook his head pensively.

  ‘Resources they give you guys, yet you come up with something like that. Make the FBI look like a bunch of amateurs.’

  Keith eyeballed him, looked into his stein, looked up. Mac saw unhappy drinking. He knew from Jenny Toohey that the federal cops posted in South-East Asia were overworked, stressed out and disillusioned about how much of a dent they were making in the slaving and drugs rackets. They were lonely, tired and constantly in danger of being assassinated. All for $71,000 a year plus allowance.

  So this bloke probably thought he deserved to have a few quiet ones with other cops and customs people without a countryman calling him a pony’s hoof.

  ‘You know,’ continued Mac, ‘you go through all that shit to break one bunch of slavers, and you think you’re not getting anywhere, right? Well you’ve probably made thirty or forty parents real happy, huh? Gotta take the positives, mate.’

  Keith was looking in his stein again. Slumped.

  ‘So don’t worry ‘bout this prick…’ Mac pointed his steak knife at Garvs. ‘He’ll get slapped, don’t you worry ‘bout that.’

  Keith laughed. ‘Thanks for that.’

  Mac gave him the wink as he went back to his mates, then turned back to Garvs, who was making a face like Who’s the fucking boy scout?

  Mac swigged his beer, pointed at Garvs with the knife. ‘You behave yourself.’

  Mac had never fi gured out how it worked, the whole organisational thing. Garvs and Mac had started in the Service about the same time, trained together, always been deployed in similar areas and with similar goals. But right from the get-go Garvs had been pegged as management, while Mac was always going to be the operations guy.