‘Have you heard of Operasi Boa?’
Mac’s head snapped up at that. ‘Well, ah, maybe. What is that?’
Ali looked around, distracted for a split second. ‘Something happening in the Bobonaro region. From what we can gather, it’s -’
Ali’s focus changed, his gun aimed upwards and a crack sounded half a second before a piece of Rahmid Ali’s head disappeared, his immaculate linen chinos folding at the knees as he collapsed in the bushes. Trying to get to his feet, Mac was almost collected by Bongo as he landed in the leaves.
‘I was going to jump him,’ said Bongo, breathing heavily as he holstered his Desert Eagle, ‘but then he was aiming at me. You okay?’
Mac was going to say something like no worries, but his head swam, his balance deserted him and as he reached out to Bongo he swooned like he had a really bad case of jetlag.
And then he was falling into darkness.
CHAPTER 15
The cacophony of bird and monkey cries roared into the room as Dili’s late afternoon turned into evening. The fragrance of blossoms mixed with the smells of the Turismo’s kitchen in the warm breeze. Slowly opening his eyes, Mac winced at the pain in his head then took in his surroundings. He was back in room 10 at the Turismo, tubes in his forearm, a dark-skinned man craning over his bed, and blond-haired Bongo leaning on the doorjamb.
‘Mr Davis,’ said the Tamil man, leaning down into Mac’s face.
‘Yeah,’ said Mac, realising the Tamil was a doctor.
The doctor shone a pen-light into each of Mac’s eyes, holding up his eyelids. A stainless-steel stand stood nearby, with two clear water bags hanging from it.
‘My name is Dr Puri,’ the man said, forcing Mac’s mouth open and poking around on the back of his tongue. ‘You fainted.’
‘I did not!’ snapped Mac, trying to sit up.
‘Aah, doc, it was more like he collapsed, okay?’ said Bongo, smothering a chuckle.
‘Okay, so you collapse,’ smiled Puri. ‘But it same anyhow – you have a bad heat exhaustion, and you must rest.’
‘I’m fine, doc,’ said Mac, dizziness swirling in his brain as he eased himself upright. ‘Just need some water and she’ll be right.’
The headache intensified, causing Mac to sag back into a lying position, gasping from the pain.
Turning away from the bed, Dr Puri addressed Bongo. ‘The drips must stay in until they’re finished – should be about four hours. I’ll come by, see how we doing tomorrow morning. Okay?’
‘Okay, boss,’ said Bongo.
‘And, Mr Alvarez, don’t let him walk around – he’ll stagger like he drunk.’
‘Situation normal, doc,’ said Bongo as Dr Puri turned and left with his medical bag.
After making sure the door was locked, Bongo came back into the room and pulled a chair to the bedside.
‘Thanks back there,’ said Mac, pissed off that Ali was dead but thankful that Bongo had his Six. ‘Ali wasn’t going to shoot, but thanks.’
‘I remembered him – no good,’ said Bongo, shaking his head, lighting a Marlboro.
‘Ali?’
‘Yeah. Kopassus – remember him from the NICA days, and Ali’s not his name.’
‘And…’
‘And I took care of it, okay, brother?’
Mac nodded. ‘Looked in his room?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Well?’ asked Mac.
‘Shipping dockets, requisitions, invoices for – I dunno – chemicals? And some other stuff.’
‘Other stuff?’
‘I’ll show you later,’ said Bongo. ‘But I got something else.’
‘Something else?’
‘By the way, the Canadian girl is after you.’
‘Coulda told you that,’ smiled Mac.
‘I’m serious – she’s trying to find you,’ said Bongo.
‘Send her up – and what’s this something else?’
‘Well, actually,’ said Bongo inspecting his thumbnail. ‘It’s more like someone else, but I didn’t have a choice, okay?’
***
The visitors car park behind the Turismo was shrouded in darkness except for one weak floodlight. Mac felt the still-warm dirt on his bare feet as Bongo opened the boot of the Camry. A pair of panicked brown eyes looked back out of a man’s face, his mouth gagged with shiny grey duct tape, dried blood caked around his ears and eyebrows.
Looking around again for Brimob or soldiers through the vine-covered wire fence, Mac looked back at the man. ‘So this is the cut-out? You sure, mate?’
‘He admitted it.’
‘If you bashed me for long enough, mate, I’d admit to having a thing for Elton John, okay?’
Raising his eyebrows, Bongo nodded towards the man’s face. ‘That wasn’t for his identity,’ said Bongo. ‘That was for Blackbird and Sudarto.’
Mac had almost forgotten that Bongo’s main plan was to drop Benni Sudarto, but for obvious reasons he didn’t want to do it in the Kopassus headquarters in Dili.
‘And?’
‘And he don’t know where Sudarto’s living, but he says the rumour is that Blackbird is alive and in the mountains somewhere.’
‘A prisoner?’
Shrugging, Bongo pulled out his cigarettes, shaking one straight into his mouth.
The cut-out squirmed and Mac saw he’d wet his pants.
‘Let him out,’ said Mac, standing back.
‘You kidding? Why don’t we just walk into Damajat’s office, ask him to start breaking our fingers? You’re still not right,’ said Bongo, twirling his index finger around his temple in the international gesture for insanity.
‘He’s not going to Damajat, and he’s not going to Brimob,’ said Mac, looking back into the boot. ‘He’s told us too much, which means he’d die too if he ratted us out, and his family with him.’
The cut-out’s throat bobbed at the mention of his family and Mac reached down, tore the duct tape off the bloke’s face, bringing some black hairs with it. Gasping and spluttering, it took the cut-out a few minutes to regain his composure. Gesturing for Bongo’s pocket knife, Mac cut the wrist and ankle ties and helped the man out of the boot.
Leading him towards the shadows, Mac grabbed the cut-out by the elbow. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, okay?’
The bloke nodded, fear still etched into his face.
‘I don’t want to know your name, and believe me, mate, you don’t want to know mine,’ said Mac. ‘What I need is everything you have on Blackbird, okay?’
The bloke, early forties and intelligent-looking, started with dignity but quickly fell into a sobbing mess. ‘She’s beautiful young girl, from good family, just trying to help her people,’ he cried, tears streaming down his face. ‘Why do these Malai take her? What right have they?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Maria. Maria Gersao.’
‘You think she’s still alive?’
‘I have heard,’ sniffed the cut-out, pulling himself together.
‘Heard what?’
‘That she in the mountains, being interrogated.’
‘Lots of mountains round here, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Can we narrow it down?’
‘People say Maliana, in Bobonaro, which is -’
‘Yeah, I know. You said interrogated – about what?’ asked Mac, trying to test the rumours. ‘What would she know?’
‘I don’t know – I just organise the meetings,’ he stuttered. ‘I was never there. But she worked for the army in Dili and someone tell me she working on the intelligence floor – maybe she seeing things, hearing things, yes?’
Envisioning the first-floor admin section he’d seen on his trip to Damajat’s office, Mac realised Blackbird would probably see all sorts of documents and security pouches in the course of a week. If she was young and cute, the Indonesian officers might have assumed she was stupid and gradually treated her as if she wasn’t there.
‘Was she hearing things about Bobonaro?’ pushed Mac.
&nbs
p; ‘I don’t know, I -’
‘Did you hear things about Maliana?’
‘Yes, yes I did,’ he sparked up. ‘They say Sudarto is now based up there, and Damajat take a trip there three weeks ago.’
‘What about the Canadian?’ said Mac.
‘I didn’t know he was Canadian till he was beating me,’ said the cut-out, pointing briefly at Bongo. ‘He had a code name, I was the cut-out – you know?’
‘The code name?’
‘I’m not supposed to say that,’ said the cut-out, flinching as Bongo shifted his weight.
‘Starts with “centre”,’ said Mac.
‘Okay – “stage”. It’s Centre Stage.’
‘So you heard nothing about the Canadian?’ asked Mac.
‘Nothing.’
‘I told you – I won’t hurt you, mate,’ said Mac, increasing his grip on the bloke’s elbow. ‘But this is important. So think – a successful white man disappears in Dili, and no one knows anything?’
‘Nothing,’ said the cut-out, looking at the ground.
Mac was momentarily overcome by dizziness and he shook it off before continuing. ‘What do you do? For a living?’
‘I don’t know, that’s not part -’ he started, before Bongo fronted him, looked him in the eyes.
‘Well? Not a state secret is it?’ asked Mac.
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘Really?’ asked Mac. ‘Anything we should know about?’
‘That’s a breech of my security,’ said the cut-out, trying to look at Mac instead of Bongo’s menacing face. ‘I’m not to be indentified!’
‘Then I guess you won’t be needing that retainer from us any longer?’ Mac needled.
‘That’s not fair – I did my job!’
‘You doing any legal work for the generals?’ asked Mac.
The cut-out kicked at the dirt, his face changing from defiance to shame. ‘These people have made us slaves and whores, Mr Skippy. And like everyone else around here, I have to act like one of those things to make a living. What would you know about having to live like that, huh?’
Mac was about to say something clever about life in Rockhampton but then he saw tears in the man’s eyes.
‘You ask the Brimob and army,’ said the lawyer, crying now. ‘They say I make the paperwork – I make it legally clean – for their courts; you ask the Falintil, and they call me a whore who sleeps in the murderer’s bed.’
‘Okay -’ said Mac.
‘You ask my children, Mr Skippy, and they say their father alive and can buy them shoes.’
‘Look -’ said Mac.
‘So do not come into my world and be the judge of me!’ yelled the cut-out, whipping his elbow out of Mac’s hand.
‘Okay then,’ soothed Mac, shaking his head slightly at Bongo, whose hand was going for his Desert Eagle. ‘On your way.’
Rubbing his wrists, the cut-out sniffed back tears, wiped his eyes with his forearm and looked from Mac to Bongo and back again, sensing a trick.
‘I mean it,’ said Mac. ‘On your bike.’
As the cut-out exited the car park, Bongo turned to Mac. ‘That stuff about the Canadian – he was lying.’
‘I know,’ said Mac, ‘but now he’s a liar who might feel he owes me something.’
CHAPTER 16
Finishing his breakfast mango, Mac reached for the coffee pot and refilled his cup.
‘So where’s Jessica?’ he asked Bongo, who was eating toast opposite him in the Turismo dining room.
‘Don’t know,’ said Bongo, making a show of checking his G-Shock. ‘Told me she was starting early – thought we were meeting here.’
‘Meeting?’ said Mac, suspicious.
‘Told her we could give her a lift somewhere, help her out, you know?’
‘Bongo!’ said Mac with a growl.
‘I know what I said yesterday,’ conceded Bongo. ‘But she’s serious about her father, so now I think it would be best if we keep her close and stop her getting into trouble. She has no idea, brother.’
‘She having any luck with her old man?’
Bongo stopped his chewing. ‘Her luck is not being arrested, not being killed. She’s been in all the wrong places.’
‘Fuck,’ muttered Mac.
‘Yeah, I been trying to keep an eye on her, but she’s got the strong head.’
Checking for messages on his Nokia, Mac pondered the day ahead. He and Bongo were heading into the mountains, up to Ainaro and then down to the coastal plain on the south side of East Timor. That’s where the sandalwood growers operated, and if he wanted to stay sweet with the military-commercial oligarchy that ran East Timor, it would help if he appeared to be doing business. On their way back to Dili, they were going to follow up on the papers Bongo had retrieved from Rahmid Ali’s room. There was an Indonesian Army corporate front that Ali had been interested in, operating in the highland border region of Bobonaro, where it looked as if Blackbird was being kept.
But first Mac wanted to make sure Jessica wasn’t doing anything stupid. She was smart and funny, but she had that North American assumption that the world was going to accommodate her assertiveness. That was fine in a bar in Santa Monica, but you only had to make one mistake in South-East Asia and you could find yourself in prison, or a lime pit. Mac felt protective about the girl, and Bongo looked uneasy about her no-show too.
Mrs Soares brought a new pot of dark Timorese coffee and Mac asked her if Miss Jessica was about.
‘She gone,’ said Mrs Soares.
‘When?’ asked Mac.
‘Hour ago,’ shrugged Mrs Soares. ‘Two hour?’
Mac hissed as he looked at his G-Shock, which said 8.06 am.
The road south wasn’t as bad as Mac remembered it, but as Bongo aimed the Camry at the mountain road it fast turned into a classic South-East Asian jungle track – ruts, one-lane corners, trucks and tractors trying to share the road with horse carts and women carrying baskets on their heads. They climbed steadily, the steep road bumpy and washed out in parts, smooth and winding in others. Monkey and birdcalls filled the air, the thick foliage that loomed over the road seemingly alive with animals.
‘You still think this Ali was the real thing?’ asked Bongo.
‘Well, there was something about what he was saying – it fits with some of the problems I’m having with my government.’
Bongo sniggered, and Mac gave him a look. What Mac wasn’t going to tell Bongo was that the defection two months earlier of Tomas Goncalves had vindicated Ali’s suspicions about Australian foreign affairs and intelligence. Goncalves was a long-time Soeharto confrere who’d established his own militia in the Emera region of East Timor in 1998. But after the generals had ordered the killing of pro-independence organisers, and then delivered three pick-up trucks filled with automatic weapons to the Emera militia, Goncalves defected. He was taken by ASIS to Macao, and was debriefed at ASIS’s Hong Kong station. The Goncalves case was assigned away from Jakarta, which meant Goncalves could not be run as an agent and his subsequent debriefings were discredited in Canberra. It was a wasted opportunity, and illustrated a certain amount of policy blow-back in Canberra, where intelligence assessments are crafted to please the government of the day. That’s what Rahmid Ali had been hinting at in wanting to speak directly with Mac.
‘Okay, so you think Ali was telling the truth – why?’ said Bongo, lighting a smoke.
‘First, Rudi Habibie is a reforming president and that means the generals are against him. He’s also from Sulawesi – he’s not Javanese – which is a problem in Golkar. So it makes sense for Habibie to have his own intel operation.’
‘He’ll get killed for it,’ smiled Bongo. ‘But a new president, isolated from the military, would probably need his own spies?’
‘Precisely,’ said Mac. ‘Secondly, BAKIN wouldn’t try a provocation like that – sending Ali out to bait me – it’s not their style. And the miliary intelligence guys? Why would they go dropping a document like that on me? What wou
ld that achieve?’
‘Running in the wrong direction, McQueen – you know how that works.’
‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘But Ali said Operation Extermination might be an internal false flag, a cover for something worse.’
‘Like the CIA leaks an eyes-only dossier on one thing, to keep the desk guys happy,’ said Bongo, leaning on the horn behind a horse and cart, ‘but the hard-ons are using it as cover for the real bad stuff? The black bag shit?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac, aware that the Agency used that trick primarily as a funding mechanism. ‘Ali wasn’t trying to cover that – he alerted me to it. That’s a bit too deep to be a simple deception.’
‘So what’s with the paperwork?’ said Bongo, peering over at Mac’s lap. ‘What was he holding back?’
Shuffling the eight pages of A4 that Bongo had retrieved from Ali’s luggage – all of them photocopied and initialled on the top right-hand corner – Mac thought about it.
‘Well, Ali was collecting invoices and dockets from two companies which, judging by his notes, he believed were owned by the generals.’
‘What do they do?’ said Bongo. ‘The companies?’
‘Sumba Scientific calls itself a biochemical research company,’ said Mac, flipping to a new page, ‘and Lombok AgriCorp – Ali has a note that they claim to be coffee exporters and also developing agricultural technologies.’
‘So why’s Ali so interested?’
Mac looked back at the papers: Lombok AgriCorp had a Maliana address, but seemed to be out of town. Maliana was near the border with West Timor, in the militia-dominated Bobonaro region – a wild-west part of the world in which US spy satellites kept finding mass graves and NGOs no longer allowed their operatives to enter. Mac knew that the Red Cross had made Bobonaro a no-go area after the Indonesian Army was accused of chasing Falintil guerrillas using assault helicopters painted white and boasting a large red cross.
‘What’s that one?’ asked Bongo, one eye on the road and the other on the papers.
Mac read the Bahasa Indonesia aloud with Bongo translating. The single-page, one-paragraph document was headed DEVELOPMENT REFORM CABINET – EYES ONLY: TIMOR TIMUR TRANSMIGRATION SOLUTION.
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