Counter Attack

Chapter 61

Running to the front door, Mac opened it slowly and stuck his head outside.

‘Psst,’ he said, trying to keep his voice down. ‘Captain Loan. Chanthe.’

The captain had already turned away from him and was talking to the two local cops who walked across the garden with the manager.

‘Here we go,’ said Sammy.

An engine roared to life, car doors slammed.

‘They’re leaving,’ said Scotty, and turning back into the cottage Mac saw his mentor grabbing an assault rifle from Sammy’s bag. ‘Just got into the car.’

Following Scotty to the back door, Mac saw Sammy Chan, in standing marksman pose, about to unleash with his assault rifle.

Mac yelled at him. ‘No! Leave it, Sammy!’

Distracted, Sammy turned to Mac, who burst past Scotty and put a hand on the American’s weapon, pushing it down. ‘Not with the cops at the door, mate.’

‘Fuck — look,’ said Sammy, incredulous.

An engine screamed and the green LandCruiser behind cottage 13 threw gravel as it accelerated out of the guest house campus.

‘I had ’em,’ said Sammy, his face telling of bad interrogation techniques.

‘No, you had twenty years in a Cambodian prison,’ said Mac. ‘And that’s all you had.’

‘Might want to put that away,’ said Scotty, nodding at Sammy’s rifle.

As Sammy walked back into the cottage mumbling about Australian pussies, Captain Loan walked through the gap between the two cottages, looking stylish in her black pant suit.

‘Captain,’ said Mac, smiling. ‘You following me?’

‘No,’ said Loan, surprised. ‘I was going to interview the —’

Turning to her right, she looked through the dust and listened to the LandCruiser’s tyres screeching as they hit the tarmac.

‘The neighbours?’ said Mac. ‘They just left — in a hell of a hurry, too.’

‘Neighbours?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘Israeli boys in a green LandCruiser.’

‘Thanks,’ said Loan, shouting at the local cops as she ran back to the manager’s office.

Loan’s white Camry turned left, heading for Highway Seven’s southbound exit out of Stung Treng. She drove fast and Scotty did well to keep the car at a casual distance while doing a hundred and forty kilometres per hour as they flashed past the Stung Treng Ville sign, a massive circular-saw blade welcoming people to the provincial capital.

‘Think they know where they’re going?’ said Sammy from the back seat, breathing heavily.

‘She’s been on Dozsa for a week,’ said Mac, squinting to see her car through the heat and dust of the highway. ‘She’s got the Cambodian cops working for her — she should know more than us.’

‘Shit,’ said Scotty, jumping on the brakes and holding the car in a long sideways skid as they left the road and slid across dirt and gravel into bushes along a levee road.

Sammy’s head bounced off the back of Mac’s seat. ‘What the fuck?’

Gunning the engine, Scotty drove the car through the scraping branches and onto the levee road, where he stopped and waited.

‘What are we —?’ asked Sammy, just as the white Camry flashed past, engine screaming as it headed back to Stung Treng.

Pulling back onto the highway, Scotty floored the accelerator and they raced through the morning traffic, taking the third lane down the middle as they flashed past trucks, buses, scooters and donkey carts.

‘There she is,’ said Mac, seeing the white Camry in the distance, pulling wild overtaking manoeuvres. Losing sight of Loan’s car as they approached the town limits, Scotty hunched over the steering wheel looking left and right for a side road.

‘Come on,’ he said to himself. ‘Fucking come on.’

As they went past a dusty road to the right, Mac looked down it and saw a procession of donkey carts and a tractor that looked one model away from the iron-wheeled traction engines. The white Camry was almost hidden in its own dust cloud, between two tractors.

‘Back here, Scotty,’ said Mac.

Throwing the car into a sliding donut at a hundred and ten kph, Scotty lost the tail in the road-side dirt and hammered the throttle as they were thrown around like a tossed salad. Truck horns sounded and air brakes hissed as Scotty brought the car around to face the opposite direction, tyres squealing.

Scotty floored it as they turned in to the side road.

Realising he’d been holding his breath, Mac made himself breathe out. They hit a crest and saw the Camry about half a mile in front of them. Mac saw something else, just as Sammy saw the same thing.

‘Airport,’ said the American, pointing between the front seats.

‘Should have been the first place we tried,’ said Scotty.

Seeing the plane tails in the distance, Mac decided the Israelis would be trying to get on a plane and would turn their guns on Loan and her cops. Mac had seen what Dozsa’s firepower looked like and as he gripped his Nokia he tossed up whether he should call Captain Loan. What did he owe her? Anything? A ten-second phone call?

‘This cop could be useful to us,’ said Mac.

They flew over another crest — all four tyres leaving the ground — and Scotty swerved around a cart as they touched down, leaning on the horn.

‘So?’ he said.

‘I should warn her about Dozsa’s people.’

‘Warn?’ said Sammy, leaning between them. ‘Who? The cop?’

‘Loan’s no use to us dead,’ said Mac, scrolling down his con- tacts list.

‘No cops, right, Scotty?’ said Sammy. ‘We’re cleanskins.’ Undeclared intel operators were supposed to go unnoticed when in-country.

Scotty lost the tail of the car in the right-hand ditch and wrestled the machine back into line with three fishtails.

Scotty finally spoke. ‘This Loan — is it personal, Macca?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Mac.

‘I mean, she’s a good sort, and she’s your type.’

‘I don’t have a type,’ said Mac.

‘Sure you do,’ said Scotty. ‘Tall, sexy, don’t like men.’

‘Watch it,’ said Mac.

Rounding a left-hand bend, Scotty hit the brakes, putting the car into a 360-degree spin and then into the ditch with a bang. Ahead, three figures were out of the white Camry, moving carefully towards the green LandCruiser parked fifty metres down the road.

The heat shimmered through the white dust and Mac tried to open his door, which was jammed against the side of the ditch.

Following Scotty out the driver’s door, they stood on the road and watched as the three figures from the Camry split and ran to opposite sides of the road. A wall of automatic gunfire plunged into the Camry, its tyres blowing out and a gas-tank fire starting after five seconds of the onslaught.

Mac saw Loan and her two cops trying to approach the defunct car as the green LandCruiser moved on.

‘Let’s get this car out,’ said Scotty, walking back to the ditch.

Sammy and Mac pushed and then they were back on the road, the transmission now featuring a loud scraping sound.

Swerving past the burning Camry, Mac ducked down in his seat to avoid Loan seeing him. As they cleared the fire, Scotty held his foot to the floor and they sat in stressed silence as the car limped and ground its way towards the airport, not managing more than a hundred and ten kph.

Scotty pulled into the dirt car park of the airport as smoke drifted into the car from the floor. There were two other cars parked, but neither of them was a green LandCruiser.

‘Maybe it wasn’t the airport,’ said Scotty, cruising slowly around the car park and trying to look in the glass front doors. The place looked deserted.

‘I’ll check,’ said Mac, opening his door before the car had stopped.

Limping up the concrete apron to the front doors, he pushed through carefully into the coolness. It looked like an abandoned factory cafeteria, with floor-to-ceiling windows at the far side, looking over the shimmering tarmac.

Taking his gun in hand, Mac entered and realised a middle-aged woman was sitting behind a counter, but with nothing to sell.

Mac smiled, hiding his gun. ‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning, mister,’ she said.

‘Any flights this morning?’

‘No, mister.’

‘No scheduled flights today?’

‘Scheduled flight, sometimes,’ said the woman, nodding. ‘It depend.’

‘Thanks,’ said Mac, smiling. He’d spent so long getting those sorts of dual responses in South-East Asia that it didn’t worry him anymore. If Garvs had been talking to the woman, he’d be arcing up by now, trying to nail her down to a real answer and suspecting her of loyalties to Brother No. 1.

Turning back to the entrance, he saw an old hangar on the other side of the tarmac and some movement around it.

Walking to the windows, he cupped his hands against the glass and peered out. Something was spinning in that hangar. He focused harder, wishing he had his binos. Then he saw it: figures moving away from a green vehicle parked at the side of the hangar, a sign over the entrance saying North Air.

Sprinting for the front doors, Mac got to the car and found Sammy leaning on the bonnet and Scotty on his knees, looking under the car.

‘Let’s go,’ said Mac, opening the boot and pulling out the M4s.

‘Car’s rooted,’ said Scotty, standing.

A puddle grew under the front axle.

‘Come on,’ said Mac, throwing one of the assault rifles to Scotty. Leading them around the south side of the terminal, through an alley and out onto the tarmac, Mac pointed to where the Friendship was emerging from the hangar, its props spinning with a whining sound.

Sammy ran, but slowed as the Friendship straightened and gained speed with its opened throttles.

Mac rested his hands on his knees as the aircraft flashed past with its signature drone and climbed into the sky.

‘He’ll keep,’ said Scotty, gasping for air.

‘Oh really?’ said Mac, as he caught a flash of Dozsa’s face in a window.

It was an expression he hadn’t yet seen in the Israeli: Joel Dozsa was laughing.