Dead Centre

1

Shit …

This was not going to end well.

The two of them were at it again, and this time one of them was going to get hurt.

Mong towered over BB, his forehead pressed hard against the top of the other man’s skull to prevent him pulling back and trying a Glasgow kiss. Mong’s sweat dripped onto BB’s face, then down into the sand. He was breathing heavily, through clenched teeth. I could hear him even from where I was sitting.

I knew Mong. What he started, he finished.

I jumped up and skirted around a pile of pulverized, multicoloured hardwood that had once been a fishing boat. It was a week since the tsunami, and Aceh was still a disaster zone. There was debris everywhere. The coastal region looked like Hiroshima after Enola Gay. The tide brought in more wreckage and bodies with every wave.

‘Mong — enough, mate! We’ve got work to do!’

He wasn’t listening. He snorted like a bull.

‘Bin it, mate. Back away. We’ve got no hospitals, fuck-all medical kit …’

But Mong was in his own little world. These boys were like two wind-up robots, grinding against each other until their clockwork motors ran out.

BB was going to get it big-time, and he knew it. But he stood his ground.

‘Lads, kick the shit out of each other when we get home.’

It still wasn’t happening.

Mong flicked his forehead back and then down and cracked BB right on the top of his normally perfectly sculpted hairdo. BB slumped, but before his knees hit the sand Mong swung a punch that connected with his right temple like a pile driver.

BB couldn’t do much except take the pain. He flung his arms round Mong’s waist, trying to drag him down as well while he regained his senses. Mong stayed right where he was, but his cargoes went south, exposing the tattooed outline of two hands, one on each cheek, which looked like someone else had already grabbed his arse.

Mong fought to free himself, but BB clung on, closed his arms round Mong’s knees and threw his weight forward. Mong toppled into the sand. They both scrabbled to land a punch.

I peeled a spar off the fishing boat.

Mong wasn’t shouting any more. He was saving his breath for the fight. He pulled himself up onto his knees and threw another two punches that BB managed to duck. Either would have laid him out.

He missed with the third, but the next got BB on the side of the neck and took him down. Mong dropped onto BB’s chest, legs astride, and pumped his fists into the boy’s body.

BB tried to curl up to protect his film-star looks.

I was nearly on top of them. ‘Mong! You gotta stop, mate! Not today!’

White faces gathered by the line of NGO tents about fifty metres behind us — some of the aid workers who’d poured in from all over the world to help. Thousands of locals had fled into the hills for safety and were streaming back every day. They’d heard there was a relief camp, but few came near the ocean. They were terrified of another killer wave.

‘Mong, you listening?’ I stood over them. ‘Bin it — now.’

It was too late. BB was fighting back. It was all his fault; it always was. He’d been having a go at Mong all day. But I had to admire the arsehole. Not many would last this long against the man mountain.

‘Mong, last chance, mate. I’m going to have to hurt you if you don’t back off.’

BB was about to get seriously fucked up. He deserved what was coming, but this wasn’t the day.

I swung the spar down on Mong’s back and kept it in place as he collapsed across BB, so he knew I was still there. BB heaved him aside, got the hint and rolled away. He crawled a metre or so, his face a mask of blood-coloured sand.

‘Fuck off, BB, and get cleaned up.’

I pushed hard between Mong’s shoulder-blades as he tried to get up. ‘Mate, stay down or I gotta hurt you again. He’s a fucking arsehole, but this isn’t the time or the place. Sort all that shit out after the job, OK?’

BB got to his feet and shuffled back to our tent. The throng of aid workers parted like the Red Sea to let him through.

I sat on an oil drum bedded into the sand, still pressing on Mong’s back. The beach was littered with all sorts of shit. The straits were the world’s favourite dumping ground for hazardous waste, and why not? The only people who’d ever know were a bunch of Indonesian fishermen. The dumpers just hadn’t reckoned on a tsunami propelling their dirty laundry into full view of a hundred tent loads of international observers.

‘And pull your cargoes up, for fuck’s sake. Those jazz hands are giving me the hump.’

2

They’d been in different squadrons, but I’d known Mong and BB since Regiment days. Now the three of us were out, and making a few bob on the circuit whenever and wherever we could.

‘BB’ was short for ‘Body Beautiful, Mind Full of Shit’. He hadn’t come into the Regiment the normal way, from one of the three services or the Oz or Kiwi military. He’d joined the TA off the street after watching too much SAS shit on telly. The problem was, he didn’t get the culture. He didn’t even speak squaddie. He was a mobile-phone salesman who played soldiers every other weekend about fifteen miles from where he lived. He was living the dream a bit too much instead of getting on with the job. He hadn’t realized you had to serve your apprenticeship before going into the trade.

BB hated his nickname. He wanted all his mates to call him Justin. The trouble was he didn’t have any mates.

He was OK, I supposed, and a pretty good operator. He just didn’t get it, whatever ‘it’ was. He was a smooth-talking Geordie fucker who fancied himself. He did all the weight training, took all the supplements. His T-shirts were two sizes too small. He plastered his face with moisturizer, and spent every spare minute building a tan for when he was back in the UK, cruising round town in his red Mazda 5.

Worst of all, he fancied Mong’s wife, and didn’t mind letting him know. BB had few scruples when it came to horizontal tabbing. He was plenty stupid enough to try it on with her. He’d tried it in the past, before Mong was on the scene, but Tracy soon cottoned on that he wouldn’t be giving her what she needed.

Of course, BB wasn’t the only one who fancied her. We all did. She was a good-looking girl. She had the kind of smile that belonged on an infant-school teacher. Everything about her was close to perfect — the way her dark hair brushed her shoulders, the way she dressed. We called her Racy Tracy, but it wasn’t really true.

For everyone apart from BB she was off-limits. She was somebody else’s wife. And that somebody was a mate.

This new fight had been brewing since the moment we’d met up a week ago in the UK. BB hadn’t seen Mong for a couple of years, but got stuck straight in with the same old banter: ‘Any time she needs a real man, just give her my number.’ And he hadn’t stopped there.

I gave Mong a prod. ‘You all right, mate?’

‘Yeah.’ He lifted his head, held a finger to each nostril and blew out a stream of sand and snot. He nodded at the waves pounding in ten metres away. ‘I suppose I’d better get cleaned up.’

His accent was West Country, borderline pointy-head. It didn’t fit with how he looked. Mong was a big unit; he could have been a poster boy for the World Wrestling Federation. He was tall and thickset, with crinkly dark blond hair. He never went to the gym or lifted weights, but still shat muscle. It was how he was made.

He really did have a huge arse. Each cheek was plenty big enough for those hands. From behind, with his kit off, he looked like a crime scene. After a few beers at a party, he’d drop his trousers and work his muscles so it looked like they were shuffling cards. His biggest pick-up line was ‘Stick or twist?’ There was still a bit of the Royal Marine in him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Any excuse, any piss-up, those lads couldn’t wait to get their kit off.

With BB it was a totally different story. To keep his bulk he had to hit the weights non-stop and take supplements by the fistful. His day sack was filled with protein powder.

3

Mong began to ease himself up. There wasn’t a mark on him.

‘He’s full of shit, Mong. You know that, don’t you?’

He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers. ‘He still gets to me. After all these fucking years.’

‘What did he say this time?’

Mong looked away. He blinked hard, like he had sand in his eyes. ‘He came out with the wedding-photo thing. The cunt. He said I’d better keep checking.’

When BB targeted a married woman, it wasn’t about shagging her, or even liking her. It was about conquering her, and having one up on her husband. When he was pissed once he told me that every time he was in the new conquest’s home he always asked to see the wedding photograph. As soon as he was alone, he’d ease it out of the frame, grab a pen and write ‘J was here’ halfway down the front of the bride’s dress. If he was in a bit of a rush, he’d just scrawl it on the back, like a dog cocking his leg to mark his territory. If it was all going tits up, he’d say to her, ‘Go and look at your wedding pic.’

That hadn’t happened to Tracy. She was a Hereford girl who’d hung around with Regiment guys from the time she was seventeen. She and her sister had been trying to snag one for years. Why not? They got a house out of it, and a well-paid husband who was away for most of the year. For girls like Tracy, it was life as per normal, but with cash and security. She wasn’t mercenary, just realistic. And it meant that once she’d got Mong, she wouldn’t rock the boat. Apart from anything else, she really did love him.

‘Fuck him. You know Tracy wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. How long have you two been together?’

‘Six years.’

‘So look on the bright side, you twat. You could have ended up with Jan. Fucking nightmare. You’d be changing the wedding photo every month — it’d look like an autograph book.’

He wiped sand out of his eyes and started to laugh.

Jan was the nightmare version of her sister. Tracy’s only failing was naïvety. While Jan’s head was full of shit, Tracy’s had room for nothing but fairies and happy endings. Before she met Mong she’d thought that meant she had to get her kit off every time she thought she’d found true love. It took her a while to realize she was just getting fucked and left to fend for herself.

Jan was a bit more cold and calculating. She knew she’d get turned over at frequent intervals until she stumbled across somebody stupid enough to take her on. Tracy had always been faithful to Mong. She didn’t belong in the Hereford meat market. But Jan had thought she could handle it; she thought she could keep moving from one man to the next unscathed.

I looked over at the NGO tents, a sea of smart blue and orange canvas hooked up to brand new generators.

BB had disappeared into ours, and the white Land Cruiser crowd had gone back to doing whatever they did. Not that they’d been much help. The NGO thing had always seemed to me to be about looking good rather than doing good. BB had missed his vocation.

4

Mong clambered to his feet and wandered to the water’s edge. I dropped my pacifier and joined him. ‘You’re a lucky bastard. You know that?’

He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick nod. He didn’t take his eyes off the scum that swirled across the sand in front of us.

‘I remember half of B Squadron telling you to steer clear of Tracy — but only because they wanted to have a crack at her themselves. They didn’t see what you saw in her. She’s in love, mate. And that’s with you, not with any other fucker. Just you.’ I pointed a finger at him like it was a bollocking.

‘You’ve got each other, that’s all that matters. Fuck BB, fuck ’em all. Just think how many of us’ve messed that up — BB included. They’re jealous of you two. We all are.’

He nodded again.

‘Why don’t you just pack up and fuck off out of Hereford? Why stay?’ In the film version of Mong and Tracy’s life that played in my mind, they would have packed up and gone to live where nobody knew them as soon as he’d left the Regiment. Like Shrek, but without the swamp.

Mong put up with a load of shit from BB, but a whole lot more of it was dealt behind his back. He was too big and fearsome for anyone else to say it to his face.

He shrugged. ‘Tracy wants to be near her mum and sister. She’s a family girl.’

I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. ‘No wonder they all think you’re soft in the head.’

He wasn’t. They were forgetting what he did for a living. And they mistook kindness for weakness. The stupid fucker was still sending cash to a woman he bumped into when he was in the Marines. He was at the checkout in Tesco one Saturday with three of his mates, each hefting a box of Stella, ready to watch the rugby. She was ahead of them, moaning that she couldn’t afford to buy nappies — one of the oldest cons in the book, but Mong was suckered. He paid for all the beer, paid for the Pampers too, and hadn’t stopped since. The baby had to be about twelve years old by now, and he was still sending her money.

Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.

Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.

‘I’m not washing your back.’

‘If anything happens to me — if I get dropped — you’ll look after her, won’t you?’

He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.

‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’

He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’

He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’

‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’

He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.

I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’

5

Our tent was a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.

BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.

BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.

I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.

I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps. Star Trek had finally met Carry on Camping. Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.

I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice — with UN stamped all over them — to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.

Camp Hope — I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour — was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place — apart from its 250,000 population — were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.

Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.

To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia to accept an independent Islamic state. Aceh had a higher proportion of Muslims than other areas of the country, and had been allowed to introduce Sharia law in 2001, but GAM wanted a lot more than just religious control. They wanted the revenue from the province’s rich oil and gas deposits, most of which went straight to the central coffers — no doubt with a few rupiahs skimmed off the top.

Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.

6

An argument erupted outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.

Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.

The MONGOs — My Own NGO — could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand — if there was anyone around to issue one — they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.

I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got over sixty thousand referrals to MONGO websites, all brand new. Some of them, of course, were scams for cash.

Individual aid work was trendy in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia. And in the US, the tax authorities were granting exemption to an average of eighty-three new charities a day. More than 150,000 had been registered so far — and these were just the lads who’d bothered to go through the system. The only reason I knew all this was because Mong, BB and I had gone that route.

Aid 4 Tsunami. That was us. We carried accreditation to prove it; we’d printed it ourselves. It wasn’t the most original name for a charity, but it would do. There were far worse out here. And it was as well funded as any other MONGO.

7

Our stretch of tent city was heaving with Western MONGO medics who’d dropped everything to come and help — which mostly meant setting off alone in hired wagons with a first-aid kit on the passenger seat. Some of the local lads had been examined three or four times each, and didn’t have a clue what the doctors told them, what drugs they’d been given, when and why they should take them.

The docs ran around in full George Clooney mode, getting it all on video so their sponsors at home would send more money. A lot of them did a great job, of course, but others made incorrect diagnoses because they were moving at speed and didn’t know about the particular challenges of the landscape. BB had a better grasp of the local parasites and diseases, and he was only a patrol medic.

The God Squad MONGOs were the worst. I’d once come across a gang of Christian hippies with guitars in Africa. They were there to round up patients for what they called their ‘mercy ship’. It turned out to be an old cruise liner that had been converted into a floating hospital to bring ‘hope and healing’ to the poor heathens.

All well and good, but because the thing was only there for a week, they could only do operations that didn’t need much aftercare. The place was crawling with people dying of gunshot wounds and machete amputations, and all the mercy ship could deal with were cataracts and hare lips, followed by films about Jesus.

There were already about four groups of happy-clappies in the camp and a hospital ship on its way. The Scientologists were also on the loose. No guitars, but plenty of mind-over-matter techniques and no sense of irony 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 News at Ten during the 1995 Brixton riots, caught on camera climbing out of a shop window with a TV under his arm. In the background a policeman was doing exactly the same.

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! Stop! Look up there!’

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 can fight over who’ll take the credit for saving him — and maybe get themselves on the news.’

10

We climbed out of the wagon. I found myself standing in a morass of mud and ripped yellow plastic sachets. This bag contains one day’s complete food requirement for one person was printed across them in English, French and Spanish. And next to the Stars and Stripes and a graphic of a bloke with a moustache tucking into an opened pack: Food gift from the people of the United States of America.

I hadn’t seen HDRs (Humanitarian Daily Rations) since my time in Bosnia. Each pack weighed about a kilo and contained a day’s calories. They only cost the American taxpayer three or four dollars each, but the joke going the rounds was that, with door-to-door delivery, this was one of the world’s most expensive takeaways. They were designed to survive being airdropped, thrown out of an aircraft as individual packages — much safer than parachuting large pallets of rations onto survivors’ heads, and better for preventing hoarding.

The HDRs dropped in Afghanistan were yellow, like they’d been in Bosnia, before it was realized that the packages were the same colour and roughly the same size as American cluster bombs, which were being scattered like confetti. They changed them to orange-pink.

Inside would be a couple of meals like lentil stew and pasta with beans and rice. There were also fruit pastries that reminded me of Pop Tarts, and shortbread, peanut butter, jam, fruit bars — even boxes of matches decorated with the American flag, a nice moist towelette and a plastic spoon. For some reason, every HDR also included a packet of crushed red chilli.

The US Navy must have airdropped this lot. They were somewhere offshore, and their helicopters had overflown the camp now and again. Some of the packets weren’t so empty. Not even the Indonesian Army could flog pork and beans on the black market.

Mong clambered across the wreckage. Wriggly tin buckled and groaned under his weight. BB leant on the bonnet as he watched him, checking his watch like we were missing a crucial meeting.

Wrinkled pictures were pinned to wood on what was left of a wall on the other side of the road. Dolls, toys and picture frames were laid out on the ground. The locals had been putting together whatever personal effects they found for others to see. For some, it would be all they had to remind them of a dead family member.

Two rounds kicked off deeper in the city and there was a faint wail of sirens. BB looked at his watch again.

‘It’s all right, mate, we’ve got another five hours until first light. It’s only going to take him ten minutes.’

11

I could tell things weren’t good as soon as Mong reached the cockpit. ‘For fuck’s sake …’ He stuck his head out of the smashed window. The leg dangled beneath him. ‘I’m going to need a hand here.’

BB pushed himself off the bonnet. ‘The kid’s alive?’

Mong ignored him and disappeared inside. I climbed the crumbling concrete blocks and hauled myself onto the boat. The deck was clear. The waves had taken everything away.

Mong was easing the leg gently out of the window frame. It didn’t belong to a child but a young woman. And crunched into the opposite corner of the cockpit was a man. A wedding ring glinted on a hand that was twisted up around his shoulder. His head had been crushed on the metal shelving just above him. There was no blood. The sea had washed him clean. The wound looked like a Hallowe’en makeup kit without the ketchup.

It was the same for the young woman, and the newly born boy who lay between her legs, umbilical cord attached and placenta still inside her.

BB followed me onto the deck, face screwed up in disgust. No way was he going to enter the cockpit. ‘This is fucking gross …’

Mong didn’t look up as he pushed aside the tangle of kit covering mother and child.

BB put his hand to his mouth.

The husband’s head twisted a little and fell forward as Mong tugged out a sodden blanket and laid it on the deck as best he could. ‘While you were fucking about at the Carphone Warehouse we were surrounded by shit like this. Women desperate to give their babies a chance before they died themselves …’

‘I don’t give a fuck. Let’s get out of here. We’re going to catch something.’

I knew Mong was talking about the Balkans. Muslim women in the villages who knew they were going to get raped and killed went into premature labour as the Serbs advanced.

He gathered up the tiny body, pruned from its prolonged soaking, and cupped it in his hands. He finally raised his head. ‘If you’d spent a bit more time actually soldiering instead of just playing at it, you’d understand what’s been going on here.’

‘Yeah? Well, fuck you.’ BB spun on his heel and disappeared over the side. The corrugated iron buckled and creaked as he made his way down to the wagon.

More shots kicked off in the distance.

Mong laid the baby on the mother’s breast and started to tuck a corner of the blanket around him like a shroud.

I lifted her legs so we could get the blanket underneath her. ‘Mate, we won’t be taking them with us.’

Mong raised the mother’s head and placed the blanket around it.

‘We’ll leave them here, mate. Tell the army or whoever when we get back. They can come and mark them up.’

He was vibrating with anger. ‘She shouldn’t have been left like that. Leg hanging out. It’s not right. That fucker would just have left her …’

‘Mong, mate, you need to calm down. BB’s on the team, and we’ve still got a job to do.’

I went over to the husband. The meat on his legs was squidgy. It wouldn’t be long before his body started to decompose.

Mong got out of the way so I could drag the poor bastard next to his wife and his child. Somehow it seemed important to have them touching. He tucked the woman’s hair into the blanket so she and the child were totally shrouded.

We both stood there silently for a minute or two.

He looked across at me. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it, doing something halfway decent for once, instead of arsehole jobs like this?’

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mate, the arsehole job’s still waiting.’

12

Beyond the flood line, every football field was crammed with refugees — thousands of them — in makeshift camps. The city had suffered the magnitude nine ’quake and was now trying to cope with the magnitude six aftershocks.

There was no electricity, and therefore no light. More fires were dotted about in the darkness. Haunted eyes peered out at us from the shadows, unsure of who lurked behind our headlights. At this time of night it wouldn’t be aid workers, which left looters or the army, both bad news.

We eventually hit the main bridge crossing from west to east. The mood in the wagon wasn’t good. BB was expecting to go down with cholera, measles or some other fatal disease at any minute because we’d had physical 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 why. It had been kicked in.

We slipped into the corridor and followed the carpet as far as the wooden stairway. I started to sweat as I climbed. A sign on the landing told us 2-17 was to the left.

This floor, too, had been systematically raided. Splintered doors hung from their hinges. More redundant wires sprouted from desktops. The small, two-desk office of Kareng Development Corp was in shit state.

Our torchlight bounced around in the darkness. Paper, folders and files were scattered everywhere. I pulled off my day sack. ‘Fuck it. Too much to sort. Let’s torch the lot.’

BB took stag on the door. He’d keep an eye out along the corridor.

Mong set to, piling the furniture into good burning stacks. The paperwork was my responsibility. As team leader, I had to make sure it was destroyed. And we’d only get the rest of our money if we had the proof.

I didn’t bother looking for material specific to the deal with the separatists. It would be quicker and easier to incinerate the lot. Fuck the building: it was either insured or would be rebuilt by foreign aid. No one was in here, and the blaze couldn’t spread to other buildings or fuck anybody up. It was an island in a sea of tarmac.

As Mong threw together a pyramid of desks and chairs, I set up the handheld IR-capable videocam on a chair by the door and set it to record.

16

There are three elements in the combustion triangle if you want to make sure your arson is productive. The fuel was the furniture and paperwork. The oxygen movement wasn’t perfect — the windows here were sealed units so the air-con could do its stuff — but with the internal doors open it should be fine. The fire needed to spark up as quickly as possible; we’d help it do so by stacking the chairs and desks at the optimum angle. The optimum angle was thirty degrees — which is why the perfect place to start a house fire is under the stairs.

Mong was building his second pyramid when BB slapped the wall. It was our signal to freeze.

I killed my torchlight and held my breath, mouth open to cut down internal body noise. I listened. Not a sound.

I breathed out, breathed in, kept my mouth open, and strained to pick up even the slightest vibration. Still nothing. I waited another thirty seconds. If someone had spotted us, surely they would have done something by now.

Mong was behind me. I turned and moved my mouth to his ear. ‘Hear anything?’

He shook his head.

Then we both did. Movement inside the building, down near the plywood sheeting. Then a shout.

Military? Maybe they had more than loudspeakers and searchlights on those APCs. Maybe they had night viewing aids and had been watching us all along.

Another shout.

It didn’t sound military. It sounded agitated. A night-watchman? What was the point? There was nothing left to watch over. Homeless? That made sense. But I’d seen no bedding or cardboard on the floor, no sign at all of inhabitants.

I could hear the shuffle of feet. Murmurs. Getting louder. Coming up the stairs.

I went and joined BB. He pulled his head back inside. ‘No lights. Can’t be military. They wouldn’t come in blind.’

Shouts echoed in the stairwell. I made out at least three or four different voices. Egging each other on. Vigilantes, maybe, who thought we were looters. Or just local lads who wanted to know who the fuck we were.

Mong moved alongside us.

The voices were getting closer.

I gripped their arms. ‘We carry on — then fight our way out of here if we have to. They might just get bored and fuck off. We have to destroy the papers. We’ll worry about that lot afterwards. OK?’

I ran back and grabbed an armful of files and thrust them under the nearest desk pyramid. Mong did the same.

The shouts were getting louder and feistier. The newcomers hadn’t got bored. They were getting more confident because we weren’t doing anything. Something landed further down the corridor with a metallic clatter.

BB came back into the room. ‘Five or six of them, I reckon.’

Mong stopped what he was doing. ‘Fuck ’em, Nick. Me and BB’ll go and clear them out. They’ll do a runner. You crack on here.’

‘No. This first. We go out there mob-handed as soon as this lot sparks up.’

They started chanting now, like football hooligans. The noise came from the top of the stairs.

I carried on hurling fistfuls of paper into the stacks. Sweat poured down my face. ‘Let’s get this done. Worry about that lot later.’

I looked up and caught Mong in my Maglite beam. He screwed his eyes shut and gave me a smile. ‘No, mate. Let us two go down there and grip a couple big-time. The rest will run — they always do, don’t they? You finish this off, and we’ll clear the exit. What happens if we get pinned down when all this shit kicks off?’

My light moved onto BB. He wasn’t happy, but Mong was chomping at the bit. ‘Nick — we need to secure the way out.’

Mong was set in his ways. The halo he’d had on at the fishing boat had slipped; it was just the horns showing now.

I grabbed another pile of paper. ‘You’re right, mate. Go!’

BB had to shout to be heard over the chaos outside. ‘Nick, what the fuck are you playing at?’

Mong tightened the straps of his day sack. He wasn’t going to wait for me to answer.

He turned and prodded BB out of the door. They dis appeared to my left as Mong roared at the gang outside. The noise was deafening.

17

I pulled the two-litre bottle of unleaded from my day sack and poured it over the two mounds, then lit the first match and threw it.

There was a loud whoosh and flames rushed up the woodwork. The sudden heat seared my face. I listened to the commotion outside. Chairs were being thrown; wood was connecting with bone.

I chucked a second match and turned towards the door. Both pyramids were well ablaze. I shoved the camera into the day sack and threw it on my back. I ran out to join the violence at the top of the stairs. Torchlight jerked and juddered as Mong and BB got aboard whoever was trying to stop us getting out of there.

There were other angry shouts, but from behind me this time. A chair slammed across my back and took me down. I struggled to my feet and ran towards the mêlée of jeans, T-shirts and sweat-soaked tattoos. The acrid stench of burning foam scoured my nostrils. I heard a series of loud cracks as the flames took hold of the veneer on the furniture.

A lad behind me screamed and shouted. Something hit me on the head. I didn’t give a fuck. These lads weren’t going to stop the fire. And soon they were going to have to leg it.

I headed for the torchlight ahead of me. The three of us needed to fuck off before the smoke overwhelmed us. I took more hits.

‘Mong! BB!’

Mong turned and roared at me: ‘Get a fucking move on!’

His shout became a scream and his headlight dropped. Smoke billowed down the corridor, hugging the ceiling. Shadows bounced along the walls as the flames grew. The locals hollered at each other. These lads were fucking off.

The headlight on the floor at the top of the stairs was dim. Then I realized it was rammed into the carpet. Mong wasn’t moving. I gave him a kick in the ribs and yelled at him to get up.

18

He was lying on his side, head twisted. Blood poured from the inside of his thigh. The carpet tiles were soaked. It wasn’t good. It was too quick. He was bleeding too fast.

‘Mong!’ I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him over. Blood spurted up at me like water from a burst pipe. His femoral artery had been severed. Maybe he’d been knifed. The femoral artery is connected to the aorta. Blood was pumping out of him at mains pressure.

I pushed down on the puncture site with one hand and tried to rip his cargoes with the other. Blood coursed up my wrists. I had to get my thumb and forefinger into the wound and try to squeeze the artery closed.

‘BB!’

My fingers slithered around the hole in his thigh. It was like trying to locate a small rubber tube buried in grease.

‘BB!’

Mong’s head lolled and his torch beam bounced along his leg. He saw what was happening. ‘Shit! I feel it. I’m going, Nick.’

‘Shut up, dickhead.’

But we both knew he had less than three minutes.

‘BB!’

I knew he couldn’t do any more than I could but he was a patrol medic. I rolled Mong on to his back and his head flopped. No resistance from his neck muscles.

Flames shot out of the door of 2-17 and licked along the suspended ceiling. Tiles ignited. There were no sprinklers because there was no electricity. Our shadows danced as the flames advanced towards us. Thick black smoke filled the top half of the corridor. It would soon sink down to our level. Mong knew that. ‘Fuck off, Nick. Go.’

‘Shut the fuck up.’ I stood up and pressed the heel of my boot into his groin, just above the wound. I pushed down with both hands on my knee. He groaned with pain. We both knew it was too late. We needed surgical clamps to stop it.

My torchlight fell on his face. His pupils didn’t react to the light.

‘Nick, remember what you promised.’

‘Shut up. You’re going to fucking look after her yourself.’ I pushed harder. ‘BB!’

Blazing tiles fell from the ceiling. The heat got more intense as the flames licked closer. I was starting to choke on the smoke. I had to bend down further. But I wasn’t going to release the pressure until he was dead. I knew it was useless. He knew it was useless. But that didn’t matter. I’d fucked up. I shouldn’t have let him go and take on the looters.

This was all I could do for him now.

He fought to get the words out. ‘Remember … Tracy …’

‘Of course I’ll look after her, you stupid fucker …’

He went quickly. No reaction to the pain. He just closed his eyes and that was it. Life had leaked out of him.

19

I lifted my boot and touched my hand to the wound. There was no blood pumping out any more. It had all gone. The smoke was just a metre off the floor. Staying on my knees, I shoved my hands under Mong’s armpits and dragged him towards the staircase. I could feel the air rush up from the smashed windows below. The flames were sucking it in.

Mong was too big to pick up and put on my shoulders. His legs bumped behind me as I dragged him down the stairs.

‘BB!’

I swept my torch beam across the floor to make sure he wasn’t lying there too.

I reached the downstairs office and lugged Mong towards the exit. I had to stop under the window, fighting for breath. Air rushed through the gap we’d come in through. I slid down the wall and leant back against it, with Mong’s head in my lap. ‘Sorry, mate.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Smoke curled down the stairs. I got to my feet and pushed the plywood further away from the frame. I had to use my head to keep it open as I eased his torso through. A gust of wind rushed past us to feed the flames.

Mong dropped to the ground and folded like a rag doll. I wasn’t going to leave him there. I’d get him to the fence and then go back for BB.

Hands beneath his armpits and linked across his chest, I started to drag him away from the building.

The windows above us shattered. Flames leapt out. Mong’s heels bounced over the tarmac.

Headlights on the main road ahead, moving left to right. They hesitated, then turned onto the tarmac.

The 4×4 slewed to a halt, side-on.

‘Get him in!’

‘Where the fuck have you been?’

‘He told me to get the wagon! Get the fuck in here! The army’s coming from the other side of the river.’