Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 9

They made good time on the road to Tenteno. Limo drove the Patrol, Hard-on rode shotgun. Spikey was in the middle of the back seat, Mac and Sawtell either side. Mac’s wrist was now bandaged and Limo had slipped him some anti-infl ammatories. But he agreed with Mac – a chipped bone in there somewhere, and the only cure was going to be resting the thing, something that was not going to happen on this trip.

They’d be arriving in Tenteno after dark and Mac wanted to case the place, have a chat to whoever was around. He wasn’t expecting miracles.

This was Sulawesi, the world’s eleventh largest island and basically unpopulated. Fishing villages dotted the coastline and highland tribes did their thing in the interior. It was all rainforest and mountains, and people trying to win forestry and mining concessions. If the trail went dead in Tenteno, Mac would give the intel guys in Jakarta a chance to come up with some piece of genius. That would set the hounds running.

If the mole was in Jakarta, he or she would make a move. Which would give Mac a chance to pull a counter-ambush.

But the trail didn’t go dead.

Mac and Spikey went into the general store on Tenteno’s main road as soon as they’d driven around the small lakeside town. The store owner was helpful, but didn’t know anything. Spikey kept it calm, doing small talk. Mac watched the owner clench and unclench his left fi st. He only did it once but it betrayed nerves.

Mac strolled out of the store, motioned to Limo and the others to drive round the back. He walked down an alley between the store and another wooden building, and came out in a rear yard.

There was a lean-to on his left. Boxes and drums of cooking oil were stacked to obscure what was in the structure. Mac walked around the makeshift wall, saw a tarp covering a large shape and whipped it off, revealing a silver Accord. Same rego as the one behind Minky’s.

Coming in through the store’s back entrance, Mac took the owner by surprise. The bloke’s eyes widened as Mac said to Spikey, ‘He stays there, he doesn’t move, right?’

It was near to closing time anyway so Mac fastened the front door and pulled the blinds. ‘Tell him this,’ said Mac to Spikey, not taking his eyes off the owner. ‘Tell him he’s harbouring a vehicle known to have been used in the terror bombings around Tenteno.’

Spikey rattled it off and the owner gulped, shook his head, gabbled something back at Spikey.

‘He says it couldn’t be,’ said Spikey.

‘Tell him if I’m wrong I can get my friends at the POLRI or Kopassus to come up here and check it out for us. Might all be a huge mistake,’ said Mac, winking at the store owner.

The owner shook his head, fear in his eyes.

Mac pressed for the breaking point. ‘Tell this guy that it might even warrant a visit from the boys from the BIN. And tell him, Spikey, that those boys will get to the bottom of it real fast by getting his wife and kids into the cells and helping him to remember. Memory is a funny thing.’

When Spikey had translated, the owner went quiet, looked at the fl oor.

Breaking point.

Mac started again, Spikey interpreting. Yes, the store owner knew the blokes in the silver Accord. They had been going out on the remote road to Sabulu. They’d made the trip several times and yes, they’d headed out that morning.

Mac got Spikey to ask what kind of people were travelling. The owner said two Javanese and one pale person.

‘Yankee?’ said Mac.

The owner nodded, said something to Spikey: a tall American.

Could be Garrison, thought Mac.

The three men had been travelling in a white LandCruiser, said the store owner. Mac’s attempts to get deeper information met with shrugs. Yes, there may have been more than three and yes, one may have been a woman. The bloke had been paid to mind his own business, and that’s what he had done. Mac believed him. He sliced the telephone lead with Spikey’s Ka-bar and moved outside.

It was dark but some light from the back of the shop spilled on to the Accord, a 2002 model. Mac tried the doors. Locked. After putting a rock through the driver’s side, Mac fl ipped the hood, and unplugged the howling alarm. That brought Sawtell and the others to the party.

‘This it?’ asked Sawtell.

Mac nodded, reached for the door handle, pulled on it.

Sawtell’s mouth fl ew open, wide-eyed, his hand reaching out.

Limo covered his eyes. Hard-on turned away.

Spikey stared at him like he was an honest-to-God dumb-ass honky motherfucker.

‘Shit, McQueen! Holy fucking shit!’ said Spikey.

‘Maybe to you that’s a car, McQueen!’ gasped Sawtell. ‘But to us, that’s a fucking bomb!’

Mac looked down at the open door, looked back. Limo was peeking from behind his hands. Sawtell looked at the sky. Spikey still stared.

‘Sorry, boys,’ said Mac.

Mac stood back, let Spikey check the vehicle for pressure plates, wires and anything tricky on the ignition column. Then Mac had his turn. He went into the boot, the glove box, the centre console, the spare wheel bay, the centre armrest of the back seat, the tool box, the ashtrays, the radio and the storage compartments. Not much.

Chewing gum wrapper again, Bartook Special Mint. Someone liked to get close to the ladies without scaring them off. Someone liked to rip it open in really thin strips.

He asked for a fl ashlight and got under the car. Positioned himself right beneath the windscreen washer reservoir and shone his torch straight up through the transparent plastic. It was a classic place to hide stuff and some people still thought the old places were best.

Nothing.

Then he started on the carpets and before he got far he found something under the driver’s seat. He fi shed out a key and shone the fl ashlight in again to see if there was anything else. He quickly went over the rest of the car’s interior.

Coming up empty-handed, he turned his attention back to the key. Hard-on asked what it was. The other soldiers groaned as one, as if to say, What does it look like, lame?

It had a diamond-shaped, black plastic key ring with the letters MPS stamped on it in silver. The key was big, German, expensive and made of forged alloys suggesting a serious lock. The number was 46. Someone had lost a key. He wondered if they would come back for it.

Mac trousered it.

He turned back to the owner of the place, who was looking unsettled about what Mac had done to the Accord.

‘Don’t worry, sport,’ he said to the bloke. ‘I bet it’s overinsured.’

The owner didn’t look convinced.

‘Ask him about Sabulu,’ Mac said to Spikey. ‘I want to know what we’re looking for.’

The road to Sabulu was even worse than the general store guy had warned. From Tenteno, the road rose up into the highlands in steep, muddy switchbacks. It had been a bad, tropical road to start with and the logging traffi c after the afternoon monsoon showers had torn it apart.

Mac asked Limo to drive. He was good, which was a change.

Most Yanks couldn’t handle that sort of terrain. At one point the Patrol slid across the track and threatened to slide off into a thousand-foot ravine. Limo kept his foot on the gas, counter-intuitively, and the Patrol came right.

‘Not from South-Central, are you?’ said Mac.

Limo smiled. ‘Costa Rica.’

It was drizzling and everyone remained quiet as the Patrol’s turbo squealed and cried its way up one ridge after another. The dark of the tropical night pressed in. The only universe was the one that the headlights illuminated, occasionally fl ashing on macaques at the side of the track, which had obviously seen a similar vehicle across several hours before. Mac could see off-road tyre tracks in the mud.

They were looking for a ‘depot’, which the store owner said was about seventy miles into the interior. Depots were sometimes shacks, sometimes compounds. Loggers and miners lived in them and the natives – the Toraja – collected weekly or monthly deliveries from them. The store owner reckoned they should be on the lookout for a depot called ‘thirteen’.

They pressed on, the Patrol rolling and sliding. They got higher, past the mist-line where it was clearer and colder. Limo hit the heat.

They glugged water from bottles and ate the fruit that Mac had known the soldiers would stash. They got to the top of a switchback and Mac asked for a toilet stop.

The stars shone huge and plush in the blackness above. A monkey argued with a bird somewhere in the rainforest canopy. It crossed Mac’s mind that the next time he came through here it might all be felled. Instead it would be sitting in a backyard in Perth or Melbourne as garden furniture. He started pissing and Sawtell came alongside.

‘You know that dude with the store is as good as dead?’ said Sawtell, not pissing but staring.

‘Hopefully we get to the bad guys fi rst, huh?’ said Mac.

Mac shook off early. Didn’t like where Sawtell was standing. If Mac was going to poleaxe someone, that’s where he would stand. At a bloke’s four o’clock while he had his hands full.

Sawtell must have sensed the vibe. He moved around in front. They both felt the cold. Plumes of mist came out of their mouths.

‘My boys weren’t happy about the Bani thing.’

‘I wasn’t over the moon myself. But it’s a good school,’ said Mac.

‘That was nice. What does he say to his folks?’

Mac didn’t want to go into all the details. He’d had a chat with Bani’s dad that morning before they went down to the dry-cleaners.

The dad had thanked Mac profusely for the opportunity. Education in Sulawesi was not like it was in the United States. Wasn’t a birthright, wasn’t an entitlement. Parents with the smartest kids watched all that potential go to waste most of the time. But there was no point in telling that to Sawtell. He was a good man, but he was an American good man.

Mac changed the subject. ‘Mate, I don’t know what to expect up here. Can we tool up now?’

Sawtell gave him a disappointed look. He stepped back, tapped on the roof of the Patrol, and the boys spilled out.

It was almost daybreak when they fi nally hit Depot 13. They were high enough to watch the sun come up over the Pacifi c. An amazing sight. The primordial rainforest started up like a soundtrack. In the space of twenty minutes it was deafening.

The depot was signalled by a couple of lamp posts dug into the ground, thirty feet apart. A track ran between them with a sign with the number thirteen strung above. They killed the lights. Mac handed off to Sawtell, who ordered Hard-on and Spikey to run a point. Then Sawtell got out of the Patrol and took a stance behind the rear fender; Limo did the same thing behind the front hood. Mac sat in the back seat with the Beretta on his lap, yawning, dreaming of some nosebag.

They waited for the all-clear and Mac asked Sawtell if Enduring Freedom was a success yet.

‘Ha!’ Sawtell snorted.

‘I take that as a no,’ said Mac.

‘Holy shit! Oh man!’ Sawtell seemed genuinely amused. So did Limo, who smiled his way.

‘It’s the wrong mission, in the wrong part of the world, for the wrong reasons with the wrong tactics,’ drawled Sawtell. ‘Oh, and the wrong leadership – political and brass.’

‘We got Sabaya, didn’t we?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell was out of view, behind the Patrol. He didn’t answer.

Half an hour later, Hard-on fl ashed three times through the trees in the dawn gloom. Limo drove the Patrol through the gates, Sawtell walked behind on the verge of the track. They drove like that for fi ve minutes and came out into a clearing. There were six or seven mid-sized wooden buildings that looked like they’d been built a decade ago and then abandoned. Hard-on put his fi nger to his lips and beckoned Mac and Limo out of the vehicle. They walked behind him, guns ready, heading between two of the buildings and coming into another clearing, a courtyard with three accommodation-style buildings around it. It was a barracks of sorts. The place looked deserted, except for the white LandCruiser that dominated the courtyard.

Sawtell looked at Hard-on, who said, ‘All clear, sir, far as we can tell.’

Sawtell looked around. Pointed at the LandCruiser. Hard-on shook his head. ‘Haven’t checked it. Waiting for you, sir.’

Sawtell nodded. Hard-on went to work on debugging the LandCruiser. Spikey jogged back into the courtyard to give him a hand.

Sawtell was distracted. He looked off into the distance and looked around very, very slowly, his face completely impassive. Mac had seen career soldiers do this before, and it usually meant the shit was on the doorstep. They just knew something was up.

Mac realised they were standing in the middle of a natural ambush.

Surrounded by buildings, surrounded by jungle.

Sawtell slowly put his fi nger in the air. ‘Hear that?’

‘Helo,’ said Limo.

They looked at each other and tried to fi nd the source. Mac couldn’t hear a thing.

‘Ain’t military,’ mumbled Limo. ‘That Euro piece of shit?’

One of the fi rst things special forces soldiers learned to do was identify aircraft and vehicles by their sound. Much of what they did they did in the dark, without fl ashlights or open comms. The tales of tired soldiers piling onto the enemy’s helo or onto the bad guys’ boat were as legion as they were apocryphal. But the lesson was the same: know your hardware.

Sawtell indicated its position with his fi nger. Then shook his head. ‘Gone.’

‘Probably a logging scout,’ said Mac.

They ignored him.

Hard-on and Spikey cleared the LandCruiser of booby traps.

Mac found a map in the glove box, and more Bartook Special Mint wrappers. Torn thin.

The map was in relief, of the highlands. It showed broken lines in red, which meant dirt roads. And it had another series of thin blue lines, which Mac assumed were horse tracks, or whatever they used up here.

It wasn’t that much use. Mac threw it back in the LandCruiser, slammed the door, moved to the rear. Then he had another idea. In the Royal Marines there had been an absolute ban on touching any map with a pen or a pencil. Anything that could possibly mark it. You put a map in a plastic sleeve, you pointed at it, you used bearings and you used coordinates so that everyone knew what everyone else was talking about. But if you marked a map in the British military someone was going to get in your face and accuse you of defacing Her Majesty’s personal property. It was a ‘back to base’ offence.

Mac went back to the front seat, unfolded the map and had a good look. If these guys did not have that basic training, they might have absent-mindedly drawn on the thing. Even just touched it. Which was the universal human instinct.

He found what he was looking for on one of the central panels. A defi nite depression with a blue ballpoint at the end of one of the blue lines. A slight blue squiggle a couple of centimetres away – someone trying to navigate with the thing on his lap.

He called Sawtell over, showed him. Sawtell picked up the map and, without hesitating, turned due north, pointed into thick jungle and said, ‘That way, nine or ten clicks.’

They tooled up. Sawtell was serious about this one, just like Mac had seen him in the Sibuco take-down; a bit nervy and controlling it with glacial calm. The lads sensed it. They checked guns and cammed their faces without saying a thing. When the Old Man went like that, it was time to get serious.

The boys took US Army fatigues out of Cordura bags. The guns were M4s – short, black assault rifl es favoured by the US Army Special Forces.

They pilfered the rat packs and the stashed fruit. Ate up large.

Then they headed into the jungle, Hard-on walking point.

The heat came up fast. The noise of the forest was thunderous and screeching at the same time, crowding in on the senses, enveloping the party with humidity, bugs and noise. They tabbed for an hour.

The horse track they were on was a steep climb. It was agony.

Mac made a mental note: more running to balance the gym and boxing fi tness.

Sawtell was a conservative campaigner. Mac wanted to stride out, get some blood going. But Sawtell stopped, peered, backtracked and did all the special forces hand-signal stuff. He was the jungle version of how Mac moved around a city: with total paranoia.

They maintained silence and walked Mac in the middle of their set-up. The tension was heavy. Every time Mac looked at Sawtell, he saw more concern. Concern that the American would not share. John Sawtell may have been a bleeding-heart boy scout but he kept it tight when the shit was hovering. There was a maelstrom of worry and contingency-mongering going on in that square head, but Mac knew he wouldn’t spook his boys. Not a squeak.

Five clicks into the hike, they took a rest in a clearing. Limo produced water bottles from his pack. Mac checked a moss-covered log for snakes and spiders, and lowered himself.

There was a crack, a soft warm feeling in his head.

Then it all went black.