Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 10

Mac came to with the kind of head pain he’d experienced once during a bout of malaria. A sensation so powerful that you hit your head against a wall to make it go away.

He could hear something. People’s voices. Then something else, humming like a machine. He took his time opening his eyes, let his right eyelid go up slightly. The rush of light was like an explosion in his brain. He groaned. His mouth was dry, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He could barely think straight. Was he drugged? Drunk?

More voices. He tried again to crack an eyelid but the light shut him down just as quick. Sparklers behind his eyes. The noise got louder and he felt hands under his armpits. Hands on his feet. Then he was going up, like when he was a kid and his dad picked him up off the sofa where he’d fallen asleep watching television.

The noise got louder. It thromped and whacked and whined.

It was fucking with his mind.

Mac thought: a helo.

Then he blacked out.

The patch was wet. Very wet. Mac shifted his head slightly and felt it cold and damp on his cheek. He must have been dribbling something chronic.

He opened his eyes. No pain in the eyeballs but a ton of it behind his right ear. He was lying on his side. There was a white sheet on him. A white pillow, white mosquito net over him that smelled of pyrethrum. He was naked except for his red briefs. He rolled over so he was looking at the white ceiling, fan turning.

He breathed, wiggled his toes, fl exed his fi sts. The right hand was still swollen and painful. But he was alive and in one piece – for the moment.

He wondered who it was. Garrison’s thugs? The Chinese? He prayed it wasn’t the boys from Beijing. When intel hacks got gossiping they inevitably came to the Chinese torture scenarios: the drugs, the hypno, the implants, the beatings, the surgery.

There were no restraints. Whoever it was, they didn’t see him as a threat.

He sensed movement. A face looked down on him. Large, round, male.

Maori. Fuck!

‘How’s the head, chalks?’

The guy smiled. A big, confi dent smile. Mac didn’t know what to say.

‘Sonny?’

The big Maori laughed, a high-pitched chortling giggle. ‘You remember me, eh Chalks?’

Mac was a stunned mullet. He was looking at a ghost from his past: Sonny Makatoa.

Mac carried something on his CV that he reckoned he shouldn’t. He was a veteran of Desert Shield/Storm. Technically. Straight from the Royal Marines he’d rotated into Basra in ‘91. The fi rst Iraq war was winding down, the wells were burning, Bush Senior was pulling the boys out and novices like Mac were being sent into a war zone to see how intelligence worked in the shit. It was the only way to get that experience. The only way for the spy masters to know if this was your thing.

It was Mac’s thing.

He deployed with a couple of older Australians, one of whom was Rod Scott. They were doing lots of sweeps for hidden missile silos and bio-warfare factories. There were loads of snitches and turncoats coming out of the woodwork in those fi nal days. Saddam military wanting US dollars. Saddam military wanting Australian visas. Saddam military planted by his intel people as doubles and provocateurs.

Mac worked the ‘show-me’ detail, as in, So this is the Brucellosis weaponisation program you were telling us about? Show me!

The Australian SAS was in demand elsewhere, so in one of the last factory-checks the spooks were doing for bio-warfare manufacture, the New Zealand SAS stepped in as the escort. It was scary work: mines in walls, snipers on the peaks, everything booby trapped. They were into the cave systems of southern Iraq where the turncoat colonels reckoned the bio-labs were.

That’s where Mac had met Sonny Makatoa. Sonny was only six years older than Mac but already leading his own unit. Senior ranks deferred to him, lesser ranks were shit-scared. His boys loved him.

He stood fi ve-eleven and was built like a tree stump. It was hard to imagine who or what could intimidate him. Sonny was tough in the strangest way. Tough like he was born to be in a war zone. Careful and professional but not nervous. Almost as if he liked it.

He remembered Sonny because on his fi rst day Mac had turned up with a different kind of hat to the rest of the spooks and soldiers.

They all wore khaki boonies while somehow Mac had ended up with a blue one.

Sonny had thrown him a spare hat at breakfast. Told him to put it on. Mac had hesitated. Sonny eyeballed him. Mac put it on.

It wasn’t till late morning when they were waiting – and for some reason, war is all about waiting – that Mac had got talking to one of the Kiwi SAS. Asked him about the hat.

‘Corporal’s saving your lily-white,’ said the Kiwi. ‘Snipers round here fi x on anything out of the pattern. Assume it’s a commanding offi cer, or someone important. He likes you.’

So Mac had remembered Sonny. And Sonny had remembered too, probably for other reasons.

Mac swung his feet to the fl oor. He was in a demountable and from the decor and size of the room, he assumed it was the sick bay. The room was air-conned but that wasn’t helping with his head. He had a dizzy spell, thought he would chuck. Put his hand to his mouth.

‘Hem – fucking get in here, now!’

It was the same old Sonny. Barking, yelling, expecting everyone around him to be on the ball. A large Maori man in a black T-shirt and olive fatigue shorts scooted into the sick bay. Barefoot, tucking in his shirt. Sonny nodded at the bloke and they got on either side of Mac and helped him up. The headache subsided slightly as they walked him out the door.

‘Put on some weight, Chalks?’ said Sonny. ‘You were a skinny little runt when I knew ya.’

The sick bay opened into a communal area with loads of natural light. Mac winced and squinted. There was a kitchen down one side, bench tables and chairs in the middle, and an area with sofas and a La-Z-Boy in front of a big plasma-screen TV at the end of the room.

Barcelona was playing Liverpool. Mac took one guess who got to sit in the La-Z-Boy.

They sat him on the sofa and he saw rainforest through a window.

He nodded to the offer of tea and the big guy called Hem moved to the kitchen. Mac had him at one hundred and eighteen kilos, about six-two, all muscle and moving like a cat.

Sonny grabbed a chair, sat on it, leaned forward with forearms on his fatigues. His black T-shirt had a white crest on the left breast, the words TOKOROA RFC printed in white.

‘That’s Hemi,’ Sonny pointed. ‘Played reserve grade for Canterbury-Bankstown. Couldn’t control the temper, though, eh?’

Sonny chuckled, then whistled low, shook his head slowly. Sombre.

‘Big, strong cunt that Hemi. Good soldier, great fi ghter. Tough as.’

Sonny looked back at Mac, smiling. ‘Just can’t let him drink, eh Chalks?’

The teapot came back, along with a glass of water. Mac sank the water in one, wincing at the pipe that bulged in his brain.

‘So what’s the set-up?’ asked Mac, who was getting his bearings and starting to worry about where Sawtell and his boys were.

‘Private work, mate. Contracting, protection, a bit of law and order. You know how it is.’

Mac had a fair idea how it was. In places like Sulawesi, the foreign miners, loggers and oil companies wanted to be able to work their concession without complication. Mercenaries like Sonny removed the complications. Accountants back at head offi ce called it ‘pacifi cation’.

Hemi moved to Mac’s nine o’clock and Sonny changed the pace.

‘So what brings you up here, mate?’

‘Girl,’ said Mac. ‘She went missing from the embassy. Just checking she’s okay.’

‘Little out of the way to go missing, eh?’

Mac was getting his instincts back. He was going to tread very, very carefully. Sonny had said he was mercing. But not for whom.

‘Well, she might be up to no good,’ said Mac. ‘Might be nothing.

They sent me out for a chat. No biggie.’

Mac reached for his tea. He realised Sonny hadn’t offered him any clothes. He was still in his undies – no Beretta.

‘Coming out for a chat with the cavalry, Chalks?’

Mac looked up and Sonny looked straight back. It was a steady gaze and it gave Mac the creeps.

‘Those boys would be, what, Yank special forces?’ asked Sonny.

‘Probably came in from Zam, right? Or Guam?’

Mac looked away.

‘What’s she done?’ said Sonny.

Funny, thought Mac; three days ago he had asked the same question in exactly the same tone. And now here he was in the middle of Sula-fucking-wesi and still none the wiser.

‘Don’t know.’

‘Don’t know?’ Sonny raised his eyebrows.

‘Don’t know – on the lam with an American as best I can fi gure it.’

‘American, huh?’ Sonny looked quickly at Hemi, looked back.

‘Tall cunt? This Yank?’

Mac nodded.

‘About my age? Dark hair?’ asked Sonny.

‘That’s the bloke,’ said Mac.

‘And?’

Mac’s training and natural inclination told him to always withhold names and histories. ‘Need to know’ was a well-worn cliche but it saved a lot of complications. Then again, Mac didn’t have many options. He decided to horse-trade. ‘Where’re my boys?’

‘They’re safe. But one of them didn’t make it.’

‘Which one?’ said Mac, gulping.

‘Big cunt. I was about to tap you on the shoulder and he took a shot at me. Hem took care of it.’

Limo!

Mac felt a wave of sadness. An American who could drive jungle terrain and not carry on about it. Dead.

‘Quick?’ Mac asked. Mac could feel something welling in his chest. He fought it off, kept it tight.

‘About fi ve minutes,’ said Sonny. ‘Billy – my helo guy – did all that Catholic shit with him.’

‘And the others? They okay?’

‘Sure. Got ‘em locked up though. Don’t wanna turn your back on those special forces cunts, eh, Chalks?’

Mac nodded, dazed. Pointed to his head.

‘Yeah, sorry, cuz.’ Sonny chuckled. ‘Got such a fright from your mate that I spun and collected you with the butt. Got you a beauty, eh?’

Mac nodded.

Mac had a choice: play the game with Sonny and see where it could lead; or clam-up and try to bluff his way out with threats of government involvement. He wanted to keep his momentum, get Hannah and get out. So Mac spilled on Garrison. Told Sonny just about everything.

Left out the bit about killing Minky and Minky’s daughter being somewhere with Garrison.

As it happened, Sonny and his lads had been keeping an eye on Garrison’s people. They were in an area which had been a Japanese mica mine in the 1940s. There were a lot of old buildings and tunnels up there, disused. But Garrison’s people were in a forestry concession, and that’s what Sonny and his mercenaries protected.

Mac couldn’t read how their chat was going to end. What Sonny might want. Then the former SASer dropped the bomb. Talking about his boss, Sonny used the word ‘Cookie’.

Mac’s face must have betrayed him.

‘What’s up, Chalks? Seen a ghost?’

‘You working for Cookie Banderjong?’

‘What’s it to you?’ snapped Sonny.

The possibilities started mounting up. With Canberra out of the picture and Mac suspecting a mole, he needed private infrastructure, he needed a guy who could make things happen. But Cookie had to have a reason to help him. Mac decided to give it a burl.

‘Does Cookie like stability? Is that what keeps business good?’

‘Maybe,’ said Sonny.

The sealed track to the mansion led up the hillside from the military compound. They walked by the helipad, where a white and blue Eurocopter sat on its wheels. There was a hangar behind it and further down the track was a long garage with cammed LandCruisers, the kind with the double rear axles. Mac noticed one of them had a turret in the top with what looked like a US military gun rail. There was a fl eet of motorbikes in there too, orange KTMs.

Mac was back in his ovies and Hi-Tecs but he still had no gun. He had his G-Shock but the time – 2.34 pm – didn’t compute. It felt like early morning and he still felt like shit.

‘So where are we, Sonny?’

‘Foothills of Malino. Santigi’s that way.’ Sonny gestured south.

‘Nice up here, stays cool in the summer.’

‘Sabulu’s a bit far south for Cookie, isn’t it?’ asked Mac.

Sonny gave him the up and down look. Like Mac was getting cheeky.

‘He’s been going south, some power vacuum thing. But you’ve heard all about that, right Mr Spook?’

Mac hadn’t heard any such thing. The truth was that Indonesian politics were a mystery to all but a circle of about two hundred insiders. In a nation of two hundred and twenty million that was a pretty tight inner circle. Back in the days when Jakarta’s heart was up for grabs and Sukarno thought that ‘non-aligned’ meant not having to deal with the Yanks, the CIA had an entire desk devoted to Indonology.

The big foreign newspapers still sent in their brightest journalists, the governments rotated in their expert diplomats and the spies trained for a year to get a posting in Jakkers.

And none of them knew what the fuck was going on.

Sonny veered towards a demountable building on the road side.

It was cool inside. A very large Fijian soldier in a black T-shirt and olive fatigue shorts sat at a desk. He leapt up on seeing Sonny, webbing gun rig swinging around as he did.

‘How they going, Mosie?’ said Sonny.

Mac looked to his right, saw Sawtell, Hard-on and Spikey. They were sitting at a table eating lunch behind a steel-mesh cage. They looked over: swollen eyes, split lips. Hate in their eyes. Mac was going to have to work on this.

‘Good – no problems,’ the Fijian replied.

The guy called Mosie looked quickly at Mac.

‘Moses, this is Mr McQueen. These are his boys.’

Mac took his hand. ‘Looking after them, Moses?’

‘Yes, Mr McQueen.’

Mac winked at him. ‘Set, brother.’

Moses beamed. There were two types of fi eldwork: thuggery and enlistment. You either treated your world as eternally hostile – like the Israelis and Russians – or you cosied up to people and enlisted them.

Mac preferred the enlistment model.

Mac moved to the cage. ”Zit going, boys?’

‘The fuck you think?!’ said Sawtell.

‘You’ll be out soon, Moses has it covered,’ said Mac, trying to keep it light.

He saw a rack of guns and Cordura bags hanging from the whitewashed wall as he left.

Time to get it sorted.

Cookie Banderjong was nothing like Mac expected. He had a full head of hair, pushed up and back in a pompadour. A good-looking, round-faced Javanese. The legs outstretched on a huge teak desk revealed a pair of Billabong boardies. His legs were muscled, his chest pushed out against the white polo shirt – the one with the alligator on it. His intel days were over but he was still working out.

As Sonny and Mac entered he was talking on the phone, wearing a headset plugged straight into his computer. He twirled the headset cable in the air as he yelled at someone in Indonesian. Then it changed to English. ‘Dave, that prick’s got something wrong with his brain. Deadset, you make me come down there and it’ll get ugly.

Tell him that… okay… yeah… sweet. Sweet as.’

What stumped Mac was the accent: pure Strine. So it was true, Cookie Banderjong did grow up in Melbourne. You could read all the fi les but you never really got a feel for a person until you heard them.

Cookie was still into somebody. ‘Yeah, I know, mate. Like I said, either the company starts getting eight-hour shifts – of actual work! out of these blokes or I’ll come down with Mr Makatoa and we’ll have a word in the shell-like.’ He smiled at Mac and Sonny, held his hand up in apology.

Mac felt expensive Sumatran silk carpet through his socks. They’d been asked to remove their shoes at the tradies’ entrance.

Cookie signed off: ‘Yeah, yeah, mate. I know. It’s not your fault.

Time to sort it though, huh? Sweet, no worries, catchya.’

He squeezed a button on the cable, tore his headset off and chucked it on the desk. Walked around the desk and across the chocolate-coloured carpet in his bare feet. Cookie was about fi ve-nine and athletic. He put out his hand, smiled big like a movie star.

‘You must be Alan?’

”Zit going?’ said Mac.

‘Can’t complain.’

They shook. Mac smiled back. Couldn’t help himself.

‘They call me Mac.’

‘Mr Makatoa’s told me a bit about you – sounds interesting.’ Cookie pointed to the white leather sofas by the huge PanaVista window that looked out over the valley.

So Cookie was an enlister too. He used the correct pronunciation of Sonny’s name. He said it Maka- tor, knowing how irritated Sonny would get hearing the Anglo version of Maka- to -er. In Maori, toa meant warrior, and people with that in their names felt it was there for good reason. Enlisters noticed the small things; Mac decided he’d better be cagey with this guy.

Cookie’s offi ce was a sprawling thing up on the second storey of the mansion. Around the walls were the mementos of his life in BAKIN, the Suharto-era Indonesian intelligence apparatus which had also had a secret police function. There was a picture of Cookie smiling with an elderly Richard Nixon, both of them in golf clothes.

A black and white photo of a group of men looking serious, standing around a strategy table. It featured a younger short-back-and-sides Cookie with a man who might have been Alexander Haig.

Cookie called for tea and came over to the sofa, saw Mac checking the walls.

‘So you’re ASIS?’

Mac didn’t respond. In any other company he’d have done the old then I’d have to kill you. But he wasn’t going to say that to Cookie Banderjong. Not here. Not in front of Sonny.

‘You’ll like this one,’ said Cookie, moving to a picture on the wall.

He took it down and gave it to Mac. It showed two men of similar age talking to one another in what looked like a banquet hall. A Chinese banquet hall. Communist Party dog collars and Liberation Army fruit salad displays fi lled the background. The two men in the foreground were in suits and ties: Cookie animated, the other man sullen but intent. The unmistakable face of Vladimir Putin.

Mac smiled. ‘Where and when?’

‘Beijing, ‘93,’ said Cookie. ‘I went through our surveillance footage with the technical guys after the dinner – as you do – and there was this one. He was such a strange guy: very smart, very intense. He was nothing then, just one of those over-serious Commies with the Russian legation.’

‘You guys got a camera into a Chinese state function?’ Mac chortled. ‘Are you fucking nuts?’

‘Only when I drink.’

They shared a laugh. It was funny. But Cookie was also pulling rank, showing Mac that he was hardcore. The real thing – a bloke who could waltz into Beijing and pull counter-surveillance on the MSS, on their own patch.

Cookie warmed to the story. ‘I saw Putin on the news a few years ago when he became president, and I’m like Holy shit – I know that prick.

Went back to the old surveillance prints, pulled some strings and got that little beauty on my wall.’

Mac was being played. He handed back the picture and Cookie gave him the wink.

The tea came through with the housemaid and kids’ screams echoed through the open door.

‘Thanks, Rosie – and tell those kids if I have to come down there I’ll take the damn PlayStation and chuck it in the bin. Okay?’

Cookie eased back into the sofa. The enlistment was over, his face slackened a bit. ‘What have we got down there, Mac? And what’s in it for me?’

Mac told Cookie as much as he could about Judith Hannah and Peter Garrison. Mentioned the ambush in Makassar, but not that he thought it was Canberra-connected.

Cookie squinted at Mac. ‘This Garrison, is that the northern Pakistan Garrison? The police compound guy?’

Mac nodded. ‘Drugs for guns for gold. A clever guy, good at playing everyone off.’

‘That wasn’t a terrorist attack, was it?’ Cookie smiled but with no conviction.

‘Nah. Garrison called in an air strike far as we could see.’

Cookie looked out on the valley. ‘And Garrison’s still Agency?’

‘I was briefed three nights ago, and they were claiming him then,’ said Mac.

Cookie looked at Sonny. ‘Well this might be a nice coincidence, hey Sonny?’

Sonny had most of his mercs running cover and clearances for a Malaysian logging company in the Tokala peninsula. At the same time, Cookie seemed to want Garrison shaken down to see where the money trail led. Sonny needed a slightly larger crew for that gig and Cookie wanted Sonny to use the Americans to make up the numbers.

‘Works for me,’ said Cookie to Sonny. ‘I want a chat with this Garrison prick, and these guys want the girl. Everyone’s happy.’

Sonny didn’t like it. ‘Those Yanks aren’t happy, boss. Might have their minds on payback, not on the mission.’

‘Your call,’ said Cookie.

Sonny and the boys had been monitoring the activity up at the old mine, but now that Cookie knew who it was on his turf, he wanted them out of there.

‘I’ll have a chat to the Yanks,’ said Sonny, not convinced. ‘See if they’re up for it.’

Cookie looked at Sonny. Looked at Mac. ‘So let’s do it.’