Second Strike

CHAPTER 14

The Ford had cleared an obvious path into the jungle but the three of them stuck to the margins, staying slow, keeping cover as they moved deeper into the thick undergrowth. Whoever these people were, they’d already busted Akbar out of a BAIS detention facility, downed a Kopassus helo and – as best they could fi gure it – created enormous devastation in Kuta. Whatever else might be said about them, they appeared to know what they were doing.

The F350 had ended up in a dry creek bed, its nose jammed deep into dirt, steam rising out of the hissing engine. The well side was empty and they surrounded it very carefully, looked under it and moved up to the cab from a reverse angle. The driver – Pakistani with a shiny helmet of hair – slumped across the centre console with two bullets in his face. The front passenger was younger, maybe just out of his teens but also Pakistani, and he had a bullet hole high on his chest, the blood oozing through his shirt. Mac reckoned that left three unaccounted for: two in the well side and the one face he saw in the rear seats of the crew cab.

The air was heavy with jungle humidity and a cacophony of birds and monkeys but Freddi heard something above it. He put his fi nger up and turned slowly to the front of the truck and then looked beyond, suddenly grabbing Mac’s forearm and pointing up into the trees, where one of the shooters from the well side was jammed in a fork of branches about fi ve metres off the ground. He was unarmed and groaning, his arms and legs twisted in directions they shouldn’t have been in. The F350 must have hit the creek bed with enough speed that the bloke had got airborne, the very reason Mac’s mother had always warned him not to ride in the back of utes.

They moved past the shooter in the tree and Purni picked up a trail, crouched down and had a look, then looked back at Freddi and held up two fi ngers. Freddi lifted his M4 into the ready position and they moved on, fanning out. The heat pushed in on Mac, adding to the nervous sweat under his Kevlar vest. He stealthed carefully through scrubby undergrowth and was suddenly facing a Pakistani bloke on the other side of the clearing, twenty metres away. Pointing his rifl e, the Pakistani fi red several three-shot bursts at him. Mac dropped and rolled to his right through scrub and into a shallow depression, then aimed up as greenery shredded around him. Freddi and Purni opened up on the shooter and he scarpered into the bushes.

Getting to his feet, Mac looked at Freddi, who gave the shoot-and-move sign that had Mac moving fi rst, Freddi second and Purni third while the others laid down support fi re across the clearing.

Mac’s heart raced and his hands slipped on his M4. Panting, he set his eyes on a shady hollow and, when the other two fi red across the clearing, he sprinted and dived for the hollow. Supporting himself on his elbows, he started shooting into the bushes as Freddi made his run across open ground. Freddi didn’t stop running, kept fi ring and went into the bushes after the shooter. Purni and Mac went in after him and found another larger clearing beyond the bushes. They watched two men run across the open space: the shooter closest to them, Akbar beside him.

Freddi, Purni and Mac started after the fugitives, mindful of the need to take Akbar alive and get to the bottom of the Kuta bombings, maybe crack open a wider security threat.

Racing into the large clearing they saw the shooter stop, swivel and assess his pursuers, his chest heaving against sweat-soaked khakis.

Then he turned back to Akbar – ten metres in front of him – and fi red three fast shots into the middle of Akbar’s back.

‘Holy shit!’ screamed Mac.

‘Come on,’ shouted Freddi as they sprinted for the shooter, who put the muzzle of the M4 in his mouth, knelt and leaned on the trigger with his thumb.

While Purni doubled back to look for any other passengers from the F350, Mac helped Freddi with ratting the corpses. Pulling on thick latex gloves, Freddi got down to business. Akbar had no wallet and no mobile phone and his shoes and labels were internationally bland.

He was scrubbed and toned, like any banker of any race anywhere in the world.

The shooter was somewhere between thirty and forty, heavyset, no tats. He had a black-face Seiko 5 watch, no jewellery, a basic Nokia.

His clothes were mainly made in China but his underwear sported a label in Arabic in green lettering. Freddi showed Mac the label and then pulled up the shooter’s shirt, revealing a heavy-duty corset of the kind worn by long-time military personnel.

‘What’s it telling us, Fred?’ asked Mac.

‘The underwear’s made in Pakistan,’ said Freddi, pensive, ‘and the corset means this guy’s done some roping, jumped off a lot of walls.’

Freddi walked forward in a crouch and carefully pulled the shooter’s jaws apart with his fi ngertips so as not to have viscera fall into the oral cavity. Freddi had a look, grunted something and stood, then wiped his gloved hands on his Kevlar vest. He pulled a Ziploc plastic bag from his side pocket, pulled it inside out and put his hand inside it. Then he reached down and picked up the shooter’s Nokia with the bag, folded it back, sealed it and put it in his side pocket.

In the intel and CT world, you are who you phone. When Jenny was apprehending someone or arresting them, her fi rst task was to ensure the bad guy’s hands were nowhere near his mobile phone.

It was like a road map of a criminal enterprise. Mac noticed Freddi was not doing his own nosey-poke in that phone, because tangos no longer just booby-trapped cars. They put small plastique charges in phones that they wanted soldiers or cops to pick up.

‘What’s with the teeth?’ asked Mac, as they saw Purni moving back into the clearing and give the thumbs-up.

‘Middle class,’ shrugged Freddi as they moved back the way they had come. ‘His teeth have been done properly.’

Mac nodded, ‘Not some trooper, huh?’

‘He’s intel or he’s an offi cer,’ said Freddi. ‘Either way, I don’t like this.’

They couldn’t get the wounded shooter out of the tree so Freddi jumped up, pulled all his weight down on the branch the shooter was snagged in, and the bloke dropped to earth like a sandbag. His screaming drowned every bird and monkey in the place as Freddi grabbed him by the collar and dragged him along until the bloke agreed to stand on his good leg and hop to the LandCruiser.

Setting off, they drove increasingly slowly as they neared the turn-off that the other BAIS team had gone to check on. Freddi couldn’t raise the other BAIS team on the radio and the closest helo support was an hour away, so they rounded every corner at a snail’s pace and kept a paranoid watch on what was in front of them. The mood was not good – the longer the other team didn’t respond to Freddi’s calls, the more likely it was they’d been bushwhacked.

Mac sat in the back of the Cruiser, his M4 resting on the lowered window. Behind him, in the rear luggage area, the moans from the wounded shooter came low and constant. Mac knew Indonesian intel would move fast and brutally on the guy despite his injuries.

Slugging on his second bottle of Vittel, Mac tried to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth, having barfed heavily back at the clearing.

He’d never seen a person take their own life and it was an image he was having problems burying.

They crawled on through the green cathedral of the Sumatran jungle, tense, nervous about what was around each corner.

When they fi nally found the other Cruiser, in the middle of a more open stretch of road, they took half an hour to actually close on it. Getting out, they recce’d it, surrounded it from all angles, crawled along on their bellies looking for trip lines. They searched exhaustively for signs of landmines and tree-mounted Claymores, taking so long that, while they searched, a buzzard landed on the Cruiser’s roof, stuck its head down and into the vehicle, its bald neck looking like a garden hose fi lled with earthworms.

Up close the BAIS vehicle had been cut to ribbons, hole by hole, the rear almost unrecognisable. Mac fi gured that a decoy bunch of shooters at the corner sixty metres up the track would probably have made the BAIS operators slow, and then the crew with the. 50-cal gun would have emerged from behind the LandCruiser and done the damage Mac was staring at.

Purni pulled out a small black tool kit and ran an IED check on the Cruiser, taking up another half-hour. There were seventy or eighty ways to booby trap a vehicle and you needed to let one guy do the whole thing to ensure a proper job. Purni couldn’t give a ‘clear’ call on the Cruiser – he suspected there was something jammed in the locking device of the rear right door and it had some kind of circuit in it. So Freddi carefully put his hand up to a rear-door pillar and dug out an object with his penknife. He brought it over and as they looked at the small dark-grey projectile, Freddi shook his head thoughtfully and tutted. ‘A fi fty-cal with tungsten loads. Armour-piercing.’

Mac forced himself to look at the blood and hair-splattered interior of the Cruiser, the pools of dark dried blood in the dirt below. The fl ies were swarming and now it was Purni’s turn to vomit, which he did quietly at the side of the track, hands on his knees, legs straight.

Freddi ignored him. ‘Who has tungsten loads in their fi fty-cal, McQueen?’

Mac shook his head. ‘Military, intel…’

Freddi nodded vaguely, his mind somewhere else. ‘I was right about the pro crew,’ he mused, looking up at the buzzards, ‘but they might be a lot more pro than I thought.’