‘Man’s got a bullet in his leg, Dozsa,’ said Bongo, empty-handed and focused on the ex-Mossad man. ‘Not like he’s giving up.’
The Israeli crouched like a dancer, his legs and feet light on the gravel as he shifted his weight. Bongo stood upright, mouth slowly chewing on gum. As the two men circled, Mac could feel the bullet hole in his leg running with blood.
‘So, how does this work?’ said Dozsa, the busted jaw pushing a faint trickle of blood down his bottom lip. ‘I come at you, and you pull a gun?’
‘Don’t need no gun,’ said Bongo.
‘Get rid of it, Morales,’ said Dozsa, ‘and let’s finish this.’
Bongo’s face was implacable behind the dark shades but very slowly he dropped his left hand and raised the bottom hem of his black trop shirt until the grip of a Desert Eagle handgun appeared above his waistband.
‘This what you’re worried about?’ said Bongo, a picture of stillness.
‘Drop it.’
‘Don’t,’ said Mac, as his blood ran freely from the bullet wound into the gravel. ‘Don’t give him the satisfaction.’
Bongo’s right hand slowly fell to the Browning. Putting two fingers and a thumb on the butt, Bongo extracted it millimetre by millimetre until he held the weapon in front of him.
The pace of the big man’s movements was mesmerising and Mac held his breath. Then Lance sat up and looked around in a daze, catching Dozsa’s attention.
Bongo said, ‘Catch’ and the Browning was arcing through the air at Dozsa, the Israeli hesitating between looking at the gun and focusing on Bongo.
Accelerating like a big cat, Bongo moved across the gap to the Israeli and got a Korean wrist lock on Dozsa’s knife hand while the Browning was still in the air.
Realising he was caught, Dozsa lashed out with a finger strike into Bongo’s eyes as he lost his balance and fell backwards, his right hand bent forwards onto the inside of his forearm.
Leaning his face away from the digging fingernails, Bongo used his strength to jerk upwards with the two-handed wrist lock, which almost raised Dozsa’s feet from the ground. Then, pulling down with all his weight, Bongo drove the Israeli’s right elbow towards the ground, destroying the carpal structure of the wrist, snapping the two forearm bones and dislocating the elbow.
In the still morning air it sounded like a child had been smacked and as Dozsa dropped to his knees and fell sideways — right arm now looking like a Picasso painting — his mouth opened in a scream that made the buzzards rise from the treetops.
As the Israeli roared with pain and sobbed in the gravel, Bongo picked up the Ka-bar and offered it to Mac.
‘Honours are yours, McQueen,’ said Bongo.
Sitting up in the pool of his own blood, Mac took the knife. It felt good in his hand. But trying to crawl to Dozsa, who’d passed out, Mac felt something else overwhelming him and he leaned on his hands, staring at the small dark spots as his tears dropped into the dust.
His back heaved and his face screwed up and before he could control it, Mac was weeping. His face wet, Mac shook his head.
‘Shit, Bongo,’ he said, trying to get the words out without blubbering. ‘I mean, shit — Ray was my friend, you know?’
‘I know, brother,’ said Bongo. ‘Ray was good people.’
‘He was,’ said Mac, sniffing. ‘He was a thousand per cent.’
Dozsa moaned and moved as he regained consciousness.
Looking down at the knife in his hand, Mac discarded it in the gravel.
‘Screw this job,’ he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t even go to Ray’s funeral, know that, Bongo?’
Bongo looked away, probably with his own list of funerals, marriages and christenings not attended because of security concerns — every one of them a source of gnawing regret.
‘I’m not going to kill this wanker,’ said Mac, suddenly feeling very clear. ‘He’s going to stand in a courtroom, in fricking Saigon, and he’s going to answer for what he did.’
Bongo rubbed his chin. ‘This is Malaysia.’
‘Then we take the jet to Saigon,’ said Tranh, walking to Dozsa and standing over him. ‘The pilots are waiting.’
Sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of the Little Bird helicopter, Mac felt shivers of shock running through his body as he waited for Bongo and Tranh to secure Dozsa in the rear of the aircraft. Lance was concussed and had lost a lot of blood, but he was alive and talking.
Bongo finally buckled in and started the helo, and Mac realised he couldn’t stretch his le gs because of a large postal sack in the cockpit’s footwell.
‘What’s this?’ he said, putting on the ear cans as the revs built.
‘Dozsa’s boys were making off with it,’ said Bongo as the helo screamed. ‘Trying to reach the jungle.’
Mac saw blood on one side of the sack. ‘So you relieved them?’
‘Lightened their load,’ said Bongo, easing the helo skywards.
‘They were abandoning Dozsa?’
‘They had their reasons,’ said Bongo, banking the helo to the south. ‘About one point three million of them.’
‘This whole story just gets classier.’
‘So, we do the same deal, right, brother?’ said Bongo.
‘Same?’
‘Same as Dili. I’ll stash your cut,’ said Bongo.
Looking out on the lush jungle of the Cameron Highlands, Mac thought about it. He’d never joined the Firm to take money from people, but he could make an exception for Joel Dozsa.
‘Nice of you, Bongo,’ said Mac. ‘I’ll give you an address.’
Chapter 70
Mac got his second beer and a shot of Bundy and sat at the end of the bar in Tan Son Nhat’s business lounge. The television played a CNN loop out of the Asia centre and he let it wash over him as he prepped for his arrival back into family life — an emotional shock every bit as severe as the disruption of going into the field.
He’d spent a day in hospital and then four days in hotels, waiting for Scotty to pull the plug and order the team back to Canberra. Scotty had finally got the story straight, which was how he liked to run his field people before sitting in front of the brass.
The TV announced the cracking of another Indochinese sex- slavery ring near the Cambodian — Vietnamese border; this time a Chinese — Cambodian gang was responsible rather than the old favourites, the Khmer Rouge. The voiceover repeated the cops’ press release — one hundred and twelve captives, seventy-two of them children, bound for places such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Dubai. The footage showed buses being filled with the rescued people and several shots featured Jenny and her long-time FBI colleague, Milinda, talking to local men who had flexi-cuffs on their wrists. CNN showed the ship the human cargo were first transported in and then the warehouse where the rescue had occurred — an address that Mac knew had been provided by Vincent Loh Han.
Mac held his breath until the report was over; he’d never be comfortable with the danger his wife put herself in.
The main story leading the CNN news at the top and bottom of the hour was the North Korean allegation that the Pentagon had infiltrated their recent Taepodong missile tests and attempted to create a diplomatic crisis with Japan. The Secretary of Defense fronted a press conference in Manila, explaining how hard the White House was negotiating for ‘workable solutions’ in North Asia and denying any US counter-measures against the Korean missile tests.
A British reporter stood up — Mac recognised him as a smart-arse from the Financial Times’ Hong Kong office. Talking straight over the American TV reporters, he asked if the Department of Defense’s intense electronic monitoring of the missile tests could be re-purposed to hack the North Korean control room. The question was delivered in a tone that Americans found rude, and the room went quiet.