‘You armed, Mr Richard?’
‘No, mate,’ said Mac, wanting to get on Boo Bray’s tail.
Turning to hide his body from the patrons, Tranh fished a Ruger handgun from under his trop shirt and pushed it into Mac’s hand.
‘Where the fuck…?’ said Mac, before realising it was ridiculous to tell the locals to go unarmed.
‘Okay — we’ll meet back at the clubhouse,’ said Mac, shoving the Ruger into his waistband and covering it with his market shirt as he made for the exit.
The rear door behind the kitchen opened into a service alley that smelled the same as every service alley in South-East Asia — like an open sewer.
Mac stepped carefully into the putrid darkness, encountering two kitchen hands smoking and complaining from their apple-box perches. To his right a silhouette of a man jogged away towards the lights of the cross street and paused at the edge of a building. Crouching beside the kitchen hands as Boo Bray turned to check if he was being followed, Mac kept eyes on him and watched the Aussie look left and right and then move slowly out of the shadow he was hiding in.
Standing, Mac checked his own six o’clock and stealthed towards Bray, staying close to the wall and mountains of boxes, his mind racing. What had drawn Boo out into the night so quickly?
As he closed on Boo, an engine revved and Mac made himself a promise: all he wanted was a look at the set-up and perhaps some insight into Jim Quirk’s murder.
Boo Bray’s right hand moved with reflexive ease to the small of his back and what Mac assumed was a concealed firearm — the seven-shooter automatics that lay flat under a waistband. Then Boo stalked out of the darkness and crossed the street at the tail-end of a bunch of chatting locals.
Jogging through the darkness, Mac closed on the end of the alley as the engine’s revs climbed to a scream.
Making a hide behind a stack of boxes twenty feet before the end of the alley, Mac saw a large 4x4 flash by. Accelerating, the SUV was doing at least seventy kph in second gear as it hit Boo Bray with the front bumper bar, sending the Aussie eight feet into the air. Spinning over the bonnet like a rag doll, Boo slammed into the driver-side windscreen pillar and was flung onto the tarmac like chaff flying out of a combine.
Female screams blended with the shriek of the over-revved motor as it continued to accelerate into the distance. Breaking from his hide, Mac raced to the middle of the street where Boo Bray lay tangled and unconscious. Blood seeped dark and wet on the road as Mac knelt, grabbed Boo’s gun and trousered it — there was no need to complicate a road accident with concealed firearms.
‘Doctor — ambulance!’ yelled Mac at the growing crowd as he gulped for air.
A young man yelled into a mobile phone while giving the thumbs-up and Mac turned back to Boo: the blood was coming from the head, and the left arm — collarbone too, probably — was broken. Trying to keep his own adrenaline out of the equation, he felt Boo’s carotid and identified a pulse but decided against moving him for fear of exacerbating a spinal injury.
A siren wailed in the distance and Mac stood up slowly, panting with fear, his hyper-anxiety shutting out the yelling of the crowd which was openly gawking at the big Anglo lying in a twisted wreck. Beyond the throng, Mac focused on the hit-and-run vehicle, which took a left-hand corner a block north at high speed and disappeared.
Moving away from the crowd before the police arrived, Mac ducked into a store front on the other side of the street and dialled Tranh.
‘Mate, there’s been an accident.’
‘I know, we’re on the other side of the road. I’m looking at you now,’ said Tranh. ‘That’s your friend, right?’
‘Yeah. Tell Lance to stay with my friend, okay?’ said Mac as he glimpsed Tranh and Lance through the rubber-neckers. ‘Lance can go to the hospital, practise his cover.’
‘Okay,’ said Tranh.
‘You and I, we’re going to find the people who tailed my friend here, okay?’
‘Sure,’ said Tranh. ‘I think that’s them in the tuc-tuc, north of you.’
Looking, Mac saw the same tuc-tuc that had pulled up in front of the Ozzie Bar thirty minutes earlier: waiting, but with the driver seated and obviously on the clock, two heads in the back seat.
‘Brief Lance and get over here,’ said Mac as the tuc-tuc moved into the northbound traffic.
Hailing his own tuc-tuc, Mac got into the back seat and watched the crowd disperse as the ambulance and police arrived. Tranh jogged up, got in and issued instructions to the driver.
Mac had come up to Indochina to tail and report like a mature forty-year-old, but whoever was tailing him had moved to another level. In the Royal Marines, the entire culture was counter-attack: you hit me — I hit you; you shoot at me — you’d better have your vest on, mate. The first ten weeks of basic training at Poole had seen endless one-minute rounds of boxing where two candidates with gloves would slam the snot out of one another with no ducking or defensive manoeuvres allowed. You couldn’t retreat in these contests — once you toed the line, that’s where your toe stayed until the instructor called ‘time’. If you retreated you’d be thrown back in until you could no longer be called a ‘pea-heart’ — the lowest designation on a Royal Marines base.
It was brutal and bloody but it taught Mac a very important lesson: when intellect and guile were no longer options, the only way home was to bludgeon the other bastard harder than he could bludgeon you.
‘Tell him to keep eyes but hold back,’ said Mac, his face hardening as he touched the Ruger and felt Boo’s gun in the small of his back.
‘Did you see who ran down your friend?’ said Tranh.
‘Yeah.’
‘You know them?’
‘No, but they know us,’ said Mac. ‘From Saigon.’
‘Saigon?’ said Tranh, eyes wide.
‘Yeah, Tranh — my mate was run down by a green LandCruiser.’
‘Not the Prado?’ said Tranh.
‘Bingo,’ said Mac.
Chapter 24
The tail didn’t last long. The tuc-tuc carrying the Chinese men stopped at an intersection and then the two men who’d followed Boo Bray to the Ozzie Bar emerged from the cab and walked to a red Toyota Camry parked in front of a fruit store.
Mac got a look at them as his own tuc-tuc paused thirty metres behind the Toyota: one was tallish and slim, the other older — perhaps Mac’s age — and stocky but a smooth mover. Probably ex-military, decided Mac; most special forces soldiers eventually walked with their hips so their shoulders remained stable.
‘That them,’ said Tranh, as the older of the two men looked briefly in their direction before ducking into the passenger seat of the Toyota.
‘Them who?’ said Mac, abandoning the tuc-tuc to hail a taxi.
‘The strong one,’ said Tranh as a battered Nissan slowed to pick them up. ‘The one taking our picture.’
‘In Vietnam?’ said Mac, getting into the taxi.
‘In the red Patrol that passed us,’ said Tranh, frowning.
The tail wound westward through the changing territory of Phnom Penh, the taxi maintaining a hundred-metre distance from the red Camry. Phnom Penh was still an enigma, all these years after Mac had first explored it: some streets were cosmopolitan and Western — or at least Hong Kong — in outlook, while others looked and smelled like something out of the nineteenth century. Wafts of sewage and rotten cabbage suddenly gave way to miasmas of incense outside trendy restaurants. In some blocks, people slept on the streets, guarded by dead-eyed men in shorts and singlets, while neighbouring blocks were well-lit and seemed as prosperous as Singapore.
Mac’s mind was spinning as they moved further away from the river. What was going on? The crew who’d killed Jim Quirk in Saigon now runs over Boo Bray in Phnom Penh? Were the Chinese spies part of the same gig?