Which left the memory chip and Jim Quirk. If the memory card didn’t have the currency protocols, what was on the chip and what was Quirk working on?
And where were the hundreds of billions in US currency?
The drive took almost as long as the footpad they’d followed Tani across the night before. It was barely wide enough to allow a vehicle through and was punctuated by boggy creek crossings and deep wash-outs. A two-wheel-drive vehicle would not have made it.
Mac listened to a rural Cambodian radio service that played cover versions of Debbie Boone and Anne Murray and he tried to come up with a plan. He felt snookered in one sense — Aussie hostages always changed the approach. But there were other ways forwards, perhaps. The memory chip was a plus, if he could find it without Grimshaw knowing. Also, McHugh was alive and she could be debriefed, as could Sammy Chan; he didn’t know how he was going to make use of Sammy, but the American knew more than he was telling and he’d have to be questioned. If he turned up.
After two hours of driving, Mac had left the highlands and come down to the warmer, monkey-infested climbs of the Mekong river flats. Easing through the dappled light of the jungle, he found the thick bush area near where they’d stowed the Silverado and motorbikes.
Turning up the radio, Mac eased quietly from the idling LandCruiser and limped downhill to the creek bed where they’d left the vehicles.
Eyeing the Silverado through the foliage, Mac cased the area and walked slowly around it for ten minutes, looking for people, smelling for cigarettes and aftershave, and keeping his eyes open for trip wires and other nasties.
Moving forwards, wincing at every cracking twig and annoyed at the constant hubbub of monkeys talking to birds, Mac finally got to the Yamaha he’d been riding the night before. Kneeling, he looked for IEDs, opened sumps, drained gas tanks — all the standard sabotages designed to either kill or frustrate the enemy. It looked clean and the keys were still in the ignition, where he’d left them. Pulling the seat up on its sideways hinge, Mac found the Nokia, also where he’d left it.
Approaching the Silverado’s king cab he looked in the tinted windows. It was unoccupied. Lying under the cab, Mac checked for unwanted wires and packages, and checked the brake lines. The light-bulb bomb was still fresh in his mind and he was hypersensitive to the idea of an IED exploding in his face.
The new-car smell wafted as Mac sat in the driver’s seat and rummaged in the centre console and the glove box, and had an extended look around the ignition assembly and under the steering column, looking for tampering. The keys were on the sunshade and there was a stash of US twenty-dollar notes in the console, which he trousered. But Mac couldn’t find what he was looking for: Tranh’s red phone and a first-aid kit.
The rear seats of the king cab were clean too, except for several discarded water bottles. Reaching back he pulled down the rear seat’s centre console and found the green nylon bag with a white cross on the cover. Riffling through it he found the T3s and popped two of the painkillers in his mouth, noting the saline vials and the iodine wash that would come in handy when he re-dressed his bullet wound. There was also a plastic bag on the floor of the crew cab containing a change of clothes. Pulling them out and checking the sizes, Mac stripped out of his possibly bugged clothing and changed into the new fatigues.
Grabbing the keys, Mac headed for the rear of the pick-up truck.
He needn’t have bothered with the keys — the closed-in rear section of the Chev was open and as he pushed up the tinted window door, he noticed two things at once: Sammy had packed enough ordnance to take down a mid-sized military base; and the handgun aimed at his nose was cocked before his eyes could widen in surprise.
‘Halt,’ said the girl, her grip steady and eyes levelled.
‘Tani?’ said Mac, his heart bouncing as he raised his arms.
‘That you, mister?’ said the girl. ‘Where my fifty dollar?’
Chapter 52
Mac checked the bags for useful weapons as Tani pulled up beside the Silverado in the LandCruiser. One thing he liked about country girls, they could drive anything.
‘So, the police,’ said Mac, who’d been thinking about Tani’s observation that the area around the checkpoint was crawling with cops — that was why she’d been hiding out in the Chev. ‘They uniforms — town police — or political?’
‘Some town police, some intel,’ she said, looking into the gear bag as he rummaged through it on the lowered tailgate.
‘But there’s another way, right?’ said Mac, loading and chambering a 9mm SIG handgun. ‘To the river and Kratie, I mean?’
‘Sure,’ said Tani, grabbing a SIG of her own from the canvas bag and inspecting it.
‘You can point me the way,’ said Mac.
‘I show,’ said Tani, slamming a clip up into the SIG’s handle.
‘No, you don’t have to come — this is where you belong,’ said Mac, placing his SIG on the tailgate beside the four clips of ammo.
‘I show,’ said Tani, as if she hadn’t heard him.
Mac pulled another bag towards him and extracted an M4 carbine — a shortened, modern version of the classic M16, with a grenade-launcher attached under the barrel.
‘I’d rather go alone,’ said Mac, holding up his Nokia, annoyed that he still had no cell coverage.
‘That work at the river,’ said Tani, pointing at the phone. ‘Come on — I take you.’
Shaking his head at her stubbornness, Mac stowed the M4.
‘I like this one,’ said Tani, holding up the SIG Sauer.
The footpad to the Mekong was easier than the one into the hills they’d taken the night before and Mac managed to keep up with Tani’s motorbike as they puttered through the jungle.
Yellow light filtered through the high-canopy forest creating a distinct atmosphere that existed nowhere except South-East Asia. It smelled of old smoke, wet dirt and monkey shit. As they motored past a meeting of canoe-bound peasants trading goods on a Mekong tributary, the footpad widened. After two minutes it turned into a jungle highway, populated with carts pulled by cattle and elderly forest people pushing handcarts and carrying poles of catfish across their shoulders. Whenever he heard an Australian complaining of how hard he worked, Mac always reminded himself of Indochina and what most eighty-year-olds did just to fill their bellies.
Emerging on the road that followed the western side of the Mekong, Mac stopped behind Tani’s bike and they cut their engines.
As Mac dismounted, a small group of farmers wandered off the road onto the jungle footpad. The one at the back knew Tani and stopped for a chat.
‘Police and intel, they gone,’ said Tani, as her friend rejoined the group.
‘Good,’ said Mac, relieved. ‘Probably best you don’t talk about me.’ Flicking Tani three US twenties, Mac asked for the SIG to be returned. ‘Trust me, you don’t want this to be the talk of the village when the intel comes back.’
‘I not tell about you, mister,’ said Tani, big eyes and serious mouth.
‘Great,’ said Mac. ‘But I need that gun.’
A tinker moved past them, a whole pile of junk on a cart pulled by a mini horse. Holding up a plastic bag containing his discarded clothes, Mac offered it and the tinker grabbed the bag with a toothless smile, looking through it before tossing it in with the rest of his stuff. It wasn’t a high-tech tactic, but it might get Dozsa confused for a few hours about where his messenger had gone.
‘Okay, keep it,’ said Mac, as Tani made to go. ‘But someone asks you about me or the weapon, tell them the truth. No heroes, okay?’
Watching Tani park her bike and walk north with a wave, Mac pulled his Nokia from his breast pocket and fossicked a bottle of water from the canvas bag on the bike’s carrier. Dialling, he waited and recognised the Aussie voice that answered.