‘Ready, mister?’ said the boat owner, a tallish local named Li.
‘One call, then we go,’ said Mac, pointing at his Nokia.
‘No worry,’ said Li, twirling the radio in the cockpit and coming up with a Thai rock star’s version of ‘Like a Virgin’.
Leaping into the boat, Scotty puffed from the effort of jumping.
‘Gotta knock off the booze,’ he said, poking at the two black kit bags. ‘This is it? Thought the Yanks would travel with more than that.’
‘Couple of assault rifles and some flash-bangs,’ said Mac. ‘And Grimshaw didn’t want to give up that much, either.’
‘It’s just us, mate,’ said Scotty, reaching for his smokes but catching a look from Li. ‘Sandy’s operation is totally Defence and we can’t even look at those Team Four boys, let alone bring them along for support.’
‘Tobin said this?’
‘Tobin, quoting Karl Berquist,’ said Scotty. ‘Defence is a loop with the PM all of a sudden.’
‘Tobin tell you to leave Urquhart and Lance?’ said Mac.
‘You kidding?’ said Scotty. ‘Firm doesn’t need to know about this — I just told him we might need Team Four for a spot of bother and he warned me off like I was asking his daughter to go on a P&O cruise.’
‘So we’re it?’ said Mac, as the stinking river slapped against the hull. ‘You feeling fit, old man?’
‘Not bad for a desk jockey.’ Scotty lit the smoke and held it over the edge.
Mac’s Nokia trilled and he answered. Clicking his fingers at Scotty, he repeated the coordinates from the latest fix on the micro-transmitter sitting in Lance’s stomach. Scotty scribbled on a map.
‘Thanks, Charles — owe ya,’ said Mac, signing off.
Mac looked down at the plots, illuminated by the wharf floodlights: the three fixes on that transmitter had Lance moving down the Mekong, about ten miles south of Kratie.
‘Know this?’ said Mac to Li, pointing to the plots on the map.
‘Sure, mister — ’bout fif’ minute.’
‘Fifteen?’
‘Sure, mister,’ said Li. ‘Go now?’
‘Yep, let’s go,’ said Mac, watching Li’s offsider — a boy of about sixteen called Johnny — cast off the lines and jump into the boat.
Mac’s adrenaline surged as Li eased on the power from the twin Evinrudes and the bow lifted into the Mekong. The dank smell and the darkness enveloped him as they slipped into the downstream of one of the oldest commercial highways in the world.
Getting the boat onto a plane, Li sat in the skipper’s stool and navigated with a small headlight mounted on the right bow while Mac searched in the gear bag. Pulling out a tub of eye-black, he dabbed three fingertips of his right hand into the greasy dark goo, and smoothed it across his face and forehead in streaks.
Scotty lit another smoke. ‘Look like one of them Maoris.’
‘Your turn,’ said Mac, dipping his fingers into the pot and streaking Scotty’s face with black greasepaint.
Pulling two hats from the bag, Mac offered one to Scotty.
‘These cricket hats?’ said Scotty, who’d gone straight from basic training to military intelligence back in the seventies.
‘Break up the shape of the head,’ said Mac. ‘We recognise humans from their gait, and the shape of the head. There’s a few tricks we can play with the gait, but hiding the melon is much easier.’
‘It works?’ said Scotty, turning the American boonie hat in his hands.
‘If it gives you half a second, it’s working,’ said Mac, smiling at his repetition of what Banger Jordan had told them in the Royal Marines: ‘A good soldier takes two seconds to aim and take an accurate shot; if you buy yourself half a second, you win and the other cunt’s dead.’
Banger had fought in the Falklands, and had been out of uniform for six years when Mac was under him at Poole. The rumour was he’d been doing assignments for British SIS during his absence, a rumour the Geordie had laughed off with jokes about how James Bond never took a crap and called it shite.
Mac remembered getting the feeling from Jordan that the more a man had committed the ultimate sin, the less he wanted people to know that about him. Pulling a box of condoms from the bag, Mac watched the lights of the fishing villages slip by, and realised the circle he’d taken hadn’t started and finished in the Firm. His circle was a soldier’s journey: he was becoming Banger Jordan.
‘The fuck are they for?’ asked Scotty, pointing at the condoms. ‘You stopping off for a root?’
Planting the M4 carbine between his knees, Mac tore the Durex packet open with his teeth and rolled the rubber down over the muzzle, tying it off against the barrel.
‘It’s what the British military calls waterproofing,’ said Mac as he handed it to Scotty. ‘They don’t care if you march all day through a swamp, in the rain — your weapon must work when it has to work.’
‘Okay,’ said Scotty as they scythed through the dark waters of the Nine Dragons. ‘What’s the plan?’
The lights of the river cruiser blinked through the haze on the Mekong, four hundred metres downstream. It was an eighty-foot diesel-powered Mekong bus of the kind that plied the river between small towns and villages — this was not a tourist vessel.
Mac watched it from the cockpit, using the captain’s binos and issuing hushed commands.
‘Okay, boss,’ said Mac, not taking his eyes off the river cruiser. ‘Cut power.’
Mac had just finished his final call to Grimshaw — the micro-transmitter was emitting from right beneath them. There couldn’t be any other target than the craft in front of them, the number K 4217 just visible on the bow.
‘Know this ship?’ said Mac, as Li cut the engines to a burbling idle.
Taking his field-glasses from Mac, Li peered into the darkness, the double-decked wooden cruiser becoming more obvious as it chugged past the floodlights of a general store which had a 1960s Elf bowser sticking out of its decking.
‘I not know this one, mister,’ said Li, shrugging. ‘Much like this. Many.’
‘Okay — cut the lights.’
‘No, mister,’ said Captain Li, shaking his head. ‘Water police — no good.’
Placing two US fifty-dollar bills on the cockpit dashboard, Mac saw them hoovered up and the lights go down on the boat.
‘Captain Li, that’s for you if you stick around, do as I say,’ said Mac, pulling four more of the bills out of his plastic Ziploc bag. ‘Two hundred US — all you have to do is motor alongside, and ask the other captain if he saw the flares.’
‘And when he say “no”, I say I saw the red flares — are you in distress?’
‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘From the first word you speak, to the point you stand off, I must have one hundred and twenty seconds. I need two minutes, okay?’
‘Sure, mister,’ said Li, gulping.
‘And then stand off and wait until we’re finished, okay?’
‘Okay, mister.’ Li avoided Mac’s eyes.
‘And Li?’ said Mac, grabbing the field-glasses and having another look.
‘Yes, mister?’
‘Keep the kid out of it, okay?’
Sitting in the aft-decks with Scotty, Mac made a final run-through as he fished the SCUBA face mask from the bag.
‘So, no heroes, okay, Scotty?’ said Mac, stripping to his underwear and wiping the eye-black over his thighs, arms and chest. ‘You only show your head with that carbine if the goons on this cruiser don’t give me two minutes.’
‘Gotcha,’ said Scotty, his moustache twitching from his blacked-out face.
Handing the pot of black paint to Scotty, Mac asked him to do his back.