‘Boa?’ she said, recovering her former poise. ‘I don’t even know who you are.’
‘I told -’
‘You could be anyone, you could be working for anybody. I never met you.’
Shrugging, Mac conceded her point. His job was to bring her out of East Timor, and then her trusted controller – Atkins most likely – would run the debrief.
‘I am sorry to waste your time and make you run around in jungle,’ she said, with kind eyes. ‘But I did what you asked, I took the files and did the drop box, so please do not ask me to betray my own family.’
‘I thought the Timorese were proud people,’ said Mac, trying for one last manipulation to turn her back.
‘We are,’ smiled the young woman, sniffling. ‘And I am proud to keep my family alive.’
Looking out over the beach, Mac assessed possible problem points for the exfil. The tide was in and by midnight it would be almost back in the same place. He would have to be careful to bring the boat in between a couple of markers and, walking to the water’s edge, he identified the distinctive rocks, gave them names and committed them to memory. He wanted to be able to give the navy boat crew some basic trig points to get them to shore without being snagged on the reef just below the surface.
Looking at his G-Shock, he felt a wave of fatigue and wondered if he shouldn’t take a nap while the commandos were still guarding the perimeter.
Making a single round of the crow’s nest, he made back to his hide and slugged at his water while Blackbird slept. It was amazing how sweet water tasted when it was all you had, he mused. As he replaced the bottle in his rucksack, he noticed the water was slightly milky. Licking at his lips, he realised it actually was sweet – his thirst had nothing to do with it.
Mind spinning, Mac reached for his rucksack, eyelids starting to droop. Pulling out the first-aid kit, he clocked that one of the benzo boxes had been torn open, the half-empty foil beside it.
‘Fuck,’ thought Mac, ‘she’s used half a packet.’
Darkness closed in from the sides of his vision and a warm, safe sleepiness engulfed him. After nine years of pushing them into people’s mouths, he finally knew what Mogadon felt like.
The onshore wind felt beautiful on Mac’s face as he opened his eyes, becoming aware of the crashing surf and the night sky through the swishing palms.
Leaning over him, Beast peered and waved his hand from side to side. ‘Awake, Macca?’ he asked, squinting.
‘Think so,’ croaked Mac, his voice sounding like it was coming from a thousand miles away.
Robbo appeared beside Beast and they pulled him up into a sitting position, Mac’s brain swirling like a top.
‘Sorry, boys…’ he started, and then leaned to the side and vomited as Beast jumped back to keep his pants clean.
He felt foggy in the brain and hungry in the stomach, but mostly Mac was confused. ‘What’s up, guys?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with his shirt front.
‘You lost the girl,’ said Robbo, pushing up Mac’s eyeballs and shining his flashlight in them. ‘You were out to it, mate – girl drugged you. Mogadon by the looks of it.’
Shaking some clarity into his brain, Mac recalled some of the morning’s events and moaned as he realised he’d been duped.
‘She gone?’ he slurred.
‘No, we caught her,’ said Robbo. ‘But we had to move, and you have to get on the net, re-call the exfil.’
‘I do?’ asked Mac, still waking up.
Behind Robbo, Blackbird’s hair blew in the sea breeze. Locking eyes with Mac, she gave a shrug that might have been an apology.
‘Our position was blown,’ said Robbo. ‘And you’re the one with the exfil call signs – we’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’
‘We’ve been made?’ said Mac.
‘No, mate – we moved before that,’ said Robbo, offering him another banana.
‘How did you know we were blown?’ asked Mac, confused.
‘The girl took off with your sat phone.’
‘Bitch,’ sighed Mac, despite some begrudging admiration.
‘Something like that,’ said Robbo.
CHAPTER 50
It was past midday when Mac awoke to the trilling of the Nokia on his beside table. Scrambling for the phone in the dimness of his room at the Natour Bali he listened before hanging up and rolling out of the bed with a groan. The debrief location had been changed from Atkins’ offices to DIA’s headquarters in Denpasar.
As the shower water pelted his head, Mac willed himself to wake up and get his thoughts together. After delaying the Blackbird exfil by a day, during which he got almost no sleep, he’d then spent another day and night on boats, ships and a helo before hitting his pillow just ten hours earlier. Putting the exhaustion to one side, he thought about what he would say at the debrief and, more importantly, what he wouldn’t say. Having spent four days in East Timor on Operation Totem, he could claim that he and the 4RAR Commandos nailed two of the three objectives: Blackbird snatched and exfiltrated to a secret location for debriefing by Australian SIS and the Pentagon, and Lombok AgriCorp’s secret facility infiltrated, photographed and sampled.
It was a difficult tasking, and Mac was proud of the Aussies for punching above their weight.
The secret airfield was not so successful, but Mac wasn’t concerned. It looked like Haryono’s administration offices for his various interests, one of which was making illegal drugs for sale to middle-class fools in Australia and Japan. The actual set-up was obviously an agricultural spraying depot, probably for mosquitos. If the Indonesians wanted to conduct secret DDT programs in contravention of the UN’s ban on outdoor spraying, then it was fine with Mac – DDT being the cheapest and most powerful enhancer of quality of life for anyone who lived in malarial zones, regardless of what non-malarial greenies in London and San Francisco said about it.
There were loose ends that niggled at Mac’s mind, but they weren’t enough to ruin his morning. The underground facility at Lombok, for instance, didn’t strike him as being a drug lab. Mac had never seen a methamphetamine factory, or a cocaine lab, but he’d heard they smelled of powerful solvents and he assumed they didn’t include live testing programs. After his debrief, he would be eased out of Totem, but he might ask around – see how others interpreted that strange underground world.
Making a cup of green tea, he found himself thinking about Blackbird. She was no longer his problem – he’d been sent to find Australia’s hottest spy and he’d done it. But it was an anticlimax to risk so much only to discover that she was ambivalent at best, treacherous at worst.
Seeing the time, Mac stood to go and noticed his rucksack. The American courier at the base behind Denpasar’s Ngurah Rai Airport had been so insistent about getting Mac’s samples as soon he stepped off the helo that she hadn’t asked for the return of DIA’s digital Nikon.
Lifting it from the bag, Mac inspected the camera’s damaged data-jack area and had an idea.
Scanning the street outside the Natour, Mac grabbed the fourth cab, waving the first three away as soon as they stopped.
Giving an address four blocks south of Puputan Square, Mac settled in the back seat of the air-conditioned Camry and sat directly behind the driver so he could clock the bloke’s face in the rear-vision mirror.
‘Still the dry weather – good for you, sir,’ said the driver, a well-presented man in his early thirties.
‘Better than the monsoon?’ asked Mac, smiling.
‘No good for tourist,’ said the bloke, shaking his head slowly. ‘They get wet and crazy, then go home and say Bali is wet and crazy.’
‘That’s about right,’ said Mac, chuckling as the street stalls and crowds flashed by in his window.
Flipping the driver a US fifty-dollar note as they stopped, Mac asked him to drive to the Golden Lantern and wait outside for ten minutes.