The Mercedes-Benz engine wasn’t enough to drown the Tagalog cursing. Then Bongo caught Mac’s eye in the mirror and held it.
‘Okay,’ snarled Bongo, his dark Ray-Bans barely able to contain the malice in his eyes. ‘But I’m not touching him, right?’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, breathing out.
‘I’ll show you the place, but I don’t rat a man once he’s buried, okay?’
As the sun came over the hills, they slowed and stopped for their first military checkpoint. Ducking down into the bench seat of the Mercedes’ half-cab, Mac listened to Bongo bullshit his way through it like a seasoned pro. Even without enough Bahasa Indonesia to follow all the conversation, it was clear to Mac that Bongo was regaling the guards with tales of a colonel’s halitosis or the crap food the 744 had to endure while those lazy 745 bastards in Dili got to eat anything they stole.
Handing out the cigarettes he’d found in the truck cab, Bongo got the rig moving again.
‘Don’t know what you said, but it sounded masterful,’ said Mac, coming out of hiding.
‘Pretending to be soldier is not hard in South-East Asia,’ said Bongo. ‘Just talk about how the brass don’t know what they doing, how politician are thieves and every base has a cook who can’t cook.’
Relieved, Mac mused on how fate had brought him together with one of the legends of spying in this part of the world. Bongo was allegedly so smooth in his covers that he sometimes found himself in tricky situations. Although known for his lisping blond concierge and his campy first-class steward covers, there was a rumour he’d once flown a Garuda 747 from Jakarta to Nagoya after his work-up had slightly oversold his experience.
‘Is that jumbo jet rumour true?’ asked Mac. ‘You know, the one about you flying to Japan?’
‘You kidding me?’ laughed Bongo. ‘You think they’d let me fly a 747?’
‘Guess not,’ said Mac.
‘Nah, brother. It was a 737 and it was only to Denpasar. The Indonesians are crazy, but they’re not stupid.’
The radio crackled to life as they crested a hill and Bongo keyed the handpiece. The conversation went back and forth, with Bongo maintaining the same sort of patter he’d managed with the checkpoint guards.
Hanging up, Bongo sighed as he fished for his cigarettes. ‘Time to find a new ride.’
‘What’s up?’ asked Mac.
‘Colonel in the engineers corps, reminding me that we have to be nice for our visitor and make it look like we busy and disciplined,’ smiled Bongo.
‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Mac.
‘They’re expecting the visitor at the camp at 0900 hours,’ said Bongo, lighting the smoke.
Mac looked at his G-Shock: 6.16 am.
‘And his name’s Captain Sudarto,’ added Bongo.
The next checkpoint was on a natural rise, and as the Mercedes-Benz slowed to a halt with a hiss of air brakes, Mac and Bongo still had the road to themselves.
Peeking from behind the driver’s seat, Mac saw a guard house with a green kijang parked beside it. A couple of bleary-eyed guards followed a more erect, more awake soldier out of the hut.
‘Why is there never a suppressor when you need one?’ muttered Bongo as the guard with the sergeant chevrons came around the front of the truck, ostentatiously noting the army rego plate on his clipboard as he passed.
His heartbeat ramping up, Mac waited behind the driver’s seat, his Beretta swimming in his hand as he waited for the imminent outburst of violence. Bongo wanted to dump the truck and he wanted to do it fast and clean. But having to drop someone created anxiety for Mac in the build-up and the aftermath; with his military training he could sleepwalk the actual assassination but controlling his fear and his guilt were the parts he had to work at.
The sergeant tried the officious tone and Bongo kept joshing. Then the tone changed and the sergeant squawked a second before a gun fired. Mac sprang from his hide in the half-cab and crawled across the centre console into the passenger seat which faced the guard house.
Running around the front of the Benz, Bongo shot the two sleepy guards before they could even present arms, while Mac jumped to the ground and rushed into the guard house. Kicking at the door on the side wall of the office, Mac surged through, his Beretta in cup-and-saucer which he swung in short arcs. In front of him, a soldier in white underwear reached for his rifle and Mac dropped him with two shots to the chest.
Swinging back, Mac beaded on two shapes sitting on a lower bunk bed. They were young women, holding sheets over them, wide-eyed with fear.
‘Hands,’ said Mac, gulping for air as the soldier gurgled on the wooden floor.
Whimpering, the girls stared back but kept their hands under the sheets.
‘I said hands!’ screamed Mac. ‘Tangan! Show me your hands!’
Behind him, Bongo stormed into the bunk house and immediately the girls lifted their hands from the sheets and stood up, covering their naked bodies.
Talking gently, Bongo moved the girls to a table and got them sitting in the chairs, though they shook with fear.
‘You okay?’ asked Bongo, when he realised Mac wasn’t moving.
‘I don’t know, mate,’ said Mac, breathing rapidly. ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore.’
‘No kidding?’
Turning back to the girls, Bongo asked a few questions and then when one of them nodded and attempted a smile, he turned to Mac.
‘Can you hold things together for two minutes?’ he asked.
‘Yep, sure,’ said Mac, making his feet move. ‘Just tired, I think.’
‘Good,’ said Bongo, collecting the guns from the room and saying something to the girls as he and Mac headed outside.
After they’d loaded the dead soldiers into the cab of the truck, Bongo got behind the wheel and drove it into the widest point of the road, pointing towards the trees. Then Bongo forced the dead sergeant’s foot onto the accelerator as he pushed back off the step. Revving to the red line, the Mercedes pushed into the bushes and hauled its trailer and bulldozer with it. They stood on the side of the road and watched the rig launch down the ravine, crashing through trees as it made its way to the bottom.
To the passing motorist, there would be no sign that a forty-tonne transporter and its bulldozer had just driven off the edge, which cheered Mac slightly. What wasn’t pleasing was the way he’d jammed up in the bunk house. His instructor in the Royal Marines, Banger Jordan, would have described his behaviour as about as useful as a cunt full of cold water.
‘So far, so good, yeah?’ asked Bongo, dangling the keys to the kijang as they walked back to the guard house.
‘Sorry about that – you know, before?’ said Mac, still not breathing easily.
‘It’s okay, McQueen.’
‘Really?’
‘First you got the heat exhaustion, then you got interrogated and beaten, and you haven’t slept for two days. You get brain-fade – happens to everyone.’
The sun finally came up as they walked to the kijang, and Mac wanted to be in that vehicle, making fast time for Dili.
‘Where you going?’ asked Bongo.
‘We’re outa here, aren’t we?’ said Mac, his hand reaching for the vehicle’s door.
‘Forgot to tell you, McQueen,’ he smiled. ‘That girl you nearly shot?’
‘Which one?’
‘The pretty one with big smile?’
‘Yep?’ said Mac.
‘That’s Florita Gersao.’
Mac didn’t get it.
‘You know, McQueen,’ said Bongo. ‘Sister of Maria Gersao – Blackbird.’
CHAPTER 26
Bongo dressed the girl called Marta in a soldier’s outfit, pulled her hair up and put an army cap on her head. Marta wasn’t happy with the arrangement but she wanted to be out of Bobonaro so she sat up front with Bongo while Mac sat under the canvas cover in the back of the pick-up truck, talking with Florita.
‘Maria alive?’ asked Mac.
‘Maybe, yes,’ said the girl, who Mac guessed was about sixteen.
‘You know where she is?’ asked Mac.
‘No, mister,’ said Florita, big sad eyes.
‘Rumours?’ asked Mac, knowing that East Timor had a jungle drum that was better than most newspapers for speed and accuracy.
‘Army got her, in Bobonaro. Maybe in Nusa Tenggara.’
‘Where’s your family?’
‘Maria taken by army, then Mum and Dad,’ she sniffled. ‘Then soldiers come…’
‘It’s okay,’ said Mac. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, pushing her palms into her eyes as she started to cry.
‘Your parents, Florita – they CNRT?’ asked Mac, referring to the grouping of Timorese organisations endorsing an independence vote in the ballot. ‘They politically active?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Florita, shutting down. Even the kids knew not to talk politics with strangers in East Timor.
‘Were they doing anything that would make the soldiers take them away?’
The kijang’s horn sounded and Bongo yelled at someone. Leaning back, Mac got a sight line through the flapping canvas canopy. They were going past Balibo’s soccer ground and a bunch of youths in Hali Lintar militia T-shirts were waving and holding their M16s aloft as the army kijang went past.
‘You from Jakarta?’ asked Florita.
‘No, I’m from New Zealand,’ he said.
‘Must not say you see Marta with soldier,’ said Florita, regaining composure and wiping tears with her fingertips. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay, sure,’ said Mac. ‘Why not?’
‘Her father very strict – so, you not saying, right?’
‘Agreed,’ said Mac, holding his hand out and shaking.
‘My parent do nothing,’ she continued.
‘Never in trouble?’
‘No, mister.’
‘What about Maria? She political? In trouble?’
‘No, mister. She work at army office – they check her out.’
Mac’s brain swam with fear and fatigue, making it hard to concentrate. Since she couldn’t tell him where Blackbird was being held, there was nothing else to ask.
‘Well, that’s it then,’ smiled Mac. ‘We’ll have you back in Dili soon.’
‘You know, my sister a good person, mister.’
‘I’m sure she is,’ said Mac, distracted and wondering what Bongo’s promised alternative route into Dili might be.
‘Army trust her, and intel too.’
‘Intel?’ asked Mac, not quite on the pace.
‘Yeah, she had meeting with intel – she say she don’t,’ said Florita, her expression conspiratorial. ‘But we see her in car with the intel man.’
‘The intel man?’ asked Mac, very slowly.
‘Yep.’
‘How did you know he was intel?’
‘Everyone know the captain,’ she said.
‘Captain?’
‘Yep, mister,’ said Florita. ‘The big malai – Captain Sudarto.’