Mac was looking out over the sea and the historic Fort Rotterdam from his fourth-fl oor room at the Sedona for one reason: the Sedona didn’t always check or photocopy passports. So for now, he was Gary Penfold.
Mac turned to the paper bag on the room’s letter-writing table, emptying its contents: hair dye, nail polish remover, cotton buds and a bunch of recharge cards for the mobile. He picked up the Schwarzkopf 10N blonder – the most powerful you could get – and had a read of the instructions. Then he set to work on the mo: took his time stripping it with the nail polish remover. Next, he shook out the hair dye pack, mixed the two liquids in the bowl, got into the shower, wet his hair down, and then got out. Stood there in the bathroom painting the 10N onto his dark brown hair with the black brush, latex gloves on both hands. Dark brown, of the type he’d dyed himself with two days earlier, was about the darkest you could use and still reverse it with a chemist product. Anything darker and the only thing he could have used would be a peroxide. If he did that, he’d end up walking around Makassar with his hair all frizzy and screwed up, looking like a punk surfer.
He sat in a chair at the window, a shower cap on his head and a towel round his waist, watching the pinisi sailing boats coming and going from the old harbour between the new commercial ports. The pinisi boats were ancient working craft that still hauled sandalwood and cloves from the river systems and coastal towns down to Makassar.
The G-Shock sat on the table counting down twenty minutes. The phone was plugged in and charging. Mac picked it up and hit redial.
He got through to the switch bloke, who recognised Mac’s voice.
Bloke did a hissy sigh, so Mac wound him up, said, ‘Hi darling -
I’m home.’
Another big sigh. A click and a clunk. Mac thought he might have to have a word in the shell-like, but then suddenly it was a voice he recognised. ‘Hello. Hello!’
‘G’day, champ. ‘Zit going?’ said Mac.
Sawtell laughed. ‘I knew it was you. We had Taylor running around worried about some psycho with an Aussie accent.’
‘I’ve been called worse.’
‘I bet you have.’
They had a bit of a chat. Mac wanted to follow through on Limo, wondering if he could contribute to the pension that traditionally accompanies a dead soldier. Sawtell said the envelope had already been sealed and went with Limo’s effects to his mum. But thanks anyway for the thought.
Then Mac tried to ease Sawtell into things. ‘That’s some shit you guys have got up in Manila, huh, John?’
‘Manila? Yeah, we’re on stand-by. SEALs are already up there.’
‘Pretty big, huh?’
‘It sounds it. Dunno what they have.’
‘It’s chemical or bio, isn’t it?’
Sawtell laughed. ‘You playing me, my man?’
Mac laughed too. He couldn’t play John Sawtell, as much as he’d like to.
‘Where are you, anyway?’
‘Lombok,’ said Mac.
‘How’s Judith?’
‘She’s good. But still wasn’t talking when we got into Jakarta.’
‘How’s she now? She remember anything?’
‘Mate, it got taken out of my hands. Delivery boy. You know that movie.’
‘Sure do, my man. Sure do.’
‘Anyway, mate – I’ll let you go. Be careful up there though, eh?
They’ve shut down the whole port. Got DIA running the show, what I hear.’
‘Not for long.’
Mac said ‘No?’, trying to keep the curiosity out of his voice.
‘DIA are just securing the place,’ said Sawtell. ‘Doing the media and government control, what I hear. They’re waiting for the Twentieth to come in from Guam.’
Mac tried to remember. The Twentieth? What the fuck was the Twentieth?
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The comms guys?’
Sawtell sniggered. ‘No, man. CBRNE. The big leagues. All that wacko scientist shit.’
Mac said, ‘Fuck!’ Couldn’t help himself.
‘That too. I’m on need-to-know – can’t tell my boys. You know how the guys get when they know they goin’ to be round that shit.’
Mac did know. CBRNE stood for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and enhanced Explosive. It was the skunk-works end of warfare and your average soldier would pull any sickie, come up with any kind of excuse, to stay away from anything that had CBRNE attached to it. Which was why people like Sawtell were given orders to stand-by on a need-to-know.
Mac’s heart was racing. CBRNE! He was getting a really bad feeling about the whole thing. The worst of it was who they were fl ying in – the Navy SEALs and Green Berets, hardly experts in chemical spills.
You didn’t pull in special forces to man road blocks and write press releases.
A trickle of Schwarzkopf 10N ran down his temple. ‘John – what have they lost up there?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Sawtell. ‘But Poppa Bear wants it back.’
Mac stepped out onto the waterfront drive of Somba Opu in front of the Sedona. Palms waved in the breeze that came off the Strait.
Makassar was one of the oldest ports on the planet. From a time when all trade was maritime, Makassar sat on the crossroads of the most heavily used shipping lanes: north through the Macassar Strait to the Philippines; south across the Java Sea to Lombok, Surabaya, Madura and Bali; west down the Java Sea to Singapore, Jakarta and Penang; east through the Banda to the Pacifi c. It was still strategic.
Mac wondered where Hannah’s expertise had fi tted with Garrison and Sabaya. Wondered what the MPS warehouse had in it.
Everything was coming back to maritime.
He was back in his well-fi tting khaki chinos and dark blue polo shirt. He looked at his refl ection in the hotel’s tinted windows and saw thin blond hair, short and pushed back from his face. He looked all right for someone who was exhausted, cut loose and scared to death.
He turned south, walked casually, some inoffensive Anglo waiting for his bird-watching tour bus to arrive.
If it was Mac doing the tail he’d only be looking at four or fi ve hotels, and the Sedona would be one of them. The Pantai Gapura would be another. So Mac wanted Ray-Bans to show himself.
The oldest trick in the military book also applied to being tailed.
If you’re smaller with less fi repower, don’t meet your larger adversary on the ground of his choosing. Be moving, be erratic, be nimble.
Mac knew his adversary was not going to do what he had to do in the street. He didn’t want to languish in a Sulawesi lock-up any more than Mac did. So Ray-Bans would set an ambush, do it the easy way.
And Mac would try to make the bloke show himself.
Mac ducked into a side street. One of the old Dutch lanes built in the 1700s. It was narrow, fi lled with tourists and local traders. It smelled of cloves, of incense and dirt. He found a fi sh shop, sat back in the shadows and watched American tourists around him.
The owner approached and Mac pointed at the cook in his bolt-hole, saying, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’
The woman bowed, smiled and yelled something at the bloke in the tiny open-sided kitchen. The bloke looked at Mac. Mac gave thumbs-up. The bloke smiled. Nodded.
Turning his eyes back to the street, he saw what he was looking for. A bloke in a bright turquoise trop shirt with a bulge under the right hip made two passes, looking sideways into the restaurant. The passenger from the red Liberty was late twenties, about fi ve-eight and ninety kilos with a strong upper body but maybe not athletic.
Mac thought he detected fl at feet. He had a cop haircut and fl at cheekbones.
The meal came quick. Swordfi sh chunks stir-fried in a coriander and chilli sauce, goreng and an assortment of vegies. He asked the woman for a cold Bintang and hooked into the sword.
The cook brought the Bintang out himself.
‘Thanks, champ. This is some great tucker,’ said Mac.
The cook was chuffed. He smiled and tried to get through the language barrier. ‘Merry Carn?’ he asked.
Mac shook his head. ‘Nah, champ. Skippy.’ Mac did his bush-roo impersonation, paws up under his chin.
The bloke laughed out loud, put his hand on Mac’s shoulder before making his way back to the woks and gas rings. Javanese social interaction had two speeds: serious appraisal verging on suspicion, and outright joyous laughter. Laughter got you closer to the gods, so if you could get a laugh out of a Javanese, they owed you.
Mac fi nished the meal and dawdled with his beer, turning it round and sipping at it. Something nagged at him – some chatter he’d picked up a couple of years ago when he was posted in Manila. His barber, Ramon, had been a National Police intelligence offi cer during the Marcos era. Ramon cut hair for all the Customs guys, cops and the Port Authority bulls. He was like a clearing house for all the good chatter, all the stuff you couldn’t get from an embassy cocktail party or a keyhole satellite feed.
Which was why Mac had got his hair cut there.
He tried to get his memory working. Ramon had once told him about a discovery at Clark, the old US Air Force base about twenty minutes’ drive north of Manila. Apparently, in their haste to decommission the joint in 1992, an entire cache of hush-hush materiel had been left behind by the Yanks. There were huge underground systems at Clark. You could drive all day around the base and never see daylight. Someone forgot about an underground storage garage, and ten years later the Philippines government had demanded that the Department of Defense come back and pick it up.
Mac had remembered the last part of the conversation because Ramon had said, ‘It’s going out to Johnston – all being handled by the spooks now.’
Mac had remembered the Johnston bit only because he was dating a Canadian girl called Bethany Johnstone at the time. She was Canadian Customs intel – gorgeous, but a little on the bossy side.
Mac had chuckled at the thought of a bunch of hush-hush hazardous materiel being shipped to Beth.
He’d never taken it further. Conspiracies weren’t his thing and in truth the Filipinos loved nothing more than tales of forgotten caches of precious stuff. The story of Yamashita’s gold was a classic example.
During the Pacifi c War, the Japanese military under General Yamashita had looted gold reserves from wherever they invaded throughout South-East Asia, and they had hidden the vast caches in secret caves around the Philippines and northern Indonesia. Filipinos had grown up on stories of where the Yamashita Gold might be hidden.
The reference to spooks at Clark linked it for Mac. He wondered if the US cache at Clark was the same stuff that had now gone missing in Manila Bay. He wanted to get on the phone to Jakarta and just ask Jen to look it up. He wanted to have a serious conversation with Garvs
– cut through the bullshit. But it wasn’t going to work that way. He wasn’t going to get Jen in the shit and he wasn’t going to give Garvs a chance to order him home.
He wolfed the beer, fl attened some rupiah and stood to go.
Suddenly he had a fl ash: when he’d brokered the logging deal with Sabaya’s business negotiators, one of the entourage had been a tallish Eurasian-looking Filipino with a huge chromed handgun. He’d never said a word, just sat in the background and stared.
Mindanao ‘02 – the guy was Ray-Bans.