Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (45 page)

‘Holy shit!’ muttered Paul, then retched.

They stopped beside a red forty-foot container with white ID

markings but no shipping company logo. Mac tried to control his breathing, put the back of his hand to his mouth not knowing whether to retch or cry.

Sawtell and Mac looked at each other. Neither wanted to be the fi rst to puke.

‘
Fuck!
‘ complained Paul, wiping dribble from the side of his mouth.

Sawtell squinted at Mac. ‘That the smell of … of
people
?’ he said.

Mac unholstered the Heckler out of its rig, his legs shaking and sweat running down his face from under his cap. His feet swam in his Hi-Tecs as he stepped forward and tapped on the steel side with the Heckler.

Nothing.

They looked at each other, their breathing crashing like Bondi surf.

Mac was about to go to another container. Then they heard what sounded like a squawk.

They waited a few seconds. Then came some murmurs. Muffl ed.

Indistinct.

Sawtell grabbed Mac’s bicep.

Then screams, cries.

‘Hello,’ Mac shouted, tapping on the steel side again.

Voices were now obvious. Young voices.

Sawtell almost wrenched Mac’s arm off, his face aghast. ‘That’s -

That’s … That’s kids. Fucking
children
!’

Mac tapped the side again. Shouted, ‘You okay?’

The noise rose to the sound of a playground of yelling kids from a block away.

Sawtell ran down the side of the box, bare-chested, panicked, sweat pouring down his back. He took the corner around the container so fast he had to grip on the pillar to stay upright. Mac was behind him. Sawtell stopped, fumbled with a huge padlock on the locking handles of the door and then shook at it like a madman, gripping on it so hard it looked like his fi ngers could knit into the padlock hook.

Sounds from inside the box got louder.

Mac yelled, ‘It’s okay - we’re getting there.’

Then he stepped back, pulled out his Nokia and dialled Jenny, who was having lunch with her crew. Mac gave her the address, asked,

‘Could you give us a hand?’

Sawtell keyed the radio, yelled for someone to get the angle grinder from the helo and bring it.

The sounds of screaming and pleading from the container were now joined by a drumming sound - scores of tiny hands banging on a steel box.

Sawtell was losing it. He stood back, levelled his Beretta at the locks on the door until Mac stepped in, stopped him. Not such a good idea.

Sawtell looked at Mac, shaking his head slowly like
This is not
happening
. ‘Kids! What the fuck is a bunch of kids doing in a fucking container?!’ he shouted, slapping on the container door with a big open hand.

Little hands banged back from the inside. Tiny voices screaming
Maa, Maa, Maa
.

Sawtell was crying as he zeroed in on Mac. ‘Well?’

‘Mate, they’re … um.’

‘
Yes?
‘ yelled Sawtell.

‘They’re, probably, you know, sex slaves. I can’t be sure …’

‘
What?
‘

‘They’re probably being shipped to, you know …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Umm, paedophile brothels, private clients - or owners, whatever they’re called.’

The din of children got worse. Crying, pleading.

The smell and sound warped the air.

Sawtell seemed to look straight through him and for a split second Mac thought he was going to have his head torn off.

Suddenly shouting echoed in the sub-level.

‘Over here, guys,’ yelled Mac.

The Green Berets arrived with a big green canvas gear bag and pinch bars.

Sawtell pointed at the container. ‘Open it. Now!’ he ordered, beyond fury.

The two forced-entry guys set up their stuff. One ran to fi nd power, the other guy set up the angle grinder.

The medic team arrived too, got to work on Paul.

Sawtell stood over Jansen, the angle-grinder guy, whispering like a maniac. ‘This is going to be the fastest forced entry you ever pull, Jansen. You hear me? They’ll give you a goddamned gold medal for this.’

Jansen nodded, put on his protective visor and gloves then busied himself with the machine, ensuring that nothing could go wrong.

The other guy reappeared with orange cable for Jansen’s angle grinder, and then picked up the pinch bar.

The children still banged and yelled.

Jansen powered up and stepped over to the door bolts. Sparks poured like an orange waterfall as he went to work.

The two doors had big handles which folded inwards where the doors met. When the handles were folded down, they locked in place security bars that extended from the top to the bottom of each door. Each door had two vertical locking bars and there was a massive German padlock securing the handles over one another in the centre of the doors. Jansen had to chop out the centre sections of the security bars; the German lock would be hardened steel and would take too long.

The noise and smell were too much for Paul, and the medic guys escorted him away. Mac went with them and pulled out the phone, hitting redial. Jenny picked up and said, ‘Almost there.’

Mac jogged up the service ramps to the main warehouse entry, pressed a button and the huge roller door went up. The scream of the angle grinder burst out into the sunlight.

The frontage apron of the warehouse now hosted a Gazelle and a Black Hawk, the pilots chewing the fat.

After three minutes a blue Commodore wagon raced onto the front apron area, a POLRI light truck behind it.

The Commodore stopped beside Mac, Jenny in the front passenger seat. Mac just said, ‘Sub-level, you can drive down.’

‘You okay?’ said Jenny.

Mac shook his head, pointed into the building.

They squealed off, the POLRI truck following. A third vehicle parked on the apron. It was a mid-sized, unmarked bus. Empty.

Two POLRI women got out and opened the side storage areas, pulling out piles of blankets, white towels, portable shower stands and large blue plastic bags. One bag fell over, spilling children’s gear on the concrete apron. There were dresses, undies, sandals.

Soft toys.

Mac waited for the ambulance and directed it down to the sub-level.

As he walked down he felt his pulse increasing again. He gagged on the smell, fl inched at the screaming noise, feeling the fear and pain in the people down there.

The door was almost off when Mac arrived. Sawtell stood behind his team, eyes huge, a mix of fear and rage, his body poised like a professional wrestler about to clinch.

A POLRI woman videotaped the proceedings, while Jenny yelled into a radio handset, one fi nger in her left ear. After she got off the radio she conferred with her POLRI colleagues.

A decision apparently made, she walked over to Sawtell, who turned to her. For a second Mac saw a scared boy under that machine-like exterior.

The angle grinder suddenly free-revved for a split second and Jansen shut it down. Smoke hung, mixing with the container smell.

Hideous.

The kids started up again as Jansen’s offsider pulled back on a pinch bar. Metal twisted and ground against itself, and the right-hand door swung open like the scene in a ghost movie.

Mac felt bile coming up as the stench fl ooded the enclosed space.

A small dark fi gure was the fi rst out. Cambodian. Five years old.

Big eyes. Naked. Shit all over her.

Looked around. Confused.

‘Maa?’ she said.

Mac, Sawtell and Paul sat speechless outside the offi ce section of the warehouse.

Paul had been cleaned, stitched and given a morphine needle.

He didn’t want to be in the ambulance. Wanted the more critically ill kids in it.

Sawtell was blanked out. Thousand-yard stare into nothing. Even his own men were leaving him alone.

Mac had cordoned off the far-end ramp to the sub-level, hoping the POLRI might fi nd some Garrison blood samples down there. He wondered what was happening in Singapore and tried to understand the situation now that he’d actually seen Garrison and Diane together in a getaway car.

Mac was so tired he could barely keep his eyelids up, even with the circus that had descended around them.

To their left, the POLRI women scrubbed down the healthier children in the portable showers, dried them off, photographed them, booked them. Then they dressed them and put them in the bus with an orange number tag on their new clothes.

Aged about four to ten, there were about seventy of them, boys and girls.

Beside the bus Jenny spoke into a mobile phone, her offsider beside her with a clipboard. Every few seconds Jenny leaned over to read out numbers: probably relaying container ID to someone at United States Customs and Border Control or the Jakarta Container Port.

A POLRI Criminal Investigation Division team dealt with the two dead Garrison guards upstairs. Another team processed the rescued hostages from a POLRI van by the helos. Jeremy’s kids stayed inside, but Wylie’s missus emerged and sat on the step box, lit a smoke, inhaled deep, lucky to be alive.

More teams from POLRI, FBI, Scotland Yard and AFP appeared ready to box-scan every container to see if there were more kids down there. They could do it with heartbeat detectors or thermo imagers.

Mac found it shaming that while sexual-servitude traffi cking was a crime that happened mostly in South-East Asia, it was driven by demand and money from Western countries.

Apart from the sheer horror of what he’d witnessed, Mac had never realised what a logistical nightmare the whole thing was. Now he could see why Jenny was gone for days and weeks at a time, working herself to a standstill. Once you found a container like this, you had to work back to the ship, back to the freight company, back through the terminal gate-logs, back to the trucking companies and the clients in order to see where it came from and whether there might be more like it. And then you had to work forwards, too, try to fi nd where other containers from the same source might be going, where another box full of children might be sitting, waiting for the paedophile industry to hand over the money.

It was a harrowing detail for cops and Mac knew it chewed them up at a hell of a rate. Not only did they have to make arrests and have an evidence bag at the end of the process, they also had child victims in the most appalling and distressed states. There were only so many hours in the day; only so many resources. Only so many containers you could search.

In front of Mac the liaison people from various embassies attempted to straighten out the in-country cooperation angle with the POLRI. The way it usually worked was the police had a job to do and wanted to take statements from those involved in, or witness to, the incidents, regardless of their nationality. The liaisons’ job was to insist that that was not in the spirit or the letter of the agreement between the countries.

The Yanks had no interest in allowing a Special Forces captain to make a statement to Indon police. And the British weren’t even acknowledging Paul. A Pommie liaison woman’s voice rose over the pack. ‘If there was a British national involved in this incident - and I’m not confi rming there was …’

Mac saw a Javanese BAIS operative he knew, Edi Sitepu. He was listening in on the diplomatic hoo-ha. He caught Mac’s eye and came over.

They shook and Edi sat down. ‘Can’t work this one out,’ said Edi to Mac. ‘Lots of talking about Abu Sabaya, but was he here?’

Mac shook his head, sipped some water. He hoped at some stage during his lifetime that smell was going to get out of his mouth.

‘Garrison and Sabaya must have split. Don’t know where either of them are.’

‘That Peter Garrison. Bad news that one,’ said Edi, shaking his head. ‘You know we tipped off the Americans about him last year?’

Mac didn’t know.

‘But it turned into this.’ Edi nodded at the British and American embassy folks doing their thing.

Mac remained silent, exhausted, over it.

‘The thing to do was to get us in a loop, hey Mac?’ said Edi.

Normally Mac loved the way Indons got Western phrases slightly wrong, but his mood was too bleak. ‘Would have been great before Bali, too, eh Edi?’

Mac shouldn’t have said it.

Edi’s face darkened. He and Mac hadn’t always seen eye to eye.

The Timor thing and Mac’s involvement in some aspects of it had created a stand-offi shness between them, even though they could have shared some more basic operational chatter over the years. Thing was, Mac’s legacy in Timor saw him gravitate closer to the old President-controlled BAKIN - now BIN - at the expense of the armed forces-controlled intelligence organisation, BAIS. So it was hard for Mac to simply make a call to Edi and get him in the loop on something like Garrison and Sabaya, even though he wanted the Indon perspective.

‘Look, Edi, why don’t I tell you what I know and you tell me how we’re going to catch these pricks - fair?’

Edi shrugged.

‘So what are the cops saying about the bodies up there?’ asked Mac.

‘Dunno, Mac. They not talking with us.’

Same old same old, thought Mac, wearied by it all: cops, spooks and military refusing to speak to one another.

He reckoned a solid police ID on Garrison’s thugs - the ones who didn’t make it past Sawtell’s boys - might be useful.

‘You got anything on the BMW?’ asked Mac.

‘Corporate registration in the name of a shelf company. Import/

export. All the usual shit. Nothing linking it with Garrison, but we’re following up right now.’

‘So, how’d it go down in Singapore?’ asked Edi, pushing for his own information.

Mac felt like Edi was going too far.

‘It was a decoy, mate. Sure of it.’

‘Decoy for what?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Just didn’t feel like real terrorism.’

Edi made a humming sound deep in his throat. ‘Funny timing though, eh Mac?’

‘Timing?’

‘You know, with Xiong in Singapore the same morning.’

Mac looked at him, his interest aroused by the Indonesian perspective. ‘Tell me.’

Edi shrugged. ‘Probably nothing. What do the Americans call it?’