Double Back (15 page)

They made fast time north in the transporter before the sun came up. Indonesia may have possessed one of the world’s largest standing armies but it wasn’t one that rose with the day.

Sitting in the half-cab behind Bongo, Mac stayed out of sight and allowed Bongo to play the cheery army truck driver, delivering a bulldozer to another part of the island. Heading north from Memo, then taking the triangle road that would allow them to avoid Maliana, they hit the main road to Balibo at 5.41 am and had it to themselves.

‘Won’t be like this in ninety minutes,’ said Bongo, lighting a smoke. ‘Be Timor rush hour.’

‘What does that look like?’ asked Mac from his rear perch.

‘Horses, buffalo and women walking,’ said Bongo. ‘Some militia too,’ he added, more serious.

‘Speaking of militia,’ said Mac, ‘is Jessica safe?’

‘Hope so, brother. The Falintil women gonna walk her down to Zumalai, get her into a UN convoy.’

‘You think she’ll go?’ asked Mac.

‘Well, you know her, right?’ grimaced Bongo. ‘I told her she had to go now – being raped and killed is not a good way to find her father.’

‘What did she say?’

Bongo took his time answering. ‘She said, I worry about my father – you worry about Richard.’

‘She said that?’ asked Mac, a smile breaking out involuntarily.

‘Yeah. She like you, that one. Like you a lot.’

Bongo kept the big rig at an even sixty kilometres per hour, not getting past fourth gear. Even the main thoroughfares of East Timor were unsealed and winding, and frequently punctuated by washouts from beneath or landslides from above.

Slowing for a washout that had been filled in and paved over in a big uneven dip, Mac had to get out of the cab and signal Bongo through the gap to avoid falling in the gorge while not bogging in the roadside ditch.

‘How long have the roads been like this?’ asked Mac, getting back into the half-cab.

‘Twenty, thirty years,’ shrugged Bongo, getting the transporter moving again. ‘The locals just fix it themselves. Some rocks, some trees.’

‘Jesus, Bongo,’ said Mac. ‘We’re in a forty-tonne vehicle, driving over washouts that have a few rocks laid over the top of them?’

‘Now you mention it,’ said Bongo.

After half an hour of driving, Bongo broke the silence. ‘So, we’re getting you to an airport, but we got a plan?’

‘I have a plan, mate,’ said Mac. ‘You’ve done all I’ve asked. Get me near to Dili or Baucau and I’ll cut you loose.’

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Bongo, looking for Mac in the rear-vision mirror.

There wasn’t much to tell. Mac needed to get back to Denpasar, regroup and perhaps rethink the assignment. He’d been blown by Kopassus intelligence, which was all-powerful in the hills of Bobonaro, and if Blackbird was up there, it was not sensible for Mac to be operating covertly. If Aussie intelligence really needed to debrief Blackbird, they’d have to send in some poor bastards from special forces to get her.

‘Plan is to get out of Dodge,’ said Mac. ‘I was hoping to have more information before I left – a nice secret document that fell off the back of a truck, or a phone.’

‘Damajat’s?’ asked Bongo.

‘I thought Damajat’s phone logs would lead me to Blackbird, maybe even tell me more about Lombok AgriCorp.’

‘What about Rahmid’s sat phone?’

‘I’d like to have a look at that too – see who he’s been speaking to.’

‘So where’s the phone?’ asked Bongo.

‘It’s either in his room -’

‘No it ain’t,’ said Bongo.

‘- or it’s in his car.’

‘Rahmid had a car?’ asked Bongo.

‘Yeah.’

‘Didn’t find no keys in his room,’ said Bongo.

‘Then…’ said Mac, hoping Bongo would offer.

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.’

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.’

After a couple of hours Bongo stopped the kijang and opened the canvas canopy.

‘Where are we, mate?’ asked Mac, squinting in the intense light and reaching for the sunnies hanging on his polo shirt collar. About one kilometre down a gentle, scrubby rise was the sparkling tropical sea that separated East Timor from Alor to the north. Shacks were interspersed with stands of trees and sand dunes, and a small grouping of houses and fishing boats was visible at a wharf on the rocky point.

Getting back in the kijang, Bongo drove it deep into a thick stand of bush and downwards into a creek bed.

‘You girls,’ Bongo said to Marta and Florita, and then continued in Bahasa Indonesia, pointing back to the road and the jungle above it, and then swinging around to point to the fishing village.

After he’d finished, he turned back to Mac. ‘They’ll take their chances through the bush. Perhaps you’d like to give them a little something?’

‘Something?’

‘Yeah – US dollars would be best,’ said Bongo, hands on hips like he didn’t have all day.

Mac fished in his once-khaki chinos and came out with the wad of dollars he’d last used in Suai, when he’d asked Mickey to open up the ice carton and liberate a carton of Bintangs.

‘Ten okay?’ asked Mac, handing a tenner to each girl.

Bongo reached over, pulled another two ten dollar notes from Mac’s pile and handed them to the girls as he said something in Bahasa Indonesia.

Turning, Florita looked at Mac. ‘Thank you, mister, and remember what we agree, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Mac, smiling at her.

The girls walked up the sand and gravel road before darting into the bush.

‘So where are we?’ asked Mac as he followed Bongo down to the creek bed where he’d dumped the kijang.

‘Batugade’s eight kilometres that way,’ said Bongo, pointing to his left. ‘And Dili is thirty-five kilometres that way.’

After stripping out of his soldier’s gear, Bongo dressed in his slacks and trop shirt. Then he leaned into the covered back of the kijang and pulled out two of the M16s confiscated from the guard post, throwing one to Mac.

As they moved away from the vehicle, the military radio sprang to life and a torrent of hysterical Indonesian poured out of the speaker.

‘Found the checkpoint,’ said Bongo as they moved out for the fishing village. ‘Let’s hope they don’t find us.’

The walk to the fishing village took twenty minutes, and when they arrived at the wharf Bongo gave Mac his gun and told him to sit on a stack of fish crates and not move.

‘I’ll need those greenbacks, McQueen,’ said Bongo, holding out his hand.

‘Don’t suppose I can get a receipt?’ said Mac, handing over most of his stash.

‘Just show ’em you alive – that’s the receipt,’ said Bongo disappearing.

Down the main pier, three sail-powered fishing boats strained on hawsers. Two deckhands walked towards Mac, young men with fish crates on one shoulder and carrying each end of a large net between them, so that the middle dragged on the decking. One wore the Indonesian fisherman’s dress of singlet, sarung and plastic sandals while the other one – a Timorese – wore Lakers basketball shorts and old canvas sneakers.

They barely acknowledged Mac as they walked past, their faces the mask of constant exertion worn by their profession.

When Bongo appeared five minutes later, it was with a middle-aged Timorese man who shook Mac’s hand and introduced his workers: the two young men Mac had watched before.

‘We got a ride, brother,’ said Bongo.

‘Are we, I mean, this is okay?’ said Mac, unsure of the deal.

‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ said Bongo, gesturing for his M16. ‘Fishermen don’t care about politics – they’re too busy or too tired.’

They made their way into the back of the vessel and Mac found a good position on a pile of canvas bags, hoping he could grab some sleep. As they sailed around the point at Carimbala, Bongo lit a cigarette.

‘Get anything from Florita, McQueen?’

‘She said that Maria had been meeting with Sudarto, in his car. Know anything about that?’

‘No, I would have told you,’ said Bongo.

‘Well, it’s made everything more complex. What do you make of it?’

‘Can’t say, brother,’ said Bongo, shrugging. ‘The Canadian never really spoke to me, and I wasn’t in the room when he met with Blackbird.’

‘What about the last time?’

‘Well, yeah – I was checking the windows and balcony when he started into conversation with Blackbird. Normally, I’d secure the room and wait outside. I think he was stressed, like he wanted it over. It was a strange afternoon.’

‘You never saw Blackbird with Sudarto?’

‘No,’ said Bongo, ‘but it wouldn’t be unusual.’

‘No?’

‘Benni Sudarto is Kopassus intel, so maybe he’s not answering to SGI.’

‘Okay,’ said Mac.

‘This SGI is a taskforce, right?’ said Bongo. ‘You ever been on an intel taskforce?’

‘Yep,’ said Mac, thinking of the intelligence empires that are so vigorously defended every time one agency is expected to cooperate with another.

‘So maybe Benni gets his own suspicions about locals working in the taskforce, and he questions them – puts some pressure on, see who cracks. You know how that works, McQueen.’

Mac sure knew how that worked, but Florita’s tone of voice suggested a closer relationship between Blackbird and Sudarto, unless that was just a sixteen-year-old getting it all wrong.

‘And you know something, McQueen?’

‘What?’

‘Benni got it right – he made Blackbird. By the way, what did you agree to with Florita?’

‘I said I wouldn’t tell anyone about those girls being with the soldiers, in case Marta’s father found out.’

‘Okay,’ nodded Bongo, looking away.

‘Florita said he’s strict – I guess he’d blame her, right?’ asked Mac.

‘No, probably not,’ said Bongo, condescending. ‘They don’t tell the father in case he go shoot some Indonesian soldiers, and that’s no good for anyone.’

‘Really?’ asked Mac.

‘The father will kill anyone who messes with his daughter,’ said Bongo, chuckling at Mac’s expression. ‘That what strict means in East Timor.’

The point south of Dili’s main wharf area came into view shortly after 2 pm, just as they were finishing a meal of rice and fish served in a banana leaf. Pulling out his Nokia, Bongo dialled a number and spoke Bahasa Indonesia in a friendly tone.

The vessel slid into a small fishing wharf and, jumping onto the pier, Bongo and Mac waved their farewells, Bongo saying something and pointing at the M16s in the back of the boat.

Making their way down the pier, Mac felt paranoid, seeing a hundred chances for one of the locals to pick up a phone and inform. At the chandlery store, Bongo paused in the shadows and lit a cigarette.

‘So, we walk into Dili?’ asked Mac.

‘Thought we’d get a cab, like normal people,’ said Bongo, winking.

From a distance, a deep whining sound vibrated and got louder as Mac pushed further into the shadows of the chandler’s, his overwhelming fatigue now making him anxious.

‘UN,’ said Bongo, pointing to the pale blue sky. A white C-130 transporter plane with United Nations painted in black down the tail section of the fuselage flew over their position, lining up for a run at Dili’s Comoro Airport.

‘Democracy – we deliver,’ said Mac.

‘That thing?’ asked Bongo.

‘Probably the voter kits,’ said Mac. ‘From Darwin.’

Mac watched a Toyota minivan approaching down the white gravel road through the palms and the fishermen’s shacks. It pulled up with a crunch and the driver leapt out and came around to open the sliding door.

‘Greetings, Mr Manny,’ said the smiling driver.

‘Hi, Raoul,’ said Mac as he followed Bongo into the van.

‘Hello, mister,’ said Raoul, slamming the door.

They drove for twenty-five minutes and when Raoul pulled up it was two blocks away from the eastern wall of the Santa Cruz cemetery – the same wall that Bongo had been perching on when he shot Rahmid Ali.

Grabbing the bottles of water supplied by Raoul, Bongo and Mac walked the streets to Santa Cruz cemetery. It was the steaming hot middle of the day and many Timorese were having a post-prandial sleep. Dogs slept, a horse-drawn cart clopped past and two old women gossiped under a Bintang umbrella half a block away. No one showed any interest in them and they got into the shadows of the trees along the eastern cemetery wall and stealthed north until they found the tree that gave easy access over the wall.

Waiting for five minutes on the top of the wall, they cased the cemetery for Brimob cops and, when the ground looked clear, they dropped down in the cover of trees on the other side.

‘So where’s this body?’ asked Mac as they regrouped, now regretting that he’d insisted on searching Rahmid’s corpse for the car keys.

‘There,’ said Bongo, kicking a branch out of the way and sitting down with the two big bottles of water.

Following Bongo’s finger, Mac saw a fresh grave with a pile of reddish earth piled on top, the casement and tombstone not yet in place.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Mac muttered, as he found his own patch of dry leaves and lay down in the merciful shade.

‘What?’ demanded Bongo, his voice sounding half-asleep. ‘It was the best I could do, brother.’

‘Is there a prayer for this?’ said Mac, his brain now floating on a lilo. ‘I mean, that’s consecrated ground, right?’

‘What about, Sorry, boss – I’ll make this fast?’ whispered Bongo.

Laughing with his entire body, Mac let himself go into sleep. ‘You’re a lunatic, Morales.’

‘Man’s gotta do, McQueen,’ mumbled the big Filipino. ‘Man’s gotta do.’