Turning for the kids, Mac struck out. If they could aim high enough into the current the ship might miss them. Closing on the children, he saw them standing; they’d reached the muddy shallows but Mac wanted them to keep swimming — a person moves twice as fast across water as they do through mud.
As they clambered through the mud like salamanders, Mac rolled onto his back to take another shot at the soldiers. If they were going to be run down, it would be now.
Looking up, trying to find a shooter, Mac saw the ship had turned away and the shooting was happening inside the vessel.
Clambering up the bank, legs weak, Mac led the kids into the bush as the ship surged back into the navigation channel, its old diesel thumping in time with the gunshots.
They weren’t clear yet. If Mac was on that ship, he’d have a boarding vessel over the side by now to chase his prey into the jungle.
‘We’re going to be okay,’ said Mac to the drenched kids as they stopped behind a tree well inside the tree line. The boy’s jaw clattered and the girl’s wide eyes expressed fear. They swapped names as they caught their breath — the boy was Kai and the girl was Chani, and they weren’t siblings: they were neighbours, from the same village in the Chamkar.
They were all naked, he had no food or water to offer them and he had no plan except that he needed to round up Urquhart and Lance. He’d been responsible for the safety of a couple of kids eight years earlier, and he’d screwed it up. Mac didn’t want another round of that weighing on him.
Making a check of his webbing belt, he confirmed he had about ten rounds left in the SIG. The knife was gone, as was the M4.
Pulling the boonie hat off his neck, where the drawstring had held it, he gave it to Kai and they fashioned it into a fig-leaf arrangement. Taking off the webbing belt, he helped Chani make it into a modesty garment.
‘This way,’ said Mac, pulling up his sagging undies and aiming inland for the highway.
By the time they hit Highway Seven — the south — north trucking route from Phnom Penh into Laos — Mac could barely walk. He’d told Lance and Urquhart to get to the road and stay put and he hoped that they’d followed his advice because he was in no mood for finding a couple of office guys in the jungle.
Kai and Chani had found him a branch that Mac tried to use as a crutch but his right leg was creating pain that ignited fire rockets at the periphery of his vision.
In the military they used to say of problems: ‘fix it or fuck it’. That is, find a solution or shrug it off. So Mac was manning it out, trying to stay conscious, trying to keep going for the kids.
Looking north and south along the highway, they watched the trucks passing with little chance of flagging one down. In Indochina, hijacking of road, sea and river commerce was a profitable activity among the local gangsters. A Cambodian trucker would as soon stop for an armed man with tiger stripes on his naked body as a media mogul would set up a porn channel on Iranian TV: it simply wouldn’t be worth his while.
They walked north, keeping to the footpads that fringed the major roads in Cambodia — the modern world had arrived but most country folk still walked or rode ancient bicycles.
Mac’s small moans of pain had been rising in volume and, after ten minutes of walking, Kai grabbed his left hand. It was functionally useless but as a gesture it meant a lot.
A branch snapped and Mac pushed Kai to the ground and dived into a shallow ditch. Bringing the SIG up to a shooting position, Mac hissed at the kids to come in behind him, staying low to the ground.
They scrambled up behind him and Mac peered into the jungle, the sounds he’d picked up getting drowned out for a few seconds as three trucks went past in convoy.
‘Macca — that you?’ came a voice from the bush.
‘Davo?’
‘Yep,’ said the voice.
Standing, his heart fluttering, Mac limped to the centre of the footpad as three locals slid past silently on their World War II — era pushbikes.
‘You told us to stay put,’ said Dave Urquhart, walking into the footpad, Lance behind him. ‘What now?’
‘Get to Kratie,’ said Mac, his head swimming.
‘Thanks for the swim,’ said Urquhart with a sneer. ‘Thought this was a rescue.’
‘Come on, Dave,’ said Lance, his rock-star image not surviving his dip in the Mekong. ‘Be glad we’re out of there.’
Mac leaned on the branch, trying to get air into his system. ‘You’ve both got shirts — the kids get one each.’
‘Fuck off, McQueen,’ said Urquhart, still smarting from the gibes about Len Cromie and Churchie, which was a big Anglican school in Brisbane and Nudgee’s bitter rival. ‘We’ve got more serious things to think about — like where the fuck are we?’
‘Kids need clothes,’ said Mac, his words sounding far away, the pain smothering him.
Lance unbuttoned his expensive adventure-traveller shirt and handed it to Chani.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Urquhart, pulling off his wet polo shirt and handing it to the shivering boy.
‘I knew a man lived inside you,’ said Mac.
‘Mister,’ said Kai as he slipped into the oversize shirt and pointed to something up the road.
Mac squinted into the darkness while Kai gabbled at Chani.
‘He say, there a well up there, mister,’ said the girl.
‘Water?’ said Lance. ‘Christ, I’d die for a drink.’
Crossing the highway, they entered the open area with a well and trough in the middle of it — a throwback to the days when Highway Seven was a farmer’s donkey track.
They drank and washed themselves, Lance and Urquhart being particularly dehydrated after their incarceration in the engine room.
As Mac scooped water into his parched, sewer-filled mouth, a Toyota 4x4 slowed and then skidded to a halt as it overshot the lay-by. The white reverse lights lit up and then the Toyota was reversing at high speed.
Motioning the team behind the trough, Mac crouched behind the concrete hide and aimed his SIG. Ten shots and a fifty per cent chance of the thing jamming after such a drenching. Against what? A vehicle full of Dozsa’s boys? The Chinese cadre? He didn’t feel up to it.
Pulse pounding in his temples, Mac cocked the handgun and aimed it at the Toyota’s passenger door as the vehicle stopped in the gravel.
Standing slightly for a better stance, Mac counted his shots in advance: two in the passenger door, run to the rear of the vehicle, create visual confusion and then drop the driver as he got out of the 4x4 and hope there wasn’t more than one in the back seat.
The door opened and Mac squeezed the trigger. The shot cracked like a stockwhip as the passenger ducked back into the vehicle, the SIG putting a star in the windshield.
Through the haze Mac thought someone was screaming Macca but he didn’t know why. Then he was falling, fainting, and his face hit the dust and gravel. He was warm now — he could sleep for a thousand years.
Chapter 59
Lying face down on the hospital bed, Mac flinched as the doctor took the hot compress off the bullet wound in his calf and pushed stainless-steel forceps into the hole.
‘You get choice,’ said the doctor, in clear English. ‘Fast and painful, or slow and painful?’
‘Just do it,’ said Mac, not in the mood for medical humour.
Besides the pain, Mac was dreading having to speak with Jenny. Some husbands’ burden was to explain their way out of a game of golf that turned into an all-nighter at the nineteenth, or a business lunch that had ended up at a nightclub. Mac would have to explain how he came to be shooting at his wife in a highway rest stop in central Cambodia.
There was a glugging sound and the nurse leaned in, and then there were strong hands wrapped around his knee and ankle as the doctor grunted and cursed under his breath. After a final sucking sound like a plunger in a blocked lav, the doctor was standing beside Mac’s face showing him a small, dark slug in the grip of the bloody forceps.