‘Yeah, Bongo?’
‘Sure, brother — Didge is taking over here.’
Chapter 67
The engineers pulled the Little Bird helicopter out of the hangar at Seletar Airport and had it ready in twenty-five minutes. Sitting in the flight office, they went over the map and narrowed down the possible targets in the hills over Rata. Most were old tea plantations and derelict guest houses from the colonial era, when the Anglos took to the cool hills during the summer heat.
‘Dozsa will be here,’ said Bongo, planting a big finger on a saddle at the top of a valley. ‘He wants a road in and a road out, and he wants some flat land for a helo or plane.’
Looking, Mac saw what he was talking about. An unsealed track passed through the valley and there seemed to be flat areas.
‘You know this place?’ said Mac.
‘It’s the old Sanderton Estate,’ said Bongo. ‘British tea plantation, bought by some foreigner for a lot of money a few years ago.’
‘Any easy approaches?’ said Mac.
‘No easy approaches,’ said Bongo. ‘This is the Cameron Highlands, brother.’
Mac tried to reach Scotty by phone but it went straight to voicemail. Watching Bongo do his pre-flight tests as Jon packed the gear bags, he keyed the phone again, trying Greg Tobin in Canberra.
‘Greg,’ said Mac. ‘Albion.’
‘How are you, old man?’ said the director of operations. ‘We got that prize yet?’
‘No, sir. McHugh is under guard in Singapore.’
‘You know where?’
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘Scotty’s with the police — we got ambushed by Dozsa in Singers. Fentanyl aerosols.’
Tobin used his tone of genuine concern, knowing that the wrong dose of Fentanyl will kill a man. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, we’re in one piece, but Dozsa got the prize and I want clearance to take it back.’
‘Where’s Scotty?’
‘In the cells, I think,’ said Mac.
‘You have a team? I don’t want you chasing Dozsa without a team, Albion.’
‘I have the team — I need the authority.’
‘For where?’ said Tobin.
‘Malaysia,’ said Mac. ‘Can do?’
‘Proceed as if it’s done,’ said Tobin. ‘And don’t muck around — you wouldn’t believe the crowing that Defence is doing because Sandy brought back that file.’
‘Well, hurrah for Sandy,’ said Mac. ‘It’s not Defence’s file that matters — it’s Dozsa’s.’
Lifting the gear bags into the Little Bird, the five of them crammed into the tiny aircraft: Mac and Bongo in the front; Tranh, Lance and Jon in the back.
Holding an assault rifle across his legs as they left the twinkling lights of Singapore behind and swept over the causeway into Malaysian airspace, Mac examined the weapon. The guns had been stored in the helo when Bongo had taken off in it from the Dozsa compound, and they weren’t conventional US weapons.
‘G36,’ yelled Bongo over the noise. ‘Heckler & Koch — nice weapon.’
Mac noticed its light weight and its NATO 5.56mm ammo.
He worked through the approaches in his mind as they flew through darkness, over the forests, with the occasional burst of yellow lights from villages and small towns. Only one insertion seemed plausible: four blokes on foot would go into the Sanderton Estate, and then call in the Little Bird. Thanks to Bongo, Mac had another piece of firepower in his backpack: two charges of C4 plastique, a box of military detonators and two digital timer fuses. There were many specialty rotations in the Royal Marine Commandos, but the one thing they all learned was how to reduce the bad guys’ lair to rubble.
If they could coordinate the attack, it might work. If they walked into a trap, it would be over very quickly.
Bongo broke the silence as they entered the hills, pointing to truck headlights on the road that wound north through the Cameron Highlands forest and then wove his hand left and around in a loop to indicate that he wanted to hook around the back of the Sanderton Estate.
After eight minutes of flying west over darkly forested hill country, they hooked north and slowly descended to a sloping piece of open ground that rolled down to a river.
Depowering, Bongo got out of the helo and joined Mac at the backpacks.
‘This is us, right here,’ said Bongo, using a map-light and placing a fingertip on a valley west of the Sanderton Estate’s main buildings, which he’d marked on the map in pencil. ‘The track goes to the top of this saddle,’ he said, breaking from the map and pointing to the ridge overlooking their position. ‘Then there’s a small river, and you climb for a thousand feet to the Sanderton plantation house.’
‘An hour to get there?’ said Mac.
‘Give yourselves two, and then thirty minutes to assess the ground,’ said Bongo, holding up his G-Shock. ‘You want to do this by radio, or you want to time it?’
‘I want radio silence until I give the “go” signal,’ said Mac, looking at his watch and seeing it was just past one in the morning. ‘Once I know the main defences, I’ll want them taken out while we sneak in the back way.’
‘Okay, McQueen, but at two hours thirty I’m coming in.’
They made fast time across the saddle and down to the river, aided by a three-quarter moon. The river wasn’t as small as Bongo had promised — a few monsoonal downpours had swollen the watercourse over its banks and they were up to their ankles in water and mud before they reached the main flow.
Pausing, Mac thought he heard an aberrant noise over the rush of water, but couldn’t find it. Probably just a monkey breaking a branch. Moving downstream to a fallen tree, Mac led them over the trunk, swinging from a large branch on the end of it and landing knee-deep in marshy water on the other side.
Wading towards higher ground, Mac felt watched. It was an open field with long grass, and even though they enjoyed the cover of darkness, he wanted to be in the trees. When the others had crossed the river, Mac led them to the base of the hill and they drank from their water bottles.
‘Shit,’ said Lance, gasping for breath. ‘This humidity is awful.’
‘Mr Dozsa is probably cooking up something slightly worse, but I get your point,’ said Mac.
Looking around, Mac still felt uneasy. They were almost on a major footpad and Mac wanted something less obvious.
‘Tranh and Jon — fan out and find a secondary trail up the hill,’ said Mac, finishing his water. ‘I want us off this freeway.’
When the two Vietnamese had stalked into the bush, Mac checked his radio and the G36.
‘Thanks for that,’ said Lance, his boyish looks now hardened. ‘You know, back there.’
‘It was Bongo’s idea,’ said Mac, stripping out the mag and breaking the German weapon down at the breech.
Lance pointed at the G36, which Mac was reassembling. ‘How’d you learn all this stuff?’
‘Royal Marines,’ said Mac. ‘And just so you know, I don’t think I’m superior because I do the paramilitary gigs, no matter what some of those whiteboard jockeys in Canberra tell you.’
‘Okay.’ Lance laughed.
‘You feel safe out here?’ said Mac, letting the trigger box’s pushpins click into place as he pushed it into the breech.
Lance shook his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Good start,’ said Mac, slamming home the full mag.
‘They say you’re difficult,’ said Lance.
‘Difficult is Joel Dozsa or Bongo Morales — people your buddies are never going to meet.’
Lance nodded in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry, about everything. I should have told you about that memory card.’
Mac looked at the younger man and saw someone who had been trained by the wrong people at the wrong time of his life. If Mac had been shoved into a Canberra office clique and rewarded for brown-nosing, he’d have turned out the same as Lance.