Minky’s face went purple.
‘Who’s this, Mink?’ Mac pointed the gun at the other side of the bladder, intimating a second shot. Minky convulsed, groaned deep and vomited on Mac’s safari suit pants.
The goon started moving. Mac stood, looked down on him. The goon wouldn’t meet his eye.
‘This a Garrison job?’
The goon looked at him, surprised.
‘Where’s Garrison?’
Now the goon went back to his studied nonchalance. He tried to shake his head but the jaw situation made him wince.
‘Where’s the girl?’ This time Mac raised the Heckler, pointed it at the goon.
Minky sobbed, puked again. Blood soaked into his dentist get-up.
Mac didn’t want to leave without having at least one part of the puzzle. And he didn’t know where he was supposed to be looking.
The goon looked back at the gun. Mac looked at the back door, expecting a charge-in at some point. The goon lashed out with his right leg, caught Mac on the inside of the right wrist. The Heckler tumbled, bounced and slid along the white lino fl oor.
Mistake one: Mac’s eyes followed the gun.
Mistake two: the goon had his hand on the Glock in Mac’s back pocket before the Heckler had stopped sliding.
Mistake three: the goon didn’t fi re immediately.
Mac swung an arc with his left hand, grabbed the goon’s gun hand, twisted it slightly away from pointing at his stomach. Grabbed the gun-hand elbow with his right hand and snapped the goon’s forearm across his knee. The goon was built in the arms but Mac’s adrenaline and speed broke the forearm bones as if he was about to start a camp fi re.
The goon screamed. The cavalry would be coming.
Mac pulled the Glock from the goon’s limp hand and hit him in the temple. Hard. The goon sagged back to the lino, blood running out of his head.
Mac frisked him for a wallet. There was none. He scooped the Heckler, checked for load. An unnecessary yet robotic habit from the Royal Marines.
A kick sounded at the door.
Mac breathed fast and shallow.
Another kick. A man yelling in Bahasa.
He knelt beside Minky, looked at him hard. Saw the bloke’s eyes, saw a deeper fear. The penny dropped. ‘They got your wife, Mink?’
Minky shook his head. The shock was making his teeth chatter.
‘Daughter?’
Minky nodded, tears starting.
‘I’ll get her, Mink, but you have to tell me where.’
Minky was on his way out. His eyeballs were rolling back.
A shot fi red outside the door. No splinters. Minky’s back door was steel.
Mac slapped Minky. A bladder shot usually gives you ten minutes, but Mac’s slug might have bounced into the leg’s main artery.
‘In Makassar? Is that where she is, Minky?’
Another head shake.
‘Is she with Garrison? Tell me, Mink.’
Minky vomited again. This time green and red. It dribbled rather than poured. A bloke about to cark it.
Minky looked up, said, ‘Eighty.’
Mac slapped Minky as his head lolled. ‘What’s that, Mink – you say “eighty”?’ He didn’t get it.
Minky nodded almost imperceptibly, his face pale.
Then he was dead.
Collapsed like a rag.
More gunshots. The sound of lead pinging around in the door.
Mac stood, raced to the front door, then had another thought and went back to the Javanese goon. He pulled back the guy’s trop shirt collar. No luck. Then unzipped the bloke’s pants, pulled them down.
‘If we don’t tell, then it never happened, hey butch?’
He grabbed the waistband, pulled it round. Bingo! A pink piece of paper stapled to the tailor’s label. Mac tore the dry-cleaner’s ticket off the pants, grabbed his black wheelie bag.
He prepared for the worst as he exited. It didn’t come. He walked straight into tourist crowds. Malaysian lawyers and dentists with their kids all kitted out in genuine Sulawesi tribal headdresses.
He fl owed with them, adrenaline bursting like fi reworks behind his eyes. His vision darted everywhere at once, breathing shallow and raspy. His brain was working so fast he could barely think of anything else except silver Honda, black polo shirt; silver Honda, black polo shirt. Silver. Black. Black. Silver…
He walked for fi ve minutes like that before he took his hand entirely off his right hip. There didn’t seem to be a tail. Not from the silver Accord, at least. The two Western-style Javanese hit men probably hadn’t wanted to take their business into the street.
Mac had got lucky.
He lurched to a stand of hibiscus behind a bus stop shelter. Vomited.
For all his reputation as a tough customer, he hated shooting, hated guns and loathed seeing someone die. But no amount of training or experience could stop a trapped and scared animal behaving like a trapped and scared animal. Mac hadn’t shot Minky because he was tough; he’d shot him because he was scared and wanted to control the situation by making the other guy more scared than him. It was a mistake. He’d known that as soon as he pulled the trigger.
He walked and walked. He backtracked, overlapped and did the oldest trick in the game: turned on his heel suddenly and walked straight back from where he came. It looked natural if you pretended you’d forgotten something. He walked past the markets, down to the waterfront, a thriving fi shing town for a thousand years and now concentrating on netting South-East Asia’s holidaying middle classes.
The local jihadists were trying to reverse that with the aid of their old friend, potassium chlorate.
Midday turned into two-thirty real fast.
He dipped into a series of dime stores of the type that blanket Asia: the ones that sell cigarettes, incense and cigarette lighters where the girl’s bikini drops when you turn it upside down. They sell the local rags as well as Tempo, the Straits Times and the Jakarta Post. Mac bought plain Nokias and pre-paid cellular network cards for a Philippines telco called EastCall. He ducked in, he ducked out. He bought phones from different shops and bought a packet of wet-wipes. He ate goreng at a street stand, sitting back in the shadows where Grandma wrapped spring rolls. He didn’t let his eyes leave the street or his hand leave his right hip, and he cleaned Minky’s vomit off his pants.
He did numbers: six shots left in the Heckler, but it would have to be dumped. He didn’t want to go back to the Pantai for the Walther – too risky now. He should have taken the goon’s Glock with him, but now he’d have to pick up a gun when he RV’d with Sawtell.
Would they have a spare? How many more did Garrison have coming for him? And who or what was Minky talking about when he said
‘Eighty’?
He walked some more, looking for a car hire place that wasn’t a big American brand – the CIA data-tapped those franchises quick-smart. And the Americans were starting to look like being part of the problem rather than the solution. Minky was an Agency contractor and the hit squad was probably the same. But whether the ambush was American or Australian, Mac felt relieved that he’d changed the RV with Sawtell from Makassar to Ralla, up the coast. Mac hadn’t been thinking about double-crossings when he’d done that at the last minute. He’d just wanted to keep a posse of highly conspicuous special forces soldiers out of town until he needed them. Now it might give him a day’s head start on whoever was after him.
He asked around and headed inland to a place called Paradise Holiday Hire Cars. A couple of locals had said it was cheap and reliable.
And they took cash.
He passed by the Golden Hotel on the waterfront and watched a bunch of Anglo and Asian junketeers milling around, waiting to get on a tour bus. They looked like IT consultants or telecom engineers.
Local police lolly-gagged with their assault rifl es. Mac slid in amongst the junketeers, smiling and making quippish non sequiturs to no one in particular.
Hoo-fucking-rah!
The junket-lovers were putting their day luggage into a pile to be loaded into the luxury coach. Mac wandered among them with his wheelie case. No one challenged him, probably because he was Anglo. One of the great weaknesses of the coalition of the willing’s War on Terror was its inherent ethnic bias. Something was wrong when a pale-eyed white man could wander through the world’s largest Muslim country and receive less attention than a local.