Spikey rattled it off and the owner gulped, shook his head, gabbled something back at Spikey.
‘He says it couldn’t be,’ said Spikey.
‘Tell him if I’m wrong I can get my friends at the POLRI or Kopassus to come up here and check it out for us. Might all be a huge mistake,’ said Mac, winking at the store owner.
The owner shook his head, fear in his eyes.
Mac pressed for the breaking point. ‘Tell this guy that it might even warrant a visit from the boys from the BIN. And tell him, Spikey, that those boys will get to the bottom of it real fast by getting his wife and kids into the cells and helping him to remember. Memory is a funny thing.’
When Spikey had translated, the owner went quiet, looked at the fl oor.
Breaking point.
Mac started again, Spikey interpreting. Yes, the store owner knew the blokes in the silver Accord. They had been going out on the remote road to Sabulu. They’d made the trip several times and yes, they’d headed out that morning.
Mac got Spikey to ask what kind of people were travelling. The owner said two Javanese and one pale person.
‘Yankee?’ said Mac.
The owner nodded, said something to Spikey: a tall American.
Could be Garrison, thought Mac.
The three men had been travelling in a white LandCruiser, said the store owner. Mac’s attempts to get deeper information met with shrugs. Yes, there may have been more than three and yes, one may have been a woman. The bloke had been paid to mind his own business, and that’s what he had done. Mac believed him. He sliced the telephone lead with Spikey’s Ka-bar and moved outside.
It was dark but some light from the back of the shop spilled on to the Accord, a 2002 model. Mac tried the doors. Locked. After putting a rock through the driver’s side, Mac fl ipped the hood, and unplugged the howling alarm. That brought Sawtell and the others to the party.
‘This it?’ asked Sawtell.
Mac nodded, reached for the door handle, pulled on it.
Sawtell’s mouth fl ew open, wide-eyed, his hand reaching out.
Limo covered his eyes. Hard-on turned away.
Spikey stared at him like he was an honest-to-God dumb-ass honky motherfucker.
‘Shit, McQueen! Holy fucking shit!’ said Spikey.
‘Maybe to you that’s a car, McQueen!’ gasped Sawtell. ‘But to us, that’s a fucking bomb!’
Mac looked down at the open door, looked back. Limo was peeking from behind his hands. Sawtell looked at the sky. Spikey still stared.
‘Sorry, boys,’ said Mac.
Mac stood back, let Spikey check the vehicle for pressure plates, wires and anything tricky on the ignition column. Then Mac had his turn. He went into the boot, the glove box, the centre console, the spare wheel bay, the centre armrest of the back seat, the tool box, the ashtrays, the radio and the storage compartments. Not much.
Chewing gum wrapper again, Bartook Special Mint. Someone liked to get close to the ladies without scaring them off. Someone liked to rip it open in really thin strips.
He asked for a fl ashlight and got under the car. Positioned himself right beneath the windscreen washer reservoir and shone his torch straight up through the transparent plastic. It was a classic place to hide stuff and some people still thought the old places were best.
Nothing.
Then he started on the carpets and before he got far he found something under the driver’s seat. He fi shed out a key and shone the fl ashlight in again to see if there was anything else. He quickly went over the rest of the car’s interior.
Coming up empty-handed, he turned his attention back to the key. Hard-on asked what it was. The other soldiers groaned as one, as if to say, What does it look like, lame?
It had a diamond-shaped, black plastic key ring with the letters MPS stamped on it in silver. The key was big, German, expensive and made of forged alloys suggesting a serious lock. The number was 46. Someone had lost a key. He wondered if they would come back for it.
Mac trousered it.
He turned back to the owner of the place, who was looking unsettled about what Mac had done to the Accord.
‘Don’t worry, sport,’ he said to the bloke. ‘I bet it’s overinsured.’
The owner didn’t look convinced.
‘Ask him about Sabulu,’ Mac said to Spikey. ‘I want to know what we’re looking for.’
The road to Sabulu was even worse than the general store guy had warned. From Tenteno, the road rose up into the highlands in steep, muddy switchbacks. It had been a bad, tropical road to start with and the logging traffi c after the afternoon monsoon showers had torn it apart.
Mac asked Limo to drive. He was good, which was a change.
Most Yanks couldn’t handle that sort of terrain. At one point the Patrol slid across the track and threatened to slide off into a thousand-foot ravine. Limo kept his foot on the gas, counter-intuitively, and the Patrol came right.
‘Not from South-Central, are you?’ said Mac.
Limo smiled. ‘Costa Rica.’
It was drizzling and everyone remained quiet as the Patrol’s turbo squealed and cried its way up one ridge after another. The dark of the tropical night pressed in. The only universe was the one that the headlights illuminated, occasionally fl ashing on macaques at the side of the track, which had obviously seen a similar vehicle across several hours before. Mac could see off-road tyre tracks in the mud.
They were looking for a ‘depot’, which the store owner said was about seventy miles into the interior. Depots were sometimes shacks, sometimes compounds. Loggers and miners lived in them and the natives – the Toraja – collected weekly or monthly deliveries from them. The store owner reckoned they should be on the lookout for a depot called ‘thirteen’.
They pressed on, the Patrol rolling and sliding. They got higher, past the mist-line where it was clearer and colder. Limo hit the heat.
They glugged water from bottles and ate the fruit that Mac had known the soldiers would stash. They got to the top of a switchback and Mac asked for a toilet stop.
The stars shone huge and plush in the blackness above. A monkey argued with a bird somewhere in the rainforest canopy. It crossed Mac’s mind that the next time he came through here it might all be felled. Instead it would be sitting in a backyard in Perth or Melbourne as garden furniture. He started pissing and Sawtell came alongside.
‘You know that dude with the store is as good as dead?’ said Sawtell, not pissing but staring.
‘Hopefully we get to the bad guys fi rst, huh?’ said Mac.
Mac shook off early. Didn’t like where Sawtell was standing. If Mac was going to poleaxe someone, that’s where he would stand. At a bloke’s four o’clock while he had his hands full.
Sawtell must have sensed the vibe. He moved around in front. They both felt the cold. Plumes of mist came out of their mouths.
‘My boys weren’t happy about the Bani thing.’
‘I wasn’t over the moon myself. But it’s a good school,’ said Mac.
‘That was nice. What does he say to his folks?’
Mac didn’t want to go into all the details. He’d had a chat with Bani’s dad that morning before they went down to the dry-cleaners.
The dad had thanked Mac profusely for the opportunity. Education in Sulawesi was not like it was in the United States. Wasn’t a birthright, wasn’t an entitlement. Parents with the smartest kids watched all that potential go to waste most of the time. But there was no point in telling that to Sawtell. He was a good man, but he was an American good man.
Mac changed the subject. ‘Mate, I don’t know what to expect up here. Can we tool up now?’
Sawtell gave him a disappointed look. He stepped back, tapped on the roof of the Patrol, and the boys spilled out.
It was almost daybreak when they fi nally hit Depot 13. They were high enough to watch the sun come up over the Pacifi c. An amazing sight. The primordial rainforest started up like a soundtrack. In the space of twenty minutes it was deafening.