‘They’re safe. But one of them didn’t make it.’
‘Which one?’ said Mac, gulping.
‘Big cunt. I was about to tap you on the shoulder and he took a shot at me. Hem took care of it.’
Limo!
Mac felt a wave of sadness. An American who could drive jungle terrain and not carry on about it. Dead.
‘Quick?’ Mac asked. Mac could feel something welling in his chest. He fought it off, kept it tight.
‘About fi ve minutes,’ said Sonny. ‘Billy – my helo guy – did all that Catholic shit with him.’
‘And the others? They okay?’
‘Sure. Got ‘em locked up though. Don’t wanna turn your back on those special forces cunts, eh, Chalks?’
Mac nodded, dazed. Pointed to his head.
‘Yeah, sorry, cuz.’ Sonny chuckled. ‘Got such a fright from your mate that I spun and collected you with the butt. Got you a beauty, eh?’
Mac nodded.
Mac had a choice: play the game with Sonny and see where it could lead; or clam-up and try to bluff his way out with threats of government involvement. He wanted to keep his momentum, get Hannah and get out. So Mac spilled on Garrison. Told Sonny just about everything.
Left out the bit about killing Minky and Minky’s daughter being somewhere with Garrison.
As it happened, Sonny and his lads had been keeping an eye on Garrison’s people. They were in an area which had been a Japanese mica mine in the 1940s. There were a lot of old buildings and tunnels up there, disused. But Garrison’s people were in a forestry concession, and that’s what Sonny and his mercenaries protected.
Mac couldn’t read how their chat was going to end. What Sonny might want. Then the former SASer dropped the bomb. Talking about his boss, Sonny used the word ‘Cookie’.
Mac’s face must have betrayed him.
‘What’s up, Chalks? Seen a ghost?’
‘You working for Cookie Banderjong?’
‘What’s it to you?’ snapped Sonny.
The possibilities started mounting up. With Canberra out of the picture and Mac suspecting a mole, he needed private infrastructure, he needed a guy who could make things happen. But Cookie had to have a reason to help him. Mac decided to give it a burl.
‘Does Cookie like stability? Is that what keeps business good?’
‘Maybe,’ said Sonny.
The sealed track to the mansion led up the hillside from the military compound. They walked by the helipad, where a white and blue Eurocopter sat on its wheels. There was a hangar behind it and further down the track was a long garage with cammed LandCruisers, the kind with the double rear axles. Mac noticed one of them had a turret in the top with what looked like a US military gun rail. There was a fl eet of motorbikes in there too, orange KTMs.
Mac was back in his ovies and Hi-Tecs but he still had no gun. He had his G-Shock but the time – 2.34 pm – didn’t compute. It felt like early morning and he still felt like shit.
‘So where are we, Sonny?’
‘Foothills of Malino. Santigi’s that way.’ Sonny gestured south.
‘Nice up here, stays cool in the summer.’
‘Sabulu’s a bit far south for Cookie, isn’t it?’ asked Mac.
Sonny gave him the up and down look. Like Mac was getting cheeky.
‘He’s been going south, some power vacuum thing. But you’ve heard all about that, right Mr Spook?’
Mac hadn’t heard any such thing. The truth was that Indonesian politics were a mystery to all but a circle of about two hundred insiders. In a nation of two hundred and twenty million that was a pretty tight inner circle. Back in the days when Jakarta’s heart was up for grabs and Sukarno thought that ‘non-aligned’ meant not having to deal with the Yanks, the CIA had an entire desk devoted to Indonology.
The big foreign newspapers still sent in their brightest journalists, the governments rotated in their expert diplomats and the spies trained for a year to get a posting in Jakkers.
And none of them knew what the fuck was going on.
Sonny veered towards a demountable building on the road side.
It was cool inside. A very large Fijian soldier in a black T-shirt and olive fatigue shorts sat at a desk. He leapt up on seeing Sonny, webbing gun rig swinging around as he did.
‘How they going, Mosie?’ said Sonny.
Mac looked to his right, saw Sawtell, Hard-on and Spikey. They were sitting at a table eating lunch behind a steel-mesh cage. They looked over: swollen eyes, split lips. Hate in their eyes. Mac was going to have to work on this.
‘Good – no problems,’ the Fijian replied.
The guy called Mosie looked quickly at Mac.
‘Moses, this is Mr McQueen. These are his boys.’
Mac took his hand. ‘Looking after them, Moses?’
‘Yes, Mr McQueen.’
Mac winked at him. ‘Set, brother.’
Moses beamed. There were two types of fi eldwork: thuggery and enlistment. You either treated your world as eternally hostile – like the Israelis and Russians – or you cosied up to people and enlisted them.
Mac preferred the enlistment model.
Mac moved to the cage. ”Zit going, boys?’
‘The fuck you think?!’ said Sawtell.
‘You’ll be out soon, Moses has it covered,’ said Mac, trying to keep it light.
He saw a rack of guns and Cordura bags hanging from the whitewashed wall as he left.
Time to get it sorted.
Cookie Banderjong was nothing like Mac expected. He had a full head of hair, pushed up and back in a pompadour. A good-looking, round-faced Javanese. The legs outstretched on a huge teak desk revealed a pair of Billabong boardies. His legs were muscled, his chest pushed out against the white polo shirt – the one with the alligator on it. His intel days were over but he was still working out.
As Sonny and Mac entered he was talking on the phone, wearing a headset plugged straight into his computer. He twirled the headset cable in the air as he yelled at someone in Indonesian. Then it changed to English. ‘Dave, that prick’s got something wrong with his brain. Deadset, you make me come down there and it’ll get ugly.
Tell him that… okay… yeah… sweet. Sweet as.’
What stumped Mac was the accent: pure Strine. So it was true, Cookie Banderjong did grow up in Melbourne. You could read all the fi les but you never really got a feel for a person until you heard them.
Cookie was still into somebody. ‘Yeah, I know, mate. Like I said, either the company starts getting eight-hour shifts – of actual work! out of these blokes or I’ll come down with Mr Makatoa and we’ll have a word in the shell-like.’ He smiled at Mac and Sonny, held his hand up in apology.
Mac felt expensive Sumatran silk carpet through his socks. They’d been asked to remove their shoes at the tradies’ entrance.
Cookie signed off: ‘Yeah, yeah, mate. I know. It’s not your fault.
Time to sort it though, huh? Sweet, no worries, catchya.’
He squeezed a button on the cable, tore his headset off and chucked it on the desk. Walked around the desk and across the chocolate-coloured carpet in his bare feet. Cookie was about fi ve-nine and athletic. He put out his hand, smiled big like a movie star.
‘You must be Alan?’
”Zit going?’ said Mac.
‘Can’t complain.’
They shook. Mac smiled back. Couldn’t help himself.
‘They call me Mac.’
‘Mr Makatoa’s told me a bit about you – sounds interesting.’ Cookie pointed to the white leather sofas by the huge PanaVista window that looked out over the valley.
So Cookie was an enlister too. He used the correct pronunciation of Sonny’s name. He said it Maka- tor, knowing how irritated Sonny would get hearing the Anglo version of Maka- to -er. In Maori, toa meant warrior, and people with that in their names felt it was there for good reason. Enlisters noticed the small things; Mac decided he’d better be cagey with this guy.
Cookie’s offi ce was a sprawling thing up on the second storey of the mansion. Around the walls were the mementos of his life in BAKIN, the Suharto-era Indonesian intelligence apparatus which had also had a secret police function. There was a picture of Cookie smiling with an elderly Richard Nixon, both of them in golf clothes.