‘Easy,’ said Sonny. ‘You get the girl, Hemi grabs Garrison, then we pick up Limo on the way back. Sounds like a plan.’ He pointed his cob at Mac. Sly smile. ‘Shit, Chalkie’s embarrassed. A blushing Australian.
Who would have thought.’
Mac put his cob down, leaned back, looked at the ceiling. Yes, he was embarrassed.
‘It was a long time ago, Sonny – I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he said. He could feel a constellation of dark eyes in brown faces staring at him. He felt like an iridescent son of Saxony. He looked back at Sonny.
‘I’m not a racist, okay?!’
There was a pause. Then they all laughed. Mac put his face in his hands, moaned slightly. He was still very tired, lump on his head the size of a lemon.
Hard-on grabbed Spikey by the arm, made a high-pitched nasal mimic. ‘ I’m not a racist, okay?’
The hard men of the military shrieked like a bunch of girls. Hemi had to hold on to the kitchen bench, like he was having a seizure.
Sonny cried with laughter. Moses, who was sitting beside Mac, patted him on the back. Smiled a very big Fijian smile.
Mac let them go. He watched a joke go down that he was excluded from. Forever.
He fi nally held up his hands. ‘Okay, Sonny, I’ll tell the fucking story.’
‘See this corn?’ He looked at Hard-on and then Sawtell as they caught their breath. ‘They don’t serve it like this in the ANZAC chow tents. If you’re Aussie and Kiwi, they pour loose frozen corn kernels out of white plastic bags, boil it till you can’t taste it and then expect people to eat it.’
‘Yuk,’ said Spikey. ‘Why don’t they just get the cobs in?’
‘That’s what Sonny here reckoned. It was the end of the fi rst Gulf War, there were two days till the airlift, and this madman here,’ Mac pointed at Sonny, ‘had heard that the Yanks served fresh corn cobs. So he invited himself to eat in the US Army NCOs’ mess.’
‘This in Basra?’ asked Sawtell.
‘Yep.’
Hard-on whistled low.
‘They put up with him for a few days – the Yanks were getting ready to pull out and they were feeding a lot of people. I think they were being polite.’
‘Sounds like us,’ said Sawtell.
‘I was seconded with Army MI for a few days and I was sitting in the NCO mess one afternoon. I had a pass.’
The lads ooo ed.
‘Anyway,’ said Mac, ‘in walks Sonny with a couple of his SAS lads.
And the bloke – what’s he called, the steward?’
‘Yeah, the mess steward,’ said Sawtell.
‘He intercepts Sonny and tries to tell him that lunch is off. Sorry, but that’s the rules.’
‘No dice?’ asked Sawtell. He laughed, shook his head like hard case!
‘But Sonny has already seen the corn, sitting there in the bain-marie,’ Mac continued. ‘And the cook seems okay to have it eaten, so the steward shrugs it off. But on the way to the bain-marie Sonny goes past this Army bloke.’
‘US Army?’ asked Sawtell.
Mac nodded. ‘They let you wear T-shirts in the American messes, and this bloke had a very short-sleeved T-shirt on, and he had these tattoos down his arms. He was a skinny, blond guy. You’d call him a peckerhead, or a, a pecker…’ Mac searched for the word.
‘Peckerwood,’ said Spikey.
‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘Peckerwood – Southern accent, and on one of his arms he had a Confederate fl ag.’
Hard-on whistled low again, turned to look at Sonny. So did Sawtell. Sonny shrugged.
‘So Sonny stops. But he doesn’t worry about the bloke’s fl ag, ‘cos on the other arm he’s got a Maori design.’
‘Moko, Chalks,’ said Sonny. ‘Fucking moko. Get it right.’
‘Sonny goes “Nice ink you got there, Chalkie – perhaps you’d like to fi ll me in on its history?” And the Peckerwood doesn’t have a fucking clue who this guy is or what he just said.’
The table laughed, egging Mac on.
‘So Sonny says, “The tat, Chalks. The fucking tat – that’s my family you’ve got on your fucking arm.” And this Peckerwood is getting frazzled. Tries to shoo Sonny away.’
Sawtell was loving this. ‘Bad idea, huh?’
‘Terrible fucking idea. Sonny does that Maori thing, looks him up and down like he can’t believe that such stupidity and ugliness exist in the same body – it just can’t be physically possible.’
Hard-on and Spikey high-fi ved.
‘The steward is coming over, people are putting down their cutlery.
It’s a bad scene because most of the people in the mess are black and Hispanic. They’re tuning in and they’re in no hurry to poleaxe Sonny Makatoa.’
The Americans swapped glances.
‘So Peckerwood tells the steward “It’s okay” and says to Sonny,
“Why the fuck would I have your family on my arm?” like he wouldn’t sink so low. And Sonny points at the tattoo and says, “‘Cos you’re wearing a something-or-other moko.”’
‘Ngati Tuwharetoa,’ said Sonny. ‘The tribe is Ngati Tuwharetoa.’
Mac continued. ‘The guy doesn’t know what the hell is going on.
And then Sonny says: “If you don’t know whose family you’re putting on your body, Chalks, then don’t fucking put it on. Understand that, boy?”’
Sawtell laughed. ‘“Chalks” and “boy” in the same sentence – bet he never got that in Tupelo.’
‘So Peckerwood leaps up,’ said Mac, ‘and Sonny just looks him up and down. Doesn’t move. Just leans further in. Peckerwood is clenching his fi sts and Sonny is ready for him. They were about to get into it.’
‘Yeah, so?’ said Hard-on.
‘So I stopped it,’ said Mac, looking at Sonny. ‘Got between them.
I shielded the Peckerwood.’
Hard-on slid his hands over his stubbly head, exasperated. ‘Oh, man. You stopped it? Why?!’
Sonny stared at Mac.
”Cos that’s how I reacted,’ said Mac.
The good humour defl ated. Mac looked down at his plate, said,
‘The guy was ignorant, had no idea what someone like Sonny could do to him.’
‘I wasn’t going to hurt him – just wanted to know about the tat,’ said Sonny.
‘You were going to take him apart.’
Sonny chuckled, then went serious. ‘You got it wrong, Chalks.
The motto of the story is this: you don’t spend a week under a soldier’s protection and then side against him in a slap-up.’
Mac looked at the lads, who nodded sagely.
‘Not how it works, cuz.’
The helo swooped in to the landing zone a little after four pm. Sonny had wanted to go while there was still wind around in the tops and the noise of an aircraft wouldn’t drift. They landed downwind from the area they were targeting as an extra precaution. The bloke called Billy de-powered and the thing came to a silent stop.
They piled out in an assortment of clothing: the Green Berets in their fatigues, Mac still in his overalls and black baseball cap, Sonny’s boys – four of them in total – all wearing the olive and blacks they’d had in camp. The new addition was the fi eld radio with throat mics.
They were wired again and Mac could see the Americans were more comfortable with it.
Sonny pulled them in, spelled it out: no heroics, no rock stars. He wanted to turn the thing around real quick without anyone getting shot. If that meant Garrison’s blokes just threw down their weapons, all for the better.
He wanted to pull the classic special forces trick: attack at about three am with maximum force and see if the enemy had the ticker for it.
Mac had one proviso on that: he’d rather take one guy – Sawtell or Hard-on – into the structure and try to snatch the girl. He’d want to do it while there was a diversion elsewhere.
Sonny gave him the okay. ‘But pick your target well. Once the shit starts there’s going to be fi re everywhere. Once it starts I can’t guarantee the girl.’
They started out and made good time across bad terrain. There was a moon and the lads were fi t. This was a lightning raid and everything they needed they carried on their webbing. M16 A2s and M4 carbines sat across their chests. Hemi hauled a heavy calibre machine gun and Mac had a borrowed SIG 9 mm handgun, with a customised suppressor that he stashed in a webbing pocket. It wasn’t as good as the Heckler but it was better than nothing.