Mac was still woozy and he struggled to keep up. He was also worried about his wrist. It was still puffed and he couldn’t get his hand properly around the SIG’s grip. But he kept that to himself.
Hemi walked point and Hard-on swept from the back. It was steep, and dark where the branches hung low; roots tripped them.
But there was little noise from the party.
Sawtell hung back a bit and Mac slowed to walk with him. There was something on his mind, something he had to clear before any shooting started.
‘John, can we talk?’ he said in a rasping whisper.
Sawtell looked at him. Mac saw a cammed face and the whites of Sawtell’s eyes.
‘What is it?’
‘Ah, the girl – Judith Hannah,’ said Mac.
‘Yeah?’
‘There’s another one, I think.’
‘Another girl? With Garrison?’
‘Yeah. Kidnapped.’
‘Who?’
‘Remember I told you about Minky?’
‘The CIA guy?’
‘Yeah. Well, he’s dead.’
‘Who?’
‘One guess.’
They stopped, Sawtell looked away, put his hands on his hips.
‘Fuck!’
‘Yeah – not good.’
‘You shot him?’
‘I was ambushed. I got scared, carried away.’
‘And this girl?’
‘His daughter.’
‘Minky’s daughter?’
Mac nodded. The entire thing was a less than ideal situation and one that he had been hoping would go away. But here they were, about to storm a compound, and a young girl was in there somewhere. It didn’t seem fair not to warn the soldiers.
‘You thought maybe some of us might like to know this? Shit, McQueen, how old is she?’
‘Dunno – eight or nine.’
Sawtell bit his bottom lip. He looked angry. Real angry.
Mac tried to dilute it. ‘Look, I didn’t want to tell you guys in Ralla
‘cos I was embarrassed, and I was hoping I’d be able to get her when I snatched Hannah. And then we ran into Sonny and, well, you’ve seen what he’s like with me.’
Sawtell nodded. ‘Yeah, I saw that.’
‘So, whaddya reckon?’
‘You’d better tell Sonny is what I reckon, ‘cos if you put a young girl’s life on his conscience it might be you he comes after.’
‘Reckon?’
‘I don’t think he’d wear that shit.’ Sawtell almost spat it. ‘And I don’t have a problem with that either.’
They eyeballed one another. They were strong words: if the girl got hurt, Sawtell would stand back and let Sonny whack the culprit.
Soldiers were a whole different breed.
Mac thought about his next words very carefully. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to get Sonny distracted with the racial stuff just before we do this thing.’
‘And why wouldn’t he be distracted by that? You focus everything on the cute white girl and a little brown girl can go to hell?’
Mac swallowed hard. This wasn’t going the way he wanted it.
‘That it, McQueen? You know that if a bunch of black and brown men know there’s a little brown girl up there, they might just give her equal priority?’
‘Look, John -‘
‘So you get the black man to make peace with the angry brown man?’
‘Umm…’
‘Five minutes before go?’
Sawtell was looking at him like he was a different species. ‘What is it with you intel guys?’
‘John, it’s not like -‘
‘Fuck you, McQueen.’ He hissed it. ‘I’ll tell Sonny. We’ll do what we have to do. But fuck you.’
Sawtell moved off, shaking his head.
Silence in Mac’s head. Like a drum.
CHAPTER 12
Mac lay on the ridge, behind a log under a low-hanging canopy of branches. Hard-on lay beside him. Below them was a compound of eight oldish wooden buildings, like pre-war public schoolhouses.
A generator drove a fl oodlight system that illuminated a courtyard.
The place had been built with little evidence of permanence and the main buildings were arranged in no particular order or angle, except that they surrounded the courtyard.
Thirty metres up a scree and clay slope Mac could see why the compound had been built: there was a mine entry with a small railway coming out of it. During the Second World War the Japanese had exploited the mine for mica, the prime ingredient in silica gels.
They took turns with Hard-on’s binos, looking for the main residence and a lock-up – diffi cult given that the buildings looked so similar to one another.
Mac had to think it through: he was either going to stealth into the right building, or he was going to stealth into the wrong building and start a shooting match.
There wasn’t one girl, there were two. What if they weren’t in the same area? Mac would bet they were. This was hardly a prison set-up and criminals were usually lazy when it came to managing incarceration.
His mate Jenny Toohey from the AFP once told him about a raid she’d led on a child sex-slave ring in Semarang. They stealthed in to fi nd the boys and girls watching TV in their pyjamas while the kidnappers slept off an opium bender.
So Mac was going to take a calculated gamble. All he needed was a good odds-on pick on which building the girls were in. He didn’t want to be wandering in and out of barracks at three in the morning, saying, ‘Sorry, fellas, wrong building.’
According to Sonny’s local intel, there were ten or twelve people in the camp. A dozen was doable.
The fi rst part of the exercise was sacking the perimeter security.
Sonny and Hemi had taken that job. There were two guards, as far as they could tell, and Mac wanted them both totally out of the picture before he wandered across that fl oodlit courtyard.
The radio system crackled. Hemi’s voice: ‘Blue team this is Red.
Good to go. On your signal.’
The sentries were down. A good start.
The plan now was old and simple: Mac and Hard-on would break into their building and search as far as they could without starting the shit. If they couldn’t go further, and needed a distraction or cover, they’d call in the Red team, who would come in with a lot more noise from the other side of the compound. The way these things worked, when they worked well, was highly effective. The louder distraction usually triggered the human instinct to protect; the enemy would hopefully race out of the place leaving the intruders and the abductees inside and unaccompanied.
Or, it could all go to shit. Like when the distraction didn’t work, or you trod on a cat or someone was simply lying awake, helping himself to a bit of self-love in the dark. That’s when it was close-range gunfi re, which made even professionals rethink their career. It was scary, and someone usually died.
When Mac did these things, he liked to work with a military athlete, and with Hard-on he’d got lucky – a good operator with soft feet, a calm brain and a killer’s body. Someone who kept their head still and their heart rate down.
He liked special forces blokes because they thrived under pressure.
That was something the intel guy needed when he was trying to think things through. Like when you get to a cell and there’s no one in there. Or there’s someone in the cell, but they’re hostile – don’t want to go anywhere.
Hard-on and Mac mumbled to one another. They settled on the larger of the buildings as the most likely residential. It had a large three painted on it in black, faded but still visible. They could make out a clearly worn path through the clay courtyard to the steps which went up into the building. They couldn’t see similar paths to the other buildings.
Sawtell agreed over the earpiece, told them he could see a cable from the generator room going into building three, but not going anywhere else.
The last thing they looked for was a security system. With two perimeter guards, Mac doubted it. Not out in the highlands of Sulawesi. But they did the grid-scans with the binos: started with the foreground, worked to and fro. Moved to the next grid, to and fro. They each did it once over, looking for small white plastic boxes mounted on the wall of a building or on a stick, hip-high to a man.