Sawtell ran down the side of the box, bare-chested, panicked, sweat pouring down his back. He took the corner around the container so fast he had to grip on the pillar to stay upright. Mac was behind him. Sawtell stopped, fumbled with a huge padlock on the locking handles of the door and then shook at it like a madman, gripping on it so hard it looked like his fi ngers could knit into the padlock hook.
Sounds from inside the box got louder.
Mac yelled, ‘It’s okay – we’re getting there.’
Then he stepped back, pulled out his Nokia and dialled Jenny, who was having lunch with her crew. Mac gave her the address, asked,
‘Could you give us a hand?’
Sawtell keyed the radio, yelled for someone to get the angle grinder from the helo and bring it.
The sounds of screaming and pleading from the container were now joined by a drumming sound – scores of tiny hands banging on a steel box.
Sawtell was losing it. He stood back, levelled his Beretta at the locks on the door until Mac stepped in, stopped him. Not such a good idea.
Sawtell looked at Mac, shaking his head slowly like This is not happening. ‘Kids! What the fuck is a bunch of kids doing in a fucking container?!’ he shouted, slapping on the container door with a big open hand.
Little hands banged back from the inside. Tiny voices screaming Maa, Maa, Maa.
Sawtell was crying as he zeroed in on Mac. ‘Well?’
‘Mate, they’re… um.’
‘ Yes? ‘ yelled Sawtell.
‘They’re, probably, you know, sex slaves. I can’t be sure…’
‘ What? ‘
‘They’re probably being shipped to, you know…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Umm, paedophile brothels, private clients – or owners, whatever they’re called.’
The din of children got worse. Crying, pleading.
The smell and sound warped the air.
Sawtell seemed to look straight through him and for a split second Mac thought he was going to have his head torn off.
Suddenly shouting echoed in the sub-level.
‘Over here, guys,’ yelled Mac.
The Green Berets arrived with a big green canvas gear bag and pinch bars.
Sawtell pointed at the container. ‘Open it. Now!’ he ordered, beyond fury.
The two forced-entry guys set up their stuff. One ran to fi nd power, the other guy set up the angle grinder.
The medic team arrived too, got to work on Paul.
Sawtell stood over Jansen, the angle-grinder guy, whispering like a maniac. ‘This is going to be the fastest forced entry you ever pull, Jansen. You hear me? They’ll give you a goddamned gold medal for this.’
Jansen nodded, put on his protective visor and gloves then busied himself with the machine, ensuring that nothing could go wrong.
The other guy reappeared with orange cable for Jansen’s angle grinder, and then picked up the pinch bar.
The children still banged and yelled.
Jansen powered up and stepped over to the door bolts. Sparks poured like an orange waterfall as he went to work.
The two doors had big handles which folded inwards where the doors met. When the handles were folded down, they locked in place security bars that extended from the top to the bottom of each door. Each door had two vertical locking bars and there was a massive German padlock securing the handles over one another in the centre of the doors. Jansen had to chop out the centre sections of the security bars; the German lock would be hardened steel and would take too long.
The noise and smell were too much for Paul, and the medic guys escorted him away. Mac went with them and pulled out the phone, hitting redial. Jenny picked up and said, ‘Almost there.’
Mac jogged up the service ramps to the main warehouse entry, pressed a button and the huge roller door went up. The scream of the angle grinder burst out into the sunlight.
The frontage apron of the warehouse now hosted a Gazelle and a Black Hawk, the pilots chewing the fat.
After three minutes a blue Commodore wagon raced onto the front apron area, a POLRI light truck behind it.
The Commodore stopped beside Mac, Jenny in the front passenger seat. Mac just said, ‘Sub-level, you can drive down.’
‘You okay?’ said Jenny.
Mac shook his head, pointed into the building.
They squealed off, the POLRI truck following. A third vehicle parked on the apron. It was a mid-sized, unmarked bus. Empty.
Two POLRI women got out and opened the side storage areas, pulling out piles of blankets, white towels, portable shower stands and large blue plastic bags. One bag fell over, spilling children’s gear on the concrete apron. There were dresses, undies, sandals.
Soft toys.
Mac waited for the ambulance and directed it down to the sub-level.
As he walked down he felt his pulse increasing again. He gagged on the smell, fl inched at the screaming noise, feeling the fear and pain in the people down there.
The door was almost off when Mac arrived. Sawtell stood behind his team, eyes huge, a mix of fear and rage, his body poised like a professional wrestler about to clinch.
A POLRI woman videotaped the proceedings, while Jenny yelled into a radio handset, one fi nger in her left ear. After she got off the radio she conferred with her POLRI colleagues.
A decision apparently made, she walked over to Sawtell, who turned to her. For a second Mac saw a scared boy under that machine-like exterior.
The angle grinder suddenly free-revved for a split second and Jansen shut it down. Smoke hung, mixing with the container smell.
Hideous.
The kids started up again as Jansen’s offsider pulled back on a pinch bar. Metal twisted and ground against itself, and the right-hand door swung open like the scene in a ghost movie.
Mac felt bile coming up as the stench fl ooded the enclosed space.
A small dark fi gure was the fi rst out. Cambodian. Five years old.
Big eyes. Naked. Shit all over her.
Looked around. Confused.
‘Maa?’ she said.
CHAPTER 42
Mac, Sawtell and Paul sat speechless outside the offi ce section of the warehouse.
Paul had been cleaned, stitched and given a morphine needle.
He didn’t want to be in the ambulance. Wanted the more critically ill kids in it.
Sawtell was blanked out. Thousand-yard stare into nothing. Even his own men were leaving him alone.
Mac had cordoned off the far-end ramp to the sub-level, hoping the POLRI might fi nd some Garrison blood samples down there. He wondered what was happening in Singapore and tried to understand the situation now that he’d actually seen Garrison and Diane together in a getaway car.
Mac was so tired he could barely keep his eyelids up, even with the circus that had descended around them.
To their left, the POLRI women scrubbed down the healthier children in the portable showers, dried them off, photographed them, booked them. Then they dressed them and put them in the bus with an orange number tag on their new clothes.
Aged about four to ten, there were about seventy of them, boys and girls.
Beside the bus Jenny spoke into a mobile phone, her offsider beside her with a clipboard. Every few seconds Jenny leaned over to read out numbers: probably relaying container ID to someone at United States Customs and Border Control or the Jakarta Container Port.
A POLRI Criminal Investigation Division team dealt with the two dead Garrison guards upstairs. Another team processed the rescued hostages from a POLRI van by the helos. Jeremy’s kids stayed inside, but Wylie’s missus emerged and sat on the step box, lit a smoke, inhaled deep, lucky to be alive.
More teams from POLRI, FBI, Scotland Yard and AFP appeared ready to box-scan every container to see if there were more kids down there. They could do it with heartbeat detectors or thermo imagers.
Mac found it shaming that while sexual-servitude traffi cking was a crime that happened mostly in South-East Asia, it was driven by demand and money from Western countries.