The tall one shrugged, and as he did so his head moved sideways in a whiplash movement, his hair fl ying up at an angle, bits of fl esh and bone fl ying at the shattered windscreen, before he sagged to the dashboard. A bullet had been fi red. Instinctively ducking, Mac heard two more shots which hit Anwar’s brother in the face and then in the throat. Blood and skin fl ew and Mac jumped back slightly as the pirate fell into him and hit the teak deck like a bag of cement.
Hearing a noise, Mac spun around to see Mano climbing over the transom with the Browning Hi-Power in his right hand. He was soaked and blood ran heavily from his right thigh into his Cat boot. Mano looked at Mac with an odd expression. ‘Thought they’d never leave,’ he said, confused, and then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed.
The last fi le – the burnt piece of paper with N W on it – was thirty metres from the boat by the time Mac got to it. He carefully folded it into eighths and put it between his teeth with some other papers, and turned for the boat which was now drifting in the current.
Pulling himself over the transom, Mac hit the deck dressed only in his undies and felt the heat of the dark wood cook his feet. Mano was alive and in shock, lying on his back in the cockpit with a rescue blanket over him, shivering in the middle of the day just one hundred miles north of the Equator.
There was a green cross on a fold-down door in the cockpit bulkhead. Mac opened it and pulled out the fi rst-aid kit, fumbling slightly from the pumping adrenaline. He pulled out gauze bandages and two packs of QuikClots, one of fi eld dressings and the other of wound sponges. Looking sideways, Mac saw Mano’s lips going white, mumbling something.
‘Hold on, mate,’ Mac muttered, tearing at the sponge pack with his teeth. ‘We’re gonna make it.’
Pulling up the grey blanket, Mac used the fi rst-aid scissors to tear away the right leg of Mano’s shorts. The bullet had gone straight through the outside thigh muscle and missed the bone. But the blood was fl owing freely. He squirted the sterile water on the wound, noticing how the skin around the entry hole had already turned dark. He wiped the wound with the blanket and pushed the fl at QuikClot sponge onto and into the hole as blood started to run again. Mano tensed and shrieked as Mac applied pressure.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Mac, his throat thick with stress and the taste of plasma. He didn’t smell blood – he tasted it, way back in his throat.
He repeated the exercise in the exit hole, which was even bigger than the entry. Pushing two QuikClot sponges into the hole, he put a big dressing across the top of it. Then he bandaged the thigh as lightly as he could to keep the sponges and dressings in place without jamming an artery. He didn’t want Mano to lose a leg to some bad triage.
Making sure the mercenary was comfortable, Mac gave him a bottle of water from his backpack and then spread his rescued papers on the deck, holding them down with bits and pieces from the fi rst-aid kit. He took the helm, stepped on the brake and brought the revs up to a moderate level and they motored at a comfortable thirty-fi ve knots, Mano giving him landmarks to look for through his chat tering teeth.
He’d sold the idea of reaching Idi, rather than turning back, on the basis of not wanting Anwar to wonder why they were going the wrong way. But it was simpler than that: Mac wanted to join with Freddi and get in front of Hassan Ali.
The eastern Sumatran coastline was essentially hundreds of miles of beaches and palms, making every section of coast look the same as the next. But landmarks became clearer after twenty minutes and Mano mumbled about the long jetty off the point. Mac saw it, lying low in the humid sea haze, and aimed for it, glancing over his shoulder every thirty seconds to see if Anwar had picked up their trail.
They pulled in to the Idi jetty at 1.18 pm and Mac hoped it wasn’t so far beyond the appointed hour that Freddi and the BAIS team had pulled out. The jetty was almost a kilometre long and Mac found a mooring close to the beach. He checked on Mano again, made sure he was drinking water, then fi shed his Nokia from the backpack. Holding it up, he checked if he had a signal. The signal was good, impossible as that seemed, and he wondered if he was connected to a TI tower in Sumatra or to another cellular network from across the Straits.
Freddi’s phone rang twice before it was picked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘Freddi,’ rasped Mac, still a little scared and not entirely sure of what he was doing. ‘Mac here, mate.’
‘McQueen, you late.’
Gulping, he tried to shift the conversation. ‘Mate, I’ve got a bloke critically injured. Gunshot to the leg.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Come on, Fred,’ said Mac, rubbing his temple and feeling a cast of dried blood. ‘He’s my driver; he got shot trying to protect me.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Jetty.’
Mac heard muffl ed conversations, and then Freddi was back. ‘Stay there, McQueen. Be with you in fi ve.’
‘Did you fi nd the stuff?’ said Mac, hoping that the Indonesians had moved fast enough to get the mini-nuke from wherever it was stored.
Freddi paused, then said again, ‘See you in fi ve.’
CHAPTER 46
Freddi walked away from the old parade ground at the Idi airfi eld.
Mac followed, slugging on a large bottle of water, while Mano got medical attention from a soldier in one of the Hueys.
It was humid and hot among the jungle scrub as they strode to the same bunker system they’d checked out fi ve years ago. Birds and monkeys screeched and the insects laid a humming foundation to the whole din. They got to the fi rst concrete pillar box, which had been stripped of its vines and the doors blasted off. Freddi led the way down the tractor ramp, pushing his sunnies into his hair and turning on his Maglite as they descended into the gloom. The Japanese had built underground storage bunkers at their forward military bases during the Pacifi c War, to keep their gasoline and food supplies out of the sun and inconspicuous to aerial surveillance.
Freddi was in a foul mood, and when they stopped in the middle of the large bunker, and he swung the Maglite around him, it became obvious that not only was there nothing down here, but there hadn’t been anything down here more recently than 1944, maybe the mid-1960s if you assumed the Indonesian military used it during the Konfrontasi paratrooper incursions into Malaya. It was fi lled with dust and sand, but no mini-nuke.
‘So, McQueen,’ said Freddi as Mac followed the torch beam around the bunker. ‘That what we got, right?’
‘Nothing.’
Humphing, Freddi turned off the Maglite and walked back towards the light of the tractor ramp. They came up outside, walking into a wall of humidity and bird noise. Mac was a little hungover from the night with Benny and Suzi, and the early start and the hit on the head hadn’t helped either. He had a buzzing sensation in his head and estimated the temperature at thirty-nine or forty degrees as he walked briskly to keep up with Freddi.
Mac sped up, and asked if they could talk. Freddi stopped in the shade of a palm and put his hands on his hips, tense in the shoulders and neck. ‘Okay, so?’
‘Mate, before we get back to all the listeners, thought we might have a chat,’ said Mac, slugging at a bottle of water.
‘Okay,’ nodded Freddi, but looking away.
‘So,’ said Mac, ‘the hotel pad had latents, a phone number?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you ran it, found the owner?’ Sweat mingled with Mac’s head wound, stinging beneath the dressing the soldiers had given him.
‘Yep.’ Freddi reached for the water.
‘Who was he?’ asked Mac.
Freddi returned the water, moved his left toe in a fi gure of eight in the sand. Embarrassed.