Then, when Santo had made a run for it, they would have seen he was just a kid and snatched him rather than make a scene with more gunfi re.
Someone had decided Merpati was dead. Which she almost was.
Freddi stood in front of the ramp that went down into the magazine. The big iron swing doors were open and the red and white skull and crossbones TNI seal – a diagonal crossing of locking bars that declared this the property of the Indonesian generals – was discarded in the thick undergrowth. Freddi muttered an order at four of the soldiers and they walked down slowly, looking for booby traps. The soldiers found two plastique charges and then Freddi turned on his Maglite and led them down the ramp into the gloom.
A series of chambers branched off the main underground avenue, one of which had a new fi re door that had been left open. Freddi and the soldiers shone their torches into the chamber, illuminating four chains hanging from the ceiling with a table suspended on the end of them. It had been designed to keep something dry and Mac guessed it had survived the Boxing Day tsunami that had devastated the region in ‘04, judging by the lack of water damage in the chamber.
‘That it, guys. Nothing,’ muttered Freddi, walking out.
Mac and Freddi found a trail around the entrance – about six men, in boots, fi ve to seven hours old, depending on what the morning dew had been like. They walked the footpad and it terminated at the north end of the dirt runway in a swirl of boot tracks and aircraft tyres. Mac and Freddi agreed on a scenario: the plane had taxied to the north head of the runway, turned to face the south, maybe not even bothering to depower. The Hassan crew had retrieved the device from its hide, boobied the magazine, walked back to the plane and fl own away.
Crouching, Mac had a closer look. The boots were mostly Hi-Tecs and one US Army desert issue. The aircraft had tricycle landing gear, single tyre at the nose and double tyres at the two underwing points, suggesting a plane the size of a King Air 200 – a twin-engine, twelve-seater.
‘King Air 200,’ mumbled Mac. ‘Get fi fteen-hundred miles out of the right one, with the right tank set-up.’
‘Could go north to Thailand, east to Singapore, west to Sri Lanka,’ mused Freddi. And then, shrugging facetiously, ‘Could maybe get to Darwin.’
Mac’s pulse banged so hard in his head that it felt like his wound was going to split open. Then everything became clear.
‘Oh shit,’ said Mac, breaking into a run. ‘ Fuck! ‘
He hit full pace as he scythed through the bush, through the palms and the undergrowth and the dry creek beds that he’d walked through years ago. He retraced them now, but at a headlong sprint.
He leapt over trees, elbowed low-hanging branches and muttered to himself – a sure sign that he was in danger of doing something from his emotions rather than his brain.
Behind him he could hear Freddi shouting McQueen, McQueen, but he kept sprinting, fi nally bursting out onto the beach and stopping, his legs like jelly, his mouth dry and rasping for breath. He jogged for the jetty, his lungs wheezing as he struggled for oxygen. Behind him, Freddi burst out onto the beach too.
‘McQueen,’ he shouted weakly. ‘Where are we going?’
Mac didn’t turn, just waved at Freddi to follow him, before racing down the jetty, his back a wall of wet fabric. The dressing was peeling from his forehead wound with all the exertion and he whipped it off, chucking it into the water. As he got to the black beauty, three kites squawked into the air. He stopped, heart thumping, resting against a post as he looked down at the pirates’ bodies lying together by the transom. Along the rest of the cockpit decking there was a lot of smeared blood and seven pieces of paper, drying in the sun. The bandage tins and mosquito sprays and tins of Savlon had held the rescued papers in place.
Freddi got alongside him and doubled over, hands on his knees.
‘Too old for this, McQueen,’ he gasped.
‘I hope I’m wrong, Freddi,’ Mac panted, leaping on to the deck of the speedboat and reaching down to pick up the last piece of paper he’d rescued out there in the Malacca. It was now dry and the effect of the water had made the blue ballpoint ink run away from the original lines, leaving those lines thinner and more accurate, perhaps closer to what the writer wanted to express.
‘See this?’ he asked, as Freddi lowered himself into the boat.
‘I found this in that other airfi eld, behind Medan, up behind Binjai.’
Freddi took it, looked at the one thing written on it. ‘Thanks for telling us, McQueen.’
‘You got everything else, mate, remember? Didn’t think this was important,’ Mac shrugged, telling a small lie. ‘I found it in a burned-down building.’
‘Burned? Don’t think we saw a burned building.’
‘No, it had been done after the Kopassus chased them off. I just went up later to have a nosey-poke and I found this charred building, still smoking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, so whatever they were burning was worth the risk of doubling back while there was Kopassus and BAIS in the area. You with me?’
‘Wish you’d told me earlier.’
‘Thing is, Fred, I kept this because someone had written on it, right? See how the bottom is burned away so that we don’t get the full context of N W because whatever’s below it is gone.’
Freddi nodded. ‘No context.’
‘I spent years wondering about that N W. I asked all our desks, all the analysts, I asked the Indians, Americans, Japs, I asked army guys and diplomats. The only thing I could come up with was the North-West, as in the North-West Frontier of Pakistan.’
‘Pretty broad,’ said Freddi.
‘But, mate, what if it’s got nothing to do with the context?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Freddi.
‘Freddi, in our game we talk about context until we make it religion, but sometimes things are simple.’
‘Yeah?’
‘So what if it’s just the wrong way up?’
Freddi and Mac looked down at the piece of paper as Fred slowly turned it around.
‘Okay, Fred, now what does it say?’ said Mac.
The washed-out blue ballpoint writing now said M IV.
Freddi chewed his bottom lip and looked into Mac’s eyes. ‘Well, it say “M 4”, McQueen, but I guess that not the American assault rifl e?’
‘Let’s get back to context, Freddi,’ said Mac. ‘You’ve got Abu Samir and Hassan Ali, risking their necks to double back and destroy a bunch of documents.’
Freddi’s eyes widened. ‘It say M4 – Mantiqi Four,’ he said very slowly, looking back from the paper to Mac, hardly believing what he was seeing.
‘The part that’s been burned away – I bet – said Operasi or Operation,’ said Mac. ‘I think this was a cover sheet for a plan of their next attack.’
‘But Mantiqi Four is -‘
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Mac, looking back towards the beach. ‘Their Fourth Brigade. The second device is on its way to Australia.’
CHAPTER 48
The meeting with Atkins did not go well. They arm-wrestled about a mini-nuke bound for Australia, a concept Atkins completely dismissed.
When Mac showed Atkins the paper with M IV written on it, the Jakarta operations chief for ASIS actually scoffed.
‘That could be anything, McQueen – I mean, shit,’ he muttered, almost throwing it back.
Mac wasn’t ready to back down and demanded that the embassy’s military attache sit in. Atkins refused and did what all good offi ce guys do: pulled in the troops. Jill Watson, an analyst on the Indonesia Desk who specialised in JI, crept into Atkins’ offi ce, sheepish at the raised voices that had been echoing out.
‘What’s that mean?’ asked Atkins, pointing at Mac’s piece of paper.