Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (17 page)

They were making for the warehouse when Purni sped out the door and jogged towards them. ‘You gotta smell this,’ he yelled.

‘Anfo fumes.’

Freddi lifted his radio handset but Purni put out a hand before Mac could. Radio waves and microwaves from a mobile phone could trigger unstable explosive vapours. The next step was to shut down the apron and get the army and fi re services to deal with it.

The PA bloke stepped out of the building and even from one hundred metres away the three of them all heard his mobile ring.

They screamed at him not to take the call, in different languages, but almost in slow motion his hand went to his hip, picked up the phone and pressed a button - the knee-jerk of modern life. As he put the phone to his ear the steel-clad walls of the warehouse bulged and split before expanding outward in a rush of air that sent the PA guy across the apron in pieces.

Freddi, Purni and Mac dropped to the ground as the shock wave swept along the container port, taking pieces of building and port worker with it. Mac got his head down, covered his ears and head, and prayed. The blast boomed, and then roared, the air shaking along with the concrete apron. Then came the tinkling, banging, scraping and smashing of thousands of pieces of material coming to earth and hitting other buildings, like the devil’s rain.

They lay like that for thirty seconds, lifting their heads only as the noise of shouts and sirens took over from where the explosion’s roar left off. When Mac sat up, he spat something that felt like hair from his lip and ran his hands over his head, checking for injuries.

Freddi stood, hitting at dust from his pants and looking around like a marooned man trying to work out where he’d landed. Purni sat with his arms on his knees, shaking his head between his legs and coughing at something stuck in his throat.

Dust and paper circulated like a confetti parade. Dead birds fell like a biblical curse.

Mac and Freddi stared at where the southern end of Sunda Logistics had stood thirty seconds ago. It now looked like a skeleton, like an industrial version of a carcass in an elephant graveyard. Blue-black smoke drifted upwards on the breeze and the smell of fuel and ammonia was strong enough to settle on Mac’s lips.

Mac saw something move. ‘Fred, over here.’

They started towards what looked like a body about fi fty metres away from the blast site. As they got closer it looked less hopeful.

Walking the fi nal few metres, Mac gagged on fi nding the PA guy, who was missing both legs and most of the bladder and bowel areas. With his one remaining arm he was trying to hold his entrails in while looking at the sky and mouthing something.

‘
Ambulan! Ambulan! Sekerang-sekerang! Ambulan!
‘ cried Freddi, screaming himself hoarse as he waved his arms at the rescue people wandering onto the apron.

Finally a port worker started their way, and Freddi screamed at him to get over to them, now!

When the worker arrived he visibly freaked at the sight of his co-worker. Freddi slapped the bloke, made him look into his eyes, gave him some orders. And when the worker tried to make a call on his mobile, Freddi grabbed it and threw it away, grabbed the worker by the shirt and remonstrated with him.

The bloke ran off, yelling something at other workers coming into the blast area, some of whom already had mobile phones to their ears.

Freddi gave a statement to the Criminal Investigations offi cers while Purni, Mac and Ari waited by the emergency vehicles inside the port security gates. Ari chain-smoked and stared at the ground, chewing on his gum, gingerly trying to keep his weight off the leg with the bullet wound. Purni was green and Mac slurped on bottled water, still feeling stunned.

The medics wheeled the Port Authority guy past on a gurney and Mac noticed they’d found a leg and some bits that might have been an arm, which they’d placed on the end of the gurney. There was a dark blanket over the guy’s face. Freddi went over and said something to the ambulance guys, who shook their heads - the international sign for
The guy didn’t make it
.

Mac noticed that on the salvaged leg was a pair of red brief underwear, same as his own.

‘Shit,’ he muttered, looking skywards. When he looked down again he instinctively crossed himself and said a little prayer. Beside him, Freddi - who was Catholic - did the same thing, then Ari joined them.

Unable to believe what he’d just seen, Mac’s facial muscles froze into a mask of anger. Then he got a fl ash of red in his brain, like he was back at Nudgee College, in the dorms, blueing with the Lenihan brothers. Hissing through gritted teeth he stepped up to Ari, threw a left-hook body-rip to the bloke’s right kidney and then followed it with a left hook to his right jaw.

Ari fell sideways, his legs buckling at the knees as he tried for balance, a spray of pink saliva squirting from the other side of his mouth. The Indonesian cops and Port Authority people reacted by going for their guns but Mac didn’t care. Standing over Ari he lifted his polo shirt and rested his hand on his Heckler. Ari pushed himself onto his left elbow and shook his head gingerly, trying to focus his eyes. He looked up at Mac, confused as a child. ‘I got it wrong?’

Mac nodded, his nostrils fl aring. ‘Don’t tell me, all Christians look the same, right? Just some dumb shit about making a cross - how hard can it be?’

Ari nodded, gently touching his right jaw. ‘I get it wrong sometimes,’ he shrugged. ‘Which one this time?’

‘You’re wearing an Orthodox crucifi x, so you cross yourself with three fi ngers,’ growled Mac as Freddi came over.

‘Everything okay, McQueen?’ asked Freddi.

‘Bloke pretends to be an Orthodox, then crosses himself with an open hand, touches his left shoulder fi rst,’ he spat, kicking at Ari’s boot. ‘That’s the Catholic way, you fucking ponce!’

‘Sorry, McQueen,’ said Ari.

Mac breathed out long and hard, tried for some composure. ‘So what are you?’

Ari looked away, spat blood out of his mouth.

‘He’s Israeli,’ said Freddi, sounding a bit confused. ‘He didn’t tell you this?’

‘No. I thought he was Russian.’

Freddi chuckled. ‘He is - he was. But now he’s Ari Scharansky, our local Mossad guy.’

Mac sulked in the front seat of the BAIS LandCruiser, humiliated, furious with Ari, angry with himself for his outburst, annoyed with Freddi for letting the issue just drift along.

‘Could happen to anyone, McQueen,’ smiled Freddi, driving instead of Purni.

‘Oh, this is funny?’

‘Well,’ said Freddi, ‘just a bit.’

‘If I pulled that on you in Australia, it would be all about the uppity Anglos and their superiority complex, Freddi. We’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Sorry,
maate
. We just get used to our foreign spooks and their covers. You know what Jakarta’s like.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I honestly didn’t think to tell you. In fact, I thought you guys knew each other.’

Burning with adolescent rage, Mac shot him a look that could kill and Freddi spluttered, turned away laughing.

Collecting himself, Freddi got serious. ‘Anyway, McQueen, that was nice work on the Orthodox thing. Gonna tell my guys that one.’

Mac relaxed a little. It actually was funny and he’d be loading on the jokes with a shovel if it had happened to someone else. When you fi rst started in the fi rm, the overarching rule was:
Assumption is the
gateway to disaster
. It sounded plodding when you were young and had huge faith in your own infallibility. But it was great advice. Mac had made a huge assumption about Ari, probably because he’d been tired and in shock at the state of Kuta when he’d fi rst arrived. But in the spy game, all assumptions had to be discarded on meeting someone new. Just because it looked like a duck and sounded like a duck, didn’t mean it wasn’t a goose.

Israeli intelligence had always had problems getting traction in Indonesia; not just because it wasn’t possible to enter the Republic on an Israeli passport, but because there were severe cultural differences between the Indons and the Israelis that made it hard for Israeli-born Mossad agents to blend in. They were too intense, for starters. The Javanese used a lot of humour in their communications, which made it easy for Australians to get along in the Archipelago, but Israelis tended to stare too long and too seriously into another man’s eyes, which instantly triggered the Javanese social defences. The Israelis also had a basic personality clash in the region. Even when a Javanese wanted to say no, he would nod, smile, make a joke, slap you on the back, equivocate - do whatever had to be done to say no without actually saying the word. The Israelis - in Mac’s experience - saw this face-saving mechanism as weakness or uncertainty, and even the most highly trained of them found it hard not to press their advantage. They just didn’t get it. Mac had tried to point this out to Mossad agents he’d known in the past but mostly they argued with his assessment, so he’d smile, slap them on the back, buy them a drink.

For these reasons, Israel’s intelligence services tended to use their Russian-born-and-bred operators in Indonesia and Malaysia.

And in the absence of an Israeli embassy or consulate, they ran front companies in shipping, telecoms and import-export which helped them to raise intelligence on the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Mac knew all this and should have at least countered Ari, fi gured him out better. He’d been tired and rushed and had fallen into assumptions. It was his fault.

‘Think I overreacted, Fred?’

‘Sure,’ said Freddi, smiling. ‘But we’re all on edge, yeah?’

Mac keyed his Nokia, got through to Ari in the tailing car. ‘Sorry about that, mate. Had a brain-snap.’

‘You hit like boxer - all Australians punch like this?’

‘All Russians have iron heads like this?’ said Mac shaking his left hand out the window.

Ari boomed laughter into the phone.

‘Listen, Ari,’ said Mac. ‘I’ve got a bunch of US dollars - can I buy you all lunch?’ He looked around and Freddi and Purni nodded.

‘Too the fucking right,
mite
,’ shouted Ari.

There was a riverside fi sh stand on the road back inland from Belawan to Medan. Freddi, Ari and Purni sat at the table, talking about Hassan and Gorilla, while Mac tried to fi nd some beers. The woman behind the stand pulled a green curtain aside and opened a dark blue esky on the fl oor behind it, pulling three Tigers from the ice. In northern Sumatra the conservative Muslims were not insulted by alcohol consumption so long as it wasn’t prominently displayed at the counter. A big glass fridge of booze might be construed as tempting the believers.

Mac put the beers on the table, with Purni the only one not to reach for a bottle.

‘That wasn’t the other device - no way,’ Freddi was saying to Ari.

‘You are right,’ said Ari, gulping at the cold beer. ‘Not enough blast, no incendiary phase.’

Mac wanted more on the Port Authority blast. ‘So what happened back there?’

‘Stored anfo,’ said Freddi. ‘That’s my guess. Microwaves can spark the fumes, we all know that.’

‘So Hassan’s still got the other device?’

Ari and Freddi were silent, naturally cagey.

‘Or it’s stored, yes?’ asked Ari. ‘And Hassan and his camel-fuckers are trying to get off this island.’

While Mac wolfed down the grilled fi sh chunks, he thought about how he was going to get either Ari or Freddi to come clean on what had destroyed the Sari Club.

‘So, one of you two going to tell me what this other device is?’

They both did their shrugs, the Javanese and Russian versions almost a parody of each other.

‘Well?’ asked Mac.

‘Nothing to say, McQueen,’ said Freddi, washing his food down with beer. ‘It’s small, it has a huge yield, it was brought in by the Pakistanis. And we are ninety-nine per cent sure they brought in two of them.’

A
thromp
sounded in the distance and as it got louder Freddi stood with his portable radio handset and walked out of the courtyard into the sun. Looking over, Mac saw three Indonesian Army Hueys about half a mile away, heading north up the coast at full speed.

Keying the radio, Freddi demanded something, and after a few seconds an adrenaline-charged voice yelled down the airwaves in raucous outbursts. Mac recognised the shortness of breath and the nervous excitement - it was the way he’d felt for the last three days.

Freddi barked into the radio as he strode back towards the fi sh shack. Mac noticed a change in the noise of the helos and that one of the Hueys had doubled back towards them.

‘Only room for two,’ snapped Freddi, then pointed at Purni and rattled an order.

‘It’s still Handmaiden, McQueen. Okay?’ said Freddi as Purni ran out to the Cruiser.

Mac’s heart sank. He just wanted to eat and sleep properly and go to New York.

Ari stood beside Mac, annoyed. ‘So where is this? Where are we going?’

Freddi looked back at them, smiling. ‘This could be it.’

As they walked outside, the Huey was landing in the grassed forecourt area putting up a blanket of dust, leaves and insects. The traffi c on the road to Medan slowed to a crawl as Purni brought over two M4s, two vests and a black Cordura bag fi lled with what Mac assumed were spare magazines, replacement radio handsets and the interrogation kit Indonesian intelligence operatives travelled around with. Mac threw his Oakley backpack over his left shoulder and took the Cordura bag, a vest and an M4. The dust drove past Mac’s sunnies and into his eyes as they moved towards where the loadmaster had his arm extended out of the army helo. Mac got into the cabin, took a hammock seat, then looked out and saw Freddi yelling something into Purni’s ear and giving him the radio, before jogging to the Huey with his vest and assault rifl e. Freddi got in and sat beside Mac, facing forward with his back against the rear bulkhead.

The revs came up and the loadmaster slid home the side door.

As the helo rose Mac noticed two things simultaneously: the person sitting beside the pilot was Major Benni Sudarto. And outside on the grass apron, Purni was looking at the rising helo … but Ari was looking at Purni with a look Mac couldn’t quite decipher.