Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 56
Outboard motors gurgled in the still, tropical air as Mac loaded his kit into the hired boat – two hundred US for a night on the fifty-foot double-hull. On the Kratie wharf, Scotty spoke into a phone, making final arrangements with Canberra.
‘Ready, mister?’ said the boat owner, a tallish local named Li.
‘One call, then we go,’ said Mac, pointing at his Nokia.
‘No worry,’ said Li, twirling the radio in the cockpit and coming up with a Thai rock star’s version of ‘Like a Virgin’.
Leaping into the boat, Scotty puffed from the effort of jumping.
‘Gotta knock off the booze,’ he said, poking at the two black kit bags. ‘This is it? Thought the Yanks would travel with more than that.’
‘Couple of assault rifles and some flash-bangs,’ said Mac. ‘And Grimshaw didn’t want to give up that much, either.’
‘It’s just us, mate,’ said Scotty, reaching for his smokes but catching a look from Li. ‘Sandy’s operation is totally Defence and we can’t even look at those Team Four boys, let alone bring them along for support.’
‘Tobin said this?’
‘Tobin, quoting Karl Berquist,’ said Scotty. ‘Defence is a loop with the PM all of a sudden.’
‘Tobin tell you to leave Urquhart and Lance?’ said Mac.
‘You kidding?’ said Scotty. ‘Firm doesn’t need to know about this – I just told him we might need Team Four for a spot of bother and he warned me off like I was asking his daughter to go on a P&O cruise.’
‘So we’re it?’ said Mac, as the stinking river slapped against the hull. ‘You feeling fit, old man?’
‘Not bad for a desk jockey.’ Scotty lit the smoke and held it over the edge.
Mac’s Nokia trilled and he answered. Clicking his fingers at Scotty, he repeated the coordinates from the latest fix on the micro-transmitter sitting in Lance’s stomach. Scotty scribbled on a map.
‘Thanks, Charles – owe ya,’ said Mac, signing off.
Mac looked down at the plots, illuminated by the wharf floodlights: the three fixes on that transmitter had Lance moving down the Mekong, about ten miles south of Kratie.
‘Know this?’ said Mac to Li, pointing to the plots on the map.
‘Sure, mister – ’bout fif’ minute.’
‘Fifteen?’
‘Sure, mister,’ said Li. ‘Go now?’
‘Yep, let’s go,’ said Mac, watching Li’s offsider – a boy of about sixteen called Johnny – cast off the lines and jump into the boat.
Mac’s adrenaline surged as Li eased on the power from the twin Evinrudes and the bow lifted into the Mekong. The dank smell and the darkness enveloped him as they slipped into the downstream of one of the oldest commercial highways in the world.
Getting the boat onto a plane, Li sat in the skipper’s stool and navigated with a small headlight mounted on the right bow while Mac searched in the gear bag. Pulling out a tub of eye-black, he dabbed three fingertips of his right hand into the greasy dark goo, and smoothed it across his face and forehead in streaks.
Scotty lit another smoke. ‘Look like one of them Maoris.’
‘Your turn,’ said Mac, dipping his fingers into the pot and streaking Scotty’s face with black greasepaint.
Pulling two hats from the bag, Mac offered one to Scotty.
‘These cricket hats?’ said Scotty, who’d gone straight from basic training to military intelligence back in the seventies.
‘Break up the shape of the head,’ said Mac. ‘We recognise humans from their gait, and the shape of the head. There’s a few tricks we can play with the gait, but hiding the melon is much easier.’
‘It works?’ said Scotty, turning the American boonie hat in his hands.
‘If it gives you half a second, it’s working,’ said Mac, smiling at his repetition of what Banger Jordan had told them in the Royal Marines: ‘A good soldier takes two seconds to aim and take an accurate shot; if you buy yourself half a second, you win and the other cunt’s dead.’
Banger had fought in the Falklands, and had been out of uniform for six years when Mac was under him at Poole. The rumour was he’d been doing assignments for British SIS during his absence, a rumour the Geordie had laughed off with jokes about how James Bond never took a crap and called it shite.
Mac remembered getting the feeling from Jordan that the more a man had committed the ultimate sin, the less he wanted people to know that about him. Pulling a box of condoms from the bag, Mac watched the lights of the fishing villages slip by, and realised the circle he’d taken hadn’t started and finished in the Firm. His circle was a soldier’s journey: he was becoming Banger Jordan.
‘The fuck are they for?’ asked Scotty, pointing at the condoms. ‘You stopping off for a root?’
Planting the M4 carbine between his knees, Mac tore the Durex packet open with his teeth and rolled the rubber down over the muzzle, tying it off against the barrel.
‘It’s what the British military calls waterproofing,’ said Mac as he handed it to Scotty. ‘They don’t care if you march all day through a swamp, in the rain – your weapon must work when it has to work.’
‘Okay,’ said Scotty as they scythed through the dark waters of the Nine Dragons. ‘What’s the plan?’
The lights of the river cruiser blinked through the haze on the Mekong, four hundred metres downstream. It was an eighty-foot diesel-powered Mekong bus of the kind that plied the river between small towns and villages – this was not a tourist vessel.
Mac watched it from the cockpit, using the captain’s binos and issuing hushed commands.
‘Okay, boss,’ said Mac, not taking his eyes off the river cruiser. ‘Cut power.’
Mac had just finished his final call to Grimshaw – the micro-transmitter was emitting from right beneath them. There couldn’t be any other target than the craft in front of them, the number K 4217 just visible on the bow.
‘Know this ship?’ said Mac, as Li cut the engines to a burbling idle.
Taking his field-glasses from Mac, Li peered into the darkness, the double-decked wooden cruiser becoming more obvious as it chugged past the floodlights of a general store which had a 1960s Elf bowser sticking out of its decking.
‘I not know this one, mister,’ said Li, shrugging. ‘Much like this. Many.’
‘Okay – cut the lights.’
‘No, mister,’ said Captain Li, shaking his head. ‘Water police – no good.’
Placing two US fifty-dollar bills on the cockpit dashboard, Mac saw them hoovered up and the lights go down on the boat.
‘Captain Li, that’s for you if you stick around, do as I say,’ said Mac, pulling four more of the bills out of his plastic Ziploc bag. ‘Two hundred US – all you have to do is motor alongside, and ask the other captain if he saw the flares.’
‘And when he say “no”, I say I saw the red flares – are you in distress?’
‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘From the first word you speak, to the point you stand off, I must have one hundred and twenty seconds. I need two minutes, okay?’
‘Sure, mister,’ said Li, gulping.
‘And then stand off and wait until we’re finished, okay?’
‘Okay, mister.’ Li avoided Mac’s eyes.
‘And Li?’ said Mac, grabbing the field-glasses and having another look.
‘Yes, mister?’
‘Keep the kid out of it, okay?’
Sitting in the aft-decks with Scotty, Mac made a final run-through as he fished the SCUBA face mask from the bag.
‘So, no heroes, okay, Scotty?’ said Mac, stripping to his underwear and wiping the eye-black over his thighs, arms and chest. ‘You only show your head with that carbine if the goons on this cruiser don’t give me two minutes.’
‘Gotcha,’ said Scotty, his moustache twitching from his blacked-out face.
Handing the pot of black paint to Scotty, Mac asked him to do his back.
‘Look,’ said Scotty as he smeared the grease on Mac’s shoulder blades, ‘I don’t know if –’
‘It won’t come to that,’ said Mac, buckling a webbing belt over his hips and slipping a condom over the barrel of the SIG before holstering it.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Scotty, his hands shaking as he finished the eye-black. ‘It’s okay for you.’
‘Why’s that?’ said Mac, doing his diaphragm breathing exercises as he reverse-slung the M4 over his shoulders so the muzzle pointed at his left ankle.
‘Well, you know . . .’ said Scotty, averting his eyes.
Calling Li to the back of the boat, Mac synchronised their watches and gave himself a ten-minute mission clock: after ten minutes, Mac would wait until Li started talking and would take his one hundred and twenty seconds from then.
Holding his G-Shock up to the other two, Mac counted three and they clicked their countdowns at the same time. He felt cold and focused, his mind empty of emotion, his skin a mountain range of goose bumps even as the humidity sat on him like warm dew. He felt fear but not the way he felt it as a teenager asking a girl for a dance at the surf club ball. This fear was a bottled, contained sensation that he used as fuel, and his trepidation was about completing the steps he’d created in his mind, not about pain or failure.
‘See you soon,’ said Mac, leaning backwards into the water on the starboard side and sliding into the ancient shallows of the Mekong.
Mac swam underwater for seventy seconds, emerging slowly into filthy flotsam about fifty metres downriver from Li’s boat. Taking gulps of air as he trod water, assessing the ground, he ducked under again and swam a line that would take him to the starboard side of the cruiser, the side closest to the riverbank. When Li arrived, Mac wanted all the talk to be on the opposite side of the boat.
After two more underwater swims, Mac tore off his face mask and let it drop to the bottom of the river. The cruiser was about fifty metres away and had lights burning on board. Expanding his diaphragm, getting as much oxygen as possible, Mac watched a figure on the upper decks of the cruiser smoking a cigarette just behind the port side of the wheelhouse.
Looking at his G-Shock, Mac saw the countdown had reached 4.11 – he had some time to play with.
Something hit him on the left shoulder blade and he spun around in time to see a grey-bellied rat float by – a welcome change from the more common floaters in the Mekong.
Another flame flared on the starboard top decks of the cruiser. Then the two goons were laughing and joking across the life-raft boxes. They looked like the PLA cadres from the Dozsa compound, their rifles not evident. The countdown hit 3.46 and the goon on the starboard side – the side Mac had decided to target – unzipped himself and pissed into the river.
Slipping under the water, Mac moved closer, using the blind spot directly behind the stern-mounted rudder to bring him into the craft. As he closed on the thick steel-plated rudder he felt the screw churning the water below the heavy steerage planks.
Reaching for the rudder, Mac mentally ticked off the approach stage from his to-do list and thought about boarding the craft without being seen and without slipping onto the prop; the screws on the older boats were under the stern’s hull, and generally weren’t a danger, but total fiasco was always just a slip away.
As his fingers searched for a hold, the air whooshed through his nostrils and he gasped as he was lifted out of the water and thumped head-first into the curved stern boards beside the rudder.
Stunned and disoriented as he sank through the murky waters, Mac coughed up a lungful of polluted water and felt his body go into panic.
Spluttering, his arms thrashing, Mac popped to the surface like a child out of a dream and grabbed for a hold on the hull of the craft. He’d been knocked down the starboard side of the ship, and as he fought for breath he heard the Chinese soldiers yelling and laughing. Digging himself into the slippery, lichen-covered hull as he vomited the river swill, Mac trod water with an egg-beater action, reaching for the SIG as the voices came to the rail twenty feet above.
Pulling the SIG up to his face as his left hand lost traction on the mossy hull, he slipped down again, his feet reaching too close to the spinning screw. With all of his strength, Mac pulled himself back to the surface with handfuls of slimy green river moss. Raising the handgun – comical with its condom over the muzzle – Mac saw the Chinese soldiers pointing at something moving in the water near the riverbank.
Following their gaze and praying they didn’t look down, he saw a pale-coloured Irrawaddy dolphin flip over and playfully swim backwards. The world’s rarest dolphin, trained now to play with European tourists, had tried to give him a ride, not knowing about the crown jewels.
Panting in agony against the hull of the ship, Mac struggled to control his breathing as he watched to see if the beast would come back for another Nutcracker dance. His G-Shock said 1.18 on the countdown as he cursed every Danish backpacker who’d ever encouraged these animals to commune with humans.
The dolphin did its squeaky little bark as it came back for another swim and the peaceful night was rent by automatic rifle fire.
Pressing himself hard against the slippery hull, Mac dug his fingernails into a gap between the planks and waited to die. As the gunfire abated, Mac allowed himself to look over his shoulder, the smell of blood and cordite floating over the oily river making him feel sick.
The dark stain of mammal blood slicked the water twenty feet from Mac’s perch and he could see pieces of shredded dolphin floating away on the current.
The Chinese soldiers laughed and a ciggie butt flew end over end, its glow extinguishing in the blood slick.
Breathing deep for composure and trying to ignore the pain in his groin, Mac moved back to the rudder and looked at his G-Shock. It showed 1.04 minutes until Go.
Chapter 57
Pulling on the boonie hat, Mac holstered the SIG handgun and climbed the rudder – a job made easy by the bands of iron wrapped horizontally around it. Lifting his eyes carefully over the transom he cased a dimly lit lower deck which would house a galley, the captain’s state room and probably a guest state room. He’d had this chat with Li: the crew’s cabins would be below decks and the holds and cargo decks were always forward of the wheelhouse. When locals travelled between towns on these ships, they sat cross-legged on the top decks and on the poop deck at the stern.
The soldiers talked on the upper decks, hidden from Mac’s view. He simply wanted to search the cabins and state rooms. If he was discovered, he’d remove the threat.
Climbing over the railing, Mac eased himself to the warm wooden decking and froze, listening for sounds as the water dripped off him. Tearing the condom off the SIG, he reached to a pocket on the back of the webbing belt and extracted a suppressor.
Moving along the port side of the covered deck, he stepped through an open hatch into a passage that led from one side of the ship to the other with a companionway dropping to the below decks.
Two doors faced the corridor. The state rooms, guessed Mac. Opening the first, he pushed his face in and saw the captain’s suite. A low-watt bulb cast a yellow glow over a functional cabin with a single cot, a wardrobe and a desk.
Shutting it quietly, Mac checked his watch. Forty-one seconds until Li pulled alongside.
Opening the second door, Mac eased into a similar cabin, no lights this time. In the darkness he saw a movement and heard some noises. From the cot in the corner, a man’s voice expressed confusion and then Mac saw him as he turned his face. Pulling the Ka-bar knife from his webbing, Mac jammed his right knee into the man’s chest, slapped his left hand across his mouth and nose and brought the Ka-bar across his throat. Feeling the air leave the dying man, Mac whipped around as he noticed there was someone else in the bed. Aiming his blade at the other face, just inches away, Mac stopped his attack as he looked into big, dark eyes. Adjusting to the darkness, he saw a naked child in the sheets on the other side of the corpse, and as he stood back, realised there was another in the bed – neither of them more than seven or eight years old.
Placing his finger on his lips, Mac made the international sign for silence as he backed towards the door, the white sheets turning black. Pulling the key from the inside lock, he locked the door from the outside, gasping for air as he looked at his watch: eighteen seconds.
Sliding down the companionway to the below decks, he moved through a smaller passageway which opened into a large aft cabin with a central table and double bunks built around it: a stinking rat-hole with white T-shirts and undies hanging from the ceiling, also known as the crew’s wardroom.
A bulb glowed in the upper bunk to Mac’s right, and pushing the laundry out of the way with the SIG’s suppressor, he found himself looking at a young Chinese man lying on his back, reading a PlayStation magazine. Mac shot him once in the forehead and followed with a shot to the temple. The suppressor reduced the noise to not much more than the sound of a Coke can being opened.
Sound came from the other side of the wardroom, and Mac moved carefully through the hanging underwear and around the central table, finding a Chinese man who’d rolled over to get some sleep.
Kneeling softly on the cot behind him, Mac withdrew his Ka-bar and sliced quickly through the carotid artery, clasping a hand over the man’s mouth and nose as he did so. The man’s head jerked slightly and a muffled yelp came from his lungs before he went slack in Mac’s hands.
Above decks, the conversation had started with Li, and Mac could hear the throb of the two Evinrudes against the hull. He reset his G-Shock to a one-hundred-and-twenty-second mission clock and left the room.
Outside the wardroom, another hatch led down a shorter companionway to the engine room – a dark, cramped space stinking of diesel and bilge and containing an old engine that had been cut to idle: Li’s story was working.
Pulling the hatch shut, realising he still had the rest of the ship to search, Mac paused. Was there someone behind that condenser? Pushing back into the engine room, he pulled the SIG to a cup-and-saucer stance and, peering into the darkness, he saw it again: between the old engine and the equally ancient condenser there was a foot.
‘Hello,’ he said, weaving the SIG through a jungle of pipes, analogue dials and jerry-rigged wiring.
‘What?’ came a confused male voice. In Aussie English.
Moving forwards Mac saw bilge slopping beneath the rotting duckboards, and as he eased around the engine block between the condenser, a face peered at him out of the gloom.
‘That you, McQueen?’ said Lance Kendrick, ankles bound and hands tied behind his back, Dave Urquhart sleeping against him.
‘No, it’s the tooth fairy,’ said Mac, kneeling and using the Ka-bar to snip the plastic ties.
Murmuring something, Urquhart woke with a start and yelped on seeing Mac’s tiger-striped face. They had seventy-six seconds before Li stood off and this ship returned to normal.
Freeing the two men, Mac shrugged off the M4, ripped the condom off the muzzle and gave it to Lance, whose injuries were obvious but not maiming. ‘You two okay to walk?’
‘Just,’ said Lance.
‘What about a swim?’ said Mac, checking the SIG for load and safety. He had fifteen shots.
‘Not if I have to dress like that,’ said Lance, nodding at Mac’s wet undies, and then examining the M4.
‘It’s just an M16,’ said Mac. ‘All you do is point and fire. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Lance, looking scared but resolved.
‘And get a good shoulder on this thing,’ said Mac, punching Lance in the right collarbone. ‘We want dead Chinamen, not holes in the ceiling.’
They moved slowly up the companionways to the first deck. Voices came from the port side so Mac led Urquhart and Lance across the first deck hallway to the starboard side.
Crouching in the shadows beside the railings, Mac looked at his G-Shock. They had under a minute to get to safety.
‘It’s very simple,’ said Mac. ‘You slip over the side, make no noise, and breaststroke or swim underwater to the banks. No flailing, no talking, no looking back.’
Looking through the steel railings, Urquhart was hyperventilating. ‘’Bout fifty metres?’
‘Less,’ said Mac. ‘You keep swimming, keep your head down and when you hit land you keep going – don’t stop and look around, especially if these pricks are shooting at you. Okay?’
The two men nodded but Urquhart had a thousand-yard stare.
‘Keep walking till you hit the highway,’ said Mac. ‘Wait beside the road – that’s the RV.’
Looking around, Mac felt something change – the engines were revving and then the screw churned the water behind the rudder. Taking the M4 from Lance, Mac offered his forearm and lowered the youngster over the side until they were both stretched out. Lance looked up and let go, disappearing into the slow-moving river.
Mac turned for Urquhart, who was frozen.
‘Remember the swimming carnivals?’ said his old dorm mate as he stole a scared look at the water. ‘Remember how I wasn’t in them?’
‘You needed a lawyer’s letter,’ said Mac, not wanting to hear this. Nudgee College had a very simple policy: everyone competed in the athletics carnival; everyone swam at least one event in the swimming carnival. The only exemption was Len Cromie, the pupil with cerebral palsy who defied his parents’ instructions one year and swam the fifty metres freestyle. He took five minutes to do it and half the school was in the pool with him by the end, urging him on and making sure he didn’t drown. The only other exemption in Mac’s memory was Dave Urquhart, who with a High Court judge for a grandfather and a father on the board of trustees somehow managed to get himself excused from the swimming.
‘We’re grown-ups now, mate,’ said Mac, watching Lance’s head bob up for air and then duck down and head for the river bank.
‘I can’t, Macca, I can’t –’
Mac stared at him. ‘
Can’t?
’
‘I never learned – I-I’m phobic,’ said Urquhart, with the same nervous stammer he had when the Lenihan brothers came around to see what was in his lock-box. ‘It’s a medical condition.’
‘No,’ said Mac, annoyed. ‘Len Cromie had a medical condition.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Urquhart. ‘Don’t use Cromie against me.’
‘You know what Len would say to you?’ said Mac, growling. ‘He’d say, “You wanna be a piker – go to fucking Churchie.”’
‘You’re a wanker, McQueen,’ said Urquhart, straddling the railing and holding his nostrils shut.
‘And you’re a Nudgee boy,’ said Mac, lowering him. ‘So get in the fucking river.’
Watching Urquhart panic and strike out for the river bank, Mac hesitated as he swung his legs over to follow him. There were fifteen seconds on his mission clock, more than enough time to drop into the water and escape.
Pulling his legs back over and onto the wooden planks of the deck, Mac cursed himself for what he was about to do. Checking the M4 for load and safety, he padded across the open space to the passageway that would take him back to the state room he’d locked the kids in. He felt foolish – he could hear the shouted conversation between Li and the ship’s captain coming to an end, and he knew the next step was going to be soldiers wandering around, finding their comrades dead and sounding the alarm.
Turning the key in the lock, fumbling in haste, Mac pushed in the door and beckoned to the kids. They huddled in the corner, behind the dead paedophile, refusing to move. Crossing the room, he held out his hand and realised that they were both naked – and modest.
Reaching for the girl – who looked the older of the two – Mac grabbed at her arm as she pulled it back. She was protective, pulling the sheet over both of the kids, and hiding the boy behind her.
‘In the
sap
,’ said Mac, using the Khmer word for river. ‘We swim in the
sap
.’
The girl shook her head – she was scared but brave and Mac had a flash of a choice: he could do the Harold, not tell anyone he’d left the kids on Dozsa’s boat and leave them out of the report entirely. But he let the weak man’s mind take over and started thinking like a father – wouldn’t want someone to walk away from his own daughters if they were in danger.
Boots thumped on the upper deck. Grabbing the girl by the arm, Mac pulled back, dragging her over the bloody sheets and the corpse, till she flopped onto the floor. She stood and opened her arms to the boy, who scrabbled over the dead rock spider to the safety of what Mac assumed was his sister.
The door almost hit Mac in the forehead as it flung open, and then Mac was looking into a soldier’s eyes.