Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent Read online

  The cook brought the Bintang out himself.

  ‘Thanks, champ. This is some great tucker,’ said Mac.

  The cook was chuffed. He smiled and tried to get through the language barrier. ‘Merry Carn?’ he asked.

  Mac shook his head. ‘Nah, champ. Skippy.’ Mac did his bush-roo impersonation, paws up under his chin.

  The bloke laughed out loud, put his hand on Mac’s shoulder before making his way back to the woks and gas rings. Javanese social interaction had two speeds: serious appraisal verging on suspicion, and outright joyous laughter. Laughter got you closer to the gods, so if you could get a laugh out of a Javanese, they owed you.

  Mac fi nished the meal and dawdled with his beer, turning it round and sipping at it. Something nagged at him - some chatter he’d picked up a couple of years ago when he was posted in Manila. His barber, Ramon, had been a National Police intelligence offi cer during the Marcos era. Ramon cut hair for all the Customs guys, cops and the Port Authority bulls. He was like a clearing house for all the good chatter, all the stuff you couldn’t get from an embassy cocktail party or a keyhole satellite feed.

  Which was why Mac had got his hair cut there.

  He tried to get his memory working. Ramon had once told him about a discovery at Clark, the old US Air Force base about twenty minutes’ drive north of Manila. Apparently, in their haste to decommission the joint in 1992, an entire cache of hush-hush materiel had been left behind by the Yanks. There were huge underground systems at Clark. You could drive all day around the base and never see daylight. Someone forgot about an underground storage garage, and ten years later the Philippines government had demanded that the Department of Defense come back and pick it up.

  Mac had remembered the last part of the conversation because Ramon had said, ‘It’s going out to Johnston - all being handled by the spooks now.’

  Mac had remembered the Johnston bit only because he was dating a Canadian girl called Bethany Johnstone at the time. She was Canadian Customs intel - gorgeous, but a little on the bossy side.

  Mac had chuckled at the thought of a bunch of hush-hush hazardous materiel being shipped to Beth.

  He’d never taken it further. Conspiracies weren’t his thing and in truth the Filipinos loved nothing more than tales of forgotten caches of precious stuff. The story of Yamashita’s gold was a classic example.

  During the Pacifi c War, the Japanese military under General Yamashita had looted gold reserves from wherever they invaded throughout South-East Asia, and they had hidden the vast caches in secret caves around the Philippines and northern Indonesia. Filipinos had grown up on stories of where the Yamashita Gold might be hidden.

  The reference to spooks at Clark linked it for Mac. He wondered if the US cache at Clark was the same stuff that had now gone missing in Manila Bay. He wanted to get on the phone to Jakarta and just ask Jen to look it up. He wanted to have a serious conversation with Garvs

  - cut through the bullshit. But it wasn’t going to work that way. He wasn’t going to get Jen in the shit and he wasn’t going to give Garvs a chance to order him home.

  He wolfed the beer, fl attened some rupiah and stood to go.

  Suddenly he had a fl ash: when he’d brokered the logging deal with Sabaya’s business negotiators, one of the entourage had been a tallish Eurasian-looking Filipino with a huge chromed handgun. He’d never said a word, just sat in the background and stared.

  Mindanao ‘02 - the guy was Ray-Bans.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mac let himself out the back of the shop and walked to the end of the rear alley. He paused, poked his head out. Looked left and right down the cross street and couldn’t see a red Liberty or men sitting in cars.

  He walked west with the other pedestrians, the streets buzzing with large tourist buses and Malaysians and Americans in tour groups.

  There was no sign of Mr Turquoise. Mac assumed he was around the corner, waiting in the street the restaurant fronted on to. He slowed as he approached the corner where an old man sold newspapers and magazines. A monkey sat on the guy’s cart, chain attached to his collar. He walked wider, stopped, put his hand in his pocket, pointed at a Straits Times, came out with rupiah. The guy fl ipped the newspaper into four, held it out and cupped the same hand for some brass. Mac hit him with some dough, leaned over and around and clocked the street. Mr Turquoise had moved on from the restaurant. Mac took his change, tossed one of the 500 rupiah coins to the monkey, who caught it and put it in his little canvas pouch, gave Mac a wink.

  Mac looked round the corner again and saw Mr Turquoise staring into a shop window. There was no sign of Ray-Bans.

  Mac walked out from the corner, exposing his position to Mr Turquoise, who was forty metres away. Turquoise stood up, turned around slow, clocked the street. Clocked Mac. Did a double take. Mac pretended to see him for the fi rst time too and, feigning surprise, turned and moved away. He kept going back down the cross street, though not as fast as he could.

  Turquoise followed Mac around the corner with his hand under his trop shirt; Mac kept moving away, down the cross street. Turquoise hesitated, probably warned to be careful. Then he came after Mac.

  Game on.

  Mac knew that fl at-footed guys tired quickly, especially in the legs. That’s why regular army never took them. A fl at-foot who tried to join the Royal Marines, the paras or a diggers’ infantry outfi t would be carried out on a stretcher. Everything was speed marches, every day was a route. There were no stragglers, no excuses.

  Mac assumed that if Ray-Bans wasn’t with Turquoise, he’d be covering the Pantai. So Mac was luring Turquoise north, away from his support, diluting the numerical advantage. If things turned out Mac’s way, he’d even up the fi repower equation.

  Mac got to a pedestrian crossing and waited. Turquoise closed as the light went green - he was already puffi ng and Mac moved off again, through the strollers, keeping a distance of about fi fty metres, keeping it straight. He wanted the tail at his six o’clock, giving the guy confi dence. They crossed another street. Mac paused at the light, turned and had a look; Turquoise was purple in the face, shirt getting wet. Mac wondered if he smoked. They came to a street behind the Sedona.

  Mac stopped, looked around as if he was confused. He wanted Turquoise to think he had the upper hand. Wanted him overeager to end it.

  Mac turned left into a cross street and slowed. They weaved between other pedestrians, Turquoise closing, wheezing, and Mac pretending to be scared and tired. He let Turquoise get within fi fteen metres and then ducked into one of the alleys, stopped, dropped the newspaper, ran straight back the way he’d come. As he fl ew out of the alley, Turquoise looked up in surprise, his right hand under the shirt, on his right hip.

  Mac slapped his left hand down on Turquoise’s gun wrist, at the same time throwing a heavy open-hand strike into the guy’s throat.

  Right up high near the jawbone. He straightened his arm, drove up through his right leg and threw his right hip behind it. Turquoise’s feet left the pavement and he went down on his back, winded, his eyes wide with fear and surprise. Mac pulled the bloke’s gun hand away from the holster with a Korean wrist-lock, belted the guy in the temple with a right-hand punch. Turquoise went slack.

  Mac’s wrist pulsed white-hot with the impact. Agony.

  He looked around. A couple of people had watched, but now quickly turned away. Mac shook his hand but it made his wrist hurt even more. He dragged Turquoise behind a pile of garbage in the stinking alley and pulled the handgun out of the holster - a Browning.

  He stuffed it in his belt in the small of his back. He checked the guy’s two breast pockets in the trop shirt: nothing. Had a feel in his pants, came out with a laundry slip from the Golden Hotel. What was it with Javanese men and their goddamned pants? He looked closer and saw Turquoise’s room number on the docket. It was 414 - level four, harbour-facing.

  There was something else: a scrap of paper with a series of numbers written on it in ballpoint. He trousered t
he scrap, checked the other pocket and laughed as he came up with a red plastic rectangle with the gold stamp of 414 on it.

  He put the key and the laundry docket back, then input the eleven-digit number into his phone. A bank account? He put the scrap back too.

  Turquoise mumbled something, came to, looked at Mac, and panicked. Mac slapped him with the Browning. Turquoise slumped again. Picking up the Straits Times, Mac opened it and spread it over him. Just another drunk sleeping it off. Then he took off.

  Mac’s instinct was to go straight to the Golden, enlist his way into Turquoise’s room and have a good old nosey-poke. Messing around in other folks’ lives was what Mac had been trained for. But he wasn’t going to do it. He remembered Ray-Bans’ presence and general demeanour from the Mindanao Forest Products infi ltration, and he hadn’t seemed stupid. In fact, as Mac ran it through his memory, it could well have been Ray-Bans who’d engineered the doubling of Tony Kleinwitz.

  So Mac wasn’t going to go stumbling into a hotel room which could be an ambush. The hotel key in the pocket? If Ray-Bans was smart enough to double Kleinwitz right under Mac’s nose, he was smart enough to plant that key knowing that Turquoise might not be up to the job.

  Mac walked north, his wrist aching, sore as. He moaned softly to himself as he tried to get his wrist comfortable. It just got worse. He’d have to attend to it.

  Ducking into a convenience shop, he bought arnica ointment and crepe. Continuing on, he came back to the rear of the Sedona, checking for eyes and cars. He walked in the rear loading bay, passing waiters having a smoke and laundry girls fl irting with the guys having a smoke. Pushing through saloon doors into the lobby, he checked for eyes before going through to the bar, asking for a bucket of ice to be brought poolside.

  Then Mac raced up the fi re stairs, made two passes of his room door, and paused outside it: the DO NOT DISTURB was still in place and the soap-scum he’d laid across the underside of the doorknob was still set in one glob, right where he’d put it. He bent down, sniffed the door knob - no solvent smell. You could remove soap scum with solvent and then put your own scum back on. But the solvent smell would linger.

  He entered the room, nervous as hell, dumped everything into the black backpack, then swung around and left.

  Mac sat by the Sedona pool, in the shadows of the palms and poured the contents of the ice bucket into the plastic mail centre bag from the pack. Screwing the top of the bag closed, he laid it on his wrist.

  Gasped. Sore as!

  Mac leaned back, trying to let the stress go, trying to breathe out the pain.

  After twenty minutes he rubbed as much of the arnica in as he could without yelling aloud and bandaged the wrist as tight as possible. Stars fl ashed in his eyes, darkness closing in from his peripheral vision. He was almost in tears as he pulled the last of the bandage around behind his thumb, held it there with his teeth and fastened it with the bandage claws.

  Agony!

  Mac’s blue Commodore rolled up to the big security gates of the Port of Makassar. He’d hired a private car and a driver called Sami to give him a better image.

  Mac got out, walked to the glass security cage, showed the MPS

  key. The Port Authority guy looked him up and down, put his hand out. Mac turned over the Richard Davis passport. Please don’t scan it; please don’t scan it.

  The bloke could have run it through his database, the same as Indonesian Customs. But instead he wrote the passport number and Commodore rego onto his log sheet, gave the passport back and fl ipped his head slightly. By the time Mac got back to the Commodore, the boom gate was up.

  They drove onto Hatta Quay, one of the huge container aprons on either side of the traditional pinisi wharves. Sami said he knew where the non-bond stores were and they drove north to a set of buildings.

  Mac left Sami at the security gate for MPS and strode across a concrete courtyard until he stood in front of a shed with the number 46 painted in huge gold letters on a black industrial roller door. It was the same as a whole group of the same doors fronting four large buildings. The warehouses were subdivisions.

  There was a single pedestrian door in the main one, and Mac put the key into the welded padlock and turned it. The door swung inwards. Mac pulled out the Browning behind him, turned back and went into the warehouse.

  It was about thirty metres long and twenty metres wide, with natural light coming down from glass panels in the gabled ceiling.

  Mac guessed it was eight, maybe ten years old.

  Empty.

  He walked around the edges, the Browning in his left hand. He felt stupid. Confused. He’d gambled everything to get back to Makassar and here he was strolling round in circles in an empty warehouse.

  Nothing but the sound of scuffs on a concrete fl oor.

  He put the Browning back in his belt, breathing deep, and rubbed his temples and eyes. He was so tired; fatigued like he used to get in the Marines. Rooted.

  He went through the options. He could go back to the gatehouse, try to either enlist or terrify the locals, fi nd out what the fuck was going on. But he didn’t see that as productive. He already knew they were scared of someone and he had a good idea who. He’d have to hurt someone and he’d only end up with intel along the lines of, Some guys turned up in a truck, they paid in cash, they unloaded the stuff, then they picked the stuff up, then they fucked off. And if he didn’t kill them, he’d be caught by the cops or the Port Authority bulls and charged with terrorist activities or economic sabotage. They’d think of something.

  His biggest problem wasn’t Ray-Bans or Garrison or Sabaya or the Service, but allowing too many hours to go past without telling Cookie that he was back in Makassar.

  He locked the door as he left, then went for a walk to get some air. Finding a path across the concrete apron and the rail tracks, he walked to the water’s edge. It was an area where standard loose cargo was stevedored - cargo that wasn’t in containers. A lot of Indonesia’s trade saw feeder ships bringing goods from secondary regional ports to the larger ports, where freight forwarders and merchants would aggregate the stuff into containers for on-shipping. That’s what MPS was for. To his left were the huge cranes of the Hatta container terminal. To his right was a breakwater made of large concrete blocks.

  Two boys stood on the blocks, casting lines.

  The sight of the boys put a smile on his face. They reminded him of growing up in Rockie.

  He wandered over. The boys were nine, maybe ten. Skinny, cocky, big smiles. No fi sh.

  Mac asked how they were doing. Their English wasn’t great, but fi shing is the same in any language. They shrugged. Mac noticed one of them had a Brazil soccer shirt. He pointed, said, ‘Ronaldo, Ronaldinho.’ Said it sagely.

  The boy burst into a smile, forgot about his fi shing line and jabbered something at his mate, who was getting shitty. Brazil pointed at his friend and said, ‘Enger Land.’ He made a face.

  Mac said, ‘Beckham? Rooney?’

  That triggered off an excited exchange between the two boys.

  Mac was amazed at the global reach of soccer. The passion was just as strong in Makassar as in Rio or Liverpool. Mac asked when Indonesia was going to a World Cup fi nal and Brazil shook his head slowly.

  ‘No good. No good.’

  Mac turned to go. Saw the MPS warehouses had a gantry along the roof line. Realised those glass panels in the roof were hinged. He’d been ten once and he’d poked around where he shouldn’t. With half a hunch he turned to Brazil and asked if he had the courage to climb the building. Mac pointed. ‘Too high?’

  The boys arced up, ten-year-old egos worn on their sleeves. Mac tried to get them going. They smiled secretly at one another. Mac pulled out some rupiah. ‘How much is one of those World Cup footballs

  - you know: the Adidas ones. Silver, aren’t they?’

  Brazil looked at the rupiah with eyes that said, The whole lot should cover it.

  Mac folded it, handed it over. ‘We go all time. All time,
’ Brazil said, swinging his hand outward, like it was no big deal.

  ‘Yesterday?’ asked Mac.

  Brazil shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Must see interesting things?’

  Brazil shrugged, said, ‘Sure.’

  Mac looked over at MPS. Noticed a yellow tractor unit parked beside the back of warehouse 46. He pointed at the tractor. ‘Interesting things in that one?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Like what?’

  The boys got coy, looked at each other like, You tell. No, you tell.

  Mac smiled. ‘You climbed in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘See?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Mac put his hands on his hips and did the disbelief-at-their-bravery tone. ‘Get some?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘No!’

  Brazil nodded frantically. ‘Sure. Had lots. Much.’

  Mac went for goal. ‘Show me.’

  Brazil led them across the concrete boulders of the breakwater, England smiling at Mac. You’ll see how cool we are.

  They got to a point where the huge boulders didn’t meet along their fl at planes, revealing a gap that made a sort of cave. Well, cave enough for a ten-year-old boy. Brazil went into his cubby-house, England smiled at Mac. You’ll see!

  Brazil came out with his haul.

  The blood drained from Mac’s face and he gestured urgently for Brazil to put the fucking thing down. Slow!

  Brazil’s eyes went wide with fear and he lowered it, staring at Mac.

  Scared. Mac called the boys to him. They were shitting themselves.

  Mac could have done with the rubber undies himself. His heart jumped as they reached him. In a few years’ time they’d be fi nding human teeth on the moon, he thought.

  Sitting on the concrete boulder in the early afternoon was a yellow plastic box with a built-in handle. It looked like a tradesman’s drill case, with a bit more grunt. CL-20: the planet’s most powerful and unstable non-nuclear explosive. Enough to vaporise the three of them.