Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (5 page)

The plainclothes came around to Mac’s side, eyeballed him, took the passport and smirked.

‘Bit early for you, eh McQueen? You’d be sleeping off the booze this time of the morning, wouldn’t you?’

‘Bloke’s not a camel, Bongo, you know how it is.’

Bongo Sitepu, a peer of Mac’s from Indonesian intelligence, snorted, fl icked the passport to the dog-handler without looking at it and walked off.

Julie spoke with the uniform POLRI. She spoke good Bahasa and Mac picked up that she was saying they were Australian Embassy staff, going straight to the Hard Rock Hotel. They were waved through as Mac watched the police carbines being lifted and aimed at an old pale blue HiAce van pulling up behind them.

They hit another roadblock forty metres from the Hard Rock.

Concrete sleds were arranged in an overlap, with a dozen riot squad POLRI inside and outside the perimeter to the hotel. Julie showed the ID and a POLRI bloke with a bum-fl uff mo fl ashed a torch in Mac’s face and then waved them through to the hotel.

As Mac got out and stretched he was hit by the noise: trucks, fi re appliances, generators powering fl oodies, shouts from panicked men.

He could see the lights originating from three blocks away. Buses fi lled with locals in white overalls fi led past; morgue trucks and cranes, police rescue, fi re rescue, ambulances - hundreds of people, running around with injured locals, yelling at one another. As he pulled his overnight bag from the Commodore, Julie came round the front and handed Mac a white envelope.

‘Room key - and you’re sharing, till all the paying guests are gone.’

Mac wanted to argue about the sharing thing but Julie was already back in the car, putting it in gear. She made to go then stopped, leaned out the window. ‘By the way, Joe wants you to call him as soon as you check in. Indons have shut down the cellular system so you’ll have to fi nd a payphone.’

Closing her window, Julie squealed out of the forecourt as a couple of Anglos wandered out of the lobby.

‘Hi, darling. Hard day?’ came a voice near Mac.

Turning, Mac came face to face with Anton Garvey, who’d been in Mac’s ASIS intake in 1990. More heavily set than he once was and a chrome-dome to boot, Garvs was going to be the declared Service operative in the AFP-led operation.

‘Garvs,’ said Mac, shaking hands as he tried to place the tallish, skinny bloke next to him.

‘Macca, this is Chez Delaney - Foreign Affairs, Jakarta.’

Mac shook the bloke’s hand, uneasy at the fl oppy fi sh effect. Mac didn’t like his cricket club tie either.

‘Actually, Mr McQueen, it’s Chester,’ said the bloke through mean lips.

‘Actually, Chez, it’s Macca,’ smiled Mac, ‘but you can call me sir.’

They walked the blocks to Bemo Corner, turned left and walked north up Legian Street to the site of the fi rst blast outside Paddy’s nightclub.

It felt ominous, bathed in the temporary fl oodlights. On their right were hundreds of locals carrying bodies, parts of bodies, shoes and clothes, and directing cranes and other heavy lifting equipment to pieces of roofi ng, walls, rubble. Mac smelled acrid, scorched material as if bamboo or wood had been torched with gasoline.

Mac didn’t want to be a bystander - he wanted to get in there and help. But he didn’t have the shoes or clothing to go into the mess that had once been Paddy’s Bar, a place he’d been very drunk in only a week ago during the Bali Sevens. They kept moving and it suddenly occurred to Mac that some of the Manila Marauders he’d played with might have been caught up in it.

They were challenged by POLRI as they tried to move across the street towards where the Sari Club had once stood. Garvs fl ashed ID and babbled something in Bahasa, and then the three of them stopped spontaneously, shocked. The Sari Club had been completely annihilated, and a number of buildings around it were fl attened and still smouldering. Firefi ghters were pumping water over torn-apart buildings behind where the Sari had been, and forty or fi fty police and fi refi ghters crawled over the site, trying to get cranes and front-end loaders over to move slabs of concrete and debris. Voices moaned and screamed above the generators and fi re pumps, and Mac’s knees went rubbery for a split second, nausea rising at the sight of total carnage.

In front of them was a crater in the road that looked to be six or seven feet deep and about twenty, maybe twenty-fi ve feet across.

‘What’s that?’ asked Mac, quite aware what it was but not expressing himself clearly. He was so tired.

‘Ground zero,’ said Garvey, but he said it like a question.

‘What’s the early mail?’ said Mac.

Chester piped up, with a high-pitched squeak, ‘Terror bombing

- a lot of Australians, I’m afraid.’

‘Few locals as well, eh Chez?’ muttered Mac.

Chester sobered up fast as he realised what he’d said. ‘Well, yes.

Umm, yep, you’re right.’

The fi rst tendrils of dawn were just starting to ease into the darkness when they got back to the Hard Rock. Mac had heard that Chester was waiting on fi nal confi rmation from Canberra that DFAT would have overall carriage of the Australian effort. The Prime Minister felt comfortable with the Australian Federal Police in general and the commissioner in particular, and a number of arguments were being mounted to ensure that the AFP didn’t actually end up running the show - an outcome considered unthinkable by Foreign Affairs. Mac’s cop girlfriend, Jenny, had always suspected this was the way people like Chester operated, and Mac had never had the heart to tell her she was damned right.

Garvs smiled as he pulled his buzzing Nokia from his pocket.

‘Network’s up again,’ he said and then turned away, took the call.

Mac walked into the lobby where American, British, New Zealand and Australian accents were all vying with each other. Phones were ringing, voices arguing. An American touched his chest with both hands and then pushed them away at an Australian, saying, ‘No, you see, I have to get the okay from your guys before I get the okay from my guys. Okay?’

Mac grabbed his overnight bag from the porter’s trolley and moved to the lift banks with Chester. He needed a shower and some nosebag and then he’d be into the day. Taking the lift to the third fl oor, he made small talk with Chez. It wasn’t till he got to his door that the two of them realised they were room-mates. They looked at each other, cleared their throats, then both looked at the folders holding their security cards, willing the numbers to change. Neither knew quite how to articulate his annoyance, so Mac pushed into the room, threw his bag on the bed closest to the window, kicked off his shoes and made for the bathroom.

‘It’ll be fi ne, Chezza,’ Mac yelled as he turned on the shower.

‘I only snore when I’m drunk. Really,
really
drunk.’

Mac slept till after nine, nightmares of craters and exploding buildings disturbing his sleep. When he woke to a background of sirens and helicopters Chester wasn’t around. He checked his bag for signs of entry, checked his phone for dialled calls, then changed into his blue overalls and Hi-Tec boots.

The hotel restaurant was packed with people shouting at each other, shouting into phones, yelling at people like Julie who were circulating with clipboards, shoving phones into people’s faces, getting signatures and waiting for the okay to go and do what they had to do. Watching Julie, Mac mused that if the Commonwealth ever ran out of bright young female organisers like her to get the lunchers into formation, the wheels would fall off the whole show.

Grabbing scrambled eggs, tomatoes and sausages, Mac poured a cup of coffee and walked over to Garvey’s table.

‘How’s it going, boys?’ asked Mac as he sat.

Chester looked him up and down very quickly, his long face and thin brown hair making him look like a Puritan.

Garvey gave Mac a quick look, sipped on his tea. ‘Job interview, mate?’

Mac poured milk into his coffee, refusing to be baited by the swipe at his clothes. ‘Thought I’d get amongst it.’

Garvey shook his head. He’d always been the more bureaucratically astute of the two of them. ‘I don’t know what your brief is, Macca, but they didn’t bring you in from Manila to shift rubble. Know what I mean, sport?’

Mac knew precisely what he meant, but before the Aussie cavalry arrived from Darwin he wanted to examine the bomb sites more closely. And he wanted to keep his media dickhead clothes clean.

‘Morning, gentlemen,’ Julie said, arriving at the table.

They murmured greetings back.

‘Mr Delaney, Jakarta,’ she said, handing Chester a Nokia, two more phones on her right hip.

As Chester put his left index fi nger in his left ear and leaned away from the table, Garvey looked at Mac and said, ‘So what
is
your role, champ?’

‘Public affairs for DFAT,’ said Mac, trying to eavesdrop on Chester.

‘Quality control - that shit.’

Mac stood on the edge of the crater in front of the Sari Club on Legian Street, one of the main streets of Kuta. Around him, the job of fi nding the injured was still going at fever pitch, even as the Indonesians bagged and tagged body parts, gently placing them in refrigerated trucks that had been backed into the blast sites. The smell was strengthening with the rising temperature and soon they’d have a rat problem.

A POLRI offi cer in pale blue overalls approached Mac, right hand on his holster. Mac held out the plastic-sheathed ID Julie had given him before he ventured out and the cop nodded and walked on.

Mac looked into the crater. Muddy water sat at the bottom and there was gravel up the steep sides. He took in what lay behind: a fl attened Sari Club. The Sari had been a large, three-storey structure occupying virtually an entire corner site. It wasn’t some fl imsy shack.

The buildings behind the Sari had the strangest damage: concrete had been blasted off the load-bearing beams, leaving nothing but the reinforcing steel which was twisted and bent.

Mac turned one-eighty degrees and saw Paddy’s Bar, which was still largely intact, the buildings beside it fi re-damaged but still standing. Even to the untrained eye, the thing that had fl attened the Sari was clearly different to whatever had hit Paddy’s.

Pulling his CoolPix from the chest pocket of his overalls, Mac took a few snaps. Intel people generally relied on newspaper archives and magazine stories to remind them of what they’d seen, but Mac liked to have his own records, liked to review pictures he’d taken himself.

Finding the non-pattern was easier when you’d been standing in the very spot from where the photo was taken.

He took two shots of Paddy’s and then moved in an arc, taking what would be a panorama of images when he played it back as a slide show on a computer. He was halfway through his arc when he heard a crunch of gravel to his right.

‘I’ll get you a postcard, if you ask nice.’

Mac took his eye from the camera, turned to Freddi Gardjito and smiled.

‘How’s it going, champ?’ said Mac, shaking Freddi’s hand.

They talked a while, affable enough for a couple of spooks who might be acting contrary to each other’s interests. Freddi was Mac’s age and had a similar history: good degree from a university, in his case the University of Surabaya, then army offi cer training which had seen him operating with Kopassus and spending time in the notorious Group 4 - the Kopassus plainclothes intel outfi t. From there it was into BAIS, Indonesian military intelligence.

Under Suharto BAIS had been the most violent intel and secret service outfi t in South-East Asia. Before the Americans had got into trouble for rendering terror suspects to Egypt and Pakistan, the CIA had used BAIS when it needed to get to the bottom of a memory problem. In the post-Suharto world, BAIS had more constitutional fetters on its behaviour, but somehow the mystique prevailed: high-level cops and politicians steered clear of BAIS.

‘Like the view?’ asked Freddi, hands on his hips. For a Javanese he was tallish - fi ve-eleven - and built strong enough to strain at the dark blue shirt and fi ll out his trousers. It didn’t matter what nationality you were, special forces required a certain build.

‘What happened here?’ asked Mac.

‘That’s what you’re here to tell us, eh Mac?’

They stared at each other - both deadpanning, eyes hidden behind dark sunnies, Freddi chewing on gum.

‘Gimme a chance, Freddi,’ grinned Mac. ‘Only got in a few hours ago.’

‘Well we’ve got three blast sites. This one, that one,’ he said, jigging his thumb over his shoulder, ‘and one outside the American consulate in Denpasar. The embassy one was a shit-bomb.’

‘A what?’ asked Mac.

Freddi waved him away. ‘Forget about it.’

‘Any suspects?’

Freddi shrugged. ‘Guess that’s why we need the Aussies, eh?’

‘Told you, mate: I just got here.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Do I, Freddi?’ said Mac, pulling a bottle of Evian from his pack and slugging at it. He offered it to Freddi, who shook his head.

‘Sure, Mac. It’ll be, “The terrible Muslims, the violent Asians who think life is so cheap, have bombed themselves again. ‘Cos that’s what these Asiatics do - they blow themselves up, and take others with them.”’

Freddi shifted his weight. ‘Something like that, eh Mac?’

Garvey wouldn’t have taken that shit, not from an Indon. But Mac liked to get the local perspective, liked to see it from their angle. He nodded slightly, enough so as not to give Freddi any confl ict to go on with.

‘So what’s with the hole?’ Mac pointed into the crater, perplexed by the size and the depth of the thing. ‘What made
that
?’

Freddi moved forward to the edge of it and looked down. ‘Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t no local IED.’

‘Reckon?’ said Mac, who had already decided that if JI was running around with a couple of improvised explosive devices, they’d be big enough to do the Paddy’s blast, but not this: not concrete blasted off its reo rods fi fty or sixty feet away.

‘Yep,’ said Freddi, putting his hand out for the water after all. ‘I’m betting there were two crews on this - the pros and the patsies.’

When Mac’s phone went off, Freddi raised his hand and walked away with the water. Mac looked at the phone screen, which said
Scare
Me
- Mac’s code for SCM, or Service Chief Manila.