Six years later
Johnny Hukapa came in hard, leading with a right roundhouse kick at Mac’s left thigh. Mac lifted his left leg slightly and covered up his face, drifting beyond the big Maori’s left hooks. Shifting his weight to the left foot, Mac left-jabbed twice at Johnny’s jaw and followed with a straight right, connecting fl ush with Johnny’s mouth, before skipping away.
‘Fuck!’ yelled Johnny through his mouthguard, annoyed at being tagged for the third time. He was slightly bigger than Mac but his strengths were in hand-to-hand combat and ground fi ghting, perfected in the Aussie SAS.
Watching Johnny’s face and eyes through the headgear, Mac threw out a few lefts and followed with a stamp kick into Johnny’s groin protector. Johnny tucked his chin down and came straight at Mac with a fl urry of punches to the headgear, pushing Mac backwards into the ropes of the Gold Coast PCYC boxing ring. Mac covered up and put in a short uppercut to Johnny’s chin, ducked and bobbed and came up on Johnny’s right, threw a cheeky left hook into the side of Johnny’s face before fading to his left and watching Johnny fall into the ropes where Mac had just been.
‘Shit!’ spat Johnny as the timer tinged.
After showering, Mac and Johnny walked down Monaco Street towards Gold Coast Highway, the early December sun hot on their backs and heating up their baseball caps. Johnny had been working in Sumatra but when his girlfriend became pregnant and put the hard word on him, the result was marriage and a move back to Australia.
Now Johnny had a fourteen-month-old son called James, while Mac’s nine-month-old, Rachel, was at home with Jenny.
‘So,’ said Mac, trying not to pry, ‘you said no again, huh? Boss’s orders?’
Johnny shrugged, put a piece of Juicy Fruit in his mouth and offered the pack to Mac. ‘Nah, mate, Arti’s cool. I’m just not ready for that shit again, know what I mean?’
Mac did know what Johnny meant. The mercenary outfi ts made the work in Iraq and Afghanistan sound great with your basic US$180,000 for a twelve-month contract, plus full medical and a whacking great life insurance policy. But once you were a parent and you’d been out of the action for a few years, it was hard to just switch on your instincts and appetite for that life all over again. Johnny had been approached three times in as many months for his old SAS expertise of infrastructure security. Some of the contracts out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Brunei and even Peru were too good to totally ignore.
‘You know how it is, mate,’ said Johnny, who had always made assumptions about Mac’s past, ‘you put yourself in a gunfi ght and you need to be in the zone. I mean, totally in the zone. I went up there now? I’d freak out or maybe I’d have no instincts. Either way, mate, I’d take a bullet and I’m too old for that.’
Mac listened intently. They were both in their late thirties, fi rst-time dads who had left dangerous professional lives behind them to go straight and forge futures without the physical risk. Mac was lecturing and tutoring two days a week at the University of Sydney. Johnny had a long-term contract with Movie World Studios, bodyguarding visiting actors – a gig whose chief danger was getting shot by the paparazzi.
But while Johnny found it easy to send the private army guys packing, for the past month Mac had been talking with one of his mentors from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Mac had realised Tony Davidson, now semi-retired, was trying to enlist him as soon as he played that fi rst voicemail on his mobile phone, but he’d called him back anyway. Davidson was the former director of operations for an ASIS jurisdiction stretching from India to Japan and down to Indonesia. He was the last genuine fi eld guy in the Service to have risen to any prominence. These days all the top jobs went to people who boasted about their time at INSEAD or Harvard rather than what they did to get Imelda to open the secret exit behind the mirror in her shoe-room.
Davidson wanted Mac back in. The former chief of spies was putting together an ‘outer circle’ of intel professionals to pick up a lot of the fi nance and trade espionage that had been overlooked as Australia focused almost exclusively on counter-terrorism. The result of Canberra’s de-prioritising of economic counter-espionage in favour of following the Yanks was a wholesale infl ux of Chinese money into Indonesia via legitimate-looking and commercial-acting companies backed either by the rich power bases of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a counterpart of the KGB.
Mac had been following it vaguely, especially the quite brazen economic infi ltration of East Timor and West Irian by MSS front companies. There was also the fi nancial blandishments being offered by PLA General Staff companies in Aceh province, where they were fl attening Sumatra and putting in palm-oil plantations, the largest the world had ever seen. Palm oil was the best and cheapest feedstock for bio-diesel, an industry the Chinese would basically own in the west Pacifi c within twenty years.
These were only a few of the issues that Davidson was worried about. There were Russian gangsters on the Gold Coast, Khmer Rouge gangs in regional slavery rackets and the Burmese Junta engaging in quite conspicuous heroin production and distribution.
They got to Gold Coast Highway and Johnny peeled right to walk towards Mermaid.
‘Take it easy, brother,’ said Johnny, slapping a big thumb handshake on Mac, who was heading on to Broadbeach. ‘And next week we’re on the mats, mate. See if you’re so cheeky then.’
‘Don’t know, Johnny. It’s me knee, mate – playing up again,’ laughed Mac, hamming a knee injury.
‘Monday, one o’clock, bro,’ said Johnny as his crossing light went green. ‘No excuses.’
Mac groaned. Johnny liked to warm up with a few rounds of Greco-Roman, followed by some Judo forms, followed by a half-hour of sparring. And when Johnny Hukapa sparred, it wasn’t hugging. The PCYC judo room would resound to a strange banging sound as Mac consistently tapped out, unable to deal with the power and technique of the bloke.
Mac stood and watched Johnny go, his gear bag held at his side in a huge paw. His hair was still thick and in a military cut, and he walked like he was marching to a C-130 for another secret rotation.
Mac turned to his own crossing, hit the pedestrian button and pondered what Johnny had said about anxiety and instincts: Either way, I’d take a bullet…
There was nothing wrong with Johnny’s reasoning. But still Mac had decided to say yes to Davidson and was meeting him the following afternoon.
He felt very nervous. He was back in… and he hadn’t told Jenny yet.