The door rattled, jolting Mac out of a deep sleep. Grabbing his pack, he threw himself off the bed, rolled across the bare teak fl oor, pulled the Heckler from the pack and aimed it. It was dark, no moon, and the breeze wafted through the windowless frames, fl apping the white curtains over Mac’s head as he steadied himself and got his breathing under control.
He sat naked on the fl oor like that for eight seconds, his heart pounding in his head. Then he heard it again; a rattling at the bamboo door. And then, ‘Mr Richard, please, sorry, sir. Mr Richard, please…’
It was Philip.
Mac took a deep breath and winced as his sternum fl ared, making lights appear at the edges of his vision.
‘What is it?’ said Mac, looking at his G-Shock: 3.12 am local.
‘I have phone for you, Mr Richard.’
Moving to the bamboo wall, Mac peered out the side window.
‘You alone, mate?’ Mac rasped.
‘Yes, I alone, Mr Richard. It the phone for you, sir.’
Mac leaned against the front wall of the cottage, looked around the corner and cased the beach. It was deserted. He pulled on a pair of undies and put one foot through the windowless space and then the other.
‘Be right with you, champ!’ he yelled, throwing himself to the sand twelve feet below. He doubled around the front of the raised cottage in cup-and-saucer mode, and up the side path to the back door. Holding his breath, he levelled the Heckler as he peeked around the corner, expecting to fi nd Philip with a gun to his head. But Philip was alone.
‘Nice this time of evening, eh?’ said Mac, having slipped his gun into the back of his undies.
Philip jumped out of his skin, yelped slightly, and Mac regretted surprising him. A few years older than Mac, Philip was a former high school teacher. He and his wife had taken over Seraya Beach from her father and uncles a few years earlier.
Mac and Philip chatted as they strolled back to the offi ce at the southern end of the beach.
‘I thought you were a ghost,’ laughed Philip.
‘Indonesian ghosts are white?’
‘Sure,’ said Philip. ‘But often they friendly,’ he added quickly, realising he may have caused offence.
The phone handpiece sat on the front desk of the offi ce area – really just a porch at the entry to Philip’s house. Philip pointed at it and Mac picked it up and said, ‘Davis.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ yelled the unmistakable voice of Joe Imbruglia, ASIS station chief in Manila, ‘where the fuck are you?’
‘Up early, Joe. You shit the bed?’
A hiss of breath came through the phone. Joe had been one of the fi rm’s best-ever operatives in Beijing, with a special talent for East Asian languages and a good feel for the weird political and cultural problems between Japan, Korea and China. But now he was a reluctant offi ce guy expected to run Mac, and while they respected one another they also clashed.
‘Don’t give me grief, McQueen. I need you in Denpasar, now!’
‘What, Garvey’s in the cells again? Just tell them to hose him down – he’ll come right.’
‘Don’t get smart, McQueen. We’ve got a multiple IED incident in Kuta, Garvey’s gone down there as a declared but we need a covert.
Understand?’
Mac massaged his temples with his left hand. ‘Well, if Garvey’s running it…’
‘Don’t argue with me, mate. I’ve got reports of hundreds dead – most of them Aussies. Those JI fuckers bombed a couple of nightclubs.
In Kuta! Eleven o’clock at night! You believe these people?’
Mac could hear the emotion coming up in Joe’s voice. ‘So, my role is what?’
‘The fucking Feds have a forward command post already on the move, okay? Your job is to keep an eye on things, make sure the story doesn’t get too out of shape.’
Mac nodded. Joe was worried about the Australian Federal Police taking control and doing naive things like telling the media precisely what was going on. Mac would need to tailor the story, stop any Boy Scout behaviour.
‘My cover?’
‘Embassy – your usual shit. If DFAT get to run the show, then you’ll have veto on the media releases. You’re public affairs, okay?’
‘Got it.’
Joe told him there was an Australian Navy Sea King helo on its way. ‘And McQueen?’
‘Yes, Joe?’
‘They’re on your side. None of that survivalist bullshit, okay?’
Mac walked slowly back to the cottage wondering what the real story might be in Kuta. His UN gig was in jeopardy – Mac could feel it. But there was a deeper worry in Joe’s voice, like the world had just changed forever.
The Sea King landed on Seraya Beach just before four am. Mac took the loadmaster’s arm-grip and jumped on with his pack. The helo rose, turned and headed west towards Bali. Mac cadged a pair of overalls to ward off the draught, strapped himself into the awkward hammock seat and tried to think through what this was all about.
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was a spy agency but it was part of DFAT – the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
So it was part of the same set-up as the diplomats and the trade commissioners. When ASIS offi cers were posted to an embassy, they were either a ‘declared’ intelligence operative or they had a cover. The cover would normally be something like a second trade attache or a diplomatic mid-ranker with vaguely defi ned public affairs duties.
The way embassies worked – which really annoyed Australians who worked abroad for their country – was that ASIS spent as much time spying on their own people as they did trying to gain information advantages over other nationalities. To preserve that internal security capacity, ASIS offi cers working within a cover in the embassy were not usually declared to other Australians in the embassy. The ambassador might know and the ASIS station chief would know, but there wouldn’t be many outside that circle.
Now Joe Imbruglia was sending in Mac under embassy cover, and doing so from Manila rather than Jakarta, further complicating the situation. Mac had about forty-fi ve minutes to work up his cover, get himself back into his normal role, which at most Australian embassies in South-East Asia was assistant third secretary – political, a position that conveniently had partial oversight of the public affairs and media functions. The ASIS cover role had once been assistant counsellor public affairs, but the public affairs section of the Australian diplomatic mission was being gutted and dismantled because some genius in Canberra had decided it wasn’t a specialist discipline. Mac had a view on that: if the Americans and the Chinese said public propaganda was a specialist diplomatic discipline then that’s precisely what it was.
They landed in the military section behind Denpasar Airport at quarter to fi ve. A young woman from the embassy in Jakarta met Mac and led him to a white Holden Commodore. Julie had honey-blonde hair pulled back and a gold chain-and-bar necklace. Mac had her as a landed Queensland girl who’d gone to a Protestant boarding school and then UQ.
On the front passenger seat was Mac’s overnight bag from his locker at the Jakarta embassy. Always packed, it contained two sets of chinos, two polo shirts, undies, socks, a tropical sports jacket, a pair of overalls, and two pairs of Hi-Tecs and boat shoes. A set of IDs and Nokias were in the side pocket.
They drove past the civilian terminal of Ngurah Rai Airport, better known to Westerners as Bali International Airport, where what looked like the entire tourist population of the island was trying to get into the terminal. Buses and taxis stood in long queues on the apron under the shimmering orange fl oodlights as worried-looking Anglos tried to push through the doors into the crowded terminal.
They accelerated past a long line of traffi c and a phalanx of traffi c cops as they headed towards Kuta Beach. Mac was still trying to adjust to his rude awakening ninety minutes before and he could feel a hunger stirring.
‘So what happened here?’ he asked, yawning, as Julie sped past thousands of locals and tourists walking around in a daze.
‘Two bomb blasts outside a couple of nightclubs at Kuta, down on Legian Street,’ said Julie mechanically. ‘Aussie tourist places. There’s a lot of dead – maybe in the hundreds. US Consulate had a small one go off too.’
An ambulance screamed past in the opposite direction as they got closer to the beach. Soon after, they hit a roadblock manned by POLRI and some plainclothes, and Julie stopped, handed over her ID. Mac went for the bag between his legs and immediately felt guns coming up. He raised his hands, opened the door and let the POLRI guy with the M16 see what he was doing with his hands. Mac reached down, pulled his diplomatic passport from the pocket in the black Cordura bag and handed to it the POLRI with the German shepherd.
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.’