‘Mate, I wasn’t -’

‘Like, how is it that a shooter walks out of a door at this meet and starts putting holes in me?’

‘Shooter?’ said Mac.

‘Three, actually,’ said Bongo, smoke streaming out of his nostrils.

Pausing, Mac tried to stay clear about the story. ‘Well, Dili’s a bit lawless right now, Bongo – maybe they saw the Anglo with a local minder and decided there was some cash?’

‘Did I say they was militia?’ snarled Bongo.

‘Not militia?’

‘You think I’d get jumped by some hairy kid with a Castro T-shirt?’

Mac shook his head. Bongo’s reputation put him out of the amateur leagues.

‘So what happened?’ said Mac.

‘I was bodyguarding this Canadian dude for the Aussies,’ said Bongo, his gun holding steady. ‘We go into this mansion in Dili and the Canadian asks a pretty local girl about Bow or Boa – something like that – and the shooting starts.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Like I said, McQueen – I’m wondering why the Aussies put me in that shit?’

‘Okay, Bongo,’ said Mac, eyeing the gun. ‘I’m going into Dili and I want a heads-up – no one on my side has details of the Canadian or the meet, and I don’t like flying blind. I heard that the Canadian had a minder down there and you were the first person I thought of. So I took a punt, put the word out through Saba.’

The heavyset Filipino contemplated the floor between his feet and then looked back. ‘Maybe we can talk some more, but what’s in it for me?’ he said.

Having worked with a lot of soldiers over the years, Mac knew they saw their priorities in terms of duty, money and payback, in that order. Bongo’s sense of duty might have evaporated when he went freelance, but that left two incentives.

‘I can offer you money or payback,’ said Mac.

‘I’ll take both,’ said Bongo.

‘You’ll have to work for it,’ Mac countered. ‘Maybe I can keep you on the payroll? I’d have to okay it, but -’

‘And the payback?’

‘Well that’ll come down to circumstances, right?’

Bongo didn’t look convinced.

‘Okay, mate,’ said Mac, trying to salvage the deal. ‘I’m going to need some protection down there, and if the shooter comes into the open, you take your shot and I look the other way. Fair?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But only once I’ve got what I want,’ said Mac.

Mac’s tension eased as a smirk creased the sides of Bongo’s mouth.

‘What’s funny?’ asked Mac, smiling tentatively.

‘Nothing, brother,’ said Bongo.

‘Come on,’ said Mac.

‘Well, this one won’t come into the open,’ said Bongo, stubbing his cigarette in the ashtray.

‘Why? Who we talking about?’

Bongo grinned. ‘The shooter – it’s Benni Sudarto.’

Mac’s tension returned twofold and his face must have told the story because Bongo slapped his leg with his gun and laughed at the ceiling.

‘Still wanna go to Dili, brother?’

The shower pressure was strong by Indonesian standards and Mac savoured it longer than he normally would. He was tired, needed a nap – and the stress of the Sudarto information was playing tricks on his facial muscles, making them twitch and spasm across his forehead and jaws.

Drying off, he grabbed a Bintang beer from the mini-bar, pushed through the bungalow’s French doors and looked around the tropical gardens of the Natour Bali Hotel. There was an out-of-sight splash from the pool and, diagonally opposite, two housemaids giggled outside a room. Otherwise, it looked clear.

Pulling back into the room, Mac opened the A4 envelope and shook the contents onto the writing desk. There was a one-page work-up for his cover, both personal and corporate. He already knew his Richard Davis and Arafura Imports details, but he’d never used the sandalwood trader pretext in East Timor, so he memorised the three commercial contacts he would approach and had a quick read of the magazine clippings and LexisNexis printouts about sandalwood prices, the Christian icon trade and the main importer into Sydney.

In a plastic folder were the printed catalogues for Arafura’s distribution, with the icons divided into Mexican and Guatemalan imports and their price per hundred. Mac put these pieces of collateral aside – they’d be making the trip with him.

Three code names were mentioned in the operation outline: Blackbird, he was aware of; Centre Stage was the official name for the Canadian; and Mac recognised his own ASIS moniker, Albion. There were also frequency settings for the radio set, should he get that desperate. He didn’t need to memorise them; there were only three frequency/bandwidth combinations used by the firm in contact with the Royal Australian Navy, and Mac knew them by heart.

He thought about the mission brief Tobin and then Atkins had outlined for him: find out if Blackbird was still able to be operated by Canberra, and then work on the question of Operasi Boa. What was it? When was it happening? The Canadian was not top of the list, but he was included in the official tasking. His background was also mentioned: YARROW, William Donald, DOB 07/04/1949; graduate of McGill University; accountant from British Columbia. CEO of an import/exporter and distributor, exploring opportunities in Bali and East Timor. Yarrow had apparently cheated millions from Canadian excise over the years, and was wanted by Canada Customs and Revenue Agency for fraud and evasion. Though Canberra didn’t consider the Canadian all that important, Mac decided to make his own decision about him.

Fishing a box of matches from the writing desk drawer, Mac put all the briefing papers in the steel rubbish bin, lit the A4 envelope and threw it in. As the flames consumed the brief, he dug out the Cathay Pacific sewing kit from his toilet bag and ran a cotton line from the French doors to the handle of a coffee cup, which he then looped over the bedpost. There was already a chair under the main door handle. As he crawled under the sheets Mac wondered about the trip to Dili and whether he was doing the right thing by running his own intelligence gathering separate to Atkins and Tobin. It was a bad habit of his, and one that had not made him any friends on the higher rungs. There were always good reasons for staying with the program and going along with the information you were being fed, but Mac had already found an information gap between Atkins and Tobin about Boa and he hadn’t been comfortable with Garvey’s furtiveness.

Mac was someone who actually worked out the placement of the aircraft’s exits every time he flew; he read the fire-escape diagram on hotel room doors. During his time in the Royal Marines, Mac’s section leader, Banger Jordan, had drummed into the Commando candidates the credo: there is no mission without an exit. ‘If you don’t know how to get out, then don’t go in!’ he would scream at them in his thick Geordie accent.

Lying in bed, he let the scenarios unfold without forcing them too much. Tobin’s and Atkins’ assertions that they didn’t know the fate of the Canadian or of Blackbird seemed genuine because Bongo – who was there – had escaped from the mansion in Dili with a chunk missing from his shoulder and with the Canadian and Blackbird still in the room. Alive.

The complication came with Captain Benni Sudarto. Sudarto’s presence in that meet had aroused Bongo’s anti-Australian instincts, because Sudarto’s training had included time at Duntroon and several rotations in the Australian SAS. So Sudarto had been trained at Australia’s elite army academy, mused Mac, but he was also a certified thug, murderer, torturer and filler of mass graves.

Benni Sudarto had moved quickly through officer school and special forces training and then opted for Indonesia’s violent special operations regiment, Kopassus. Over the years, Mac had followed Sudarto’s career, which could also be plotted by cross-reference to Amnesty International reports. Having made his name in Aceh and Ambon, Sudarto had really become famous in East Timor, hunting Falintil ‘terrorists’ through the mountains and shutting down villages.