Dead Centre Read online

  Mong always had been a sucker when it came to kids. He was godfather to enough of them to make a football team. He and Tracy still hadn’t had kids of their own, and I was pretty sure that hurt. But it wasn’t something he spoke about, so I’d never asked.

  Mong waded through the plastic bags and bottles and into the sea. ‘Nick?’ he shouted, over the roar of the surf.

  ‘I’m not washing your back.’

  ‘If anything happens to me – if I get dropped – you’ll look after her, won’t you?’

  He made a bit of a meal of splashing his face in the water to avoid eye-to-eye. I knew it was difficult for him to be this emotional. Fucking hell, he wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’

  He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’

  He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’

  ‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’

  He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.

  I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’

  5

  OUR TENT WAS a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.

  BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.

  BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.

  I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.

  I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps. Star Trek had finally met Carry on Camping. Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.

  I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice – with UN stamped all over them – to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.

  Camp Hope – I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour – was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place – apart from its 250,000 population – were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.

  Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.

  To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia to accept an independent Islamic state. Aceh had a higher proportion of Muslims than other areas of the country, and had been allowed to introduce Sharia law in 2001, but GAM wanted a lot more than just religious control. They wanted the revenue from the province’s rich oil and gas deposits, most of which went straight to the central coffers – no doubt with a few rupiahs skimmed off the top.

  Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.

  6

  AN ARGUMENT ERUPTED outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.

  Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.

  The MONGOs – My Own NGO – could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand – if there was anyone around to issue one – they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.

  I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got over sixty thousand referrals to MONGO websites, all brand new. Some of them, of course, were scams for cash.

  Individual aid work was trendy in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia. And in the US, the tax authorities were granting exemption to an average of eighty-three new charities a day. More than 150,000 had been registered so far – and these were just the lads who’d bothered to go through the system. The only reason I knew all this was because Mong, BB and I had gone that route.

  Aid 4 Tsunami. That was us. We carried accreditation to prove it; we’d printed it ourselves. It wasn’t the most original name for a charity, but it would do. There were far worse out here. And it was as well funded as any other MONGO.

  7

  OUR STRETCH OF tent city was heaving with Western MONGO medics who’d dropped everything to come and help – which mostly meant setting off alone in hired wagons with a first-aid kit on the passenger seat. Some of the local lads had been examined three or four times each, and didn’t have a clue what the doctors told them, what drugs they’d been given, when and why they should take them.

  The docs ran around in full George Clooney mode, getting it all on video so their sponsors at home would send more money. A lot of them did a great job, of course, but others made incorrect diagnoses because they were moving at speed and didn’t know about the particular challenges of the landscape. BB had a better grasp of the local parasites and diseases, and he was only a patrol medic.

  The God Squad MONGOs were the worst. I’d once come across a gang of Christian hippies with guitars in Africa. They were there to round up patients for what they called their ‘mercy ship’. It turned out to be an old cruise liner that had been converted into a floating hospital to bring ‘h
ope and healing’ to the poor heathens.

  All well and good, but because the thing was only there for a week, they could only do operations that didn’t need much aftercare. The place was crawling with people dying of gunshot wounds and machete amputations, and all the mercy ship could deal with were cataracts and hare lips, followed by films about Jesus.

  There were already about four groups of happy-clappies in the camp and a hospital ship on its way. The Scientologists were also on the loose. No guitars, but plenty of mind-over-matter techniques and no sense of irony about the volcano logo on their bright yellow T-shirts.

  These twenty-first-century missionaries didn’t seem to realize that their message was going to fall on deaf ears. One press of the Google button would have told them that Islam had taken root here from the Middle East before it grew anywhere else. More than a thousand years ago Banda Aceh was known as the Port of Mecca.

  Our problem was that these jokers moved around the city pretty much at will. Some of them even went out deliberately to get shot at by the army so they could blog home about how heroic they were. They could do what they wanted as far as I was concerned. But eyes and ears in the city were the last things we needed while we did what we were here to do.

  Arnie and the American were still going at it hammer and tongs.

  ‘What is it with these lads? They’d go to war over a brew.’

  Our very own Mongo was following their argument with as much bemusement as I was. He jabbed a finger at the lump in the sleeping-bag. ‘Why don’t you ask Body Beautiful? They’re all a few bricks short of a load. All loners. The only thing that brings them together is this sort of shit.’

  BB sat bolt upright. ‘How many times, for fuck’s sake? I’m just as good as you cunts. What have I done that’s different? I’ll tell you. I didn’t fuck about on a drill square for ten years, that’s all. I passed Selection, all my training’s the same. The only things you can do that I can’t are polish your boots and square a blanket. Big fucking deal.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Mong didn’t bother getting up. ‘And to be fair, I wouldn’t have a clue how to sell someone a mobile phone.’

  ‘Bin the fucking sarcasm. What does all that fucking trade training you’re so proud of add up to? Nothing. You think life stands still on Civvy Street, but listen up. All the time you two were getting wet, cold and hungry playing squaddie, I was learning how the real world works. I’m in this because I want to be. You’re in it because you can’t do anything else.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘All those nights you were wet and cold, I was tucked up warm and shagging. So fuck the both of you. When we get back I’m going to find a job and run it myself.’

  He turned away and pulled his sleeping-bag over his head.

  I resisted the temptation to go over and wring his perfectly toned neck. ‘Be my guest. But until then I’m the boss and you will do what I say. You got it?’

  BB’s mumbled reply was drowned by Mong’s snort of laughter and comment: ‘Fucking great! I feel well and truly bedded in now. We’re behaving just like real MONGOs.’

  We had three hours left until last light. Then we were going to move into the city to deliver our own special brand of humanitarian aid. We were going to use the confusion of the disaster to recover or destroy a bunch of confidential documents from an office in the city centre. If they fell into the wrong hands, the energy company we were working for would be well and truly fucked. The last thing our employers wanted was the government and the military discovering that they were cutting deals with the separatists over future oil and gas concessions.

  8

  23.54 hrs

  BANDA ACEH HAD been Ground Zero on 26 December. Only 250K from the earthquake’s epicentre, a twenty-metre-high wall of water had hit it within minutes. A third of the city, twenty-five-kilometres square, was totally destroyed. All that remained of it was a tangled mass of rubble, furniture, cars, fridges and bodies – thirty thousand of them. Many were children, who hadn’t been strong enough to resist the force of the wave. There were almost no dead animals. They’d seemed to know what was coming, and fled for high ground before the tsunami arrived.

  The camp was about six K from the Krueng Aceh River, which split the city in half. It was sited so close to the sea because the roads hadn’t been that well cleared further inland. Our target building was in Kuta Raja, one of the nine districts on the city’s west side.

  The NGOs had warned us not to make the trip. Looters were picking through the debris, carrying off household goods, towing away cars, loading up stereos and TVs on motorbikes. If they thought we were about to report them, things could turn into a gangfuck.

  To make things worse, the political conflict had also resurfaced. There’d been a firefight a couple of days ago between the army and the separatists. The separatists had hijacked relief workers and kidnapped doctors to look after their own people.

  As we drove through a maze of crushed breezeblock and wriggly tin buildings and their scattered contents, we didn’t see any other 4×4s. Anyone in Aceh who owned or had managed to steal one had driven it straight to the airport the day after the wave hit. The NGOs and MONGOs streaming in from the four corners of the globe snapped them up for top dollar, especially if they boasted air-con.

  There was no air-con in the last of the Toyota 4×4s that had been lined up on the airport forecourt. We left the windows open instead, but with the temperature in the high twenties and 80 per cent humidity I wasn’t sure it was worth it. Our skin was covered with sweat, and the breeze filled the car with the smell of sewage and decomposing flesh.

  The power cables were down. Globes of light flickered among the devastation as far as the eye could see. Survivors huddled around cooking fires under plastic sheeting, boiling up whatever scraps the army had sold them. They had to use the wood from their own buildings to keep the fires burning.

  We zigzagged through a random collection of sofas strewn across the road. The tsunami had wiped whole fishing villages off the map. Large steel vessels and flimsy wooden skiffs alike had been picked up by the wave and flung down again far inland. Two twin-engine Cessnas were flattened against a wall, nose cones pointing skywards. Big Xs had been spray-painted on cars and buildings to show there were bodies inside. There hadn’t been time to move them.

  The army was on the prowl to try and stop the looting, but probably only so they could do some of their own. It didn’t matter where in the world you were at a time like this: if you’d never had a bean now was your time. My elder brother had been on News at Ten during the 1995 Brixton riots, caught on camera climbing out of a shop window with a TV under his arm. In the background a policeman was doing exactly the same.

  9

  THERE WAS A curfew in place, but people were moving in the darkness.

  BB was at the wheel. I was on his right. Mong was tucked away in the back. We all had our nice MONGO cargoes and khaki shirts on, with brassards on our right arm emblazoned with our very own logo – a Union flag on a big white circle, with Aid 4 Tsunami proudly displayed beneath it. We wanted to look the part.

  BB pointed out of his window.

  Mong craned his neck between the front seats to get a better view.

  ‘Shit!’

  Ahead of us, across a sea of bright blue tin roofs, a fishing boat rested on a mound of corrugated iron and breezeblocks. It was a traditionally built narrow wooden vessel with a modern cockpit and an engine sticking out of the back.

  Mong’s arms windmilled like a madman’s. ‘Stop, BB! Stop! Look up there!’

  BB spotted it before I did. ‘He’s dead. Must be.’

  A skinny brown leg, bent at the knee, dangled out of a smashed window at the side of the cockpit.

  Mong lunged from his seat. His hand shot forward and grabbed the wheel. ‘We don’t know that. No cross …’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, look at it …’

  Mong gripped the wheel harder. ‘Nick, it won’t take a minute. Let me check. It’s a kid, mate.’

 
‘BB, pull in. If he’s alive, we’ll sort him out and pick him up on the way back. All those lads back at the camp can fight over who’ll take the credit for saving him – and maybe get themselves on the news.’

  10

  WE CLIMBED OUT of the wagon. I found myself standing in a morass of mud and ripped yellow plastic sachets. This bag contains one day’s complete food requirement for one person was printed across them in English, French and Spanish. And next to the Stars and Stripes and a graphic of a bloke with a moustache tucking into an opened pack: Food gift from the people of the United States of America.

  I hadn’t seen HDRs (Humanitarian Daily Rations) since my time in Bosnia. Each pack weighed about a kilo and contained a day’s calories. They only cost the American taxpayer three or four dollars each, but the joke going the rounds was that, with door-to-door delivery, this was one of the world’s most expensive takeaways. They were designed to survive being airdropped, thrown out of an aircraft as individual packages – much safer than parachuting large pallets of rations onto survivors’ heads, and better for preventing hoarding.

  The HDRs dropped in Afghanistan were yellow, like they’d been in Bosnia, before it was realized that the packages were the same colour and roughly the same size as American cluster bombs, which were being scattered like confetti. They changed them to orange-pink.

  Inside would be a couple of meals like lentil stew and pasta with beans and rice. There were also fruit pastries that reminded me of Pop Tarts, and shortbread, peanut butter, jam, fruit bars – even boxes of matches decorated with the American flag, a nice moist towelette and a plastic spoon. For some reason, every HDR also included a packet of crushed red chilli.