Dead Centre Read online

  The US Navy must have airdropped this lot. They were somewhere offshore, and their helicopters had overflown the camp now and again. Some of the packets weren’t so empty. Not even the Indonesian Army could flog pork and beans on the black market.

  Mong clambered across the wreckage. Wriggly tin buckled and groaned under his weight. BB leant on the bonnet as he watched him, checking his watch like we were missing a crucial meeting.

  Wrinkled pictures were pinned to wood on what was left of a wall on the other side of the road. Dolls, toys and picture frames were laid out on the ground. The locals had been putting together whatever personal effects they found for others to see. For some, it would be all they had to remind them of a dead family member.

  Two rounds kicked off deeper in the city and there was a faint wail of sirens. BB looked at his watch again.

  ‘It’s all right, mate, we’ve got another five hours until first light. It’s only going to take him ten minutes.’

  11

  I COULD TELL things weren’t good as soon as Mong reached the cockpit. ‘For fuck’s sake …’ He stuck his head out of the smashed window. The leg dangled beneath him. ‘I’m going to need a hand here.’

  BB pushed himself off the bonnet. ‘The kid’s alive?’

  Mong ignored him and disappeared inside. I climbed the crumbling concrete blocks and hauled myself onto the boat. The deck was clear. The waves had taken everything away.

  Mong was easing the leg gently out of the window frame. It didn’t belong to a child but a young woman. And crunched into the opposite corner of the cockpit was a man. A wedding ring glinted on a hand that was twisted up around his shoulder. His head had been crushed on the metal shelving just above him. There was no blood. The sea had washed him clean. The wound looked like a Hallowe’en makeup kit without the ketchup.

  It was the same for the young woman, and the newly born boy who lay between her legs, umbilical cord attached and placenta still inside her.

  BB followed me onto the deck, face screwed up in disgust. No way was he going to enter the cockpit. ‘This is fucking gross …’

  Mong didn’t look up as he pushed aside the tangle of kit covering mother and child.

  BB put his hand to his mouth.

  The husband’s head twisted a little and fell forward as Mong tugged out a sodden blanket and laid it on the deck as best he could. ‘While you were fucking about at the Carphone Warehouse we were surrounded by shit like this. Women desperate to give their babies a chance before they died themselves …’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck. Let’s get out of here. We’re going to catch something.’

  I knew Mong was talking about the Balkans. Muslim women in the villages who knew they were going to get raped and killed went into premature labour as the Serbs advanced.

  He gathered up the tiny body, pruned from its prolonged soaking, and cupped it in his hands. He finally raised his head. ‘If you’d spent a bit more time actually soldiering instead of just playing at it, you’d understand what’s been going on here.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, fuck you.’ BB spun on his heel and disappeared over the side. The corrugated iron buckled and creaked as he made his way down to the wagon.

  More shots kicked off in the distance.

  Mong laid the baby on the mother’s breast and started to tuck a corner of the blanket around him like a shroud.

  I lifted her legs so we could get the blanket underneath her. ‘Mate, we won’t be taking them with us.’

  Mong raised the mother’s head and placed the blanket around it.

  ‘We’ll leave them here, mate. Tell the army or whoever when we get back. They can come and mark them up.’

  He was vibrating with anger. ‘She shouldn’t have been left like that. Leg hanging out. It’s not right. That fucker would just have left her …’

  ‘Mong, mate, you need to calm down. BB’s on the team, and we’ve still got a job to do.’

  I went over to the husband. The meat on his legs was squidgy. It wouldn’t be long before his body started to decompose.

  Mong got out of the way so I could drag the poor bastard next to his wife and his child. Somehow it seemed important to have them touching. He tucked the woman’s hair into the blanket so she and the child were totally shrouded.

  We both stood there silently for a minute or two.

  He looked across at me. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it, doing something halfway decent for once, instead of arsehole jobs like this?’

  I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mate, the arsehole job’s still waiting.’

  12

  BEYOND THE FLOOD line, every football field was crammed with refugees – thousands of them – in makeshift camps. The city had suffered the magnitude nine ’quake and was now trying to cope with the magnitude six aftershocks.

  There was no electricity, and therefore no light. More fires were dotted about in the darkness. Haunted eyes peered out at us from the shadows, unsure of who lurked behind our headlights. At this time of night it wouldn’t be aid workers, which left looters or the army, both bad news.

  We eventually hit the main bridge crossing from west to east. The mood in the wagon wasn’t good. BB was expecting to go down with cholera, measles or some other fatal disease at any minute because we’d had physical contact with the family.

  He had a point. It was monsoon season and rained for a couple of hours every day. The mosquitoes were out in force, raising the risk of dengue fever and worse. Thousands of corpses, hanging in trees or washed up on beaches, were rotting in the tropical heat. With open wounds and no food or clean water, the survivors wouldn’t survive for long.

  ‘Shit!’ BB slammed on the brakes.

  Our headlights had picked out a pair of Saracen APCs, six-wheeled monsters that had probably been bought off the Brits. BB kept us tight in to the right as they rumbled across the bridge towards us.

  Mong and I exchanged a glance. As young infantrymen we’d both done too many tours of Northern Ireland stuck in the back of those fuckers.

  ‘Three times I was blown up in one of those, Mong. Three IEDs in two years. You?’

  BB’s knuckles went white as he clenched the wheel. ‘Fucking hell.’ He swung his head round. ‘Shut up, both of you. I don’t want to hear your old war stories. I’ve had enough of that shit.’

  ‘Calm down, mate. It wasn’t a dig.’

  Mong looked as though he was about to join in but I shook my head. We had to cut away from this shit. I was glad BB was going to bin it after this. With luck I’d never have to share a vehicle with him again.

  The Saracens were closing. They bristled with 40mm grenade launchers and .50 cal machine-guns, Tannoy systems and searchlights. Lads in olive green stuck out of the mortar hatches, armed with M16s. In this part of the world they would have been Singapore-made, under licence from Colt. The searchlights burst into life and played across us.

  We waved and smiled in the blinding light. I pointed at my armband. ‘British! Aid workers!’

  I knew that wouldn’t necessarily guarantee us membership of the Good Lads Club. The West had criticized the Indonesian government heavily for how they’d been prosecuting their war, while at the same time selling them the weapons to fight it with. Now the tsunami had made their lives twice as hard. They had looters to deal with as well as a resistance movement, and a massive influx of foreigners looking over their shoulders. Rumour had it they wanted the airlines to stop bringing us in. They certainly weren’t on the streets to provide aid. Their aim was to kill as many separatists as they could while confusion reigned. The last thing they wanted was Western witnesses.

  The searchlights stayed on us but the wagons passed by. I couldn’t see the faces behind them. But I saw the M16s swing away.

  13

  WE CARRIED ON to the other side of the bridge and headed into the darkness of the Kuta Raja district. We wanted the fruit market, straight along the road, first junction left, less than half a kilometre away. In an office block next to it somebody had
been negotiating oil and gas concessions with GAM.

  We didn’t know who our employer was. It didn’t work like that, and it wasn’t as if I wanted to. That sort of knowledge doesn’t give you power, it gets you dead. Crazy Dave was the broker; we never got to meet the organ-grinder. But whoever it was, they weren’t taking any chances. The separatist movement wasn’t all about power to the people: it was about taking control of the fossil fuels.

  In the aftermath of the tsunami, there was a strong chance the deal could be exposed. Our client would be screwed; maybe our government too. Big business and politics tended to be one and the same in this part of the world.

  The job was sold to us as a straight destruction of documents – and proof that we’d done so. We’d make a video, save the SD card, and take it back. We were getting £50,000 each.

  The market was deserted. It probably had been since the drama. On the recce, we’d seen nothing much more than a series of steel-framed stalls covered by bright blue tarpaulins.

  The wagon stopped in the thoroughfare between two lines of stalls. We sat and listened.

  A shot rang out in the distance. Then the bark of a Tannoy and some rapid, pissed-off chatter. The lads with M16s were probably telling someone with a TV in their hands to stay right where they were.

  We tuned in and checked for any drama before we got to work. Mong lifted his wrist. His watch said it was nearly one thirty.

  14

  MAKING ENTRY INTO the office block was going to be easy enough. We’d seen the boarded-up windows. The hard bit would be finding the documents if they weren’t where they should be.

  I powered up my window. ‘All right, lads. Time to go.’

  We grabbed our day sacks. They contained everything we’d need on-target, including holdalls to carry the docs if we had to destroy them elsewhere.

  BB shoved the key under the nearside rear wheel. All movement from now on would be in slow-time and without light so we could watch and listen. The sophisticated infrastructure of electricity and comms was all down for now, which suited us just fine.

  The whole area was pitch black, the atmosphere almost apocalyptic. Fires still flickered in the darkness. I expected a massive pterodactyl to fly in any minute and grab a few civvies for dinner.

  There was more Tannoy action on the other side of the river, accompanied by a burst of gunfire. Two rounds were tracer. We watched as they ricocheted off something and spiralled into the sky. Then the propellant burnt out and the light disappeared.

  We moved carefully through the market. Crates were stacked precariously. Rotten fruit, two weeks old, littered the ground. The two-storey office block was just ahead on the riverbank, a big square chunk of concrete and blue-tinted glass. The glass had taken a beating in the earthquake, but the structure had stood up well.

  Still in slow-time, we climbed a rusty, sagging chain-link fence and landed on the solid new tarmac that surrounded the building. There was no landscape gardening here: this was a place of work. There were car-park signs and allocated spaces but no cars. The offices were rented to about twenty different companies. The one we wanted housed the Kareng Development Corp on the first floor. Room 2-17.

  We walked around the building. It wasn’t a tactical move. We just needed to get in and out as fast as we could, and there was a chance a new opening might have been created by the aftershocks that had followed the recce.

  Large sheets of plywood had been nailed to the window frames on the ground floor to replace broken glass. Some had been loosened by looters. I gripped a sheet on the corner facing the river and pulled it out far enough to create a gap. There was no reason to waffle. We knew what we were doing.

  Mong ducked his head inside and had a quick look and listen. He climbed in and BB followed. The two of them then pushed out the sheeting for me.

  15

  WE STOOD ON thick carpet, listening for any noise above that of our own breathing, and tuned in to the new environment. I gave it a full minute before I dug my Maglite head-torch out of my day sack. The other two followed my lead. Our beams swept across an open-plan office, maybe twenty metres long. Dozens of desks stood in neat rows. Bare wires stuck out of conduits where PCs should have been. Some computers were still in position but had been smashed. Drawers had been pulled out and papers strewn all over the place. It looked like there’d been a revolution. But the looters were looking for stuff to sell, I hoped, not read.

  I headed towards the door and Mong and BB followed. It looked half open. When we got there we found out why. It had been kicked in.

  We slipped into the corridor and followed the carpet as far as the wooden stairway. I started to sweat as I climbed. A sign on the landing told us 2-17 was to the left.

  This floor, too, had been systematically raided. Splintered doors hung from their hinges. More redundant wires sprouted from desktops. The small, two-desk office of Kareng Development Corp was in shit state.

  Our torchlight bounced around in the darkness. Paper, folders and files were scattered everywhere. I pulled off my day sack. ‘Fuck it. Too much to sort. Let’s torch the lot.’

  BB took stag on the door. He’d keep an eye out along the corridor.

  Mong set to, piling the furniture into good burning stacks. The paperwork was my responsibility. As team leader, I had to make sure it was destroyed. And we’d only get the rest of our money if we had the proof.

  I didn’t bother looking for material specific to the deal with the separatists. It would be quicker and easier to incinerate the lot. Fuck the building: it was either insured or would be rebuilt by foreign aid. No one was in here, and the blaze couldn’t spread to other buildings or fuck anybody up. It was an island in a sea of tarmac.

  As Mong threw together a pyramid of desks and chairs, I set up the handheld IR-capable videocam on a chair by the door and set it to record.

  16

  THERE ARE THREE elements in the combustion triangle if you want to make sure your arson is productive. The fuel was the furniture and paperwork. The oxygen movement wasn’t perfect – the windows here were sealed units so the air-con could do its stuff – but with the internal doors open it should be fine. The fire needed to spark up as quickly as possible; we’d help it do so by stacking the chairs and desks at the optimum angle. The optimum angle was thirty degrees – which is why the perfect place to start a house fire is under the stairs.

  Mong was building his second pyramid when BB slapped the wall. It was our signal to freeze.

  I killed my torchlight and held my breath, mouth open to cut down internal body noise. I listened. Not a sound.

  I breathed out, breathed in, kept my mouth open, and strained to pick up even the slightest vibration. Still nothing. I waited another thirty seconds. If someone had spotted us, surely they would have done something by now.

  Mong was behind me. I turned and moved my mouth to his ear. ‘Hear anything?’

  He shook his head.

  Then we both did. Movement inside the building, down near the plywood sheeting. Then a shout.

  Military? Maybe they had more than loudspeakers and searchlights on those APCs. Maybe they had night viewing aids and had been watching us all along.

  Another shout.

  It didn’t sound military. It sounded agitated. A night-watchman? What was the point? There was nothing left to watch over. Homeless? That made sense. But I’d seen no bedding or cardboard on the floor, no sign at all of inhabitants.

  I could hear the shuffle of feet. Murmurs. Getting louder. Coming up the stairs.

  I went and joined BB. He pulled his head back inside. ‘No lights. Can’t be military. They wouldn’t come in blind.’

  Shouts echoed in the stairwell. I made out at least three or four different voices. Egging each other on. Vigilantes, maybe, who thought we were looters. Or just local lads who wanted to know who the fuck we were.

  Mong moved alongside us.

  The voices were getting closer.

  I gripped their arms. ‘We carry on – then
fight our way out of here if we have to. They might just get bored and fuck off. We have to destroy the papers. We’ll worry about that lot afterwards. OK?’

  I ran back and grabbed an armful of files and thrust them under the nearest desk pyramid. Mong did the same.

  The shouts were getting louder and feistier. The newcomers hadn’t got bored. They were getting more confident because we weren’t doing anything. Something landed further down the corridor with a metallic clatter.

  BB came back into the room. ‘Five or six of them, I reckon.’

  Mong stopped what he was doing. ‘Fuck ’em, Nick. Me and BB’ll go and clear them out. They’ll do a runner. You crack on here.’

  ‘No. This first. We go out there mob-handed as soon as this lot sparks up.’

  They started chanting now, like football hooligans. The noise came from the top of the stairs.

  I carried on hurling fistfuls of paper into the stacks. Sweat poured down my face. ‘Let’s get this done. Worry about that lot later.’

  I looked up and caught Mong in my Maglite beam. He screwed his eyes shut and gave me a smile. ‘No, mate. Let us two go down there and grip a couple big-time. The rest will run – they always do, don’t they? You finish this off, and we’ll clear the exit. What happens if we get pinned down when all this shit kicks off?’

  My light moved onto BB. He wasn’t happy, but Mong was chomping at the bit. ‘Nick – we need to secure the way out.’

  Mong was set in his ways. The halo he’d had on at the fishing boat had slipped; it was just the horns showing now.

  I grabbed another pile of paper. ‘You’re right, mate. Go!’

  BB had to shout to be heard over the chaos outside. ‘Nick, what the fuck are you playing at?’

  Mong tightened the straps of his day sack. He wasn’t going to wait for me to answer.