Double Back by Mark Abernethy

chance to be owner-coach at the Dili Diehards?’
    As Damajat laughed, Mac eased back in his chair and took a glass of Scotch, forcing himself to relax into the meeting. Sipping as Amir made a point, Mac caught a brief look through a gap in the frosted glass around the office. A face in dark Ray-Bans peered through into the office and turned away as Mac looked. Mac had only seen this person in file pictures, but the face and size were unmistakable: Benni Sudarto was lurking outside Damajat’s office.

CHAPTER 11
    Mac sipped his fifth Bintang as the sun got low in the sky and the mosquitos in the beer garden started their thing. Patting the letter of free passage that Damajat had written for him, Mac was relieved he could now travel anywhere in East Timor and seriously frighten anyone who tried to stop him.
    The Damajat meeting had gone well for Mac, and the commercial interests he was developing with the Indonesian military were a perfect cover for moving around what was a garrison-province: a ratio of one soldier for every forty locals was essentially martial law even if Jakarta hadn’t declared it yet. There was a defeated, abandoned feel to Dili; a sense of hopelessness pervaded – all the cheekiness and openness of the locals was gone. Despite the ballot taking place in two weeks, the East Timorese wouldn’t look Mac in the eye. And there was an energy and arrogance about the Indonesian military that Mac found disconcerting.
    In one made-for-media opportunity, the Indonesian generals had announced the withdrawal of its stationed troops, but the troops who’d been paraded in front of the TV cameras had merely been shipped around the headlands and put ashore further up the coast. From what Mac could glean of that episode, the entire sham had been designed for the Australian media. The Australian government knew about the ruse from its signals intelligence, yet said nothing. Meanwhile, in the mountains and farming districts of East Timor, the army-backed militias were killing, razing and raping at will.
    In Bosnia and Kosovo, the world had united to end atrocities that paled next to what the Indonesian generals did on a weekly basis in East Timor. The Western world – Australia and the United States in particular – had gone along with Soeharto’s Caesaresque dream of a ‘Greater Indonesia’ in 1975 and the results were obvious in Dili. If you gave bullies the green light to behave any way they wanted, then they’d behave any way they wanted.
    Mac had had these arguments with Canberra’s pro-Jakarta ideologues, but they’d built their careers on being pro-Jakarta and they couldn’t suddenly change their minds now. The last person Mac knew of in DFAT who had the stones to challenge the pro-Jakarta clique was Tony Davidson. He used to say, ‘We don’t gather the nice product from Indonesia and the bad product from everywhere else – we simply gather product.’ But Davidson was also the last senior person in Australia’s SIS with an operational background, and when he retired the top ranks of Australia’s foreign spy agency would become wall-to-wall theorists, analysts, managers and academics – all of them politically astute enough to be pro-Jakarta.
    Checking his watch, Mac decided to grab a meal and then get ready for his next assignment. As he made for the lobby the Korean started yelling into his mobile phone again, this time in his native tongue. The bloke was so loud Mac could hear his voice echoing from upstairs.
    ‘The dining room is open when?’ Mac asked Mrs Soares, who told him, ‘Ten minutes.’
    The chalk under his door hadn’t been pushed back to the wall and the Doublemint stick was exactly as Mac had left it. Cranking out twenty push-ups and fifty sit-ups, he had a quick shower with very poor pressure, and dressed in fresh clothes. Then he lay on the bed thinking through what he wanted to do and how hard he was going to push things. He wanted to get an early night and walk out to the