Double Back by Mark Abernethy Page B

alternated between running across open ground and waiting behind cover, heading quietly southwards.
    A light flashed down the street from two blocks away, and Mac ducked behind a frangipani tree. Waiting, all his senses on high alert, he watched the Brimob SWAT van turn into the deserted street and move slowly towards him. A Brimob officer’s head and shoulders stuck out the top of the roof and swivelled a searchlight through the darkness as it approached. Ducking for cover, Mac used the lee of the frangipani to crawl into a stormwater culvert that ran the length of the avenue. Lying in the dog shit and rotting leaves he held his breath as the diesel growl of the Brimob truck came alongside his position. He exhaled, relieved, as it kept moving, ‘I Will Always Love You’ echoing out of the vehicle’s radio, sung rather painfully by an Indonesian male. One of the eternal wonders of the universe was why Indonesian men felt the need to record songs associated with Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Olivia Newton-John.
    Dusting himself off, Mac got in behind the frangipani tree and watched the Brimob truck fade into the distance and then turn right – probably scouting for kids around the stadium.
    Feeling naked without his gun, Mac kept a steady pace from one hide to another as he continued on. Heading left into a larger avenue, he became exposed to streetlights and crossing the dusty street to the sanctuary of the darkness on the other side, his panting and footfalls seemed to echo down the empty avenue. Suddenly a light went on in a mansion somewhere behind the trees he was hiding in. Mac froze as an Indonesian woman in a housecoat stepped out onto her veranda, not six metres away, and made a high-pitched musical call. Two cats darted out of the shrubbery and shot past the woman’s calves into the house like a couple of lightning bolts.
    Pulling back into the house and shutting the door, the woman killed the lights. Mac gulped down the stress and moved on.
    Using a small banyan to get himself to the top of the cemetery wall, Mac lay along the top of it for ten minutes, assessing the ground. There was no movement, no whispers and he couldn’t smell cigarettes or aftershave. Sliding down the opposite side of the wall, he found one of the walkways and moved swiftly to the main road of the cemetery. Staying twenty metres off the main track, he dodged and weaved through the tombstones and fenced plots until he located the twenty-first path. Finding it, he counted seven gravesites until he was looking at the drop: a modest plot, squashed between two larger ones.
    Holding back for a few minutes, Mac waited for movement, wishing he hadn’t drunk so much beer the night before. Pretty girls with a ton of charm sure did make the world go around, but they didn’t help with work the next day.
    Satisfied that he wasn’t walking into an ambush, Mac found a decent-sized tree and created a hide with a sight line to the drop box and also a view of the cemetery’s main road. Placing the water bottle on his ‘chair’, Mac left the hide and moved at a crouched jog to the main road, scuttled across it, wanting to check on how observable the water bottle was to those approaching it.
    Moving to the other side of the cemetery, he numbered off the side paths until he was on the thirty-fifth on the right, and then numbered the plots back to the seventh on the left. Breathing deeply, he stayed still, waiting for movement or sound. The only action came from the trees where a bat was feuding with a bird. Fumbling in the dark, he ran his hands over a white marble gravesite and headstone. It was immaculately maintained, just like all the plots at Santa Cruz. The crypts were whitewashed, headstones were scrubbed and polished, there were no weeds and the edges were all trimmed. Mac marvelled at how the world’s poorest and most oppressed people so often had the most beautiful graveyards. He’d seen the same in Phnom Penh and Rangoon. Was it