Suryei and Joe were again searching for a tree they could climb so that they could get another fix on their bearings. The hunt proved fruitless. Trees that were big enough to get them above the canopy had no branches low down, just broad, smooth trunks, gigantic living columns that appeared to support the green roof overhead, and they provided no purchase whatsoever.
They had just decided to keep moving in the direction they thought was the correct one when the distant pulse of the twin explosions, followed by a large number of popping noises, bounced off the canopy overhead. Both Joe and Suryei guessed correctly what those sounds were. They glanced at each other anxiously, and for a number of reasons. The blasts confirmed that people with guns and other explosive devices were still in the jungle and obviously still searching for them. Of more concern was that neither Joe nor Suryei had the slightest idea from which direction the sounds originated. The jungle fractured and splintered sound so that it appeared omni-directional, virtually surrounding them. For all they knew, they could be walking straight towards the source, and certain death.
‘Shit,’ said Suryei, looking left and right and then turning slowly in a complete circle attempting to pinpoint the direction of the explosions.
‘I reckon it came from down there,’ said Joe, indicating off to their right.
‘Are you sure? Sounded to me like it came from just up ahead. Or maybe from over there.’ Suryei gestured up the ridge to their left. ‘How far away?’
Joe shrugged, spinning around, unsure, rattled. It had been more than twelve hours since their last contact with the soldiers and the rubbery dimension time had taken on added to his disorientation. It felt like they had been wandering around in the jungle forever, certainly more than three days, perhaps because surviving the jungle was a moment-by-moment proposition that took every ounce of concentration, obliterating any other reality. The crash of exploding ordnance was a blunt reminder that their pursuers were determined. And close.
To make matters worse, if that were possible, Joe and Suryei were running on empty. They had slept very little and eaten next to nothing, which had brought them to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion. If giving up had been an option, they would gladly have taken it. But it wasn’t.
‘Come on, this . . . way,’ said Suryei, panting, sucking in the hot, wet air.
Whether or not he agreed with the direction, Suryei wasn’t sure. Joe was also too tired to argue. Any decision could be wrong. Any decision could be right. Frowning, Suryei picked her way soundlessly past Joe towards a dense thicket of matted tree ferns. She ducked low with a grunt and disappeared inside.
Java, 0745 Zulu, Friday, 1 May
Achmad Reza pulled in to the centre of a small village. There was an open concrete building with seats inside where an old lady sat mending clothes. Several small children played noisily with a plastic missile, making loud rocket-type sounds. Scrawny chickens scratched for food on the ground around them.
The building, painted various shades of dirty white, green and blue, as if the people who had applied the paint had been unable to make up their minds on the colour, matched an adjoining shop. Bottles of water, Coca-Cola and Heineken beer lined the shelves outside. A blue light set in an electrified grille hung on the wall beside the darkened doorway and fried insects that became too adventurous. Several other small buildings with dark, glassless windows sat beyond. A small group of men squatted in a wired enclosure and fussed over a large rooster, cooing and patting it. The animal seemed comfortable with all the attention, holding its proud head high, red neck stretched.
As he drove slowly past, Reza saw a young woman leaning on the outside corner of the building occupied by the old woman and the children. He gathered from a slight movement of her head that he was to follow her. He glanced in the rear-view mirror. He saw a couple of bikes carrying laughing children, but nothing sinister.
Reza parked his old Mazda beside two other equally decrepit vans in a cleared area by the roadside, and cautiously walked towards the building the woman had disappeared into. He paused at the doorway, wiping the sweat from his forehead with an old, folded handkerchief he always kept in his pocket for the purpose, and stepped nervously into the dark interior.
His eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness. The small, oneroom house was home to a family. Inside, there were two sets of bunks, a table, matting and cushions on the beaten earth floor. The aroma of potent spices filled the air. The home was neat but there was little room to spare for anything other than the people who occupied it.
A very old woman sat on some cushions in one corner. She sang quietly and tunelessly to herself and seemed oblivious to his presence. The young woman kneeled beside her. She wore a thin, bright yellow cotton sundress that complemented the copper colour of her skin. Her hair was thick and black with highlights that caught the sun pouring through the glassless window. A hint of lavender underpinned the smell of chilli and dried fish.
‘Don’t mind the old bag. She has Alzheimer’s,’ said the young woman in a disrespectful way that took him by surprise and threw him even more off balance.
‘Were you followed?’
‘I don’t think so.’
She looked Indonesian yet spoke English with an Australian accent. Her black almond-shaped eyes never left his. Reza wondered if this woman was as dangerous as she was beautiful.
She answered his questions before he had time to get them out. ‘My name is Elizabeth. I work for the Australian government. I sent you the photo.’
At that moment, Reza knew he’d been set up, used as a pawn in a game he had no knowledge of. He’d thought the photo had originated from within the TNI, but now he knew it had not. The questions lined up in his head, each fighting so hard to be asked first that none succeeded. ‘What . . . what is this all about?’ he stammered lamely.
‘You tell me. We know your air force shot down a Qantas jumbo. We know the air traffic controller, the man who first reported the disappearance of the Qantas plane, Abe Niko, died in a wonderfully timed accident yesterday,’ she continued. ‘We also know that there are Indonesian soldiers in the jungles of Sulawesi trying to kill any Australians who might have survived the crash of the Qantas plane.’
Achmad Reza’s mouth had opened involuntarily in shock. A roaring sound filled his ears and he found it difficult to breathe. He sucked at the air, taking small, feeble breaths like someone on their deathbed, his chest constricted.
The woman casually lit a Marlboro, dragged deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke into the sunlight. It swirled into a pattern of blue fingers. She seemed to be enjoying herself. ‘We know that two of the conspirators are the Generals Suluang and Kukuh Masri.’
Suluang and Masri. That was odd, thought Reza, struggling to find some solid ground in a world that had suddenly tilted on its edge. Weren’t theirs the units brawling in the streets of Jakarta?
‘What we don’t know is whether all this is something secretly sponsored by the Indonesian government. That’s where you come in,’ she continued, flicking the ash from her cigarette out the window.
Reza felt dizzy. ‘Are you Indonesian?’ he asked.
‘Indonesian parents. They migrated to Australia before I was born. That makes me a hundred percent Aussie.’
‘You’re a spy?’
‘If you like,’ she said, examining the end of her cigarette.
Reza had no idea why he was being chosen to be some kind of go-between. Is that what I am? Certainly there were many others more qualified, better connected. He hesitated before asking the next question. ‘What . . . what do you want?’
‘We want you to . . . we call it throw a spanner in the works.’
Reza was familiar with the expression, and he recalled the chaos he’d caused in the parliament. ‘I think I’ve already done that.’
The woman drew elegantly on her cigarette and blew the smoke into the air between them before continuing. ‘My government can’t contact yours through the usual channels because, of course, if you
r government has anything to do with this, then all we’ll get is denials. And if we go charging in with unsubstantiated accusations . . .’ She let the thought hang.
The Australians were right. ‘Do you know why the plane was shot down?’ he asked.
‘No. But that is the question, isn’t it?’
‘You said there were soldiers hunting for survivors. Do you know if there are any survivors?’
‘Yes, we believe there are two,’ she said, stubbing the cigarette out on the floor before flicking the butt out the window. ‘We are working on getting them out.’
That could only mean Australian soldiers on Indonesian sovereign territory. Uninvited. Reza felt decidedly uncomfortable.
‘Think of it as a rescue,’ she said, smiling, reading his concern and enjoying his obvious discomfort.
‘Who’s going to rescue Indonesia?’ Reza said, sweating profusely.
‘You are.’ Her eyes held his.
Somewhere east of central Sulawesi, 0745 Zulu, Friday, 1 May
The V22 pulled a two-g turn, bringing Wilkes out of a dream that left him restless and disturbed. He opened his eyes. The men were edgy, fidgeting with gear and straps and ropes, like a football team getting set to play a final. The V22 bucked through low-level turbulence. If Wilkes had peered through the small fuselage porthole, he would have seen the choppy green surface of the Banda Sea barely five metres below.
Wilkes went through a mental checklist, going over his equipment and the ROE: kill the bad guys, rescue the good guys. The fact that he would soon be snuffing out human lives didn’t concern him. He was a soldier and the enemy were soldiers. That’s what soldiers did – they killed each other. That he was up against Kopassus – the Indonesian equivalent of the SAS – gave the exercise a vaguely competitive edge. Wilkes had no doubt who would come out on top. He wasn’t over-confident – the Indons were well trained, ironically by the Australian military. But his men probably had the edge in continued training and the latest equipment. And given the circumstances of this mission, his men also had the certainty that right was on their side. But right or wrong, they would function as he knew they would – with calm, professional efficiency. If things did get nasty, Wilkes reminded himself, he couldn’t be in better company. Bring it on.
The sergeant surveyed his men. There wasn’t any talking going on – the intercom system didn’t allow them privacy. They sat in their own world, lost in their own thoughts, most likely doing what Wilkes had been doing, going through their gear and trying to visualise the mission. There was expectancy. They actually liked doing this shit.
Wilkes felt a presence beside his shoulder. He glanced up. McBride knelt beside his seat with an A3-size photo in his hand. The captain wasn’t smiling.
‘What is it?’ said Wilkes, wary.
‘A few priorities have been rearranged upstairs and we’ve got a proper military sat on this for you now,’ said the marine. That made Wilkes wonder. How did this man know the intel they’d been using up till now hadn’t been military?
‘This baby’s got keyhole resolution in the visible light and infrared spectrum. It also has x-ray capability. It can map radio waves, even do a spectroscopy analysis. This is one serious motherfucker piece of equipment.
‘What we got here is an infrared image of your search area. The satellite has been programmed to scan for temperatures up to and including one degree either side of 98.4, emanating from sources within a certain mass range; the idea being that you’ll get a photo that will register human presence without it being cluttered by hotspots or ghost images that turn out to be monkeys, pigs, and so on. Anyway,’ said the captain, handing him the photo, ‘take a look.’
Something told Wilkes he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see. The worry creasing the captain’s forehead told him as much. Within a couple of seconds of examining the photo, Wilkes was wearing a similar expression.
The photo was extraordinarily clear. The satellite it came from was indeed an astonishing piece of equipment. He took the black and white A-4 photocopy of the pic he’d been shown at the briefing back in Dili out of his top pocket, and compared it. The information presented by the new, colour A3 had totally and utterly changed. If the identical lat and long coordinates hadn’t been in the left of the new photo, he would have sworn that it was a view of a completely different area.
The smudged dots previously identified as the Kopassus soldiers waiting in ambush for one of the two sets of contacts had disappeared. The jungle was now alive with pairs of distinct, hard-edged markers. Now it was impossible to tell which of the contacts were his survivors. Wilkes studied the two utterly different photographs and couldn’t make sense of the information.
He shook his head. ‘Jesus . . . Can we get another pass at this before we go in?’ he asked hopefully.
‘No, I’ve checked on that already.’
Wilkes had half an idea. ‘Can you blow this one up to A3?’
‘That I can do,’ nodded the marine, taking the creased A4 sheet of paper up towards the aircraft’s comms suite.
Wilkes glanced up from the A3 sheet on his lap. The men were all looking his way. ‘What’s happening, boss?’ said the expression on Ellis’s face beside him.
Wilkes gestured that he wasn’t sure.
The captain returned with the old A4-size image blown up to A3 and handed it to Wilkes. He laid the new satellite intel over it. He lifted the top sheet up and down a few times and the hint of a smile curled his lips. ‘You got a pen or pencil?’ asked Wilkes. He took the pencil and drew a series of arrows and circles on the photos.
‘Okay,’ said Wilkes, ‘I think I’ve made a bit of sense out of this.’ McBride sat in the vacant seat beside Wilkes. ‘This is the first photograph. We started with this bunch of contacts here, assuming that it was an ambush line. These two contacts over here were apparently on the move, and these two over here weren’t.’ He indicated the position on the old photo.
‘Let’s take a look what’s happened.’ Wilkes lifted the top photo up and down and the photos came alive. Now the captain could suddenly see which of the contacts had moved, and had a few hints about the direction they had moved in, since the first photo was taken.
‘The ambush has broken up. The Indons are now fanning out across the jungle in twos.’ Arrows Wilkes had drawn on the photos showed the direction they were headed in. ‘These two sets of contacts here, and here, are the mystery players,’ he said, circling each pair with the pencil and doodling several question marks. ‘One set is friendly, the other is not. Trouble is, I’m still not sure which is which. All I can do is take a punt. Keep your eye on these two, the pair down the bottom,’ he said as he did his little animation trick again, lifting the top sheet up and down.
‘Yeah, ’observed McBride,‘ they’re stationary.’
‘The only contacts that are,’ agreed Wilkes. ‘Any idea why one of the two dots that make up this stationary duo down the bottom would be fainter than the rest?’
The captain shook his head. ‘Can’t say with any certainty. It’s a temperature thing. Could be someone who’s sick enough to put his or her body temperature almost out of the scanning range, accompanied by someone who’s okay. Could also be someone who has recently died where the core body temperature hasn’t dropped completely out of range.’ The marine considered the information presented. ‘Could be your people. The jungle’s murderous. Maybe one of your passengers is on the way out.’
‘Yeah,’ said Wilkes, ‘so they’re the most likely good guys – this pair here,’ he said, tapping the other circled contacts with his pencil. ‘These fellas aren’t following the pattern either. And they’re just to the north-east of our most likely survivors.’
‘Could be Indon scouts?’ said McBride.
Sergeant Wilkes was not too keen to make assertions about who was friend or foe on such scant information, but he had to make a decision. ‘How long till you set us down?’
The captain checked his watch. ‘Fifteen to twenty at
the most. There’s quite a bit of wind out there. Once we get up into the hills and it starts swirling about . . . ? Hard to know whether there’ll be a headwind or a tailwind.’
‘Tell the avos to set us down here,’ said Wilkes, indicating a position on the photo midway between the two sets of mystery contacts. ‘Also, a few copies of these would be good. I can hand them out to the lads.’
‘Yes to the first,’ said McBride. ‘And I can do better than copies on the second.’
The American again disappeared forward to the comms desk. A minute later, a video screen flickered into life and the first of the two satellite photos appeared.
‘Bastards have left the in-flight entertainment a bit late, haven’t they?’ quipped Morgan over the intercom.
The marine handed the sergeant a remote. ‘Press this button to change views. There’s a laser you can use as a pointer, here,’ he said, indicating another button. Wilkes pressed it. A red dot appeared on the ceiling.
‘Incoming!’ joked someone, the dot reminding all of them of laser sniper scopes.
Wilkes shifted between the images a couple of times to get the hang of the technology, and began briefing his men on the revised intel.
The V22 climbed steeply as it crossed a deserted white sand beach and rose above the palm covered hill rushing to meet them. The Osprey banked forty-five degrees right and lifted towards a deep ravine cut between two towering cliffs. The whine of the turbofans crashed off the volcanic faces and ricocheted throughout the valley.
Inside the V22 Osprey, the air-conditioning was turned off. Time to acclimatise.
Central Sulawesi, 0758 Zulu, Friday, 1 May
Suryei ran her hand over Joe’s back. Blood seeped from the innumerable weeping sores left by an army of leeches. Her dirt-blackened thumb flicked the lighter’s small friction wheel until the gas caught. It was now on the highest setting but the flame flickered low. She managed to sizzle one last grey-black tube the size of a small cucumber, sending it spinning to the ground before the Bic went out for good. She put it in her pocket. If she managed to escape from this with her life, she’d recycle the lighter into a good luck charm.
Rogue Element Page 27
