Randall swung it away. Kakadi’s soldiers were fanning into firing positions to guard the rendezvous, their ageless, war-hardened faces nervous and watchful. Their weapons were modern FNCs, captured from ambushed ABRI patrols.
Randall was bowstring tense. He knew now they’d walked into a trap. What he didn’t know was how it was to be sprung. Everything that had brought them up here, the hints, the suspicions – all of it could be sourced now to people connected with General Sumoto.
‘I need to do a quick standupper,’ Charlie whispered, touching Nick’s arm and nudging him towards the brighter light of the clearing. Kakadi’s fury she saw had subsided. He and Bawi were conversing less heatedly. ‘Frame me to one side with the two of them in the background. OK?’
‘Fine. Hang on. Warning light. Need to change the battery.’
He fumbled in the bag for the spare power-pack, brushing aside a loose AA battery from a walkman. Odd. Hadn’t packed any. Must be Charlie’s. He found the fresh nickel-cadmium cell and clicked it on to the camera.
‘Ready?’ he asked, anxious to get this over with.
‘Ready,’ she replied. The sun struck like a blow-torch as they stepped from the shade. She ran a hand through her hair, checked her clothing for undone buttons, struck an authoritative pose, then began.
‘I’m standing in the very heart of the mountains controlled by Kutu’s OKP guerrillas. The kidnapping of Stephen Bowen has split the Kutu resistance down the middle. Today the pacifist leader of the OKP’s political wing has defied the house-arrest imposed on him by Indonesia’s military rulers and has come up here to plead with his guerrilla counterpart for Stephen Bowen’s release.’
She held her look, then he switched off.
‘Just a scene-setter,’ she said awkwardly. ‘To show I’m here.’
Suddenly there was an angry shout, a frantic waving for them to get back under the trees. A black finger jabbed towards the sky.
Half a second later Nick heard the whistle-crack of the jet. The Hawk. Dead overhead like a homing pigeon. Followed them like an arrow, straight to the man ABRI most wanted dead – Soleman Kakadi.
‘Film it! Film it!’ Charlie shrieked, as they ran for cover.
‘No way,’ Randall panted. He wanted them out, now. Away from there before it was too late. But a flustered Junus Bawi beckoned them over. Kakadi wanted to leave in a hurry but would speak with them if they were quick.
‘Straight in,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Interview. Still running?’
‘Yep.’
‘Hello, Mr Kakadi,’ Charlie began, crouching in front of him. ‘Charlotte Cavendish from the News Channel. Can you tell us, are you going to release Stephen Bowen?’
Kakadi’s ebony face was blank, his chiselled expression haughty, his eyes withdrawn.
‘He speaks no English,’ Bawi explained, softly. ‘But he has already told me … that he knows nothing about Mr Bowen.’
Charlie gaped.
‘He … he doesn’t have Stephen Bowen?’ she stammered.
‘No,’ said Bawi, confused and embarrassed. ‘The first that Soleman heard of the kidnap was from me when I sent the message yesterday that I wanted to meet him. You see, the batteries in their radios are dead. They have not heard any news for two weeks …’
Battery. Randall gulped. The loose one in the bag. The one that belonged to Charlie’s Walkman. She hadn’t got a bloody Walkman!
‘Fucking hell!’ Nick switched off and stood up. ‘Everybody get out of here. Quick!’
Charlie turned, startled by his outburst. ‘What’s up?’
‘They’re coming! For him! For Kakadi. Tell him, Junus. It’s a trap. The soldiers are coming!’
The whites of the guerrilla chief’s eyes were streaked with malarial yellow. Bawi jabbered in Kutun, translating.
Then they heard it. All of them together. A sound from hell that turned their guts to water. The heavy thump-thump of twin-blade rotors. Randall switched the camera back on. Evidence. That’s what he needed. Evidence on camera of a conspiracy still well beyond his comprehension.
Kakadi’s head whipped towards the noise. On his face, the pain of betrayal, then hatred. He stood up, a murderous look in his eyes, his big hands clamped round the stock of his FNC. He swung the barrel up to the firing position.
‘Chri-ist!’ Charlie cried as the muzzle levelled with her mouth.
Then, as suddenly as he’d stood, Kakadi spun away, hammering like a boar through the long, dry grass, yelling to his men.
Randall pointed the camera at his fleeing back. ‘Get away from the clearing!’ he snapped to Charlie. ‘Into the trees.’
Just the three of them left. Him, the girl and Bawi. Kakadi and his men evaporating like tree spirits. Abandoning them to their fate.
The rotor clatter grew to a roar. He swung the camera towards it, then the mud-green machine filled his viewfinder, sweeping over the rim of the trees, chain gun poking out like the beak of a pterodactyl. Randall’s stomach clenched. He knew what those guns could do.
‘Fucking run!’ he yelled.
Camera off, feet flying over roots and rocks, they fled into the dark of the forest hacking with their arms at the creepers. Thick foliage closed around them.
Then, behind, came a sound like an earthquake as the chain gun ripped the air.
‘Down!’
Flat on the earth, Charlie’s quivering breath beside him, the thunder of the gun made the ground shake. But the shells, Nick realised, weren’t coming their way. Cautiously he rose to a crouch, found a gap through the leaves and aimed the camera. Framed by the lens, he saw flames spurt from the helicopter cannon, the spent cartridges cascading to the ground.
Just fifty metres away the shells smacked through the trees, splintering trunks. The gunner was firing blind, putting down a sweep of fire that would shred anything in its path. Including Kakadi and his men if they were there.
Then the UH-1 jinked away, its pilot running for cover, the chain gun falling silent. As the echoes died they heard the sharp crack of assault rifles, the OKP firing back.
Camera off. He thrust it at Charlie. ‘Hold this a minute.’
‘Oh my God,’ she trembled. ‘What are we going to do?’
There was one thing he had to do. His fingers dived into the grey bag, scrabbling round until they closed on the short, thin tube that he’d thought was a battery. He pulled it out. Even looked like a bloody battery … apart from the little wire trailing from it.
What a mug! Check, check. Standard Operating Procedure. And he bloody hadn’t. Walked into this wasps’ nest of a country like it was an English village. SIS would piss themselves if they knew. He held out the device in the palm of his hand.
‘What is it?’ Charlie croaked.
‘Tracer beacon. We left the camera bag in our room when we had breakfast this morning. We’ve been fucking bugged, Charlie. Followed every bloody inch of the way.’
He rose to a crouch again, wrenched his arm back and hurled the device towards the clearing.
The thunderclap of grenades way off in the trees threw him down again. They heard a shout, then a scream, then a long burst of automatic fire. Bawi clutched his head in his hands, certain he was about to die.
Through the foliage Randall saw two more helos skim the trees, heading to cut off Kakadi’s retreat, their doors open, commandos poised to abseil through gaps in the canopy.
‘Who, for Christ’s sake?’ Charlie gaped. ‘Who put that bug in our bag?’
‘Same person who put Bowen’s passport under our door … Somebody with a bunch of airborne infantry at his disposal …’
‘I don’t understand …’ she cried. ‘You mean Sumoto? Who is he?’
Junus Bawi had lost his spectacles in the scramble through the trees. He blinked about like a mole, feeling for them on the ground.
‘KOPASSUS,’ he breathed. ‘These men are KOPASSUS.’
The hard boys who don’t take prisoners. That’s what Dugdale had called them.
�
�It’s what I told you,’ Bawi wailed, ‘the Javans are using Mr Bowen as the reason to destroy us.’
‘But Soleman Kakadi hasn’t fucking got Bowen,’ Charlie screamed, despairing of ever understanding.
‘No …’ Bawi was boiling with hate now for the intel man who’d tricked him. ‘That is the truth and you must report it on the news. Quickly. Tell the world before they kill us all.’
The only report on the news would be of their own deaths if they didn’t get the hell out of there, Randall decided. First thing was to move further from the clearing before ABRI brought the helos in to lift out casualties.
‘Nick! Tell me about Sumoto, for God’s sake!’ Charlie yelled.
No time. He was calculating how many soldiers there could be. Eight to ten in each aircraft. Maybe eight machines, a dozen at the most. So, sixty men. A hundred. Snatch squads, that’s all. In quick. Kill or capture, then out quick before the guerrillas hit back. Their best chance was to find good cover and lie low.
Charlie, he saw, was now trembling like a leaf, hit suddenly by the desperateness of their plight.
‘It’s not us they’re after, is it?’ she whispered, hoping Bawi wouldn’t hear. ‘You and me, Nick. I mean we’ll be all right, won’t we? What if we were to walk into the open waving something white and say we’re British journalists? You speak the language, Nick.’
‘The Geneva Convention doesn’t work here, love,’ Randall warned her gently. ‘If we tell ’em we’re journalists they’ll put a bullet in our heads and pretend it’s an accident.’
And in Darwin Jim Sawyer would say that he’d told them so.
‘No. We move deeper into the trees and lie low,’ he declared, taking charge. ‘Can you see without your glasses?’ he whispered to the professor.
‘Enough,’ Bawi answered, crawling closer. ‘Enough to be able to follow you.’
Randall tugged the compass from his pocket. Rotor clatter to the north and east. Kakadi must be trying to escape towards the volcano. The KOPASSUS commandos would hope to turn him, to drive him and his men back towards the valley where more soldiers would be waiting. Like a pheasant shoot, beating the guerrillas towards a line of guns.
They had to go the other way. South and west, along the ridge, then try to find another way down to the valley.
The chain gun hammered again, a sound like a tree trunk being torn apart by giants. Further away this time.
‘We’d better move,’ he told them. ‘Follow me and keep low. Use the trees for cover. Stay about five metres apart, and if I hiss, get down.’
He headed south, trying to avoid the thorny creepers that could slash an arm, hoping the noise of the fire-fight had frightened off the snakes. He stopped at the first tree, listened, then moved on, glancing back to check the others were following. The helicopters he guessed were holding off beyond small arms range.
On again. Then a fresh burst of shooting. Nearer. Much nearer. Less than fifty metres to their left. The helos must have dropped a patrol right close to them.
He fell to his knees, crawled forward then slithered into a dip in the ground littered with moss-covered rocks. Good cover. To find them a patrol would have to be right on top.
Charlie slid after him, then Bawi a few seconds later.
‘We’ll stay put for a while,’ he breathed. ‘Stay silent too.’
Close by, a fierce fire-fight broke out. When it ended the echoes were pierced by the terrible screams of a wounded man. Charlie covered her ears. Then came a single shot and silence.
No prisoners.
They heard a turbine whine and glimpsed the fat, dragonfly shape of a helicopter pass swiftly overhead. Then a different sound, short and sharp like a door slamming. Randall recognised it instantly. A second later the machine that had passed them detonated in a sheet of flame.
‘A missile,’ Nick breathed. ‘Kakadi’s got bloody missiles.’ As the thunder of the explosion died away, metal fragments clattered through the trees.
Randall crawled up the slope. Less than a hundred metres away the forest was ablaze. If they weren’t shot, they could be burned to death. He slithered back into the hollow.
‘Time to move again.’
West now, he decided. Towards the valley. He led them away at a crouch. Then the trees thinned. Open ground to be crossed and no way round it.
‘One at a time,’ he whispered. ‘Wait till I reach cover, then follow. Keep low.’
From the direction of the blazing helicopter came shouts of panic, of men distracted. He stood up and ran.
Crack! A high-velocity round inches over his head.
Fuck! His guts did somersaults. Blown it.
Crack! Crack! Two more shots. Bark flicked off a branch as he reached the tree.
‘Nick!’ A scream from Charlie, well behind.
A half-turn. A split second’s hesitation. Go back for her? Suicide.
‘Keep down!’ he yelled.
In front of him the ground fell away towards the valley and safety. Behind, there were men trying to kill him. No choice. Heart pounding, feet dancing, he ran downwards, weaving through the trees.
Another shot, muffled this time, then the clunk of heavy metal in the branches above and a thud as a rifle grenade hit the soil behind him. He flung himself flat, fingers in his ears.
The explosion hammered the earth. Grenade fragments spattered the leaves above his head, but none touched him. He lay in dense ferns. As birds screamed at the disturbance, huge red ants scurried past his face.
He lay still, straining to hear above the thunder of blood in his temples if the others had tried to follow.
Nothing. No feet pushing through undergrowth. No sound of a chase. Maybe it had been a lone sentry they’d stumbled across, too concerned for his own safety to come after them.
Nick crawled forward beneath a screen of ferns, the camera bag nestling in the small of his back. Had to find cover. Then locate Charlie and Junus Bawi. His team. Had to see them all right.
Two more shots suddenly. Single rounds. Aimed with deliberation, but not at him.
Then a woman screaming hysterically.
‘Christ!’ he gasped.
They’d got Charlie.
Charlie cowered on her haunches, back against a tree, her hands smothering her unstoppable yells, staring at Dr Junus Bawi sprawled face down in front of her. Blood gushed from the mess that had been his head. A red stain spread from the middle of his white shirt. The two soldiers who’d killed him were short, squat men, but they towered over her, their young, dirt-smeared monkey faces taut with the elation that came from killing one of the enemy.
Charlie shook uncontrollably. ‘I … I’m British,’ she babbled between screams, terrified she was next. The soldiers levelled their guns at her head, but seemed uncertain what to do.
She gaped at Bawi. Seconds ago a human being, now a doll with a head of crimson sponge and a pool of dark-red treacle under his chest. Suddenly her stomach spasmed. She turned to the side and threw up.
Randall hid behind the thick roots of a huge tree, his mind in bits. Images of Charlie badly wounded flashed through his head. She’d be lost. Panicking like hell. And this was his fault. Should never have arm-twisted her into coming with him.
‘God what a mess …’ he muttered.
He listened, praying for another shout, something to show she was OK after all. He felt powerless. No weapon. No backup. Crawling up the slope to try to help her was madness. He’d be picked off like a duck at a fairground.
Backup. He thought of the Ops Room on the sixteenth floor of the Yard. A long, long way away. A big friendly machine full of blokes who got you out of trouble. Run by rules. Rule number one: working with women led to trouble.
He listened again. Nothing. He moved his face along to a dip in the root until he could look back through the ferns. He flinched and ducked down. Crouching on the ridge above half-hidden by a rock, a helmeted soldier was searching for him with binoculars.
He frowned. Why hadn’t they come aft
er him? Too few of them. Scared of Kakadi’s men now they’d seen what they could do to a helicopter. But they knew he was down here – the other half of the bait in their trap. They’d want to scoop him up. Need to, to prevent word of the raid getting out. But they wouldn’t hang around for ever, so at least he had time on his side.
Suddenly from the direction of the valley below came the deep bass boom of a mine explosion, followed quickly by another.
Maybe that was why the soldiers on the ridge hadn’t followed. Leaving him to be caught by a patrol coming up the hill – a patrol that had just walked into the trap set by Kakadi’s men.
From the ridge above he heard the muted crackle of a tactical radio. The commandos were getting new orders.
Charlie. Her scent haunted him. Smelled it in his head.
‘Oh, fuck!’ he breathed. Don’t let her be dead.
The soldier guarding Charlie stood an arm’s length away, but she caught his odour. Same as in the jeep last night. The sour stench of unwashed battledress. From his contemptuous stare she knew that her life was as insignificant to him as piss.
She trembled like a jelly, no longer daring to look at the mess of Junus Bawi. The flies were at his head already.
She took deep breaths to steady herself. Think, think. She at least was alive. They could’ve killed her, but hadn’t. Because she was white, perhaps. A foreigner. Hard to explain to the big wide world if they murdered a Brit up here.
But who would know?
She felt desperately alone. Like a severed limb. She wanted to cry out for Nick and get a shout back to show he was OK. But they’d fired bullets and a grenade for Christ’s sake! How could he be OK? Dead like Bawi, maybe. Or worse, wounded and in pain.
She wanted the soldiers to find him – to save his life, and so they could be together again. But the bangs from down the hill had made the commandos jittery. The one with the binoculars had rolled away from the ridge, shouting into his radio. Now he was kicking through the scrub looking for a fallen branch. When he found one he unhooked the machete from his belt and hacked the wood to length.
Body pressed to the forest floor, Randall heard rotors heading for the clearing. Medevac, he guessed. Or maybe KOPASSUS were pulling out … He eased himself back to the gap in the roots to risk another look.
Java Spider Page 28
