Sword of Allah

by David Rollins

  The picture changed as the cameraman swung his camera around to show Weaver and Billy the Kid, both of whom were wearing the full NBC suit with the hood and gasmask over their heads. Annabelle also wore hers, but the hood and gasmask hung behind her back.

  ‘Ever since the threat of the VX-laden drone became known, the local television station has been running programs on how to turn a house into a chemical shelter, sealing the doors with plastic sheeting and tape. As expected, most hardware and department stores have run out of these materials, as well as plastic garbage bags and stocks of bleach, said to be an effective VX neutralising agent.

  ‘The early riots and looting touched off by the news of the impending terrorist strike have stopped, largely due to a significant army presence on the streets here…’

  Two RAAF F/A-18 fighters suddenly ripped through the air overhead, cutting a low arc over the city, heading out towards the sea. As the thunder from their turbines rolling around the harbour receded, Annabelle went on with her report, departing from the script to make the flypast appear part of the show.

  ‘And as you might expect, the RAAF has every available plane in the sky searching for the terrorists’ drone, hoping to shoot it down before it arrives.’

  Weaver appreciated the adlib with a thumbs up.

  ‘So now Darwin waits, holding its breath, while the ghosts of that fateful day in nineteen forty-two judge our present. For this is a conflict Australia will fight on its own, as this departing US warship symbolises, on its way to defend Indonesia’s shores against the shared threat.

  ‘It’s perhaps not the end of ANZUS, our strategic alliance with the US, but without doubt the treaty has been severely wounded. Those wounds could well become mortal if a small pilotless plane airbursts upwind of this northern capital.’

  At this point Annabelle reached behind her and pulled the hood and mask over her head so that her final words were muffled.

  ‘This is Annabelle Gilbert for ANTV Network News, Darwin.’

  Annabelle stood in front of the camera for five seconds in her chemical warfare suit, looking like a camouflaged two-legged insect, and waited for Weaver’s signal.

  ‘…and cut,’ he said. ‘Now let’s go find a bar and some loose women.’

  ‘How was that?’ asked Annabelle.

  ‘All bullshit aside, I think you’re too good to sit behind a desk,’ he said. ‘Saunders did you a favour, whether you realise it or not, kiddo. The funny thing is, Saunders doesn’t realise it.’

  ‘Thanks, Barry.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Weaver. ‘So, can we go and have sex now?’

  ‘Will you settle for something to eat?’ Annabelle was starving. She hadn’t eaten dinner or breakfast and she was starting to feel faint.

  ‘You know I could hit that for six, don’t you?’

  Annabelle smiled. ‘Come on. Everything in this town can’t be khaki.’

  Five minutes later, Billy the Kid was back behind the wheel of the army Land Rover, and they were slowly cruising the back streets of Darwin but, of course, everything was shut. It was like the place was in a coma, thought Annabelle. It was alive in one sense but as good as dead in another.

  ‘The lights are on, but ain’t nobody home,’ commented Weaver, looking at the vacant shops. A lone dog padded along the footpath, tongue lolling in the wet heat.

  ‘You took the words right out of my brain,’ said Annabelle.

  She heard Billy the Kid say, ‘What’s this guy do –’ and she had time to look out the window, but there wasn’t even enough time to be afraid.

  The brown steel bucket of a large agricultural earthmoving machine filled the side windows. It slammed into the Land Rover, T-boning it. The force of the impact threw the vehicle’s occupants sideways. Billy the Kid’s head smashed into the b-pillar by his shoulder, knocking him senseless. His blood splattered across Annabelle as his head rolled from side to side. She screamed with the shock of the impact. The Land Rover’s tyres protested as the machine pushed it broadside across the road. The bucket then lifted them up and over the kerb and drove them viciously into the side of a building. The machine’s massive diesel roared. It was as if the thing was determined to push them through the wall they were pinned against. The machine shunted and strained as it jammed them repeatedly against the brickwork. Annabelle yelled at them to stop. The windscreen of the Land Rover suddenly shattered into tiny crystals that fell into the laps of the cameraman and Billy the Kid, both of whom were unconscious. And then, all was quiet for a few seconds.

  ‘Reach for a radio or your mobiles and you are all dead,’ yelled a man in front of them. He wasn’t joking. He had a large machine gun pointed at them. Bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossed his chest. There were two men with him who were also armed. One had a small rocket launcher and the other carried a can Annabelle assumed was full of petrol. All three were dressed in dirty T-shirts, shorts and thongs, the uniform for males in the Australian far north.

  Her vision was blurred from the impact with the earthmover. She shook her head to try to clear it. The palm trees that dotted the footpath and the mall just in front of them had been sawn off at their base. The trees themselves had been dragged away and lay helter-skelter further down the mall. Another large tractor was having a tug of war with an automatic teller machine set into the partly demolished wall of a bank. The ATM was losing. It suddenly came free and half a dozen men gave a cheer.

  ‘It’s a fucking bank robbery!’ said Weaver groggily.

  The earthmover wrestling with the ATM swung it onto the tray of a flatbed truck. The men jumped on and slapped each other on the back as they ripped into tins of beer. They drove off leaving the Land Rover pinned against the wall by the steel bucket.

  Billy the Kid came around in time to watch the crooks jump into their truck. ‘So now we know who stole the guns from the museum,’ he said, holding his head in his hands.

  The sudden blast of a diesel motor again filled the Land Rover causing Annabelle and Weaver to flinch. An armoured personnel carrier sped past blowing clouds of blue-black smoke, followed by three more Land Rovers, these ones carrying mounted machine guns. They roared down the road in hot pursuit of the bank robbers.

  ‘Are you people all right?’ A face popped into view, framed by the empty windshield. Annabelle recognised him as the major they’d met at the airport when they first arrived.

  ‘I thought you buggers said you had the looters under control,’ said Weaver, pissed off, rubbing a very large bump on his head.

  Arafura Sea, 15 000 feet

  Seventy-fifth Squadron’s Flight Lieutenant Andrew Corbet and Flying Officer Robert Burns had taken off from RAAF Tindal base after sunrise and covered the three hundred odd kilometres tracking north-west to Darwin in around fifteen minutes – easy with a little application of afterburner at thirty thousand feet. They’d then been vectored low over the city, the third flight to do so, a bit of flag waving to reassure the city that the air force was on the job. Corbet glanced down as they skimmed the rooftops; it was more of a town really, small and vulnerable. His mind wandered to the drone. Finding it would be an almost impossible task – everyone at the squadron knew that – especially with F/A-18s. They climbed quickly to twenty-five thousand feet and accelerated to five hundred knots. They’d been given a patch of sky to search way out in the middle of nowhere – east of Ashmore Reef and the Cartier Islands where the Timor Sea met the Indian Ocean. During transit, they were given a complete sit-rep. The clock was definitely ticking.

  ‘Shogun one, Darwin control.’

  ‘Shogun one,’ Corbet replied.

  ‘Shogun one, squawk code 2907.’

  ‘Shogun one, squawking code 2907.’ Corbet keyed the numbers into the transponder.

  ‘Shogun one. Radar contact. Strategic Command confirms UAV launched and inbound Darwin. Repeat UAV inbound Darwin. Good luck, guys. Keep your eyes peeled,’ said the voice over the radio, becoming human all of a sudden.

  Corbet breathed deeply
into the oxygen mask and felt some of the stress ebb away. Funny, but a part of him was relieved that the nightmare was real at last, and not an exercise. They’d been told that intelligence sources had a UAV loaded with nerve agent possibly headed to Darwin. And now it had been confirmed. It was fact. ‘Shogun two. Did you get that?’ he asked Burns.

  ‘Roger, Shogun one. Now what?’

  The question was rhetorical and Corbet knew it. He didn’t have a clue. Practically every serviceable aircraft the RAAF had was in the air – C-130s, Caribou, submarinehunting PC3 Orions, Hawk trainers and Hornets – searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack and all of these aircraft, with the possible exception of the slower flying C-130s, Orions and Caribous, were unsuited to the task.

  It was apparent at the hurried mission briefing that the RAAF had a fair bit of intelligence on the target UAV itself, but that hardly helped. The Prowler cruised – or rather crawled – at around seventy knots. It was small, too, with a length just shy of three-point-three metres and a wingspan of just under five and a half metres. More than likely it would be hugging the wave tops and, to make matters still worse, its lines employed stealth technology augmented with radar absorbing material – RAM. On top of that, the RAM was tinted a pale blue, so not only was it almost invisible to radar, the naked eye would also be hard pressed to pick the UAV out against the sky or sea.

  The F/A-18’s radar was the new, sexy APG-73 Raytheon unit that provided air-to-air and air-to-ground capability. It was truly an amazing piece of high-tech wizardry that gave the F/A-18 the reconnaissance capability equal to that of a U-2 spy plane. Or so the blurb from Raytheon promised. But it wouldn’t help them find a low-tech bug smasher a third the size of the Hornet flying low enough and slow enough to troll for fish. Even if they managed to be nose on to the UAV, the radar worked on the Doppler theory that measured and detected closing speeds. It wouldn’t ‘see’ the Prowler for the simple reason that the thing wasn’t travelling fast enough.

  The other variable, just to make the task seem truly impossible, was that the UAV’s flight plan was unknown and, most probably, unpredictable. Okay, so it was heading for Darwin, but what were the chances that it would take the most direct route there? Unlikely. If he were a terrorist, Corbet reasoned, he’d get the UAV over Australian soil and have it approach the city from the south, apparently the route least expected for some reason that escaped him. So there was a chance the thing was already over the Australian coastline, coming up on Darwin from the blind side. If that were the case, with the RAAF’s assets all deployed over the sea, then it would deliver its deadly cargo unchallenged.

  All Corbet and Burns could do was fly their designated patch of sky, low and slow, keeping their eyes on their fries. It didn’t escape either pilot that what they needed to help them find this thing was a miracle, pure and simple.

  Flores, Indonesia

  Seeing Annabelle on the television – in Darwin – had stopped Wilkes cold, but Atticus had since talked some sense into him. ‘It’s not a nuke headed her way, Tom. It’s a cloud of poison gas,’ he’d said. ‘You saw her, man. The girl is suited up and ready for action. Chill!’ What Monroe said was right, of course, but he still didn’t like the thought of Annabelle being in the line of fire. And when that thought struck him, he knew he’d had an insight into Annabelle’s fears about him whenever he left on a sortie.

  Wilkes checked his watch. If it wasn’t intercepted, the drone would strike within around four hours.

  ‘All that stuff about Uncle Sam deserting you guys, though. That was a bit harsh, wasn’t it?’ said Monroe.

  ‘Forget it, Atticus. Bad news rates better.’

  The two expected Indonesian navy destroyers had dropped anchor a mile offshore and sent across armed sailors to help secure the camp. None of the terrorists who were still alive, however, had any fight in them. Almost thirty percent of the encampment’s population were dead. Many more people were close to it.

  Somewhere beyond the horizon the USS Constellation was steaming towards them because suddenly, as if underlining the fact, a flight of US Navy Super Hornets creased the air overhead, the noise from their engines threatening to rupture Wilkes’s eardrums. In their wake, a US Navy Sea King helicopter pulled around the headland west of the landing strip, about five hundred feet above the water. It slowed to a hover over the strip and then settled onto the packed earth with a bump, the trees on the edge of the cleared jungle thrashing wildly in the downdraft. Half a dozen soldiers dressed in JSLIST suits hopped onto the earth and hauled a couple of crates out of the helo, which then immediately took off and climbed on a heading out to sea.

  Mahisa and Wilkes went to meet them. The Americans saluted, Mahisa and Wilkes returned it crisply. ‘Colonel Hank Watson, US Army Chemical Corps,’ said the officer in front, yelling through his suit to be heard.

  ‘Colonel,’ said Mahisa. ‘We’ve been expecting you. Captain Mahisa of the Tentara Nasional Indonesia. I am CO here. We met before in Canberra. I have been instructed by Jakarta to give you every assistance. And this is Warrant Officer Wilkes, Australian Special Air Service.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I believe you have found WMD.’

  ‘Come this way,’ said Mahisa, gesturing at the Americans to follow.

  Wilkes felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned. It was Atticus. ‘Tom, I’ve been thinking…You know, I don’t think Darwin is the target.’

  ‘And why not?’ said Wilkes.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘we don’t have much time.’

  S10°30'10" E126°15'02", Timor Sea

  HMAS Arunta was rigged for battle. Commander Steve Drummond stood on the fly bridge, legs taking the rolling motion of the frigate as it rode the swell. Leading Seaman Sean Matheson stood beside him, behind the Browning, watching the dolphins racing along and giving the ship a good run for its money. Both men wore their JSLIST suits but the hoods and gasmasks were hanging down their backs. Drummond inched the binoculars along the horizon off the boat’s port bow. Strategic Command in Canberra had hoped to add the Arunta to the protective screen around Darwin but the ship was too far to the north. Intelligence sources expected the drone would be nowhere near their current position, but Drummond put the crew on high alert anyway. ‘Anything on screen, X?’ asked the captain into the microphone.

  ‘Negative, sir,’ said Lieutenant Commander Angus Briggs. There was plenty of unusual traffic at the radar’s extreme range, much of it airborne and RAAF in nature. A couple of F/A-18s and a KC-130 tanker were approaching but they were still a long way off to the south-west. In short, there was nothing unidentified or unusual. Briggs again checked the display on the monitor generated by the Saab Vectronics radar, its massive dish rotating atop the ship’s communications tower interrogating the sea and air around it with a powerful spray of microwave energy. The radar showed the landmass of East Timor lying off their starboard beam and their track was south-west, roughly parallel with the coastline.

  HMAS Arunta had completed its six-month tour. By all accounts, the mission had been a successful one, although one man – Johnny Teo – had lost his life aboard a cargo vessel being inspected, falling into its bilge and drowning. Finally, after months of the stress of battle, no sleep and the constant threat of attack, they were headed home, on a course for Darwin. And then the change of orders came through at the same time as the story broke on the news: the UAV, the nerve gas, the resulting fear and violence in both Darwin and Jakarta. The crew had watched the report, stunned. Hadn’t this been why the war was being fought? Had the sacrifices all been for nothing? A feeling of pointlessness had settled on the ship that was hard to shake.

  Flores, Indonesia

  Monroe and Wilkes had peeled off their JSLISTs and although the temperature was close to thirty degrees the slight breeze felt cool and sweet. Colonel Hank Watson and his crew had quickly confirmed the air free of VX. They’d located and secured the drums that had contained the nerve agent, and had just announced that the camp’s water sup
ply was the culprit. How it had come to be contaminated was yet to be ascertained.

  ‘The whole Darwin thing is a massive assumption on our part, isn’t it?’ asked Monroe, spreading the METFOR out on the bench. ‘We don’t have intel on a positive target that I’m aware of. Kadar Al-Jahani didn’t give it up, the financier continues to say he has no idea, and we’ve yet to recover anything from the hard disks here and nothing on paper has come to light.’

  ‘Except for the METFOR,’ said Wilkes.

  ‘That’s right. So then, let’s go over it again.’ Monroe frowned as he leaned over the bench and willed the answer to leap off the printout.

  ‘You know, when you’re serious it makes me want to laugh,’ said Wilkes.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I don’t know whether you’re taking the piss.’

  ‘And that means…?’

  ‘Taking the mickey, pulling my leg.’

  Monroe turned his frown on Wilkes.

  ‘Okay, Atticus. Let’s get serious,’ said Wilkes. ‘All this fresh air’s getting to me.’

  ‘We assume Jakarta’s not the target. Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not on this METFOR, the one the terrorists checked prior to launch.’

  ‘A fair assumption,’ said Monroe. ‘So what is on the METFOR?’

  ‘Indonesia east of the island of Bali, West Papua, part of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Northern Territory.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A bunch of lines, the pressure gradients and a whole lot of ocean.’

  ‘Okay, so why Darwin?’

  ‘I think it’s assumed Darwin’s the target because it’s a big population centre full of non-believers, infidels. And it’s in a different country to the one the terrorists live in.’

  ‘But it’s not the only population centre on the map. There are plenty of others. And, for that matter, why does the target have to be a population centre?’