by Anita Bell
They handed the weapons around, arguing over who got the Minimi submachine gun. After what sounded like an accidental burst of about a dozen rounds into the chicken hutch, the Minimi stayed in the hands of Cleverboy, who seemed to be the first one to figure out how to use it. Shorty sent him to relieve the guard on the southwest gate, which was just below the eight o’clock hut. Once there, Cleverboy propped the weapon up on its bipod, positioning it atop the low rock wall overlooking the widest track that led to the village.
In any sane weather, the narrow snakelike clearing provided rough access by four-wheel drive to other villages down the range. As unlikely now as it was, that direction was still the most likely for attack from ground forces. In addition, it was also the best position from which to watch the sky.
Locklin scratched his chin, wondering how he was going to take him out. Cleverboy and the submachine gun had to be the first to go.
He worked his way around the village from beyond the treeline, proceeding again in short bursts, pausing only to watch for routines or weaknesses that could be exploited. But there were few. What he needed was a distraction, something that would attract their weapons fire so he could assess their response tactics to danger.
He didn’t have to wait long. Below the chicken hutch, between the village and the creek, he ducked behind the low earthen hump of a man-made bog for domestic buffalo and as he did, he caught the attention of both buffalo and one of the three black razorbacks that wallowed there.
He bellied himself flat against the muddy ground, feeling the rain pelt the length of his soaked body as he listened to the biggest black pig squeal a warning to the others. From the sow’s point of view, he was behaving like a predator and she stirred up the buffalo to a full alert. They lifted their noses, snorting at him and swaying as a threat to charge him.
He had only a few seconds to calm them. Locklin raised his eyes just enough for a quick glance towards the village and saw that the ruckus had already attracted attention. A skinny yellow dog was racing on its way. He couldn’t dash the distance to the nearest trees without attracting its attention, and he couldn’t let it get close enough to sniff him out.
He reached round to his bumpack and quickly fished through his rations. Three anzac biscuits, two packets of M&M’s, a Mars Bar, three cans of spaghetti, a small carton of longlife cream for his coffee and a tube of pine-scented mosquito repellent to keep insects at bay while he ate.
He unwrapped the biscuits, wishing for a quieter wrapper. Then he lobbed the first one directly into the path of the galloping dog, which nosedived as it ran over the scent of sweet pastry and sniffed around in the long grass until it found it.
He lobbed the other two Anzacs into the mud wallow, landing them near the rumps of the startled buffalo. The pigs saw them drop, and being used to having food scraps thrown at them, bolted over to squabble over the morsels. They bumped against the back legs of the buffalo, which spun around to horn the pigs back to their own space in the corner. The dog saw that happen and bolted in to sniff out the food it suspected they were fighting over. The noisy battle that followed brought shouts from the village.
Locklin hugged the mud, rolling his head slowly in it to smudge the shine off his forehead, nose and cheeks. He did the same with his watch and the backs of his hands and became one with the mud as he waited.
The dog got the blame. Without bothering to get closer, Shorty fired two rounds at it through one of the Steyrs. He had it set to semi-automatic and it gave him a bigger kick on firing than he’d expected. The rounds went high, missing the dog, but still having the desired effect. One bullet zinged over the dog’s ears and it took off in fright, vanishing into the bush in the opposite direction to the kitten. The buffalo moved to the quieter deep end of the wallow, and without the dog, the pigs settled quickly in their muddy corner and the clearing fell quiet again.
Shorty and the other militiamen vanished from behind the wall and Locklin dashed on to his next position at the edge of the treeline. Shorty didn’t order each of his men to fire a few rounds to get used to their new weapons, and Locklin wasn’t too surprised. They still had the threat of needing every round they had for a possible fight and with night falling quickly, Shorty had plenty of other things to worry about before he could bed down. He shouted towards the twelve o’clock hut and four women were herded out and assembled in front of him.
Shorty organised them into a working party, assisted and supervised by three of his men to gather bodies two at a time onto makeshift stretchers. Under guard, the women were made to carry their heavy loads through the lower gate towards the creek.
Locklin followed, keeping pace with them from inside the treeline.
The clouds opened up and the black hair of the women clung wet to their faces as they struggled with the heavy weights. Water raced under their feet in little streams like tiny rivers that gushed down the tracks towards the creek.
One of the women slipped. Heavily pregnant, she went down, taking the back end of the makeshift stretcher with her and forcing the smaller woman at the front off her feet as well. The smaller woman rolled a short distance down the gully, knocking one of the militiamen to his knees.
He cried out, more from surprise than pain, but before the woman could help him up, she was knocked down again by a blow to her back with a rifle butt.
Giant shouted as he towered over her and kicked the two women to their feet again. The other two women put their stretcher down and tried to help, but he ordered them away in broken Tetum.
The militiamen laughed and Locklin swore at them silently. He was less than eight metres away, but he couldn’t do anything about it, not without broadcasting to Shorty that he was coming.
The women rolled the bodies of their loved ones onto the creek bank and the men herded them back for another five trips in the rain. On the second last trip, they brought the body of Corporal West. A great emptiness filled Locklin’s gut and he realised that the women had to feel the same way. The dead were being left for the crocodile.
Locklin saw a familiar ripple downstream and decided not to follow the work detail back to the village for the last trip. Instead, he fossicked through his bumpack again for his tube of mosquito repellent. He climbed out onto a thick branch over the water and squeezed the entire tube into the waterhole below the bodies. The long skinny trail of water-resistant repellent sunk straight to the bottom of the shallow pool near the edge. Locklin stirred the slow-moving water with a long, skinny branch, not much, just enough to stir up some of the strong pine scent — and he watched a ripple in the water that headed away.
With the insect paste under water, Locklin couldn’t smell it, but the predator could. Its keen sense of smell had failed it and it could no longer detect the fresh scent of a meal waiting for it on the bank.
How much time that bought, Locklin didn’t know, but he didn’t get much time to think about it. From the village came noises that he hadn’t been expecting and as he dissolved into the undergrowth to wait for the last work detail to return, his blood turned to acid in his veins.
The children were being herded with the women towards the creek.
His heart pounded high in his chest, knowing, as they did, what was planned for them. The women cried, struggling with their last load as screaming children clung to their legs in the rain.
It was 7.30pm and night was falling.
Locklin chewed on his lip, knowing he was about to give up the best chance he had of rescuing his mates. He didn’t need to remind himself of the reason they’d been brought to East Timor. As he watched the huddled group of frightened children, it was obvious. He squatted in the underbrush and pulled his Steyr to his shoulder.
He looked down his Ninox sights and felt for the steel button on the bottom of the weapon’s trigger. He pulled the button outwards and his semi-automatic rifle switched to being fully automatic. He was now holding the equivalent of a very noisy submachine gun, but at least it would sound like the weapon they were about to us
e.
Giant stood guard over the group with his stolen Steyr, smiling while the women set their final stretchers down. The women gathered the children behind them, crying and begging for the little ones to be set free while an eight-year-old boy shouted defiantly from behind his mother’s skirt.
The three militiamen stepped abreast of each other, Skinny with an AK47, while the others fumbled with the safeties on their stolen Steyrs. Skinny was the closest and as Locklin targeted an infrared sight on Skinny’s temple, the other two stepped in line with him. In one rapid burst, Locklin realised he could drop all three of them like dominos.
He let the air out of his chest to halt his breathing and steadied his aim.
The three men pulled their weapons to their shoulders. They levelled their muzzles at the crying villagers. The rain fell heavier and the women begged for their children’s lives. A shout rang out from behind their skirts and the eight year old squeezed out and bolted for the bush.
Locklin fired and the militiamen fell dead before they could swear. He snapped the safety back on his Steyr, shouldered his weapon and bolted after the boy.
‘Hide!’ he shouted in Tetum, as he ran past the women. ‘Up there!’ And he pointed to the ridge on the far side of the creek.
He followed the boy’s muddy footprints a hundred metres, realising he was headed for the track leading down the range to the next community. And something else was already after him.
Paw prints of a medium-sized dog were imprinted over the small toes that were headed south.
Locklin lengthened his stride as he cut what he hoped would be an intercept course through forest country that was unfamiliar to him. He spotted the head of the child bobbing over the top of the long grass as he passed through a small clearing inside the forest and realised that if the boy made it to the bigger clearing at the top of the ridge, he’d be in full view of Cleverboy with the submachine gun on the seven o’clock gate. Locklin veered left, accelerated and tackled the child at the edge of the top clearing.
The boy rolled under him with the momentum and bit hard on the hand that Locklin clamped over his mouth.
‘Australian! Australian! Shhh!’ Locklin whispered hoarsely into the boy’s ear. And as the boy relaxed, a fierce set of teeth snarled less than five centimetres from his ear. A large yellow paw scratched at Locklin’s arm and another paw placed the full weight of the dog on his shoulder as it growled even closer to his cheek. It grabbed the back of Locklin’s collar, its teeth brushing his neck as it incapacitated the soldier on the ground. Locklin couldn’t roll over to fight the dog without hurting the child or leaving him vulnerable to the hungry animal. And as his mind raced, he heard another set of footsteps.
He braced himself, expecting to feel a bullet in his back.
Instead, a woman panted quietly to catch her breath as she called the dog to heel.
He rolled slowly off the boy to look around and the woman landed beside him, kissing the child who wrinkled his nose and tried to pull away. Then she kissed Locklin, smothering his hands in wet kisses before sobbing against his chest. He rolled to his feet, pulling them both with him. And as he withdrew them to the safer depths of the forest with the dog following, he realised that she had a belly full of baby. He asked her in her own dialect if she was okay, and she nodded.
But the night was dark and growing darker.
He circled the village wider than ever, using his night-vision goggles to help guide the frightened fugitives over the rough terrain. He carried them across the creek downstream and picked his way carefully back along the ridge to where he expected the others to be hiding. He passed them without realising it until he felt something tap his helmet. It was a small stone that rolled down over his shoulder and as he turned, he saw the old woman from the cooking fire signal him from a thorny thicket.
He smiled to see that the children were out of the weather now. The women had been busy, draping the thicket with large waxy leaves from a sugar palm to keep off the rain. They were all shivering, but at least they were alive.
‘Obrigado, obrigado!’ the women echoed in grateful whispers and he pushed his finger to his lips. He didn’t need their thanks, he needed their silent cooperation.
‘Any come looking?’ he asked in a language that he knew mainly in theory.
They shook their heads. ‘None come, none come, none come,’ the whispers circled.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Did you get their rifles?’
And again, their heads shook. ‘Hide,’ said one in Tetum. ‘We ran and hide.’
‘We don’t know guns,’ said another. ‘Only run.’
He nodded. They were frightened mothers, Locklin reminded himself, with frightened children to get to safety and they’d done that, despite everything they’d been through. He tried to reassure them with an awkward smile.
‘Can anyone tell time?’ he asked, finishing his sentence in English because he didn’t know the Tetum phrase. He brushed the mud off his watch and pointed to it. ‘Time?’
The boy’s mother nodded. ‘I learned some English,’ she said, touching the face of his watch. ‘I learned time in church.’
He smiled, not realising how much he’d missed hearing his native tongue in the last few hours and gave her his watch. Then he unpacked his field radio and realised he had a new problem. There was no moon, no starlight at all. His Ninox goggles compensated the heavy black by intensifying the translucent eerie greens at lower light frequencies to a level that was sufficient to recognise shapes and movement, but he only had one pair, and two people that needed them.
He took out a slim-line torch from a side pocket on the radio’s bag and fitted a red lens cap to it before taking off his goggles. He couldn’t leave them on. They would intensify the dull red light to the equivalent of a blinding flare.
By itself, the torch provided just enough glow to see the receiver and the numbers that he needed the woman to dial, without ruining their natural night vision or being too obvious to anyone who might be hunting them in the dark forest. He looked over his shoulder towards the village and realised that was a possibility.
Shorty may have heard the weapons fire. He would have been expecting a reasonable burst anyway to dispose of the women and children, but eighteen minutes had slipped by since Locklin had reduced eleven of his men to eight. Shorty would have figured on close to twenty minutes for his men to feed the giant croc and hike back up to the village which, Locklin realised, meant that if they hadn’t been missed already they soon would be.
‘It’s just like a phone,’ he said, setting up the radio, but from the look on her face she didn’t know what a phone was. ‘Wait ten minutes,’ he said pointing to his watch again. ‘Then lift this, push this, and talk into this.’
She nodded, pointing to everything. ‘Lift this, push this, talk this.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling to encourage her. ‘You say, ‘Charlie Six to Sunray’ and then tell them what happened.’
‘Charlie Six to Sunray, yes. I tell them Lock … lin,’ she said, carefully pronouncing the surname-only badge on his chest, ‘Locklin saved us.’
‘No!’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t mention me. I’m not supposed to …’ How could he explain it? ‘I’m not supposed to be here. You’ll get me in trouble. You’ll get the whole of Australia in trouble,’ he said, not really exaggerating. ‘You can tell them we’re here. Tell them we need help, but if you tell them what I did, Australia will have to leave East Timor, okay? Other countries will take over then.’
Her eyes widened in disbelief but he knew she understood. Her smile sagged to a frown. ‘You will come back for us?’
He touched her shoulder, meaning no. ‘I have to help my friends. You wait until the shooting stops. When the choppers fly over, you come down. It should be safe then.’
‘What do I tell them? They will ask who saved us.’
‘Tell them … tell them a dead man saved you,’ he said, thinking quickly.
Worry filled her eyes, but he didn�
��t have time to explain. She kissed her finger and touched it to his ear.
‘Be safe and listen to our thanks on every wind,’ she said.
He nodded and headed quickly back to the village. He crossed the creek again, eyeing the croc and giving it a wide berth as he saw that all three targets were still lying beside their weapons. They hadn’t been discovered yet.
Working quickly, he collected the weapons, removed the firing mechanisms and cast them into the water. He couldn’t use the Steyrs anymore, but then neither could anyone else and since he already had enough firepower to do the job without rattling when he ran, that was more important.
The bodies of the three militiamen were next to be taken care of. Bodies with bullets meant soldiers with guns and the last thing he needed was Shorty jumping to that conclusion.
Locklin hefted the first body over his shoulder and carried it to the water’s edge. No search party would hang around long if they couldn’t find a trace of the execution squad or its victims, not this soon after dark. They had a village to hold, and not many men to do it with. With luck they might assume the women had been taken upstream to be shot. Without luck, they’d bolt back and either fortify and make ready for attack, or shoot their hostages and make a run for the border.
He waded into the creek a few steps, past the pine-scented buffer that he’d set up earlier, and rolled the first body into knee-deep water. The splash and the fresh scent of blood immediatly attracted the predator’s attention. Before Locklin could repeat the process with the second body, the croc had performed its death roll around the corpse, dragging it into deeper water. It snapped off a few chunks to satisfy its appetite, and then disappeared with its catch to stash the fresh meat under a submerged log to rot for a few days and make it easier to pull apart later. When the croc returned to the surface, it appeared to be smiling. In the water, it could smell enough meat to last a full cycle of moons.
