Rogue Element

Maros, Sulawesi, 0350 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

The young woman manoeuvred her tricycle through the narrow street. It was difficult to see over the top of the oven perched on the front wheels, stuffed with ears of corn. She had to lean out far to one side to see. She moved from one side of the trike to the other, hanging out like a sailor on a trapeze, tapping at the horn continuously to warn the dogs that slept dangerously close to the edge of the road, or to someone ahead on another bike, that she was closing in on them from behind.

It was practically midday and she was very late, not that she had a boss she had to check in with. But the world she lived in had a good ten hours head start, frantically trying to keep its head above the poverty line. People were slicing fruit, carrying bricks, hacking open coconuts, selling, hawking, scrabbling, feeding children or pigs, mending clothes, making clothes, firing bricks and roof tiles, planting rice, fertilising, tilling, serving, sharpening, sweeping, living and dying — all by the roadside. Indonesia was the busiest, most industrious country on earth. It had to be, thought the young woman. Everyone had a job, except for the very young, the very old or the enfeebled. In fact, most people had two or three jobs, just to keep themselves clothed and fed. And they all helped each other, supported each other, and in a way that neighbours back home rarely did. There was a fellowship here, a genuine community. There had to be something going for Maros, because it certainly wasn’t the town itself. It was hot, dusty, noisy and smelly. One would have to have been born here to love it, she thought. She still found it hard to believe that such a shithole could produce such a friendly people.

The young woman arrived at her usual spot and parked the trike. She dismounted and hurriedly set up her stall, tearing husks from the ears and placing the corn in the portable oven. She noted that a competitor a little further back down the road, Sekrit, had already sold about a third of his load. She waved to him. Half those sales should have been hers, she thought angrily.

And then she laughed. What did she care, really? She wasn’t in the hot corn business. She was so deep under cover that sometimes she forgot who she was, and what she was doing. There were some soldiers from the base meandering down the road on foot. She held up her corn, kernels burned black by the oven’s heat, and shouted her singsong sales pitch at them. Her corn was the freshest. Her corn was the tastiest. Her corn was the cheapest. None of which was true but that hardly seemed important. Everyone exaggerated; it was part of the pitch.

There were more soldiers than usual on the road, and some of them seemed edgy, in a hurry. She tried to engage a soldier in conversation, but all she got was a terse, barked reply for her to hurry and to stop chattering like a monkey.

A-6, as her employers in Canberra knew her, was the perfect spy. Her skin said Indonesian, but her heart was Australian. Despite frantic attempts to remedy the situation, Australia didn’t have enough HUMINT — spies — in Indonesia, certainly not enough to provide reliable intelligence on a nation that stretched across some 17 000 islands and embraced more than 219 million people. Most of the assets it did manage to have on the ground had a similar profile to A-6.

She didn’t stand out. In many respects, she was unimpressive, being of average height and weight. She was neither ugly nor particularly attractive. She spoke Indonesian like a local. She also had a deep love of her adopted country, Australia, and an equally deep sadness for what she believed Indonesia had become. A-6 wrapped another ear in newsprint and handed it to the soldier, who rudely flicked a note at her.

A truck ground to a halt in front of her stall, blowing a cloud of road grit into her face. A couple of soldiers jumped down from the cabin. They were the Kopassus, the elite. She’d been wary of these men from the start. They were haughty, dangerous.

She knew one of them well. He put his face close to her so that she could smell his sour breath and demanded half a dozen cobs in that sneering way of his. She smiled helpfully, trying hard not to let her resentment or her fear show, and handed him the corn. He didn’t pay; he never did. He just turned and swaggered back to the truck.

She cast her mind back to their first meeting. It had been at night and she had heard screams coming from an alley. She went to investigate and came upon a young woman lying naked on the ground, a Kopassus soldier holding her face in the mud as he rammed into her. A-6 started yelling at the man to get off. Another soldier came out of the shadows and grabbed her arm. A knife was under her throat. She felt the sharp edge against her skin and smelled the oil on the blade. She looked down and saw that his pants were undone and his fly was open. He’d either had his turn, or was about to have it.

The soldier with the knife recognised her as the woman who sold corn in front of the barracks. He forced her against a wall, grabbed a handful of hair and hacked away at it with his knife, pulling out whole handfuls of it by the roots. He did it smiling through her pleadings and then her screams.

He said it was fortunate for the woman under his corporal that the ‘corn cob girl’, as he called her, had happened along. They didn’t have to kill her now, he said, waving the dagger at the woman on the ground, because each was a hostage for the other. A-6 suddenly realised that he was right. If she managed to find a sympathetic policeman prepared to investigate, someone who wasn’t afraid of the army — and that was unlikely, she reminded herself — then the soldier would kill the woman in the mud, thereby disposing of the evidence. And if the victim complained, then she, the corn cob girl, would be killed. More than likely, in either event they’d both end up dead. Ripping out her hair was merely underlining the assertion that he meant what he said. But her intervention had been stupid because she’d ceased to be anonymous. But what could she have done, she admonished herself, ignored what was going on?

A-6 remembered that particular soldier, the sergeant with smallpox scars covering his round face. Her hair grew back but her fear of him remained. She learned from other soldiers that his name was Marturak, Sergeant Marturak. She called him ‘Sergeant Melon’ after the large, evil-smelling durian that had similarly rough skin. Every morning Sergeant Melon took corn from her stall, often taunting and jeering at her about her plain, unattractive appearance.

Indonesia seemed full of men like Sergeant Melon, men who had achieved power and used it as an excuse to threaten and bully others. She was sure, however, that her father, a colonel in the Indonesian army, had not been like this pig. He had commanded an artillery regiment. A-6 often talked to her mother about him. He had been a highly decorated soldier who had fought the Japanese during the war, and the Dutch imperialists after it. He was not a politician or a warmonger, he just believed in Indonesia, strong and independent.

Then things started to go wrong. The Communists in the army were getting bolder. The Soviets were filling the military’s armoury with hardware and its head with idealistic rubbish. The army divided into factions. Her father was asked to join both and he declined both, which made him the friend of neither.

One night when her father was sleeping at the barracks, they came for him. No one knew whether it was the Communists or the Nationalists but a lot of men died that night when the old government was removed with bullets and knives.

Her mother had scooped her up from her cot and ‘friendlies’ had smuggled them to Singapore. From there they went to Australia and applied for refugee status. The colonel had been highly regarded by senior Australian army officers. That helped them win their refugee status and A-6 spent the next sixteen years of her life growing into a proud Australian woman.

And then one day, a young man, a total stranger, approached her. He showed her ghastly photographs of her father snapped after they had finished with him. The man asked her whether she wanted to avenge her father’s death. Looking back on it, the whole episode had been unconvincing. Nevertheless, she’d fallen for it. Now, she couldn’t even be sure the photos had been genuine. They could easily have been faked. They could also have been real and the man being tortured could have been anyone. But she had been vulnerable. She’d heard many stories about her father, how much he’d loved her when she was a baby. A-6 even believed that she remembered him as a large and friendly shadow in the most distant reaches of her memory. She had said to the man that she wanted time to think but she already knew that the answer was yes.

She spent the next three months learning basic spycraft, self-defence, and how to pass herself off as a poor Indonesian. That was two years ago.

At first A-6 enjoyed the cloak and dagger stuff. It was easy being a spy in the new millennium. All she had to do was call in detailed reports of troop deployments in and around Hasanuddin AFB. For this she was given a satellite phone. The techies back home were a bit concerned about that at first. The handset was nothing special. It looked just like any old Nokia. The dish, however, was more obtrusive, even though it was small, about the size of a small dinner plate. A woman with an old mobile wasn’t in the least unusual, but a satellite phone? It turned out not to be an issue. Satellite TV was everywhere in Sulawesi, or throughout Maros at least. It was cheap, easy entertainment. It was almost unusual not to have it and a dish sat on even the poorest roof.

The phone could be used as a normal mobile but to use it as a satellite phone, she had to key in a ten-digit code. The handset then scrambled her voice into a random binary code and transmitted it on a scattered frequency to a military communications satellite. It was important that her calls could not be intercepted, unscrambled or traced without considerable effort. It was just prudent to be out of sight when she phoned in her reports. No big deal, she’d thought, although finding privacy in Maros was difficult.

Her run-in with Sergeant Melon demonstrated how serious and dangerous espionage was. And the current amicable relationship between Australia and Indonesia could turn ugly in a heartbeat, as it had often enough in the past. If she was caught when things were tense, there was the likelihood that she would be taken away and shot, unless there was political mileage to be gained by parading her through the courts. And then they’d shoot her.

A-6 wondered what it would be like to be a normal woman again, going to parties, the beach, nightclubs. It would be nice to dance, meet boys and have a normal life. The danger was all getting a bit too close now, especially given the continued contact with Sergeant Melon.

A-6 gave herself another six months. After that, she would review her situation. But in the meantime, something unusual was definitely going on in town. She heard the choppers before she saw them: two large Super Pumas came in low and lifted the tiles off several roofs, flinging them into the narrow, dank lanes. They cruised unhurriedly overhead at barely a walking pace. A-6 put a hand over her nose and mouth to protect her lungs from the dust picked up by the powerful downwash of the rotor blades, and squinted up at the aircraft through the stinging cones of sandblast. She was just in time to see that the helo was full of Kopassus soldiers before Sergeant Melon pushed the door shut. The aircraft then accelerated quickly into a climb.

The thump of the Super Pumas faded to a distant beat before A-6 started up her trike. Something of interest was happening somewhere if two Super Pumas full of Indonesia’s crack soldiers were hurriedly being airlifted to… where? She would try to find out, but didn’t like her chances. The Kopassus weren’t the most talkative people and asking direct questions could prove unhealthy.