Rogue Element

Exmouth Gulf, 0455 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

The Joint US-Australian Facility at Exmouth Gulf in the far north of Australia received the transmission from A-6. The report from the asset was brief and processed by one of the US Air Force Security Services Signals Intelligence personnel.

The report read: ‘A-6 Stat. 39. 29040440/29040453/TM VS-K UN/S 20–30 H2 B360 ENQ/D U.’ It came off the printer and the corporal looked at it blankly. The sequence was decoded, but it still might as well have been Latin for the Sig Op had no ‘need to know’, therefore the significance of the string of numbers and letters was opaque to him.

It had to be one of the most boring jobs in the world, he told himself. Right up there with working on an assembly line, sticking widgets in boxes all day long. From morning till night he looked at shit that meant nothing to him. Then, at the end of the day, he went home to fuck-all nothing out here in the desert. No bitches except for really ugly ones, but at least there was plenty of beer to improve their looks. Lots of flies, though. Sticky motherfuckers that wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The corporal took another look at the sequence on his screen. The one thing he did know was that Stat. 39 meant Station 39, or ‘somewhere in Indonesia’. Another godforsaken shithole, no doubt, he told himself.

So much for ‘join the air force and see the world’. If he was outside, he would have spat.

He sent on the slip — the coded sequence — via sealed hardline intranet to NSA, Hawaii, and copied the information to the local intelligence services as per the standard operational bullshit.