Rogue Element

Denpasar, Bali, 0600 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Working at the control tower at Denpasar Airport, Bali, was no different from working in the control tower of practically any airport in the world. It wasn’t as busy as LAX, Narita, Schiphol or Heathrow, and it certainly wasn’t as good on your resumé as any of those other world-class facilities. But Denpasar had other advantages, especially when Japan was in the grip of winter, Abe Niko reminded himself.

Niko enjoyed sending tropical island paradise-style postcards home to Tokyo, just to annoy his friends grinding it out in the freezing rat race there. They all thought he was so fortunate to be living in such a place. And they were right. There’d been the bombings, of course, and that had changed things for a while, but life had returned to normal, especially with the European and Asian tourist trade. People had such short memories.

Through the week he didn’t get to see much of the Bali he had fallen in love with as a tourist years before, but he knew it was there, spread out below his tower, and that made all the difference. Of course, Denpasar itself was hardly a paradise. It had to be one of the noisiest, dustiest, hottest and, he had to admit it, ugliest cities he’d ever seen. And that’s why he lived far away from it, in the centre of Bali, where the grit gave way to the green of lush jungle, and a thousand feet of altitude took the edge off the heat and humidity.

Niko threaded his Honda Accord through a thicket of two-stroke motor scooters that meandered across the road, blowing blue smoke, ignoring the painted lanes. When he’d first arrived in Bali, he’d thought the traffic a living example of chaos theory. Very few road rules appeared to be obeyed, which offended his sense of order. Once a traffic controller, always a traffic controller, he had joked to himself.

But then, as he became used to it, he realised the rules of the road were sensed, as if by some form of telepathy. Riders on motor scooters seemed to know when a vehicle was approaching around a blind turn and would pull back onto the correct side of the road at the last moment. To survive, one just had to be in tune with it. Until one could do that confidently, driving in Bali was a dice with death.

Abe Niko made his way to the outskirts of the city, through the prawn farms and furniture factories, and only started to unwind when he turned his car off the main road and began the climb. The people up in the hills were more relaxed than the city dwellers. They had a calmness, a serenity about them, that was lacking in the population in Denpasar. They were more in touch with Balinese traditions and culture, embracing their animist beliefs. And it wasn’t just a show put on for tourists either.

Niko was a romantic about Bali and its people, but when it came to his job, he was rigorous, rational and pragmatic. He sat in front of a screen and directed international air traffic, handing aircraft from his chunk of sky to the next controller’s chunk of sky. That was his job. It was routine work in a sector that was rarely busy, and not exactly taxing if one had a systematic mind. And Abe Niko had such a mind. It was because of this that he was troubled. He really had no idea what was going on. Niko had immediately reviewed the disks from his control board after he had called the authorities. The seven-four was at Flight Level 350 (35 000 feet), and then it was gone. Blink, then nothing. QF-1 had vanished from his screen without warning, no radio calls — complete silence — in a way that suggested the worst.

Immediately, however, the police had confiscated his disks, the ones that recorded the information collected by the traffic control system displayed on his screen. That was bad. But what had really got under his skin was a news report that made him sound like he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In his view QF-1 had probably been blown out of the sky. Terror. Yet what the authorities were saying — and quoting him, apparently — was that QF1 had suffered some kind of cataclysmic system failure and that it had probably come down outside Indonesian airspace. That was stupid. The Qantas plane would turn up pasted against a mountain in Sulawesi like a bug against a car radiator grille and everyone would look like amateurs. Especially him. Why would they say such rubbish? And who were ‘they’ anyhow? The more he thought about it, the more worked up he became. What possible motive would anyone have for trying to conceal a plane crash? Or delaying the discovery of the wreckage?

He turned off the main road and started to descend through the palms, tamarind and mango trees along the track that led to his home. Niko was tired. He wanted to get home, have a shower and go to bed. He’d sleep first and then call a friend of his who worked in the newsroom of a major TV station in Jakarta. The nameless authorities had gotten it totally wrong. Worse, they’d gotten it wrong in his name! Just thinking about it made him angry. And edgy. Maybe I shouldn’t wait, he thought, and decided he’d phone his TV friend as soon as he arrived home, to set the record straight. Sometimes these second-world countries did and said the dumbest things, but what on earth was the motive for this stupidity? The question kept repeating itself in his head. And then, suddenly, he knew. The answer was obvious. The plane had been shot down. He wouldn’t wait to get home, he’d make that call now.

Niko fumbled with his mobile phone, turning it on as he rounded a corner. An army truck blocked the road. He saw it too late, swerved and braked hard, locking up the wheels on the slick mud surface. The car slid and spun, almost in slow motion, but nothing Niko could do prevented it from slipping off the road’s soft edges and down the steep gully. The Honda gathered speed slowly at first, then accelerated as it fell through the trees. A front wheel hit a large stone, caving in the front suspension. The car rolled, then flipped. The front doors were flung open, the mounting centrifugal forces ripping them off their hinges.

Niko was still conscious when the car came to rest upside down in the creek that ran rapidly through the gully at the base of the hill. He’d had the wind crushed out of him but his air-bag had saved his life. It started to deflate and he felt less restricted, but his leg was jammed somewhere under the dashboard. He tried to free it, but couldn’t. Upside down, the blood rushed to his head and the pressure built. His eyes felt like they were being squeezed out of their sockets. He saw his phone. It was sitting on a bit of plastic under the passenger glove box. He tried to reach it, but it was just beyond his fingertips.

Water filled the upturned roof space below his head. He heard it first, then felt the cold wetness on his scalp. He tried to lift his head up towards the dashboard trapping his knees, but his stomach muscles gave out. He yelled for help, screamed for it, as the water gurgled relentlessly into his mouth, making him cough and hack. Silence. The water was nearly up to his eyes, which were bulging with panic.

Somewhere there was the hiss of steam as water ran over hot engine parts. He managed to get his mouth out of the water for one last desperate plea for help. Exhausted, the water invaded his nostrils. He gagged, spluttered. Niko registered that the hissing sound had changed pitch now that his ears were under the surface. The water was malevolent, a force with an almost conscious determination to kill. He struggled again, hopelessly, to free his legs.

Abe Niko’s head was under water for a good two minutes before he stopped thrashing, his brain forcing him to inhale. The water was cooling as it flowed into his seared lungs and the air traffic controller felt happily light-headed. He wondered why he hadn’t sensed the truck’s presence around the corner. He slipped into a black blanket of unconsciousness, all fight removed by a calming euphoria. Within another minute, he was dead.

A starter motor for a large diesel whirred and the engine caught. The army truck ground its gears and slowly moved off.