Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 0730 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Sergeant Marturak walked towards his men as they appeared at the edge of the jungle. In their camouflage fatigues they were barely silhouettes, shadows on shadows. The corporal made his report quickly and pointed towards the area that had been engulfed by the fireball. He handed his sergeant a plastic bottle found by the creek. Marturak considered his corporal’s view that it had belonged to the man they were hunting. No other wreckage or objects were found in the vicinity, just two very dead men. His men. He unscrewed the top and smelled the contents. Water. He poured it onto the ground before dropping the bottle.

Marturak didn’t want to report that he was unable to perform to his general’s expectations — that the site was unsecured, that two of his soldiers were dead, and that he was in pursuit of an unknown number of survivors. He decided to abbreviate it to something more innocuous like ‘site unsecured’.

The operating procedure for this mission was that he would report within two hours of arrival, and give the go-ahead for the experts to come in, clean the area and recover the black boxes — the flight data and flight deck voice recorders. If the site was unsecured then he would have to report every subsequent twelve hours, or until the mission had been accomplished, whichever came first.

As if on cue, one of his men materialised and produced two metal cases painted a luminous orange, roughly the size of shoeboxes, marked with number sequences and letters. The aircraft’s black boxes must have been exactly where they had been told to search for them because they’d turned up quickly. One of the heavy cases was badly dented. Marturak turned it over. It didn’t appear to have been breached. He congratulated the soldier. Finding the black boxes was something good at least. Marturak told the man to guard them with his life. The soldier saluted, and retreated into the night.

Back at Maros, Marturak had scoffed at the notion that this operation might last more than a day. He had been given a maximum of three days to resolve the situation — their rations would expire then. Time was crucial on this one. That had been made very clear. He had expected to go in, quickly establish that there were no survivors, then get his men out within a few hours. How many people were likely to have survived a 747 ploughing into the hills? Answer: none. Simple, clean, easy. Marturak hawked up a gob of phlegm from deep in the back of his throat and aimed it at a frog resting on the splintered end of a tree stump. The frog jumped clear just as the spinning oyster plastered its perch.

He called his men together and laid out a plan. The troops then formed a line abreast, one hundred metres across, and began moving into the jungle. Sergeant Marturak was happy to be leaving the crash site. It smelled disgusting and it was virtually a bio-hazard zone — too much death and too many insects.

Marturak removed the night vision goggles from his pack, adjusted them to his head and switched on the power source. The NVGs turned the black, shapeless wall of jungle in front of them into clearly visible individual trees and bushes, picked out in various shades of green, the spectrum of visible light human eyes were most sensitive to. His men glowed lime as they moved out of the clearing and into the bush.