Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 0915 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Suryei took the lead. Joe felt a bit uneasy about that. He thought it should have been him out front probing the tunnel, but Suryei just forged ahead and he was too exhausted to argue.

He’d managed to squeeze out a few more details from the woman, but they’d been given grudgingly. She lived in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, and she’d had some previous jungle experience. That was as far as he’d managed to get before meeting a wall of silence.

The going was slow but at least they were making progress. The tunnel walls guided them but it would have been nice to know where. They could be going around in circles for all they knew. It was getting darker by the minute. Occasionally he ran in to Suryei’s backside and she once accidentally kicked him in the face. He sucked in his lip. It was swollen and split.

His back was now cramped from being doubled over and the skin on his hands was sliced by vegetation impossible to avoid on the tunnel floor. Joe didn’t complain. He’d heard Suryei gasp in pain quite a few times, stop briefly, and then continue, but she wasn’t whining either. Joe imagined her squeezing away the pain of another cut, wincing quietly while she sandwiched her hand under an armpit. She was a cool customer. But for her, Joe knew he’d already be dead.

Joe’s watch didn’t lie. They hadn’t been in the tunnel long but it seemed like a lifetime. They’d briefly talked about leaving the security of the tunnel and striking off into the jungle, but his enthusiasm for this had been one-sided.

‘Why?’ Suryei asked. ‘Neither of us has a compass. There are no landmarks to navigate by. We can’t see any stars because of the cloud. The moon’s not up yet. And we can’t move nearly as freely through the undergrowth, as you’ve already discovered. And believe it or not, this tunnel is probably the safest way to get around. As I said earlier, it’s like a freeway. The other, smaller animals know that too. They stay away.’

The question on Joe’s lips slipped out before he could stop it. ‘So what do we do then?’ he whispered between short, hoarse breaths. He heard her stop just in time to avoid burying his head in her rear yet again.

‘Jesus, how would I know? I’m just going in the opposite direction to the people with guns.’ Joe was worried that they were being herded, and Suryei had just confirmed it.

‘Look,’ he whispered, sucking in wet oxygen. ‘You said earlier you didn’t really know where this was taking us. We could be heading back to the plane for all we know. We could just crawl right into those bastards.’ In the almost complete darkness he could make out her shape, head bent, slumped against the side wall of the tunnel. But she was listening, so he continued. ‘Also, just a guess, but I’d say those soldiers are pretty relaxed in the bush.’ Joe took a breath. He felt like he was about to wade into deep, freezing water. ‘I know this sounds crazy, but I once reviewed a computer game called Nam. The only way to evade the bad guys was to stay off the trails and yet here we are, heading down jungle main street.’

Silence.

Joe pressed on. Suryei was at least listening, keeping an open mind, even if he was talking about tactics featured in a computer game. ‘If you stuck to the trails you’d always lose because there’d be ambushes and booby traps set by the enemy. The point was the enemy expected you to take the easy route, the trails. The only way to win was to stay off them and move through the untracked jungle.’

There was an unexpected pause. Joe wasn’t sure whether she was about to laugh at him or just leave him behind. Her eventual response took him by surprise. ‘Okay, I accept that,’ she said quietly, intensely. ‘So what do you think we should do?’

Joe thought, the now almost complete darkness hiding his insecurity. ‘We should have something to eat and drink.’ He rummaged through the rucksack and fetched out the trays of aeroplane food and two bottles of water. His fingers told him there were only three full bottles left amongst the empties. He thought he had six full bottles altogether. Have I dropped one somewhere? He hoped he’d made a mistake counting them in the first place. Joe handed her a tray and one of the bottles. ‘And I don’t know about you, but the other thing I need is sleep. I haven’t slept in over thirty-six hours. Just an hour will do — I don’t usually sleep much anyway.’ He took a bite out of a stale ham and cheese sandwich with the crust cut off. ‘Ugh,’ he said, ‘economy!’

‘Sure, no problem. We can just find a nice hotel. I’d like a swim and room service,’ she suggested sarcastically through a mouthful of sandwich.

Joe knew it sounded stupid. They were being hunted like animals and his big idea was to have a snooze. But the reality was that they were both physically and mentally exhausted.

‘I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I’m not thinking about anything other than putting one hand in front of the other here. If we’ve got any chance of getting out of this alive, we’ll need our wits about us. Simple as that.’ Joe’s conviction that he was right grew with every word. Sleep wasn’t a luxury, it was mandatory.

Suryei surprised him. ‘Okay, but only if you let me choose the hotel.’

‘Fine,’ he whispered. ‘After you.’ Then he paused while his tired mind ordered his thoughts. ‘Suryei, any idea what sort of people we’re up against?’

‘Not really. All I know is what I learned when I was in East Timor.’

‘What, taking wildlife shots?’

‘No, back then I was doing hard news, covering the Indonesian military’s handover after the elections in ’99,’ she said quietly. The tunnel reached a small clearing in the bush. She poked her head out tentatively and looked around. There was plenty of chirping from crickets and frogs — a good sign. She felt Joe bump into her. Again.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered. Suryei crawled out of the tunnel and stood in the small clearing, stretching, massaging the cramp out of the small of her back with her hands. Joe stood beside her quietly and did the same. They both then crouched, making themselves as small as possible.

‘You said you were in East Timor,’ Joe said after a minute of silence. ‘Was it as terrible as the papers reported?’

‘Worse.’

‘I never really understood why. I mean, the place was a thorn in Indonesia’s side from the beginning, wasn’t it? Surely they’d have been pleased to be jack of it?’

Suryei was reluctant to talk. She wanted to save her breath, use it to get away from these people as fast as she could. But at the same time, talking helped them both imagine they were some place a long way from their current nightmare. ‘Back home in Australia, the media went on about how giving up East Timor offended the pride of the TNI, the Indonesian army. That was often suggested as the reason behind the army’s willingness to engage in violence and intimidation, and for arming and inciting the militias to do the same.’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

Suryei was remembering now too, and vividly. ‘The real motive for the death and destruction in East Timor was financial. There are 200 000 soldiers on the TNI’s books but Indonesia can’t afford that. They pay the soldiers a pittance. So the men are encouraged to augment what little the government pays them.’

‘Shoot people in the morning, then sell oranges and lemons to the survivors in the afternoon?’ Joe said.

‘If you’re not going to take this seriously then —’

‘Sorry. But that’s exactly what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

Suryei waved her hand dismissively in the darkness. ‘I guess so, if you want to be flippant about it. In the light of that, what happened in East Timor made perfect sense. The army was entrenched in the economy of East Timor, from the bottom up and the top down. There was no way the TNI was ever going to happily turn its back and walk away from the businesses it had built up there over the previous twenty-five years. Once Indonesia lost control of East Timor — in other words, once the army gave up control of the economy of East Timor — all the hard work put in since the invasion in 1975 was for nothing.’

‘Jesus, no wonder it got so nasty.’

‘The TNI ends up controlling everything. And they drive tanks, so very few local communities argue,’ Suryei said, summarising.

‘Sounds like a hell of a recipe for graft and corruption. Are they good soldiers despite all that?’

Suryei put her hand on Joe’s arm and squeezed gently. He stopped talking. The night creatures had suddenly fallen silent. Joe and Suryei listened hard, trying to discern the reason for the sudden stillness. Then, just as mysteriously, the night chorus chirped up again. After a while, Joe prompted, ‘The Indonesian soldiers?’

‘It depends who you ask, and on the unit you’re referring to, and, for that matter, on what the government has sent them to do,’ said Suryei. ‘But, as individuals, there are good soldiers and bad ones, just as there are good people and bad people everywhere and in every walk of life.’

Suryei paused. ‘There are some pretty awful things going on in Indonesia — Ambon, Aceh, Kalimantan and West Papua. We don’t hear about a lot of it in Australia.’

‘Why not, do you think?’

‘Your average Australian isn’t interested, for one thing, and for another, Canberra is reluctant to piss Jakarta off. I reckon the relationship between our two countries is shakier than they let on.’

Suryei suddenly felt nervous and vulnerable standing out in the open having a chat. Perhaps it was the subject matter. ‘Come on. If we’re going to get some rest, we’d better get moving. There are still a few hours left before the moon comes up and I think we should be hunkered down before it does.’

‘Why is that?’ asked Joe.

‘I met a lot of different troops in East Timor, on both sides. The best — and worst — of the Indonesians were their Special Forces troops, the Kopassus. They’re better trained and equipped than the average Indonesian foot-slogger. Meaner too. They do a lot of the real dirty work. If it is Kopassus out here, they might be carrying night vision goggles to help them see in the dark. When the moon comes out, it’ll be like daylight for them but still pretty difficult for us to see. That’ll give them a big advantage.’

Suryei threaded her way carefully across the clearing, staying low.

‘Where did you pick up all this stuff?’ asked Joe, genuinely impressed by the woman’s general knowledge, particularly about military things.

‘When I was in Dili, I had a friend. I met a soldier, a New Zealander.’

‘Oh, what did he do?’ Joe enquired, picking up on the subtle inflection on the word ‘friend’ that implied something more.

‘Who said it was a he?’ replied Suryei, distracted by the task of deciding which path through the jungle would provide the easiest passage. She quietly parted some fronds of a fleshy plant and slithered through the opening, staying low. Halfway through she stopped and quietly whispered behind her, ‘Shh. Enough talk. Keep your eyes and ears open.’

The tunnel appeared to begin again on the other side of the clearing. Suryei’s ghostly outline ignored it. She had decided to play the Nam way, disappearing into the wall of jungle.

It had taken Sergeant Marturak and his men at least fifteen minutes to advance in stealth to the creek. He had rarely seen such thick jungle. The current had carried the two soldiers gently downstream, scraping them occasionally along the bottom of the creek bed. They were not pretty corpses. His men quickly buried them under cairns of smooth black river stones.

The fact that two of his soldiers had perished in this way made Marturak angry. He wondered how the creek had been set alight. Was it an accident brought about by their own stupidity, or was there some kind of booby trap? Whoever it was had been close to his men when the explosion had killed them — the discarded empty water bottle proved that. Sergeant Marturak had not the slightest doubt that he would catch and kill the perpetrator, but who and what was he up against here? He found the entrance to a tunnel in the bush and sent two men into it.

The jungle was not an ideal environment for the NVGs. They worked best when there was some open space with large areas of contrast against which the distinctive shape of a human could be painted. In the thick bush, there were just too many confusing planes and shapes of green, and these often began inches from the lens of the goggles. Also, the NVGs cut peripheral vision down to a paltry twenty percent. It was like peering through a long black tunnel.

Sergeant Marturak swung his head slowly left and right. He couldn’t see any of his men despite the fact that they were close, only five to seven metres on either side of him. He saw numerous pairs of astonishingly large, round eyes flashing bright green in the fork of a tree — tarsiers, small primates. He removed the goggles and fed them into a pouch off his webbing. The things were more trouble than they were worth. He concluded that he would be unlikely to catch his quarry at night unless he was lucky and they (yes, maybe it was a they) were stupid.

It was difficult to find anything in the complete darkness. Joe wondered what his hands must look like. They felt greasy, slick from the blood oozing from countless cuts. The pain almost didn’t bother him any more. He was tired, a fog insulating his brain. They felt through the darkness with their hands, stopping every couple of metres to listen.

Unfortunately, noise was all around them. There were monkeys — he assumed they were monkeys — chattering high in the trees, coughs and snarls from the kind of animals that sounded as if they might like eating meat, and once there was the sound of something very large and heavy brushing aside the undergrowth. Suryei froze.

‘Snake,’ she said. That was a good reason to freeze in Joe’s mind too. He wasn’t phobic about them but they weren’t exactly his best friends either.

Suryei whispered behind him, ‘This place is crawling with them.’

‘Don’t you mean slithering?’ Joe said quietly to himself, suddenly very careful about where he put his feet and hands.

After about half an hour of inching through the dense growth they stopped in a small clearing. ‘I think this will do us,’ said Suryei. ‘Bed.’

Joe manoeuvred himself beside her and he reached out in front of him, into the darkness. The pain of the barb that immediately stabbed into his open palm made him cry out. ‘Shit!’

‘Careful,’ said Suryei softly, and too late. It was impossible to see it in the darkness, but the bush Suryei was suggesting they sleep under seemed to be nature’s answer to razor wire. It was tough and vine-like, with plenty of thick foliage, and lethal two-centimetre spikes protruding in every direction. The vine also bore some kind of bulb or fruit, and the spikes were obviously employed to protect it.

‘I am not a bloody swami, Suryei. This is a bloody pincushion.’ Joe stretched his hand into the dark again, more carefully this time. He isolated one of the barbs. It was a weapon, the kind of flora you gave a wide berth, not snuggled into. He’d been hoping for a pile of soft leaves at best, or maybe a fork in a tree at worst.

‘We need protection and this bush will provide it. Have you seen those little fish that swim between sea urchin spines?’ she asked condescendingly. ‘Well, think like a little fish.’

He wondered how the hell they were going to get on the other side of those barbs without being skewered.

‘Give me your shirt,’ said Suryei. Joe was too tired to say anything smart about her request. He just did as he was asked. He could dimly see her wrap it around her hands, grab a section of the vine and lift it up. ‘Come on,’ she said impatiently. Joe wriggled under the mass of vine Suryei was hoisting. Once inside, he had to agree it made sense. No light whatsoever made it into the centre of the bush, and as there was no fruit on the inside, there wasn’t a requirement to protect anything, which meant fewer thorns.

Once inside, Joe put his shirt back on and curled up on the leaf litter. It was dry and soft and there weren’t too many mosquitoes. All in all, a good idea. He vaguely heard Suryei say, ‘You’ve got an hour, then it’s my turn,’ through the plunge into merciful sleep.