Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 2330 Zulu, Thursday, 30 April

Joe and Suryei ran through the jungle as quickly as they dared, making just enough disturbance to alert any wildlife in their path and give it time to move out of the way but, hopefully, not enough noise to telegraph their whereabouts to the murderers somewhere behind them.

‘Stop… stop,’ she said eventually, exhausted, collapsing on a rotten, moss-covered log.

Joe fell beside her, shaking. He vomited onto the ground, panting as his stomach heaved uncontrollably. This was not his world. He didn’t belong here. ‘Shit,’ he said when the convulsions stopped, a string of yellow bile hanging from his lips. ‘What are we doing? What the fuck is going on?’ His mind replayed the severing of the soldier’s fingers and the back of his throat constricted, preparing itself for the arrival of more digestive juices.

‘Come on,’ said Suryei, dragging Joe to his feet. ‘We have to keep moving.’

‘I’m okay,’ he said, knowing that he didn’t feel okay at all.

Suryei turned and stepped through a hole in a low bush and let out a scream. She disappeared down a steep mud-slide, plunging beneath the surface of a rivulet. She yelled in shock and took a mouthful of water, spluttering, choking. The water could be brackish, stagnant, and a serious danger to her health. As it slid down her throat, she realised that it was sweet. Relieved, she put her health concerns away and gulped mouthfuls.

Joe appeared at the edge of the bank, anxious until he saw Suryei come to the surface. She waved at him to join her, but quietly. Joe ditched his rucksack and axe and eased himself into the water, careful not to splash. He sank into the cool depths, feeling the water sluice through his clothes. It soothed him, took away some of the tension. He drank deeply, not caring that the water invaded his nostrils. He shook his head beneath the water, running his fingers through his hair and rubbing his face, invigorated. He then quietly surfaced, again making as little noise as possible, aware that sound would travel far in the cooler, denser air above the water. He turned and caught a glimpse of Suryei climbing up the opposite bank. Her clothes clung to her skin like wet tissue paper. Her breasts were not large but they were firm and her shirt hung suspended from her nipples. Joe stopped himself from staring, but not before Suryei caught him at it.

He climbed out of the water soundlessly and sat on the bank. Joe felt better, still numb, but at least he felt back in his body again rather than remote from it in shock.

‘You okay, Joe?’ Suryei asked.

He nodded. ‘Thanks.’

He took the empty water bottles from his rucksack. Filling one, Joe held it up to examine the contents. The water was clear and clean. He filled the other bottles, stuffed them back in his rucksack and reshouldered the load. Joe then picked his way carefully up the slippery mud, grabbing tufts of foliage to keep his balance as he went. He glanced up as Suryei looked around. He took another quick glimpse of the woman squeezing water out of her hair.

He’d half expected that she would sprain her ankle or something, and that he’d then have to carry her through the jungle. That old cliché, the helpless female. But it hadn’t taken him long to realise that she was tough and that if anyone would be doing the carrying, it would probably be Suryei.

The bush did not appear to be quite so dense here. It seemed cooler too. Enormous trees, giant columns, appeared to support the massive green roof overhead. At their base was a carpet of lime-green ferns. Families of monkeys chattered high overhead.

And then something occurred to him. ‘Hang on, Suryei,’ he said quietly. He went back to the rivulet, crossed it, and found a broken branch. He scrubbed at his footprints and at the skid Suryei had made in the bank where she’d slipped into the water, until they ceased to look man-made. He then crossed the stream and did the same to their tracks on the other side.

He considered whether they should have travelled down or upstream a distance before leaving the water, so as to throw off their pursuers. But, he reasoned, providing they were careful and left no entry or exit footprints along the bank, their pursuers wouldn’t have a clue whether they’d even been in the stream, let alone where they’d left it.

Joe wondered where they would end up. Certainly he had not the slightest idea where they were going. Neither did Suryei. They were just trying to stay ahead of the killers. Maybe they’d just step out of the jungle and into a dirty great car park with a Pizza Hut. He wondered whether he was getting delirious.

Their eyes and brains were growing accustomed to their environment now. The foliage wasn’t scratching and tearing at them quite as often. Indeed, it was much easier going in this forest of giants. That had a downside, he realised. The soldiers would also move more quickly through it, and there were significantly fewer places in which to hide. Their world had been a misery of crawling in and around thickets of greens and browns through air so dense and heavy with water that it almost seemed to physically impede their progress. And always behind them, or beside them, or in front of them, the ever-present threat of death.

Then there was the rain. They heard it before they felt it, a hammering that battered the leaves in the treetops far overhead. Eventually, the weight of the water would make the leaves sag and it would then fall through the next layer of trees and bushes and so on, until it eventually hit the spongy ground as enormous bloated gobs. There was a lot of mud too, thick molasses mud that sucked at their shoes. Joe started walking on the smaller ferns to avoid it, which kept his legs wet and covered with fiery bites from caterpillars, insects and small spiders.

The ground began to rise and with it, a new dimension of misery was brought to their efforts. The incline steepened quickly and became slick with water and their legs burned with the extra exertion. The higher ground, however, soon afforded them a view of the valley below and occasional patches of sky above, a welcome change from the dark canopy overhead.

Joe could barely remember having another life before the one he was now forced to endure. He was losing track of time. How many days, weeks, years ago since the plane crash? Was it a week ago that the cobra had helped them escape from certain capture and death? How long ago had they run into the logging camp? Joe trudged on behind Suryei as she climbed slowly, one heavy step at a time.

At first they didn’t know whether the sound was behind them or in front of them. But it was man-made, an engine, and it was getting close. Then Suryei saw it and risked giving away their location to the soldiers. ‘There,’ she yelled, pointing and looking down as it circled low and slow over the trees in the valley, banking into figure eights. It was bright purple with a yellow and red striped propeller. An ultralight. It was discovery, rescue, a hot bath. So many wonderful things flashed through Joe’s mind that he shouted for joy, like a fan at a grand final whose team has just scored the winning points.

But then the little aircraft shifted its pattern to a new part of the sky, gaining altitude, and Joe and Suryei were overcome by an enormous sense of loss. They jumped up and down and screamed, desperately waving their arms. The little aircraft gave no acknowledgement of their existence. They heard the clatter of a long burst of machine-gun fire. Suryei and Joe watched, horrified, as the ultralight flew into the dotted line of tracer reaching up from the jungle.

The pilot appeared to jump about in his seat and there was a puff of black smoke from the small rear engine. The propeller stopped and the aircraft’s wing dipped steeply. They watched it spiral one and a half times before the craft vanished silently into the trees 500 metres away. Suryei was first to start walking, continuing her way up a steep incline. She had a grim expression on her face, one that didn’t invite conversation or comfort.

Joe ignored that and caught up with her anyway. ‘That’s good,’ he said, gasping for air.

‘Yeah, right. Soldiers, ten. Suryei and Joe, zero.’

‘There’ll be more ultralights,’ said Joe, trying to convince himself that rescue was nearer.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘It had to have been from another logging camp, or maybe a bigger base camp somewhere. Maybe they were checking things out, to see what had happened to their mates.’

Suryei nodded but kept walking. Whether Joe was right or not, there was nothing else they could do.

The little plane was soon forgotten. Before long, Joe and Suryei were back in their own spaces, together but apart, heading uncertainly to an unknown destination.

They climbed on for what seemed an eternity. Just when they thought they’d put the last hill behind them, another would rise out of a valley. And then there was food, or lack of it. It had been twenty-four hours since they’d eaten anything. Coconut trees abounded but, so far, they hadn’t managed to find any coconuts on the ground. And climbing the trees was out of the question.

Suryei caught Joe picking at some fruit hanging from a low branch. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ she said. ‘They’re brightly coloured. Nature’s way of saying, “I’m poisonous”.’

Joe let the berries fall to the ground. Things were bad enough already. He didn’t want to make them worse by getting violent stomach cramps.

Lack of food was starting to slow them down, and so were the hills, again. They were getting steeper. Both Joe and Suryei now had legs of clay. Every step was an effort. Joe stopped to get his breath. The scree shifted under his feet and he slipped back a couple of metres. He bent forward and let the axe, propped on the ground, take his weight. Ants scurried over the scree looking for food. He wondered if they were as hungry as he was, and doubted it. He panted. The muscles in the front of his legs, his quads, were pulsing, twitching, like the flanks of a horse that had run a hard race. He didn’t think he could go on, but at the same time he knew he had to.

He wondered how high they’d climbed. The trail behind disappeared after a hundred metres into the dark green melange of the bush beyond. The vegetation was not as dense here at the higher altitude. Above was blue sky. The sky! Joe hadn’t seen that for a while. It had been obliterated by a continuous canopy, which had also thinned considerably.

Joe caught a movement from the corner of his eye. It was Suryei, further up the trail, standing on what appeared to be the summit, the crest of the ridge, but Joe wasn’t being fooled by that mirage again. A couple of times he thought they’d reached the top but it was only the angle of the scree lessening briefly before steepening again maddeningly. Suryei gestured urgently. Her hand movements said, ‘Haul your arse up here, quick. There’s something you should see.’ At least, he guessed that was what she meant. They hadn’t actually talked for a good few hours. Talking took too much effort, and made the climb that much harder.

Joe got his legs moving again. He was surprised they agreed to cooperate. One foot in front of the other, that’s all I ask, he assured them. Twenty or so agonising steps later, Joe pulled up beside Suryei. He was gratified to see that her chest was also heaving. She was out of breath too. He had been starting to think this girl was some kind of goddam superwoman.

Suryei said, ‘Look,’ gesturing with a slight nod of her head. Joe turned and saw, away in the distance, the massive, perfectly conical shape of a volcano. Like something from a prehistoric landscape. It was blue-grey with a fluffy white bib of cloud around the summit. Ridge lines rolled away from the base of the volcano like ripples in beach sand. He realised that they had spent several exhausting hours climbing one of those ripples and he suddenly felt small and insignificant.

The view made him forget his legs, his lungs, his stomach, and the fact that a bullet could whistle out of the bush at any minute and take the view, and everything else, away from him. And from Suryei.

‘Come on,’ said Suryei softly, breaking the spell. She turned away from the volcano and renewed the climb up the ridge’s spine.