Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 2136 Zulu, Thursday, 30 April

Joe and Suryei awoke in the darkness. They were stiff and sore and barely able to move. They had climbed for most of the previous day, continuing into the twilight. Joe had started to worry that they might walk straight off a cliff; there were plenty of them around. In the dying twilight, they had found an overhang surrounded by rocks. They needed sleep. Going further without it was impossible. They were both frightened that they’d wake up blinking into a gun barrel again, or worse, not wake up at all. Exhaustion had got the better of them so they’d climbed into the hollow, covered themselves with ferns and relied on the camouflage for protection.

Both Joe and Suryei came awake warily, expecting the worst. They stayed motionless, listening to the sounds of the pre-morning, trying to sense if danger was near, but their ears still rang from the explosions of the day before.

When they were satisfied that they were alone, Joe and Suryei drank some water, and began the day’s climb. It was mercifully short. They trudged wearily to the top of the ridge on cold, stiff legs and aching feet. Suryei stopped in her tracks and put her arm across to stop Joe taking another step. The smell made Suryei retch. Kerosene. It was now irrevocably mixed with the dreadful stench of burning flesh. Horrific shapes formed in her mind — black, contorted, ghastly.

Joe pondered whether they had tracked a giant circle through the jungle and ended back at the crash site, but the area didn’t seem at all familiar. It was no longer wet and hot, but damp and cool. He wondered how high they’d climbed — perhaps a few thousand feet. Goose-bumps made the hair on his forearms bristle. He pinched a few leeches off his chest and blood oozed freely from the bites. He’d become casual about them, and wondered while he squashed them how the buggers had managed to get there. The direction of the air shifted slightly and the stench of kerosene strengthened.

Joe and Suryei held their breath and tried to concentrate on the sounds of the jungle. They could hear nothing out of the ordinary. They warily picked their way through the smashed tree branches littering the jungle floor. Something had torn them from the canopy overhead.

The kerosene smell thickened with every step. There was a clearing ahead. Something black and grey sat amongst fallen branches and tangled vines. The object was totally out of context and it was difficult to place. But then it clicked and Joe knew what it was.

‘Jesus, Suryei,’ he whispered, ‘one of our engines.’ They approached it slowly, cautiously. They were not comfortable stepping onto the open ground. It made them easy targets.

They edged towards the twisted metal turbine. The smell made Suryei cringe. Joe walked around it, examining it. He stuck his head in the tail pipe for a closer look. The metal was shredded like the end of an exploding cigar. He ran his fingers across one of the torn edges of metal and quickly drew his hand away, blood oozing from a sliced finger. ‘Shit! When am I going to stop doing that?!’ He clenched his finger and rich, red blood flowed from the cut. He nursed his hand before continuing the inspection.

Joe recalled the intense fireball on the end of the 747’s wing. At the time, he hadn’t been sure what it was. Now the significance of it struck him immediately: the outboard engine. ‘It must have dropped off the wing. Maybe this is what caused us to crash. See how the back of this pipe is splayed out? Looks like something blew up inside it.’

Suryei’s curiosity overcame her fear and she moved closer. She put her head inside the tail pipe next to Joe’s. Neither Joe nor Suryei had the experience to know how much of the damage had been caused by the impact with the earth, or by something else.

The sun still hadn’t come up and there was only a dim twilight. Some stencilled writing on an engine part drew Suryei’s attention. ‘Why would a Rolls-Royce engine have the words “secure here” inscribed in Indonesian on a part?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think it would,’ said Joe.

‘Then how would you explain this?’ She pointed to a section of tube that appeared fused to the internals of the turbine. Everything was coated with a film of dirty oil and it was difficult to tell where one part stopped and another began, but the writing was clear enough. ‘What does that say?’ asked Joe again.

‘It’s Indonesian. It says, “secure here”.’

Joe wiped away the film of carbon and oil with the flat of his hand. The section of tube with the writing on it was painted olive drab and had embedded itself in the engine’s tail pipe. Something began to trouble him. There were bits and pieces, fragments that made up a picture, swirling in his mind, trying to take shape. He was standing too close to it, like seeing the dots but not the whole. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Joe took a mental step backwards. And then he collapsed, sitting heavily on his backside as if a chair had been whipped unexpectedly from under him.

‘Oh, shit!’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a missile!’

‘What?’ asked Suryei. ‘What did you say?’

Joe didn’t answer. He was sorting things out. He stared at the ground between his feet, his head between bloody, oily hands.

‘Why in God’s name would someone shoot down a passenger plane?’ said Suryei. ‘Joe?’

‘What?’ he asked, lost in his own world. It’s a missile! The Internet connection in the plane. The Indonesian general… Is it possible?

‘Joe, do you hear me?’ she asked.

Joe had frozen, his muscles locked up solid. He didn’t even appear to be breathing.

‘Joe! What’s going on here? Are you okay?’

Could this really be happening? Am I responsible for this? So many people?

‘Suryei… I…’ Joe looked up, horror in his eyes. ‘I think I know what happened.’ His voice was hoarse, constricted. ‘It was… me…’

‘What? What are you saying?’ Suryei sat in front of him, lifting up his head so that she could see his face.

‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘The whole fucking thing.’

‘What? The plane crash?’

‘Yeah. All those people…’

Joe tried to take his mind back to the early hours of Wednesday morning, before the crash, but that wasn’t easy. That world didn’t seem real any more. His existence had become a brutal here-and-now, a life and death struggle that obscured the recent past, making it seem almost as if it was someone else’s.

He closed his eyes. He remembered glancing at the video screen at his elbow. The news… a villager was pulling something out of a well… A town somewhere in West Papua. The memory of it gradually came back stronger, clearer. The man wore a dirty cloth tied around his nose and mouth. A desiccated, ancient woman stood off to one side, tears tracking down the dust on her face. Sobbing children were clutched to their parents in a separate group. Joe recalled pulling the plug from his DVD and jacking into the aircraft’s entertainment system to hear what the story was about.

‘… the separatist violence continues in West Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, in a virtual repeat of East Timor,’ reported the BBC correspondent. ‘In this village, resistance was pointless. The male population was hunted down by local militia, some were hacked to pieces, then thrown down the village well. Some of the younger males were held down and had their teeth pulled by rusty pliers. This woman’s four year old great grandson was just one of the victims, the boy torn from her arms by men she had once called friends from the neighbouring village, who then kicked her for resisting. Their gruesome job done, the marauders melted back into the jungle…’ The vision cut to a high-ranking Indonesian soldier shaking his head. ‘The TNI denies any involvement. More Indonesian troops are due to arrive next week in an effort Jakarta says will help stabilise…’

Joe was surprised by the detail that came back, as if he was watching himself viewing the incident on the video back in first-class. Like all Australians, he’d seen plenty of images of the suffering of the East Timorese, the former twenty-fifth province of Indonesia. He had thought himself immune to them but there was something vividly pathetic about the old lady, standing by the well’s edge, waiting for the body of the little boy to be retrieved. Joe had been deeply affected by it.

Joe hadn’t believed for one moment the Indonesian army’s assertion that they were ignorant of the carnage. He’d heard it all before. The general in the news piece had shiny, sweaty skin, wore old-fashioned Elvis-style sunglasses, and his uniform was so tight that the fabric at his shirt’s buttonholes was scalloping with the strain. Joe took an instant dislike to the man. He wanted to strike a blow, even just a small one, for the old lady and her dead child.

‘I was watching the news in the plane,’ he said, almost whispering. ‘There was a report of a mass grave in West Papua. One of the victims… a four year old child in a well. I wanted to get even, make someone pay. So I hacked into an Indonesian general’s computer, copied a few files and left a virus. Nothing serious.’

‘And for that, you think they shot the plane down?’

Joe didn’t answer.

Suryei analysed what he was saying, chewing her lip. Civilian jets weren’t blown out of the sky as a regular occurrence. Something had prompted the military into an act of desperation. Something terrible. ‘What sort of virus?’

‘Pretty childish, really.’

‘And you think they traced you back to the plane?’ she asked incredulously.

‘No. Too many different networks, switches. And I decoy my own computer’s IP broadcast.’ He thought about that. It used to be impossible to trace a break-in, but he’d been out of hacking for a couple of years now, lost touch. Things move fast. Maybe… Joe felt an enormous weight settle on him. Guilt.

‘I thought you did computer games.’

‘I do. Now. But I used to do a bit of industrial spying. Nothing too serious… perfume formulas, carbon fibre applications, that sort of thing.’ Joe sat slumped, round-shouldered.

‘Do you remember what files you copied?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you must have taken something pretty bloody important.’ Suryei’s mind raced. Even then, would they shoot down a 747 full of innocent people to protect it? ‘Think, Joe. Can you remember anything about the files? What the hell did you see? What did you take?’

Joe again forced his mind back to the recent past. He had checked the protocols available from the aircraft and noted that WASP was on tap, the new Wireless Application Satellite Protocol that allowed wireless Internet access anywhere under a satellite footprint. He’d opened up his browser, found the phone directory for Jakarta, and noted the forty different numbers for the TNI. They appeared to be grouped in five distinct number series. He had had his computer ring all the numbers. Within a few minutes he knew which were old analogue and which were newer, digital phone numbers. Joe’s computer then called the digital numbers, adding and subtracting extra digits either side of the original phone numbers until his system noted the familiar return signal of a file server.

Joe easily cracked the server’s low security files. He remembered noting with satisfaction that the four digits of the carpark space reserved for the Indonesian general also matched his internal office phone extension. Recurring patterns of numbers were good news for hackers. It meant that whoever set the system up was careless. The time he’d spent hunting around inside the server amounted to a handful of minutes. He certainly hadn’t loitered.

To an observer on the plane, it would have appeared that Joe was merely tapping away at computer keys, perhaps writing a letter. But Joe’s mind saw it differently. He didn’t see the keyboard at all. He became melded with the computer’s hard-drive, sucked into another dimension that blotted reality from his mind. This was a black, light-less world where he existed as pure thought. There were objects in the blackness that appeared only semi-visible, mere shapes shrouded in black velvet. These objects were program spurs. To find them, Joe had to feel around until he sensed the shapes as ripples in the void. Joe had quickly discovered what he was looking for — the sophisticated, secure software program that ran the Indonesian army’s computer network.

Fortunately, the system was a good three years out of date. That kind of time frame was an eternity in the world of software design. But while the operating system was old, it was incredibly complex. He remembered thinking that he had no desire to spend the rest of the flight carefully picking the matrix apart. He’d been after something familiar. Sometimes companies low on funds would augment their old enterprise software with something relatively cheap and off the shelf, just to keep the system more or less current.

But while Joe had been inside the general’s computer disturbing the regular flow of electrons, the system’s Watchdog had picked up his ‘scent’ and it had padded off unseen, backtracking to the origin of the call barking its silent alarm.

And then Joe found what he was after; the ubiquitous operating system he knew like an old friend. It was running the Indonesian army’s internal mail. He thanked the declining value of Indonesia’s currency for the country’s willingness to cut corners, and hitched a ride on an internal memo. An instant later, Joe found himself on the general’s hard-drive, the place he’d gone looking for.

He remembered being confused by what he found because he couldn’t speak or read any Indonesian, and so couldn’t understand the unfamiliar language strings. He’d moved through the space, shouldering the unfamiliar words and sentences aside. That’s when he’d seen the safe. Not a real safe, of course, but a virtual one. It had immediately captured his interest. A safe meant secrets. So the general had files he wanted to keep off the army’s tailored operating system, for extra privacy and security?

This was what hacking was all about, Joe remembered thinking at the time. Secrets were extremely tempting, even now when he was no longer hacking. There was something sexy about revealing them. He’d examined the box, walked around it in the black room. In the real world, it would have been made of hardened tool steel. Indeed, even in the virtual world it had appeared formidable, unbreakable, impregnable. But to someone like Joe, the safe might as well have been carved from balsa. He’d tapped out a coded sequence, the equivalent of a virtual shaped charge, lit the fuse and stood back. The ensuing explosion peeled the door from its hinges.

Inside the vault, Joe had hoped to find more than the general’s Christmas shopping list, but he’d not been able to make sense of any of it. Disappointed, he nevertheless thought what the hell and burned the lot onto a beer mat anyway.

Joe seemed to wake from a trance. ‘There were a few papers.’

‘Is that all?’ asked Suryei.

‘The general had made an attempt to keep them hidden. But, now I think about it, there was something weird.’

Joe stood and walked slowly about the small clearing, piecing the fragments of the memories together, shoulders hunched, drawn into himself. ‘There was something… I didn’t think much about it at the time. Australia was part of a map…’

‘A map?’

‘Yeah, it’s odd.’

‘Why? How?’

‘The names of all the countries. I remember now because those names were the only words I could understand. They were written in English. Except Australia. It was called something-or-other Irian Jaya.’

‘Okay,’ said Suryei, standing up, hands on hips, facing him. ‘Can you remember what that something-or-other was?’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Try harder.’ The blood had drained from her face.

Joe ignored her impatience. ‘There was another word that prefixed Irian Jaya. Like Salute, or Salami…’

Suryei’s face felt cold yet hot at the same time. The tips of her ears burned. Could it possibly be…? No way. The Indonesians would never conceive… It was too outrageous. Yet, they had been in a Qantas 747 that had been blown out of the sky. And now they were being hunted by Indonesian troops. Maybe it wasn’t too far-fetched at all and Joe had actually found something incredible, something so big that perhaps a plane-load of people had to die to prevent it being brought to the world’s attention. ‘Joe, think hard now. Was the word possibly… Selatan?’

Joe tried to visualise the map. ‘Yes,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I think that was it. Yeah, Selatan Irian Jaya. Why, what does that mean?’

Christ, thought Suryei, her stomach twisting. This was something she didn’t want to make a mistake about. ‘The word Irian means “high” in Indonesian. Jaya means “victory”. And Selatan means “southern”. Selatan Irian Jaya — Southern High Victory. Whose computer did you hack into?’

‘A general. A bloke called Soo-ang.’

‘You mean Suluang. He’s the Mr Big of the TNI.’ At that moment, Suryei saw it all clearly and a painful anxiety gripped her chest. She sat heavily on the ground, just as Joe had earlier. ‘I think what you might have found was part of an invasion plan.’

‘What…?!’

‘It seems bizarre, but the facts fit — the plane, the missile, the soldiers trying to kill us. The Indonesians trying to keep some sort of invasion of Australia secret. Something like that is big enough to make sense of everything.’ Suryei stared at the ground at her feet, in shock.

‘That’s why there’s been no rescue. I’ll bet the Australian authorities don’t even know where the plane is,’ Suryei said.

‘Then we’re fucked,’ said Joe quietly.

‘Is it possible they — the soldiers — know they’re chasing the person who uncovered the plan?’

‘I don’t know how they could.’

‘But if they did, it would make them pretty damned determined to put a bullet in you… us.’

Joe paced nervously and started towards the trees. ‘Come on. Let’s get moving. We can’t stay here.’

‘Hang on a sec. What are we going to do? We need some sort of plan here,’ she said to his back.

He stopped. ‘You’re right. We can’t go much further this way.’ Joe looked up at the escarpment towering above them.

‘I think we should head back to the aeroplane,’ she said.

‘Sure. And let’s put big red targets on our chests for those nice men in khaki.’

‘We’re not getting anywhere wandering around in circles,’ said Suryei, allowing his sarcasm to pass over her.

‘Aside from whether going back to the plane’s a good idea or not, I don’t know where we are, or where the plane is in relation to us. So how do you propose we find it?’

‘I don’t know, but we have to try. When rescue comes, it’ll go there, not out here. And there are plenty of places we can hide close by the wreckage until it does.’

When rescue comes… Joe also wanted desperately to believe in rescue. Someone had to come and pluck them from this nightmare. It was the one thought keeping him going, except for the ever-present threat of a bullet between the eyes if they didn’t. Perhaps a search was underway right now, only looking in the wrong area. That happened sometimes, didn’t it? Okay, so Suryei was right. Again. They needed to get back to the plane. That in itself was troubling: not that Suryei always seemed to have the answers, but because if their only option was so obvious, the soldiers would probably come to the same conclusion about their likely movements. Joe looked around. He had no idea in which direction the plane lay. Somehow they had to get their bearings.

Joe imagined what it must smell like back at the 747 with all the bodies bloating in the tropical heat. The memory of that awful smell found its way back into his nostrils and it took all his will not to gag on it.