Rogue Element

Dili, East Timor, 0515 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

SGT Wilkes and his men had spent most of the morning poring over maps and photographs of the crash site and the surrounding area. It was difficult planning for a mission that didn’t exist, but that wasn’t unheard of in the SAS. Lance Corporal Gary Ellis and Private Al Coombs were out scrounging for extras. Wilkes liked to have backups of backups. Radios that worked perfectly well inside the barracks sometimes went mysteriously dead in the bush. And, of course, a radio was useless junk without batteries. They also needed a few extra NVGs because some arsewipe had lifted some of theirs. Gear had a habit of making the rounds like that — the stuff you nicked sometimes got nicked back — and with so many troops from so many different countries in Dili making up the UN force, there was some pretty tasty gear lying around for the taking.

Scrounging was not something the SAS needed to do. They had access to equipment other regiments only dreamed about. But the feeling in the group was that pinching articles from under the noses of some of the toughest hombres in the world kept them sharp. It was also just plain good fun.

Ellis and Coombs swaggered back with a couple of bulging duffel bags.

‘Gather round, fuck-knuckles, and see what Santa brung you,’ said Coombs in his best imitation of a London barrow-boy, lowering his bag gently to the table.

He unzipped it and disgorged a whole range of booty from compact sleeping bags to radios, knives, webbing and a scoped and silenced full-automatic H&K carbine, which he began stripping down. ‘Ooh, this is nice,’ he said, squinting down the barrel’s rifling. PTE Coombs had no intention of using the new prize in the field. Interchangeability was important on the job and he wouldn’t put his life in the hands of weaponry he didn’t know inside out, and trust unreservedly. He even felt a touch guilty stealing the rifle but it served the owner right. The soldier concerned would take more care of his next one.

‘Do these work?’ asked Wilkes, picking up the radios.

‘Best of British, mate,’ said Ellis happily, ‘so probably, no,’ he joked. ‘We nicked most of this stuff from those tough-shit SBS pricks. Like candy from a baby. Hang on a sec,’ he said, after examining the radios more closely. ‘These are Kraut-made. Maybe the Poms have been a bit light-fingered themselves.’

‘They’ll be spitting fucking chips when they find them missing. Serves them right for leaving it all lying around. Well done, blokes,’ said Wilkes as he turned the radios’ switches to the standby mode and got green lights and plenty of static until he tuned them to the ETFOR base frequency.

‘Spare batteries?’ he enquired.

‘Two sets,’ said Coombs, digging around in the other duffel bag and coming up with the trophies. ‘Plus TACBEs,’ he added holding up three smaller tactical beacons, radios that sent out a constant radio signal that could be picked up by satellites and aircraft monitoring the distress frequency. The TACBEs could also be modified to broadcast low-power radio messages to aircraft circling overhead — good for keeping your whereabouts discreet. Not all of the gear had been pilfered. Most of it had come from Supply.

‘And look at all this sexy shit,’ exclaimed Coombs, pulling assorted Cordura magazine holders and chest webbing for 40 mm grenades from the duffel bags. ‘What all the best SpecWarries are wearing this autumn.’ He threw them to PTEs Chris Ferris, Smell Morgan and James Littlemore to sort and hand around. PTEs Greg Curry, Stu Beck, Kevin ‘Gibbo’ Gibson and Mac Robson mooched around the table to see what treasures they could claim.

‘I bet none of you losers have seen one of these babies before.’ Coombs pulled a small, unusual-looking machine pistol out of a thigh pocket. The weapon had a carbon fibre handle and a ceramic barrel. He removed the magazine. Polymer-cased ceramic projectiles. Real black stuff. The pistol was extremely light and appeared to contain no metal parts. A nasty little toy designed to foil X-ray machines at places like airports and embassies.

‘South African?’ enquired Curry.

Coombs nodded. ‘Where else? God knows what something like this is intended for here. Probably just some wanker’s toy.’

‘Any hairdryers?’ asked Gibson playfully. He’d recently shaved his head to get rid of a bad case of lice.

At that moment an Australian major walked into the demountable with a couple of men in nondescript uniforms — the spooks. The informal atmosphere within the room instantly dissolved, not because there was an officer present or because he had company but because the men could tell from their guests’ body language that there was news. ‘You’re going in,’ the major said as he loaded a disk into the laptop attached to a projector on the table, and turned it on. The computer booted up and the overhead light went off.

The now familiar overhead view of the remains of the 747 appeared on the wall. It was replaced quickly by a view from a similar angle of the logging camp. Both shots were slightly different to the ones Wilkes and his men had seen earlier, because they were more recent and taken at a different hour of the day. The camp had obviously been destroyed with the tents and other structures all burned.

‘We’ve just got word from Canberra. There are Indonesian troops — we think it’s our Kopassus friends — in the jungle. And they’re hunting for crash survivors,’ said one of the spooks. An electricity filled the room. Wilkes’s Warriors exchanged glances. Not much shocked them any more, but this news was beyond even their experience.

A new satellite image flashed up on the wall. A number of bright green dots floated on the darker green chaos of the vegetation. ‘Precisely which of these dots are Kopassus and which are our survivors is uncertain, although we do have a point of view. Initial reports suggested around twenty unfriendlies, plus two survivors. Unfortunately, we can only locate twenty contacts in total, rather than twenty-two. That could mean any number of things, including the worst — that our survivors have already been eliminated. However, the deployment of these forces would suggest something different.’

Another image was projected on top of the previous slide. ‘Now, if we superimpose a topographical map over the satellite view, the picture gets clearer.’

‘An ambush,’ said Wilkes.

‘Classic,’ nodded the spook. ‘The way the Indon soldiers are deployed makes their intentions obvious. That leaves two separate pairs of contacts away from the main group.’ He circled them with a laser pencil. ‘One of those sets is our pair of survivors. Obviously we can’t be sure which is which but this pair here appears to be static,’ he said pointing to the contacts at the base of the image. ‘They could well be in hiding, which could explain their lack of movement. This couple up here appears to be on the move. One interpretation is that they could be forward scouts.’

The major stepped in. ‘As has been said, we can’t be sure which set of contacts are the survivors. These photos are less than half an hour old. The satellite we have on this is taking shots of the area at every pass, so we’ll hopefully be able to freshen the intel at least once before you go in.

‘These two people have lived through a plane crash and survived three days in the jungle. You’re tasked to get to them before the Indons do, and bring them out.’

‘Just two questions, Major,’ Wilkes said after considering the presentation. ‘Dili’s a good 500 nautical miles from there. If we load now, and I assume we’ll be in Black Hawks flying nap of the earth for most of it, we’ll be pushing shit uphill to get there within four, but more likely six, hours from now.

‘And with an educated guess about the kind of terrain they’re in, I’d say these contacts here, the ones on the move, are only a few hours walk away from strolling into the known Kopassus placements indicated here.’ Wilkes stuck his finger into the projected light, turning it into a pointer. ‘You suspect these moving dots are also Kopassus troops. What if you’re wrong? What if they’re our survivors? Unless we’re certain, we might get put down in completely the wrong place to do any good. So, question one — how do we get there before it’s too late? And second question, sir, what are the ROEs here?’

‘The rules of engagement are straightforward, Sarge. Go in, get our people out and don’t take no for an answer.’

Wilkes nodded. This could be a tough one to pull off and he didn’t want his hands tied with any niceties. ‘Okay, so we’re not sure which of these other contacts are our survivors, but we do know what this large group is and what they’re up to.’ He indicated the ambush placements. ‘My suggestion is we take them out first — the large group — and then sort through who’s friend or foe amongst the rest.’

‘Fair enough,’ agreed the major. ‘The mission details are your call, Sarge.’ The men in the SAS, even the lowest private, were selected on a number of criteria, not the least being resourcefulness and intelligence. They were all bloody tough bastards too. They knew what they were doing and they now knew what had to be done. It was not the major’s job to tell them how to do theirs.

‘Your assessment of the time constraints is spot-on. Fast transport is the primary issue. We’re working on it with some help from the Americans. RV at Dili heliport within the next twenty minutes.

‘What medical expertise you got here, Wilkes?’

‘Trooper Beck has done all the battlefield courses and knows a thing or two about tropical diseases,’ said Wilkes, tipping his head in Stu Beck’s direction. Beck raised his finger in acknowledgement.

‘Well then, I suggest you go over to the hospital, Beck. I know you don’t have nearly enough time but talk with the doctors about the kind of condition you’re likely to find these survivors in. They’ve been through hell and they’re not going to be in a good way.’ The major’s eyes flicked around the room and found it question-free. ‘Okay then, if we’re all done, good luck. This is an important one, you blokes.’

‘We’ll need a passenger manifest of QF-1 so that we can identify the survivors,’ said Wilkes.

‘Of course,’ said the major.

‘Also, we don’t have any native speakers amongst us.’

‘Yeah, not ideal, but then if our intelligence is accurate, I don’t suppose you’ll be doing too much negotiating, Sarge.’

Wilkes frowned. The major’s comment was ill informed. When going into a foreign, and most likely hostile, land it made good practical sense to be able to speak the language, in this instance, Bahasa — Indonesian.

The major sensed Wilkes’s disquiet. ‘You’ve gotten by okay here on East Timor, haven’t you?’

The more Wilkes listened to this major, the less he was impressed with him. Language hadn’t been a big issue on East Timor because multilingual forces surrounded them. In the middle of Sulawesi, they’d be well and truly on their own. But there was nothing Wilkes could do about it, and obviously nothing the major could help with either. Wilkes let it go.

There was something else far darker niggling at the sergeant. ‘Major, do we know why the Indons shot the aircraft down?’

‘We’re kind of hoping you’ll be able to answer that one for us once you’ve been out there. Have you got everything you need?’

‘Pretty much, sir.’

‘So I see,’ said the major with a hint of a smile, surveying the collection of goods on the table in the centre of the room before stepping out into another stinking hot day in East Timor.