Rogue Element

Dili, East Timor, 0530 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

The Mobile Assault Group, hauling heavy packs on bent backs, made its way across the Dili heliport apron towards the Black Hawk. There was a deceptively large space inside the chopper, but there wasn’t much of it left once the ten men and their gear were stowed and secured.

SGT Wilkes found a position of relative comfort against the forward bulkhead, pack at his feet. The floor of the Black Hawk was bare alloy, and no matter how comfortable he was now, Wilkes knew the bones in his butt would soon ache against the unforgiving surface. But it was a minor discomfort. He was far more concerned about the job at hand.

There had been fuck-all planning on this op. Usually, every detail within reason would be thought through and shit still happened often enough even then. Shit happening looked likely on this one from beginning to end.

Lack of knowledge was the biggest killer in the field and a severe lack of it was gnawing away at the pit of his stomach. He felt like doing a nervous crap but couldn’t. Black Hawks were lacking in passenger comforts. Questions swam around in his brain that he knew he’d get no answers to. He didn’t even know how they were going to get into the middle of Indonesia in time, let alone get out in one piece. The whole business was one big shitty question mark.

He jacked into the helo’s intercom and tipped his forefinger to his brow in a casual salute at the LM securing the Black Hawk’s human cargo. The LM checked Wilkes’s seat-belt, no more than webbing fastened into the floor of the aircraft, and then went on to secure the next trooper. When the soldiers and their kit were secured, the LM indicated as much to the two pilots on the flight deck, and the pitch on the rotor blades changed, carving deep into the air. The Black Hawk lifted positively, climbing rapidly, nose low. The helo banked as it climbed and turned through a steep 180-degree arc. Wilkes felt his cheeks being sucked down and his arms grow heavy with the gs.

As the helo gained altitude, Wilkes forced his mind to focus on the immediate issues. He scanned his men, receiving grins from most. But there was tension in the hot, cramped confines of the Black Hawk. Not the usual tension before a mission, the sort of fear checked by an innate belief in their training and ability. The atmosphere here was one of uncertainty, coupled with a sense of being up against it — time, stupid odds, and a situation that seemed, to put it bluntly, plainly fucking bizarre.

A voice in the headphones pierced Wilkes’s concentration. ‘Hey, Sarge. Lieutenant Harvey. I’ve been your taxi before. Up in the hills? I medivacked you and your mate after that firefight back in ’99. How’s your shoulder?’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Wilkes, recalling the pilot’s face as he turned around and waved. ‘Never got to thank you.’

‘No wukkas.’

‘Well, thanks anyway,’ said Wilkes, dialling his brain back to the skirmish with the militia.

‘What about the other bloke?’

‘He lived.’

‘Looked pretty bad.’

‘Bad enough.’ Wilkes changed the subject. ‘So what you doing back here?’

‘Exchange program with the States. Six months into it my Yank squadron got seconded to UN duty and here I am, back where I started.’

‘Groundhog Day,’ said Wilkes.

‘You know it, girlfriend,’ said the Royal Australian Army lieutenant in his best white trash American accent. ‘Only there’s probably some American lying in my bed back home screwing my missus, while I’m up here chewing dirt.’

Wilkes laughed.

‘Nice to see you guys back to your old tricks. Ever landed on an aircraft carrier?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, today’s your lucky day.’ The lieutenant didn’t bother asking specifically what mischief these SAS boys were up to because he knew it was none of his business, and trying to make it so would get him nowhere.

‘What’s the flight time, ace?’

‘There’s a touch of headwind so, providing that’s constant, I give us twenty-five minutes airtime.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sweet. Just sit back and enjoy the kind of service our competitors shoot at us for.’

Wilkes smiled and let his mind wander.

On a mission, the rigid formalities and observances of rank dissolved. They were just men doing a job, a job that could get them killed. On this kind of sortie, the SAS carried no rank or indication of nationality. They were going in to a foreign country, one considered friendly, yet they would very likely leave a number of dead Indonesians behind them. In the event of capture, all hell would break loose. It would be highly embarrassing for both countries. Australia would cut them adrift. What they were about to do never happened. It was a hazard of the job — not all jobs he’d done as a member of the SAS, but definitely a hazard of this one.

Wilkes reflected on that, and the new information just passed to him through his phones from the flight deck. The Americans were involved. An aircraft carrier, for Christ’s sake! Somehow the Yanks were going to get them into the middle of Indonesia in double-quick time. That kind of joint operation was rare, especially when the op had been put together on the fly as this one obviously was. So the S70 A9 Black Hawk wouldn’t be making the insertion. He wondered what would.

The sergeant closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the bulkhead and he tried to separate the known from the speculation. Indonesia had shot down a Qantas 747 and denied doing it. Why? It made sense to lie about something so heinous. They had then sent in Special Forces troops to kill any survivors. Again, why? That fitted with something they wanted to keep hidden.

Australia was sending in a MAG to protect the survivors and get them out. Nothing odd there — they were probably Australian citizens. But if this was such an important mission, as it undoubtedly was, why not send in a Special Recovery Squadron? Because sending in a full thirty-man SRS would require three times the logistics and it would be unlikely they’d manage that with any stealth. Wilkes had to admit to himself again that he didn’t know much at all. He also had to admit that he was intrigued, but no less nervous. The MAG was going in armed to the teeth and ready to wreak serious havoc. They knew they were outnumbered almost two to one by the Indon forces, but they did have surprise on their side.

Being SAS, the men were permitted to take in weapons of their own personal choice. The US-made M4 was popular, a development of the 5.65 mm M16 A2 carbine, with 14.5 inch barrel and collapsible stock. The M4 was ideal for engaging multiple targets. It had low recoil, making it easier to keep the gun pointing in the right direction, and it was also very light, feeling more like a toy. Yet at three hundred metres and in the hands of a skilled shooter, the M4 was a devastating weapon. Excellent ergonomics also made it simple and reliable in the field, and hard to fuck up in a high-stress situation.

The M203 was a separate weapon slung under the M4. It hurled a grenade, which looked like a miniature artillery shell, up to four hundred metres. It was a useful weapon in open territory but Wilkes thought it was of questionable value in a jungle environment, where branches and other foliage could easily deflect the grenade’s trajectory with possibly disastrous results. Also, once fired, the grenade required a minimum distance before it would arm itself and it was unlikely that the jungle would provide the open air necessary. It packed a powerful punch, though, and, who knows, might come in handy anyway. Most of the men favoured the HE 463 round. It was smokeless and trackless and so didn’t give away the firer’s position. Troopers with 203s had at least a dozen of these rounds.

Wilkes preferred the 5.56 mm Minimi light machine gun. He’d had the barrel shortened, and a silencer fitted. The weapon still made a healthy racket but the silencer eliminated muzzle flash, reducing the chance of giving his position away in a firefight. PTE Mac Robson also carried the Minimi, and with the same improvements. The Minimi could fire up to sixteen rounds per second from an underslung box containing two hundred rounds, so it was the ideal weapon when covering fire was needed. And if the weapon ran out of ammo, the M4 magazine slotted right in. If the Minimi did have an Achilles heel, it was the ammo box. It was not as easy to replace in the heat of battle as an M4’s magazine. Wilkes’s insurance policy covering him against being caught between magazines was a butt-ugly, sawn-off pump-action Remington loaded with heavy #4 buckshot. Extra cartridges were held on the outside of the weapon with clips. It looked like it had been run up in the garage, probably because it was, but it comforted Wilkes enormously to have the weapon along for the ride. Wilkes carried the Minimi and had the shotgun strapped to the outside of his pack, so that it could be readily reached and deployed.

Robson snatched at a fly that had been caught in the dead air of the cockpit. He opened his hand in front of PTE Gibson’s face. Empty. He’d missed.

‘Wanker,’ said Gibson, shouting over the helo’s massive whirling blades and punching Robson solidly in the arm.

Wilkes smiled. At thirty, Gibbo was the grandfather of the section. A former secondary school maths teacher at a tough western Sydney state school, Gibbo had attended a presentation given by the Australian Defence Forces during Vocation Week. He’d sat through the presentation open-mouthed at the opportunities in the forces presented by the army lieutenant. Barely halfway through the one-hour presentation, Gibbo had been convinced. The lecture broke for lunch and Gibbo went AWOL from the school, taking a bus to the city to enlist. The love affair with the regular army hadn’t lasted long, though. The life of a regular army trooper was dull between exercises. He wanted to be training full-time. That’s when Special Forces caught his eye. Gibbo failed at his first attempt, the rigorous and difficult selection processes for the SAS taking him by surprise. But he’d succeeded at his second.

Gibson laid his M4 on the deck briefly and adjusted the pistol on his hip. It was his backup weapon — the same one they all carried — the H&K USP, the 9 mm self-loading pistol commonly in use in the Australian army.

Wilkes looked around, trying to read the state of his men. Morgan had his head back, resting against the bulkhead. It moved slightly as the helo rode the air currents. He appeared relaxed. In the crook of his arm was the H&K MP5SD, a 9 mm sub-machine gun, silenced, of course; the expelling rounds made no more noise than a baby farting. On his chest webbing were four M26A1 defensive hand grenades and four M34 ‘Willie Pete’ incendiary/fragmentation hand grenades. The M26A1 had been in service with the US forces since the Korean War. The body was of thin sheet metal lined with a prefragmented spirally wound steel coil, and filled with 155 gm of composition B. On detonation, the M26A1 created a casualty zone with a radius of fifteen metres. A blunt instrument, but effective.

PTE Morgan could toss a grenade fifty metres and land it in a garbage can. He’d won lots of beers from dubious visitors on the firing range with that trick. The point was, he was damn accurate, and with a weapon like a Willie Pete grenade, you needed to be because it had been known to kill quite a few of the good guys. It was filled with white phosphorus that burned at 2700 degrees Celsius, on contact with air, for around sixty seconds. The phosphorus particles were scattered over an area of around thirty-five metres. Get that stuff on you and it burned clear through to China.

Between them, the group also packed a dozen claymore mines, very common, nasty and cheap-to-buy little devices that held ball bearings encased in PE. The claymore was designed to fire its load of ball bearings in a specific direction so that its killing zone could be tightly controlled. It was the ideal sentry to place in a narrow defile or track you knew the enemy would take. The mine could be triggered remotely or by trip wire. And it was easy to deploy. One face of the casing instructed matter-of-factly, ‘This side to enemy’.

For communications, the MAG was equipped with two Raven 11A HF sets, the extra one for backup. Ellis had one, Morgan the other. TACBEs, three carried for the sake of redundancy, had made the trip. More communications were always better than less. The Raven 11A, a development of the original and much-vaunted Raven, had a theoretical range of 200 nautical miles with 120 metres of aerial deployed, and was also capable of sending and receiving secure, scrambled short-burst transmissions. Two satellite phones were also carried, one as backup, with receiving equipment for image viewing. Two sets of backup batteries were carried for each.

The helo had quickly reached a cruising altitude of around 5000 feet. Wilkes peered out at the green water flecked with whitecaps below. A movement caught his eye. It was PTE Littlemore, fiddling with his patrol radio, the type that allowed each man to stay in contact with the rest of the section. He was slapping the receiver in the palm of one hand, then checking the connections. Whatever the problem, it seemed to have been fixed. The trooper repositioned the tiny boom mike in front of his mouth, adjusted the earpiece then, satisfied, moved on to his pack, checking the tightness of the straps. Littlemore was a fiddler. Always checking and rechecking. Like all the men, Littlemore wore thick camouflage paint on his face, which, in his case, only served to highlight the shock of carrotcoloured hair on his head. Red hair also sprouted profusely from the top of the t-shirt at his neck.

Water had been scarce and they were thirsty. Joe and Suryei made their way cautiously into a gully, listening for suspicious sounds. They scooped handfuls of the cold, clear water into their mouths and then Joe quietly filled the bottles. A small yellow frog drifted across the surface of the slow-moving pool, stroking for the far side. Just as it reached the bank, a slender, bright green viper darted from the grass and snatched it up. The frog’s legs quivered either side of the snake’s jaws briefly and then were still. The reptile briefly held its prize above the water, as if in triumph, then carried it into the tall grass where it quickly disappeared.

Another movement in the grass caught Joe’s eye — a large black scorpion stinging a beetle into submission with the wicked-looking barb on its tail. It occurred to Joe that he was witnessing metaphors for their own situation. Waiting somewhere were their killers — determined, ruthless and committed. That they’d managed to avoid their fate was nothing short of a miracle. He wondered whether he should share this pleasant thought with Suryei and instantly decided against it. Suryei’s determination, her will to survive, had been their defence against the soldiers. Best not to undermine it, he thought. Something large pushed aside the bush on the far bank. Whatever it was it was making its way to the creek. Suryei placed her hand on Joe’s shoulder and they slid back silently from the water’s edge on their bellies into the thick of the jungle.

Wilkes shifted his weight against his pack — something was digging into his ribs and his butt was already sore. The insertion flight was always the worst aspect of any op, the helo flight out the best. His stomach rumbled. There’d been no time to grab something from the mess. He wondered what had been stuffed into the ‘ratpacks’, their primary food source for the duration. Ratpacks — ration packs — had been developed by nutritionists to provide all the calories and essential vitamins required to keep a soldier out in the field killing for twenty-four hours. They weren’t exactly gourmet, but they weren’t bad either, containing precooked meals, chilli powder, salt, pepper, Vegemite, peanut butter, cheese, crackers, coffee, tea, condensed milk, sweet biscuits, sugar and chocolate. They had each taken enough ratpacks for a two-day insertion. Wilkes added a satchel of coriander powder to his kit to enliven the flavour of the precooked meals.

Like all SAS soldiers, Wilkes and his men were more than capable of living off the land, especially the jungle, which Wilkes thought of as part kitchen, part garden shed. There was food literally growing on trees, as well as underground in the form of roots and tubers. There were also plenty of animals that could be eaten — mammals and reptiles. That was the kitchen part. A veritable smorgasbord of berries and fruits that looked edible but were, in fact, lethal was the garden shed part. But while Wilkes and his men could all live indefinitely on the food nature provided around them, it was a hell of a lot easier to just rip into a ratpack. Foraging for food could take hours and significantly reduce their effectiveness as a fighting force.

Each man also carried a light sleeping bag, mosquito netting, groundsheet and silk hammock, which could be strung between trees to provide a comfortable resting place no matter what the angle of the ground, as well as keeping the trooper out of range of the ants, scorpions and other biting nasties. The groundsheet was thrown over the top to keep the rain off. And the mossie net’s use was obvious. In the morning, the whole lot could be packed away leaving no trace of their presence.

Finally, the soldiers each had a survival kit that included a map of the area printed on fine silk fabric that could also be used as a water filter, a needle and thread, water purification tablets, a flint and steel with which to start a fire, a length of fishing line and a hook that could be used both to catch fish and as a snare for capturing small animals, a basic first aid kit complete with bandages, disinfectant powder, antibiotics, liquid sutures, a scalpel, gauze, codeine tablets, lock-ties and three one-shot ampoules of morphine with hypodermic syringe built in.

Floppy hat, Kevlar helmet, camouflage face paint, trenching tool, a dagger, and a machete to hack away the dense foliage once their cover was blown, when stealth and secrecy were no longer on their side, completed the approximately eighty-five kilogram pack each man was lugging into the jungle. It was like hauling a full-grown man on your back. It could have been worse, thought Wilkes, if they’d expected the operation to last a week rather than a couple of days. Once they arrived and had scouted the surrounding terrain, they would cache most of this gear, returning as needed for ammunition, spare comms, batteries and rations, carrying only what was needed to keep them as light and as mobile as possible.

Wilkes looked at the nine men jammed in around him: Ellis, Coombs, Littlemore, Beck, Curry, Robson, Gibbo, Morgan and Ferris. They seemed okay — almost comfortable — but the risks they were about to face were enormous. Wilkes reflected on his own mortality. If death came to him, well, no fucking worries, mate. He was by no means a fatalist, nor did he have a death wish, but you could hardly be a member of the SAS and not be at least a little ambivalent about your own life and death. If you bought it, tough shit. Sure, there were people who would miss him and cry at his passing and he felt a pang of sorrow for them but, for himself, this was the only way to live.

He’d done a lot of very dangerous shit over the years: served in Bougainville advising the Papua New Guinea regulars fighting the guerrillas; he’d been inserted into the Congo with US Marine Recon to eradicate the organised gangs of gorilla poachers; he’d helped rescue a couple of CIA men who’d been captured and held to ransom in Bosnia; he’d been dropped into Kosovo scouting for targets for the UN pilots. And, of course, East Timor. He’d missed Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran — he was a jungle expert.

Each job had had its own unique brace of problems. With this one, the big question was how they were going to penetrate Indonesian airspace and get to their RV, a ridge behind the two contacts Wilkes had assumed were the friendlies on the infrared photos, without stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble — and in time. Perhaps the Americans would have the answer. They had some pretty specialised gear for this sort of thing.

The Sea King helo from the USS Kitty Hawk appeared out of the haze at the appointed time. Lieutenant Harvey followed standard procedure for approaching a US Navy Battle Group and did not transmit his call sign or intentions to the American helo. The Black Hawk was expected. Harvey merely lined up behind the Sea King and followed abeam of its slipstream. The Sea King banked to starboard and altered its heading forty-five degrees. A large guided missile destroyer drifted by beneath them while the enormous grey-blue bulk of the carrier loomed out of the haze-obscured horizon.

The Kitty Hawk grew as they approached the fantail and Harvey saw the deck as an F-14 Tomcat pilot on short finals would. Although it was four and a half acres of black non-skid steel, it appeared as small as a domino, a minute target to hit with a fighter jet weighing four tons screaming earthwards in a controlled crash at 280 kilometres an hour.

Fighter ops on the carrier were in full swing. The deck bristled with F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18E Super Hornets. One of the Super Hornets was waiting on the catapult for launch. The Sea King held its station, hovering three hundred metres abeam the port side of the carrier. Harvey did the same astern of the US navy helo. The F/A-18E squatted down briefly on its undercarriage as it started to move. A river of steam exhausted from the side of the ship as the cat shot the jet down the absurdly short runway. The catapult flicked the fighter off the end of the threshold and the jet lurched away to port staggering, struggling for height, twin turbofans grinding out 40 000 pounds of thrust in full afterburner.

A paddle-wielding ‘yellow shirt’ on the deck of the carrier waved the Black Hawk and its escort towards the forward deck. Fighter operations were suspended briefly while the two choppers manoeuvred for landing, rotors whirring, over American sovereign territory suspended in the milky Arafura Sea.

The smell of AV-TUR, rubber and hot grease filled Wilkes’s nostrils and cleared his sinuses. It was a heady brew, the smell of hard, high-powered military muscle. Perfume. He breathed it in deep as he loosened his floor safety strap. He grabbed his pack and shuffled to the door on his arse. Once outside, he glanced back through the Plexiglass side window and got a thumb’s-up salute from Harvey. The Black Hawk had kept its revs up. This was to be a quick letdown. Once his troops were offloaded, the helo rose from the deck. No fuel stop. Wilkes made a quick mental calculation and concluded that the Black Hawk would probably get its tanks filled mid-air on the flight back to Dili.

The Sea King’s rotors drooped with their own weight as they spun down. When stationary, the rotors would be folded back. A small vehicle had already tethered to the front of the helo in preparation for the short haul to one of the massive elevators that would take it below decks.

‘Captain Chuck McBride, US Marine Recon. You must be Sergeant Wilkes,’ shouted the tall black man over jet noise as he walked briskly up to the Australians.

The marine towered over him. Wilkes saluted and the officer returned it crisply, strong white teeth showing in a smile of genuine warmth. He wondered how the officer knew which one of the ten foreign soldiers that spilled from the American Black Hawk was Sergeant Wilkes, given that none of the SAS wore any badges of rank. He forgot about it and continued to gawk about like a dazed schoolkid at the activity on the carrier deck.

‘Follow me, Sarge, and I’ll get you out of harm’s way.’ The captain and two other marines in lightweight aviation overalls herded the Australians towards the looming shadow of the carrier’s control island. Wilkes was happy to follow. He was aware that the deck of an aircraft carrier was the most dangerous workplace in the world, with any number of objects that could kill a man — from jet blasts to thick, grease-covered arrestor cables that slithered across the surface.

A shriek with a completely different tone filled the air as two US Marine AV-8B Harrier 11s, Jump Jets, rocketed down the dead side of the carrier’s traffic pattern and lined up two nautical miles abeam of the fantail for landing. Gary Ellis caught Wilkes’s eye as they watched the spectacle and gave a soft whistle. This was impressive shit they were watching, a well-oiled machine.

The AV-8s came in slow and didn’t bother ‘trapping’, picking up one of the four heavy cables strung across the deck that brought jets like the Tomcat from 130 knots to zero in a neck-breaking three seconds. They came in over the fantail with drooping wings and dangling landing gear and hung in mid-air above the deck like giant mechanical gnats. The AV-8s appeared to defy gravity, descending slowly on invisible columns of air. They taxied to the space vacated by the jungle-camouflaged Black Hawk, which had slipped away unnoticed by most of the Australians during the show put on by the new arrivals.

Refuelling carts raced to the Harriers in a practised ballet. The pilots opened their canopies, loosened their harnesses and oxygen masks, and pushed themselves up and out of their ejection seats. Aircraft handlers wheeled over ladders to help the pilots down from their aircraft. The two officer pilots then trotted over to the ‘island’, disappearing inside the hatch.

‘They’re yours,’ shouted the marine captain over the shriek of turbines, indicating the AV-8s. ‘And so is that.’ He directed Wilkes’s gaze to the large hole in the deck that had opened up. An aircraft levitated up from the blackness. It looked like a mutant helicopter, or a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong, with two enormous black propellers sitting across the top of the fuselage. The cockpit area was heavily glassed and looked similar to the front end of a Huey, the UH-IB, the helo most people associated with the war in Vietnam. The back half of the aircraft was reminiscent of the Hercules, except that a C-130 didn’t have its horizontal stabiliser between two vertical fins like this aircraft. It couldn’t possibly fly. It was, without doubt, the most unusual-looking aircraft Wilkes and his men had ever seen.

The puzzled look on the combined faces of the Australians indicated an explanation was needed. McBride provided it. ‘It’s called a V22 Osprey, made by Bell and Boeing!’ shouted the captain. That didn’t seem to help. ‘The new Tiltrotor — part aeroplane, part helo and better than both. Cruises at 270 knots with a self-deploying range of over 2100 nautical miles. Designed to get us in and out of trouble spots before the enemy knows what’s going on.’

Wilkes nodded, liking the sound of that.

Recognition spread on Ellis’s face. ‘Weren’t these things grounded?’ he shouted.

‘Yeah, but we think we’ve nailed the problem — a glitch in the software that ran the flight control computers.’

The words ‘we think’ and ‘glitch’ were not very reassuring and Wilkes couldn’t stop himself eyeing the aircraft suspiciously.

‘Don’t worry, Sarge,’ said the captain, smile gone. ‘This is one safe motherfucker. We wouldn’t be putting you and your men on it if it weren’t. A successful mission under combat conditions is what the V22 program needs.’

It distinctly sounded to Wilkes and Ellis like they were being used as guinea pigs. But what option did they have?

‘It’s lucky for you, actually. The V22’s been on a limited joint navy/marine shakedown trail. You know, to re-prove the concept that had been proven the last time we reproved it,’ he laughed, as if sharing an in-joke. ‘That’s why we happen to be here in the right place at the right time for you guys. That baby there’s how we’re going to do this thing.’ The marine captain spoke as if the mission was in the bag already.

‘What’s our flight time, sir?’ asked Wilkes.

The captain checked his watch. ‘We’ve got some pretty hefty tailwinds. Around two hours will see you on the ground at your drop-off point, but we’ll know precisely when we’re airborne. We’ve got extensive comms on board this baby and we’re expecting satellite intel to come through en-route to make sure you let down on the right spot.’

‘You coming along, Chuck?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ the captain laughed.

Wilkes didn’t see the humour.

The Australians watched as the V22’s wing swung from its storage position, lying along the top of the fuselage, to the place where a wing should be on an aeroplane. At least now it looked like something that could fly. Maybe.