Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 0705 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

Joe and Suryei struggled up the steep incline. The vegetation was too thick to penetrate so they trudged up a cut left by an eon of monsoonal rains. Joe pushed aside a clump of bamboo overhanging their path and his hand erupted in pain. He peered at the bamboo and saw that it was covered in white hairs. On closer inspection, the hairs turned out to be fine needles that undoubtedly carried poison. He swore and held his hand at the wrist, squeezing it. He slid backwards. The ground was unstable, black mud and they both stumbled as they struggled against the sucking at their feet. Their legs and arms were black, and their faces were streaked with mud from their attempts to wipe away the stinging sweat that constantly dribbled into their eyes.

Their lungs were dry and their breathing hoarse with the effort of keeping muscles supplied with oxygen. Suryei rasped with every painful step. One step forward, half a step back as their feet lost purchase. They paused halfway up the ravine to catch their breath and give their legs a rest, chests heaving. The sun winked through the sparse covering overhead, sending the temperature soaring every time the direct light struck them.

Joe’s axe had become heavy with the caked mud. He found a stick to prise it off, but the wood was rotten and the stick buckled and splintered. He used his fingers instead.

Suryei reached inside the rucksack on Joe’s back and removed two bottles of water, now at body temperature. Handing one to Joe, she guzzled the tepid contents and wanted more. Joe did the same, but insisted they preserve the rest of their supply.

Despite the exertion required to climb, it had been Joe’s decision to again strike for the higher ground. He had his reasons and he still thought that they were sound. They had no compass and therefore no means of orientation. Beneath the jungle canopy it was easy to wander around in circles. If they were to arrive at a specific point in the jungle, namely, the 747 crash site, they would need to continually check their bearings against features that rose above the canopy, such as the volcano and the escarpment now at their back and curving around to the right.

The visibility was very much better than it had been when he had first opened his eyes in the middle of this bad dream. The clouds had rolled away and the air was clear of the mist that had shrouded the horizon. They were a good 500 metres below the crest of the ridge so there was still plenty of climbing to be done. The realisation made him light-headed with frustration. He wondered what they would see when they reached the top. He hoped they would be looking down on the remains of QF-1 and a rescue team sifting through it, rather than the bunch of killers trying to turn them into fertiliser.

He wondered what had happened to the soldiers. If the theory he and Suryei had pieced together was true, very likely they were still on their trail. But where the fuck were the bastards? He wished he’d had some military training, some kind of knowledge that would allow him to predict the soldiers’ behaviour.

‘They’re still out there looking for us,’ said Suryei, reading his thoughts.

Joe nodded while he stared, trying to pierce the canopy spread out around them with the force of his gaze. Somehow, they had managed to slip away from professional killers, men who were no doubt trained in jungle warfare and survival. It was pure fluke. But they couldn’t just continue to blunder around, and perhaps making a beeline for the 747 wreckage wasn’t so smart either. It was difficult to think straight with, among other things, the cloud of mosquitoes swarming about him, buzzing, humming, biting, distracting him, pissing him off.

What to do, what the fuck to do? And where, exactly, was the plane? They could guess, but that was all. The soldiers had seemed to know the general bearing Joe and Suryei were taking. They probably knew that their quarry would run into the mountains and that scaling them would be impossible. Would they then assume that they would double back and make for the wreckage? Without maps, guides or supplies there were really no other alternatives. It was likely, then, that the soldiers would just lie in wait for them somewhere.

‘Suryei, where do you think the plane is from here?’ Joe asked.

Suryei thought about it for a few seconds. She raised her arm and pointed in a direction roughly forty-five degrees to the left of their current line of march, up and over the ridge. ‘Over there, I reckon, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.’

Joe didn’t agree. Before the soldiers arrived and added to this nightmare, he remembered surveying the horizon with binoculars. A flash of memory, like a moving postcard, flared in his mind. In the picture he clearly saw the volcano and the escarpment, and suddenly he knew exactly where the plane was. He just had to reverse the positions of those two dominating features, and put them behind his back. ‘I think it’s more in that direction,’ he said, holding his arm out like a street sign forty-five degrees to the right of Suryei’s reckoning. ‘You’re going to have to trust me, but I’m sure I’m right.’

‘I’m worried that we’re not on the same page about this,’ said Suryei.

‘I know, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure.’ He squatted on his heels and smoothed a square metre of mud with his hand, flicking off the excess that stuck to his palm. He then sketched out a map using a small stick.

Suryei crouched and scowled at the ground.

‘Look, we’ve been wandering around in a natural kind of bowl with the plane wreckage here. The snake and camp we ran into was here and here,’ he said, marking various points with crude icons. ‘And this is our track so far.’ Joe etched their wanderings with a dotted line. ‘All of it’s contained within this escarpment, the hot springs, and there’s the volcano.’ Their situation presented by the mud map was suddenly obvious.

‘If you were to set an ambush for us,’ Joe continued, ‘where would it be?’

Suryei considered the lines and squiggles in the mud. Then she took Joe’s axe and scratched a few Xs on it. ‘Here,’ she said, simply.

‘I agree.’

‘How nice. Only, we’re trapped,’ she said.

‘Well, the scale of things on this map is deceptive, but I think if we’re not careful we could walk into one.’

Suryei nodded.

‘Those mountains, the volcano, they’re a natural barrier. The soldiers must realise that. We’re just edging around the base of the really difficult steep country because we don’t have any other options.’ Joe stood before continuing. ‘Those soldiers are just waiting for us.’

‘Okay, assuming you’re right, and I think you are, what do you suggest?’

‘Fucked if I know, to be honest,’ said Joe, scratching his head vigorously with both hands, scraping crawling things off his scalp with broken fingernails. ‘We can stay more or less here, go back, go sideways, just any way but forwards.’

‘What if we move in a big circle, an opposite circle to the one we’re making now?’ said Suryei.

‘Double back?’

Suryei rubbed out Joe’s track and replaced it with her alternative suggestion. ‘I know it sounds obvious but, yes, basically. Cut across here at right angles and rejoin our original path out from the crash. Then, we should be able to come up on the 747 from behind.’

Joe thought about it. It made sense and was perhaps their only option. ‘Okay, sounds reasonable. We’ll continue to the top of this ravine and confirm our bearings, then slip across hard left.’

‘But what if those assassins think we’ll do that and set a trap for us?’

‘Jesus, Suryei —’

‘I know. I’m just asking what you think. I don’t want to die here, you know.’

‘Okay, well, we can double think this, or double-double think the options, but no matter what we decide to do, we could think ourselves into a trap.’

‘I know that too, okay?’ Suryei’s shoulders had slumped.

‘Suryei, I —’

‘Look, whatever. Let’s just get it fucking over with.’

Joe was too tired to argue.

Despite her exhaustion Suryei did feel less anxious about their revised plan. Their last one, simply making a beeline for the plane wreckage, didn’t take into account the people with guns. She felt a little more confident now and it took some of the heaviness out of her step. Still, it was a wickedly steep climb. Sheer determination kept them going, just one more step. Half an hour’s near vertical climbing brought them exhausted to the summit.

It did them no good. The canopy closed in overhead and any view of the surrounding country below them was obliterated. Joe flopped to the ground with disappointment and exhaustion. He was filled with self-pity until he saw that Suryei had continued to move into the trees. She was no better off, but she wasn’t complaining. She just kept going. He caught up to her. Suryei looked at him and smiled — albeit wanly. They walked in silence along the ridge for a time. The low ground rose to meet them and they found themselves back in the thick of the jungle. Maddeningly, the climb had been for nothing. They hadn’t managed to catch even the barest glimpse of the surrounding terrain.

Joe found a tree he thought he might be able to shin up. Around ten minutes later he was back beside Suryei, panting and weak with exhaustion from the climb and lack of food. ‘We’re okay. Our track is about right.’ He shouldered his rucksack and they walked slowly.

‘Do you do a lot of computer hacking?’ asked Suryei after they had regained their rhythm. They did their best to pick the path of least resistance through the jungle but, now that they were back on low ground, the jungle pressed in on them from every side.

‘A bit. It’s a sideline.’

‘It’s stealing, though, isn’t it?’

Joe looked at Suryei’s back. She didn’t turn her head when she spoke. He wondered how much was conversation, and how much was accusation. Probably both. Talk was dangerous. He had no idea how far noise carried but, without conversation, he felt alone. Perhaps Suryei felt the same. Her question, if it was an accusation, was almost impossible to defend because he knew she was right.

At seventeen, he had gone to work for a software giant in the States, because that was the Mecca if you were seriously gifted. Joe was regarded as one of its brightest stars, but he was easily distracted. Within a few months he’d decided that the money the giant corporation earned was obscene. He created a virus he called Ethiopia which, when activated, consumed any word on the hard disk that was even remotely reminiscent of food, and left a small thumbnail image of a young black child with a distended belly in the space. Joe incorporated the virus into the operating system he was helping to write. The trigger for Ethiopia was keying the word ‘lunch’ into the system’s appointments book. Over 50 000 copies of the new operating system had been shipped before the virus revealed itself.

Joe was quietly but forcefully shown the back door, while the corporation went into damage control. That’s when Joe also discovered that he had a talent for hacking, particularly as the giant’s employees had designed so many systems in use. He knew the way these people thought, and that was the key, getting inside the mind of the programmers. So Joe went to work as a freelancer, spying for companies wanting information from competitors.

The pay was good. And the conditions were great, because he could work from anywhere. Joe wasn’t an information anarchist, an idealist. It just started out as a way to make a buck, nothing more. But then his conscience had kicked in. He was taking something that didn’t belong to him, and that was wrong. So he stopped hacking and started authoring games, and providing critiques on others for various magazines. Most of the people who created computer games were maverick types like him, and he enjoyed their company. It was a more benevolent way to make a living, and one that didn’t keep him awake nights.

‘Yes, it’s theft. That’s why I don’t do it any more.’ Joe pushed a fern frond out of their way, careful to use his axe and not his hand or arm.

‘So why’d you hack into Suluang’s computer?’

‘That was different. I had the chance to strike back at those thugs… I should have thought about it a bit harder before I dived in.’

‘Hey, I’m not having a go at you. There aren’t many individuals who get the chance to strike back at a whole system. You’re lucky, you had a weapon. In Dili, I thought I had that too — a weapon — being a journalist, keen to write the truth. And then reality hit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I landed with the first troops to secure Dili airport. There was a ute burned out behind a hangar. In the back were half a dozen blackened human skeletons. On the side of the ute, someone had painted, “Welcome to East Timor”. I wasn’t prepared for that.’ Suryei bit her lip and tasted blood as the brutal memory crashed into her mind.

‘The authorities didn’t regard the scene as a mass grave. That seemed ridiculous to me. I mean, how many murdered people have to be dumped in a confined space before it’s considered a mass grave?’

‘Sounds like a sick riddle,’ said Joe. He looked at Suryei and saw that the memory was still fresh and that it upset her.

‘Yeah… anyway, I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer. There was a grave of over thirty bodies outside one village I visited. The people were so scared they didn’t tell anyone about it till months after we arrived. These stories, and many others like them, were embargoed,’ Suryei said bitterly.

‘We heard rumours of mass graves wherever we went. Mostly, they were just that — stories. But every now and then… The village well you mentioned was nothing special. In East Timor, it was the militia’s favourite dumping place for bodies because a rotting corpse or two also poisoned the water. And if it didn’t physically, it sure as hell poisoned the well in people’s minds. It’s hard to drink from a place that’s your family’s grave.’

The picture of the old lady and her dead grandson flashed into Joe’s head. ‘Did you end up hating the Indonesians?’ he asked quietly.

‘No. It’s not just the Indonesians, it’s humans. Us. All of us. We’re an incredibly brutal species.’

‘It must have been rough coping with what you saw and heard.’

‘I toughened up.’

Joe thought about Suryei’s determination, her will to survive. Yes, she’d toughened up. ‘Why East Timor? Why’d you go there?’

‘My fiancé… I haven’t told you.’ Suryei swallowed hard and Joe regretted the question.

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘It’s okay. I can talk about it now.’ Suryei took a deep breath, as if she was about to plunge into turbulent water. ‘My fiancé and I were in the car together, coming back from a weekend away — a skiing holiday. It was night and I was dozing, listening to music on the radio. Then I heard Ric, my fiancé, say, “What’s this guy doing?’’

‘I opened my eyes and a set of headlights was coming up over the crest, on the wrong side of the road. Everything slowed down. The approaching car was swerving about from his lane to ours. There was nowhere to go. A cliff face to the right, a big drop to a river on the left. In the last second, it was like our two cars were tied together, destined to crash.’

Suryei’s breathing was heavy, her body reacting visibly to the traumatic memory. ‘At the last instant, Ric turned in to the oncoming car. He saved my life. Instead of a head-on, the other car slammed into Ric’s door. The last thing I remember about it was the glare from the headlights sparkling through our shattered windscreen. I thought I was going to die.’

Suryei cleared her throat, snapping out of a trance. She flashed Joe a nervous smile to let him know that she was alright. ‘I spent a month in hospital — broke my pelvis. Then lots of physio. Missed Ric’s funeral. I had amnesia for a while and didn’t remember anyone or anything. My mother stayed with me in hospital. Had no idea who she was.’

‘What about the other driver?’

‘Eighteen months in prison. He was asleep at the wheel. The bastard was drunk. Anyway, you asked me about East Timor.’

Joe nodded.

‘At the time, I was working for a big metro daily newspaper. After the accident, when I came back to work, the editor asked me if I wanted a change, do something different to take my mind off things. He was talking about sending me to East Timor. He thought I could give the paper’s readers an interesting perspective — you know the sort of thing, an Asian-Australian torn between homeland and heartland… Sounds a bit trite now, but I jumped at it.

‘First day there, I met a New Zealand soldier — just a rifleman. We became friends. I went out on patrol with his section a couple of times. The guys showed me a few survival techniques…’

Joe smiled. ‘Oh, so it was a “he”.’ That explained a lot, he thought. Her apparent confidence in the jungle for one thing.

‘He was killed in an ambush,’ Suryei said abruptly. ‘Dead. Gone. Again, no goodbyes. Nothing.’

‘Jesus…’

‘Happened up on the border. They were in an area known for militia activity when his patrol was fired on.’ Suryei was mentally back in East Timor, staring into the middle distance. ‘Witnesses said it was a strange, weird moment. According to the other guys in the patrol, there were Indonesian soldiers in the area, and other militia too, who were watching the firefight and laughing and cheering. When it all started, and even during the shooting, militia soldiers would step in from the wings, start firing, then withdraw. Like a game of tag-team wrestling or something.

‘The rules of engagement meant the UN soldiers couldn’t fire unless the enemy aimed their weapons at them, so they couldn’t do anything about the enemy on the sidelines. It sounds like bullshit, but that’s modern warfare for you.

‘A couple of militiamen were killed. Nearly a thousand rounds were fired. Two UN soldiers, my friend and his buddy, were wounded. My friend died soon after of his wounds. The TNI soldiers watching from the West Timor border thought it was lots of fun. They were shouting and laughing through it all.

‘It was only after he’d gone that I realised how important he was to me. Anyway…’ she said, breathing deeply, realising that her eyes were moist.

‘What was it like, going into Dili at the beginning?’ asked Joe. He found the questions difficult to ask, because remembering seemed to affect Suryei profoundly. But somehow, he knew she wanted to talk, exorcise some of the demons.

‘Tragic,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The people were terrified and the place was a mess. Ransacked. Just about everything that wasn’t nailed down was carted off by the TNI. You couldn’t find a window that hadn’t been smashed, or a door that hadn’t been kicked off its hinges. The smell of human faeces was everywhere — it was disgusting and pathetic. The streets were filled with broken tiles and glass and rubbish. Any kind of infrastructure had been torched or torn down. But the worst part of it was the fear — that was as much a part of the smell of the place as anything.’

‘What about the Indonesian army?’

‘Everyone was tense. No one was really sure how the Indonesians would react after the vote. At first, they were pushy. There was a real swagger about them. I don’t think they realised that the battle had been fought at the ballot box.

‘Seventy-eight percent of East Timor voted for independence, rather than for autonomy within Indonesia, despite the intimidation and the killing going on before the ballot. Indonesia lost.’

‘The soldiers take it bad?’

‘Take it bad?’ she said, snorting. ‘When it looked likely that the poll wouldn’t go Indonesia’s way, the TNI and the militia just went bananas,’ Suryei said, the memories still so vivid.

‘The Indonesians had been stomping around East Timor since 1975, don’t forget. This territory had become their plaything. The army had money and time invested there and it didn’t want to lose that investment. And neither did a small but very determined band of East Timorese who were doing very nicely out of the TNI. Neither the militia nor the TNI were prepared to lose that without a fight. That’s what was so amazing about the people of East Timor. They bore the brunt of the TNI/militia rage. They endured the looting, the murder and the rape and quietly, resolutely, voted Indonesia off their soil.’

‘You think they’re heroes, the people of East Timor?’ said Joe, breaking into her trance.

‘Yes I do,’ she said, crouching to remove a small stone from her shoe.

‘From what you saw, do you think the media did a good job there?’

‘I guess, only Australians now find it impossible to draw any distinction between the people of Indonesia and its politics. Yet our democracy isn’t exactly perfect either. We have our share of crooks and scandals.’

‘Yeah, but we don’t shoot our own people, and we don’t blow passenger aircraft out of the sky.’

‘On that first point, I’m pretty sure the Aboriginals wouldn’t agree with you. And on the second… okay, I’ll give you that.’ They walked in silence while they negotiated a particularly boggy section. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the thick mud and flew into their nostrils, mouths, ears and eyes. They ran through the last few sucking puddles, half blind, scooping the insects out of their mouths. Suryei lost her shoe in the mud. Joe volunteered to go back and get it for her. Suryei refused. She tied some fabric saved from Joe’s shirt around her nose and mouth, went back and freed it from the bog herself.

‘Look, I don’t think the media are the bad guys but they have a serious flaw,’ said Suryei, picking up where she’d left off.

‘And that is?’

‘The news media can only handle information in a certain way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not good with grey.’

‘Eh?’ Joe was not sure he understood the point. He pulled aside a branch that threatened to whip back into Suryei’s face.

‘Well, you know the expression, “it’s all there in black and white”?’

Joe nodded.

‘Well, it’s never there in grey. Newspapers, the media generally, they take a side of a story, one that can be dealt with unequivocally, and report on it more or less accurately.

‘And the news sources may — not always, but sometimes — give the other side of a story, providing the issues are clear. But it’s not very adept at dealing with issues that have black and white mixed in equal parts. Like I said, it’s not very good with grey. The bad guys are always bad and the good guys are always good. But life is rarely so ordered and people, issues — whatever — are never, in truth, so perfectly one dimensional and transparent.’

‘You’ve obviously thought about this a bit.’

‘Haven’t you? Or do you just accept everything you’re spoon-fed without question?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, but I don’t think my levels of cynicism are up to yours. Probably because I haven’t seen as much,’ Joe added. Suryei had certainly been exposed to more life than he had.

‘But it’s always been like this. Take wars. The media dehumanises the opposition. That makes things worse because people are then more prepared to do things, cruel things, when they don’t think the other side is as “human” and “civilised” as they are. That’s what happened in Vietnam, and in the Second World War with Japan, and probably every war in human history…’ Suryei gathered her thoughts. She stopped and surveyed the jungle hemming them in.

‘Anyway, it’s easy to see how the media works when there are extreme examples, such as when there are confrontations between nations, but the principle, the way the media simplifies things, is the same no matter what the issue.’

‘Okay, but you can’t blame just the media,’ Joe interjected. ‘It’s been fashioned by the people who buy newspapers and listen to the news. News is presented the way it is because that’s what sells. People want the facts delivered that way — simply.’

‘That, Joe, is an incredibly simplistic view,’ said Suryei, stopping. Her hands were on her hips, like she was ready to fight. ‘The public believes getting the facts is the same as getting the truth, and one is not the same as the other. Those embargoed stories back in East Timor — the truth was managed, massaged, put through the blender.’

Joe quietly entered a small clearing. A family of macaques occupying a large tree, its roots dangling into the space below it like a matted screen, chattered and screeched and whirled quickly up and down the branches. Joe noticed the discarded fruit on the ground and nudged one over with his toe. It looked familiar — green on the outside with rich crimson flesh full of seeds inside. He picked one off the tree’s trunk, peeled it open and took a bite. It tasted sweet. He ate it quickly and had another. He tossed a couple to Suryei. She joined him beside the tree, picking the fruit that sprouted from its bark.

‘This is what the babirusa eats,’ said Suryei, diverted, the journo again. ‘It’s a fig, unique to Sulawesi. Evolved just for the babirusa’s dinner. The fruits are low, see, and easily reached.’

‘Can you imagine what must be going on back home in Australia?’ said Joe, almost incoherently, talking with his mouth full. ‘Do you think the authorities — the government — know what’s going on?’

‘They must. Think about it. QF-I has gone missing,’ Suryei said, hunting for a branch that hadn’t been stripped. ‘They must know it’s crashed somewhere in Indonesia. The relatives of the passengers — your parents and friends — the whole bloody country’s probably in mourning. And shock. And if it appears the Indonesians are up to no good…’

Joe whistled softly. ‘Jesus, the shit-fight that must be going on… My guess is that if the Indonesians aren’t letting our blokes in to help with the search — and why would they, given what we know? — then Australia will probably put it on the Yanks to get a spy satellite on the case. It’s the obvious thing to do. But if they know the plane was shot down by Indonesia then, shit… maybe we’re already at war with them!’ Joe thought about that and shuddered.

‘Maybe that explains the soldiers shooting at us,’ said Suryei.

‘Or maybe they’re trying to stop us because we’re just loose ends.’

Selatan Irian Jaya. Joe thought about what they knew for sure, and what was pure speculation. ‘It’s unlikely they’ll know the whole story back home. I just hope they know enough to send our own people here with guns to come get us.’