Rogue Element

Somewhere east of central Sulawesi, 0745 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

The V22 pulled a two-g turn, bringing Wilkes out of a dream that left him restless and disturbed. He opened his eyes. The men were edgy, fidgeting with gear and straps and ropes, like a football team getting set to play a final. The V22 bucked through low-level turbulence. If Wilkes had peered through the small fuselage porthole, he would have seen the choppy green surface of the Banda Sea barely five metres below.

Wilkes went through a mental checklist, going over his equipment and the ROE: kill the bad guys, rescue the good guys. The fact that he would soon be snuffing out human lives didn’t concern him. He was a soldier and the enemy were soldiers. That’s what soldiers did — they killed each other. That he was up against Kopassus — the Indonesian equivalent of the SAS — gave the exercise a vaguely competitive edge. Wilkes had no doubt who would come out on top. He wasn’t over-confident — the Indons were well trained, ironically by the Australian military. But his men probably had the edge in continued training and the latest equipment. And given the circumstances of this mission, his men also had the certainty that right was on their side. But right or wrong, they would function as he knew they would — with calm, professional efficiency. If things did get nasty, Wilkes reminded himself, he couldn’t be in better company. Bring it on.

The sergeant surveyed his men. There wasn’t any talking going on — the intercom system didn’t allow them privacy. They sat in their own world, lost in their own thoughts, most likely doing what Wilkes had been doing, going through their gear and trying to visualise the mission. There was expectancy. They actually liked doing this shit.

Wilkes felt a presence beside his shoulder. He glanced up. McBride knelt beside his seat with an A3-size photo in his hand. The captain wasn’t smiling.

‘What is it?’ said Wilkes, wary.

‘A few priorities have been rearranged upstairs and we’ve got a proper military sat on this for you now,’ said the marine. That made Wilkes wonder. How did this man know the intel they’d been using up till now hadn’t been military?

‘This baby’s got keyhole resolution in the visible light and infrared spectrum. It also has x-ray capability. It can map radio waves, even do a spectroscopy analysis. This is one serious motherfucker piece of equipment.

‘What we got here is an infrared image of your search area. The satellite has been programmed to scan for temperatures up to and including one degree either side of 98.4, emanating from sources within a certain mass range; the idea being that you’ll get a photo that will register human presence without it being cluttered by hotspots or ghost images that turn out to be monkeys, pigs, and so on. Anyway,’ said the captain, handing him the photo, ‘take a look.’

Something told Wilkes he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see. The worry creasing the captain’s forehead told him as much. Within a couple of seconds of examining the photo, Wilkes was wearing a similar expression.

The photo was extraordinarily clear. The satellite it came from was indeed an astonishing piece of equipment. He took the black and white A-4 photocopy of the pic he’d been shown at the briefing back in Dili out of his top pocket, and compared it. The information presented by the new, colour A3 had totally and utterly changed. If the identical lat and long coordinates hadn’t been in the left of the new photo, he would have sworn that it was a view of a completely different area.

The smudged dots previously identified as the Kopassus soldiers waiting in ambush for one of the two sets of contacts had disappeared. The jungle was now alive with pairs of distinct, hard-edged markers. Now it was impossible to tell which of the contacts were his survivors. Wilkes studied the two utterly different photographs and couldn’t make sense of the information.

He shook his head. ‘Jesus… Can we get another pass at this before we go in?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No, I’ve checked on that already.’

Wilkes had half an idea. ‘Can you blow this one up to A3?’

‘That I can do,’ nodded the marine, taking the creased A4 sheet of paper up towards the aircraft’s comms suite.

Wilkes glanced up from the A3 sheet on his lap. The men were all looking his way. ‘What’s happening, boss?’ said the expression on Ellis’s face beside him.

Wilkes gestured that he wasn’t sure.

The captain returned with the old A4-size image blown up to A3 and handed it to Wilkes. He laid the new satellite intel over it. He lifted the top sheet up and down a few times and the hint of a smile curled his lips. ‘You got a pen or pencil?’ asked Wilkes. He took the pencil and drew a series of arrows and circles on the photos.

‘Okay,’ said Wilkes, ‘I think I’ve made a bit of sense out of this.’ McBride sat in the vacant seat beside Wilkes. ‘This is the first photograph. We started with this bunch of contacts here, assuming that it was an ambush line. These two contacts over here were apparently on the move, and these two over here weren’t.’ He indicated the position on the old photo.

‘Let’s take a look what’s happened.’ Wilkes lifted the top photo up and down and the photos came alive. Now the captain could suddenly see which of the contacts had moved, and had a few hints about the direction they had moved in, since the first photo was taken.

‘The ambush has broken up. The Indons are now fanning out across the jungle in twos.’ Arrows Wilkes had drawn on the photos showed the direction they were headed in. ‘These two sets of contacts here, and here, are the mystery players,’ he said, circling each pair with the pencil and doodling several question marks. ‘One set is friendly, the other is not. Trouble is, I’m still not sure which is which. All I can do is take a punt. Keep your eye on these two, the pair down the bottom,’ he said as he did his little animation trick again, lifting the top sheet up and down.

‘Yeah, ’observed McBride,‘ they’re stationary.’

‘The only contacts that are,’ agreed Wilkes. ‘Any idea why one of the two dots that make up this stationary duo down the bottom would be fainter than the rest?’

The captain shook his head. ‘Can’t say with any certainty. It’s a temperature thing. Could be someone who’s sick enough to put his or her body temperature almost out of the scanning range, accompanied by someone who’s okay. Could also be someone who has recently died where the core body temperature hasn’t dropped completely out of range.’ The marine considered the information presented. ‘Could be your people. The jungle’s murderous. Maybe one of your passengers is on the way out.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wilkes, ‘so they’re the most likely good guys — this pair here,’ he said, tapping the other circled contacts with his pencil. ‘These fellas aren’t following the pattern either. And they’re just to the north-east of our most likely survivors.’

‘Could be Indon scouts?’ said McBride.

Sergeant Wilkes was not too keen to make assertions about who was friend or foe on such scant information, but he had to make a decision. ‘How long till you set us down?’

The captain checked his watch. ‘Fifteen to twenty at the most. There’s quite a bit of wind out there. Once we get up into the hills and it starts swirling about…? Hard to know whether there’ll be a headwind or a tailwind.’

‘Tell the avos to set us down here,’ said Wilkes, indicating a position on the photo midway between the two sets of mystery contacts. ‘Also, a few copies of these would be good. I can hand them out to the lads.’

‘Yes to the first,’ said McBride. ‘And I can do better than copies on the second.’

The American again disappeared forward to the comms desk. A minute later, a video screen flickered into life and the first of the two satellite photos appeared.

‘Bastards have left the in-flight entertainment a bit late, haven’t they?’ quipped Morgan over the intercom.

The marine handed the sergeant a remote. ‘Press this button to change views. There’s a laser you can use as a pointer, here,’ he said, indicating another button. Wilkes pressed it. A red dot appeared on the ceiling.

‘Incoming!’ joked someone, the dot reminding all of them of laser sniper scopes.

Wilkes shifted between the images a couple of times to get the hang of the technology, and began briefing his men on the revised intel.

The V22 climbed steeply as it crossed a deserted white sand beach and rose above the palm covered hill rushing to meet them. The Osprey banked forty-five degrees right and lifted towards a deep ravine cut between two towering cliffs. The whine of the turbofans crashed off the volcanic faces and ricocheted throughout the valley.

Inside the V22 Osprey, the air-conditioning was turned off. Time to acclimatise.