Rogue Element

Central Sulawesi, 0834 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

A red light illuminated. Minus one minute to the drop. It had been a good twenty minutes since the LM had helped the men locate their ropes and loop them into their wrap-racks. The MAG would fast-rope down together in one wave. It was necessary to get the soldiers out and off quickly so that the V22 could leave the area pronto. Hovering stationary over the drop zone would make it an easy target for forces equipped with portable, hand-held Stinger missiles, or even just well-aimed rifle fire.

The designated LZ approached, the coordinates of which had been nominated by Wilkes and punched into the Osprey’s nav com. The pilot repositioned the switch that fixed the angle of the nacelles on the wingtips and they began to rotate to the vertical. The Osprey’s flight computers countered the aircraft’s natural tendency to alter its altitude as the thrust vectors changed, feathering the aircraft’s control surfaces to maintain level flight. The resultant forces slowed the aircraft, bringing it to a hover twenty metres above the swirling canopy. Total flight time from the Kitty Hawk: just one hour and fifty-five minutes.

The Jump Jets cruised high overhead, sweeping the area for bandits, conserving fuel. They were capable of hovering with the V22, behaving like helicopter gunships, but only for the briefest period. In hover mode, the AV-8’s wings provided no lift whatsoever, so an enormous amount of fuel was burned to keep the aircraft aloft. Besides, there was no point putting more aircraft than necessary in the hover position vulnerable to ground fire. The pilots hoped the EA-6B Prowler had done its job, blinding Indon radar. Three Super Hornets might well be orbiting fifteen minutes away but if a flight of F-16s jumped them now, they’d be thirteen minutes too late.

The wind made it difficult to maintain position. The Osprey slid left and right, bobbing high and low as thirty-knot winds knocked it about. Wilkes gave his men the signal and they leapt forward into the air from the V22’s ramp. From the ground, the soldiers might have looked like baby spiders jumping clear of their mother. Their heavy packs swung below them, attached to their abseiling harnesses with karabiners, so that the weight of their gear didn’t hinder their control and manoeuvrability, or break their legs when they hit the ground.

The men dropped to the canopy and hung suspended above it. They lowered themselves slowly through the uppermost leaves and branches until they could see a clear path to the ground fifty metres below. When each man was satisfied that his progress wouldn’t be impeded, their journey down continued.

Suddenly, a wind gust that would have measured more than forty-five knots lifted the Osprey several metres and shouldered it aside. The men, still attached to their ropes fastened to the buffeted aircraft, were pulled through branches like floss through teeth.

Kevin Gibson was unlucky. He was threading his way through the fork in a heavy branch when his rope pulled him up, then dropped him. The fork caught the lower lip on his helmet as he fell through the narrow opening. The additional weight of his pack hanging from his abseil harness ensured that his neck snapped cleanly, cutting his spinal cord. Gibson wouldn’t have had time to notice anything amiss before St Peter was giving him his room number.

Wilkes could see that Gibbo was in strife. The man was swinging forward on his rope in that odd way, arms hanging limply. He then bashed into a tree trunk twice but did nothing to prevent the impact either time. After the second collision, the tension on his rope released and Gibbo fell the last fifteen metres, accelerating rapidly.

None of the men shouted out when they saw him fall. It would not have been a smart thing to do. If enemy troops were in the immediate vicinity, the noise of the aircraft would have had them searching the canopy overhead.

Wilkes’s eight remaining men arrived safely, meeting at the base of a hardwood giant. They instantly fed the rope through their wrap-racks to release the tension, so that the V22 pitching around in the wind overhead wouldn’t bounce them off the ground. They then released the karabiner that secured the wrap-racks to their harnesses, and the umbilical cord of the webbing that attached them to their packs.

Wilkes checked his men, counting heads as he went while snippets of conversations he’d had with Gibbo flashed into his mind.

‘Jesus Christ, Gibbo,’ said Ellis, bending over the body of his friend and comrade. They were drinking buddies, both single and loving it.

The others knelt beside the fallen trooper and gave him a minute of silence out of respect. He was a good soldier, one of them.

Wilkes kept to the schedule for the moment, ignoring his fallen comrade. He clicked the ‘send’ button on his TACBE three times, the agreed signal that they were on the ground and released from their ropes. Almost immediately the ten ropes, dangling from the canopy like strands of black spaghetti, rose up through the trees. The ear-splitting noise of military jets and turbofans receded quickly. It would be smart to vacate the area as quickly as possible.

Gibbo’s body would probably have to be left behind, but in the meantime they didn’t want to telegraph to the enemy any more than was absolutely unavoidable that foreign troops were in the house. Burying it would stop scavengers being attracted, a gathering of which might be an invitation to any Kopassus in the area to investigate. Deny the enemy as much intel as possible, for as long as possible.

Wilkes turned, taking in their position. There was no point burying Gibson here. They had to put some jungle behind them and the LZ as a first priority. ‘Morgan, you and Littlemore divvy up his pack. Mac, you and Beck carry him between you till we find a spot to cache the gear.’

Robson was already fashioning a crude stretcher for the body. ‘Silly bloody prick,’ he muttered. The bastard should have been more careful. They all knew the risks involved and embraced them readily, but that didn’t make it any easier when one of them carked it. And Gibbo had been popular. He was the tallest man in the group, the rest being more compact types. He was unbeatable in the line-outs when the rugby season was on.

With Gibson’s gear divided and the body aboard a stretcher fashioned from saplings and rope, the MAG moved off through the jungle with an easy, practised rhythm, despite the weight on their backs. Wilkes noted that there were plenty of small spiders’ webs strung across the spaces between the grasses and fern trees, an indication that these tracks hadn’t been travelled recently. Half a kilo-metre from their LZ, the men came across three enormous hardwoods that formed almost an equilateral triangle, with a copse of waist-high ferns in the centre. The ground was high, reasonably dry, and soft — the perfect place to cache their gear and bury the body.

Chris Ferris and Greg Curry freed their trenching tools and dug the depression to the required depth. The men went through their rucksacks and removed duplicated gear. They placed it in heavy-duty plastic garden bags to protect it against moisture and dirt and lowered the bags into the hole. Gibson’s body went in last. The men needed to be able to travel fast and light. If they succeeded quickly in their mission, the gear would be left to the worms.

‘Come back for you later, bud,’ said Ellis, tossing a handful of soil on the mound.

Ferris topped off the cache with a claymore set to explode upwards should the hidden mound be disturbed by unfriendlies. The exercise took seven minutes. They were practised.

Now, loads considerably lightened, the men were ready for business. The order of march was different this time. Wilkes formed his men up in a line abreast to sweep through about sixty metres of jungle. Each man confirmed that his field radio was both transmitting and receiving by answering a quick roll call.

Wilkes swept the area. He picked out cicadas, birds, spiders and even stick insects. His brain processed the images and noted any colour or movement at odds with its surroundings. Untrained eyes found it almost impossible to differentiate military camouflage from the surrounding vegetation, especially if the wearer was stationary, but Wilkes’s eyes were sharp and well trained. They registered the pattern and recognised it for what it was — man-made. Wilkes would have made a good sniper, except that there was a little too much waiting around in that profession for his liking.

This jungle was beautiful, virgin. Wilkes breathed in the heavy, moist air. It was easy to imagine that they were the only humans in this, a primordial forest. The jungle was a good place to be if you knew your craft. He saw a fishtail palm. It looked a bit like the sago palm, only it had a couple of beards covered in tasty-looking fruit that hung from its umbrella of fronds. The fruits were extremely poisonous, but a sago-like pulp could be extracted from the palm’s trunk. You had to know, and it was as simple as that.

The palm towered thirty metres towards sunlight that burned through a hole in the canopy left by a giant tree which, succumbing to termites, had crashed to the jungle floor, flattening many smaller trees as it fell. He paused beside the monstrous fallen trunk and noted the position on his GPS. At a pinch they could use this place to RV with the V22 later. Indeed, it was not that far from the spot the V22 had set them down, nor from their cached gear.

He wondered what foods the survivors of the air crash had been living on. It would be easy to die of starvation in the jungle if you had no idea where to look for food. But most likely you would die of poisoning, the desire to eat overwhelming the fear of the unknown. Many things that appeared edible could kill painfully. He trod on some fungi that looked suspiciously like Amanita phalloides, the death cap mushroom. Wilkes knew his fungi — had to, it was part of essential survival training — but it was easy to get it wrong. Species that were edible often had deadly cousins and it was not always easy to tell the two apart.

The jungle was alive with sound. Cicadas screamed, birds sang, macaques hooted and squealed, and the ground rustled with movement. It took some getting used to — filtering the noise so that anything man-made could be distinguished. It was nearly an impossible task. The soldiers they were up against were professionals, like themselves. They knew, as did Wilkes’s men, how to move through the environment without announcing their presence. Perhaps, Wilkes hoped, providing their LZ had been out of earshot, they would still hold the trump card of surprise, the opposition believing they had the jungle to themselves.

Wilkes’s men moved soundlessly to the edge of the clearing made by the fallen giant and melted into the bush, their senses tuned and sharpened by hard experience. They were the hunters now.

There was something familiar about the area, but Suryei couldn’t put her finger on it. She thought she must have been imagining it — one grove of ferns looked like every other grove of ferns. There was nothing on the ground to indicate that they’d been in this area before. Perhaps it was a combination of details — a tree next to a rock beside some tall palms on an area of ground that sloped away from a sharp rise. Whatever it was, there was something about this place that felt familiar. And dangerous.

Suryei slowed her pace and held up her hand for Joe to stop. There was something, something not right…

The trail narrowed somewhat beside a hardwood giant and sloped steeply. They picked their way down, careful not to make any noise or slip on the muddy carpet of rotting leaves. At the base of the rise the trail flattened out and then widened into a small clearing with two towering trees standing in it.

Suryei noticed an odd shape on the ground, like a giant cocoon. The cocoon moved and groaned. And then she realised why the area had been so familiar. There was the thorny bush in the centre of the clearing where they had rested on the first night, a lifetime ago. The cocoon was a man wrapped in a blanket. Joe and Suryei remembered the events of that morning as if from an old movie. This was the man who had urinated on them and then been bitten by the cobra. He didn’t sound well.

‘Let’s go,’ said Joe, feeling more vulnerable than usual in this familiar place.

‘Hang on,’ she said, her curiosity getting the better of her judgement.

Suryei approached carefully and bent over him. He groaned again. He was lying on ground that had been cleared of leaf litter. The man was conscious enough to open his eyes but evidently had trouble focusing them. Eventually his bloodshot eyes met hers but there was not a shred of recognition in them. He was no longer a soldier. The snake’s venom had reduced him to a basic level of consciousness. His lips were black and cracked; a track of dried spittle ran away from the lower corner of his mouth. The man’s tongue, dry like the head of a lizard, moved over them continuously.

Suryei signalled to Joe. He was reluctant to step into the open, away from the protective cloak of the jungle. He made his way nervously over towards them.

‘Water. He’ll die otherwise,’ said Suryei going for one of the bottles in Joe’s rucksack. Fortunately, they had only just refilled them and the water was still cool.

‘Cobra venom dehydrates,’ Suryei said quietly. She dripped some water on the man’s tongue as it flicked out, cracked and swollen. He responded, groaning a dry, hoarse sound. She poured a little more water into the man’s mouth. His Adam’s apple moved up and down then spasmed as he coughed weakly. The coughing stopped. More water. The lizard came out again to drink.

‘He’s in a bad way,’ Suryei said. ‘We should leave some water and go.’

‘Go, yes. Good idea,’ said Joe, anxious to be far away from this place.

A sound came from behind them. It was a metallic sound. The jungle didn’t make noises like that. Joe and Suryei both glanced over their shoulders. A man stood in the clearing, smiling. Joe looked down the barrel of a gun for the third time in as many days. He was still failing to find the experience a pleasant one.

The soldier gestured at them with the weapon to move away from his comrade on the ground. They moved slowly. Joe realised that both their hands were raised in the air. It had been an automatic reaction. They shuffled step by step off to one side, presenting their armpits to their captor.

The soldier with the gun nervously took their place beside the cocoon. He glanced down quickly and noted the plastic water bottle on the ground at his feet. He picked it up and said something in Indonesian. ‘He wants the rucksack, ’said Suryei. The soldier shouted and aimed his weapon, the point between Suryei’s eyes the target. Suryei turned her head away and dropped her hands in front of her face to protect it. He yelled again. Her hands went up quickly. Joe slowly took the rucksack off his shoulder and tossed it at the soldier’s feet. The man kicked it. Several bottles fell out along with Joe’s axe. The soldier picked it up and tossed it out of the clearing. Joe heard it thud against a tree and drop to the ground. Several birds flew up screeching, marking its landing place.

The soldier then turned the muzzle of his automatic towards Joe and carelessly fired a round from the hip. The bullet spun Joe around as if he’d been hit a glancing blow by a car. He was on the ground, his mouth full of leaves and moss, before he realised that he had been shot. He couldn’t move, shock rendering his muscles useless. The soldier then turned the weapon towards Suryei, daring her to move. She didn’t.

Joe found it difficult to breathe. A rib had fractured close to his spine, the slug breaking it off cleanly as if a hammer and cold chisel had clouted it. The bullet had been deflected slightly by the collision. It drilled under his right lung and tore an exit hole in his back the size of a punnet of strawberries. Blood oozed out both holes and pooled under his belly. It felt warm, as if he’d pissed himself. He would have made a joke about it if he could have found the breath, which he couldn’t. There wasn’t any pain yet, but he knew it was there. Oddly, he could see it, building up like water behind a logjam. Soon he knew he would hurt like he’d never hurt before. The world went from full colour to grey and white and Joe slipped away into a little black box in his head.

The soldier toed Joe’s shoulder but the body on the ground was inert. He considered putting another bullet into it anyway to make sure, but something caught his eye. From the side he could see one of Suryei’s breasts inside her shirt. He wondered what it would feel like cupped in his hand. The urge to do exactly that distracted him. Oddly, he looked around the clearing in case anyone could see him taking advantage of the situation but it was empty except for the two bodies lying on the ground and this woman in front of him. He smiled. He could do whatever he wanted with her and no one would stop him.

Keeping his weapon trained on her head, the soldier slipped his free hand inside her shirt. She was breathing heavily and he managed to delude himself that it was excitement induced by his touch that had made her nipples hard.

He unbuttoned his fly and his penis sprang from the opening expectantly. Her breasts were quite large, he noted, swallowing. The soldier took one of her raised hands and wrapped it around the organ jutting from his jungle greens. Suryei had no choice. He took his knife from its sheath, letting his rifle slip to the ground.

He placed the point of the dagger against her navel and told her to take down her pants. Suryei wanted to take the knife and cut off the disgusting thing in her hand but she was afraid. At least try, she demanded to herself. He was going to rape her then kill her anyway — of that she was certain. Damn it, go out fighting! Something in her eyes must have given the thought away because he thrust the knife into her stomach harder. The point pierced her skin and blood oozed down towards the top button of her pants. The soldier moved the knife down and sliced off the button, then he pushed her hard so that she sprawled on the ground on her back.

The soldier was so drunk with lust and power he had convinced himself that she wanted him. His tunnel vision failed to catch Joe struggling to his feet, or his fist as it smashed into the side of his jaw, breaking it. The soldier’s eyes rolled back in his head as if there was suddenly something of great interest painted on the inside of his skull, and then his legs dropped out from under him.

Joe smiled. Laying the arsehole out felt good but the effort hurt like a bitch. The smile turned to a wince and he collapsed onto the ground unconscious beside the soldier.

They all heard the distinctive crack of the carbine. It came from a patch of low ground. The sound bounced around but they were reasonably sure of its source. Wilkes estimated the distance at less than 100 metres. He gave the direction of the shot his best guess and double-checked it over the communications with his men. They all agreed.

An effort was required to fight the tendency to rush forward. That’s where training and experience was so important. They could run straight into an ambush. The men took their weapons off safety and rested their fingers outside the trigger guards. They moved ahead in twos and threes, leapfrogging each other, then covering the advance of the men behind them, weapons off safety, scanning the jungle ahead and to the sides for movement.

Suryei picked herself up off the ground and realised that she was hot with anger. She wanted to pick up the man’s gun and shoot him, empty its bullets into him, stick the barrel in his side and let the hot lead penetrate him. Somehow she resisted the urge and instead swung the weapon into the trees by its barrel. She heard it clatter through branches to the ground somewhere unseen.

The eyes of the man laid out by the snakebite darted left and right. He had either become suddenly aware of reality, or the activity around him had provoked delirium — probably the latter, Suryei decided, when she looked at him more closely. There was still no comprehension in his eyes.

She dropped beside Joe and put her ear to his chest. His heart beat strongly. A large amount of rich purple blood had seeped from the raw holes in his body. He opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times and said, ‘Ouch.’ Suryei was so relieved she didn’t know what to do. So she got up and ran around in a circle before retrieving a bottle of water from the rucksack. She put it to Joe’s lips. He shook his head, declining to drink.

‘Rather have a Coke,’ he said, wincing. ‘Oh, fuck that hurts… just help me up.’ Suryei put her arm behind Joe’s back and helped him sit. His stomach muscles were gone. Breathing felt like someone was chopping into his abdomen with a tomahawk. The pain was really starting to come on with a rush now. Neither Suryei nor Joe had enough medical experience to know whether the wound was serious, so they both just assumed that it was. The assumption was reasonable. If he didn’t get proper medical assistance soon, he would die, if not from blood loss then from secondary infection. Already, insects were swarming gleefully at the fresh source of food that had suddenly presented itself.

The soldier Joe had knocked out now started to move slowly. The actions were lethargic, but becoming less so, like an animal that had been frozen beginning to thaw. The man cried out when the bones in his jaw separated, sending a spike of pain to his brain that went off like a hand grenade. The bone had fractured, dislocating across the complex lattice of nerves on the side of his jaw. A couple of teeth had also been broken off at the root, exposing raw nerves. Any movement was agonising but all the soldier’s training told him that he had to get up and surmount the situation he now found himself in if he was to have a chance of surviving it. He sat up. He wanted to scream but he knew the pain in his jaw would increase many fold if he did.

Suryei watched him drag himself up on an elbow, grunting in agony. She didn’t know what to do. Should she hit him, kick him? Beat him with the empty rucksack? Why did I throw away the gun? And then Suryei saw the knife speared into the ground. She ran to it and picked it up as the man got to his feet. He approached her, staggering. What do I do with this thing? Suryei had never killed a man. She froze. The soldier slowly peeled the blade from her grip, each finger giving up one at a time.

And then the soldier did something unusual. He grinned. Not at her but past her, over her shoulder. Suryei followed his line of sight, knowing that she wouldn’t like whatever it was that could be so good it cut through his pain and put a smile on his face. Two Indonesian soldiers stepped into the clearing and began scouting around the edges, weapons up and ready. They moved quickly through the area, searching for anything hidden. When they were satisfied that the people in the clearing were isolated, the soldiers returned to their starting point, a little more relaxed but weapons still on Joe and Suryei. Suryei looked at Joe. There was nothing more they could do. The soldiers’ eyes were vacant, black, reptilian. There was death in them.

Suryei didn’t feel panicked about dying. It was like being back in the car with the lights coming over the hill, moments before impact. There was nothing more she could do to prevent it happening. She was resigned to it. They had fought well, and lost. Suddenly, a small red dot appeared like a third eye in all three of the soldiers’ foreheads and the men crumpled to the ground as if their bones had been sucked clean out of their bodies.

A small movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. Another two soldiers stood up in a thick clump of bush that bordered the clearing. There was no one there, and then there was. And there was something different about these two men. They wore different uniforms and their faces were heavily painted in camouflage colours. She recognised the helmets worn by the troops in Dili — the Kevlar ones. One of the men wore a floppy hat made from camouflage material. And then she realised. They were Australians. Australian soldiers. Suryei didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. One of the men put his finger to his lips for her to be quiet.

Suryei turned to look at Joe, to see whether he’d also witnessed what she’d just seen. He hadn’t. He’d slumped forward and was leaning against a tree for support. She noticed that the man with the broken jaw now had the same red dot between his eyes, and he was lying sightless on the ground. He was dead, and that made Suryei feel good.

Within thirty seconds, the little clearing seemed surrounded by soldiers. She counted nine of them. A stocky, powerfully built man strolled up to her and smiled.

‘Sergeant Thomas Wilkes. We’re Australian. Your name, please.’ He was friendly but efficient — businesslike. Perhaps it was the hard battleship grey colour of his eyes, but something in her was aware that this man was perhaps even more dangerous than any of the Indonesians. She hoped knowing her name wouldn’t put him offside.

‘Suryei Hujan. The man on the ground there is Joe Light,’ she said. ‘We were both passengers on the Qantas plane. Joe’s been shot.’ Her potted history seemed stupid when she heard it — terribly inadequate — but she didn’t know what else to say. Two other soldiers were already kneeling beside Joe, assessing his wound. The sergeant pulled a wad of paper from a shirt pocket and checked her name against it.

‘Suryei Hujan, seat 51F. Joseph Light, 5A. Any other survivors that you know of, Suryei?’

‘No, we’re it. There was an old couple but these bastards,’ she indicated the Indonesian soldiers lying inert on the ground, ‘shot them.’

Suryei realised that she was blubbering. The tears streamed down her cheeks and out through her nose. Standing there in the jungle, hungry, half naked, every inch of exposed skin cut and bleeding, the burns on her forearms now weeping suspiciously with a yellowish fluid, swaying with exhaustion, was the happiest moment of her life. She put her head on the soldier’s shoulder and cried tears of release.

Wilkes put his arm around the woman and squeezed her reassuringly. Her small body heaved with sobs.

‘How’s he doing, Stu?’ asked Wilkes, wanting an answer on the condition of the other plane survivor, sitting on ground stained red with his clotting blood.

‘Okay, I think, boss. The bullet has worked its way through. The exit wound’s messy. Broken a rib… lung is only nicked. Lucky fucker — could be a hell of a lot worse. Going to hurt like crazy, but. Given him a shot of morphine, some antibiotics. He’s a fit bugger by the looks of him. Should be able to move with a bit of help after I strap him tight.’

Wilkes took a quick look at the exit wound and knew exactly how Joe would be feeling. He’d taken a bullet in almost exactly the same place when on patrol in the first days of INTERFET. He was up on the border of West Timor when the first round fired by the militia ambush had hit him in the chest and exited below his shoulder blade. A fusillade had then poured into their position. He could see men aiming their weapons and firing at him from thirty metres away, the dirt kicking up all around him. Miraculously, he wasn’t hit again. It all happened in slow motion. Then, suddenly, one of his men was on the ground, blood gurgling from both sides of his neck.

‘Got a time on that?’ asked Wilkes, getting his mind back on the job at hand.

‘Gimme five.’

‘What about that bloke?’ asked Wilkes, indicating the Indonesian soldier on the ground with the wild eyes.

‘Dunno, boss.’

‘He was bitten by a cobra,’ said Suryei, wiping her eyes, getting herself back under control.

‘He must have been given some antivenom or he’d have carked it by now,’ said Stu. ‘What’ll I do with him?’

The man was obviously in a bad way. There was not much more they could do for him. ‘Give him food and water and leave him for his own people.’

‘You’ve got food?’ grunted Joe.

Wilkes turned to Robson and Curry. ‘Sure. Cough up, you blokes. And don’t hog your chocolate,’ he said.

‘Already on it, boss,’ said Curry.

‘As in Cadbury’s?’ asked Joe. Curry found some chocolate in his pack and held it under Joe’s nose. He breathed deeply. It smelled glorious. But then the morphine kicked in and he vomited. ‘On second thoughts…’ Joe said between heaves, changing his mind. Robson shrugged and put his rations back in his pack.

‘James. Get on the blower and see if you can get us a lift out of here pronto,’ said Wilkes to Littlemore, who was already in the process of laying out the Raven’s aerial. It came wrapped tightly around a small but heavy lead sphere. He fired it up into the upper reaches of the canopy with a rubber sling provided especially for the purpose. The extended aerial gave the radio a phenomenal range. Without it, transmission was limited to a handful of kilometres.

The sound of the crack from the FNC80 that wounded Joe was carried up the ravine to the Indon force fanned across the ridge line. The shape of the valley guaranteed that there was no confusion over its point of origin.

Captain ‘Sandman’ Elliot shook his head with disappointment. Goddam it! The turnaround of the V22 Osprey and its AV-8 escort couldn’t have come at a worse time. The special ops boys on the ground must have completed their mission — whatever it was — in lightning quick time.

Sandman had taken the lead as the flight had penetrated Indonesian airspace. His job was to blast enemy radar with massive bursts of energy — weld them with electrons — so that it was blinded, allowing his flight to pass unseen into the viper’s pit. Only, there was a slight problem. His number two engine had just suffered an overheat with the needle going right off the dial, and he’d had to throttle it back to idle. There was no choice. He had to turn for home, whether he liked it or not. Correction. He’d have to plot a course to the Philippines. He’d never risk trying to limp all the way back to the Carrier Battle Group down in the Arafura Sea. It was just a little too far away on one engine, and he didn’t trust this bucket to keep him out of the water.

He cursed and slapped the Perspex canopy with the back of his hand. These Prowlers were great for prying but they flew like bags of shit. He called in his situation and reviewed his position in relation to the tanker, the V22 and the AV-8s. Having no electronic warfare on this sortie could get messy. The Indon air force would investigate the presence of foreign military planes in its airspace if it detected the incursion. He doubted the country had a full array of ground-based air defence radar, but Indonesia could certainly have some kind of coast watch. Whatever, like it or not, his countrymen were on their own.

Sandman was halfway through briefing his three-man crew on their situation when the AWACS informed him that there was another Prowler on exercise nearby. It was forty minutes away, and could replace him in the flight, giving the mission back its cloak of invisibility. Forty minutes. That wasn’t so bad. Those damn AV-8s were probably low on fuel. Again. Most likely they would need to RV with the KC-135 and take on a load. By the time they were back over Indon territory, the replacement EA-6B would have just about arrived. The AV-8s and Osprey would just have to fly low until it did. A slight delay. No sweat.

Sandman turned away feeling a little less glum. He was still pissed at having to bug out and miss the show, but at least he wouldn’t be leaving anyone in the crapper.

James Littlemore broke off the transmission. ‘We got maybe an hour to kill, boss.’

‘What’s their bloody story?’ snapped Wilkes, annoyed. The MAG’s objective had been completed. It was time to go and every minute they spent loitering in enemy territory could be disastrous.

‘Gremlins,’ said Littlemore, still hunched over the radio. ‘One of the aircraft has had engine trouble. Plus the Harriers need juice. They’re RV-ing with a tanker in twenty minutes. It’ll take ten to fifteen for the lot of them to refuel… around fifty-plus minutes to get their arses back here.’

There was absolutely nothing Wilkes or anyone else could do about it. ‘Are they okay with our revised RV?’ he asked.

‘Gave them the coords, Sarge. They said no problem.’

‘It would be nice to know where those other Kopassus boys are at. Have we got any fresh intel on that?’

Littlemore shook his head. ‘Didn’t ask.’

The Americans would have passed on any further information for sure if they had it. Still, it often paid to check. Wilkes walked the inside perimeter of the clearing, focusing his senses on the jungle outside it, while Littlemore re-established communications.

‘That’s a negative on a fresh satellite pass, boss,’ said Littlemore, disappointed, when Wilkes returned.

Wilkes was not aware of the satellite’s period, but he was reasonably sure another pass would have been made by now so it was worth the ask. And they had to update Canberra when contact was made with any survivors anyway. ‘Give Canberra a call and see what they’ve got.’

‘The sat phone’s out, boss. Deader than Kurt Cobain.’

‘What’s the story?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Dunno. It’s not batteries,’ shrugged Littlemore. ‘The jungle canopy might be acting as a shield… Could be the phone, but I checked it twice back at Dili.’

‘Have you tried hitting it?’ Morgan chipped in.

‘Violence and microprocessors go together like fish and chocolate, Smell,’ said Littlemore. ‘But I did give it a little tap — nothing.’

The satellite phones were their only secure communications link. Wilkes was not keen about using the AWACS as a relay station. If anyone was listening in, their presence would be known. A message to Canberra would have to wait until they were outside Indonesian airspace.

Wilkes went through the odds of further meetings with the Kopassus in his head. In all, there’d been twenty contacts illuminated by the sat. Two were the survivors Joe and Suryei, the one with the odd heat signature must have been the man incapacitated by snakebite, and they’d just taken three more out of the game. That left a maximum of fourteen Kopassus troops to contend with. Nine against fourteen. Shit odds in a game of footie, but the difference here was that the Indons weren’t aware that the SAS were on the field.

‘Okay, let’s fuck off out of here,’ said Wilkes, getting edgy. ‘This place is soon going to be crawling with nasties.’ Every Indon soldier within earshot would be zeroing in on their position, and he was unsure of the direction they’d be coming from.

Wilkes had noted from the Indons already taken out that the Kopassus weren’t wearing comms, so it was likely that the rest of them didn’t know shit from shinola, but they would have heard the shot from the FNC80 just as they had. Wilkes’s Warriors should have been gone from this location already. ‘How you going there, Beck? Can we move out yet?’

‘Just about, boss.’

‘We’ve got to hoof it. If they can’t walk, carry them.’

Suryei’s cuts and abrasions were being seen to. The burns on her forearms had been bandaged in a way that would keep the insects off while allowing the air to circulate. Her forearms throbbed hotly under the bandages. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, finding that her smile came easily. Beck produced a hypodermic syringe and swabbed her skin before driving in the needle. ‘Antibiotics cocktail,’ he said. ‘The cut in your belly. You don’t know where that soldier’s knife has been, but you can bet it wasn’t sterile.’ Suryei nodded. ‘Those burns on your arms don’t look too good either.’

She crouched beside Joe, who was lying on a groundsheet. He had stopped vomiting. ‘How you going?’ Suryei asked.

‘Can’t feel a thing,’ said Joe dreamily. ‘My brain tells me I should be in pain, but nothing’s getting through. I know it’s there. Very weird. You should try this stuff.’ Joe brought his hand up to his face and turned it slowly in front of his eyes as if it was something strange and foreign. ‘Unreal…’ he said.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Baby, I can fly.’ Joe struggled to his feet, helped by Suryei.

LCPL Ellis came up to Suryei and held out his hand. ‘This might come in handy, Miss,’ he said. In his palm was the button the Indonesian soldier had sliced off. He’d found it next to the snakebite victim. ‘I’ve got a needle and thread too.’ He produced the items from one of the many pouches hung on his belt.

Suryei realised that her pants were open at the front and that someone, unnoticed, had draped a camouflage shirt over her shoulders. Joe was also now wearing an Australian regulation army shirt. She looked around. A couple of the men had stripped down to khaki singlets. ‘Thanks,’ she said, accepting the offer.

‘You’ll have us knitting tea cosies next, Ellis,’ said Wilkes, humour and impatience mixed in equal measure. ‘We don’t have time for that.’

Ellis nodded and produced a small tube from his medical kit. He put a few drops of the liquid on the open flaps of her pants. ‘Don’t get this on your fingertips or it’ll stick them together,’ he said quickly. ‘Superglue — originally developed for battlefield wounds… liquid stitches.’

And then Suryei was aware that the mood in the clearing had suddenly changed. Within an instant, all the Australian soldiers, except for Corporal Needle-and-thread and the medic, had disappeared. The medic put his finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Then he cocked his head to the side, concentrating. He nodded and spoke softly into a small boom mike which, until now, had been folded back away from his mouth.

Several pairs of Indonesian soldiers, including Sergeant Marturak, converged on the clearing where they’d left one of their number to care for the snakebite victim. The men met up unexpectedly in the thick jungle drawn by the sound of the gunshot, and the surprise rendezvous, coupled with their nervousness, nearly resulted in a firefight. Had they been aware that enemy soldiers were also in the immediate area, they would almost certainly have started shooting at each other.

The Indon soldiers were wary. Nervous. Three days in the jungle tracking a foe that had eluded their best efforts — and killed or incapacitated a number of their comrades — had made them tense. And cautious.

There was a single silenced shot, phut. One of Marturak’s men fell, and then suddenly the jungle was alive with the sound of automatic FNC80 fire.

One of the Indonesian soldiers walking in a crouch beside Marturak collapsed forwards into fern trees as a small fountain of blood plumed from the back of his head. Marturak’s surprise only lasted an instant. He dropped to the ground with the rest of his men and emptied his magazine in what he thought was the general direction of the shot. He then changed magazines.

Were they under friendly fire? Another of his men fell down beside him, much like the first, with one shot removing half his skull. The shot sounded different. It was-n’t like the familiar noise made by his soldiers’ weapons. The combination of confusion and stress was not allowing his brain to draw the correct conclusion that perhaps these weren’t his own men firing on them. He called out again to cease fire but his words were cut to pieces by a thirty-round burst fired by one of his men off to the left.

The blanket of fire put down by the familiar-sounding FNCs was reducing in intensity. Marturak realised that his men were being cut down. He worked towards what cover he could find on his belly, snaking through razor grass. It was impossible to see what was going on. He had to keep his head down or lose it. Moving constantly meant survival. If he stayed where he was, he would eventually be encircled and death would pour in from all sides. Marturak glanced left and right. He had a man on either side of him that he could see. They were his men. Beyond that, he had no idea what was left of his force.

Retreat was the only answer. Was it possible that the two survivors from the plane crash had found themselves weapons and were now hunting them? No, impossible. He then reminded himself that the fire coming from unseen sources sounded different. It wasn’t Indonesian issue, whatever it was.

That meant there were other soldiers in the jungle. Marturak tried to piece together the action of the last few minutes. His men had fired possibly upwards of three hundred rounds, yet he had heard only several of the deadly ‘popping’ sounds. Silenced weapons. He was aware that at least two of those shots had found targets. Head shots.

Marturak’s mind was starting to work now and the picture it was painting did not augur particularly favourably for his future health and well-being. It had to be some kind of Special Forces group. But whose? He called to his men that he would cover their retreat to trees ten metres behind. He came up on one knee and sprayed the jungle ahead of him in a forty-five degree arc. He kept the trigger squeezed against the guard until the magazine ran dry. He dropped flat to the ground and fumbled with another magazine. Silence. Perhaps he’d been lucky, taken the opposition by surprise and killed the lot of them.

Marturak worked his way backwards to the trees on his stomach, as quietly and as quickly as he could. The chest-high growth was good cover. His feet pushed against something immovable. Swinging himself around, Marturak came face to face with two more of his men. He couldn’t recognise either of them because their faces were missing. Marturak was cornered and he knew it. It was pure luck that had saved him from sharing the fate of the handful of men now lying silently in the grass around him.

It was the first time in his career as a soldier that he felt helpless. Worse than that, he was paralysed with fear. If he stayed where he was, he would be surrounded — if he wasn’t already — and slaughtered. If he tried to fight it out, he would end up like the rest of his men. When he realised exactly how limited his choices were, Marturak’s temper snapped, breaking his paralysis.

He had been after two pathetic survivors, civilians, for well over forty-eight hours. They were unarmed, untrained (as far as he knew) and they had managed, somehow, to make him look like an amateur. He had failed in his mission. If he ever made it back to Jakarta alive, he was certain he wouldn’t stay that way for long. The men he worked for would see to that. Marturak thumbed the selector switch to single shot. He couldn’t remember how many rounds were left in his magazine; in the excitement, he’d lost count of the number of shots he’d fired. He expelled the magazine, placing it inside his shirt, and fitted a fresh mag with one oiled movement.

Marturak bit a large chunk out of his lower lip and blood filled his mouth. The pain worked. It sent him into a rage. The scream filled his throat and he sprang to his feet, weapon ready for killing. But just as quickly, the scream died, strangled. Marturak was surrounded, literally ringed by soldiers, high-tech camouflaged warriors, weapons zeroed at his head. Suicide suddenly seemed a pointless option. Marturak flung his rifle away from him as if it was poisonous. Holding onto it would definitely end his life. It was bald reaction.

One of the soldiers moved forward. His weapon was different to the others’. It was a sawn-off shotgun and blue smoke snaked lazily from the black pit pointed at his head. Shotgun blasts. Marturak realised now why he couldn’t recognise the mashed faces of his comrades. He raised his hands slowly, interlocking his fingers behind his head.

He examined the soldiers who had so adeptly surrounded, cornered and slaughtered his men. They were young, serious, but far from nervous, as his men would have been if the roles had been reversed. These soldiers were cool, calculated professionals. No emotion, just business. It wouldn’t take much for one (or all) of them to pull their triggers and kill him in cold blood. Again, if the positions had been reversed, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it and he didn’t expect them to either. His hunch was right. They were Australian SAS. The way they carried themselves and did their job made them instantly recognisable. Marturak had trained with these people before, and even fought against them in a skirmish on the border of West and East Timor. He remembered that battle vividly. He’d managed to shoot one in the head as the man stood over his fallen comrade, yet still the soldier had stood his ground and kept firing. He’d been fighting against the Australian occupation forces with the militia and had barely managed to escape with his life. Yes, they were good.

Marturak talked to them, quietly at first. He knew they probably wouldn’t understand Indonesian but if he somehow forced his humanity on them, there was a slight chance that they would find it harder to kill him. That’s what the TNI psychs said. Now he played that card for all it was worth.

Marturak clasped his hands together in front of his face in the universal gesture of prayer and babbled pathetically, beseeching, pleading. He almost made himself sick grovelling like this. Such antics had never deflected him from a chosen course of action, namely, to pull the trigger. But he needed time. It was all about time. The stocky soldier who appeared to be the leader — he couldn’t be sure because none of the men carried any insignia of rank — ignored his pleas. The soldier stuck the barrel of his shotgun above one of Marturak’s wrists and forced it down, gesturing at him to put his hands behind his back. Another soldier, one he couldn’t see, held his fingers interlocked together and secured his wrists tightly with a nylon lock-tie while a third soldier patted him down, removing his sidearm, grenades and knife. A muzzle jabbed him in the back and he was walking forward, a captured prisoner in his own country.

Getting his mind back into gear took a couple of minutes but the shock of capture passed as he began assessing the situation, sifting through options. He knew he had more men out there in the bush. They would have heard the shooting. They had a radio, and they were in Indonesia. It was their home. He needed time to turn it around on these invaders. These… Australians (he mentally spat the word). In the meantime, he had to stay alive, so he prayed for mercy and tried to squeeze tears out of his eyes.

Wilkes couldn’t speak Bahasa, but he didn’t need to. The man was obviously begging for his life. Wilkes was not a cold-blooded killer. He had not been specifically ordered to slot this man. But he also had absolutely no idea what to do with him. Slotting him seemed his only option. Perhaps an alternative would present itself.

Coombs came up to Wilkes and revealed the contents of a rucksack belonging to one of the dead Indonesian soldiers. ‘Looks like black boxes to me, boss. From the plane.’

That was a find. The people back home would be interested in those, big time.

Marturak walked into the small clearing pushed in front of his captors, head bowed and hands behind his back. The SAS soldiers filed in behind him. Beck and Littlemore stood to meet the advancing party, as did Suryei, while Joe stayed on his back, hypnotised by the canopy swaying high overhead. Marturak saw more of his men laid out next to each other on the ground, their shirts pulled over their heads to hide the gore from view. It took every ounce of willpower not to scream with rage at the sight of his men slaughtered by these fucking Australian pigs. He tried not to look at the bodies. It was important to keep intact the cloak of meekness he’d managed to pull over himself.

Then the woman, one of the survivors he’d failed to hunt down, came up to him and spat in his face and that was the end of his composure. He staggered forward in an attempt to shoulder-charge her, but having his hands tied behind his back upset his balance. Marturak tripped and ploughed head first into the ground, dirt filling his mouth. He struggled to get his feet under his body until a hand grabbed his shirt firmly by the collar and hauled him up.

The woman stared at him defiantly. She appeared to be Indonesian. This was one of the people who’d made him and his men look stupid. Her companion was on the ground, wounded by the look of him. Good.

Suryei feared this man. He’d come to represent for her all the senseless brutality of a nation, the torment of East Timor — the graves, so much destruction. He had pursued them through the jungle in order to kill them. She looked at the bodies being lined up on the ground, and thought about the men who probably lay dead beyond her view in the jungle. It struck Suryei that her and Joe’s survival was nothing more than sheer good luck. The odds of living through the plane crash had been staggering, but then there was the jungle and this bunch of killers to contend with. The soldier didn’t even know her. The soldier’s hate was mindless. He inhabited a brutal world she wanted no part of. With that fresh realisation, she turned her back on the invective streaming from Marturak’s mouth and quietly sat beside Joe.

There were more Indonesian soldiers out there somewhere. Wilkes glanced at his watch. Just on forty-nine minutes till extraction. It would take them a good thirty-five minutes to reach the RV — the place where the felled hardwood had torn a huge gash in the canopy, large enough for the V22 to drop in and lift them out. Better to take it slow and careful. It was time to move. Now. Any Kopassus within cooee would have been drawn to the gunfire at a run.

‘Stu, you ready?’ he asked.

‘When you are, boss.’

‘How about Joe there?’ he said, nodding at Joe, who was staring up at the canopy, smiling.

‘Having a wonderful time, by the looks of things. He’ll be right.’

‘Okay, fuck-knuckles, let’s blow,’ said Wilkes quietly into his boom mike. ‘Stu, stay with the civilians. James, you’ve done bugger-all on this job. Make yourself useful and take the point. Get your machete out and cut us a path. Gary, you and Coombsy ranger for us. Mac, you take the rear. If anyone takes the easy way down our trail, let them know they’re making a big mistake. We don’t want any surprises and we’ve still got quite a few unfriendlies out there.’ Wilkes had no idea where the Indons would be coming from, but if they came across an obvious path cleared through the jungle, they just might follow it. That would be handy, because knowing where the Indonesians were would make dealing with them that much easier.

‘No wukkas, boss,’ said Mac Robson, checking the ammo box on his Minimi and moving off at the trot.

‘What do we do with blubber-mouth here?’ asked Ellis, gesturing at the Indonesian prisoner.

Wilkes had momentarily forgotten about the Indon sergeant. He sized the man up and again considered the alternatives. The Kopassus soldier was an ugly son-of-a-bitch, that was for sure, with the skin on his face so badly pockmarked it had the appearance of a dirty golf-ball. He tried not to let the look of the man influence his decision either way. The humanitarian side of him considered leaving him behind to care for his own man, the snakebite victim. The SAS soldier in him thought that he should at least take the man with them so that their identity, strength and position weren’t passed to his Kopassus mates, if they happened to stumble across each other. The soldier won the internal debate. ‘He comes with us. Tell him any funny business and we send him to Allah,’ said Wilkes simply.

The woman stepped up to within centimetres of the Indon soldier, yelled something at him, then turned and walked away.

Wilkes pulled her aside. ‘You speak Bahasa. What did you say to him?’

‘That if he doesn’t behave you’ll stick your shotgun up his arse and pull the trigger,’ she said coolly.

Wilkes cleared his throat involuntarily. ‘That’s about right, Suryei, thanks. We’re moving off now to our rendezvous. Getting airlifted out in forty-six minutes. You could give us a hand by staying close to Joe and helping him. He’s going to need it. We’re not going to race, but I want to get there with time to spare to set up a few defences, just in case.’

‘Ah, what’s your name again?’ enquired Suryei, embarrassed, aware that in the surprise of the arrival of the Australian soldiers, she’d forgotten it.

‘Tom will do,’ said Wilkes. ‘And this is my merry band of wankers.’ Several men laughed out loud.

‘If there’s one thing Joe and I can do after three days in this place, it’s move through the jungle. Don’t worry about us.’

‘Okay.’

Suryei suddenly realised that she had no idea how long they had been marooned here. ‘What day is it?’

‘It’s Friday. Thank God.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘All day…’ said Tom with a smile.

Suryei couldn’t believe it. It was only Friday? So much had happened. She had left Sydney on the Tuesday afternoon, and the plane had crashed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just two days ago. Unbelievable.

Suryei saw the soldier talk softly into the wire in front of his mouth. The mood in the clearing changed. Joe was lifted to his feet, supported by the soldier who’d dressed his wounds. Joe was obviously shaky, swaying on rubbery legs. Suryei went over to him and put her arm around him carefully, supporting him. He gave her a wan smile. Before she realised exactly what was going on, they were picking their way through the jungle again. Only this time it was different. The soldiers ahead were blazing the trail, and they knew where they were going. She felt safe with these people. They were her army. She felt good, secure, and Joe was doing better than expected.

As they walked, Wilkes reached up and plucked a piece of fruit, seemingly from out of the air, and gave it to her, smiling. He made a peeling gesture. She removed a portion of the skin and took a small bite. Whatever it was, it was sweet and delicious. She knew when they’d found the jackfruit that they were probably surrounded by food, and the soldier had just proved it. A small shiver went through her. It was good to be alive — a tangible thrill.

And then it hit her. The plane crash. The old couple shot dead. Finding Joe. Fire. Running. Death. And the awful question: why? Had the Qantas plane really been shot down because Joe had hacked into the Indonesian general’s computer and stolen invasion plans? Christ Almighty! The invasion! She couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten the most important thing.

Shit, it was more than important. And yet it had completely slipped her mind. Purely surviving had overwhelmed everything. One breath at a time. One step at a time. And why were Australian soldiers here in Indonesia fighting, shooting Indonesian soldiers? Jesus! Had it already begun? Were Australia and Indonesia at war? One country’s soldiers didn’t go into another country and kill that country’s soldiers unless they were. The thought sent a shudder down her spine. She kicked herself for being so self-absorbed.

‘I need a radio or a phone or something,’ she blurted to Wilkes. ‘I know why the Indonesians shot down our plane.’

Wilkes was taken aback. He had been expecting her to say that she liked the breadfruit. ‘How do you know the Indonesians shot it down?’

‘Because we found one of the plane’s engines in the jungle, blasted off the wing. There was an Indonesian missile still stuck in it.’

Jesus. Wilkes was genuinely surprised.

‘Are we at war with Indonesia?’ she asked nervously.

‘Not when we left East Timor,’ said Wilkes, frowning.

That’s something at least, thought Suryei. ‘I have to use your radio.’

‘We already know Indonesia shot the plane down, ’Wilkes said, attempting to calm her.

‘You know? You knew? How long have you known?’

‘About a day, maybe more.’

‘Then why has it taken so much time to get to us?’

‘Hang on, you asked how long it has been since we knew the plane was shot down. Not how long we’ve known about survivors.’

‘Okay, then when did you know about us?’

‘About as long as it takes to stuff us into a plane and get us here — a few hours, no more.’

Suryei chewed her lip. ‘Are you here because of Joe?’

‘Eh?!’ He looked at her, puzzled.

Suryei desperately wanted to tell the soldier everything, but she was afraid. Perhaps if they knew what Joe had done, these men would be less inclined to bring them to safety.

Wilkes felt she was holding something back. Suryei had become silent. ‘If you want to talk to anyone in Australia, you’ll have to wait. We’ve got a satellite phone but it’s not working. Something to do with interference from the canopy.’

Suryei had no reason to doubt the man. He was on her side. Still, a powerful feeling of unease swept through her. How much time did they have? Or had time run out? And who was she going to call anyway? It wasn’t as if she knew the Prime Minister…

Suryei watched Joe pick his way carefully through the jungle, leaning on a soldier. The morphine had wrapped him in its protective sheath. ‘How long will the morphine last?’ asked Suryei.

‘Depends on the person — their sensitivity to the drug, body weight, the level of pain. I’d say Joe’s got forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, before he comes back to earth. And he will land hard. That wound is going to hurt.’