Sword of Allah

Nam Sa River, Myanmar

The US Blackhawk, cleared through Thai airspace, landed Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes and Lance Corporal Gary Ellis on a remote hilltop just inside the northern Thai border with Myanmar. Monroe had wanted to ‘tag along’, but Wilkes had vetoed it. Their partnership in Israel was a temporary one and Wilkes was no longer seconded to the CIA. This particular leg of the mission required stealth, something that seemed to go against the American’s grain. Commander Niven had shrugged when Monroe had complained. ‘Sorry, but the call is Warrant Officer Wilkes’s,’ he’d said. Monroe was pissed about it but Wilkes was sure the friendship would survive.

Wilkes and Ellis crossed into Myanmar just after sunset, when the air had cooled appreciably and smelled of rain and composting humus, of decay and regeneration. They made good time to the planned observation point twenty-five klicks inside Myanmar, because most of it’d been spent on the back of an elephant, the animal’s swaying flanks rustling the grasses and leaves with a slow four/four beat.

‘American, American,’ the old elephant handler had said when Wilkes and Ellis bailed him up a handful of klicks into their trek. After his initial surprise at seeing two heavily armed soldiers from the West, the man had smiled with a mouth full of glistening black teeth and said, ‘Rocky, Rocky,’ and jabbed and hooked at the air. American? Well, it was close enough so Wilkes let it pass and, besides, he’d be paying with US dollars, the universal lubricant. He brought out a fistful of greenbacks and struck a deal on the spot.

There was not much to do on the elephant and it gave Wilkes time to reflect. Despite everything going on, his mind kept wandering back to Annabelle. He still couldn’t understand how they’d managed to hit the wall so hard. They’d talked a couple of times on the phone but the conversations had been strained. She’d moved to Sydney and, as usual, he was somewhere he couldn’t reveal. The fact that Belle was in Sydney was good, and bad. Townsville wasn’t under threat but, probably irrationally, he felt better about her being further away from Darwin.

Wilkes and Ellis arrived within two kilometres of the observation hill with time to spare. Their handler readily accepted an additional cash bonus, and somehow Wilkes managed to convey that there’d be more to come if he could keep the pachyderm’s motor running and take them back to the border before sunrise.

The night swallowed the elephant as it turned noisily, snorting through its trunk, and headed back down the trail, the handler waving at the soldiers and tapping the beast’s ears with a stick. Wilkes and Ellis both verified the time. The moon would rise above the hills at 0446, so there were plenty of hours of complete darkness to use as cover as they completed their tasks. Wilkes heard a coughing sound carried on the faint breeze. ‘Tiger,’ he said just above a whisper.

‘I know,’ said Ellis, who had a brief flash of himself hanging helplessly from the mouth of a large cat as it trotted proudly off to its cubs, and he shuddered. Eating a bullet was one thing, becoming an animal’s dinner was something else entirely, and he gave the pistol grip of his silenced M4 an involuntary squeeze to reassure himself.

Wilkes picked up on Ellis’s nervousness. ‘It’d be more scared of you than you are of it,’ he said.

‘I doubt it, boss,’ said Ellis smiling, his teeth almost fluorescent against his painted, camouflaged skin. He adjusted the NVG’s harness over his head, tightening it, and switched on the unit’s remote light source. One eye filled with green daylight, the jungle trail ahead now clearly illuminated and defined.

‘Let’s move,’ said Wilkes.

Ellis nodded.

They made their way cautiously to the ridgeline, listening for human sounds. The hills were densely covered in vegetation. They climbed the face of a lone hill too steep and rocky for the jungle to get a footing. Once climbed, the vantage point offered a clear line of sight across the valley. Wilkes breathed in the still night air and considered the changing role of Special Forces. Spotting for laser-guided munitions had become their raison d’être. In World War II, a commando had had to physically attach explosives to the target, set the fuse and, once the thing had gone off, try to get as far away as possible before the enemy found him and fried his arse. It hadn’t changed much in Wilkes’s father’s day, a lance corporal in the SAS in Vietnam. Those men set the benchmark. They were masters of stealth, bushcraft and evasion. They had to be. Just as in World War II, they had to snuggle up to the target, blow it up and then vamoose through territory the enemy knew intimately.

The laser had changed all that. It created a hot spot that could be projected on a target up to four kilometres away. The explosive charge, instead of being affixed by a soldier, was dropped from an aircraft. A sensor in the nose of the bomb locked onto the hot spot and, in the majority of cases, bingo, scratched the target. The soldier still had to hightail it out after the damage was done because the laser had to paint the target right up until the ordnance did the job, but at least he had a head start. That was Gulf War I technology.

The ground-based laser target designator, and other systems like it, advanced the game even further. Satellites orbiting miles overhead were now in the loop, guiding the explosives package to the target. This allowed the user to slip in and out quietly, and be back in the Jason recliner rocker watching telly when things went boom.

‘Boss?’

‘Sorry, mate. Daydreaming,’ said Wilkes.

Ellis took up a position on an overhang above and behind Wilkes and kept his senses honed, a round up the spout of his M4. Wilkes removed the GLTD from his pack and mated it with the tripod. He switched the power on and adjusted the legs of the tripod until the digital readout confirmed that the system was level. The GLTD illuminated the field of view in the familiar bright green of light enhancement. Wilkes centred the green dot on the intended target and confirmed the fact with the touch of a pad. This activated the device’s sensitive laser, which measured and recorded the target’s elevation, latitude and longitude to within fractions of seconds. He touched another pad, saving the information for later transmission. Finally, he used the GLTD to take an infrared image of the target, also for transmission. Wilkes signalled to Ellis that he was done, and then quickly dismantled and repacked the GLTD. Wilkes climbed up to Ellis and gave the signal to move. ‘The place is deserted,’ said Ellis.

‘Local festival,’ Wilkes said.

‘I hope for their sake they don’t return to work early.’

They quietly retraced their steps down the ridge and crossed the valley, where Wilkes made two more recordings on the GLTD.

An hour later, they were back on top of the elephant heading south, parting the jungle like a blunt-nosed barge through water, the musty smell of the animal’s hide mingling with the tang of sweat-soaked leather and the handler’s body odour.