Sword of Allah

S10°30′10″ E126°15′02″, Timor Sea

HMAS Arunta was rigged for battle. Commander Steve Drummond stood on the fly bridge, legs taking the rolling motion of the frigate as it rode the swell. Leading Seaman Sean Matheson stood beside him, behind the Browning, watching the dolphins racing along and giving the ship a good run for its money. Both men wore their JSLIST suits but the hoods and gasmasks were hanging down their backs. Drummond inched the binoculars along the horizon off the boat’s port bow. Strategic Command in Canberra had hoped to add the Arunta to the protective screen around Darwin but the ship was too far to the north. Intelligence sources expected the drone would be nowhere near their current position, but Drummond put the crew on high alert anyway. ‘Anything on screen, X?’ asked the captain into the microphone.

‘Negative, sir,’ said Lieutenant Commander Angus Briggs. There was plenty of unusual traffic at the radar’s extreme range, much of it airborne and RAAF in nature. A couple of F/A-18s and a KC-130 tanker were approaching but they were still a long way off to the south-west. In short, there was nothing unidentified or unusual. Briggs again checked the display on the monitor generated by the Saab Vectronics radar, its massive dish rotating atop the ship’s communications tower interrogating the sea and air around it with a powerful spray of microwave energy. The radar showed the landmass of East Timor lying off their starboard beam and their track was south-west, roughly parallel with the coastline.

HMAS Arunta had completed its six-month tour. By all accounts, the mission had been a successful one, although one man — Johnny Teo — had lost his life aboard a cargo vessel being inspected, falling into its bilge and drowning. Finally, after months of the stress of battle, no sleep and the constant threat of attack, they were headed home, on a course for Darwin. And then the change of orders came through at the same time as the story broke on the news: the UAV, the nerve gas, the resulting fear and violence in both Darwin and Jakarta. The crew had watched the report, stunned. Hadn’t this been why the war was being fought? Had the sacrifices all been for nothing? A feeling of pointlessness had settled on the ship that was hard to shake.