Rogue Element (10 page)

‘Jesus! What happened then?’ Joe said, pulling himself up off the ground. The woman was dry retching. After she finished, she opened her hand and revealed a Bic disposable cigarette lighter. Her arms were bright red, burned by the heat.

‘Couldn’t you smell the kero?’ she asked. ‘It’s pooling everywhere here.’

‘Did you light it? With that?’ said Joe, incredulous.

‘I . . . I think so, yeah. There was some of the stuff – the kero – beside me.’ She stared at the lighter, every bit as surprised as Joe.

Joe’s breathing was short. He had just seen two men die a horrible death. They’d danced a ghastly jig as they’d tried to escape the flames that clung to them. If there’d been an opportunity to turn back, there was none now. Joe realised that killing, or being killed, was his only future.

In the cool underground cubicle, Ruth examined the brief report. Her radar and that inner voice of hers were working
as one now. Was the air traffic controller murdered, or was it just an accident? Ruth didn’t believe in coincidences. She sent on the report and wondered, what next?

There was a gentle tap on the door. A lance corporal entered and, with the grace of an excellent waiter at a three-hat restaurant, handed a sheet of paper to the ASIS chief.

Graeme Griffin read it and immediately snatched up the phone. ‘Spike, just got something from our NSA friends at the US embassy here. They thought it might be of interest. The air traffic controller in Bali who first reported QF-1 missing was found dead in his car at the bottom of a gully a short while ago.’

‘Shit . . .’ Niven said.

‘Yeah, I know. Look, I’m not sure what it means. Maybe nothing.’ But the feeling in Griffin’s gut told him it meant a hell of a lot of something.

After phoning in her earlier report, A-6 went home, parked her motor scooter, showered, changed, and took a taxi to Hasanuddin Airport. She had the appearance of any number of the welcoming friends and relatives milling about
the airport. She noted that a few children besotted by aircraft even had binoculars, like her, with which to watch the takeoffs and landings, and that relaxed her a little. She doubted, though, that any of them had a satellite phone on them, as she did.

She further observed that there were quite a few police and security officers around, but there was really nothing about her outward appearance that would attract their attention. A couple of aircraft had been late, so even the fact that she had lingered for hours at the observation deck, watching through her binoculars, passed unnoticed.

A-6 kept her binoculars trained on the air force side of the facility, and even that failed to raise an eyebrow, although A-6 thought it might. She’d begun the stakeout nervously, but soon relaxed. There were at least a thousand people in the place, coming and going, and she was just one woman amongst them. No one special.

Eventually they arrived, as she knew they would. The Super Pumas came in low from the north and settled over the other side of the airport on the air force apron. The doors cracked open when the rotors started to slow, but only the crew jumped down onto the tarmac. Other than their crews, the helos were empty. They had gone out with soldiers and come back from places unknown without them. It might be nothing, she thought. But there was something about the urgency of their departure that had attracted her attention in the first place. The helos had been gone around three hours. Was it worth reporting or not? She decided to call it in anyway. Too much information was always better than not enough.

The Tannoy announced that a Garuda flight from Jakarta had been diverted due to weather. A-6 feigned
disappointment and, shoulders hunched, joined the grumbling exodus from the terminal.

None of this made any sense to Joe. Why were these people trying to kill him? It was bizarre. They should be bundling him up and taking him to a hospital so that he could start recovering from the shock of the air disaster. What the fuck was happening here? And who was this woman who’d appeared from, well, nowhere, and rescued them from certain death with her cigarette lighter, like some female McGiver?

‘We’d better not hang around,’ she said, interrupting his train of thought. ‘They’ll come to investigate for sure.’ She stood, turned her back on Joe and the foul stench of sizzling flesh and kerosene, and made her way to the relative security of the tunnel. Joe got up and followed, somewhat dazed. It was mid-afternoon and surprisingly dark under the canopy, the light reduced further by the smoke. When the sun set it would be pitch black. Complete darkness would bring a mixed blessing. It would hide them, but it would also cover the approach of more soldiers.

The all-pervading screeching sound he assumed was made by some kind of bird had stopped. In its place was a vast number of chirps, squeaks, grunts, rustlings and chatterings. The jungle was waking from the sleep induced by the heat of the day.

Joe joined the woman in the tunnel. Given what had just happened, he was reluctant to crawl back into the
hole, but he had nowhere else to go. The gloom was suddenly lit by a glow. The woman was burning leeches off her legs with the lighter. In the light provided by the single flame he saw that his own legs were covered in the things, as well as cuts and bruises.

‘If I were you, I’d strip down,’ she said. ‘You’ve been in the water. You’ve probably got these buggers all over you.’

Joe took off his shirt and pants in the confined space of the tunnel and inspected his chest in the shifting yellow glow. He counted a dozen leeches.

‘There are more on your back. Here . . .’ The woman carefully burned them off. ‘You’ve probably got some down there, too,’ she said, gesturing at his underpants. ‘But you can get them off.’ There was no smile accompanying that. She was all business.

‘Where did you come from?’ he asked over the sizzling and popping of the leeches.

‘Same place you did. I was in economy, down the back. I always travel down the back. Statistically gives you the best chance of surviving a crash. I saw the part of the plane I was seated in down the bottom of a gorge. I don’t think there would have been any survivors in it. So, so much for statistics,’ she said with the suggestion of a wry smile. ‘Anyway, I got lucky. I was thrown clear.’ The woman ran her fingers gently over the back of her skull, tracing the outline of a bump the size of a golf ball. The swelling was tender. She spied another crop of leeches behind her legs and the discovery distracted her. She forgot about the bump and went after them.

‘The noise of the choppers overhead woke me up. I must have been unconscious, or asleep, or in shock – whatever. When I saw those soldiers, I just couldn’t believe it. I was thrilled.’

Joe knew exactly how she’d felt.

‘And then I saw them shoot a couple of people and I just ran into the jungle. I thought I was it, the last survivor.’

‘In the tunnel . . . how did you know I wasn’t one of them?’ Joe asked, gesturing back behind him with a flick of his head.

‘I didn’t. You surprised me.’

Joe nodded. When the woman had broken through into the tunnel, he’d thought the worst too. ‘So, what’s your name?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Um . . .’ Joe was confused by her reluctance.

‘Sorry. I’m just a bit . . . you know. I don’t know what’s going on. Why are we being shot at?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Joe. ‘I just keep thinking I’ll wake up, that I’m having a nightmare – too much MSG in the food or something.’

‘Why kill us? What possible reason . . . those poor people, shot in cold blood.’

Joe heard the woman take a deep breath.

‘Well, my name’s Joe. Joe Light.’ He offered his hand.

She took it, forcing a smile. ‘Suryei Hujan.’

Shaking her hand felt weird and reassuring at the same time. Introductions were gestures that belonged in the real world, like the pub or the office. But the contact felt good, like it was possible for things to return to normal.

‘Pretty name. Mean anything?’ he asked.

‘Sun and rain, a yin and yang thing. My parents are romantics,’ she said, checking around the tunnel walls.

Joe didn’t know where to go from there. The small talk evaporated.

Suryei had kept the flame on her lighter burning during
this conversation. But now the flame had heated the lighter to a point where the metal was too hot to handle. She let out a quiet gasp. The light flicked off and she stuck her finger in her mouth to relieve the burning sensation. They were instantly swallowed by a blackness that swam with after-images of the flickering light. Night had fallen.

‘Better not waste this,’ she said, pocketing the Bic. ‘We should get moving. The soldiers . . .’ The sense of shared safety they’d felt huddled together in the friendly glow of the lighter was extinguished with the flame, and the atmosphere between them became strained and awkward.

‘What do you do, Joe, when you’re not dodging bullets?’ asked Suryei quietly after they’d crawled some way in silence.

‘Computer software. Games, mostly.’

‘Great,’ said Suryei, half under her breath. ‘That’ll come in handy here.’

Joe had never felt like apologising for his occupation before. Back in Sydney, it was mostly a pretty cool thing to do for a living.

Joe could hear Suryei breathing in the murk. He called up his last image of her before the lighter was extinguished. It was hard to tell exactly what she looked like with all the mud and gore that covered her face. With a name like Suryei Hujan, she had to be Asian.

‘Got some water here,’ he said, trying to be friendly. Despite the hot, close air, the ambience was frosty.

‘Thanks,’ she said, a little of the edge gone from her tone. ‘You’ve got a rucksack. What’s in it?’

He felt around inside it. ‘Some bottles of water, a couple of trays of aeroplane food, and a sort of axe.’ He rummaged through the contents again quickly. Something was
missing. ‘Had a pair of binoculars . . . must have left them somewhere.’

‘More than I’ve got,’ she said. ‘The lighter. That’s it.’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Did. Ran out.’

Joe held out a bottle to her ghostly outline. She took it. He heard her open it and drink.

She handed him the empty. ‘Put this back in your bag. We don’t want to leave those bastards any signposts.’

‘Sure . . . Hey, what was that thing that came down the tunnel?’ Joe was not keen on meeting another of the animals in the darkness.

‘A babirusa.’

‘Strange looking thing.’

‘Pretty rare.’

‘What were those growths on its face?’

‘Teeth.’

‘Eh?’

‘Its canines grow through its snout . . . God, I’m an idiot!’ said Suryei suddenly. ‘That tells us where we are!’

‘Yeah?’

‘The babirusa is native to Sulawesi.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Part of Indonesia, one of the larger islands.’

‘How do you know all that?’

‘I’m a photo-journalist. These days nature stuff, mostly. We’re lucky to have seen one. Wish I’d had my camera.’

‘The babirusa probably isn’t feeling too lucky at the moment,’ said Joe, remembering how it had died.

‘No, guess not. Anyway, at least we know where we are now. This tunnel was its highway through the jungle. Probably leads to a favourite food or water source. Which
reminds me, we’re sweating heaps. We’re going to have to drink three litres each a day at least. If we’re here a while, we’ll need a good, clean supply.’

Joe was glad she’d cleared up the water consumption question for him, but the thought of being ‘here a while’ filled him with dread.

‘Come in, you blokes,’ the PM said to Niven, Griffin and Sharpe, who had been waiting outside. ‘I’ve just briefed Hugh Greenway and he’s up to speed.’ The tall, stooped Minister of Defence, nicknamed ‘Lurch’ by the press, nodded at his colleagues as they filed through the door and took their seats in the small auditorium.

‘I’ve booked a conference call with Byron Mills, our ambassador in Washington, and I thought it best if we all caught it, to save time and avoid the Chinese whispers.’

He picked up the handset and pressed a number. ‘Shirl, get Byron on the line, would you, mate?’

The snow on the television coalesced to become a distinguished-looking, white-haired man.

‘G’ day, Byron,’ said the PM.

‘Bill, gentlemen,’ began the ambassador in his sonorous baritone. ‘Everyone here?’

‘Yep,’ Blight said. ‘We’re it.’

‘Okay . . .’ He paused to look down at his notes outside the camera’s field of view. ‘I’ve put our case through the appropriate channels here and, well, we’ve got a problem.’

‘What’s that?’ said Niven.

‘The Americans won’t help us with a satellite.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because basically, they don’t have enough assets to go around. They’re keeping watch over a large part of the earth at the moment – the Middle East, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Chinese, the Russians, the Korean peninsula, and there’s that unfortunate business going on in East Africa.’

‘Terrific,’ Niven said.

‘The feeling here is that the plane will turn up anyway before they can re-task a sat and get it on station. The Indonesians say they’re putting a lot of effort into locating it and the Americans believe that. So do we, right?’

Blight looked at the other men in the room. ‘Yes,’ he said unconvincingly.

‘They believe that if the plane crashed in the jungle, the chances of anyone surviving would be next to nil. So . . . look, they’re saying it’s a tragedy, but not one they’re happy to take their eye off other balls to investigate. I reckon they’d probably think differently if terrorists claimed responsibility, and if the prospect of finding people alive was greater, but, well . . .’

There’d been reluctance to state the chances of survival so emphatically – there was always hope – but there it was: reality. Christ! thought the PM. ‘So where does that leave us, Byron?’ Blight asked, plainly disappointed.

‘There is one avenue I’d like to investigate, but I’ll keep that to myself for the moment because it mightn’t go anywhere.’

‘Fair enough. If something turns up?’

‘Sure, get back to you straight away. I’m going to keep at
them anyway, Bill. If the plane doesn’t turn up for a couple of days they might change their tune, especially if we’re prepared to do a little horse trading over free-trade issues. Keep you posted.’

‘Thanks, Byron.’ The PM’s deflated tone reflected everyone’s disappointment.