Rogue Element (13 page)

Niven woke exhausted after a brief catnap and sat upright
on his couch. He checked the time: almost half past eleven. He’d desperately wanted to sleep, to curl up under the warmth of the covers at home, and wake up to find the whole Qantas mess a bad dream. But the situation was real, and he knew that he’d never get any worthwhile shuteye so he hadn’t bothered trying.

He’d requested a briefing on Sulawesi, but nothing much of practical use had turned up. It was an island covered in volcanoes, formerly known as Celebes, and very inhospitable. A small mountain of largely useless reference material sat on his desk and spilled onto the carpeted floor.

There was a knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he said. Griffin walked in, looking dishevelled, tie off and top button open, and flopped onto the CDF’s sofa. ‘Hey, Griff, I see you live here like me,’ said Niven. ‘What’s up?’

The ASIS chief held up a folder and waggled it, expelling a lungful of air noisily as his body sank into the cushions. ‘A DOD briefing on Hasanuddin AFB, Sulawesi, its strategic importance – the usual.’ He tossed the cream manila folder onto the pile on Niven’s desk. ‘You turn up anything?’

‘On Sulawesi? We’ve got nada on the place, and neither does Foreign Affairs. Can you believe I had to send someone down to the local library and travel shop? Once you leave the population centres on the coast, it’s a mystery island. There’s bugger-all on the place in these books. A bit of history – it was once the capital of the Dutch Spice Islands. There’s the occasional picture of a prahu, a local teak schooner with a high sweeping bow, and a mug shot of a Bugis, the people who sail them. Oh, and the Toraja, a tribe who bury their dead in limestone caves tunnelled into cliff faces. That’s about it.’

‘The best source we found was this fifteen dollar tourist guide.’ Niven held up a thin, greeting card-sized publication. ‘Get this. It says here, “Look at the maps and our texts on the island’s central regions: you’ll notice there is very little information available for most of the mountainous areas. If you travel to any of these parts, let us know if you survive and what you found.” Great, huh?’ he said, flipping the booklet into the bin.

‘Yeah, I know. I’ve come up with pretty much the same from my people. But I do have something that’ll interest you,’ said Griffin. ‘We have an asset on Sulawesi.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Niven, suddenly focused.

‘No, seriously. At a place called Maros, around twenty-five klicks north of Makassar. Near Hasanuddin AFB.’

Niven leaned forward. He sensed that Griffin had some news. ‘C’mon, mate, you do drag things on. Spit it out.’

‘We got something from our asset this morning. Apparently, a couple of Super Pumas loaded with Special Forces – Kopassus – took off heading north. The helos came back three hours later. Empty. It’s all in the folder.’ Griffin nodded at the sheaf he’d put on Niven’s table.

The information didn’t appear to be ground-breaking, but it could be the key to something major. ‘What’s the significance?’ asked Niven.

‘Apparently they were in a big hurry to go somewhere,’ said Griffin.

‘Do you think our Indonesian friends are keeping something from us?’

‘No, but the asset there thought the behaviour unusual. The NSA also thinks there could be some significance in it. The question is, what?’

‘So we are getting some cooperation from the
Americans at last?’

‘Spike, they’ve never been uncooperative. We’re getting lots of NSA stuff. They just can’t give us satellites. There’s nothing sinister in it.’

‘Hmm,’ said Niven, thinking. ‘Well, at least we’ve got someone up there on the ground. Can we get the asset more involved if we need to?’

‘She’s trained as an observer only, but she’s good – thorough.’

‘Got any ideas?’ asked Niven.

‘Not at the moment. What about the Kopassus? What do you think?’

‘Not much to go on, is it? Special Forces guys move around on training exercises every second week, just to keep sharp. As you said, could be significant, or not,’ Niven said, spinning a pencil around his thumb habitually, looking uncharacteristically lost. ‘I can’t believe we’re still in the dark, Griff. Bloody frustrating.’ He let the pencil fall to the desk with a clatter and wrung his hands. ‘I’m going to hang around here tonight and see what turns up. Just as a matter of interest, did you know there are three hundred and forty-seven individual sites on the Net dedicated to aircraft crashes?’

The intelligence chief said no, he didn’t know that. He stood to go. ‘Okay, Spikey, if you need me you know where to reach me. And get some sleep yourself, or you’ll be no use to anyone.’

‘Sure,’ said Niven, turning on his computer.

Yeah, sure, thought Griffin.

Joe was free-falling. Worse, he was being dragged down, accelerating backwards, arms and feet flailing as he fell. He was breathing hard, the oxygen being sucked from his lungs. The air pressure pushed into his back so that he felt squeezed by the forces above and the forces below – pressed meat in a sandwich. He opened his eyes with a start. The ghost light of pre-dawn had replaced the dark. They had overslept. And there was something else. Silence. That troubling, localised, eerie void he’d experienced in the tunnel. Suryei was also frozen beside him, except for her eyes. They were making a comical sideways motion. Again and again. He followed Suryei’s exaggerated eye movements and then he saw it too. The peril of their immediate situation became clear. His heart stopped. Treading softly just on the other side of the bush was a soldier.

They were painfully cramped already, so Joe and Suryei didn’t need to freeze. They followed the man with their eyes. He wasn’t looking in their direction, but away from them. They had no idea whether he was alone, leading other soldiers, or bringing up the rear. By oversleeping, they had totally lost their position in relation to their pursuers. When they were in the tunnel, they knew not only that the soldiers were behind them, but also how much of a head start they had. Now, they had lost that perspective. The stress and strain of the crash and their subsequent flight had sapped their bodies of all reserves of strength. They’d only meant to sleep for an hour each, but the second they’d closed their eyes they fell not so much asleep as
unconscious, their metabolisms working overtime to repair the mental and physical damage sustained.

Now they’d woken from their brief few hours of hibernation to discover themselves without any kind of tactical advantage whatsoever. The enemy was at the gate. All he had to do was turn, brush aside a few leaves, and the bush would present him with a prize. A spike from the vine had penetrated Joe’s Converse shoes. He felt pinned like a moth to a board, vulnerable and pathetic.

Joe braced himself for the bullets, hypnotised by the sight of the soldier. A rabbit in the headlights. He held his breath and waited for death to spit from the muzzle of the man’s rifle. But the bullets didn’t come. Instead, the soldier propped his gun against a fern and urinated into the bush. He appeared to look everywhere but
at
them. Yellow fluid coursed down one of the vines. It ran down another branch, and dripped onto the ground. Eventually, a small puddle formed at Suryei’s foot. She dared not move. The smell of the urine was sickening. Steam curled from it. Suryei felt like retching. Groaning occasionally with relief until he finished, the soldier buttoned his fly, picked up his rifle and rested the butt in the crook of his elbow, barrel pointing towards the jungle canopy high overhead. He then moved off, cautiously.

Joe began to say something but Suryei put her forefinger to her lips. They lay motionless and silent for at least half an hour. Suryei spoke first, in a whisper. ‘We don’t know whether that man was on his own. If we leave here now, we might walk straight into a whole bunch of them. We’ll have to stay here till nightfall.’

A whole day . . .
Joe frowned at that but he didn’t have an alternative suggestion. ‘Thought for sure he’d see us,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ agreed Suryei in a low whisper. ‘But it’s darker in here than it is out there. Those little binocular things high on his head were those night vision goggles I told you about. If he’d been wearing them . . .’ She drew her finger across her throat.

Joe took his first good look at Suryei. He realised that he really didn’t have a clue what she looked like. They’d met in the perpetual twilight under the jungle canopy and complete darkness had come down fast. She was curled in a loose foetal position beside him. He knew she was Asian but her accent was Australian. Her almond eyes were closed and he could see her abdomen rising and falling as she breathed. She was petite, smaller than he’d thought. Her face was covered in sweat-soaked mud and dust, and her black shoulder-length hair was matted with leaves, twigs and dirt. He imagined that she could be quite attractive, but it was difficult to tell. Given our current situation, why am I even wasting energy thinking about things like that? he wondered. Here I am, being hunted and shot at, starving, possibly about to die in the fucking jungle, for Christ’s sake, considering whether or not this woman’s hot. What did her looks have to do with anything anyway? She has saved my life at least once. Isn’t that enough? Still, his mind wandered on. He concluded that she was between twenty and thirty, but even that was hard to be sure of.

Sergeant Marturak was as good as lost. He knew exactly where he was geographically, but he had not the slightest idea where his quarry had gone. It was as if the jungle had opened up and swallowed his objective whole, without a trace. Again he wondered who he was up against. An ordinary person with no jungle training would have been
overtaken by now, no question about it. The jungle was a dangerous and inhospitable place for the inexperienced. He reminded himself that it also presented an almost infinite number and variety of hiding places. The man could be holed up somewhere, too frightened and scared to show himself. Marturak had initially hoped that the survivor may have gone to ground in the tunnel beaten into the jungle by the wildlife, but the two men he’d sent up into it had reported no contact.

He knew the young man on the hill had seen him kill the old couple. That’s what had frightened him into the jungle, and the volley of automatic fire hadn’t helped either. He now cursed his own lack of patience. He should have trawled for any and all survivors first, then killed them as a group. That way he could have then simply radioed for the pick-up and by now he would be back at the barracks. He’d been overconfident, and there was never any value in overconfidence. But it was too late to dwell on earlier tactical errors. The question now was how to make good on this mission.

It was an important operation, of that he had no doubt. The crashed aircraft was a Qantas 747-400 and it had come down here in secrecy. He could make a lot out of successfully completing this job and he was not about to let the opportunity slip through his fingers. He whistled softly, imitating a species of bird common to Java but not found on Sulawesi, and caught the attention of the soldiers on either side of him.

Hand signals told them to stop and have breakfast. The men dropped to their haunches immediately after communicating the order along the line, and broke into their rations. Sergeant Marturak considered his next move as he
unconsciously waved off the cloud of insects surrounding him. They were right on the equator and the day was heating up fast. Soon it would be almost too hot to move in the still, steamy sauna under the jungle canopy. But he was used to it. He had trained for it and he liked it. What he didn’t like was being made a fool of.

He considered it remote that any untrained person could have tracked this far into the jungle as his current position. Splitting his men into two troops, he decided, would be the best option now. He would have each force sweep the jungle at right angles to their current line of march for around three kilometres, and then turn again through ninety degrees and move back towards the crash site. In that way, he would have picked through almost fifteen square kilometres of jungle: fifteen square kilometres of one of the densest concentrations of plant life on the planet.

It was possible that the man could slip through his fingers, but improbable. Another soft bird-like whistle gathered his force together. Marturak got down on a knee, cleared a small patch of earth and outlined their tactics with his dagger. He then divided his men and told them they had five minutes to complete their breakfast. Few words were exchanged between the men. No one smoked, joked or laughed. The man they were hunting could be close by and no one wanted to compromise their position. Everyone wanted this mission over with.

Unseen, the snake silently parted the bush and made its way to its nest. Suryei shifted her weight, pulling one leg towards her. The snake instantly reacted, rearing up and flaring its distinctive hood.

‘Jesus!’ said Suryei when she saw it, louder than she’d intended.

‘What!?’ said Joe.

‘Cobra!’ For the first time, Suryei saw a bunch of leaves and twigs gathered on the ground just inside the leaf canopy. There were eggs in the centre of the nest and a couple had broken open.

The snake moved its head from side to side, sensitive to the slightest movements made by Joe and Suryei.

‘It’s seriously deadly.’

‘Seriously pissed off too, by the looks of it,’ said Joe under his breath, trying to disappear into the foliage behind him.

‘It’s a mother, see?’

Joe saw the smashed eggs in the nest.

‘We have to go. Get ready.’

Joe sat up slowly and the snake reared higher, as if it found his movement a challenge to fight.

‘Careful,’ said Suryei quietly. It was difficult for both of them to move. They had cramped into their resting positions. Joe flexed his hands. Blood cracked and fresh, crimson rivulets appeared. He ignored the pain. He slowly and carefully took his axe out of his bag. Suryei moved her foot.

The snake raised its hooded head and reared back, tensing to strike. It looked at Suryei and then at Joe and then back at Suryei, as if uncertain who to bite first. Suryei moved her foot, shifting a section of vine which sprang back. The snake reacted, striking at Suryei’s feet. It darted once, twice, advancing belligerently. Suryei screamed. Joe tried to fend it off with the head of his axe. Before she realised it, Suryei was up, pushing wildly through the
vines, thrashing through the spikes that tore at her clothes and skin. Joe was right behind her. The snake moved its head aggressively from side to side as the threat retreated, and then returned to sentry duty, coiling around its eggs.

Joe found Suryei collapsed at the foot of an enormous teak. She was whimpering to herself. Her composure had evaporated. She wrenched the shoe off, examined it, and found two neat sets of punctures in the leather upper. She rapidly switched her attention to her foot, and then fell back against the tree, relieved.

‘What? What?!’ Joe found her anxiety contagious.

‘Nothing, thank Christ!’ Suryei rasped. ‘The bastard didn’t get me.’

‘Bitch.’

‘What?’

‘Bitch. You said it was a female, remember?’ Joe picked up the shoe and examined the punctures in it. ‘Saved by Nike,’ he said quietly.

Suryei stood up and hopped behind Joe. She rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a bottle of water. ‘Shouldn’t we save that for later?’ he said as he watched her pour it over the shoe.

‘I knew a photographer once who was taking shots of one of those things in a snake park. He got cocky. Went right up close to take its photo. The flash and the noise angered the cobra and it struck. It missed the photographer but got the camera body instead. The photographer wiped the venom off with his finger. Within an hour, he was fighting for his life. So, I’m washing my shoe, okay?’

‘Okay, okay . . .’

‘Sorry. I’m just a bit freaked out at the moment.’ Suryei sloshed the water onto the suspect area of the shoe.

‘Save some of that water for your arm. You’re bleeding.’ He ripped off the other sleeve, then poured the last of the water into the deep gashes. The sleeve made do as a bandage, and he wound it around her arm a few times.

‘So are you,’ she said.

‘My blood clots quickly.’ Joe drank the remaining water.

Suryei noted his physique. ‘I thought you said you were a computer nerd. What’s with the muscles?’ Suryei was instantly annoyed at herself for asking the question. She played it back in her mind and she thought she’d sounded like some boy-happy bimbo. All that had been missing was the giggle.

Joe caught the rapid swings in Suryei’s mood. He put his shirt back on. ‘I box. Strictly amateur stuff, but I’ve been doing it since I was ten.’

‘Great,’ said Suryei.

‘I don’t do it to beat people up,’ he said, sensing the sarcasm. ‘I was bullied as a kid. You know, the weedy guy in the playground. Now I just do it to keep fit. It’s a sport.’ He shrugged.

She didn’t like boxers, was that it? Joe shook his head to clear it. There were more pressing issues at hand. They couldn’t just hide and wait for a rescue that might never come, or come too late. They had no food left, virtually no water and no survival training. They couldn’t just walk out – they had not the slightest idea what direction would lead them to the nearest outpost of civilisation. All they had was each other.

And then the unexpected happened. A soldier stepped out from behind the bush they’d been hiding in, the stock of the rifle at his cheek, eye positioned over the sight. The scare with the cobra had made Joe and Suryei forget about
him completely. He sighted the barrel from one to the other. Joe’s mouth was open. It was like a movie they were watching, rather than something that was actually happening to them.

The three people just looked at each other, wondering what to do next. The soldier was nervous, shouting something in a language Joe didn’t understand. To his surprise, Suryei answered him. She put her hands behind her head and sank to her knees. The soldier gestured aggressively at Joe to do the same. He didn’t move fast enough. The soldier reversed his rifle and drove the stock hard into Joe’s stomach. The blow caught him by surprise, winding him, but a daily regimen of three hundred sit-ups prevented any real damage. Joe fought for breath, falling to his knees, gagging. The soldier still wasn’t satisfied with his level of compliance. He lifted the barrel of his rifle and pressed the flash suppressor hard against Joe’s cheek, prising his teeth apart.

‘No!’ yelled Suryei. The bastard was going to pull the trigger. ‘No!’

And then the cobra struck. It lunged through the bush beside the soldier’s leg and sank its fangs into his thigh. The man looked at the snake like he didn’t believe it was happening, but then it bit again and again, ferociously, and the reality of the attack suddenly hit him. He screamed and emptied the magazine of his weapon into it.