Rogue Element (23 page)

Wilkes shifted his weight against his pack – something was digging into his ribs and his butt was already sore. The insertion flight was always the worst aspect of any op, the helo flight out the best. His stomach rumbled. There’d been no time to grab something from the mess. He wondered what had been stuffed into the ‘ratpacks’, their primary food source for the duration. Ratpacks – ration packs – had been developed by nutritionists to provide all the calories and essential vitamins required to keep a soldier out in the field killing for twenty-four hours. They weren’t exactly gourmet, but they weren’t bad either, containing precooked meals, chilli powder, salt, pepper, Vegemite, peanut butter, cheese, crackers, coffee, tea, condensed milk, sweet biscuits, sugar and chocolate. They had each taken enough ratpacks for a two-day insertion. Wilkes added a satchel of coriander powder to his kit to enliven the flavour of the precooked meals.

Like all SAS soldiers, Wilkes and his men were more than capable of living off the land, especially the jungle, which Wilkes thought of as part kitchen, part garden shed. There was food literally growing on trees, as well as underground in the form of roots and tubers. There were also plenty of animals that could be eaten – mammals and
reptiles. That was the kitchen part. A veritable smorgasbord of berries and fruits that looked edible but were, in fact, lethal was the garden shed part. But while Wilkes and his men could all live indefinitely on the food nature provided around them, it was a hell of a lot easier to just rip into a ratpack. Foraging for food could take hours and significantly reduce their effectiveness as a fighting force.

Each man also carried a light sleeping bag, mosquito netting, groundsheet and silk hammock, which could be strung between trees to provide a comfortable resting place no matter what the angle of the ground, as well as keeping the trooper out of range of the ants, scorpions and other biting nasties. The groundsheet was thrown over the top to keep the rain off. And the mossie net’s use was obvious. In the morning, the whole lot could be packed away leaving no trace of their presence.

Finally, the soldiers each had a survival kit that included a map of the area printed on fine silk fabric that could also be used as a water filter, a needle and thread, water purification tablets, a flint and steel with which to start a fire, a length of fishing line and a hook that could be used both to catch fish and as a snare for capturing small animals, a basic first aid kit complete with bandages, disinfectant powder, antibiotics, liquid sutures, a scalpel, gauze, codeine tablets, lock-ties and three one-shot ampoules of morphine with hypodermic syringe built in.

Floppy hat, Kevlar helmet, camouflage face paint, trenching tool, a dagger, and a machete to hack away the dense foliage once their cover was blown, when stealth and secrecy were no longer on their side, completed the approximately eighty-five kilogram pack each man was lugging into the jungle. It was like hauling a full-grown
man on your back. It could have been worse, thought Wilkes, if they’d expected the operation to last a week rather than a couple of days. Once they arrived and had scouted the surrounding terrain, they would cache most of this gear, returning as needed for ammunition, spare comms, batteries and rations, carrying only what was needed to keep them as light and as mobile as possible.

Wilkes looked at the nine men jammed in around him: Ellis, Coombs, Littlemore, Beck, Curry, Robson, Gibbo, Morgan and Ferris. They seemed okay – almost comfortable – but the risks they were about to face were enormous. Wilkes reflected on his own mortality. If death came to him, well, no fucking worries, mate. He was by no means a fatalist, nor did he have a death wish, but you could hardly be a member of the SAS and not be at least a little ambivalent about your own life and death. If you bought it, tough shit. Sure, there were people who would miss him and cry at his passing and he felt a pang of sorrow for them but, for himself, this was the only way to live.

He’d done a lot of very dangerous shit over the years: served in Bougainville advising the Papua New Guinea regulars fighting the guerrillas; he’d been inserted into the Congo with US Marine Recon to eradicate the organised gangs of gorilla poachers; he’d helped rescue a couple of CIA men who’d been captured and held to ransom in Bosnia; he’d been dropped into Kosovo scouting for targets for the UN pilots. And, of course, East Timor. He’d missed Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran – he was a jungle expert.

Each job had had its own unique brace of problems. With this one, the big question was how they were going to penetrate Indonesian airspace and get to their RV, a ridge behind the two contacts Wilkes had assumed were
the friendlies on the infrared photos, without stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble – and in time. Perhaps the Americans would have the answer. They had some pretty specialised gear for this sort of thing.

The Sea King helo from the USS
Kitty Hawk
appeared out of the haze at the appointed time. Lieutenant Harvey followed standard procedure for approaching a US Navy Battle Group and did not transmit his call sign or intentions to the American helo. The Black Hawk was expected. Harvey merely lined up behind the Sea King and followed abeam of its slipstream. The Sea King banked to starboard and altered its heading forty-five degrees. A large guided missile destroyer drifted by beneath them while the enormous grey-blue bulk of the carrier loomed out of the haze-obscured horizon.

The
Kitty Hawk
grew as they approached the fantail and Harvey saw the deck as an F-14 Tomcat pilot on short finals would. Although it was four and a half acres of black non-skid steel, it appeared as small as a domino, a minute target to hit with a fighter jet weighing four tons screaming earthwards in a controlled crash at 280 kilometres an hour.

Fighter ops on the carrier were in full swing. The deck bristled with F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18E Super Hornets. One of the Super Hornets was waiting on the catapult for launch. The Sea King held its station, hovering three hundred metres abeam the port side of the carrier. Harvey did the same astern of the US navy helo. The F/A-18E squatted down briefly on its undercarriage as it started to move. A river of steam exhausted from the side of the ship as the cat shot the jet down the absurdly short runway. The catapult flicked the fighter off the end of the threshold and the
jet lurched away to port staggering, struggling for height, twin turbofans grinding out 40 000 pounds of thrust in full afterburner.

A paddle-wielding ‘yellow shirt’ on the deck of the carrier waved the Black Hawk and its escort towards the forward deck. Fighter operations were suspended briefly while the two choppers manoeuvred for landing, rotors whirring, over American sovereign territory suspended in the milky Arafura Sea.

The smell of AV-TUR, rubber and hot grease filled Wilkes’s nostrils and cleared his sinuses. It was a heady brew, the smell of hard, high-powered military muscle. Perfume. He breathed it in deep as he loosened his floor safety strap. He grabbed his pack and shuffled to the door on his arse. Once outside, he glanced back through the Plexiglass side window and got a thumb’s-up salute from Harvey. The Black Hawk had kept its revs up. This was to be a quick letdown. Once his troops were offloaded, the helo rose from the deck. No fuel stop. Wilkes made a quick mental calculation and concluded that the Black Hawk would probably get its tanks filled mid-air on the flight back to Dili.

The Sea King’s rotors drooped with their own weight as they spun down. When stationary, the rotors would be folded back. A small vehicle had already tethered to the front of the helo in preparation for the short haul to one of the massive elevators that would take it below decks.

‘Captain Chuck McBride, US Marine Recon. You must be Sergeant Wilkes,’ shouted the tall black man over jet noise as he walked briskly up to the Australians.

The marine towered over him. Wilkes saluted and the officer returned it crisply, strong white teeth showing in a
smile of genuine warmth. He wondered how the officer knew which one of the ten foreign soldiers that spilled from the American Black Hawk was Sergeant Wilkes, given that none of the SAS wore any badges of rank. He forgot about it and continued to gawk about like a dazed schoolkid at the activity on the carrier deck.

‘Follow me, Sarge, and I’ll get you out of harm’s way.’ The captain and two other marines in lightweight aviation overalls herded the Australians towards the looming shadow of the carrier’s control island. Wilkes was happy to follow. He was aware that the deck of an aircraft carrier was the most dangerous workplace in the world, with any number of objects that could kill a man – from jet blasts to thick, grease-covered arrestor cables that slithered across the surface.

A shriek with a completely different tone filled the air as two US Marine AV-8B Harrier 11s, Jump Jets, rocketed down the dead side of the carrier’s traffic pattern and lined up two nautical miles abeam of the fantail for landing. Gary Ellis caught Wilkes’s eye as they watched the spectacle and gave a soft whistle. This was impressive shit they were watching, a well-oiled machine.

The AV-8s came in slow and didn’t bother ‘trapping’, picking up one of the four heavy cables strung across the deck that brought jets like the Tomcat from 130 knots to zero in a neck-breaking three seconds. They came in over the fantail with drooping wings and dangling landing gear and hung in mid-air above the deck like giant mechanical gnats. The AV-8s appeared to defy gravity, descending slowly on invisible columns of air. They taxied to the space vacated by the jungle-camouflaged Black Hawk, which had slipped away unnoticed by most of the Australians during the show put on by the new arrivals.

Refuelling carts raced to the Harriers in a practised ballet. The pilots opened their canopies, loosened their harnesses and oxygen masks, and pushed themselves up and out of their ejection seats. Aircraft handlers wheeled over ladders to help the pilots down from their aircraft. The two officer pilots then trotted over to the ‘island’, disappearing inside the hatch.

‘They’re yours,’ shouted the marine captain over the shriek of turbines, indicating the AV-8s. ‘And so is that.’ He directed Wilkes’s gaze to the large hole in the deck that had opened up. An aircraft levitated up from the blackness. It looked like a mutant helicopter, or a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong, with two enormous black propellers sitting across the top of the fuselage. The cockpit area was heavily glassed and looked similar to the front end of a Huey, the UH-IB, the helo most people associated with the war in Vietnam. The back half of the aircraft was reminiscent of the Hercules, except that a C-130 didn’t have its horizontal stabiliser between two vertical fins like this aircraft. It couldn’t possibly fly. It was, without doubt, the most unusual-looking aircraft Wilkes and his men had ever seen.

The puzzled look on the combined faces of the Australians indicated an explanation was needed. McBride provided it. ‘It’s called a V22 Osprey, made by Bell and Boeing!’ shouted the captain. That didn’t seem to help. ‘The new Tiltrotor – part aeroplane, part helo and better than both. Cruises at 270 knots with a self-deploying range of over 2100 nautical miles. Designed to get us in and out of trouble spots before the enemy knows what’s going on.’

Wilkes nodded, liking the sound of that.

Recognition spread on Ellis’s face. ‘Weren’t these things grounded?’ he shouted.

‘Yeah, but we think we’ve nailed the problem – a glitch in the software that ran the flight control computers.’

The words ‘we think’ and ‘glitch’ were not very reassuring and Wilkes couldn’t stop himself eyeing the aircraft suspiciously.

‘Don’t worry, Sarge,’ said the captain, smile gone. ‘This is one safe motherfucker. We wouldn’t be putting you and your men on it if it weren’t. A successful mission under combat conditions is what the V22 program needs.’

It distinctly sounded to Wilkes and Ellis like they were being used as guinea pigs. But what option did they have?

‘It’s lucky for you, actually. The V22’s been on a limited joint navy/marine shakedown trail. You know, to re-prove the concept that had been proven the last time we reproved it,’ he laughed, as if sharing an in-joke. ‘That’s why we happen to be here in the right place at the right time for you guys. That baby there’s how we’re going to do this thing.’ The marine captain spoke as if the mission was in the bag already.

‘What’s our flight time, sir?’ asked Wilkes.

The captain checked his watch. ‘We’ve got some pretty hefty tailwinds. Around two hours will see you on the ground at your drop-off point, but we’ll know precisely when we’re airborne. We’ve got extensive comms on board this baby and we’re expecting satellite intel to come through en-route to make sure you let down on the right spot.’

‘You coming along, Chuck?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ the captain laughed.

Wilkes didn’t see the humour.

The Australians watched as the V22’s wing swung from its storage position, lying along the top of the fuselage, to the place where a wing should be on an aeroplane. At least now it looked like something that could fly. Maybe.

Elizabeth surveyed the room, looking for errant belongings. The disturbing satellite photo was on the bed. She placed it in the envelope and reread the instructions on her laptop. The people back home were convinced the general was somehow responsible for the crash, and that seriously pissed her off.

It was Elizabeth’s job to get close to high-placed military figures, but she’d never expected to land one of the biggest fishes of all. The restaurant she waited at was known to Australian intelligence as one of the haunts of TNI officers. It was also known that the owner was closely related to General Suluang. It had been surprisingly easy to gain employment there, and to catch the general’s eye, and that worried her. Perhaps
she’d
been the person who’d been set up. No, that was unlikely, she thought, dismissing her suspicions. Very few restaurateurs would turn away such an attractive potential employee. And Suluang was a known ladies’ man. She hadn’t slept with him that first night, or the second or third – he would have thought her a slut. But she’d tantalised him enough to be certain he’d come back.

Elizabeth checked through the room once more, satisfying herself that nothing had been left behind. She then made her way to the lift. Suluang had turned out to be a
difficult customer. On military matters, he was a model of discretion. She was angry that her efforts had gone unrewarded, gleaning precisely nothing of interest from Suluang. When the news came through that he was possibly responsible for the disappearance of the Qantas plane, Elizabeth felt she’d been ripped off. Suluang could have been a motor mechanic or an usher at the local cinema for all the worthwhile intelligence he’d divulged.

Elizabeth walked past a couple of hotel guests, a Japanese couple. She didn’t notice the man’s eyes grow large as they devoured her.

Suluang was a good fuck, but not a good talker. For him, women were either sex objects or servants. The assignment was beginning to frustrate her. And then yesterday, she’d received a drop in her etray. Up till now, interest in him back home had been routine. But now he was suddenly big news.

She replayed the previous twelve hours in her mind. He’d been distracted in their lovemaking and he hadn’t slept much, leaving for the barracks early in the morning. As usual, he’d deflected her questions, preferring to talk about the quality of her skin or the shine of her hair. Bloody annoying.

Elizabeth swept past the front desk in the foyer, the morning light making her thin cotton dress vaguely transparent. She had to hurry. She fingered the A4-size envelope, reassuring herself that she hadn’t left it back in the room. The concierge watched her walk through the revolving glass door out into the hot grit of another Jakarta morning and noted that she had no luggage. Whore, he thought, and unconsciously licked his lips as the sun outlined her long straight legs.