Rogue Element (29 page)

The soldier with the gun nervously took their place beside the cocoon. He glanced down quickly and noted the plastic water bottle on the ground at his feet. He picked it up and said something in Indonesian. ‘He wants the rucksack, ’said Suryei. The soldier shouted and aimed his weapon, the point between Suryei’s eyes the target. Suryei turned her head away and dropped her hands in front of her face to protect it. He yelled again. Her hands went up quickly. Joe slowly took the rucksack off his shoulder and tossed it at the soldier’s feet. The man kicked it. Several bottles fell out along with Joe’s axe. The soldier picked it up and tossed it out of the clearing. Joe heard it
thud against a tree and drop to the ground. Several birds flew up screeching, marking its landing place.

The soldier then turned the muzzle of his automatic towards Joe and carelessly fired a round from the hip. The bullet spun Joe around as if he’d been hit a glancing blow by a car. He was on the ground, his mouth full of leaves and moss, before he realised that he had been shot. He couldn’t move, shock rendering his muscles useless. The soldier then turned the weapon towards Suryei, daring her to move. She didn’t.

Joe found it difficult to breathe. A rib had fractured close to his spine, the slug breaking it off cleanly as if a hammer and cold chisel had clouted it. The bullet had been deflected slightly by the collision. It drilled under his right lung and tore an exit hole in his back the size of a punnet of strawberries. Blood oozed out both holes and pooled under his belly. It felt warm, as if he’d pissed himself. He would have made a joke about it if he could have found the breath, which he couldn’t. There wasn’t any pain yet, but he knew it was there. Oddly, he could see it, building up like water behind a logjam. Soon he knew he would hurt like he’d never hurt before. The world went from full colour to grey and white and Joe slipped away into a little black box in his head.

The soldier toed Joe’s shoulder but the body on the ground was inert. He considered putting another bullet into it anyway to make sure, but something caught his eye. From the side he could see one of Suryei’s breasts inside her shirt. He wondered what it would feel like cupped in his hand. The urge to do exactly that distracted him. Oddly, he looked around the clearing in case anyone could see him taking advantage of the situation but it was empty
except for the two bodies lying on the ground and this woman in front of him. He smiled. He could do whatever he wanted with her and no one would stop him.

Keeping his weapon trained on her head, the soldier slipped his free hand inside her shirt. She was breathing heavily and he managed to delude himself that it was excitement induced by his touch that had made her nipples hard.

He unbuttoned his fly and his penis sprang from the opening expectantly. Her breasts were quite large, he noted, swallowing. The soldier took one of her raised hands and wrapped it around the organ jutting from his jungle greens. Suryei had no choice. He took his knife from its sheath, letting his rifle slip to the ground.

He placed the point of the dagger against her navel and told her to take down her pants. Suryei wanted to take the knife and cut off the disgusting thing in her hand but she was afraid. At least try, she demanded to herself. He was going to rape her then kill her anyway – of that she was certain.
Damn it, go out fighting!
Something in her eyes must have given the thought away because he thrust the knife into her stomach harder. The point pierced her skin and blood oozed down towards the top button of her pants. The soldier moved the knife down and sliced off the button, then he pushed her hard so that she sprawled on the ground on her back.

The soldier was so drunk with lust and power he had convinced himself that she wanted him. His tunnel vision failed to catch Joe struggling to his feet, or his fist as it smashed into the side of his jaw, breaking it. The soldier’s eyes rolled back in his head as if there was suddenly something of great interest painted on the inside of his skull, and then his legs dropped out from under him.

Joe smiled. Laying the arsehole out felt good but the effort hurt like a bitch. The smile turned to a wince and he collapsed onto the ground unconscious beside the soldier.

They all heard the distinctive crack of the carbine. It came from a patch of low ground. The sound bounced around but they were reasonably sure of its source. Wilkes estimated the distance at less than 100 metres. He gave the direction of the shot his best guess and double-checked it over the communications with his men. They all agreed.

An effort was required to fight the tendency to rush forward. That’s where training and experience was so important. They could run straight into an ambush. The men took their weapons off safety and rested their fingers outside the trigger guards. They moved ahead in twos and threes, leapfrogging each other, then covering the advance of the men behind them, weapons off safety, scanning the jungle ahead and to the sides for movement.

Suryei picked herself up off the ground and realised that she was hot with anger. She wanted to pick up the man’s gun and shoot him, empty its bullets into him, stick the barrel in his side and let the hot lead penetrate him. Somehow she resisted the urge and instead swung the weapon into the trees by its barrel. She heard it clatter through branches to the ground somewhere unseen.

The eyes of the man laid out by the snakebite darted left and right. He had either become suddenly aware of reality, or the activity around him had provoked delirium – probably the latter, Suryei decided, when she looked at him more closely. There was still no comprehension in his eyes.

She dropped beside Joe and put her ear to his chest. His
heart beat strongly. A large amount of rich purple blood had seeped from the raw holes in his body. He opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times and said, ‘Ouch.’ Suryei was so relieved she didn’t know what to do. So she got up and ran around in a circle before retrieving a bottle of water from the rucksack. She put it to Joe’s lips. He shook his head, declining to drink.

‘Rather have a Coke,’ he said, wincing. ‘Oh, fuck that hurts . . . just help me up.’ Suryei put her arm behind Joe’s back and helped him sit. His stomach muscles were gone. Breathing felt like someone was chopping into his abdomen with a tomahawk. The pain was really starting to come on with a rush now. Neither Suryei nor Joe had enough medical experience to know whether the wound was serious, so they both just assumed that it was. The assumption was reasonable. If he didn’t get proper medical assistance soon, he would die, if not from blood loss then from secondary infection. Already, insects were swarming gleefully at the fresh source of food that had suddenly presented itself.

The soldier Joe had knocked out now started to move slowly. The actions were lethargic, but becoming less so, like an animal that had been frozen beginning to thaw. The man cried out when the bones in his jaw separated, sending a spike of pain to his brain that went off like a hand grenade. The bone had fractured, dislocating across the complex lattice of nerves on the side of his jaw. A couple of teeth had also been broken off at the root, exposing raw nerves. Any movement was agonising but all the soldier’s training told him that he had to get up and surmount the situation he now found himself in if he was to have a chance of surviving it. He sat up. He wanted to scream but
he knew the pain in his jaw would increase many fold if he did.

Suryei watched him drag himself up on an elbow, grunting in agony. She didn’t know what to do. Should she hit him, kick him? Beat him with the empty rucksack?
Why did I throw away the gun?
And then Suryei saw the knife speared into the ground. She ran to it and picked it up as the man got to his feet. He approached her, staggering.
What do I do with this thing?
Suryei had never killed a man. She froze. The soldier slowly peeled the blade from her grip, each finger giving up one at a time.

And then the soldier did something unusual. He grinned. Not at her but past her, over her shoulder. Suryei followed his line of sight, knowing that she wouldn’t like whatever it was that could be so good it cut through his pain and put a smile on his face. Two Indonesian soldiers stepped into the clearing and began scouting around the edges, weapons up and ready. They moved quickly through the area, searching for anything hidden. When they were satisfied that the people in the clearing were isolated, the soldiers returned to their starting point, a little more relaxed but weapons still on Joe and Suryei. Suryei looked at Joe. There was nothing more they could do. The soldiers’ eyes were vacant, black, reptilian. There was death in them.

Suryei didn’t feel panicked about dying. It was like being back in the car with the lights coming over the hill, moments before impact. There was nothing more she could do to prevent it happening
.
She was resigned to it. They had fought well, and lost. Suddenly, a small red dot appeared like a third eye in all three of the soldiers’ foreheads and the men crumpled to the ground as if their bones had been sucked clean out of their bodies.

A small movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. Another two soldiers stood up in a thick clump of bush that bordered the clearing. There was no one there, and then there was. And there was something different about these two men. They wore different uniforms and their faces were heavily painted in camouflage colours. She recognised the helmets worn by the troops in Dili – the Kevlar ones. One of the men wore a floppy hat made from camouflage material. And then she realised. They were Australians. Australian soldiers. Suryei didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. One of the men put his finger to his lips for her to be quiet.

Suryei turned to look at Joe, to see whether he’d also witnessed what she’d just seen. He hadn’t. He’d slumped forward and was leaning against a tree for support. She noticed that the man with the broken jaw now had the same red dot between his eyes, and he was lying sightless on the ground. He was dead, and that made Suryei feel good.

Within thirty seconds, the little clearing seemed surrounded by soldiers. She counted nine of them. A stocky, powerfully built man strolled up to her and smiled.

‘Sergeant Thomas Wilkes. We’re Australian. Your name, please.’ He was friendly but efficient – businesslike. Perhaps it was the hard battleship grey colour of his eyes, but something in her was aware that this man was perhaps even more dangerous than any of the Indonesians. She hoped knowing her name wouldn’t put him offside.

‘Suryei Hujan. The man on the ground there is Joe Light,’ she said. ‘We were both passengers on the Qantas plane. Joe’s been shot.’ Her potted history seemed stupid when she heard it – terribly inadequate – but she didn’t
know what else to say. Two other soldiers were already kneeling beside Joe, assessing his wound. The sergeant pulled a wad of paper from a shirt pocket and checked her name against it.

‘Suryei Hujan, seat 51F. Joseph Light, 5A. Any other survivors that you know of, Suryei?’

‘No, we’re it. There was an old couple but these bastards,’ she indicated the Indonesian soldiers lying inert on the ground, ‘shot them.’

Suryei realised that she was blubbering. The tears streamed down her cheeks and out through her nose. Standing there in the jungle, hungry, half naked, every inch of exposed skin cut and bleeding, the burns on her forearms now weeping suspiciously with a yellowish fluid, swaying with exhaustion, was the happiest moment of her life. She put her head on the soldier’s shoulder and cried tears of release.

Wilkes put his arm around the woman and squeezed her reassuringly. Her small body heaved with sobs.

‘How’s he doing, Stu?’ asked Wilkes, wanting an answer on the condition of the other plane survivor, sitting on ground stained red with his clotting blood.

‘Okay, I think, boss. The bullet has worked its way through. The exit wound’s messy. Broken a rib . . . lung is only nicked. Lucky fucker – could be a hell of a lot worse. Going to hurt like crazy, but. Given him a shot of morphine, some antibiotics. He’s a fit bugger by the looks of him. Should be able to move with a bit of help after I strap him tight.’

Wilkes took a quick look at the exit wound and knew exactly how Joe would be feeling. He’d taken a bullet in almost exactly the same place when on patrol in the first
days of INTERFET. He was up on the border of West Timor when the first round fired by the militia ambush had hit him in the chest and exited below his shoulder blade. A fusillade had then poured into their position. He could see men aiming their weapons and firing at him from thirty metres away, the dirt kicking up all around him. Miraculously, he wasn’t hit again. It all happened in slow motion. Then, suddenly, one of his men was on the ground, blood gurgling from both sides of his neck.

‘Got a time on that?’ asked Wilkes, getting his mind back on the job at hand.

‘Gimme five.’

‘What about that bloke?’ asked Wilkes, indicating the Indonesian soldier on the ground with the wild eyes.

‘Dunno, boss.’

‘He was bitten by a cobra,’ said Suryei, wiping her eyes, getting herself back under control.

‘He must have been given some antivenom or he’d have carked it by now,’ said Stu. ‘What’ll I do with him?’

The man was obviously in a bad way. There was not much more they could do for him. ‘Give him food and water and leave him for his own people.’

‘You’ve got food?’ grunted Joe.

Wilkes turned to Robson and Curry. ‘Sure. Cough up, you blokes. And don’t hog your chocolate,’ he said.

‘Already on it, boss,’ said Curry.

‘As in Cadbury’s?’ asked Joe. Curry found some chocolate in his pack and held it under Joe’s nose. He breathed deeply. It smelled glorious. But then the morphine kicked in and he vomited. ‘On second thoughts . . .’ Joe said between heaves, changing his mind. Robson shrugged and put his rations back in his pack.

‘James. Get on the blower and see if you can get us a lift out of here pronto,’ said Wilkes to Littlemore, who was already in the process of laying out the Raven’s aerial. It came wrapped tightly around a small but heavy lead sphere. He fired it up into the upper reaches of the canopy with a rubber sling provided especially for the purpose. The extended aerial gave the radio a phenomenal range. Without it, transmission was limited to a handful of kilometres.