Rogue Element (30 page)

The sound of the crack from the FNC80 that wounded Joe was carried up the ravine to the Indon force fanned across the ridge line. The shape of the valley guaranteed that there was no confusion over its point of origin.

Captain ‘Sandman’ Elliot shook his head with disappointment. Goddam it! The turnaround of the V22 Osprey and its AV-8 escort couldn’t have come at a worse time. The special ops boys on the ground must have completed their mission – whatever it was – in lightning quick time.

Sandman had taken the lead as the flight had penetrated Indonesian airspace. His job was to blast enemy radar with massive bursts of energy – weld them with electrons – so that it was blinded, allowing his flight to pass unseen into the viper’s pit. Only, there was a slight problem. His number two engine had just suffered an overheat with the needle going right off the dial, and he’d had to throttle it back to idle. There was no choice. He had to turn for home, whether he liked it or not. Correction. He’d have to plot a course to the Philippines. He’d never risk trying to limp all the way back to the Carrier Battle Group down in the Arafura Sea. It was just a little too far
away on one engine, and he didn’t trust this bucket to keep him out of the water.

He cursed and slapped the Perspex canopy with the back of his hand. These Prowlers were great for prying but they flew like bags of shit. He called in his situation and reviewed his position in relation to the tanker, the V22 and the AV-8s. Having no electronic warfare on this sortie could get messy. The Indon air force would investigate the presence of foreign military planes in its airspace if it detected the incursion. He doubted the country had a full array of ground-based air defence radar, but Indonesia could certainly have some kind of coast watch. Whatever, like it or not, his countrymen were on their own.

Sandman was halfway through briefing his three-man crew on their situation when the AWACS informed him that there was another Prowler on exercise nearby. It was forty minutes away, and could replace him in the flight, giving the mission back its cloak of invisibility. Forty minutes. That wasn’t so bad. Those damn AV-8s were probably low on fuel. Again. Most likely they would need to RV with the KC-135 and take on a load. By the time they were back over Indon territory, the replacement EA-6B would have just about arrived. The AV-8s and Osprey would just have to fly low until it did. A slight delay. No sweat.

Sandman turned away feeling a little less glum. He was still pissed at having to bug out and miss the show, but at least he wouldn’t be leaving anyone in the crapper.

James Littlemore broke off the transmission. ‘We got maybe an hour to kill, boss.’

‘What’s their bloody story?’ snapped Wilkes, annoyed. The MAG’s objective had been completed. It was time to
go and every minute they spent loitering in enemy territory could be disastrous.

‘Gremlins,’ said Littlemore, still hunched over the radio. ‘One of the aircraft has had engine trouble. Plus the Harriers need juice. They’re RV-ing with a tanker in twenty minutes. It’ll take ten to fifteen for the lot of them to refuel . . . around fifty-plus minutes to get their arses back here.’

There was absolutely nothing Wilkes or anyone else could do about it. ‘Are they okay with our revised RV?’ he asked.

‘Gave them the coords, Sarge. They said no problem.’

‘It would be nice to know where those other Kopassus boys are at. Have we got any fresh intel on that?’

Littlemore shook his head. ‘Didn’t ask.’

The Americans would have passed on any further information for sure if they had it. Still, it often paid to check. Wilkes walked the inside perimeter of the clearing, focusing his senses on the jungle outside it, while Littlemore re-established communications.

‘That’s a negative on a fresh satellite pass, boss,’ said Littlemore, disappointed, when Wilkes returned.

Wilkes was not aware of the satellite’s period, but he was reasonably sure another pass would have been made by now so it was worth the ask. And they had to update Canberra when contact was made with any survivors anyway. ‘Give Canberra a call and see what they’ve got.’

‘The sat phone’s out, boss. Deader than Kurt Cobain.’

‘What’s the story?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Dunno. It’s not batteries,’ shrugged Littlemore. ‘The jungle canopy might be acting as a shield . . . Could be the phone, but I checked it twice back at Dili.’

‘Have you tried hitting it?’ Morgan chipped in.

‘Violence and microprocessors go together like fish and chocolate, Smell,’ said Littlemore. ‘But I did give it a little tap – nothing.’

The satellite phones were their only secure communications link. Wilkes was not keen about using the AWACS as a relay station. If anyone was listening in, their presence would be known. A message to Canberra would have to wait until they were outside Indonesian airspace.

Wilkes went through the odds of further meetings with the Kopassus in his head. In all, there’d been twenty contacts illuminated by the sat. Two were the survivors Joe and Suryei, the one with the odd heat signature must have been the man incapacitated by snakebite, and they’d just taken three more out of the game. That left a maximum of fourteen Kopassus troops to contend with. Nine against fourteen. Shit odds in a game of footie, but the difference here was that the Indons weren’t aware that the SAS were on the field.

‘Okay, let’s fuck off out of here,’ said Wilkes, getting edgy. ‘This place is soon going to be crawling with nasties.’ Every Indon soldier within earshot would be zeroing in on their position, and he was unsure of the direction they’d be coming from.

Wilkes had noted from the Indons already taken out that the Kopassus weren’t wearing comms, so it was likely that the rest of them didn’t know shit from shinola, but they would have heard the shot from the FNC80 just as they had. Wilkes’s Warriors should have been gone from this location already. ‘How you going there, Beck? Can we move out yet?’

‘Just about, boss.’

‘We’ve got to hoof it. If they can’t walk, carry them.’

Suryei’s cuts and abrasions were being seen to. The burns on her forearms had been bandaged in a way that would keep the insects off while allowing the air to circulate. Her forearms throbbed hotly under the bandages. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, finding that her smile came easily. Beck produced a hypodermic syringe and swabbed her skin before driving in the needle. ‘Antibiotics cocktail,’ he said. ‘The cut in your belly. You don’t know where that soldier’s knife has been, but you can bet it wasn’t sterile.’ Suryei nodded. ‘Those burns on your arms don’t look too good either.’

She crouched beside Joe, who was lying on a groundsheet. He had stopped vomiting. ‘How you going?’ Suryei asked.

‘Can’t feel a thing,’ said Joe dreamily. ‘My brain tells me I should be in pain, but nothing’s getting through. I know it’s there. Very weird. You should try this stuff.’ Joe brought his hand up to his face and turned it slowly in front of his eyes as if it was something strange and foreign. ‘Unreal . . .’ he said.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Baby, I can fly.’ Joe struggled to his feet, helped by Suryei.

LCPL Ellis came up to Suryei and held out his hand. ‘This might come in handy, Miss,’ he said. In his palm was the button the Indonesian soldier had sliced off. He’d found it next to the snakebite victim. ‘I’ve got a needle and thread too.’ He produced the items from one of the many pouches hung on his belt.

Suryei realised that her pants were open at the front and that someone, unnoticed, had draped a camouflage shirt over her shoulders. Joe was also now wearing an Australian regulation army shirt. She looked around. A
couple of the men had stripped down to khaki singlets. ‘Thanks,’ she said, accepting the offer.

‘You’ll have us knitting tea cosies next, Ellis,’ said Wilkes, humour and impatience mixed in equal measure. ‘We don’t have time for that.’

Ellis nodded and produced a small tube from his medical kit. He put a few drops of the liquid on the open flaps of her pants. ‘Don’t get this on your fingertips or it’ll stick them together,’ he said quickly. ‘Superglue – originally developed for battlefield wounds . . . liquid stitches.’

And then Suryei was aware that the mood in the clearing had suddenly changed. Within an instant, all the Australian soldiers, except for Corporal Needle-and-thread and the medic, had disappeared. The medic put his finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Then he cocked his head to the side, concentrating. He nodded and spoke softly into a small boom mike which, until now, had been folded back away from his mouth.

Several pairs of Indonesian soldiers, including Sergeant Marturak, converged on the clearing where they’d left one of their number to care for the snakebite victim. The men met up unexpectedly in the thick jungle drawn by the sound of the gunshot, and the surprise rendezvous, coupled with their nervousness, nearly resulted in a firefight. Had they been aware that enemy soldiers were also in the immediate area, they would almost certainly have started shooting at each other.

The Indon soldiers were wary. Nervous. Three days in the jungle tracking a foe that had eluded their best efforts – and killed or incapacitated a number of their comrades – had made them tense. And cautious.

There was a single silenced shot,
phut
. One of
Marturak’s men fell, and then suddenly the jungle was alive with the sound of automatic FNC80 fire.

One of the Indonesian soldiers walking in a crouch beside Marturak collapsed forwards into fern trees as a small fountain of blood plumed from the back of his head. Marturak’s surprise only lasted an instant. He dropped to the ground with the rest of his men and emptied his magazine in what he thought was the general direction of the shot. He then changed magazines.

Were they under friendly fire? Another of his men fell down beside him, much like the first, with one shot removing half his skull. The shot
sounded
different. It was-n’t like the familiar noise made by his soldiers’ weapons. The combination of confusion and stress was not allowing his brain to draw the correct conclusion that perhaps these weren’t his own men firing on them. He called out again to cease fire but his words were cut to pieces by a thirty-round burst fired by one of his men off to the left.

The blanket of fire put down by the familiar-sounding FNCs was reducing in intensity. Marturak realised that his men were being cut down. He worked towards what cover he could find on his belly, snaking through razor grass. It was impossible to see what was going on. He had to keep his head down or lose it. Moving constantly meant survival. If he stayed where he was, he would eventually be encircled and death would pour in from all sides. Marturak glanced left and right. He had a man on either side of him that he could see. They were his men. Beyond that, he had no idea what was left of his force.

Retreat was the only answer. Was it possible that the two survivors from the plane crash had found themselves weapons and were now hunting them? No, impossible. He
then reminded himself that the fire coming from unseen sources sounded different. It wasn’t Indonesian issue, whatever it was.

That meant there were other soldiers in the jungle. Marturak tried to piece together the action of the last few minutes. His men had fired possibly upwards of three hundred rounds, yet he had heard only several of the deadly ‘popping’ sounds. Silenced weapons. He was aware that at least two of those shots had found targets. Head shots.

Marturak’s mind was starting to work now and the picture it was painting did not augur particularly favourably for his future health and well-being. It had to be some kind of Special Forces group. But whose? He called to his men that he would cover their retreat to trees ten metres behind. He came up on one knee and sprayed the jungle ahead of him in a forty-five degree arc. He kept the trigger squeezed against the guard until the magazine ran dry. He dropped flat to the ground and fumbled with another magazine. Silence. Perhaps he’d been lucky, taken the opposition by surprise and killed the lot of them.

Marturak worked his way backwards to the trees on his stomach, as quietly and as quickly as he could. The chest-high growth was good cover. His feet pushed against something immovable. Swinging himself around, Marturak came face to face with two more of his men. He couldn’t recognise either of them because their faces were missing. Marturak was cornered and he knew it. It was pure luck that had saved him from sharing the fate of the handful of men now lying silently in the grass around him.

It was the first time in his career as a soldier that he felt
helpless. Worse than that, he was paralysed with fear. If he stayed where he was, he would be surrounded – if he wasn’t already – and slaughtered. If he tried to fight it out, he would end up like the rest of his men. When he realised exactly how limited his choices were, Marturak’s temper snapped, breaking his paralysis.

He had been after two pathetic survivors, civilians, for well over forty-eight hours. They were unarmed, untrained (as far as he knew) and they had managed, somehow, to make him look like an amateur. He had failed in his mission. If he ever made it back to Jakarta alive, he was certain he wouldn’t stay that way for long. The men he worked for would see to that. Marturak thumbed the selector switch to single shot. He couldn’t remember how many rounds were left in his magazine; in the excitement, he’d lost count of the number of shots he’d fired. He expelled the magazine, placing it inside his shirt, and fitted a fresh mag with one oiled movement.

Marturak bit a large chunk out of his lower lip and blood filled his mouth. The pain worked. It sent him into a rage. The scream filled his throat and he sprang to his feet, weapon ready for killing. But just as quickly, the scream died, strangled. Marturak was surrounded, literally ringed by soldiers, high-tech camouflaged warriors, weapons zeroed at his head. Suicide suddenly seemed a pointless option. Marturak flung his rifle away from him as if it was poisonous. Holding onto it would definitely end his life. It was bald reaction.

One of the soldiers moved forward. His weapon was different to the others’. It was a sawn-off shotgun and blue smoke snaked lazily from the black pit pointed at his head. Shotgun blasts. Marturak realised now why he couldn’t
recognise the mashed faces of his comrades. He raised his hands slowly, interlocking his fingers behind his head.