Rogue Element (32 page)

He turned and saw four soldiers with their sights on his head. This time he was going to die, no arguing, and no begging. And then he remembered the disk, the one he’d taken from the computer in the plane. He had no idea what was on it, perhaps nothing, but these men didn’t know that. Would they spare his life for it?

He moved his left hand slowly inside his webbing to pull out the disk. Slowly. Steady. He held it in his right hand and wiggled it to attract attention.

‘Bondi Beach,’ he asserted. ‘I love Sydney.’ There was more in that vein. Marturak felt stupid saying it. He’d never been to Australia and didn’t know anyone who had. But it was survival. He wasn’t even sure there was a place in Australia called Bondi Beach, the name just popped into his head. The soldier with the smoking shotgun came forward and took the disk from him. Marturak smiled and put his hands together in a prayer of thanks.

‘Very important. Sydney!’ he said, smiling, all teeth. He watched the soldier frown at the disk and turn it over, examining it. It was obvious the Australian had no idea of its significance. The stocky soldier, the one Marturak took to be the leader, gave a small shrug then placed the disk in his breast pocket.

‘I’m from Melbourne,’ Ellis said to the Indonesian as
Wilkes turned away. There were two quick shots and the Indonesian crumpled to the ground. Wilkes turned back, frowning. ‘What . . .?!’ Ellis said, shrugging playfully. ‘Had to make sure, boss.’

Robson wheeled, disappearing into the trees to investigate his earlier handiwork. It took him five minutes to slip through the undergrowth to the small clearing he’d found off their trail. The closer he got, the stronger the smell of freshly brewed coffee became. He wondered how many Indons had fallen for the bait. Upon reaching the clearing, he waited on the edge amongst the trees and listened. Silence, except for the coffee still bubbling away. Two dead soldiers lay opposite. Undoubtedly they had been drawn by the aroma of Robson’s favourite mocha blend, expecting to surprise the unknown enemy happily taking a break. Robson wondered whether they’d had time to realise their mistake before they met their maker.

He checked the mines he had personally set and found the Indons had only tripped one. Three were left. He disarmed them and repacked them in his rucksack, not wanting to leave behind explosive devices that an innocent person might stumble on fatally in the future.

Robson walked soundlessly to the brew, turned off the stove and packed it into his rucksack. Pouring a little cold water into the pot to cool the contents, he quickly tossed back the coffee, grounds and all. It was bitter. Burned. Oh well, better than instant. He heard aircraft approaching. It was time to leave.

The clearing filled with noise and wind as the V22 descended slowly through the darkening sky, carefully, through the hole in the canopy, rotors clearing the thrashing foliage by less than a metre. The rear door was down. McBride and the LM, both lifelined to the fuselage, waved at them to hurry aboard. Above, an AV-8 blocked the sun as it screamed overhead.

Ferris and Robson helped Suryei and Joe aboard the instant the aircraft’s wheels settled tentatively on the spongy ground. The shriek of the turbines tore at Suryei’s eardrums.

Ferris and Robson then immediately turned back, jumping off the ramp to cover the MAG’s retreat. Wilkes and Littlemore carried Curry aboard between them, while Morgan half-carried the hobbling Coombs. Beck leapt on and then Ferris and Robson climbed on last. Where the fuck was Ellis? Wilkes had seen him running through the jungle earlier. Where had he gone? Wilkes was starting to feel a tightening in his stomach.

And then he saw Ellis running awkwardly across the clearing from the far end, something large and green over his shoulder. It was Gibbo’s body. Ellis arrived at the rear door just as an enormous explosion threw a mushroom cloud into the air. ‘The rest of our shit!’ yelled Ellis over the engine noise. He’d blown up their cache, denying Indonesia the opportunity of parading any gear in front of the media. The LM helped Ellis and Wilkes inside with the body. He said something into his boom mike and the aircraft lifted off immediately, the rear door closing on the jungle as the V22 rose tentatively through the opening in the canopy.

McBride shouted into Wilkes’s ear above the noise, ‘Joe
Light, alive! Amazing!’

Sergeant Wilkes nodded and pushed past, concerned about his men.

Curry’s wound was bad. The bullet had shattered the clavicle and was still lodged in his shoulder. He was losing a fair bit of blood and his skin was grey-white. Beck did what he could with field dressings, but there was nothing they could do without an operating theatre and an orthopaedic surgeon. He immobilised the shoulder and gave Curry a shot of morphine. The LM had the wounded soldier carried to a stretcher fastened to a bulkhead, and strapped him in. Gibbo’s body was also secured in the same way. He gestured to the soldiers to take their seats, belt up and put their headphones on.

Suryei watched the men load the bodies on stretchers and realised again how much had been sacrificed by these men to keep Joe and her alive.

‘Ferret Handler. Six bandits. Six bandits. West. Eighty miles. Angels Twelve. Heading zero-niner-zero.’

‘Ferret Leader. Roger that. Request bandit type and weapons intel.’

‘Bandits inbound F-16. BVR capabilities negative.’

‘Ferret Leader.’

Let’s get ready to rumble, Captain Pete ‘Toad’ Sanders said to himself. The call came from an Airborne Warning and Control System, an aircraft with enormously powerful radar, orbiting well outside Indonesian airspace and out of enemy missile range. Its job was to provide the flight over Indonesian territory with Airborne Control Interception – letting the good guys know what the bad guys were up to without the fighters having to turn on their own radars.

The ACI provided by the AWACs had just painted a picture that made Toad’s scrotum tighten with fear. And, if he’d been asked, a whole lot of excitement. Uncle Sam had spent millions training him to dogfight, and he was finally getting a chance to put that training to good use.

Six enemy aircraft, F-16s, were inbound from the west. They were at angels twelve or 12 000 feet, on a course that was taking them due east. West to east. Toad was tracking north. He checked his own display to verify the call. There they were, closing at roughly twenty miles a minute off his port wing, at a range of eighty nautical miles. Six against two. Not terribly good odds on paper. In reality, however, they were heavily stacked in the AV-8s’ favour.

Out in front of the AV-8s was the replacement EA-6B Prowler. The Americans turned towards the Indonesians. Almost immediately, the pods on the Prowler’s wings would begin blasting them with so much energy they’d be stumbling around like Ray Charles. Totally blind.

The guys in the AWACS had said that the bandits were BVR negative, which meant they didn’t have beyond visual range missiles. That was a relief. Fire-and-forget over-thehorizon missiles were expensive and only America and her best buddies had access to them. They weren’t even available on the black market. It meant the aircraft closing on them had nothing smart they could launch at them and then bug out. The Indons would have to get up close and visual and use AIM-9 heaters – heat-seekers – and guns.

Indonesia was not a rich nation. They’d be running older F-16A Falcons, planes that had been superseded more than ten years ago by F-16Cs with numerous upgrades, including more powerful engines and weapons. Toad and his wingman were up against aircraft that, while
not quite museum pieces, were not far from it. Their AV8Bs, on the other hand, were the upgraded Harrier 11 Radar type, AV-8s with more powerful Pegasus engines, avionics, and the OSCAR on-board computer, which made life in the cockpit about as difficult to manage as playing a Nintendo game. Toad’s weapons systems could define who was friend or foe, acquire targets, as well as arm and deploy the aircraft’s weaponry, and do it all in the same instant. Once on its way, the AMRAAM missile’s own systems would take over, directing the warhead to the target. Toad didn’t even have to keep the target painted or illuminated in any way. Once launched, the missile was its own extremely smart, extremely deadly master.

Toad checked his ordnance by setting the correct mode and toggling from one weapons station to the next; two Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles and a couple of AIM-9M missiles, the new, more intelligent heaters with a longer range, and a 25 mm fuselage-mounted machine gun loaded with HEI, high-explosive incendiary shells. His wingman was similarly armed. The V22? Zip. Not even a spitball. Toad glanced left and right and was reassured by the sight of his own AIM-120 AMRAAMs. Seeing them snuggled under his wing gave him an enormous sense of security.

Toad wondered what would be going through the minds of the F-16 pilots. The poor bastards would be shitting bricks. Their threat indicators would be frying like eggs on a skillet under the barrage emitted by the EA-6B. Those Prowlers were bloody frightening. Get too close to one of them while it was emitting and you could forget about ever having any children. It was highly unlikely that the Indons would have experienced anything like the EW
they were now being subjected to. It meant that they were literally heading into the unknown, against an unknown enemy of unknown strength from an unknown origin. It was a fighter pilot’s nightmare.

Less than four minutes to intercept. He was running passive, emitting no radar waves. Given the probable state of confusion in the cockpits of the Indonesian F-16s, he was being overcautious. But why take the risk if it was avoidable? The AWACS was providing intelligence on the F-16s rushing towards them, then beaming the ACI straight into Toad’s aeroplane. He was getting all the information he could have asked for, without giving his existence away by emitting his own radar energy to get it. His threat indicator had all six bandits. Closing speed, 1.9 Mach.

Toad banked sharply and took in the terrain below. The dominating feature was the threatening cone of a huge volcano that rose from the jungle around ten klicks to the south. It towered into a duvet of cloud.

The V22 sucked negative gs as it hugged the contour of a ravine and plunged into a deep volcanic channel. Suryei just managed to pull a bag from the seat pocket in front of her and place it under her mouth before her stomach let go. The extreme movement recalled the terror of the final moments of QF-1, and the memory of it now made her gag with fear. The SAS men were all clipping in their shoulder straps and the negative-g strap between their legs. Suryei followed their example between stomach convulsions.

Toad checked his fuel pressure. Barely enough, but so what else was new? Fuel load was the AV-8B’s Achilles heel. The aircraft’s range, or lack of it, was a bit of a joke.
He was carrying external tanks and they’d been topped off three times by KC-135s yet, despite the numbers they’d been flying to ensure best range since the last fill, he’d burned a high percentage of the aircraft’s juice already.

Major Loku Shidyahan rolled his F-16 left and right, trying to pick out anything unusual against the green of the jungle below. He had the eyes in his head but nothing else to help him find the intruder. His radar was being jammed. The major had never experienced it before but he’d read enough about it to know it was happening to him and his flight.

His younger brother, Wyan, had phoned him out of the blue to ask him whether Indonesia had anything that sounded suspiciously like a V22 Osprey, because one had just flown in from the sea at wave height and disappeared inland. Of course we haven’t, he’d said. It was an American plane being tested by their army and marines. As it happened, Shidyahan had just read a performance review on them that suggested they were too dangerous and would probably never see service. His brother’s enquiry was just another coincidence in a day full of them. Hasanuddin AFB had been experiencing all kinds of unusual radar interference, but couldn’t trace the problem to its source. And then the call had come from Wyan. There was definitely something odd going on. There were also the orders from the top to be particularly vigilant. Why? The major had no idea but he had enough muscle at Hasanuddin to get a flight of F-16s fuelled and airborne to investigate.

His brother had provided an estimated heading and speed of the suspected intruder but the plane would most likely have altered course once it had made landfall. In
short, the V22 could be just about anywhere. The major wished his country had the resources to afford blanket radar coverage. With its tens of thousands of islands, having that kind of support would make the air force’s job so much easier. He rolled left and right again. Nothing. A gnawing in his gut told him the radar interference hid a malignant force. He gave brief instructions into his oxygen mask and the flight made a descending turn to the left, and decelerated.

Toad’s threat indicator showed the Indons making the turn. It was decision time. The Prowler had reached the agreed point where it, too, would turn away from the inbound flight of F-16s, and hightail it out of the area. Almost immediately, the Indonesians would get their radars back and the three intruders would be revealed on their scopes. The Indonesians were fifteen miles out. Toad and his wingman held the tactical advantage. He selected the AMRAAMs and his wingman did the same.

Toad, being the flight leader, chose the two leading aircraft in the approaching formation, as his wingman knew he would. Toad’s OSCAR confirmed that the two leading aircraft had been targeted. He watched the Prowler turn away on his scope. As it did so, Toad thumbed the fire button. One, two missiles away. The AV-8’s airframe rocked with the energy expended by the departing ordnance. OSCAR calculated time to impact.

Toad’s wingman had targeted the next two closest F-16s. As Toad manoeuvred his aircraft out of the way, the wing-man popped up from behind and launched his missiles. They had launched a total of four AMRAAMs between them.

On his radar, Major Sanders saw the effect on the F-16s
of the missile launches. The enemy formation split, aircraft spearing left and right in a deadly dance of evasion. The AV-8s pumped, turning aggressively through 180 degrees, to resume their sweeping fore and aft of the Osprey still hugging the treetops below.

Major Shidyahan happened to be peering at his radar display when the storms of electrons sweeping across it broke up. He saw three contacts, bandits, turning away and four inbound foxes, missiles, heading towards his flight. He instantly began to sweat. Inbound missiles! Who fired them? Where did they come from? What were they? He hoped and prayed that they would be something old and inaccurate. An equally assertive voice within him told him not to be stupid. The missiles would be coming in at Mach three. No time to think. He jerked his control stick back and the F-16 bucked, clawing for altitude. No, he wanted the ground, not sky. He pushed the stick forward. His shoulders strained against the straps and blood gushed into his brain as the F-16 hit four negative gs.

A warning horn went off in his phones from the threat indicator.
Beep. Beep.
The missile was hunting for him. The tone changed.
Wah-wah-wah
. Now it had found him. He threw the F-16 through a 90-degree left turn and pulled back into a climb. Blood rushed to his feet. His vision narrowed, blackout imminent. He released pressure on the stick, allowing a little blood back into his brain to restore sight, then jammed the stick back again.

Condensation formed at the wing roots, pressure waves squeezing the vapour out of the air.
Wah-wah-wah
. The horn might be the last thing he’d hear. Shidyahan jinked right. Then left.
Wah-wah-wah
. He looked behind him. He could see the trail left by the exhaust of the missile’s solid
rocket propellant. A deadly white finger reaching towards him.
Wah-wah-wah
.

Two towering, converging volcanic cliffs reared in Major Shidyahan’s forward view. He was going to drill into them. Faced with a certain, violent death, he screamed. Unconsciously, he flicked the F-16 into a knife-edge turn and pulled the control stick back hard. The vertical volcanic rock wall seemed to suck the F-16 towards it. His vicious manoeuvring forced the AMRAAM to go stupid when its sensors lost the target against the noise of the ground. The missile slammed into the cliff behind him, the concussion wave from the ensuing explosion tossing the F-16 into a yaw.

Major Shidyahan sucked in the oxygen to steady his nerves. Sweat dribbled down his forehead into his eyes and stung them. He scanned his instruments. No damage, Allah be praised. As his aircraft climbed smoothly away from the rockslide caused by the AMRAAM’s impact, he fought to regain control of his body and tried to think through the implications of the battle in progress. He radioed his position and situation quickly to Hasanuddin AFB. They asked him to clarify. He ignored the request. Aviate, navigate, communicate, he reminded himself, the three most important things for a pilot to remember, in their order of importance. Remembering the maxim from his early training days reassured him. But where was the avoid-incoming-missiles-at-all-costs bit? he asked himself, elated by his improbable escape from certain death.