Rogue Element (37 page)

ABC Radio 702: ‘In news just to hand, it has been announced by the Indonesian government that two survivors have been found at the crash site of the Qantas 747. The names of the two survivors, believed to be a man and a woman, have not been released. The survivors were found early this morning by an Indonesian air force rescue team flown in after the location
of the site was revealed by a spy satellite.

‘The Indonesian government has invited Australian military and civilian aviation authorities to investigate the causes of the crash.

‘Qantas Flight QF-1 was bound for London via Bangkok when it disappeared from air traffic control screens three days ago. The flight was fully booked, and it is believed over four hundred people are likely to have perished in the tragedy. The majority of the flight’s passengers are thought to have been Australian, and Thai nationals returning from Australia. The crash brings to an end Qantas’s fatality-free safety record.

‘It is now believed that the location of the downed plane was known for at least twenty-four hours by several Indonesian military leaders, but withheld by them in the hope of embarrassing the Indonesian government prior to attempting a coup d’etat.

‘One of those implicated in the cover-up and failed coup was General Suluang, Commander in Chief of the TNI, the Indonesian army, who was found dead in a hotel room earlier today after committing suicide. His death has sparked further tensions between rival military factions in Jakarta where a standoff . . .’

The operation had been underway for at least an hour and it was running like a Rolex. General Kukuh Masri sat propped in an APC. He moved his bandaged head to an angle that lessened the hammer that pounded in his brain despite the cocktail of drugs he’d been dosed with. In his
mind, Masri went over the strategy devised by the Australians with himself and members of the Indonesian government. His partners in the coup were all, by now, more than likely dead. They would not have seen their deaths coming.

Suluang was already removed, found in a hotel room with his brains staining the walls. Suicide was the initial verdict. There was no note. There would be no national mourning. He would be found a traitor to Indonesia, as would Rajasa and the others. The coup would be announced, the perpetrators rooted out and that would be that. Case closed.

Masri would be proclaimed a hero for delivering the traitors to the Indonesian people. Then he would retire quickly and quietly leave Indonesia, never to return. The truth about his involvement would eventually come out, but by then he would be long gone. The thought saddened the general. He loved Indonesia and didn’t want to leave it, but there was no alternative because he also loved living. Masri was just thankful that he was needed to subdue Suluang’s men. Otherwise, he too might have ended up in a lonely hotel room sucking a pistol like Suluang.

He forced his mind back to the present. Soldiers had been exchanging fire for the last thirty minutes. Each shot seemed to make the hammer in his head pound harder. The soldiers in Suluang’s regiment were besieged by the same men they’d overwhelmed the day before, almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier. There was more noise than anything else – more bark than bite – plenty of expended ammunition. There were a few casualties, but no serious attempt to kill or maim had been made by either side. The soldiers on both sides of the barricades knew the
outcome of the ‘battle’ before it started. Suluang was gone, shot by his own hand, and nothing would bring him back. The snake’s head had been removed. The firefight happening around Masri was more an expression of grief by Suluang’s men than anything else, the snake’s body writhing in shock.

Understandably, Masri thought, Australia had had a large say in how the operation would go. He was aware that simultaneous manoeuvres were in full swing against other regiments and squadrons loyal to the traitors he had given up to the government. The air force squadrons, unlike the army units, would surrender without a fight because their battles were fought in the sky. They would be overrun on the ground. The rogue naval squadrons would also be surrounded and neutralised. The cancer had to be removed.

It was time. Masri said a few brief words into the intercom and the APC rolled. The mechanised cavalry rumbled forward. They arrived as a phalanx at the front gate of Suluang’s barracks and brought their guns to bear on various structures within the gates.

Masri looked down with surprise at the blood that suddenly welled from under his arm. He wondered what was going on, but only for an instant. A stray, ricocheting FNC80 round had found a gap in the Kevlar plates of his body armour. It bored through his chest and severed the aorta. He died with a look of surprise on his face, slumped like a stuffed doll in the APC’s hatch.

White flags appeared at the gates of the barracks and the soldiers met and embraced, smiling, just as they had done the day before when the roles of victor and vanquished had been reversed.

A-6 was finished with this business. Maros in Sulawesi, and now Jakarta. Enough was definitely enough. She craved normality. But at that moment what she wanted even more desperately was sleep. It had been a long night and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been horizontal.

A-6 had arrived in Jakarta in the early hours of the morning from Maros, after being urgently summoned there to the Australian embassy. They briefed her on the coup. Indonesia, they said, was on the verge of falling to extremists in the military. They also told her about the plane, the Kopassus, the survivors in the jungle, each new twist and turn raising the bar of her astonishment considerably. When the briefing had finished, she was speechless. But once the reality of it had started to sink in, A-6 began to feel proud of the small but not insignificant part she’d played in helping to unravel the plot, and prevent it from coming to pass. The knowledge fortified her for the role the Australian ambassador, Roger Bowman, pressed on her.

She’d been asked to help take members of Jakarta’s powerful student body through an overview of the plot. A-6 was not a negotiator or a diplomat, but she had been drafted into this particular enterprise, she’d been told, because she looked and talked like an Indonesian, conveying the facts with an integrity that a white Australian public servant could never hope to match. She had conducted the meeting jointly with Achmad Reza, an Indonesian politician she’d never met or heard of before.
The students seemed to trust him, however, holding him in high regard.

Achmad Reza sat somewhat dazed by events as he sipped sweet tea at a cafeteria inside the parliament and reviewed the last few hours in his mind.

Standing in front of the student delegation, armed with satellite photos and the alarming contents of the disk showing Australia redrawn as part of Indonesia, Reza had felt well out of his depth. At stake was nothing less than the future of Indonesia and even, conceivably, the stability of the world. Redressing this evil was too much responsibility for one man to shoulder. His countrymen had plotted and killed in an outrageous bid for power. The ultimate outcome of their actions was beyond his ability to predict. All that could be done now – all anyone could do – would be to ride events as they bucked and kicked sickeningly to a conclusion.

He had agreed with the Australians that the truth would have to remain hidden. Peace in the region depended on it. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t taken much to convince the ruling party about the need for outright secrecy, because everyone was in a collective state of mortification at the evidence revealed. It gave Australia an upper hand in the relationship between the two countries, and that mildly concerned Reza, but then he realised that the two countries were entering into a conspiracy and each was dependent on the other. The Australians and Indonesians all agreed that the traitors had to be purged. The coup had to be made public. Using the student body as the conduit for this news had been his idea. It seemed logical. They were party neutral and, as such, regarded by the wider
population as being concerned more for the welfare of their country than politicking.

The young Indonesian woman who’d assisted him with the briefing of the students had been extremely nervous. He wasn’t given her name. She’d been introduced to him as an Australian public servant. Quite obviously, she was a spy of some kind, but vastly different to the other young woman, the unnerving one called Elizabeth, who’d anonymously passed him the photo and later met with him in the village. This woman was refreshingly unsure of herself, almost frightened by the situation she found herself in. Reza had warmed to her instantly, because he knew exactly how she felt.

The angry noise outside the building reached in and bounced around the stone courtyard. Reza sipped his tea as various politicians and bureaucrats rushed past, for the most part no doubt hurrying to quieter, more secure places. The students had obviously decided that a show of solidarity, a stand against the forces determined to return Indonesia to the bad old days, was necessary. He was stunned at the speed of their reaction. They were well organised.

At first the student delegation he met with in the early hours of the morning had had trouble accepting what Reza revealed to them about Suluang and the rest. They preferred to believe that they were being used as unwitting pawns in some dangerous deception. But the taped interview with General Masri in his hospital bed was utterly convincing. Masri had been somewhat of a national hero and his confession shook them.

The police hadn’t been brought into the loop for obvious reasons. Lanti Rajasa, the country’s top policeman and
a traitor, might have been tipped off and that would have been a disaster. The result was the conflict outside. Policeman versus student. Reza hoped that no one would get hurt.

He sighed and quaffed the remains of his tea. Perhaps the students were right and the demonstration outside was necessary, the open conflict a first important step in the healing process. Indonesia would never be the same again, of that he was certain. At the very least, the constitution would have to be redrafted to redefine the role of the armed forces. They could never again be allowed to act as financially autonomous satraps in far-flung provinces. The practice entrenched powerful expectations that ran counter to the nation’s best interests. Yet Indonesia needed a strong army if it was to prevent disintegration. How could they possibly afford it? The conundrum caused Reza to have a premonition of deeply troubled times ahead.

A roar spiked through the blanket of the chanting and the bullhorns. Reza decided to leave the security of the parliament’s inner sanctum and join the melee outside. The students believed in a free Indonesia, and so did he. That, at least, was simple, uncomplicated, noble; and his soul needed sustenance. Reza gently placed his cup on the delicate saucer and stood up gingerly. He knew it was risky, but his place was out front with the students.

Out on the street, A-6 was amazed at the speed of the student response. Hundreds of belligerent police with batons and riot shields were forming lines, eyeing ranks of students wearing crash helmets and scarves tied around their mouths. Just as frightening, many students wore no protection at all. Behind the student lines was the
Indonesian parliamentary building. Angry young men and women with loud-hailers bellowed that the parliament needed protection. Police vehicles rushed back and forth in the no-man’s land between the opposing forces, rocks and other projectiles popping off their armour plating. She watched horrified as several students fired volleys of ball bearings at the police with homemade slingshots. Tear gas was returned. Things were spinning out of control.

A-6 glanced down at her foot. Under it was a flyer with the large black headline ‘Traitors!’ in Bahasa. Moving her shoe revealed mug shots of several high-ranking officers. More tear gas canisters were launched into the student ranks. It quickly became difficult to see anything clearly, as much for the tears that filled her burning eyes and throat as for the thick white smoke that swirled in the square. Several cars attempted to gain access to the parliament. The students were gathering excitedly around one of them.

Lanti Rajasa had woken around midnight with an uneasy feeling. He’d been expecting a call from Suluang with an update from the Kopassus at the crash site. The call hadn’t come through, leaving a sour lump in his belly that made sleep troubled. He gave up trying just after three in the morning, got up, showered and dressed, and left the car park of his apartment building in his black Mercedes. He had his driver cruise the hot, dusty sprawl of Jakarta, driving aimlessly for hour after hour with no set destination,
while he pondered a course of action.

His initial thought was to go to the parliament, keep his ear to the ground, try to contact Suluang and some of the others and make a decision on the basis of what they told him. Then Rajasa suddenly realised the source of his unease: he was the head of the police but he did not know what was going on. That was unthinkable, and it set off an array of alarms in his head. There was only one possible reason for this lack of intelligence, and it didn’t bode well for his future health and happiness. Was he purposefully being kept in the dark, starved of information, cut off for a reason? How quickly things appeared to be falling apart.

Suddenly frightened by this insight, Rajasa changed his mind. He would go to the parliament as he’d planned, but instead of contacting anyone he would go straight to his office, shred anything dangerous, wipe his hard-drive and clean and trash his email folders. He would then get on the first plane out.

It was now morning, just after nine-thirty. The sky was grey and, as usual, heavily polluted. The sight of students clashing with police had become so commonplace that it scarcely raised his interest when he arrived at the parliament. The students manning obstacles, petrol drums filled with bricks and burning rubbish, were stopping the cars at the entrance gate. Several masked faces appeared in the windows and Rajasa saw their eyes bulge first with surprise, then with anger as they recognised him. The front passenger door was flung open and his driver was pulled from the car. A poster titled ‘Traitors’ with the faces of himself, Suluang and the others was placed against his window and the cause of the riot was now obvious to Rajasa. He was no longer disinterested, he was afraid.

The car rocked violently from side to side. Rajasa rolled about inside helplessly, screaming obscenities. Young faces were pushed against his window yelling, spitting. A brick crashed into the bulletproof glass window beside him and bounced harmlessly off. Rajasa felt reassured by that. But then the Mercedes was pushed up onto its balance point and rolled over on its roof. He could feel and hear the bodywork being pounded by bricks and sticks. Rajasa smelled petrol and any feelings of invulnerability he may have had evaporated. Somehow the fuel tank had been punctured. One of the students lit the petrol and the flames spread quickly.

The students pulled back as the fire took hold and the heat became intense. Rajasa could see the orange tongues licking at the windows outside while inside, the car’s interior filled with smoke. The fuel tank exploded, sending a shockwave through the vehicle that killed Rajasa long before the flames reached him.

A-6 had seen enough. Through her hacking cough and watering eyes, she’d witnessed the mob burn a man alive in his car. She wondered who the victim was. It was getting impossible to breathe and the widening melee, increasing in ferocity, made it likely that sooner or later she’d be dragged off by the police or hit by student missiles filling the air. She staggered down a side street, gagging, eyes weeping uncontrollably from the gas, more than ever ready to leave the espionage business, and Indonesia, behind her.