Rogue Element (6 page)

ABC Radio 702: ‘We interrupt this program to bring you a news flash. Qantas Flight 1, en-route from Sydney to London via Bangkok, is missing, feared crashed.

‘Unconfirmed reports are that the 747-400 disappeared from Bali Air Traffic Control radar screens in the early hours of the morning, local time.

‘Just repeating: fears are that Qantas Flight QF-1, the regular service from Sydney to London, has crashed. We will bring you more news on this as developments come to hand.’

Another uncomfortable silence filled the room. The Prime Minister of Australia, The Right Honourable William (Bill) Blight, glanced at the window and allowed his eyes to focus beyond the raindrops spattering the glass pane. The trees in the grounds of Parliament House had lost most of their leaves, letting them go in a circle of gold on the emerald couch below. Autumn. It occurred to Blight that he didn’t much care for the view. It was sentimental, almost soppy. He preferred the iron trunks of heavy lift cranes that had formed part of the vista of most of his working life, and the ordered ranks of rusting containers that clanged like giant bells when dropped. What the hell am I doing here in this place? he wondered, vaguely aware that the Indonesian ambassador, Parno Batuta, had begun to speak again. Blight blinked, waking from a daydream edged by the oily rainbows that filled the puddles on the docks.

‘Once again, Mr Prime Minister, let me say how sorry I am,’ said Batuta, eyes lowered.

‘I appreciate your authorities informing us so quickly of this disaster. Do your people know yet exactly where the plane came down?’ asked Blight.

‘No. Our military and civil aviation authorities hold different opinions, but no one has had the time to review all the facts. The natural assumption is that the aircraft has come down where it disappeared from radar on the island of Sulawesi. But our military believes the plane could also have flown on outside Indonesian airspace. We are testing both theories. Our air force has pledged every available aircraft for the search and I have been assured that we will find it quickly.’

‘Can we provide any assistance?’

‘Thank you, Prime Minister. I will ask our air force people if there’s anything Australia can do. Colonel Ari Ajirake, one of our most senior officers, is personally overseeing the search. I’m sure he would welcome your support to bring this tragedy to a speedy conclusion.’

Blight nodded. He was detached and distant. A frown deeply lined his forehead and the corners of his mouth were weighed down.

‘Mr Prime Minister, I assure you my country has no residual enmity for Australia,’ said Batuta, wringing his hands. ‘East Timor is behind us and I promise you we will do absolutely everything we can to find the Qantas plane as quickly as possible.’

Blight realised that he had been cool, even cold, and that talking to him had probably been a bit like conversing with a wall, lengthy silences punctuating the conversation. Perhaps the ambassador had translated this difficulty as a sign that he felt Indonesia was in some way responsible for the crash. That was nonsense. Blight
smiled wanly, apologetically, and did his best to reassure the envoy. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ambassador, I’m sure you will. And thank you. I appreciate you coming over. I’m sure Indonesia will do everything it can to help us in this dark hour. I’m just a bit preoccupied.’

‘Not at all. Understandable,’ replied Batuta, relieved and smiling with a tilt of his head that conveyed understanding, sympathy and sadness all at once.

There was nothing more that could be said. Blight stood and Batuta followed his lead. The ambassador usually found the Prime Minister loud and physically intimidating. But here, in this situation, Blight appeared much smaller than usual, almost life-size. Batuta preferred him that way.

The Prime Minister’s PA popped her head around the door as soon as the ambassador departed. ‘Shirley, tell the Air Vice Marshal to come in,’ said the PM. Blight stood and stretched his thick arms out behind his broad back. He felt and heard a couple of bones pop and crack. ‘Bloody hell, it’s going to be a god-awful day,’ he sighed as the Commander in Chief of the Australian Defence Forces walked in. ‘Take a seat, Spike,’ said the PM.

Blight sucked in a breath. There were no pleasantries. ‘Okay, the Indonesians are doing everything they can. The question is, what can we do?’

The phone rang in the adjoining room. Shirley answered it. A moment later, there was a tap on the door as it swung quietly open. With her small, sharp-featured face and pinched mouth, Shirley could easily have passed for a disciplinary officer in a correctional facility for girls. ‘Excuse me, Bill. Line two.’

‘Yes?’ he said into the receiver impatiently. What he
heard made the PM’s face blench visibly. He hung up the phone slowly. ‘Andrew Harris and his whole family – wife and four kids – were on QF-1.’ Blight knew that Harry, the Minister for Industry and Workplace Relations, was taking his family to England on holiday, but he had refused to entertain the thought that his best mate and close colleague had chosen to fly Qantas, and was therefore probably on the missing flight. But there it was, the phone call he’d been dreading. The news gutted him and he needed to sit. Alone.

‘Jesus . . .’ he said.

Joe was caught in a tunnel. He knew there was an end to it but he couldn’t see it. He was falling and the tunnel was swirling. It felt like he was in the centre of a tornado. The forces in its centre were powerful, pulling the skin on his face and pushing it into rolls, as if he was an astronaut in a centrifuge.

He found it hard to breathe. The pressure was sucking the air from his lungs. And then something changed. He found himself in the very centre of the tunnel. It was calm here and he began to float. The tugging stopped, remnants of it dragging lightly at his legs then at his toes and then, gone. Above, there was light.

Joe’s eyes flickered. He was reluctant to open them. His head hurt. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been pummelled, beaten black and blue by an opponent a couple of weight divisions heavier than him. Something was
pinning him down and he sensed that he should move with caution. He wondered why he should be feeling so sore, and then he remembered. Surely the crash had been a dream too? He reluctantly opened his eyes. The ground was fifteen to twenty metres below him. It hadn’t been a dream. The blood pounded behind his eyeballs. He moved his head to better take in his surroundings and he discovered that he was in a tree, still strapped into his seat, only upside down. The whole thing must have been ripped out of the plane. His mind was working, but only just.
I’m alive. Jesus, I’m alive.

Joe remained still for a time, pulse thumping in his head, and he marvelled at his astonishing good luck. He was suspended, secured by his lap restraint. If he unclipped it, he would fall to the ground and it was a long way down. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Survive the plane crash and get killed by my own stupidity. He did a mental check of his body. He didn’t think anything was broken, but the bruises were painful.

Joe hooked an arm around the back of the seat and carefully unclipped the restraint. He slid forward. The shift in weight destroyed the balance of the seat. It fell several metres before being caught in another fork. The fall was fortunate, though, because it brought Joe’s feet into contact with a branch. His legs took his weight, but they were rubbery. He collapsed and fell the last five metres, landing on a canvas duffel bag full of air and clothes.

There was a large, torn sheet of aluminium lying not far from the tree. The tail of the letter Q filled one corner. Joe recognised it as a section of the plane’s fuselage. He went over to the sheet and lifted it up. It was warm to the touch. A man, a woman and two young children were huddled
beneath it. The man looked familiar. They had shared the first-class section with him. The children had been noisy, bugging him, pushing the back of his seat continually as they got up and down, came in and out. Now it looked like they were all asleep, peaceful. Joe bent down and nudged the man. ‘Hey, mate,’ he said quietly. The man didn’t move. Neither did his wife or kids. It took a few more prods before Joe realised that they were dead.

He was briefly afraid of the bodies, wary that their death might somehow infect him with their lifelessness. A whole family. Gone.

Joe turned around slowly on the spot, and found it impossible to comprehend the world around him. It reminded him of a rubbish tip, but no tip he’d ever seen was as gruesome as this, for bits of human bodies were strewn around together with clothes and luggage and scrap metal. The clearing carved in the jungle by the 747 was an open wound. Leaf litter and splintered tree trunks were churned with the contents of hundreds of suitcases flung from the aircraft as it tumbled through its landing. Few bodies were intact. Arms and legs were ripped from hips and shoulders, and hands lay here and there like stiff blue spiders. Already, ants, flies and beetles had found paths to the gore. They probed through earth that looked like melted dark chocolate because of all the blood.

Everywhere, bits of metal and rubber burned and smoked. An enormous section of wing was engulfed in flame and billowed black clouds. Little of the 747’s superstructure was recognisable. Joe couldn’t see the tail section anywhere. The nose of the aircraft was flattened, punched inwards. Broken seats were scattered all over, some with passengers still strapped in. A few seats had been tossed
high into the trees where they hung like ghoulish ornaments. Joe stumbled through the ragged piles of clothing, broken bodies and twisted metal as if in a dream. The obscene smell of hot kerosene and barbecuing flesh filled his nostrils.

Things like this did not happen to Joe. His mind rebelled and shut down, wrapping itself in cotton wool. A woman’s arm, wrenched clean off a shoulder, complete with gold watch and painted red fingernails, lay on the dirt. The reality of it pierced Joe’s defences. He fell to his knees and heaved yellow bile from his empty stomach.

Something moved under him. He felt it, then heard a groan. He scrabbled back and saw a foot shift in the debris. Joe ran forward and lifted back a row of seats. Underneath, an elderly man and woman untangled themselves from the debris. The old woman let out a sharp cry. The man, sobbing, held his wife’s dirty face in his hands and kissed it over and over. Her leg was bent back on itself, badly broken. She shrieked as Joe lifted away a suitcase.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe in a dry, cracked voice that sounded alien to him. ‘Your leg . . .’

The old man and woman ignored him. Joe searched the immediate area for something to use as a splint. He returned with a length of aluminium tubing and panty-hose taken from one of the hundreds of suitcases ripped open, the contents scattered across the ground. He didn’t really know what he was doing, but he’d seen broken legs fixed on television often enough to know that he had to straighten and secure it somehow.

Joe knelt beside the couple and carefully pulled away the bits of suitcases, clothing, and a bloody foot in a boot. He wondered what had saved this couple. Maybe they were
just lucky like him, plucked from certain death by a quirk of fate. The old man, he saw, was practically untouched. He wore an expensive suit and it was remarkably clean. The woman, also, was immaculately dressed. He vaguely recognised them. More fellow first-class passengers.

‘Hey,’ said Joe, giving the man’s arm a gentle nudge. The old man looked up with moist, rheumy eyes. ‘Your wife. We have to fix her leg.’ It was obvious from the man’s blank look that he hadn’t heard him, or that shock had prevented him from understanding.

‘Your wife’s leg is broken,’ Joe repeated, directing the man’s gaze to the bizarre angle of the limb, poking up under her skirt. The old man nodded finally. He wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders in a bear hug as they lay there on the ground. Joe held her lower leg, wrapping his arm firmly around her foot and slowly, firmly, pulled back.

The woman’s scream launched a flock of birds come to watch the grim spectacle from the safety of a nearby tree. They flew off, squawking, into the humid, grey morning sky.

The young woman manoeuvred her tricycle through the narrow street. It was difficult to see over the top of the oven perched on the front wheels, stuffed with ears of corn. She had to lean out far to one side to see. She moved from one side of the trike to the other, hanging out like a sailor on a trapeze, tapping at the horn continuously to
warn the dogs that slept dangerously close to the edge of the road, or to someone ahead on another bike, that she was closing in on them from behind.

It was practically midday and she was very late, not that she had a boss she had to check in with. But the world she lived in had a good ten hours head start, frantically trying to keep its head above the poverty line. People were slicing fruit, carrying bricks, hacking open coconuts, selling, hawking, scrabbling, feeding children or pigs, mending clothes, making clothes, firing bricks and roof tiles, planting rice, fertilising, tilling, serving, sharpening, sweeping, living and dying – all by the roadside. Indonesia was the busiest, most industrious country on earth. It had to be, thought the young woman. Everyone had a job, except for the very young, the very old or the enfeebled. In fact, most people had two or three jobs, just to keep themselves clothed and fed. And they all helped each other, supported each other, and in a way that neighbours back home rarely did. There was a fellowship here, a genuine community. There had to be something going for Maros, because it certainly wasn’t the town itself. It was hot, dusty, noisy and smelly. One would have to have been born here to love it, she thought. She still found it hard to believe that such a shithole could produce such a friendly people.

The young woman arrived at her usual spot and parked the trike. She dismounted and hurriedly set up her stall, tearing husks from the ears and placing the corn in the portable oven. She noted that a competitor a little further back down the road, Sekrit, had already sold about a third of his load. She waved to him. Half those sales should have been hers, she thought angrily.

And then she laughed. What did she care, really? She
wasn’t in the hot corn business. She was so deep under cover that sometimes she forgot who she was, and what she was doing. There were some soldiers from the base meandering down the road on foot. She held up her corn, kernels burned black by the oven’s heat, and shouted her singsong sales pitch at them. Her corn was the freshest. Her corn was the tastiest. Her corn was the cheapest. None of which was true but that hardly seemed important. Everyone exaggerated; it was part of the pitch.

There were more soldiers than usual on the road, and some of them seemed edgy, in a hurry. She tried to engage a soldier in conversation, but all she got was a terse, barked reply for her to hurry and to stop chattering like a monkey.

A-6, as her employers in Canberra knew her, was the perfect spy. Her skin said Indonesian, but her heart was Australian. Despite frantic attempts to remedy the situation, Australia didn’t have enough HUMINT – spies – in Indonesia, certainly not enough to provide reliable intelligence on a nation that stretched across some 17 000 islands and embraced more than 219 million people. Most of the assets it did manage to have on the ground had a similar profile to A-6.

She didn’t stand out. In many respects, she was unimpressive, being of average height and weight. She was neither ugly nor particularly attractive. She spoke Indonesian like a local. She also had a deep love of her adopted country, Australia, and an equally deep sadness for what she believed Indonesia had become. A-6 wrapped another ear in newsprint and handed it to the soldier, who rudely flicked a note at her.

A truck ground to a halt in front of her stall, blowing a cloud of road grit into her face. A couple of soldiers
jumped down from the cabin. They were the Kopassus, the elite. She’d been wary of these men from the start. They were haughty, dangerous.

She knew one of them well. He put his face close to her so that she could smell his sour breath and demanded half a dozen cobs in that sneering way of his. She smiled helpfully, trying hard not to let her resentment or her fear show, and handed him the corn. He didn’t pay; he never did. He just turned and swaggered back to the truck.

She cast her mind back to their first meeting. It had been at night and she had heard screams coming from an alley. She went to investigate and came upon a young woman lying naked on the ground, a Kopassus soldier holding her face in the mud as he rammed into her. A-6 started yelling at the man to get off. Another soldier came out of the shadows and grabbed her arm. A knife was under her throat. She felt the sharp edge against her skin and smelled the oil on the blade. She looked down and saw that his pants were undone and his fly was open. He’d either had his turn, or was about to have it.

The soldier with the knife recognised her as the woman who sold corn in front of the barracks. He forced her against a wall, grabbed a handful of hair and hacked away at it with his knife, pulling out whole handfuls of it by the roots. He did it smiling through her pleadings and then her screams.

He said it was fortunate for the woman under his corporal that the ‘corn cob girl’, as he called her, had happened along. They didn’t have to kill her now, he said, waving the dagger at the woman on the ground, because each was a hostage for the other. A-6 suddenly realised that he was right. If she managed to find a sympathetic
policeman prepared to investigate, someone who wasn’t afraid of the army – and that was unlikely, she reminded herself – then the soldier would kill the woman in the mud, thereby disposing of the evidence. And if the victim complained, then she, the corn cob girl, would be killed. More than likely, in either event they’d both end up dead. Ripping out her hair was merely underlining the assertion that he meant what he said. But her intervention had been stupid because she’d ceased to be anonymous. But what could she have done, she admonished herself, ignored what was going on?

A-6 remembered that particular soldier, the sergeant with smallpox scars covering his round face. Her hair grew back but her fear of him remained. She learned from other soldiers that his name was Marturak, Sergeant Marturak. She called him ‘Sergeant Melon’ after the large, evil-smelling durian that had similarly rough skin. Every morning Sergeant Melon took corn from her stall, often taunting and jeering at her about her plain, unattractive appearance.

Indonesia seemed full of men like Sergeant Melon, men who had achieved power and used it as an excuse to threaten and bully others. She was sure, however, that her father, a colonel in the Indonesian army, had not been like this pig. He had commanded an artillery regiment. A-6 often talked to her mother about him. He had been a highly decorated soldier who had fought the Japanese during the war, and the Dutch imperialists after it. He was not a politician or a warmonger, he just believed in Indonesia, strong and independent.

Then things started to go wrong. The Communists in the army were getting bolder. The Soviets were filling the
military’s armoury with hardware and its head with idealistic rubbish. The army divided into factions. Her father was asked to join both and he declined both, which made him the friend of neither.

One night when her father was sleeping at the barracks, they came for him. No one knew whether it was the Communists or the Nationalists but a lot of men died that night when the old government was removed with bullets and knives.

Her mother had scooped her up from her cot and ‘friendlies’ had smuggled them to Singapore. From there they went to Australia and applied for refugee status. The colonel had been highly regarded by senior Australian army officers. That helped them win their refugee status and A-6 spent the next sixteen years of her life growing into a proud Australian woman.

And then one day, a young man, a total stranger, approached her. He showed her ghastly photographs of her father snapped after
they
had finished with him. The man asked her whether she wanted to avenge her father’s death. Looking back on it, the whole episode had been unconvincing. Nevertheless, she’d fallen for it. Now, she couldn’t even be sure the photos had been genuine. They could easily have been faked. They could also have been real and the man being tortured could have been anyone. But she had been vulnerable. She’d heard many stories about her father, how much he’d loved her when she was a baby. A-6 even believed that she remembered him as a large and friendly shadow in the most distant reaches of her memory. She had said to the man that she wanted time to think but she already knew that the answer was yes.

She spent the next three months learning basic spycraft,
self-defence, and how to pass herself off as a poor Indonesian. That was two years ago.

At first A-6 enjoyed the cloak and dagger stuff. It was easy being a spy in the new millennium. All she had to do was call in detailed reports of troop deployments in and around Hasanuddin AFB. For this she was given a satellite phone. The techies back home were a bit concerned about that at first. The handset was nothing special. It looked just like any old Nokia. The dish, however, was more obtrusive, even though it was small, about the size of a small dinner plate. A woman with an old mobile wasn’t in the least unusual, but a satellite phone? It turned out not to be an issue. Satellite TV was everywhere in Sulawesi, or throughout Maros at least. It was cheap, easy entertainment. It was almost unusual
not
to have it and a dish sat on even the poorest roof.

The phone could be used as a normal mobile but to use it as a satellite phone, she had to key in a ten-digit code. The handset then scrambled her voice into a random binary code and transmitted it on a scattered frequency to a military communications satellite. It was important that her calls could not be intercepted, unscrambled or traced without considerable effort. It was just prudent to be out of sight when she phoned in her reports. No big deal, she’d thought, although finding privacy in Maros was difficult.

Her run-in with Sergeant Melon demonstrated how serious and dangerous espionage was. And the current amicable relationship between Australia and Indonesia could turn ugly in a heartbeat, as it had often enough in the past. If she was caught when things were tense, there was the likelihood that she would be taken away and shot, unless there was political mileage to be gained by parading her through the courts. And then they’d shoot her.

A-6 wondered what it would be like to be a normal woman again, going to parties, the beach, nightclubs. It would be nice to dance, meet boys and have a normal life. The danger was all getting a bit too close now, especially given the continued contact with Sergeant Melon.

A-6 gave herself another six months. After that, she would review her situation. But in the meantime, something unusual was definitely going on in town. She heard the choppers before she saw them: two large Super Pumas came in low and lifted the tiles off several roofs, flinging them into the narrow, dank lanes. They cruised unhurriedly overhead at barely a walking pace. A-6 put a hand over her nose and mouth to protect her lungs from the dust picked up by the powerful downwash of the rotor blades, and squinted up at the aircraft through the stinging cones of sandblast. She was just in time to see that the helo was full of Kopassus soldiers before Sergeant Melon pushed the door shut. The aircraft then accelerated quickly into a climb.

The thump of the Super Pumas faded to a distant beat before A-6 started up her trike. Something of interest was happening somewhere if two Super Pumas full of Indonesia’s crack soldiers were hurriedly being airlifted to . . . where? She would try to find out, but didn’t like her chances. The Kopassus weren’t the most talkative people and asking direct questions could prove unhealthy.