Rogue Element (9 page)

Excerpt from phone interview with Indonesian Ambassador Parno Batuta on ABC Radio 702:

ABC: What sort of terrain has the Qantas plane crashed in?

Batuta: We do not know where the plane has come down.

ABC: But you’re searching the island of Sulawesi?

Batuta: Yes, we are concentrating our search there. It’s a rugged place. Much jungle and volcanoes. And the plane could feasibly be anywhere within a very wide area.

ABC: There’s a report coming out of Jakarta, attributed to the air traffic controller who raised the alarm, that the plane could have crashed outside Indonesian territory.

Batuta: We are operating on the advice of our air force and that is something being considered.

ABC: When will you broaden the search?

Batuta: I believe our air force is already doing that.

ABC: If you are also considering other possible areas, then the search must be vast. That being the case, what resources have been allocated?

Batuta: Every available aircraft has been committed.

ABC: Have you invited Australian aircraft to help search?

Batuta: No. Our air force is more than capable.

ABC: What will you do when you find the aircraft?

Batuta: We will allow experts to examine the crash site and try to find the causes, naturally.

ABC: Are there any suggestions yet of terrorism?

Batuta: I would ask you, please, not to ask such a question. We don’t know anything about terrorism. A plane has come down and that is all anyone can say for certain at this moment. And certainly, all I will say. Thank you.

The void into which QF-1 had flown left a vacuum that needed to be filled. Everyone, but especially people close to the passengers, needed answers. Not the ones asked by the politicians and the media, but simpler, more real questions. What has happened to my son? Is my daughter alive? Is my husband dead? The questions were underpinned by a consistent belief that the plane had to be in the air somewhere, still flying, because Qantas planes simply didn’t
crash. The government couldn’t tell them anything new, and neither could Qantas. They were left to work it out for themselves.

The first of these bewildered people began to arrive at the departure lounge of Sydney Airport. They came in ones and twos, besieging the Qantas flight check-in desks with questions. By noon the crowd had swelled to over a hundred and the section had become unworkable. And as their numbers had grown, so had their mood changed. Sydney Airport management had called security and had the irate throng moved as calmly as possible out of the way, into a large section of vacant seating. Qantas staff drifted amongst them with tea, coffee and sandwiches but offered nothing more sustaining, namely, answers.

A sonic boomlet cracked as a bullet going supersonic creased the air over Joe’s head. His mind was grappling with his situation, and nothing about it figured.

Now they were coming for
him
! The last thing he remembered seeing, before throwing himself onto the ground, was the image of two soldiers racing across the crash site towards him. Bullets continued to slap through the bush beside and behind him. They wanted him to keep his head down. He complied.

Eventually, one of those bullets would get lucky. While Joe was sure they couldn’t see him, his position on top of the hill was exposed. He had to leave. His problem was that he didn’t have a clue where he should run to, only that
he should move, and fast. His world had utterly collapsed. He hurriedly stuffed bottles of water and the axe into the rucksack and slipped into the bush on his belly, dragging the rucksack behind him.

At the crash site Sergeant Marturak surveyed the wreckage. It was an unpleasant scene with an equally unpleasant smell, and while he was pleased that he hadn’t been one of the passengers, the devastation left him unaffected. Marturak and his Kopassus troops were no strangers to death and destruction. He was surprised that there had been survivors at all, given the obvious violence of the aircraft’s impact, but survivors were easily turned into victims with an FNC80, the Indonesian army’s standard issue carbine.

He moved cautiously to where the nose section of the aircraft had come to rest. A shot punctuated the quiet as a soldier made sure of another passenger. The noise did not distract the sergeant, who was comfortable around the sound of firearms. Marturak first inspected what was left of the cockpit. The force of the impact had concertinaed the section to around half its original size. There was nothing recognisable left of the flight crew. Something crunched under his boot – a small plastic model of an F/A-18.

Remarkably, some of the seats and lockers were still in place. The sergeant levered himself up inside the giant tube and, using the jagged ends of aluminium ribbing jutting from the severed end of the fuselage as footholds, climbed easily into the first-class section. Careful not to lose his footing on the slippery human remains, he made his way towards the seat he had been briefed to specifically search. He hoped to find the occupant still strapped
in, and alive, so that he could learn the passenger’s identity before killing him, but the seat was gone.

However, a computer and other electronic equipment had become entangled in the seat beside the one he was searching for. He freed it. The casing was cracked. He pressed the on button to see what would happen. Unbelievably, it booted, albeit noisily. The screen named the owner but required a password to continue. Sergeant Marturak checked the drives. There was a disk in the slot. He smashed the computer with the butt of his rifle, recovering the disk, then tossed the remnants into a nearby smouldering fire giving off the smell of rancid barbeque pork.

He placed the disk in his webbing and made his way to the open end of the fuselage. A knot of soldiers were standing around laughing, smoking pungent clove cigarettes as a defence against the stench of death that hung over the place. Marturak barked an order. The men jumped, making their way to the sergeant. The young men effortlessly swung up through the wreckage and into the nose section. Marturak issued another staccato command. The soldiers checked the corpses littering the area, looking through pockets for identification.

The sergeant climbed down to a point where he could jump to the ground. He then trotted up to a higher vantage point and squinted through his Persols at the hill being searched for the survivor. The jungle was thick but the hill didn’t seem too far away. It wouldn’t be long till his men reported from its crest that the last surviving passenger had been killed, and he would then be able to make his radio report that the crash site was secured.

Once the jungle had obscured his retreat, Joe got to his feet and charged into the bush that hemmed him in on three sides. There was nowhere to go but downhill
towards
the killers! He stopped several times to listen to the jungle through his own heavy panting. He sucked in the warm, damp air to settle his racing heartbeat, and then held his breath, reaching out with his senses.

The jungle was not a quiet place. There was a bird – he thought it was a bird but he couldn’t be sure – making a sound like fingernails dragging across a blackboard. The sound filled the jungle, combining with the press of the foliage to give him a profound sense of claustrophobia. It made his head swim. He was close to panic. A few hours ago he was a first-class passenger. Now he was being hunted, part of the food chain.

He touched his cheek and felt the swollen, angry skin. The side of his face had puffed up like a soufflé. What had caused the itchy swelling? Then he saw the large spiky green caterpillar hanging from a thick thread centimetres from his face. He pinched off the grub’s bungee and angrily swung it away into the leaf litter on the jungle floor.

He had to get moving again. But which way? Joe was disoriented. The hill’s fall-line was his only signpost. He traversed across it as much as the jungle allowed, taking a bottle from his rucksack and throwing back the contents as he half ran, but mostly crawled, sweat pouring down his face and stinging his eyes. He broke a stick from a tree and held it in front of his face, guarding against further assaults from the wildlife.

Joe managed to find a rhythm as he moved through the clawing bush. A machete would have been helpful. Then
he remembered his makeshift axe. He dropped the stick and removed the axe from his rucksack. He thought he was beginning to tell the difference between bush he could charge through and vegetation he had to go around. And then he ran through a clump of leaves and into the solid trunk of a tree. The force of the collision nearly knocked him out. He bounced off the tree and found himself on the ground. His nose hurt badly enough to make his eyes water but he knew it wasn’t broken. He’d had plenty of bloody noses from boxing and the pain was reassuring, like meeting up with an old friend.

He pushed on through a mat of vines sheathed in fine needles that made his skin itch. A section gave way and he fell into water. He’d reached the creek at the base of the hill that separated it from the crash site. It smelled of kerosene, even stronger here. Then he heard something. He froze and listened, trying to isolate the sound of moving water from the alien snap of a stick. The jungle was just as noisy as it had been, except that his fall had disturbed ground-dwelling animals that scurried off like startled smugglers, back into their hidden caves. He thought that finding some thick scrub to hide in would probably be a good idea for himself too.

Joe crawled out of the creek. He was careful not to make any sound that might alert the soldiers. He’d badly bruised his shins in the fall into the creek and he grimaced when he put his weight on his feet. He slowly pulled himself up the bank and into the jungle’s embrace. He forced his way through on all fours and found himself in the tunnel he had noted earlier. He peered into it in the diminished light. The tunnel carved through the jungle, remaining roughly parallel with the creek bank for a while
before twisting back at right angles and heading (probably, he thought) back around the base of the hillock. Joe turned and backed into it, deciding that if he was shot at, he didn’t want to take a bullet in the arse, or have his nuts blasted off.

The floor of the tunnel was made up of flattened grasses and leaf litter. The tunnel walls were remarkably uniform, as if they’d been woven. He continued reversing through the tunnel until it kinked right. Then he stopped. Something around him had changed. But what? Then he knew what it was. The world had suddenly fallen silent. What was that? Had he heard something? He held his breath.

The wall of the tunnel suddenly collapsed in front of him. Something large fell into the space. Joe was paralysed with fear. It was either some kind of wild animal, or one of the soldiers. Either way, things were about to get unpleasant. Before he could react with a scream or shout, he was head-butted on the point of his chin. The force concentrated in his head, orange planets exploding behind his eyes. His mind fought to maintain consciousness. Then a hand covered his nose and mouth, and a weight pressed on his chest. In front of his face were frightened eyes as wide as Frisbees. It was a woman lying on top of him, pressing the air out of his lungs. At least, he thought it was a woman. She put her finger to her lips for him to be quiet. He nodded.

A noise! She gestured at the hole in the side of the tunnel. And then Joe heard it too. Again, it wasn’t a noise so much as a patch of unnaturally still air in the fabric of sound that enveloped them. There was something close, very close, and it was trying hard to be stealthy. Its presence was something he could feel rather than see. Joe’s own
heart pounded noisily in his ears. He tried in vain to control it. The boot came down quietly an arm’s length from the matted wall of the tunnel.

Joe saw the disturbance in the pattern of greenery first, then the mud-covered leather of the boot itself. It was a soldier’s boot. The camouflage pattern of the fatigues was so effective he could only see that it wasn’t foliage when the leg moved. Joe’s eyes were large in his head. Not a metre away was a man with a gun, trained to kill, hoping to put that training to good use on them. On top of him was a woman as scared rigid as he was, pressing the life out of him. The boot lifted and was gone. They waited for the bullets to rip through the tunnel wall. Nothing. The soldier had come close to stepping on them, but still hadn’t seen them. After what seemed an age, the woman quietly, slowly, slid off to one side. Joe exhaled and silently blessed the creator of the tunnel.

He blessed too soon. A brown head appeared around the bend of the tunnel ahead. It was an animal, a large four-legged animal the size of a full-grown pig. It stopped, wrinkled its nose and moved its head quickly from side to side. Joe blinked dumbly, not knowing what to do. Something in the animal’s brain decided, for whatever reason, that it should be afraid of the animals in its path. Maybe it was their reluctance to move, or it smelled their fear. Whatever the reason, the beast’s legs suddenly started pumping. The animal charged through the wall of the tunnel and made off noisily into the undergrowth, grunting and squealing.

At last, the soldier had a target. Bullets zeroed in on the ruckus. A scream of surprise and death followed. The undergrowth came alive as countless snakes, lizards and small mammals decided they’d rather be somewhere else.
The cracks from the carbine launched monkeys and birds from the trees. They squealed their distress at the sudden disturbance. Joe and the woman scuttled on all fours through the tunnel until they reached the relatively open ground that sloped down to the creek. They stood for a few seconds to get their breath, and a section of tree centimetres from the woman’s head suddenly split away from the trunk as bullets slammed into it. Joe had forgotten that
two
soldiers had been dispatched to his hill. The man stood, weapon coming up to his shoulder, in the middle of the creek. If they hesitated, the next shots wouldn’t miss. The woman pulled Joe to the ground and they scrambled for the thicker growth. But the jungle was too dense to penetrate. Nowhere else to go, they were forced back to the creek. They hid behind a mound of mud pushed up by the monsoon floods. Joe snatched a look over it. The two soldiers had now joined together in the pursuit and were running through the creek bed towards their hiding place.

One of the men opened fire just as he tripped on a stone. The bullet spat from the muzzle with a downwards trajectory. The propellant that launched the round burned through a thin layer of tin and ignited phosphorus packed into a hollow at the base of the bullet. It was a tracer. The projectile glowed fiercely red on its brief flight, striking the creek bed not far from the woman’s outstretched hand.

And then suddenly the flesh on Joe’s face was seared as the very creek itself exploded into a twisting, orange snake of intense heat. The punch of the explosion knocked the air out of him. A ball of flame was deflected by the mud bank and rolled skywards.

The two soldiers became human torches. Joe lifted his head and saw them run blindly through the firestorm.
One of the men was discharging his weapon into the air, his finger convulsing on the trigger. Then they both dropped to their knees and fell forward into the river of fire, hissing like hot pans doused in a bucket. Their screams choked with a gurgle.

Sergeant Marturak’s attention was captured by the familiar report of an FNC80. The shots came from the hill being searched. It had been helpful of the old man to give up the whereabouts of the only other survivor. And it was good of that last living passenger to present himself as such a willing target.

Did killing the old couple give him pleasure? Perhaps not, but it was reassuringly professional to be able to do his job well. There were to be no passengers left alive. Those were his orders. The general had been very specific on that point. He had even elaborated on the reason why, saying the security of Indonesia depended on it. That was both unusual and unnecessary. An order was good enough for Sergeant Marturak and reasons were not required; following orders was his job.

The shots: he estimated thirty rounds. One whole magazine. That was wasteful. He’d sent two trained soldiers to shoot an unarmed man. It was a simple task, one his men knew well enough. It didn’t take thirty rounds. That smacked of panic. Other smaller bursts of gunfire followed. Odd. There was obviously something wrong.

Marturak saw the fireball before he heard the explosion. It took him completely by surprise and he felt the radiated heat of it on his face. There was another blast of gunfire and then a menacing, black mushroom cloud of smoke, forked with yellow and orange flame, rose out of the gully. What could have caused that? he wondered. Then the
smell of burnt kerosene reached his nostrils and he put it together. One of the aircraft’s tanks must have ruptured and spilled its contents, the fuel pooling on lower ground. But what had set it off? He hoped his men had not had a careless smoke. No, they were good soldiers, the best, despite the spray of firearms. They certainly weren’t stupid. What had caused the explosion? He spat an order and four soldiers immediately jogged off to investigate.