Sword of Allah (3 page)

Suddenly several shots rang out, explosions from somewhere behind the treeline. ‘Jesus!’ said Littlemore. ‘Does that sound like military assault carbines to you blokes?’ No one answered. They were too busy scoping the treeline, looking for the source of the gunfire. Then followed a howling scream, a terrifying noise that sent the warriors in the village scattering for cover. Several natives threw their spears blindly at the trees as they ran helter-skelter. The PNG soldiers also ran, some even bumping into each other in their efforts to vacate the open ground of the village centre. Sergeant Wilkes and his men dropped to their knees in the confusion, sighting down their M4s and machine guns ready for whatever was about to burst into the open. The eerie howling grew louder still and then a swarm of painted and feathered warriors erupted from the cover of the dense jungle, screaming, waggling their tongues, running at full tilt towards the village centre.

Wilkes assessed the situation fast. ‘Ellis, Beck, Robson! Get the civilians under cover. Go!’

The two SAS troopers gathered up the politicians and the guide and herded them, running at a crouch, behind some heavy logs.

A spear thudded into the soft ground at Trooper Littlemore’s feet, frightening the crap out of him. Never in a million years did he expect to die on the point of a firehardened, barbed tip. The man who hurled it kept coming
towards him, some kind of feathered club held high in his hand, ready for the death swing. Littlemore had no choice. He let off a short burst with his Minimi. Slugs smashed into the man, hurling him backwards into two of his mates.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Wilkes above the din. ‘Aim fucking high!’ He saw a couple of PNG soldiers fall down as they ran, one whose leg buckled under as it broke clean below the knee.

After a moment of confusion, the SAS men recovered their equilibrium. The politicians and other civilians secured behind the logs, Ellis and Robson rejoined Wilkes and Littlemore. They then split into twos and fired close to the marauders, but not at them, pulverising the trees around them and turning the ground at their feet into boiling cauldrons of earth and hot steel jackets. The PNG soldiers had also begun to organise themselves and were returning fire.

Wilkes popped a grenade from his webbing and loaded it into the underslung M203 launcher. He aimed quickly and then fired, lofting it behind the charging tribesmen. The HE round hit the open ground where Wilkes intended, exploding with a deafening pulse that spooked a dozen warriors, who turned and fled back into the trees. The concussion stopped several more warriors, who stood and shook their heads, deafened and disoriented.

‘What the hell are these people doing with AK-47s?’ yelled Littlemore. Wilkes didn’t answer because he had no idea. But the fact was they had them, and a round fired by a primitive warrior could do as much damage as a round from a professional sniper if it hit the right spot.
Fortunately, though, they had no training and hitting a target from a distance of two hundred metres with a rifle as powerful as a Kalashnikov wasn’t easy even if the finger on the trigger was experienced. Adding the confusion of battle made the task of aiming accurately even more difficult, and if the shooter was running, well-nigh impossible. It was not surprising, then, that despite the considerable amount of lead flying about, none of the SAS was killed or wounded. But Wilkes knew that this situation would change rapidly if the attackers were permitted to close with his men. No skill or experience hitting the bullseye was necessary when the bull itself was at point-blank range. ‘C’mon, you blokes. Start earning your pay,’ he said. He made a few quick hand signals and his men took the offensive. They moved about, never staying in the one place more than a few seconds. This willingness to move confused the painted warriors, making their targeting even more erratic. As soon as they stopped and took aim, Wilkes’s Warriors would fire on them from an angle they didn’t expect. With the benefit of surprise lost, the initiative passed to the defenders. Wilkes and his men kept splitting off at different angles, firing, moving. The attackers soon had no idea where to concentrate their attack. Withdrawal was their only option.

Trooper Beck had a lucky escape. He rolled out from behind a grass hut, coming to the kneeling position, and found himself looking up into the black eyes of a warrior less than three metres away, the smoking muzzle of the man’s AK-47 pointing a little over his head. The highlander had just fired a burst from the carbine. All he had to do was drop the weapon slightly, squeeze the trigger and Beck
was dead. Beck brought his own weapon to bear on the warrior – it took an age to come around, turning, turning – and Beck expected at any instant to have his lights burned out as he registered the muzzle flash. But it never came. The two men glared at each other, the warrior’s nostrils flaring like something wild and dangerous as he breathed. Beck was mesmerised by the sight of the man, fierce and proud, and spectacularly adorned with technicolour feathered plumes and red, yellow and white paint. It would have been like shooting a lion or a tiger, only this man was something rarer, a migrant from an age lost to modern civilisation. In that instant, Beck felt a distant connection with the proud and dangerous warrior. The SAS trooper registered the highlander’s finger squeezing the trigger repeatedly and he realised that he should be dead. The weapon’s magazine was spent. The tribesman knew he’d lost this encounter when the rifle in his hands refused to fire. He flung it down, turned and ran, disappearing into the jungle, gone in an instant like a dream that dissolves into an uncertain waking memory.

‘Shit,’ said Beck. He blinked several times and sucked in a lungful of the wet mountain air as his heart pounded. He felt like a man who’d played dead while a bear sniffed him over, expecting the ruse to be discovered at any moment. ‘Shit,’ he said again under his breath. He stood and looked around, regaining his composure in time to see a band of naked men from the village charge into the bush, giving chase to the retreating marauders. They’d picked up some of the dropped weapons and were firing them on the run, chasing the attackers. Two warriors from the village fell from the pack as they ran, victims of friendly fire, just
as the melee reached the treeline. The party giving chase disappeared from view at that instant, but their path through the dense bush was marked by the clatter of semiautomatic fire that frightened birds from the trees.

‘You okay, mate?’ said Wilkes, trotting over to Beck. ‘You’re one lucky bastard. Did the bugger hypnotise you or something?’

‘Dunno, boss. Maybe,’ said Beck.

Beck leaned down and picked up the dropped AK-47. He expelled the magazine and checked it. Just as he’d thought: empty. The selector was on automatic fire.

‘If it’d been set to single shot, there might have been something left in the till with your name on it,’ Wilkes said. He held out his hand and Beck passed him the weapon. He turned the carbine over and the two men gave it a cursory examination. It was old and filthy with a stock deeply scarred from years of abuse. The blueing on the barrel was also removed in places and rust eggs spotted the metal here and there.

‘The bloke on the other end was lucky this didn’t blow up in his face,’ said Ferris, looking over Wilkes’s shoulder. ‘What the hell are these bastards doing with Kalashnikovs anyway?’

‘Is there an echo around here?’ said Wilkes.

‘What?’ Ferris asked.

‘Never mind,’ said Wilkes, passing him the weapon. ‘I’d like to know where this came from, and how it got here.’

‘Yeah, well, knowing the important questions is why you’re the leader of our merry band of wankers, Sarge.’ Ferris handed the carbine back. Originally called Wilkes’s Warriors, the sergeant’s troop had been renamed Wilkes’s
Wankers when they were in East Timor, and the epithet had stuck.

‘Come on,’ said Wilkes, ‘we’d better see how the rest of our party is enjoying themselves.’

‘What are we going to do about the locals?’ Robson said, nodding in the direction of the popping gunfire.

‘Not much we can do. We’re not here to sort that one out. We’re on protection duty, remember? So we’d best go and protect.’

‘All our guys are accounted for,’ said Lance Corporal Ellis jogging over. ‘A couple of the PNG boys are wounded, though. Stray shots. Nothing serious. Nurse Beck, you might like to see to ’em.’

‘Yep,’ said Beck. He turned and ran back to the Land Rover to get his first aid kit.

‘There’re ten dead – four defenders, six attackers,’ said Ellis, continuing his debrief. ‘Loku, the other pollie and the interpreter are okay, but shaken up.’

‘Could be worse,’ said Wilkes.

‘Sorry about shooting that bugger, Sarge,’ said Littlemore, disappointed with himself.

‘It was you or him, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah, I know, but…’

‘Let it go, Jimbo. Did your best.’

The SAS were the elite of the Australian Army, trained to kill but not killers. There was a big difference and Wilkes’s men were proud of their level of professionalism. Littlemore had just ended the life of a man wielding a stone-age club. If nothing else it was a terribly uneven contest and he didn’t feel good about it. Five more warriors lay dead in the village centre, shot by the PNG troops who
were a little less concerned about sparing their countrymen’s lives.

Wilkes’s men stood in a loose group, heads swivelling about, prepared for trouble. ‘How’s everyone for ammo?’ asked Wilkes.

The men checked their webbing and most shook their heads. They’d expended much of their personal stores. Frightening people away took more bullets than killing them. Wilkes didn’t like to be low on ammunition, especially when the jungle around them appeared to be full of people with twitchy fingers. He had half a magazine left – fifteen rounds. He could still call on his trusty pump action Remington, and he had plenty of heavy #4 buckshot to go with it. He also had five HE grenades left for the M203. Wilkes admonished himself for not having a few flash-bangs in his kit. As their name suggested, flash-bangs made a hell of a noise when they went off, as well as making a blinding flash. They were designed primarily for anti-terror work, for disorienting terrorists without killing innocent civilians. A few of them would have come in handy during a skirmish like the one they’d just experienced, stopping the invaders cold, and maybe saving lives on both sides.

Bill Loku, Andrew Pelagka and Timbu walked over, dusting themselves down.

Wilkes gave the civilians a quick once-over. They were dishevelled and muddy, but otherwise unharmed. He asked anyway, directing the question first to Loku: ‘Yu oraet, sir?’

The politician nodded, sweat beads glistening on his black skin.

‘Mr Pelagka?’

‘Yes, mi okei tenkyu.’

‘Timbu?’

The translator nodded.

Wilkes next turned his attention to his men. ‘How about you blokes? All OK?’

‘Fabulous, boss,’ said Beck.

‘Same,’ said Littlemore.

Ellis nodded agreement.

The headman of the village walked towards the group, taking broad steps, his composure not in the least affected, as though the events of the past half an hour were nothing too extraordinary. Indeed, he seemed more interested in Wilkes’s M4. He pointed at it and spoke in a language that was utterly foreign, barely moving his ancient lips. Timbu spoke to him, and they conversed back and forth. Finally, in unaccented English that continually surprised Wilkes, Timbu said, ‘The chief wants many guns like yours, Sergeant, so that he can bury his enemies. Can you show him a grenade? He saw you fire one and wants a closer look.’

Wilkes prised one from his chest webbing and handed it to the chief. It was perfectly safe. The device had to spin clockwise at quite high rotations to arm itself. The chief felt its weight in the palm of his hand, then threw it up and down carelessly a couple of times. He spat a crimson quid of betel nut and saliva on the ground at his feet before speaking again.

‘The chief is amazed that something so small can lift several men off the ground and throw them around like sticks. He says it’s truly magic of the gods, but can’t decide whether those gods are good or evil.’

They might be primitive people, but that didn’t dull their perception any. Wilkes said, ‘Tell the chief I admire his wisdom, Timbu.’

Timbu translated and the chief nodded, handing the grenade back. Next he beckoned for Wilkes’s weapon. The sergeant first checked that the chamber was empty and the safety on before he handed it over. Again, the chief felt its weight then brought it up, pulling the stock back into his shoulder and lining up his eye behind the sight. He muttered something.

‘He doesn’t like it. Says it feels light – not very strong,’ said Timbu.

The old man handed back the carbine. ‘Can you ask the chief where the jungle people get their guns from?’ Wilkes asked.

Timbu nodded and spoke in the strange, mumbling tongue and the chief replied. ‘Men from Papua – Indonesians,’ he said, nodding towards the west. ‘They come with guns and barter for the marijuana that grows wild here. It’s very powerful.’

‘It’s called New Guinea Gold. It’ll blow the top of your head off,’ said Ellis, chipping in.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that you’ve never inhaled,’ said Wilkes with a smile.

‘Actually, I knew a bloke who knew a bloke whose sister’s boyfriend had the stuff once,’ said Ellis. ‘And
he
didn’t do the drawback.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Stale marijuana smoke. That was the smell Wilkes had recognised earlier but couldn’t quite place.

Timbu talked some more with the chief, nodding
occasionally and asking questions. The chief became quite

animated.

‘What is it?’ Wilkes asked.

‘The Indonesians first came about a year ago with just a few weapons and gave them to a small village over the ridge,’ said the translator, pointing north. ‘In return, the people gave them food and herbs, which probably included marijuana. Six months later, the Indonesians returned, this time with several crates of weapons and boxes of ammunition, and bartered the lot for bales of pot. The guns proved a big success with the locals. They could kill at great distances – much better than spears, but there were a couple of accidents. The chief says he heard one man blew his hand off accidentally, and two boys shot each other dead playing with them, but the weapons had allowed the small village to finally exercise payback on a much larger neighbouring village they’d been warring with for some time.