Sword of Allah (38 page)

‘Armed escort, miss.’

‘Yeah, so what do we need one of those for, again? I mean, we only have to beat off one other network and we don’t need guns for that.’

‘Looters mainly, sir. There were quite a few gangs on the streets before the army moved in.’

‘And now?’ asked Annabelle.

‘Mostly under control now.’

Weaver had been around long enough to know that ‘mostly’ meant mostly not. He shrugged, letting it pass. Maybe they’d get a good story from Darwin after all.

A burst of noise came through the radio speakers. It sounded only vaguely reminiscent of English. ‘What are they saying?’ Annabelle asked.

‘ARCOM wants all PUBCOMs to present at DARCON asap.’

‘Right,’ said Annabelle.

‘I think the lady means can we hear the translation,’ Weaver said from the back seat.

‘Pardon, miss. We hear the acronyms so much, they sound kinda normal after a while. Army Command wants all public communications – you guys, basically – to come to Darwin Control now, if not sooner.’

‘So DARCON is the Novotel?’ Annabelle asked.

‘That’s right. You know, the Seventh Day Adventist retreat?’ said Weaver, keeping himself entertained.

‘Yes, miss.’ The soldier addressed himself to Annabelle, ignoring Weaver.

The two-car convoy crawled cautiously along the highway, which had become a barely moving snarl of trucks, utes and four-by-fours heading south beneath a pall of black diesel smoke. Here and there, brawls had broken out involving sometimes up to a dozen people, due to perceived slights induced by alcohol. There were police cars amongst the confusion, but they were clearly overwhelmed by the task at hand. The cameraman had a micro digital recorder in his hand, committing the exodus to hard disk.

‘Annabelle, I prepared these notes for you on the plane up. A bit on the history of Darwin, background, that sort of thing,’ said Weaver, with his producer’s hat back on. Annabelle Gilbert had to be properly briefed before she stood in front of the camera. ‘Might be worth skimming before we meet DARCON the ARCON, great warrior from the outer galaxy of somewhere or other. We’ll file straight after, when we know what they’ll let us say.’

‘Okay,’ said Annabelle, flicking through the five-page summary.

‘Also, I reckon a good backdrop might be the deck gun of the USS
Peary
, with Port Darwin behind it. It’s all in there,’ he said, motioning at the report. ‘The
Peary
sank when Darwin was bombed in the last war.’

Annabelle Gilbert put the brief down. It was good and thorough. The background it contained would form the basis of all her reports.

‘And, as chance would have it, the USS
Peary
monument is virtually across the road from our Adventist friends at the Novotel.’

Annabelle knew Tom didn’t like Barry Weaver. He’d called the producer a pain in the butt. And indeed, he wasn’t well liked by the staff around the office. She suddenly realised that the only people Weaver got on with were the people he’d worked with out in the field, where it really counted. The longer she spent with him on this assignment, the more she could see why. He was still a sleaze, albeit one with a blunt charm. Barry Weaver would be something – another thing – she and Tom would have to agree to disagree on. The thought of Tom swung her mood from tough reporter to pathetic glob of wet tissue paper.
Wherever you are, Tom, I hope you’re okay…

Duat and Hendra both woke from a sleep filled with horrors, yet some of their strength had returned. They wandered through the encampment by torchlight noticing for the first time the stench of death hanging in the night air. It seemed that many people had died, either from the poison, or from a self-administered bullet when the madness from the VX-induced dreams became too much to bear. The suicide squads had been virtually annihilated. No one remained in any fit state to take Babu Islam’s message beyond the encampment. Hendra’s young protégé, Unang, had also died, but he’d lived long enough to see his whole family perish in the frightening nightmarish way common to VX exposure.

Duat and Hendra returned to Rahim’s quarters to
conduct a thorough search in the hope of finding more antidote, but there was none. They turned next to the Internet in a quest for additional supplies but, in an irony that escaped neither himself nor Hendra, all available stocks of atropine appeared to have been cornered by the Indonesian and Australian governments as they waited for the terrorist weapon to burst over their cities.

Duat sat behind a computer terminal and tried to order his mind. If he were to survive, he knew that he must leave the encampment as soon as possible because neither he nor Hendra were aware of the source of the poisoning. More than likely it was in something widely distributed throughout the encampment – the water, the rice, or possibly even the air itself. The drums that contained the VX were stored in Rahim’s quarters. They had examined them and their seals appeared to be intact. It was a mystery. Perhaps Rahim himself had accidentally poisoned the encampment, the white powder having dulled his oncesharp mind.

After several mistakes Duat finally managed to control his fingers well enough to tap the correct Internet address into the bar. The site flashed onto the screen. He keyed in his personal identity code, the number of his favourite Sura from the Qur’an. The screen went blank momentarily before returning. Duat blinked at what he saw. Surely not? He re-entered his code, refreshing the screen in the process, and received the same response. He read the words that flashed red in French, Italian and English across the page: ‘Account terminated. Contact bank administration.’ Duat swallowed as the implications of this dawned on him. The account had been closed, the
funds frozen. How could that be? Only one other person knew his account number, the Australian financier. That could only mean one thing: that the infidel had been captured and had talked. Duat realised then how much damage the sickness that had descended on the camp had caused. For almost a week he had lain in his bed, not caring about the world, and that was time he would never win back. If the capture of Kalas was anything to go by, much had probably happened that he should have been aware of. He connected to CNN.com and tapped ‘Kalas’ into the site search engine. The headlines told him the worst: ‘Raid nabs terrorist moneyman’, and then, ‘Terrorist financier cracks’. Duat disconnected from the server, his heart racing. How long did they have? A day? Hours?

‘Duat, good news at last,’ said Hendra, folding a meteorological printout on the bench. ‘Allah has given us a break in the weather.’

‘Then we must launch,’ said Duat. ‘Now.’

Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes felt as if he were on some wild theme park ride with a never-ending ticket. After Myanmar, the Eurocopter had flown them to Bangkok, where Jenny Tadzic had disembarked with the agents they’d rescued from General Trip’s holiday camp. There, a Royal Australian Air Force C-130 was waiting for him and Monroe on the apron, its turboprops spinning and a clearance to take off granted. The LM stood on the aircraft’s
ramp motioning them to get a hurry on. Wilkes and Monroe jogged over.

‘Hey, boss, s’up?’ Lance Corporal Gary Ellis walked down the ramp towards them, grinning.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ said Wilkes, just a touch confused.

‘Hey, that’s the kind of welcome I was getting from the missus just before we called it quits,’ Ellis yelled over the noise of the Herc’s spinning props. ‘The rest of our blokes are in Jakarta, waiting for us.’

‘Jakarta?’ Wilkes was surprised, and curious. ‘What gives?’

‘Those coordinates you sent back from Myanmar, boss. Someone in Canberra had the bright idea to put us on standby in case you turned up with the goods. We’ve been hanging out for a few days with the Kopassus. Do you know a Captain Mahisa? I hope so, ’cause he says he knows you.’

The LM motioned the men to take their seats on the bench that ran down the plane’s fuselage, and buckle in.

‘The coordinates put the terrorist digs on the southern end of Flores. That means the target is more likely to be Darwin. Jakarta falls outside the drone’s standard range. Just. But the terrorists could have modified the thing, so no one’s taking any chances. Also, the weather looks like it’s going to come good any day now, and you know what that means…People are shitting themselves like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘So what are we doing about it?’

‘Kick freckle, boss. A dawn HALO drop. Like, in half a dozen hours.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Wilkes in disbelief.

‘Nah, fair dinkum.’

Ellis talked Wilkes and Monroe through the essentials of the planned high altitude low opening parachute insertion. They’d be jumping out the back of an Indonesian C-130 with the Kopassus, possibly men from the same battalion Wilkes and his men had fought against less than six months ago – Ellis had been reluctant to enquire. The irony of the partnership Wilkes found hard to shake. But that was the world they were living in: today’s enemy, tomorrow’s best bud. He felt the scar on his cheek and snorted. A Kopassus bullet had given it to him. He’d completely forgotten about it, probably because the scar had stopped itching and he hadn’t been in front of too many mirrors recently.
Wounds heal – just like relationships.
The Hercules accelerated down the runway with the usual deafening, high-pitched scream transferred into its passengers’ earholes. Wilkes sat back, squashed plugs into his ears and closed his eyes.

‘Hey, sleeping beauty. Rise and shine,’ said Atticus Monroe what seemed like only seconds later, shaking Wilkes roughly.

‘What?’ said Wilkes, momentarily disoriented.

The slight nose-up attitude of the C-130 lowered along with a drop in the engine note. They’d begun to descend.

Hendra and Duat hurried to prepare the
Sword of Allah
for launch. The sky overhead was an infinite black. A night
launch was something Hendra hadn’t prepared himself for and he began to think only of what might go wrong. He fired up the generator while Duat opened the double doors. Halogen lights blazed over the drone, chasing away the shadows. The aircraft was painted a flat pale grey and seemed to absorb the light, trapping it so that its surfaces and edges were poorly defined.

Duat ran his fingers across the nose, and again admired the seamless repairs carried out by Hendra on the damaged wing and fuselage. The moment had finally arrived, Duat said to himself, mixed emotions jostling for ascendency. Somehow, the group’s isolation, together with the death of Kadar Al-Jahani and the poisoning of the encampment, had subtly changed Duat’s sense of purpose. The weapon had begun as a tool that would rally Indonesia’s faithful and awaken them to their duty. But now, Duat just wanted revenge for his own failure. The coordinated strategy devised by himself and Kadar was in tatters, poisoned by circumstances and VX contamination. The
Sword of Allah
at his fingertips was all that remained. He would unsheathe it and plunge it into the heart of the unbelievers.

Hendra directed Duat to a drum of aviation fuel carefully sealed against moisture, and showed him how to use the hand pump.

‘How far will it fly?’ Duat asked as he worked the pump.

‘The propeller is slightly longer than standard and I have increased the size of its fuel tanks. It will fly a little faster than it did before, and a lot further. With the wind as it is predicted, around one thousand four hundred miles.’ Hendra took the updated weather forecast from his back pocket and spread it out on the bench.

Duat raised his eyebrows. One thousand four hundred miles was a very long way indeed. He looked at the world map hung on the wall and found the scale. The additional fuel load, he saw, gave them a phenomenal range of possible targets.

Hendra read the METFOR a second time to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. Indications were that conditions looked like they’d remain stable for the following thirty-six hours, but weather was fickle, he reminded himself, and the forecast was nothing more than that – a
prediction
of what might happen, not a statement of fact about what would actually come to pass. He shrugged. There was nothing that could be done about it, anyway. With the boy’s death, reprogramming the Gameboy chip was not an option, although small alterations allowing for wind direction could be made in the location of the waypoints, downloaded to the UAV’s guidance system from a laptop.

Hendra felt a pang of sympathy for those in the target area. The encampment had probably suffered only a mild exposure to the nerve agent. The pain, suffering and death that would result downwind of an airburst of VX was something he now felt that he could relate to. And the truth at that instant was that Hendra wished he’d never become involved in this cause. He’d allowed himself to be persuaded. And the group had needed him at a time when a sense of usefulness after his discharge from the air force was what he craved most. He had no wife and no children and, now that the air force was no longer his home, no family. What also troubled Hendra was where God fitted into this. He could identify his own purpose or lack of it, but what about God’s? Was he, Hendra, really God’s
instrument as Duat had told him? Or was he just Duat’s? The project with the Prowler drone had absorbed him completely, given his life meaning and direction, and now the time had come to let it loose so that it could rob the lives of possibly thousands of innocent people. But he had come this far and if he did not see it through, then what had been the point?

Duat opened the hatch on the top of the drone’s fuselage and looked in. He saw a mass of wires attached to the moulded blocks of explosive that encased the epoxy chemical containers. ‘Hendra, how will this work?’ he asked.

‘It’s simple,’ said Hendra, the question refocusing him on the task at hand. ‘The drone will hug the waves until it nears the target. It will then climb to a height of five thousand feet. When it reaches this altitude, a switch activated by low pressure will close the circuit, allowing current to pass to the detonators triggering the explosives. These will crush the four epoxy canisters that hold the inert components of the VX in separate halves, mixing and atomising them at the same time. A deadly cloud will be formed on the wind. As it slowly drops to earth, it will kill everything in its path.’

Duat couldn’t help himself. He smiled. Hendra’s description had a certainty about it that Duat found rewarding. Babu Islam would make a final dramatic statement on Allah’s behalf that the world would not soon forget. He closed the hatch, secured it and began pumping fuel into the tank.

‘Emir, has the target changed?’ asked Hendra, looking up from the laptop.

Duat had considered doing just that, especially given
the news of the drone’s extended range. The news media carrying the panic from Jakarta and Darwin had certainly given him some interesting ideas. He shook his head. ‘No, it remains as planned.’ Duat had also given some thought to life after the weapon was launched. Kadar Al-Jahani had decided on the target in conjunction with himself and their supporters in the Holy Land. The influence and friendship of those supporters might have to be called on again, and soon.

Hendra keyed in the final lat and long coords. According to the METFOR, a ten-knot sou’easter was running at ten thousand feet, still ten knots at five thousand feet, but reducing to light and variable winds at one thousand feet. The chances of rain in the area were less than twenty-five percent. Acceptable odds. But there was a problem. Rahim had died before providing him with an accurate descent rate for the atomised droplets of VX. If the cloud took five hours to fall to earth, the toxic miasma at ground level would be vast. It could have a front anywhere between ten and fifty miles wide. It was truly an awesome weapon. Hendra synchronised the Gameboy/ GPS with the laptop, transferring the information. He then verified it and, satisfied, disconnected the PC. He then reinserted the guidance system into the drone and changed all the on-board batteries for new ones. Hendra also checked the engine’s oil level, the alternator belt for wear, and drained a measure of fuel from the drone’s tanks. Satisfied that there was no water contamination, he moved around the aircraft and examined its control surfaces and checked that the towrope was properly attached. Finally, he turned on the remote pilot station and moved
the miniature joysticks in their wells. The drone’s ailerons, elevator and rudder responded appropriately.

Duat watched, interested, and realised how lucky Babu Islam was to have had this man walk into the encampment.

Hendra moved around the plane for a final inspection and made sure the wheels were chocked. He stopped at the engine in the rear and slowly turned over the propeller, passing each blade from hand to hand. Then, with one circular motion, he gave the propeller a downward flick. The engine caught immediately and settled into a smooth burble that ricocheted off the walls. The drone appeared to hunker down on its chocks briefly, eager to move. The sound of a loud smash behind him made Hendra turn. He watched Duat pick up the laptop and again throw it down on the paved floor, the second blow shattering the plastic case and the components within. Hendra turned back to the drone. He’d finished with the laptop, anyway.

‘Emir, it is time,’ he said, shouting over the noise of the engine. ‘Help me move it forward.’

Hendra positioned Duat to hold one wingtip before removing the chocks. He then walked around the front of the drone, across to the other wingtip, and they wheeled the plane forward slowly until it cleared the shed. Hendra disappeared briefly back inside. He flicked a switch and, suddenly, a row of lights on either side of the short strip winked on.

‘Emir,’ he said in Duat’s ear when he returned, breathing hard, ‘you must hold the drone secure here while I ready the catapult. Just keep hold of this one wingtip. I will rev the engine once, briefly. That will be your signal to let go.’

Duat nodded at the instructions as Hendra turned and walked down the strip between the ground lights, the remote piloting box under his arm.

Just fifty metres later, Hendra felt like he was about to pass out. He was weak from exposure to the VX, from the lack of food and sleep, and he hadn’t been able to keep down any water. He was exhausted, undernourished and dehydrated. Duat had found them cans of fruit to eat – the only food in the camp that could be guaranteed safe from VX contamination. The fruit and the juice had helped enormously, but both men were still weak.

Hendra tried to walk faster but his legs wouldn’t obey. By the time he reached the catapult motor two hundred metres down the runway, he was struggling not to collapse. He leaned on the catapult drum, sweating profusely, and tried to catch his breath. The launch would be difficult and he would need his wits about him. Hendra placed the remote box on the ground and readied the catapult. His palms, also, were greasy and slick. The launch was the drone’s most critical moment. If he got it wrong, the plane would crash and now, loaded with explosives, full fuel tanks and VX…Hendra put the consequences of a failed launch out of his mind and tried to focus on getting it right. The trouble was, there were still unknowns. Test launches when fully loaded had never been conducted for fear of crashing the drone and disabling it permanently.

Hendra licked the sweat off his lips and wiped his arm across his eyes. There was no right or wrong, just life or death. His fate was in the hands of God. Hendra picked up the remote pilot box and goosed the throttle briefly, the signal for Duat to let go and stand clear. He then wound
the throttle that controlled the catapult’s outboard motor to the stops. The cable sprang taut as the drum quickly gathered speed. Hendra set the throttle on the remote box to half speed. As he fed in some elevator the cable rose off the ground and began to point at the sky, increasing its angle. Hendra put the elevator to the neutral position.

When Hendra estimated that the drone was overhead, he snicked the gearshift lever to the neutral position. The sudden elimination of drag caused the motor to race quickly to its rev limit, whereupon it cut out as it was supposed to do, stalling with a coughing, spluttering sound like that of a man drowning. The cable dropped to the ground.

And then Hendra was rewarded by the sound of the drone’s Rotax humming sweetly in the still night air as it passed seventy metres above him. The light from several stars was briefly extinguished as the plane, settling into its pre-programmed flight, flew directly overhead. He switched off the remote control box and the
Sword of Allah
’s pre-programmed guidance system, his guidance system, took over. If Hendra had had the energy, he would have jumped for joy. Instead, he collapsed on the ground, panting.

Duat’s heart had been in his mouth. The plane’s motor had revved briefly and so he’d let the wingtip go as instructed. And then suddenly it appeared to have been snatched forward and swallowed by the night. He lost sight of it until it climbed into the sky, going straight up and a little to the right, its shape silhouetted against the faint echoes of light from the stars. As the hum of the drone’s engine faded into the starlight, Duat was left in
the middle of the runway, a man without love, bereft of conscience and purpose, penniless, alone and haunted by hideous dreams. He walked down the strip, panting and nauseous. There was still much to do. When he reached Hendra, the man was on his knees, vomiting. ‘Allah will point the way now,’ said Duat.

Hendra answered with a heave as his stomach contracted, expelling the canned fruit. Duat’s stomach convulsed too but he managed by force of will not to join Hendra on the ground. Instead, he pulled the pistol from his pocket and placed the muzzle lightly against the back of Hendra’s skull. Hendra swayed, too weak to do anything about what would happen next. ‘Emir –’ he said, the word cut short by an explosion that removed the back of his skull and deposited it on the ground between his knees.