Sword of Allah (39 page)

Wilkes, Ellis and Monroe arrived at the brightly lit hangar as a man concluded a semi-official address to the Indonesian soldiers. The first thing Wilkes noticed about those soldiers was their red berets: they were Kopassus.

‘I think that’s the Indonesian Minister of Defence,’ said Monroe.

‘Nah,’ said Ellis. ‘A politician prepared to drag his arse out of bed at sparrow’s fart, and no TV camera to witness it?’ He shook his head doubtfully.

‘Hey, boss!’ It was more of a loud whisper than a shout,
and the voice was familiar. Wilkes walked inside the hangar and saw the rest of his troop standing in a group away from the Indonesians. Wilkes nodded a greeting to his men – Littlemore, Beck, Morgan, Robson, Coombs and Ferris. They’d been listening attentively, politely, to the politician, despite the fact that none of them understood Bahasa. Then the minister turned to the Australians and said in accented English, ‘I am here on behalf of our president to tell you that all Indonesia thanks you for your assistance and wishes you well. Our prayers go with you. May Allah watch over you and bring you back to your homes and loved ones safely,’ he said, bowing slightly.

Wilkes saluted the minister, and especially the man’s sentiment. He then went up to the nearest Indonesian soldier and shook his hand. If there was any tension between the two groups of men from two very different countries, it dissolved at that moment.

Captain Mahisa pushed his way through the group and clapped Wilkes on the shoulder as the minister climbed into a long black car and departed. ‘Pleased to have you with us, Tom. What do you say…? We shall kick some butt?’

‘Captain Mahisa!’ said Wilkes, happy to see a familiar face amongst the Indonesians. The captain looked in far better spirits than the last time they’d met. ‘Actually, no, we don’t say things like that. But our American friend here does. Do you remember Atticus Monroe? From our first meeting in Canberra?’ Monroe saluted the captain.

‘That’s right, yes,’ said Mahisa, brow knotted as he called on his memory. ‘CIA, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Monroe with a grin.

‘Atticus has been making the tea and running errands for us lately, Captain. We call it work experience. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll prove useful on this mission too,’ said Wilkes, laughing when he saw Monroe appeared to be lost for words. For once.

Wilkes noticed a whiteboard full of numbers and squiggles in black and red pen. ‘We missed the briefing,’ he said to Mahisa. ‘Can you fill us in?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mahisa.

‘Do we have any intel on the camp?’ asked Wilkes. ‘Aside from its position.’

‘No, unfortunately, nothing,’ answered Mahisa. ‘The terrorists could number anywhere from twenty to two hundred persons. There hasn’t been time for an overflight. Our job is to hold the ground until the navy arrives. There are three ships on the way there now, along with a US carrier battle group. The first of these vessels should arrive zero-seven-thirty this morning. We can safely assume the terrorists will be heavily armed and we know they have VX. Do they have the means to use it against us?’ Mahisa shrugged. ‘We don’t know that either. All we can do is expect the worst and take precautions.’

The ‘precautions’ Captain Mahisa referred to was the wearing of a joint service lightweight integrated suit technology or JSLIST. It was a two-piece suit designed for US forces that, together with its M40 gasmask, multipurpose overboots and rubber gloves, gave the wearer twenty-four-hour protection against liquid and vapour chemical agents. Mahisa looked uncomfortable in it, the sweat soaking his hair and running into his eyes.

‘What are our numbers?’ asked Wilkes.

‘I have thirty men.’

Jesus, is that all?
Wilkes had nine, including himself and Atticus Monroe. Depending on the terrorists, their commitment and readiness, it could get ugly. He remembered the gun battle in Ramallah and his sphincter tightened involuntarily. Men like this did not capitulate readily.

‘What’s the objective?’ asked Wilkes.

Mahisa could sense Wilkes’s unease. The situation was far from ideal. ‘Secure the VX, stop the launch of the drone and, if possible, capture this man. Duat.’ The captain passed Wilkes a laser print of the terrorist, one of a stack being handed around. It was a face already burned into his memory. The eyes, the gold tooth.

‘And if we’re too late?’

‘Confirm the destination of the weapon.’

‘Prisoners?’ Monroe asked.

‘Yes, if we can. But if we can’t…’ Mahisa shrugged. Taking prisoners was not a priority. ‘You and your men are proficient with HALO drops?’

‘Yes,’ said Wilkes, who glanced at Monroe nodding confidently. He’d forgotten to ask whether Atticus was proficient on the jump when Ellis had first informed them of it. Wilkes was sceptical about his proficiency but there was no way the American would miss out on the drop. Mahisa led them across to the whiteboard covered in figures, the captain’s movement restricted by the JSLIST suit so that he appeared to walk like a robot. A HALO insertion would minimise time in the air over the target, but there was a catch. Unfortunately the bad guys might be able to hear their chutes popping open. That wasn’t so good.

‘Your men have already been briefed, Tom,’ said Mahisa as he picked up a marker pen and faced the board.

‘Okay,’ said Wilkes.

‘We’ll be exiting at eighteen thousand feet above mean sea level,’ he said, underlining the figure in red. ‘The weather people tell us that wind speed at exit altitude is twenty knots, becoming light and variable on the ground. At a hundred and twenty knots indicated air speed, we’ll have a forward throw of around three hundred metres.’

‘What’s the OA?’ asked Wilkes, studying the figures.

‘Our opening altitude is three thousand five hundred feet. You and your men will exit last. Your OA is up to you. Your chutes have a mean descent rate of around fifteen feet per second.’

‘Yeah, but with all the gear we’ll be carrying, it’ll be more like twenty feet per second.’

‘So you’ll be dropping slightly faster than my men,’ said Mahisa.

Wilkes nodded.

Mahisa considered that and then continued. ‘Give us six seconds to exit. How you get your people on the ground is your business.’

Wilkes and his men had done this so many times before, he didn’t need to think about it too hard. He did not, however, want to be anywhere near the Indonesians. He hadn’t trained with these Kopassus and had no idea of their capabilities. ‘We’ll follow four seconds later and exit in a packet. We’ll open at four thousand five hundred. I’ve had a look at your nav boards. They’re different to the ones we use,’ Wilkes said politely. In fact, they seemed downright primitive. ‘You happy with them?’ The navigation
board strapped to a man’s chest housed a variety of electrical, magnetic and pressure instruments enabling the jumper to ‘fly blind’ and still hit the target zone. Jumping out the back of a plane at night required some deft in-flight manoeuvring when under the parachute canopy, more so if it was a HAHO jump, a high altitude high opening jump, and a particular landing spot was to be reached with certainty. But in this instance, it should be a pretty simple exercise. There were no waypoints to hit on the descent and the winds were predictable. Wilkes decided not to carry a nav board, and would rely instead on the altimeter strapped to his wrist and the occasional stickybeak through his NVGs.

‘Compared to your system, ours is a bit old fashioned, but it works,’ Mahisa said, jealously casting his eye over the high tech Australian nav board lying on a parachute container.

‘What about oxygen?’

‘Inbound, connect to the aircraft’s oxygen system. Three minutes out, the red jump lights at the rear hatch will give us the signal and we’ll switch to bottled oxygen.’

Wilkes nodded. SOP.

Mahisa put down the pen and vented his JSLIST suit, pulling it in and out at the neck like a bellows to circulate the air inside it. ‘I notice your men have orange chemlights and reflective strips on their helmet and parachute container. We use green. Just follow us in,’ said Mahisa. ‘The terrorists must have a runway of some considerable length if they are intending to launch a drone. We’ll be making for that if we can pick it out.’

‘So will the terrorists,’ Wilkes observed.

‘Yes. The enemy might hear our chutes open, even if they can’t see us. And if they have sophisticated radar, they’ll be able to pick us up long before we exit.’

Well, thought Wilkes, Mahisa was living up to his first impression of the man. He was an honest, straight talker. Frankly, there were better ways to approach the camp. It was right on the sea. A submarine insertion would have been the safest method for the attacking force, but there was no time. They had to go in hard and fast with guns blazing, and hope to demoralise the enemy.

‘Okay, so we’re on the ground. What next? We’ve got different comms to you and your people, we speak a different language, our signals and training are foreign.’ All this was Wilkes’s major concern. This op had been thought up by politicians and cobbled together at the last minute. There were real operational considerations that appeared to have been overlooked, such as how were the two groups of soldiers going to take this camp without whacking each other in the confusion on the ground?

‘My men will head into the encampment’s centre to disorient the terrorists’ command HQ and, hopefully, discourage any organised defence. I was thinking that your men could secure the landing strip itself and work around the perimeter of the encampment.’

‘Okay, but how do we prevent blue on blue?’ said Wilkes, his major concern.

‘Do not advance into the centre of the encampment until after first light,’ said Mahisa. ‘And then, enter the camp only on my command and by a route marked with chemlights. I’ll need your tactical radio frequency so that I can brief you on developments in the camp itself.’

Wilkes took the marker pen and wrote his frequency in large numerals on the whiteboard. All that sounded reasonable, he thought. Mahisa’s plan would keep the Kopassus and the SAS separate until they could be integrated without anyone getting trigger-happy.

One of the Kopassus men interrupted the briefing and handed Mahisa three JSLIST suits. The captain passed them to Wilkes, Monroe and Ellis.

‘What’s our time at the DIP?’ asked Monroe.

Wilkes raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s a DIP?’

‘Hey, I thought you were experienced jumpers,’ said Monroe. ‘Are you sure you amateurs know what you’re doing? A DIP is a desired impact point.’

‘Oh, you mean time on target,’ said Wilkes, smiling.

‘Whatever,’ said Monroe, waving a hand dismissively.

Despite the hard time he was giving Monroe, Wilkes had heard the term DIP before. It was American. If Atticus knew the jargon, did that mean he also knew how to HALO jump? It didn’t matter, anyway. Wilkes had long since given up telling Atticus what he could and couldn’t do.

‘We should hit the target at zero five four zero,’ said Mahisa.

‘Sunrise is…?’ asked Monroe.

‘Zero six hundred.’

‘Perfect,’ said Wilkes, forgetting about Monroe’s experience or his lack of it. ‘We’ll be coming out of the night sky, with just enough light to see by.’ But then, maybe it wasn’t so perfect. If the navy arrived at zero seven thirty, the ground battle would be more than an hour and a half old. A lot could happen in that time, and if it was still going on, most of what was going on would be bad.

‘Can we count on any air support?’ Wilkes asked.

‘No.’ Mahisa shook his head. ‘No one wants the VX accidentally atomised by a stray dumb bomb.’

Fabulous, thought Wilkes.

‘Any other questions?’ asked Mahisa.

Wilkes shook his head. Actually, he had a barrage of them, but Mahisa wouldn’t be able to provide any answers. Mostly, the questions concerned what resistance they’d be meeting at the encampment and those answers were in the laps of the gods.

Perhaps the same questions were also buzzing around Mahisa’s brain because he said, ‘Tom, if you’ll excuse me. There’s something I want to do before we go.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘You should know that the God of Islam is not the God of the men we go to fight. Theirs is a manmade abomination created to justify the evil in their black hearts. Do you believe in God, Tom?’

Wilkes shook his head. ‘No.’ A straight answer to a straight question.

‘Then you are an infidel. That, to the vast majority of Muslims, means that you are a non-believer. It doesn’t make you my enemy. But I feel sorry for you; that you have been denied His love and His wisdom. Maybe, one day, you will see the light, my friend, and I hope that light is the God of Mohammed, may His name be praised.’ Mahisa put his hand on Wilkes’s shoulder.

‘Maybe,’ said Wilkes with a smile. He watched the captain join his men at prayer, laying small rugs on the hard concrete floor.

Watching the soldiers face Mecca and commune with the God of Islam touched Wilkes in an odd way. Even if
they were wearing JSLIST suits, the sight gave him an inkling of hope, like the small crack of light that escapes from a closed door. He was proud to serve with these men and for a moment he felt that he was one of them.

The interior of the Indonesian air force C-130 was even noisier than the Australian version, and the sweat that had poured out of Wilkes when on the ground in the JSLIST suit had become cold and clammy now with the temperature one degree at eighteen thousand feet. All the men were wearing helmets and oxygen masks not unlike those worn by pilots, a necessity for clear thinking above altitudes of fourteen thousand feet above mean sea level, unless one had time to become accustomed to it. The helmets and masks and the noise of the turboprops prohibited conversation. Occasional hand signals were exchanged but the isolation left each man alone with his thoughts.

Wilkes tried to think about the jump ahead rather than allowing his mind to wander over the situations that could face them on the ground. HALO jumps were potentially dangerous, especially when there were so many men jumping in a relatively small block of night sky, all heading to the one destination.

He looked across at the row of men sitting opposite. In the JSLIST suits and with their tac radios off, Wilkes didn’t know who was who. That anonymity would amplify once they landed. They’d be working independently of the Indonesians because of the language barrier. The Kopassus were also on a different radio frequency.
Add the twilight to the communications separation, and the fact that they were expecting fierce resistance…well, fuckups were guaranteed…
Jesus, concentrate on the JUMP!