Sword of Allah (40 page)

Wilkes got his mind back on track by again checking over his gear. His preferred weapon, the 5.56mm Minimi light machine gun, hung from his side by its strap and was secured by the parachute harness. Wilkes’s usual insurance policy, the cut-down Remington 870 pump, modified in the garage and loaded with heavy #4 buckshot, was attached to his right leg with Velcro strips, barrel pointing down towards his boot. Wilkes also carried half a dozen M36A2 frag grenades that weren’t at all kind to humans. His oxy bottles were attached to his parachute harness, and readily accessible. He moved his hands carefully over his kit, accounting for various items and making sure the lot was secure. The oxy mask prevented him from looking down, but he couldn’t do without it and that was that. His gloved hand told him his ripcord was in place and weapons secured. He looked at the altimeter strapped to his wrist: still bang on eighteen thousand feet AMSL. He ran the coordinates of the target area through his mind together with remembered wind speeds and forward throw details.

Across the other side of the plane lined up on pulldown seats, Wilkes could see that his men were going through similar routines, touching gear with their hands, mentally ticking it off. Lance Corporal Ellis and Troopers Littlemore, Robson, Beck, Morgan, Coombs and Ferris carried the usual assortment of weaponry: Minimis, M4A2 carbines with the underslung M203 grenade
launchers, Heckler & Koch MP5SD nine millimetre submachine guns, H&K sidearms and M36A2 frag grenades. For once, Atticus was happy to fit right in, and strapped to his parachute harness was a plain, ordinary Minimi. Maybe that was the best way to distinguish between his men and Mahisa’s: by the weapons they carried. The primary Indonesian weapon appeared to be the American M16A1 and the locally made FNC80s, a type of M16 lookalike.

Canberra had wanted this to be a joint exercise – Australians and Indonesians working together – and Jakarta had agreed, perhaps because the threat to the two nations was equally split. Wilkes could see the logic but the practice worried him. He turned his tac radio on briefly and, through his earpiece, heard Atticus Monroe humming a tune: ‘…oh, when the saints go marchin’ in…’ Well, at least someone was happy about things, thought Wilkes.

The interior white overhead lights had been replaced by a dull, blood-red glow so that the soldiers’ night vision wouldn’t be impaired. The flight from Jakarta to the exit point was a mercifully quick one and red parachute jump lights beside the rear hatch lit up the back of the plane. Three minutes to exit. All the men jacked out of the aircraft’s oxygen system and switched to their portable bottles. The ubiquitous roar from the C-130’s turboprops became a high-pitched scream as the plane’s rear ramp lowered on its hydraulic struts. The smell of burnt AV-TUR, exhaust from the turboprops, found its way into
Wilkes’s oxygen mask. It was a smell Wilkes had always liked: the perfume of action. He watched Captain Mahisa stand, illuminated by the red glow, and move to the back of the ramp. All the soldiers stood. The temperature inside the aircraft had dropped below zero. The green jump lights suddenly began to flash and a large number of men stepped into the void behind the ramp and disappeared – no speeches, no fanfare, no bullshit. A second later, the remaining Kopassus fell into the blackness.

Wilkes counted to four as he walked to the back of the ramp and turned. His men were right behind him in a tight knot. He grabbed the shoulder straps of the two men facing him, and the three of them fell away from the aircraft. The rest of his men followed a second later. Wilkes and the two men beside him quickly assumed the high arch position and stabilised their descent. No one somersaulted or jumped off with a pike and half-twist, the usual horseplay. None of his men had jumped in a JSLIST suit and there was a concern that the hood, even though heavily taped out of the way, might somehow catch their slipstream and act as a sail, flipping and rolling them out of control with disastrous results.

Wilkes looked up and watched the black shadow of the C-130 diminish as he fell away from it. He saw his remaining men drop from the back of the plane, Ellis the last to leave. The men separated quickly, controlling their respective flight paths, heading away at right angles to each other and then lining up with the aircraft’s track. The airflow buffeted Wilkes like a hundred small fists as he shot through nine thousand feet, chasing the minute glowing bars of green chemlights winking faintly below.

Fifteen seconds later, Wilkes glanced at his altimeter. He counted off another ten seconds before pulling the ripcord. He felt the buffet as the airflow pulled his drag chute clear of the parachute container and then…BANG. It was as if a massive hand had reached down from above and wrenched his harness. He looked up and was reassured to see a patch of stars obliterated by the canopy deployed overhead. A vague premonition of dawn, the faintest green glow, gathered on the horizon to Wilkes’s right. The wrist altimeter read four thousand feet. Bottled oxygen was no longer required, so Wilkes tore off his helmet and oxy mask and attached them to the parachute harness on his side. The green chemlights of the Kopassus below were closer, and brighter, a set of glowing dashes that led all the way to the ground. By now, the first of the Indonesians would have touched down and bundled their chutes and unclipped their parachute containers, leaving the lot where they landed.

With some difficulty, Wilkes reached behind him and pulled on the hood of the JSLIST suit. It came away after several tugs. He jammed the hood into his parachute harness and then grabbed hold of the parachute’s risers. The two men he’d jumped with were slightly above and beside him. Good training. Although he couldn’t see them, he knew the rest of his men were also just where they should be.

The ground lay approximately a thousand feet below, as black as a blacksmith’s anvil and every bit as unforgiving. He located the pair of NVGs attached to his belt with Velcro straps and released it. Slipping the unit’s harness over his head, he flipped the lenses down in front of his eyes. The blackness under his feet suddenly became two
pools of green light with the terrorist encampment plainly visible. He could see the Kopassus landing beneath him, flaring their rectangular parachute canopies above the airstrip. There didn’t appear to be any gun battles going on, which could only mean that, somehow, they’d managed that most vital of tactical advantages – surprise. But that, surely, would not last too much longer.

Wilkes slipped off the NVGs. He didn’t want to land with the unit in front of his eyes because if he hit the ground heavily, the device could get smashed into his face, blinding him. Also, there was the threat of VX and, with the terrorists’ camp getting closer by the second, it was time to put the JSLIST’s hood on. He hung the NVGs back on his belt and pulled out the hood with its incorporated gasmask and slipped it over his head. The smell of the rubber, charcoal and sweat filled his nostrils.

Now almost overhead of the target area, the fluorescent strips on the soldiers landing below had formed a spiral invisible from the ground. And then he saw the airstrip itself in the dim first light of the pre-dawn, a light scab of grey on the skin of the earth. The camp was barely visible but he could still make it out, off to the right of the strip. It was big, easily capable of housing more than two hundred men and, from this altitude, well laid out – like a proper military compound. As he drifted closer, the huts became clearer. They appeared to be mostly built from some kind of sheeting with corrugated steel roofing – demountables – and the whole operation was obviously well funded.

The strip lay directly below him. Wilkes was the first of the Australians to land. Small piles of discarded equipment
dotted the ground like gopher holes. The Indonesian soldiers were still hurriedly gathering in their chutes while others were running at a crouch towards the encampment. And then the ground suddenly appeared to accelerate towards him. Wilkes bent his legs and flared the chute four metres above the rolled, hard-packed dirt of the strip. He hit the earth, legs bent, and his breath was punched out of him.

Wilkes stood quickly and gathered in his parachute as the air left its foils and it began to roll sideways. When it was in his arms, he dropped the bundle at his feet, released the harness and also let the parachute container fall to the ground along with the oxygen bottles, face mask and helmet. With the parachute released, his Minimi was freed. Time to gather his men amongst the moving grey shapes. Get this show on the road. He made the hand signal for ‘on me’. A group of beings that looked more like insects than men quickly formed up around him.

‘Sound off,’ said Wilkes through the tac radio.

‘Ellis.’

‘Monroe.’

‘Robson.’

‘Coombs.’

‘Morgan.’

‘Beck.’

‘Littlemore.’

‘Ferris.’

‘Any problems?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Yeah,’ said Littlemore. ‘Who’s Monroe?’

‘Okay,’ said Wilkes, ignoring Littlemore. ‘Just to recap,

Atticus stay with me. Littlemore, you too. Ellis, take Beck and Ferris and check out that shed at the end of the
runway, then work around the back of the camp. Robson, Morgan, Coombs, take the shoreline. Keep me up to speed on what you find. When you’ve done that, reassemble here.’ The distinctive sound of an FNC on full automatic rattled through the morning. ‘Let’s move it.’

Mahisa and his Kopassus squadron had a few minutes’ head start and the assault on the encampment should have been in full swing by now, but things were strangely still. Except for the burst of fire from the FNC, the place was as quiet as a grave.

‘Let’s rock,’ said Monroe.

‘Yeah, sure…’ Wilkes replied, distracted. There was something odd.

The three parties separated, leaving Wilkes, Monroe and Littlemore amongst the piles of discarded gear. Wilkes tucked low and ran a short way along a well-worn path illuminated with green chemlights that snaked towards the huts, Monroe and Littlemore behind, careful not to spook the Kopassus who were conducting hut-to-hut searches. He watched a couple of paratroopers drag two men from a hut by their hair. The terrorists appeared to be alive, but barely. Both of them were gripping their stomachs, rolled into tight balls.

‘Jesus, boss,’ said Littlemore, ‘are you getting that smell or is my filter fucked?’

‘Could be. You’re not supposed to smell anything through these,’ said Monroe. ‘Maybe you got one of the faulty ones – a dud.’

‘Lucky me.’

There was an incredible stillness. A camp like this full of terrorists would be on high alert. There should be lead
and tracer flying all over the place. And something else strange; there were no animals, no dogs or cats wandering around.

Several men in JSLIST suits appeared at the head of the track that began where the first of the huts were erected. They were walking towards Wilkes, Monroe and Littlemore, their rifles sweeping through the arc. It occurred to Wilkes that they could be terrorists. If there was VX in the air, there was a good chance the bad guys would also be wearing chemical warfare suits. Wilkes gave the hand signal for his men to go into a crouch. He took a bead on the man leading the group but rested his finger on the trigger guard, prepared to wait until the last possible moment. This kind of potential friendly fire incident was exactly what he’d been concerned about.

‘Tom, is that you?’

‘Captain?’

The men heading down the trail stopped and the man in front lifted his weapon above his head. Wilkes, Monroe and Littlemore did the same. The moment of potential blue on blue vanished, and the men lowered their weapons and walked towards each other. When the two groups met, Captain Mahisa handed his weapon to a subordinate and began waving an instrument through the air. ‘The air is clear of VX,’ he said. He then ran his finger down the JSLIST’s front rubber seal and peeled off the top half of his suit. ‘But it smells like…’

‘…like death,’ said Wilkes, following Mahisa’s lead, removing his hood and sampling the air.

Several Kopassus ran down the path to Mahisa and talked excitedly.

‘Nearly everyone here is dead,’ said the captain, ‘and the ones that aren’t are very sick.’

‘Until we find out exactly what’s going on here, we’d better keep these things on,’ said Wilkes. He felt like he was wearing a mobile sauna. Mahisa agreed and they reluctantly pulled the JSLIST hoods back over their sweat-sodden heads.

The first rays of the sun crossed the horizon and illuminated the clear blue sky, yet a chill remained over the camp – the final breath exhaled by the dead.

‘Boss!’ Wilkes turned and saw three men jogging awkwardly towards them from the direction of the airstrip, encumbered by their suits. It was Ellis, Beck and Ferris. ‘The drone,’ said Ellis. ‘It’s gone – launched. And recently too, by the look of things.’ They presented Wilkes and Mahisa with a fistful of Polaroid photos showing the drone and various people standing beside it. Wilkes and Mahisa recognised Duat instantly. Something in Arabic was painted on the plane’s nose. ‘We found this in the shed at the end of the runway,’ Ellis said, holding up the remains of a laptop. ‘Battery and hard drive are still warm. We also found a man killed – a cap in the head. Been dead less than an hour by the looks of him – no rigor and only a few ants and flies. He’s one of the men in the photos.’ He selected one of the Polaroids and said, ‘This guy.’ The picture showed the drone with Duat, a man and a boy – all smiling. ‘The wound was not self-administered, unless he was a contortionist. The shed was the drone’s hangar. There’s fuel, wheel tracks and this,’ he said, handing him a sheet of paper. ‘Check out the date, boss.’

Wilkes examined the paper. ‘Shit!’ he said. It was a METFOR. And for the following twenty-four hours. How
much had they missed the bloody thing by? ‘It’s got to be Darwin then,’ he said, looking up.

‘Can you be sure about that?’ asked Mahisa urgently, joining them. ‘What about Jakarta?’

Wilkes handed him the sheet. Mahisa didn’t need the significance of the data explained. He would have been familiar with METFORs, accurate meteorological forecasts that covered a given time and area. Knowing the wind speed and direction are critical when you’re about to spread chemical weapons over a particular area. And the area covered by this METFOR was the island of Flores, the islands to the west of West Papua, and the north of Australia, including Darwin. The fact that Jakarta wasn’t included eliminated it categorically. ‘That is great news,’ he said, placing a gloved hand on Wilkes’s padded shoulder. ‘Not about Darwin…’ he added quickly.