Crystal Coffin (18 page)

Five women and eight children, he remembered Westy saying.

Two guarded huts equalled two sets of prisoners, he figured. It made sense, but it wasn't good news. Whatever he was going to do, he'd have to do it before any of the militia got a chance to use the prisoners as a human shield, which meant he'd have to figure out a way to be in two places at once. But he couldn't plan anything from where he was. He could hear voices but not the words, and he needed to get closer to fix that.

He proceeded forward in short bursts through the underbrush on the lower side of the village until he reached a thick stand of bananas that had been tended by the villagers. He startled a wet kitten and watched it disappear into the forest away from the creek.

Smart kitty, he thought as voices swept to him on the breeze.

From his new position, he could see over the short rock wall, through the burned-out remains of the two nearest huts and directly into the heart of the small village. He could see Shorty standing out of the rain under a shanty roof that seemed to cover what looked like a communal cooking pit. He could see and smell the blue tinge of smoke that struggled out from the roof and upwards in the rain and could hear the heavy clunk of a lid being bumped into position over a cooking pot, just like they did it in the boy scouts when he was a kid.

He saw an old woman crumple to her knees to feed the fire and Shorty poked her with the sharp end of his Chinese SKS rifle.

‘Cook faster,' he ordered in broken Tetum. ‘And cook good or we shoot you now instead of morning.' He switched from the woman's native dialect and spoke fluently to one of his men in a different tongue, then laughed and prodded her again with his rifle.

Locklin gripped the webbing across his chest and squeezed. Back at camp, the Aussie brass had pulled in a few teachers and priests from the bigger towns to help familiarise at least one man from every unit with the basics of the local dialect. Locklin had been through with the first batch. But it didn't seem to occur to any of the bright sparks up in officer country that a few words from across the border would have come in handy too.

He could only understand what the militiamen were saying when they spoke to the villagers in their own dialect, and even then it was difficult since some of them were worse at it than he was. But their body language spoke volumes and they were following basic military procedures for securing the area, which meant he now had a pretty fair idea of what they were up to.

The rain had eased momentarily but the weather was closing in again. The tracks that radiated like tree roots from the three rickety gates on the village perimeter had already seen heavy traffic and were turning to slush. The clouds were settling on the forest canopy for the long wet night and the winds were choppy and picking up. They must have known that army Blackhawks would be grounded until at least morning for anything less than a life-or-death emergency, even if HQ realised that his recon unit had failed to check in.

Shorty was staying put for the night, but getting ready to break camp and hoof it over the border to safety before sun-up, and it didn't sound as though they were planning on taking the women and children with them. He couldn't tell what fate was planned for his unit, but things didn't look good. As prisoners, alive and healthy, the militia could have held them up to the world as an example that they had a just cause being fought for in a just manner. Instead, they seemed intent on sending a different message.

As Locklin watched, they herded the women out from the twelve o'clock hut and assembled them in a semi-circle. Then they dragged the remaining three men from his unit out from the nine o'clock hut, beat them to the ground in front of the women and started shooting at their legs.

Locklin snapped his Steyr to his shoulder and stared down his sights for a clear shot on Shorty. If he took out their leader, he hoped they might be surprised enough in the confusion to let him pick off a couple more of them before they got him.

The muzzle of his Steyr wavered between the banana trees, hungry for its target, and Locklin swore under his breath. The little slime was gloating over his latest achievement by pacing inside the circle of women. The eight o'clock guard kept his weapon on them, while the others gave the Australians another beating. Locklin watched them with narrowed eyes, listening to his mates scream and paying close attention to which guards kicked the hardest.

The border with West Timor was only ten mountainous clicks away, an hour's jog on healthy legs or closer to three hours humping wounded prisoners through hill and gully. If they were taking any of his unit with them, they'd have to leave earlier, probably closer to three or four in the morning.

He checked his watch, figuring that gave him a window of almost ten hours to complete his objective. Shorty watched the sky regularly and that was keeping the rest of his men edgy, so the first six hours he could expect his targets to be on close to full alert. His best chance of success, he realised, was to catch them between two and three in the morning, when their metabolisms would be naturally sluggish.

But his mates were bleeding now. He couldn't wait that long.

Twelve of them, he counted. And only one of me.

He did a quick weapons check to assess his resources. So long as he wasn't packing any duds, he had one smoke grenade, two M26 fragmentation grenades and his rifle, a Steyr-88 with thirty rounds in the magazine and another hundred and twenty for it attached to the webbing around his waist. His rifle came with Ninox night vision goggles, which could also see through smoke as well as dark, an invisible sighting laser and a detachable bayonet.

But for nearly everything he had, they now had four times that and more.

As well as any weapons they'd brought with them, they now had the Minimi submachine gun and the body armour that Mulhany had been packing as their forward scout and the full kit
from each of
the four Aussie grunts, including the kit they'd raided from Westy's body.

The only bonus he had was a Browning 9mm handgun that he'd traded his spare time for with a Special Forces major who needed a kid's pony broken in before his daughter's birthday. The Browning had a not-so-silent-as-movies-make-out silencer with thirteen rounds in the magazine and a spare twenty round clip in his left leg pocket.

Locklin watched the militia drag his mates back into the nine o'clock hut and prayed for heavier rain to mask the muffled thock of his Browning's silencer. The women were herded back into the twelve o'clock hut soon after that and on a cue from Shorty, the militiamen bolted to a pile of armoury that had been confiscated from their Australian prisoners; They scrambled over them like kids raiding a Christmas tree.

They handed the weapons around, arguing over who got the Minimi submachine gun. After what sounded like an accidental burst of about a dozen rounds into the chicken hutch, the Minimi stayed in the hands of Cleverboy, who seemed to be the first one to figure out how to use it. Shorty sent him to relieve the guard on the southwest gate, which was just below the eight o'clock hut. Once there, Cleverboy propped the weapon up on its bipod, positioning it atop the low rock wall overlooking the widest track that led to the village.

In any sane weather, the narrow snakelike clearing provided rough access by four-wheel drive to other villages down the range. As unlikely now as it was, that direction was still the most likely for attack from ground forces. In addition, it was also the best position from which to watch the sky.

Locklin scratched his chin, wondering how he was going to take him out. Cleverboy and the submachine gun had to be the first to go.

He worked his way around the village from beyond the treeline, proceeding again in short bursts, pausing only to watch for routines or weaknesses that could be exploited. But there were few. What he needed was a distraction, something that would attract their weapons fire so he could assess their response tactics to danger.

He didn't have to wait long. Below the chicken hutch, between the village and the creek, he ducked behind the low earthen hump of a man-made bog for domestic buffalo and as he did, he caught the attention of both buffalo and one of the three black razorbacks that wallowed there.

He bellied himself flat against the muddy ground, feeling the rain pelt the length of his soaked body as he listened to the biggest black pig squeal a warning to the others. From the sow's point of view, he was behaving like a predator and she stirred up the buffalo to a full alert. They lifted their noses, snorting at him and swaying as a threat to charge him.

He had only a few seconds to calm them. Locklin raised his eyes just enough for a quick glance towards the village and saw that the ruckus had already attracted attention. A skinny yellow dog was racing on its way. He couldn't dash the distance to the nearest trees without attracting its attention, and he couldn't let it get close enough to sniff him out.

He reached round to his bumpack and quickly fished through his rations. Three anzac biscuits, two packets of M&M's, a Mars Bar, three cans of spaghetti, a small carton of longlife cream for his coffee and a tube of pine-scented mosquito repellent to keep insects at bay while he ate.

He unwrapped the biscuits, wishing for a quieter wrapper. Then he lobbed the first one directly into the path of the galloping dog, which nosedived as it ran over the scent of sweet pastry and sniffed around in the long grass until it found it.

He lobbed the other two Anzacs into the mud wallow, landing them near the rumps of the startled buffalo. The pigs saw them drop, and being used to having food scraps thrown at them, bolted over to squabble over the morsels. They bumped against the back legs of the buffalo, which spun around to horn the pigs back to their own space in the corner. The dog saw that happen and bolted in to sniff out the food it suspected they were fighting over. The noisy battle that followed brought shouts from the village.

Locklin hugged the mud, rolling his head slowly in it to smudge the shine off his forehead, nose and cheeks. He did the same with his watch and the backs of his hands and became one with the mud as he waited.

The dog got the blame. Without bothering to get closer, Shorty fired two rounds at it through one of the Steyrs. He had it set to semi-automatic and it gave him a bigger kick on firing than he'd expected. The rounds went high, missing the dog, but still having the desired effect. One bullet zinged over the dog's ears and it took off in fright, vanishing into the bush in the opposite direction to the kitten. The buffalo moved to the quieter deep end of the wallow, and without the dog, the pigs settled quickly in their muddy corner and the clearing fell quiet again.

Shorty and the other militiamen vanished from behind the wall and Locklin dashed on to his next position at the edge of the treeline. Shorty didn't order each of his men to fire a few rounds to get used to their new weapons, and Locklin wasn't too surprised. They still had the threat of needing every round they had for a possible fight and with night falling quickly, Shorty had plenty of other things to worry about before he could bed down. He shouted towards the twelve o'clock hut and four women were herded out and assembled in front of him.

Shorty organised them into a working party, assisted and supervised by three of his men to gather bodies two at a time onto makeshift stretchers. Under guard, the women were made to carry their heavy loads through the lower gate towards the creek.

Locklin followed, keeping pace with them from inside the treeline.

The clouds opened up and the black hair of the women clung wet to their faces as they struggled with the heavy weights. Water raced under their feet in little streams like tiny rivers that gushed down the tracks towards the creek.

One of the women slipped. Heavily pregnant, she went down, taking the back end of the makeshift stretcher with her and forcing the smaller woman at the front off her feet as well. The smaller woman rolled a short distance down the gully, knocking one of the militiamen to his knees.

He cried out, more from surprise than pain, but before the woman could help him up, she was knocked down again by a blow to her back with a rifle butt.

Giant shouted as he towered over her and kicked the two women to their feet again. The other two women put their stretcher down and tried to help, but he ordered them away in broken Tetum.

The militiamen laughed and Locklin swore at them silently. He was less than eight metres away, but he couldn't do anything about it, not without broadcasting to Shorty that he was coming.

The women rolled the bodies of their loved ones onto the creek bank and the men herded them back for another five trips in the rain. On the second last trip, they brought the body of Corporal West. A great emptiness filled Locklin's gut and he realised that the women had to feel the same way. The dead were being left for the crocodile.

Locklin saw a familiar ripple downstream and decided not to follow the work detail back to the village for the last trip. Instead, he fossicked through his bumpack again for his tube of mosquito repellent. He climbed out onto a thick branch over the water and squeezed the entire tube into the waterhole below the bodies. The long skinny trail of water-resistant repellent sunk straight to the bottom of the shallow pool near the edge. Locklin stirred the slow-moving water with a long, skinny branch, not much, just enough to stir up some of the strong pine scent — and he watched a ripple in the water that headed away.

With the insect paste under water, Locklin couldn't smell it, but the predator could. Its keen sense of smell had failed it and it could no longer detect the fresh scent of a meal waiting for it on the bank.

How much time that bought, Locklin didn't know, but he didn't get much time to think about it. From the village came noises that he hadn't been expecting and as he dissolved into the undergrowth to wait for the last work detail to return, his blood turned to acid in his veins.