Expatriates (23 page)

“Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.”

—Jerry Pournelle, in a reply to reader e-mail, in
Chaos Manor
Mail 141, February 19-25, 2001

Q
uentin Whittle was typical of the solo Stay Behinds in the Northern Territory. He had military experience and few family connections. A self-proclaimed “spitting chips mad bogan,” Whittle was a former bush logger and commercial hunter. He was forty-three years old and divorced, with no children.

When he was in his early twenties, Quentin had served just two years in the Australian Army as an infantryman before a trailer hitch accident crippled his left hand—leaving him with only one finger and very limited strength in his thumb. Although the army would have allowed him to continue with active service if he transferred to a support branch, he opted to take a disability “early out.” He eventually settled into a job as a truck driver and log loader operator with Kasun Logging headquartered in Rapid Creek, a suburb north of Darwin.

After the Crunch curtailed most logging, Quentin took up commercial hunting. His hunting territory ranged mostly east into the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park where he mainly went after feral pigs, feral banteng cattle, feral sambar deer, and magpie geese. He sold or bartered all of the meat that wasn't necessary for him to survive and drove a battered old Toyota HJ75 trayback ute that was equipped with a pivoting hoist and electric winch for lifting the heavier animal carcasses.

Quentin was one-eighth aboriginal by the blood of his great-grandmother Polly, but his fair skin and light brown hair didn't show it. His status as an “octoroon” gave him aboriginal hunting and fishing privileges under the Territory Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1976 and the Cobourg Peninsula Aboriginal Land and Sanctuary Act of 1981. He was occasionally confronted by the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory Rangers. When showing the Aboriginal Land Council hunting permit and the Aboriginal Status Declaration documentation that he always carried in his wallet, he would often play it up, putting on a heavy aboriginal accent. “Why you blokes always harassing us hard-yakka black fellas, uh?” This infuriated the park officials since his status made him immune from enforcement of most of the game laws, and even from the requirement to purchase any hunting permits under the most recent legislation.

Whittle's small and nondescript rented house outside of Jabiru, about 150 miles east of Darwin, was notable only for having three chest freezers filled with frozen meat, and rawhides dominating the living room. His next-door neighbor was a full-blooded aboriginal named Sam who made his living catching and drying freshwater barramundi. When the Indonesian invasion started to look imminent, Quentin gave Sam two of his three freezers. With Sam's help, they loaded the third freezer into Quentin's ute bed. Towing a trailer containing only the most valuable and useful items from his other household goods, Quentin drove to Rapid Creek. Among his other gear was a duffel bag of military field gear that he had stolen several years before from a fellow army private in retribution for a barracks prank that went too far.

In Rapid Creek, Quentin took up residence in the disused gardener's house on the grounds of an estate owned by Kasun Logging. The owner was about to “head for the Big Smoke” (a big city) with his family and was happy to have a caretaker.

Quentin Whittle owned just two guns: a 1920s-vintage Belgian-made Liege 12 bore double-barrel shotgun with almost all of its original bluing worn to a gray patina, and a Remington Model 7 .308 Winchester bolt action. The latter was equipped with an inexpensive Simmons variable 3-9-power scope. The rifle's buttstock was badly battered from constant use in the field.

As a designated Stay Behind, Quentin was issued four pale olive green 200-round cans of ammunition marked
7.62 MM BALL F4
on their sides and
7.62 BALL BDR-CHGR
on their lids. Each can held four green canvas bandoleers of ammunition in stripper clips. The ammo was compatible with his .308 Winchester rifle. His prior army qualifications also made him eligible to be issued fragmentation hand grenades and Claymore mines. After a half-hour refresher course, he was given ten frags and six Claymores with one proviso from Caleb Burroughs: “Be sure to put them to good use. Do not bury your talents.”

By training, an infantryman's first instinct is to dig. During the week before the Indos landed, Quentin selected, developed, and stocked sites for three hidden firing/hide positions on the periphery of Darwin and one bivouac site. He spent the next two nights shuttling clothing, rations, ammo, and gear from the guest house to the four sites. At the three chosen firing positions, he dug foxholes with wooden lids, commonly called spider holes.

According to his laser range finder, each of the holes was between 350 and 550 yards from positions that would likely be occupied by the Indonesians. The first spider hole was on the military crest of a knoll near the edge of Holmes Jungle Nature Park. This hole was 407 yards from the junction of Vanderlin Road and McMillan Road. He called this his Jungle Park hole.

The second spider hole was in Charles Darwin Nature Park and had a view across Sadgrove Creek to a long stretch of Tiger Brennan Drive. Even before he finished digging it, the bottom of this hole began to fill with seeping swamp water. This “swamp hole” was in a wetland location that would be difficult for the Indonesians to pinpoint and even harder to access.

The third spider hole was on a triangle of scrubland at the junction of Howard Springs Road and the Stuart Highway southeast of Palmerston City. He called this his Road Watch hole. This one was just sixty yards from Taylor Road, but he didn't plan to shoot in that direction. Anticipating that the Indonesians would quarter some of their troops at the abandoned Robertson Barracks and that they would frequently use the Stuart Highway, he hoped this would be a prime sniping location.

His main bivouac—a “sleeping hide”—was one and a quarter miles northeast and just a mile east of Robertson Barracks, just beyond a group of small lakes. He found one of the thickest patches of brush in the area, crawled in, and leveled off a shelf on a gentle slope that was not much wider than his bivy bag. The brush was so thick that he could hardly see the sky. This bivouac site was just a few yards uphill from a small creek where he could refill his filter canteen. From his position, he could hear the Indo ships unloading vehicles at the East Arm docks. Darwin Harbor was full of Indonesian and Malaysian ships of all descriptions. A few of these were civilian roll-on, roll-off (RORO) ferryboats that had simply been painted gray and pressed into navy service.

Quentin plotted the coordinates for the three spider holes and his sleeping hide with his GPS, offsetting each sixty yards to the east, in case his GPS receiver was ever taken.

The spider holes were armpit deep. He used thirty-inch square scraps of Australply laminated plywood for their lids. With a jigsaw, he cut the lids into curving oblong shapes to reduce their chance of detection.

Quentin then camouflaged them further with a generous coat of Clag Kid's PVA white glue and sprinkled them heavily with soil and dried leaves. A few small downed tree limbs were then attached with finishing nails. He was careful to use soil, leaves, and limbs gathered in the immediate vicinity of each spider hole so they would look natural.

“A fine marksman with a second rate rifle is far more effective than the reverse.”

—Colonel Jeff Cooper, writing in Mel Tappan's newsletter
Personal Survival (P.S.) Letter

J
ust as he was finishing up camouflaging the lid of his third spider hole, Quentin caught his first glimpse of the Indonesians: a Korps Marinir scout vehicle roaring through an intersection a quarter mile away. It was a French-built AMX-10P, but Quentin initially mistook it for an American-made M113—a model he'd once ridden in. It was not until he had a chance to look at the vehicle through his rifle's scope that he could see the distinctive 25 mm gun turret atop the APC.

Quentin spent the next three nights further stocking his three spider holes. On a packboard, he carried three four-liter water jugs and one case of CR1M rations to each hole. He also spent a few hours at the Road Watch spider hole observing the Indos' vehicle movements on the Stuart Highway through his binoculars or rifle scope. A huge variety of vehicles passed by, most of which looked unfamiliar. Nearly half of the trucks appeared to have been of civilian manufacture and simply painted in tan and reddish-brown blotches to prepare them for use in the Australian invasion.

The vehicle movements initially looked chaotic, but then he noticed a pattern: at five
P.M.
each day, an Alvis Stormer tracked APC stopped on the shoulder of the Stuart Highway just south of Howard Springs Road. There, a soldier set up a small satellite dish on top of the vehicle and connected it to a backpack SATCOM radio. Once it was set up, another soldier—presumably an officer or NCO—climbed atop the APC to read a message into the SATCOM radio's handset, referring to pages on his clipboard. Each message seemed to take about five minutes to transmit. Then the subordinate soldier would disassemble the radio, collapse the folding dish, and stow the gear. Each time, they'd make a 180-degree turn and drive back in the direction of Palmerston.

Whittle surmised that they chose the spot near the road junction because of its excellent line of sight to the north. He decided that if the opportunity arose again, he might have the chance to take out an officer or a senior NCO.

The next day, Quentin spent the late afternoon watching the highway through his rifle scope instead of his binoculars. The Stormer APC arrived on time as usual. As the radio man set up the SATCOM dish, Quentin used his rangefinder and confirmed that the APC was 570 yards away. He tested the wind with a spittle-moistened finger. There was a very slight breeze from the south. The soldier with the clipboard climbed atop the APC and began sending his message. He was facing almost directly toward Whittle, but the other soldier was looking southward.

Quentin started feeling anxious. He knew his rifle was zeroed for three hundred yards, so at this distance he would have to hold high. With the rifle steadied on a Harris bipod, the scope crosshairs tracked smoothly. In a way, this almost felt like harvesting a roo, but he had never shot a man before, and this seemed particularly cold-blooded. The man with the clipboard droned on. Quentin decided to aim at the top of the man's left ear to allow for both the bullet drop and the slight wind. He clicked the rifle's safety forward and took deliberate aim. He could see a slight oscillation in the crosshairs caused by the pounding of his heart. He fought to control his breathing. A seven-vehicle convoy approached, so Quentin decided to wait.

Once the convoy was out of sight, Quentin again took up his normal cheek weld on the Remington's stock. He settled the crosshairs above the soldier's ear. He let half a breath out, and gently squeezed the trigger with the first pad of his trigger finger. The bullet struck the Indonesian just to the right of the center of his chest. As the rifle came down from the recoil jump, Quentin caught a glimpse of the soldier going down. But he didn't wait to observe any longer. He slipped into his spider hole and slowly slid the lid in place. He was breathing rapidly, feeling overwhelmed. In the almost pitch-blackness of the spider hole, he methodically cycled the rifle's bolt and flipped the safety back to the safe position.

Just then, the 25-millimeter atop the Stormer came to life. Firing in long bursts, the gunner expended 120 rounds. Of all those rounds fired, Quentin heard just two rounds zip over the top of his spider hole, so he knew that the Indos had only a vague idea of the direction from which his shot had been fired. There was a pause in the cannon fire as the gunner switched to a fresh ammo can. During this lull, Quentin could hear sporadic lighter-caliber fire. He surmised this was from the 5.56 mm rifles he had seen the Indos carrying. The gunner cycled the first round from the belt into the cannon and resumed firing. This time the bursts were shorter—just three to six rounds per burst. Again, the gunner burned up an entire belt, but unlike the previous belt, Quentin heard no near misses. He snorted to himself and mouthed silently, “Those wankers have no clue where I am.”

The firing ceased. Quentin could hear other vehicles stopping near the APC. There were many shouted orders. After five minutes, Quentin heard a whistle blowing. It sounded just like his rugby coach's whistle from twenty years ago. Expecting a dismounted infantry advance in his direction, Quentin's attitude quickly changed from curiosity to fear. He wished he had a miniature periscope or something like a webcam so he could see what was going on around his position. He didn't dare lift the lid of the spider hole. There were a few rifle reports as the skirmish line of nervous Indonesian soldiers shot at any suspected targets.

After a couple of minutes, Quentin could hear the voices of individual Indo soldiers. It wasn't long before the voices became quite distinct. He heard the crunch of approaching footsteps. Quentin's breathing grew more rapid, and he could hear the blood pounding in his ears. His hands began to shake, but the Indonesians passed by his undetected spider hole. The voices faded into the distance. There were still a few occasional rifle shots, but none came close to his hiding position. Sitting in the darkness, Quentin grinned in relief. He whispered to himself, “What galahs.”

Other than cracking the lid roughly once an hour for fresh air, Quentin stayed hunkered down in the spider hole. He took sips of water and nibbled on a packet of prawn crackers, but he didn't feel very hungry. He waited until his wristwatch showed three thirty to fully open the lid and investigate his surroundings. The Indo vehicles had long since departed. A sliver of moon was setting in the west. He waited, watching and listening intently for ten minutes. After the moon had set, he hopped up out of his hole and carefully replaced its lid. He moved very slowly and quietly in case the Indos had left an ambush patrol.

Quentin sprinkled a bit of earth around the edges of the spider hole's inset lid. If it weren't for the distinctive Y formed by the limbs atop the lid, it would be very hard for him to locate, even in full daylight. Forty minutes later he was resting in his daytime hide. He had trouble getting to sleep. Just before falling asleep at sunrise, he thought to himself,
One down, three hundred thousand to go
.

The next morning the sky became overcast early and it began to rain. Quentin spent some time deepening the draining trench at the uphill side of his sleeping platform. He crawled back into his bivy bag, zipped the mosquito netting closed and shifted the thin tropical-weight sleeping bag beneath him for extra padding. He fell asleep. After a half hour the rain transitioned to a torrent. He zipped the bivy bag's end flap shut. He chuckled and said to himself, “Try using your tracking dogs now.”