Rogue Element (26 page)

‘My fiancé . . . I haven’t told you.’ Suryei swallowed hard and Joe regretted the question.

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘It’s okay. I can talk about it now.’ Suryei took a deep breath, as if she was about to plunge into turbulent water. ‘My fiancé and I were in the car together, coming back from a weekend away – a skiing holiday. It was night and I was dozing, listening to music on the radio. Then I heard Ric, my fiancé, say, “What’s this guy doing?’’

‘I opened my eyes and a set of headlights was coming up over the crest, on the wrong side of the road. Everything slowed down. The approaching car was swerving about from his lane to ours. There was nowhere to go. A cliff face to the right, a big drop to a river on the left. In the last second, it was like our two cars were tied together, destined to crash.’

Suryei’s breathing was heavy, her body reacting visibly to the traumatic memory. ‘At the last instant, Ric turned
in to
the oncoming car. He saved my life. Instead of a head-on, the other car slammed into Ric’s door. The last thing I remember about it was the glare from the headlights sparkling through our shattered windscreen. I thought I was going to die.’

Suryei cleared her throat, snapping out of a trance. She flashed Joe a nervous smile to let him know that she was alright. ‘I spent a month in hospital – broke my pelvis. Then lots of physio. Missed Ric’s funeral. I had amnesia for a while and didn’t remember anyone or anything. My mother stayed with me in hospital. Had no idea who she was.’

‘What about the other driver?’

‘Eighteen months in prison. He was asleep at the wheel. The bastard was drunk. Anyway, you asked me about East Timor.’

Joe nodded.

‘At the time, I was working for a big metro daily newspaper. After the accident, when I came back to work, the editor asked me if I wanted a change, do something different to take my mind off things. He was talking about sending me to East Timor. He thought I could give the paper’s readers an interesting perspective – you know the sort of thing, an Asian-Australian torn between homeland and heartland . . . Sounds a bit trite now, but I jumped at it.

‘First day there, I met a New Zealand soldier – just a rifleman. We became friends. I went out on patrol with his section a couple of times. The guys showed me a few survival techniques . . .’

Joe smiled. ‘Oh, so it was a “he”.’ That explained a lot, he thought. Her apparent confidence in the jungle for one thing.

‘He was killed in an ambush,’ Suryei said abruptly. ‘Dead. Gone. Again, no goodbyes. Nothing.’

‘Jesus . . .’

‘Happened up on the border. They were in an area known for militia activity when his patrol was fired on.’ Suryei was mentally back in East Timor, staring into the middle distance. ‘Witnesses said it was a strange, weird moment. According to the other guys in the patrol, there were Indonesian soldiers in the area, and other militia too, who were watching the firefight and laughing and cheering. When it all started, and even during the shooting, militia soldiers would step in from the wings, start firing, then withdraw. Like a game of tag-team wrestling or something.

‘The rules of engagement meant the UN soldiers couldn’t fire unless the enemy aimed their weapons at them, so they
couldn’t do anything about the enemy on the sidelines. It sounds like bullshit, but that’s modern warfare for you.

‘A couple of militiamen were killed. Nearly a thousand rounds were fired. Two UN soldiers, my friend and his buddy, were wounded. My friend died soon after of his wounds. The TNI soldiers watching from the West Timor border thought it was lots of fun. They were shouting and laughing through it all.

‘It was only after he’d gone that I realised how important he was to me. Anyway . . .’ she said, breathing deeply, realising that her eyes were moist.

‘What was it like, going into Dili at the beginning?’ asked Joe. He found the questions difficult to ask, because remembering seemed to affect Suryei profoundly. But somehow, he knew she wanted to talk, exorcise some of the demons.

‘Tragic,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The people were terrified and the place was a mess. Ransacked. Just about everything that wasn’t nailed down was carted off by the TNI. You couldn’t find a window that hadn’t been smashed, or a door that hadn’t been kicked off its hinges. The smell of human faeces was everywhere – it was disgusting and pathetic. The streets were filled with broken tiles and glass and rubbish. Any kind of infrastructure had been torched or torn down. But the worst part of it was the fear – that was as much a part of the smell of the place as anything.’

‘What about the Indonesian army?’

‘Everyone was tense. No one was really sure how the Indonesians would react after the vote. At first, they were pushy. There was a real swagger about them. I don’t think they realised that the battle had been fought at the ballot box.

‘Seventy-eight percent of East Timor voted for independence, rather than for autonomy within Indonesia, despite the intimidation and the killing going on before the ballot. Indonesia lost.’

‘The soldiers take it bad?’

‘Take it bad?’ she said, snorting. ‘When it looked likely that the poll wouldn’t go Indonesia’s way, the TNI and the militia just went bananas,’ Suryei said, the memories still so vivid.

‘The Indonesians had been stomping around East Timor since 1975, don’t forget. This territory had become their plaything. The army had money and time invested there and it didn’t want to lose that investment. And neither did a small but very determined band of East Timorese who were doing very nicely out of the TNI. Neither the militia nor the TNI were prepared to lose that without a fight. That’s what was so amazing about the people of East Timor. They bore the brunt of the TNI/militia rage. They endured the looting, the murder and the rape and quietly, resolutely, voted Indonesia off their soil.’

‘You think they’re heroes, the people of East Timor?’ said Joe, breaking into her trance.

‘Yes I do,’ she said, crouching to remove a small stone from her shoe.

‘From what you saw, do you think the media did a good job there?’

‘I guess, only Australians now find it impossible to draw any distinction between the people of Indonesia and its politics. Yet our democracy isn’t exactly perfect either. We have our share of crooks and scandals.’

‘Yeah, but we don’t shoot our own people, and we don’t blow passenger aircraft out of the sky.’

‘On that first point, I’m pretty sure the Aboriginals wouldn’t agree with you. And on the second . . . okay, I’ll give you that.’ They walked in silence while they negotiated a particularly boggy section. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the thick mud and flew into their nostrils, mouths, ears and eyes. They ran through the last few sucking puddles, half blind, scooping the insects out of their mouths. Suryei lost her shoe in the mud. Joe volunteered to go back and get it for her. Suryei refused. She tied some fabric saved from Joe’s shirt around her nose and mouth, went back and freed it from the bog herself.

‘Look, I don’t think the media are the bad guys but they have a serious flaw,’ said Suryei, picking up where she’d left off.

‘And that is?’

‘The news media can only handle information in a certain way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not good with grey.’

‘Eh?’ Joe was not sure he understood the point. He pulled aside a branch that threatened to whip back into Suryei’s face.

‘Well, you know the expression, “it’s all there in black and white”?’

Joe nodded.

‘Well, it’s never there in grey. Newspapers, the media generally, they take a side of a story, one that can be dealt with unequivocally, and report on it more or less accurately.

‘And the news sources may – not always, but sometimes – give the other side of a story, providing the issues are clear. But it’s not very adept at dealing with issues that have black and white mixed in equal parts. Like I said, it’s
not very good with grey. The bad guys are always bad and the good guys are always good. But life is rarely so ordered and people, issues – whatever – are never, in truth, so perfectly one dimensional and transparent.’

‘You’ve obviously thought about this a bit.’

‘Haven’t you? Or do you just accept everything you’re spoon-fed without question?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, but I don’t think my levels of cynicism are up to yours. Probably because I haven’t seen as much,’ Joe added. Suryei had certainly been exposed to more
life
than he had.

‘But it’s always been like this. Take wars. The media dehumanises the opposition. That makes things worse because people are then more prepared to do things, cruel things, when they don’t think the other side is as “human” and “civilised” as they are. That’s what happened in Vietnam, and in the Second World War with Japan, and probably every war in human history . . .’ Suryei gathered her thoughts. She stopped and surveyed the jungle hemming them in.

‘Anyway, it’s easy to see how the media works when there are extreme examples, such as when there are confrontations between nations, but the principle, the way the media simplifies things, is the same no matter what the issue.’

‘Okay, but you can’t blame just the media,’ Joe interjected. ‘It’s been fashioned by the people who buy newspapers and listen to the news. News is presented the way it is because that’s what sells. People want the facts delivered that way – simply.’

‘That, Joe, is an incredibly simplistic view,’ said Suryei, stopping. Her hands were on her hips, like she was ready
to fight. ‘The public believes getting the facts is the same as getting the truth, and one is not the same as the other. Those embargoed stories back in East Timor – the truth was managed, massaged, put through the blender.’

Joe quietly entered a small clearing. A family of macaques occupying a large tree, its roots dangling into the space below it like a matted screen, chattered and screeched and whirled quickly up and down the branches. Joe noticed the discarded fruit on the ground and nudged one over with his toe. It looked familiar – green on the outside with rich crimson flesh full of seeds inside. He picked one off the tree’s trunk, peeled it open and took a bite. It tasted sweet. He ate it quickly and had another. He tossed a couple to Suryei. She joined him beside the tree, picking the fruit that sprouted from its bark.

‘This is what the babirusa eats,’ said Suryei, diverted, the journo again. ‘It’s a fig, unique to Sulawesi. Evolved just for the babirusa’s dinner. The fruits are low, see, and easily reached.’

‘Can you imagine what must be going on back home in Australia?’ said Joe, almost incoherently, talking with his mouth full. ‘Do you think the authorities – the government – know what’s going on?’

‘They must. Think about it. QF-I has gone missing,’ Suryei said, hunting for a branch that hadn’t been stripped. ‘They must know it’s crashed somewhere in Indonesia. The relatives of the passengers – your parents and friends – the whole bloody country’s probably in mourning. And shock. And if it appears the Indonesians are up to no good . . .’

Joe whistled softly. ‘Jesus, the shit-fight that must be going on . . . My guess is that if the Indonesians aren’t
letting our blokes in to help with the search – and why would they, given what we know? – then Australia will probably put it on the Yanks to get a spy satellite on the case. It’s the obvious thing to do. But if they know the plane was
shot down
by Indonesia then, shit . . . maybe we’re already at war with them!’ Joe thought about that and shuddered.

‘Maybe that explains the soldiers shooting at us,’ said Suryei.

‘Or maybe they’re trying to stop us because we’re just loose ends.’

Selatan Irian Jaya
. Joe thought about what they knew for sure, and what was pure speculation. ‘It’s unlikely they’ll know the whole story back home. I just hope they know enough to send our own people here with guns to come get us.’

ABC Radio 702: ‘And something just to hand . . . The crash site of Qantas Flight 1 has been located. A spy satellite photo, showing the 747 crashed on a ridge line in central Sulawesi, Indonesia, has just been released in a joint press conference given by the Minister for Defence, Hugh Greenway, the Australian Defence Forces Commander, Air Vice Marshal Ted Niven, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service Director-General, Graeme Griffin, and the Indonesian Ambassador Parno Batuta.

‘It is believed the photo was released a short time earlier to a stunned Indonesian parliament. Questions were
raised in the Indonesian parliament about whether the Indonesian army had prior knowledge of the existence of the photo.

‘The Indonesian air force officer heading up the search, Colonel Ari Ajirake, has denied that the military had been keeping the photo secret. He said that, now the exact coordinates of the downed plane were known, a rescue team could immediately be dispatched to the site. He also said it wasn’t surprising that the site hadn’t been located sooner, given the remote nature of the plane’s location.

‘Just to repeat the news: the crash site of the Qantas 747 that went missing in the early hours of last Wednesday morning Eastern Australian time in Indonesian airspace, has been located . . .’

That uneasy feeling was again building within Sergeant Marturak. He had deployed his men and the waiting game had begun. At the core of his concern was a complete lack of intelligence. He had absolutely no idea what the two survivors were up to. For all he knew, they were indeed trying to scale the impossible heights of the almost vertical escarpment rising like a painted blue wall from the jungle beyond. He knew he was up against just two people – a man and a woman – but who were they? He doubted that two ordinary civilians would have been capable of enduring three days in the jungle, let alone be able to outmanoeuvre and escape him and his men, and on more than just one occasion.

He dredged those moments of contact up from his memory and replayed them. He would have liked to believe that surviving the encounters with his men was pure chance, and if that’s all it was then the survivors were extraordinarily lucky indeed. It was not reasonable to assume that people with no training could keep themselves alive for three days and two nights in an environment that was as dangerous and inhospitable as Sulawesi. Especially when one or both were wounded, had no food, no shelter, and were probably in shock.

Perhaps they weren’t alive. Perhaps they were already dead, or dying somewhere of exposure, a fall, dehydration or poisoning, or any one of countless ways the jungle could take a human life. If they hadn’t walked into his ambush by the appointed time at around four hours from now, he would assume them dead and notify Jakarta of the fact, then sweep the jungle for their bodies.

The unexpected boom of an explosion interrupted this thought, followed by another thunderous blow. His men were up and racing towards the area mined by the claymores. The jungle filled with automatic fire. Marturak began constructing the radio message in his head, one that would please the general, as he ran towards the source of the noise, all self-doubt erased by the deafening thunder of the exploding PE.

The staccato automatic fire petered out just as the sergeant converged on the narrow passage formed by the trunks of two massive hardwoods. On the floor of the jungle between the two giants, carpeted by leaves and mosses and spongy fungi, was a large four-legged black body with a thick crimson pool where the head should have been. One of Marturak’s men walked into the clearing with the
missing part of the animal – its head – one side of it a stew of red flesh, white bone and congealing blood. The soldier smiled as he held the head high. His expression of delight changed when Marturak caught his eye. The soldier dropped the trophy on top of the carcass and melted back amongst his comrades.

Marturak spat an order and three men went off to check the remaining claymores. Marturak felt like screaming. This was without doubt the most frustrating op he’d ever undertaken. The animal, some sort of wild cow or deer the size of a large dog, had obviously been running down the trail and tripped the first and second wires, discharging the mines. The first claymore had probably been set too high for the ball bearings to do their job. The second mine had effectively decapitated the animal as it ran in terror from the first explosion and the thrash of ball bearings that flailed the surrounding vegetation.

Marturak wondered how far the noise of the explosions and the ensuing automatic fire had carried. He hoped like hell that he hadn’t given their position away but, as with every other aspect of this absurd chase that had them stumbling about virtually blind, he couldn’t be sure. ‘Allah!’ he cried in desperation at the top of his voice. A flock of birds which had only just resettled in the treetops overhead were again frightened into the sky.

The sergeant knew he was going to have to replan, but what in God’s name to do next? He paced around the small clearing considering the limited options, his men stepping out of his way. Perhaps the ploy of passively setting an ambush was flawed from the beginning. One thing he was reasonably sure of was that he had the two passengers bottled up. He had the noose in his hand; he just had to tighten it.

Marturak had sixteen men left from the original deployment, including the soldier who had lost three fingers from his left hand to the weapon wielded by one of the survivors. The man was in a lot of pain but a low dose of morphine helped, and he could still hold and discharge his weapon. Marturak decided to divide his force into pairs, providing eight separate opportunities to make contact with, and kill, the objectives. If his men struck serious opposition – which he doubted, but then nothing would surprise him on this job – the two-man team was a reasonably effective weapon – one man could advance under the covering fire laid down by the other. He would have preferred three-man teams but concern about spreading his force too thinly across the jungle swung his mind against it. Marturak gave each pair a compass heading to follow and established an RV, the place where his two men had been left behind after the cobra strike.

Silently, Marturak cursed their lack of equipment, in particular the lack of inter-section comms. He’d been told that this op had to be strictly emissions free, except for the scheduled broadcasts. Marturak completely understood the need for security. The Qantas plane, the elimination of civilians – it was the kind of mission that would either set him up for life if he succeeded, or get him killed if he failed. A sudden pang of objectivity made him realise that having him killed would be the safe option for his superiors, no matter what the outcome of this mission. The op was black and would have to remain so forever. It would be prudent to consider some kind of insurance policy, he decided. Marturak was vicious, but he was no fool.
The disk.
He tapped it in his webbing once to make sure it was still there, and found himself reassured by its presence. It
was something only he knew the existence of and it might prove to have considerable value.

Suryei and Joe were again searching for a tree they could climb so that they could get another fix on their bearings. The hunt proved fruitless. Trees that were big enough to get them above the canopy had no branches low down, just broad, smooth trunks, gigantic living columns that appeared to support the green roof overhead, and they provided no purchase whatsoever.

They had just decided to keep moving in the direction they thought was the correct one when the distant pulse of the twin explosions, followed by a large number of popping noises, bounced off the canopy overhead. Both Joe and Suryei guessed correctly what those sounds were. They glanced at each other anxiously, and for a number of reasons. The blasts confirmed that people with guns and other explosive devices were still in the jungle and obviously still searching for them. Of more concern was that neither Joe nor Suryei had the slightest idea from which direction the sounds originated. The jungle fractured and splintered sound so that it appeared omni-directional, virtually surrounding them. For all they knew, they could be walking straight towards the source, and certain death.

‘Shit,’ said Suryei, looking left and right and then turning slowly in a complete circle attempting to pinpoint the direction of the explosions.

‘I reckon it came from down there,’ said Joe, indicating off to their right.

‘Are you sure? Sounded to me like it came from just up ahead. Or maybe from over there.’ Suryei gestured up the ridge to their left. ‘How far away?’

Joe shrugged, spinning around, unsure, rattled. It had been more than twelve hours since their last contact with the soldiers and the rubbery dimension time had taken on added to his disorientation. It felt like they had been wandering around in the jungle forever, certainly more than three days, perhaps because surviving the jungle was a moment-by-moment proposition that took every ounce of concentration, obliterating any other reality. The crash of exploding ordnance was a blunt reminder that their pursuers were determined. And close.

To make matters worse, if that were possible, Joe and Suryei were running on empty. They had slept very little and eaten next to nothing, which had brought them to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion. If giving up had been an option, they would gladly have taken it. But it wasn’t.

‘Come on, this . . . way,’ said Suryei, panting, sucking in the hot, wet air.

Whether or not he agreed with the direction, Suryei wasn’t sure. Joe was also too tired to argue. Any decision could be wrong. Any decision could be right. Frowning, Suryei picked her way soundlessly past Joe towards a dense thicket of matted tree ferns. She ducked low with a grunt and disappeared inside.