She cast her mind back to their first meeting. It had been at night and she had heard screams coming from an alley. She went to investigate and came upon a young woman lying naked on the ground, a Kopassus soldier holding her face in the mud as he rammed into her. A-6 started yelling at the man to get off. Another soldier came out of the shadows and grabbed her arm. A knife was under her throat. She felt the sharp edge against her skin and smelled the oil on the blade. She looked down and saw that his pants were undone and his fly was open. He’d either had his turn, or was about to have it.
The soldier with the knife recognised her as the woman who sold corn in front of the barracks. He forced her against a wall, grabbed a handful of hair and hacked away at it with his knife, pulling out whole handfuls of it by the roots. He did it smiling through her pleadings and then her screams.
He said it was fortunate for the woman under his corporal that the ‘corn cob girl’, as he called her, had happened along. They didn’t have to kill her now, he said, waving the dagger at the woman on the ground, because each was a hostage for the other. A-6 suddenly realised that he was right. If she managed to find a sympathetic policeman prepared to investigate, someone who wasn’t afraid of the army – and that was unlikely, she reminded herself – then the soldier would kill the woman in the mud, thereby disposing of the evidence. And if the victim complained, then she, the corn cob girl, would be killed. More than likely, in either event they’d both end up dead. Ripping out her hair was merely underlining the assertion that he meant what he said. But her intervention had been stupid because she’d ceased to be anonymous. But what could she have done, she admonished herself, ignored what was going on?
A-6 remembered that particular soldier, the sergeant with smallpox scars covering his round face. Her hair grew back but her fear of him remained. She learned from other soldiers that his name was Marturak, Sergeant Marturak. She called him ‘Sergeant Melon’ after the large, evil-smelling durian that had similarly rough skin. Every morning Sergeant Melon took corn from her stall, often taunting and jeering at her about her plain, unattractive appearance.
Indonesia seemed full of men like Sergeant Melon, men who had achieved power and used it as an excuse to threaten and bully others. She was sure, however, that her father, a colonel in the Indonesian army, had not been like this pig. He had commanded an artillery regiment. A-6 often talked to her mother about him. He had been a highly decorated soldier who had fought the Japanese during the war, and the Dutch imperialists after it. He was not a politician or a warmonger, he just believed in Indonesia, strong and independent.
Then things started to go wrong. The Communists in the army were getting bolder. The Soviets were filling the military’s armoury with hardware and its head with idealistic rubbish. The army divided into factions. Her father was asked to join both and he declined both, which made him the friend of neither.
One night when her father was sleeping at the barracks, they came for him. No one knew whether it was the Communists or the Nationalists but a lot of men died that night when the old government was removed with bullets and knives.
Her mother had scooped her up from her cot and ‘friendlies’ had smuggled them to Singapore. From there they went to Australia and applied for refugee status. The colonel had been highly regarded by senior Australian army officers. That helped them win their refugee status and A-6 spent the next sixteen years of her life growing into a proud Australian woman.
And then one day, a young man, a total stranger, approached her. He showed her ghastly photographs of her father snapped after they had finished with him. The man asked her whether she wanted to avenge her father’s death. Looking back on it, the whole episode had been unconvincing. Nevertheless, she’d fallen for it. Now, she couldn’t even be sure the photos had been genuine. They could easily have been faked. They could also have been real and the man being tortured could have been anyone. But she had been vulnerable. She’d heard many stories about her father, how much he’d loved her when she was a baby. A-6 even believed that she remembered him as a large and friendly shadow in the most distant reaches of her memory. She had said to the man that she wanted time to think but she already knew that the answer was yes.
She spent the next three months learning basic spycraft, self-defence, and how to pass herself off as a poor Indonesian. That was two years ago.
At first A-6 enjoyed the cloak and dagger stuff. It was easy being a spy in the new millennium. All she had to do was call in detailed reports of troop deployments in and around Hasanuddin AFB. For this she was given a satellite phone. The techies back home were a bit concerned about that at first. The handset was nothing special. It looked just like any old Nokia. The dish, however, was more obtrusive, even though it was small, about the size of a small dinner plate. A woman with an old mobile wasn’t in the least unusual, but a satellite phone? It turned out not to be an issue. Satellite TV was everywhere in Sulawesi, or throughout Maros at least. It was cheap, easy entertainment. It was almost unusual not to have it and a dish sat on even the poorest roof.
The phone could be used as a normal mobile but to use it as a satellite phone, she had to key in a ten-digit code. The handset then scrambled her voice into a random binary code and transmitted it on a scattered frequency to a military communications satellite. It was important that her calls could not be intercepted, unscrambled or traced without considerable effort. It was just prudent to be out of sight when she phoned in her reports. No big deal, she’d thought, although finding privacy in Maros was difficult.
Her run-in with Sergeant Melon demonstrated how serious and dangerous espionage was. And the current amicable relationship between Australia and Indonesia could turn ugly in a heartbeat, as it had often enough in the past. If she was caught when things were tense, there was the likelihood that she would be taken away and shot, unless there was political mileage to be gained by parading her through the courts. And then they’d shoot her.
A-6 wondered what it would be like to be a normal woman again, going to parties, the beach, nightclubs. It would be nice to dance, meet boys and have a normal life. The danger was all getting a bit too close now, especially given the continued contact with Sergeant Melon.
A-6 gave herself another six months. After that, she would review her situation. But in the meantime, something unusual was definitely going on in town. She heard the choppers before she saw them: two large Super Pumas came in low and lifted the tiles off several roofs, flinging them into the narrow, dank lanes. They cruised unhurriedly overhead at barely a walking pace. A-6 put a hand over her nose and mouth to protect her lungs from the dust picked up by the powerful downwash of the rotor blades, and squinted up at the aircraft through the stinging cones of sandblast. She was just in time to see that the helo was full of Kopassus soldiers before Sergeant Melon pushed the door shut. The aircraft then accelerated quickly into a climb.
The thump of the Super Pumas faded to a distant beat before A-6 started up her trike. Something of interest was happening somewhere if two Super Pumas full of Indonesia’s crack soldiers were hurriedly being airlifted to . . . where? She would try to find out, but didn’t like her chances. The Kopassus weren’t the most talkative people and asking direct questions could prove unhealthy.
Exmouth Gulf, 0455 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April
The Joint US-Australian Facility at Exmouth Gulf in the far north of Australia received the transmission from A-6. The report from the asset was brief and processed by one of the US Air Force Security Services Signals Intelligence personnel.
The report read: ‘A-6 Stat. 39. 29040440/29040453/TM VS-K UN/S 20-30 H2 B360 ENQ/D U.’ It came off the printer and the corporal looked at it blankly. The sequence was decoded, but it still might as well have been Latin for the Sig Op had no ‘need to know’, therefore the significance of the string of numbers and letters was opaque to him.
It had to be one of the most boring jobs in the world, he told himself. Right up there with working on an assembly line, sticking
widgets in boxes all day long. From morning till night he looked at shit that meant nothing to him. Then, at the end of the day, he went home to fuck-all nothing out here in the desert. No bitches except for really ugly ones, but at least there was plenty of beer to improve their looks. Lots of flies, though. Sticky motherfuckers that wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The corporal took another look at the sequence on his screen. The one thing he did know was that Stat. 39 meant Station 39, or ‘somewhere in Indonesia’. Another godforsaken shithole, no doubt, he told himself.
So much for ‘join the air force and see the world’. If he was outside, he would have spat.
He sent on the slip – the coded sequence – via sealed hardline intranet to NSA, Hawaii, and copied the information to the local intelligence services as per the standard operational bullshit.
NSA, Helemanu, Oahu, Hawaii, 0457 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April
Ruth was now on the lookout for anything from Indonesia and had coded her etray accordingly. The slip popped into the box and launched a flashing red exclamation mark on her desktop. She read it. The message didn’t clarify anything for her but it certainly added to her disquiet. Something was definitely going on down there, she thought. Ruth pondered the significance of the information for a minute before snapping out of the trance. She dragged and dropped it into the box she’d created especially for Bob Gioco. Ruth shook her head. That inner voice was screaming at her, but she couldn’t make out what it was saying.
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, 0500 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April
Bob Gioco, NSA Group Analyst for South-East Asia, was gazing sleepily at his computer screen when the slip arrived. One in the morning. It was time to go home and he was dead on his feet. It had been a shit of a day, and he had a headache squeezing his head like a tight helmet. The icon popped up yet again telling him something had arrived for his attention. He clicked on it and the slip came up in a box: ‘A-6 Stat. 39. 29040440/29040453/TM VS-K UN/S 20-30 H2 B360 ENQ/D U.’ It got his attention. Indonesia. Anything from that part of the world did at that moment. There was that Qantas plane down in the area. Perhaps it had been found.
Bob translated the figure groups in his mind: A-6, an asset shared with an Australian intelligence service, with a report from Station 39, that’s Maros near Makassar (formerly Ujang Padang) in Indonesia – on the southern end of Sulawesi. A-6 made the observation on the 29th of the 4th at 0440 Zulu time, and thirteen minutes had passed before she made the report at 0453. He glanced at his watch to check the date and time. Maryland was five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Coordinated Time as it was now known – fourteen hours behind Sulawesi. Whatever this report was about had happened just twenty minutes ago in a small town on a forgotten island off the world’s radar screen. In other words the system was working, thanks to intel sharing and this A-6 asset who was obviously one on-the-ball individual. Gioco ignored his headache, sipped his decaf cappuccino and considered the information contained in the string of numbers and letters.
Okay, A-6 has had a TM VS-K or a troop movement confirmed visually of Kopassus units. She was UN/S or unsure of numbers but 20-30 is the estimate. They are in H2, two helos, departing on a bearing of 360 (north). ENQ/D – enquire question/destination, which means she has no idea where the helos are going. The observation, she thinks, is U – unusual.
Yes it was a bit U, but only a little. The Indonesian forces had been active for months now. And besides, there were much more interesting things going on, like that missing Qantas jumbo. The activity A-6 was reporting was in the right area, he observed again. Perhaps the Indonesians were sending in Kopassus troops to help find the thing. They were jungle-trained specialists. There was plenty of jungle on Sulawesi. It made sense. Kind of. But there was something . . .
The debate going on in Gioco’s mind was whether this had anything to do with terrorism. Planes did occasionally crash for reasons that had nothing to do with nutters prepared to die for some cause and take as many innocent civilians with them as possible. Terror was now the prime suspect whenever and wherever a plane went down. Indonesia . . . Hmm . . . Gioco distractedly chewed the end of a pencil. He knew the Australians had always been leery of the place – a big, sprawling country with porous borders, a succession of less than democratic governments, a fractious military, and a questionable human rights record. And recently, the realisation that terrorist groups linked to al Qaeda were flourishing there, hiding out in Java’s rugged mountains.
South-East Asia had been targeted by the US as a potential terrorist hotbed, but not so much Indonesia. It was more the Philippines people here were concerned about. Then Bali happened. Was this 747 thing more of the same? Gioco absently made popping sounds with his mouth while he mulled through things. He tapped the pencil on his desk, a syncopated beat. There was nothing solid here to go forward on. He decided to give this one the benefit of the doubt, unless something else turned up to change his mind, of course.
Gioco went back to his slips. He had another two hundred or so to review and analyse before his day was done. He wouldn’t get home for at least another hour. No doubt there would be other interesting and relevant slips amongst the dross. He tapped the keystroke that fixed the slip from A-6 onto a desktop noticeboard, and attached a small flashing star to it. Bob found this system a good way to work. A lot of meaningless crap drifted into his etray. He took out the interesting or relevant slips from his pile and pinned them on the board for later review. The slip from Station 39 joined a couple of other unconnected slips forwarded by that old battleaxe in Hawaii. What was her name . . .?
Parliament House, Canberra, 0500 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April
The PM sat at his desk with his head in his hands. Losing such a close friend made him physically ache. And Harry’s entire family had perished with him. He wondered about the chances of surviving a plane crash. The only connection he’d had with such events in the past was, as for most people, through news reports. Do people walk away from such things? It occurred to Blight that the friends and family of the passengers aboard the Qantas flight were probably feeling every bit as confused as he was, switching between grief and hope. What if my own kids were aboard that plane? He was able to visualise their final moments filled with terror, and the picture almost made him feel ill.
Answers. Bloody answers, that’s what we need.
Qantas confirmed that the aircraft had crashed. The wreckage hadn’t been located yet but it had to have come down. It was only carrying enough fuel for the Bangkok leg and time was well and truly up.
The country was already in deep shock. There was disbelief on everyone’s face. Was this the work of terrorists again? That was Blight’s first thought, so it had to be everyone else’s too. Australia had once enjoyed the benefits of being isolated, a backwater. Then those days had come to a bloody end in a couple of tourist bars on his favourite holiday island. On some level attributing the plane’s disappearance to an act of terrorism made the situation easier to come to terms with. This was a Qantas plane and Qantas planes just did not crash. The thing couldn’t have come down for no reason, surely? Qantas had suffered some embarrassing ‘incidents’ in recent years, but the carrier’s unequalled safety record had been maintained, and so had the public’s faith in the carrier.
To lose a 747 was bad enough. To have no idea where it had come down made things a damn sight worse. Somewhere out there, four hundred people, many of them Australian citizens, were dead or dying of their injuries.
The Chief of the Defence Force, Ted ‘Spike’ Niven, tapped on the open adjoining door.
‘Come in, Spike,’ said the PM, motioning the country’s most senior officer towards the leather chesterfield opposite.
In his day, Niven had been one of Australia’s top fighter pilots. He had a mind that was relentlessly calculating, even under the stress of battle, and his hand–eye coordination was phenomenal. Blight had previously reviewed the man’s record. As a young flight lieutenant he’d been sent to the U
S by the RAAF as part of an exchange program. The RAAF wanted the best pilots and the US had the finest combat training programs, the most famous being the US Navy’s Top Gun Academy. The Australian proved an apt pupil. Once he’d come to grips with the extra power available from the American-specification F/A-18, Squadron Leader Ted Niven was unbeatable. No matter what the instructors threw at him, the Australian could find a winning answer. And if he got on your tail, he waxed it and you lost.
The Yanks gave him the call sign ‘Spike’. They joked that it had nothing to do with his flying – it was because once he had his teeth into you, he never let you go. The truth was that Niven looked disturbingly like Spike, the bulldog who featured in Warner Brothers’ Sylvester cartoons. His dark eyes were set wide apart on a square face with a small button-nose underlined by an aggressive jaw with a slight overbite. He was also short, barrel-chested, and had slightly bowed legs. Spike he had been christened, and Spike he had remained.
Niven’s tour of the States had been in the early eighties. Now, at forty-seven, he was the youngest-ever CDF. ‘Sorry for the intrusion, Prime Minister, but I have a thought on how QF-1 could be located quickly,’ he said, scowling. He’d just heard that one of the men from his former squadron had been a pilot on the ill-fated jumbo’s flight deck. Niven hadn’t met the man, but the connection still added a personal element to the tragedy. ‘I also think, if you don’t mind, that it’d be worthwhile bringing Graeme Griffin into the loop.’
Griffin was the Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, a man Niven could always rely on to play it straight. The two men had been to university together, played football together, and had even been out with a few of the same women.
Rogue Element Page 6