Rogue Element

by David Rollins

  The floor of the tunnel was made up of flattened grasses and leaf litter. The tunnel walls were remarkably uniform, as if they’d been woven. He continued reversing through the tunnel until it kinked right. Then he stopped. Something around him had changed. But what? Then he knew what it was. The world had suddenly fallen silent. What was that? Had he heard something? He held his breath.

  The wall of the tunnel suddenly collapsed in front of him. Something large fell into the space. Joe was paralysed with fear. It was either some kind of wild animal, or one of the soldiers. Either way, things were about to get unpleasant. Before he could react with a scream or shout, he was head-butted on the point of his chin. The force concentrated in his head, orange planets exploding behind his eyes. His mind fought to maintain consciousness. Then a hand covered his nose and mouth, and a weight pressed on his chest. In front of his face were frightened eyes as wide as Frisbees. It was a woman lying on top of him, pressing the air out of his lungs. At least, he thought it was a woman. She put her finger to her lips for him to be quiet. He nodded.

  A noise! She gestured at the hole in the side of the tunnel. And then Joe heard it too. Again, it wasn’t a noise so much as a patch of unnaturally still air in the fabric of sound that enveloped them. There was something close, very close, and it was trying hard to be stealthy. Its presence was something he could feel rather than see. Joe’s own heart pounded noisily in his ears. He tried in vain to control it. The boot came down quietly an arm’s length from the matted wall of the tunnel.

  Joe saw the disturbance in the pattern of greenery first, then the mud-covered leather of the boot itself. It was a soldier’s boot. The camouflage pattern of the fatigues was so effective he could only see that it wasn’t foliage when the leg moved. Joe’s eyes were large in his head. Not a metre away was a man with a gun, trained to kill, hoping to put that training to good use on them. On top of him was a woman as scared rigid as he was, pressing the life out of him. The boot lifted and was gone. They waited for the bullets to rip through the tunnel wall. Nothing. The soldier had come close to stepping on them, but still hadn’t seen them. After what seemed an age, the woman quietly, slowly, slid off to one side. Joe exhaled and silently blessed the creator of the tunnel.

  He blessed too soon. A brown head appeared around the bend of the tunnel ahead. It was an animal, a large four-legged animal the size of a full-grown pig. It stopped, wrinkled its nose and moved its head quickly from side to side. Joe blinked dumbly, not knowing what to do. Something in the animal’s brain decided, for whatever reason, that it should be afraid of the animals in its path. Maybe it was their reluctance to move, or it smelled their fear. Whatever the reason, the beast’s legs suddenly started pumping. The animal charged through the wall of the tunnel and made off noisily into the undergrowth, grunting and squealing.

  At last, the soldier had a target. Bullets zeroed in on the ruckus. A scream of surprise and death followed. The undergrowth came alive as countless snakes, lizards and small mammals decided they’d rather be somewhere else. The cracks from the carbine launched monkeys and birds from the trees. They squealed their distress at the sudden disturbance. Joe and the woman scuttled on all fours through the tunnel until they reached the relatively open ground that sloped down to the creek. They stood for a few seconds to get their breath, and a section of tree centimetres from the woman’s head suddenly split away from the trunk as bullets slammed into it. Joe had forgotten that two soldiers had been dispatched to his hill. The man stood, weapon coming up to his shoulder, in the middle of the creek. If they hesitated, the next shots wouldn’t miss. The woman pulled Joe to the ground and they scrambled for the thicker growth. But the jungle was too dense to penetrate. Nowhere else to go, they were forced back to the creek. They hid behind a mound of mud pushed up by the monsoon floods. Joe snatched a look over it. The two soldiers had now joined together in the pursuit and were running through the creek bed towards their hiding place.

  One of the men opened fire just as he tripped on a stone. The bullet spat from the muzzle with a downwards trajectory. The propellant that launched the round burned through a thin layer of tin and ignited phosphorus packed into a hollow at the base of the bullet. It was a tracer. The projectile glowed fiercely red on its brief flight, striking the creek bed not far from the woman’s outstretched hand.

  And then suddenly the flesh on Joe’s face was seared as the very creek itself exploded into a twisting, orange snake of intense heat. The punch of the explosion knocked the air out of him. A ball of flame was deflected by the mud bank and rolled skywards.

  The two soldiers became human torches. Joe lifted his head and saw them run blindly through the firestorm. One of the men was discharging his weapon into the air, his finger convulsing on the trigger. Then they both dropped to their knees and fell forward into the river of fire, hissing like hot pans doused in a bucket. Their screams choked with a gurgle.

  Sergeant Marturak’s attention was captured by the familiar report of an FNC80. The shots came from the hill being searched. It had been helpful of the old man to give up the whereabouts of the only other survivor. And it was good of that last living passenger to present himself as such a willing target.

  Did killing the old couple give him pleasure? Perhaps not, but it was reassuringly professional to be able to do his job well. There were to be no passengers left alive. Those were his orders. The general had been very specific on that point. He had even elaborated on the reason why, saying the security of Indonesia depended on it. That was both unusual and unnecessary. An order was good enough for Sergeant Marturak and reasons were not required; following orders was his job.

  The shots: he estimated thirty rounds. One whole magazine. That was wasteful. He’d sent two trained soldiers to shoot an unarmed man. It was a simple task, one his men knew well enough. It didn’t take thirty rounds. That smacked of panic. Other smaller bursts of gunfire followed. Odd. There was obviously something wrong.

  Marturak saw the fireball before he heard the explosion. It took him completely by surprise and he felt the radiated heat of it on his face. There was another blast of gunfire and then a menacing, black mushroom cloud of smoke, forked with yellow and orange flame, rose out of the gully. What could have caused that? he wondered. Then the smell of burnt kerosene reached his nostrils and he put it together. One of the aircraft’s tanks must have ruptured and spilled its contents, the fuel pooling on lower ground. But what had set it off? He hoped his men had not had a careless smoke. No, they were good soldiers, the best, despite the spray of firearms. They certainly weren’t stupid. What had caused the explosion? He spat an order and four soldiers immediately jogged off to investigate.

  ‘Jesus! What happened then?’ Joe said, pulling himself up off the ground. The woman was dry retching. After she finished, she opened her hand and revealed a Bic disposable cigarette lighter. Her arms were bright red, burned by the heat.

  ‘Couldn’t you smell the kero?’ she asked. ‘It’s pooling everywhere here.’

  ‘Did you light it? With that?’ said Joe, incredulous.

  ‘I . . . I think so, yeah. There was some of the stuff – the kero – beside me.’ She stared at the lighter, every bit as surprised as Joe.

  Joe’s breathing was short. He had just seen two men die a horrible death. They’d danced a ghastly jig as they’d tried to escape the flames that clung to them. If there’d been an opportunity to turn back, there was none now. Joe realised that killing, or being killed, was his only future.

  NSA, Helemanu, Oahu, Hawaii, 0705 Zulu, Wednesday, April 29

  In the cool underground cubicle, Ruth examined the brief report. Her radar and that inner voice of hers were working as one now. Was the air traffic controller murdered, or was it just an accident? Ruth didn’t believe in coincidences. She sent on the report and wondered, what next?

  Parliament House, Canberra, 0730 Zulu, Wednesday, April 29

  There was a gentle tap on the door. A lance corporal entered and, with the grace of a
n excellent waiter at a three-hat restaurant, handed a sheet of paper to the ASIS chief.

  Graeme Griffin read it and immediately snatched up the phone. ‘Spike, just got something from our NSA friends at the US embassy here. They thought it might be of interest. The air traffic controller in Bali who first reported QF-1 missing was found dead in his car at the bottom of a gully a short while ago.’

  ‘Shit . . .’ Niven said.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Look, I’m not sure what it means. Maybe nothing.’ But the feeling in Griffin’s gut told him it meant a hell of a lot of something.

  Hasanuddin Airport, Maros, 0730 Zulu, Wednesday, April 29

  After phoning in her earlier report, A-6 went home, parked her motor scooter, showered, changed, and took a taxi to Hasanuddin Airport. She had the appearance of any number of the welcoming friends and relatives milling about the airport. She noted that a few children besotted by aircraft even had binoculars, like her, with which to watch the takeoffs and landings, and that relaxed her a little. She doubted, though, that any of them had a satellite phone on them, as she did.

  She further observed that there were quite a few police and security officers around, but there was really nothing about her outward appearance that would attract their attention. A couple of aircraft had been late, so even the fact that she had lingered for hours at the observation deck, watching through her binoculars, passed unnoticed.

  A-6 kept her binoculars trained on the air force side of the facility, and even that failed to raise an eyebrow, although A-6 thought it might. She’d begun the stakeout nervously, but soon relaxed. There were at least a thousand people in the place, coming and going, and she was just one woman amongst them. No one special.

  Eventually they arrived, as she knew they would. The Super Pumas came in low from the north and settled over the other side of the airport on the air force apron. The doors cracked open when the rotors started to slow, but only the crew jumped down onto the tarmac. Other than their crews, the helos were empty. They had gone out with soldiers and come back from places unknown without them. It might be nothing, she thought. But there was something about the urgency of their departure that had attracted her attention in the first place. The helos had been gone around three hours. Was it worth reporting or not? She decided to call it in anyway. Too much information was always better than not enough.

  The Tannoy announced that a Garuda flight from Jakarta had been diverted due to weather. A-6 feigned disappointment and, shoulders hunched, joined the grumbling exodus from the terminal.

  Central Sulawesi, 0730 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  None of this made any sense to Joe. Why were these people trying to kill him? It was bizarre. They should be bundling him up and taking him to a hospital so that he could start recovering from the shock of the air disaster. What the fuck was happening here? And who was this woman who’d appeared from, well, nowhere, and rescued them from certain death with her cigarette lighter, like some female McGiver?

  ‘We’d better not hang around,’ she said, interrupting his train of thought. ‘They’ll come to investigate for sure.’ She stood, turned her back on Joe and the foul stench of sizzling flesh and kerosene, and made her way to the relative security of the tunnel. Joe got up and followed, somewhat dazed. It was mid-afternoon and surprisingly dark under the canopy, the light reduced further by the smoke. When the sun set it would be pitch black. Complete darkness would bring a mixed blessing. It would hide them, but it would also cover the approach of more soldiers.

  The all-pervading screeching sound he assumed was made by some kind of bird had stopped. In its place was a vast number of chirps, squeaks, grunts, rustlings and chatterings. The jungle was waking from the sleep induced by the heat of the day.

  Joe joined the woman in the tunnel. Given what had just happened, he was reluctant to crawl back into the hole, but he had nowhere else to go. The gloom was suddenly lit by a glow. The woman was burning leeches off her legs with the lighter. In the light provided by the single flame he saw that his own legs were covered in the things, as well as cuts and bruises.

  ‘If I were you, I’d strip down,’ she said. ‘You’ve been in the water. You’ve probably got these buggers all over you.’

  Joe took off his shirt and pants in the confined space of the tunnel and inspected his chest in the shifting yellow glow. He counted a dozen leeches.

  ‘There are more on your back. Here . . .’ The woman carefully burned them off. ‘You’ve probably got some down there, too,’ she said, gesturing at his underpants. ‘But you can get them off.’ There was no smile accompanying that. She was all business.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ he asked over the sizzling and popping of the leeches.

  ‘Same place you did. I was in economy, down the back. I always travel down the back. Statistically gives you the best chance of surviving a crash. I saw the part of the plane I was seated in down the bottom of a gorge. I don’t think there would have been any survivors in it. So, so much for statistics,’ she said with the suggestion of a wry smile. ‘Anyway, I got lucky. I was thrown clear.’ The woman ran her fingers gently over the back of her skull, tracing the outline of a bump the size of a golf ball. The swelling was tender. She spied another crop of leeches behind her legs and the discovery distracted her. She forgot about the bump and went after them.

  ‘The noise of the choppers overhead woke me up. I must have been unconscious, or asleep, or in shock – whatever. When I saw those soldiers, I just couldn’t believe it. I was thrilled.’

  Joe knew exactly how she’d felt.

  ‘And then I saw them shoot a couple of people and I just ran into the jungle. I thought I was it, the last survivor.’

  ‘In the tunnel . . . how did you know I wasn’t one of them?’ Joe asked, gesturing back behind him with a flick of his head.

  ‘I didn’t. You surprised me.’

  Joe nodded. When the woman had broken through into the tunnel, he’d thought the worst too. ‘So, what’s your name?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘Um . . .’ Joe was confused by her reluctance.

  ‘Sorry. I’m just a bit . . . you know. I don’t know what’s going on. Why are we being shot at?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Joe. ‘I just keep thinking I’ll wake up, that I’m having a nightmare – too much MSG in the food or something.’

  ‘Why kill us? What possible reason . . . those poor people, shot in cold blood.’

  Joe heard the woman take a deep breath.

  ‘Well, my name’s Joe. Joe Light.’ He offered his hand.

  She took it, forcing a smile. ‘Suryei Hujan.’

  Shaking her hand felt weird and reassuring at the same time. Introductions were gestures that belonged in the real world, like the pub or the office. But the contact felt good, like it was possible for things to return to normal.

  ‘Pretty name. Mean anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Sun and rain, a yin and yang thing. My parents are romantics,’ she said, checking around the tunnel walls.

  Joe didn’t know where to go from there. The small talk evaporated.

  Suryei had kept the flame on her lighter burning during this conversation. But now the flame had heated the lighter to a point where the metal was too hot to handle. She let out a quiet gasp. The light flicked off and she stuck her finger in her mouth to relieve the burning sensation. They were instantly swallowed by a blackness that swam with after-images of the flickering light. Night had fallen.

  ‘Better not waste this,’ she said, pocketing the Bic. ‘We should get moving. The soldiers . . .’ The sense of shared safety they’d felt huddled together in the friendly glow of the lighter was extinguished with the flame, and the atmosphere between them became strained and awkward.

  ‘What do you do, Joe, when you’re not dodging bullets?’ asked Suryei quietly after they’d crawled some way in silence.

  ‘Computer software. Games, mostly.’

  ‘Great,’ said Suryei,
half under her breath. ‘That’ll come in handy here.’

  Joe had never felt like apologising for his occupation before. Back in Sydney, it was mostly a pretty cool thing to do for a living.

  Joe could hear Suryei breathing in the murk. He called up his last image of her before the lighter was extinguished. It was hard to tell exactly what she looked like with all the mud and gore that covered her face. With a name like Suryei Hujan, she had to be Asian.

  ‘Got some water here,’ he said, trying to be friendly. Despite the hot, close air, the ambience was frosty.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, a little of the edge gone from her tone. ‘You’ve got a rucksack. What’s in it?’

  He felt around inside it. ‘Some bottles of water, a couple of trays of aeroplane food, and a sort of axe.’ He rummaged through the contents again quickly. Something was missing. ‘Had a pair of binoculars . . . must have left them somewhere.’

  ‘More than I’ve got,’ she said. ‘The lighter. That’s it.’

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘Did. Ran out.’

  Joe held out a bottle to her ghostly outline. She took it. He heard her open it and drink.

  She handed him the empty. ‘Put this back in your bag. We don’t want to leave those bastards any signposts.’