And yet, a competing voice told him he was panicking unnecessarily. That there was nothing to worry about. Elizabeth always had that effect on him, the ability to block out reality; a safe harbour. She’d called him forty minutes ago at the barracks to tell him that she had rented a room at a five-star hotel, and filled the bath with bubbles. She did that occasionally. Suluang had things on his mind that demanded attention, but the thought of Elizabeth naked but for lavender suds was utterly distracting. Reluctantly, after telling her he was too busy, he’d capitulated. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the diversion would do him good. One last time?
Suluang was glad that he’d given in. He lay back on the crisp linen sheets in the cool, darkened room. The woman’s body was exquisite. She was young, with breasts that strained against the thin fabric of her dress. Her waist was narrow and her legs long and straight. He really should talk to his uncle about including more such delicious items on the menu. What a find she was. He’d been sleeping with her, when the opportunity presented itself, for some time now. He doubted that he’d ever slept with such a beautiful woman before. And she had a dirty mind. The woman looked like an angel, but fucked like a whore.
Elizabeth smiled at the man lying on the bed. It wasn’t her real name, of course. She wore names, identities, like masks. When she was done with this assignment, she’d write the name on a piece of paper and throw it in the bin. The ritual helped clear her mind so she could adopt a new mask the next time it was needed.
No matter what the assignment, Elizabeth loved sex. Indeed, the more the better. She didn’t care who the man was as long as he was healthy, preferably not fat, and had a decent-sized organ. And not necessarily in that order, she thought. In the lexicon of modern neuroses, Elizabeth was a sex addict. She knew what her body demanded, and she satisfied that demand at every opportunity. She’d never suffered the indignity of having to fake an orgasm, no matter who she happened to be in bed with. She couldn’t understand women having problems reaching that glorious plateau. It was so easy for her. She often wondered if men had the same attitude to fucking that she did. It would be an interesting thesis – she’d certainly enjoy researching it.
Choosing a wardrobe had been difficult for this job. Ultimately, she’d settled on a range of cotton sundresses. They were cheap but, with the right colour and length of hemline, could be very sexy. She liked the ones with buttons down the front best of all. She could keep them buttoned to the collar at work. Afterwards, the buttons could be undone to the appropriate depth. And when the sun was just so in the sky, the cotton fabric hid nothing while covering everything.
Elizabeth leaned against the side table, one of her long brown legs parting the sky-blue dress to her thigh. She undid the buttons at her chest, her golden skin glowing. She hadn’t even started and already she could see that the general was ready for her. This man was too easy. The dress fell from her shoulders, crumpling at her feet. The general swallowed dryly.
He was hard when she lifted the sheet to straddle him. Suluang felt the cool fabric of her panties against the heat of his skin. His excitement thrilled her and she sensed her own wetness.
Elizabeth rode him. The general’s thrusts felt good. She moved on him, positioning her body for the most pleasure. And then, like an engine on a cold morning, her orgasm began to catch, the pleasure exploding in a ball of light and heat between her legs. She tried to keep the feeling going forever. But inevitably its power subsided and she was left with the man beneath her, spent, useless.
Suluang looked up at her with a smile on his lips, the usual triumphant smile most men wore afterwards. It said, ‘Yeah, baby, I’m good.’ Elizabeth didn’t mind that. Leaving the man confident in his prowess was part of her power. Elizabeth smiled back and slid off, reaching for her Marlboros on the bedside table. She walked towards the bathroom, through the sun, in a swirl of grey-blue smoke. Suluang marvelled at the highlights that flashed blue-black in her hair. The woman disappeared behind the closed bathroom door. He heard the tap running in the bath. Ah, bubbles, he thought.
Suluang closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the pillow. He thought that he could probably become quite attached to this woman, even though she was perhaps only just half his age. And only a waitress. How could she afford a room in such an expensive hotel? he wondered. Maybe his uncle was also receiving ‘favours’. He shouldn’t allow himself to get so attached.
A small click that came from another world distracted him, made him open his eyes.
He looked into the small black hole of a silencer attached to a Glock. He shifted focus to the pale green eyes behind it. He noted that, with only one ear, the man’s head appeared lopsided. Suluang wondered how he’d lost it. The gun made the sound of a cork coming out of a champagne bottle. At the instant the bullet smashed into his skull, Suluang’s mind registered blinding pain before closing down forever.
Vince had fired into the target’s mouth, up into the brain. He’d resisted the temptation to follow his first shot with one more round. Two shots to the head. Once ingrained, SAS training was hard to overcome. This was not to look like a professional hit. With the man’s brains all over the bed head, he didn’t need to check the carotid artery but did so anyway, out of a sense of professionalism. There was no pulse.
The air smelled tangy and salty, the combined perfume of sweat, sex and propellant. Vince’s nose twitched. He retrieved the small brass shell casing, rolled it between the dead man’s thumb and forefinger, then let it fall to the carpet. Next he removed the gun’s silencer, pocketing it, and placed the gun on the carpet close to the bed after pressing it into the man’s hand to ensure the stock was marked with the proper fingerprints. Forensics would fail to turn up evidence that supported suicide, such as grains of gunpowder burned into the skin of the general’s hand, but Vince knew that sort of inspection would take a couple of days to process. By then, he would be long gone. Vince could hear the water running in the bathroom – Elizabeth. There was no reason to disturb her. Each knew what had to be done. He went to the door of the hotel room and placed the hole in the side of his head against it. There was no sound from the hallway on the other side. Vince was out and gone, just another European tourist in a five-star Jakarta hotel full of them.
Elizabeth exited the bathroom, dressed and ready to leave in a tan Chanel suit. Her hair was up and she wore expensive make-up. The young waitress was gone. In her place was a sophisticated businesswoman, a marketing director or an advertising executive, perhaps, from a big multinational agency. The man she’d left alive not ten minutes ago was now very dead, as she knew he would be. She was impressed – Vince worked quietly. White sheets, red blood, brown skin: very artistic. She observed that her g-string was still dangling from the general’s fingers. She shrugged. What would it hurt to leave it? She wondered if it would cause a stir. At the very least, it would give the police something tantalising to put under their microscopes. The thought made her smile, exciting her. Elizabeth, not her real name, left the suite without a backward glance.
Sydney, 1230 Zulu, Friday, 1 May
ABC Radio 702: ‘In news just to hand, it has been announced by the Indonesian government that two survivors have been found at the crash site of the Qantas 747. The names of the two survivors, believed to be a man and a woman, have not been released. The survivors were found early this morning by an Indonesian air force rescue team flown in after the location of the site was revealed by a spy satellite.
‘The Indonesian government has invited Australian military and civilian aviation authorities to investigate the causes of the crash.
‘Qantas Flight QF-1 was bound for London via Bangkok when it disappeared from air traffic control screens three days ago. The flight was fully booked, and it is believed over four hundred people are likely to have perished in the tragedy. The majority of the flight’s passengers are thought to have been Australian, and Thai nationals returning from Australia. The crash brings to an end Qantas’s fatality-free safety record.
&
nbsp; ‘It is now believed that the location of the downed plane was known for at least twenty-four hours by several Indonesian military leaders, but withheld by them in the hope of embarrassing the Indonesian government prior to attempting a coup d’etat.
‘One of those implicated in the cover-up and failed coup was General Suluang, Commander in Chief of the TNI, the Indonesian army, who was found dead in a hotel room earlier today after committing suicide. His death has sparked further tensions between rival military factions in Jakarta where a standoff . . .’
Jakarta, 0235 Zulu, Saturday, 2 May
The operation had been underway for at least an hour and it was running like a Rolex. General Kukuh Masri sat propped in an APC. He moved his bandaged head to an angle that lessened the hammer that pounded in his brain despite the cocktail of drugs he’d been dosed with. In his mind, Masri went over the strategy devised by the Australians with himself and members of the Indonesian government. His partners in the coup were all, by now, more than likely dead. They would not have seen their deaths coming.
Suluang was already removed, found in a hotel room with his brains staining the walls. Suicide was the initial verdict. There was no note. There would be no national mourning. He would be found a traitor to Indonesia, as would Rajasa and the others. The coup would be announced, the perpetrators rooted out and that would be that. Case closed.
Masri would be proclaimed a hero for delivering the traitors to the Indonesian people. Then he would retire quickly and quietly leave Indonesia, never to return. The truth about his involvement would eventually come out, but by then he would be long gone. The thought saddened the general. He loved Indonesia and didn’t want to leave it, but there was no alternative because he also loved living. Masri was just thankful that he was needed to subdue Suluang’s men. Otherwise, he too might have ended up in a lonely hotel room sucking a pistol like Suluang.
He forced his mind back to the present. Soldiers had been exchanging fire for the last thirty minutes. Each shot seemed to make the hammer in his head pound harder. The soldiers in Suluang’s regiment were besieged by the same men they’d overwhelmed the day before, almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier. There was more noise than anything else – more bark than bite – plenty of expended ammunition. There were a few casualties, but no serious attempt to kill or maim had been made by either side. The soldiers on both sides of the barricades knew the outcome of the ‘battle’ before it started. Suluang was gone, shot by his own hand, and nothing would bring him back. The snake’s head had been removed. The firefight happening around Masri was more an expression of grief by Suluang’s men than anything else, the snake’s body writhing in shock.
Understandably, Masri thought, Australia had had a large say in how the operation would go. He was aware that simultaneous manoeuvres were in full swing against other regiments and squadrons loyal to the traitors he had given up to the government. The air force squadrons, unlike the army units, would surrender without a fight because their battles were fought in the sky. They would be overrun on the ground. The rogue naval squadrons would also be surrounded and neutralised. The cancer had to be removed.
It was time. Masri said a few brief words into the intercom and the APC rolled. The mechanised cavalry rumbled forward. They arrived as a phalanx at the front gate of Suluang’s barracks and brought their guns to bear on various structures within the gates.
Masri looked down with surprise at the blood that suddenly welled from under his arm. He wondered what was going on, but only for an instant. A stray, ricocheting FNC80 round had found a gap in the Kevlar plates of his body armour. It bored through his chest and severed the aorta. He died with a look of surprise on his face, slumped like a stuffed doll in the APC’s hatch.
White flags appeared at the gates of the barracks and the soldiers met and embraced, smiling, just as they had done the day before when the roles of victor and vanquished had been reversed.
Jakarta, 0235 Zulu, Saturday, 2 May
A-6 was finished with this business. Maros in Sulawesi, and now Jakarta. Enough was definitely enough. She craved normality. But at that moment what she wanted even more desperately was sleep. It had been a long night and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been horizontal.
A-6 had arrived in Jakarta in the early hours of the morning from Maros, after being urgently summoned there to the Australian embassy. They briefed her on the coup. Indonesia, they said, was on the verge of falling to extremists in the military. They also told her about the plane, the Kopassus, the survivors in the jungle, each new twist and turn raising the bar of her astonishment considerably. When the briefing had finished, she was speechless. But once the reality of it had started to sink in, A-6 began to feel proud of the small but not insignificant part she’d played in helping to unravel the plot, and prevent it from coming to pass. The knowledge fortified her for the role the Australian ambassador, Roger Bowman, pressed on her.
She’d been asked to help take members of Jakarta’s powerful student body through an overview of the plot. A-6 was not a negotiator or a diplomat, but she had been drafted into this particular enterprise, she’d been told, because she looked and talked like an Indonesian, conveying the facts with an integrity that a white Australian public servant could never hope to match. She had conducted the meeting jointly with Achmad Reza, an Indonesian politician she’d never met or heard of before. The students seemed to trust him, however, holding him in high regard.
Achmad Reza sat somewhat dazed by events as he sipped sweet tea at a cafeteria inside the parliament and reviewed the last few hours in his mind.
Standing in front of the student delegation, armed with satellite photos and the alarming contents of the disk showing Australia redrawn as part of Indonesia, Reza had felt well out of his depth. At stake was nothing less than the future of Indonesia and even, conceivably, the stability of the world. Redressing this evil was too much responsibility for one man to shoulder. His countrymen had plotted and killed in an outrageous bid for power. The ultimate outcome of their actions was beyond his ability to predict. All that could be done now – all anyone could do – would be to ride events as they bucked and kicked sickeningly to a conclusion.
He had agreed with the Australians that the truth would have to remain hidden. Peace in the region depended on it. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t taken much to convince the ruling party about the need for outright secrecy, because everyone was in a collective state of mortification at the evidence revealed. It gave Australia an upper hand in the relationship between the two countries, and that mildly concerned Reza, but then he realised that the two countries were entering into a conspiracy and each was dependent on the other. The Australians and Indonesians all agreed that the traitors had to be purged. The coup had to be made public. Using the student body as the conduit for this news had been his idea. It seemed logical. They were party neutral and, as such, regarded by the wider population as being concerned more for the welfare of their country than politicking.
The young Indonesian woman who’d assisted him with the briefing of the students had been extremely nervous. He wasn’t given her name. She’d been introduced to him as an Australian public servant. Quite obviously, she was a spy of some kind, but vastly different to the other young woman, the unnerving one called Elizabeth, who’d anonymously passed him the photo and later met with him in the village. This woman was refreshingly unsure of herself, almost frightened by the situation she found herself in. Reza had warmed to her instantly, because he knew exactly how she felt.
The angry noise outside the building reached in and bounced around the stone courtyard. Reza sipped his tea as various politicians and bureaucrats rushed past, for the most part no doubt hurrying to quieter, more secure places. The students had obviously decided that a show of solidarity, a stand against the forces determined to return Indonesia to the bad old days, was necessary. He was stunned at the speed of their reaction. They were well organised.
At first the student delegation he m
et with in the early hours of the morning had had trouble accepting what Reza revealed to them about Suluang and the rest. They preferred to believe that they were being used as unwitting pawns in some dangerous deception. But the taped interview with General Masri in his hospital bed was utterly convincing. Masri had been somewhat of a national hero and his confession shook them.
The police hadn’t been brought into the loop for obvious reasons. Lanti Rajasa, the country’s top policeman and a traitor, might have been tipped off and that would have been a disaster. The result was the conflict outside. Policeman versus student. Reza hoped that no one would get hurt.
He sighed and quaffed the remains of his tea. Perhaps the students were right and the demonstration outside was necessary, the open conflict a first important step in the healing process. Indonesia would never be the same again, of that he was certain. At the very least, the constitution would have to be redrafted to redefine the role of the armed forces. They could never again be allowed to act as financially autonomous satraps in far-flung provinces. The practice entrenched powerful expectations that ran counter to the nation’s best interests. Yet Indonesia needed a strong army if it was to prevent disintegration. How could they possibly afford it? The conundrum caused Reza to have a premonition of deeply troubled times ahead.
A roar spiked through the blanket of the chanting and the bullhorns. Reza decided to leave the security of the parliament’s inner sanctum and join the melee outside. The students believed in a free Indonesia, and so did he. That, at least, was simple, uncomplicated, noble; and his soul needed sustenance. Reza gently placed his cup on the delicate saucer and stood up gingerly. He knew it was risky, but his place was out front with the students.
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