Rogue Element

by David Rollins

  Out on the street, A-6 was amazed at the speed of the student response. Hundreds of belligerent police with batons and riot shields were forming lines, eyeing ranks of students wearing crash helmets and scarves tied around their mouths. Just as frightening, many students wore no protection at all. Behind the student lines was the Indonesian parliamentary building. Angry young men and women with loud-hailers bellowed that the parliament needed protection. Police vehicles rushed back and forth in the no-man’s land between the opposing forces, rocks and other projectiles popping off their armour plating. She watched horrified as several students fired volleys of ball bearings at the police with homemade slingshots. Tear gas was returned. Things were spinning out of control.

  A-6 glanced down at her foot. Under it was a flyer with the large black headline ‘Traitors!’ in Bahasa. Moving her shoe revealed mug shots of several high-ranking officers. More tear gas canisters were launched into the student ranks. It quickly became difficult to see anything clearly, as much for the tears that filled her burning eyes and throat as for the thick white smoke that swirled in the square. Several cars attempted to gain access to the parliament. The students were gathering excitedly around one of them.

  Jakarta, 0235 Zulu, Saturday, 2 May

  Lanti Rajasa had woken around midnight with an uneasy feeling. He’d been expecting a call from Suluang with an update from the Kopassus at the crash site. The call hadn’t come through, leaving a sour lump in his belly that made sleep troubled. He gave up trying just after three in the morning, got up, showered and dressed, and left the car park of his apartment building in his black Mercedes. He had his driver cruise the hot, dusty sprawl of Jakarta, driving aimlessly for hour after hour with no set destination, while he pondered a course of action.

  His initial thought was to go to the parliament, keep his ear to the ground, try to contact Suluang and some of the others and make a decision on the basis of what they told him. Then Rajasa suddenly realised the source of his unease: he was the head of the police but he did not know what was going on. That was unthinkable, and it set off an array of alarms in his head. There was only one possible reason for this lack of intelligence, and it didn’t bode well for his future health and happiness. Was he purposefully being kept in the dark, starved of information, cut off for a reason? How quickly things appeared to be falling apart.

  Suddenly frightened by this insight, Rajasa changed his mind. He would go to the parliament as he’d planned, but instead of contacting anyone he would go straight to his office, shred anything dangerous, wipe his hard-drive and clean and trash his email folders. He would then get on the first plane out.

  It was now morning, just after nine-thirty. The sky was grey and, as usual, heavily polluted. The sight of students clashing with police had become so commonplace that it scarcely raised his interest when he arrived at the parliament. The students manning obstacles, petrol drums filled with bricks and burning rubbish, were stopping the cars at the entrance gate. Several masked faces appeared in the windows and Rajasa saw their eyes bulge first with surprise, then with anger as they recognised him. The front passenger door was flung open and his driver was pulled from the car. A poster titled ‘Traitors’ with the faces of himself, Suluang and the others was placed against his window and the cause of the riot was now obvious to Rajasa. He was no longer disinterested, he was afraid.

  The car rocked violently from side to side. Rajasa rolled about inside helplessly, screaming obscenities. Young faces were pushed against his window yelling, spitting. A brick crashed into the bulletproof glass window beside him and bounced harmlessly off. Rajasa felt reassured by that. But then the Mercedes was pushed up onto its balance point and rolled over on its roof. He could feel and hear the bodywork being pounded by bricks and sticks. Rajasa smelled petrol and any feelings of invulnerability he may have had evaporated. Somehow the fuel tank had been punctured. One of the students lit the petrol and the flames spread quickly.

  The students pulled back as the fire took hold and the heat became intense. Rajasa could see the orange tongues licking at the windows outside while inside, the car’s interior filled with smoke. The fuel tank exploded, sending a shockwave through the vehicle that killed Rajasa long before the flames reached him.

  A-6 had seen enough. Through her hacking cough and watering eyes, she’d witnessed the mob burn a man alive in his car. She wondered who the victim was. It was getting impossible to breathe and the widening melee, increasing in ferocity, made it likely that sooner or later she’d be dragged off by the police or hit by student missiles filling the air. She staggered down a side street, gagging, eyes weeping uncontrollably from the gas, more than ever ready to leave the espionage business, and Indonesia, behind her.

  Sydney, 2315 Zulu, Wednesday, 6 May

  The radio journalist sat in the press lounge at Kingsford Smith Airport. Other journalists from across the media spectrum surrounded her. This was the best show in town, without a doubt, and there was genuine expectation in the room.

  The two survivors of QF-1 were coming home. They’d spent a couple of days in hospital recovering from their ordeal, and were likely to be physically and mentally exhausted for a while yet. The journos had been instructed to keep their questions brief and not to overstress them. This could be one of those great survival-against-all-odds stories the public ate up.

  Here in this very room, the survivors, both in their twenties, would be reunited with their families. It promised to be quite an emotional scene. Amongst all the sadness of so many people lost, everyone hoped some joy would come out of the reunion about to take place.

  The RAAF Hercules transport which had brought the two home was taxiing to its holding point on the apron. Several medical staff rushed to the door as its engines spooled down. The door was flung open and a knot of people instantly formed at the base of the mobile stairs. A young woman appeared at the doorway of the aircraft, smiled and stepped into the sea of doctors, nurses and officials. A man followed, head bandaged, and joined the turmoil.

  The radio journalist switched her view to the monitor. It was already happening up there on the screen. Bloody TV bastards always got first access. No doubt a report was going out live on the networks, interrupting children’s shows, soap operas, and home-shopping programs. The thought really annoyed her. The brief flash the journalist managed to get of the young woman standing at the doorway of the plane surprised her. She was beautiful. Asian.

  A door opened behind the dais, diverting the journalist’s attention from the TV screen, and several worried-looking people filed in. The parents, obviously. One set was Indonesian. The radio journalist checked her briefing notes. That’s right, she remembered now. The girl who’d survived was Indonesian, an Australian citizen but born in Indonesia of Indonesian parents. The girl’s mother had a tissue out and was dabbing an eye. The energy levels in the room surged. Double doors off to one side banged open and the two survivors, surrounded by medicos, RAAF personnel, diplomats, cameramen and Qantas execs, burst in. The parents were instantly on their feet, rushing to comfort their children. Flashes went off, video lights blazed. It was beautiful.

  Elizabeth had been given the new name of Tuti Murthi, and she was feeling tense about it. This was a serious acting job. Being Suluang’s lover was comparatively easy. The people looking at her with sympathetic faces wanted facts, tears, feelings.

  Tuti had been well briefed, as had the agent playing her fellow survivor, Vince, the man who had helped her deal with Suluang. So were the alleged parents up on stage, who were as much Tuti’s parents as she was a QF-1 survivor.

  They had to put on a good show. They would all have to endure the spotlight for a couple of days, then it would be announced that a magazine had bought exclusive rights to their story. The tale would be written, pictures taken, then they’d all beg to be left alone to get on with their lives. She’d get on a plane and disappear.

  The journos were getting ready to ask their questions. Tuti was not going to enjoy this. She
looked forward to the moment when she could write the name on a piece of paper, screw it up, throw it in the bin, and move the hell on.

  Niven watched the show on TV. All the major networks covered it, interrupting their regular shows with the reunion. The two stand-ins were doing a great job. There was a tap on the door.

  ‘Come,’ said Niven.

  ‘Good, hoped you’d be watching,’ said Griffin as he put his head round the door. ‘Mind if I sit in?’

  ‘No, take a seat.’

  Griffin sat and smiled at the news report. ‘This was a great idea. Yours?’

  ‘No, actually. It was Joe’s – Joe Light’s.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Griffin said.

  ‘Seriously. Had it completely figured out. He pointed out that, as the passenger manifest hadn’t been released, all we had to do was take his and Suryei’s names off it and, bingo, it could never be proved they were on the flight.’

  ‘Shit, that’s clever. So simple. The guy should be working for us.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Niven.

  20 000 feet, Eastern Australian airspace, 2032 Zulu, Tuesday, 12 May

  Joe and Suryei had been put on a plane home. Flying wasn’t something either of them was keen on, but they weren’t given a choice. Fortunately, the flight had been uneventful, even boring, and she decided that boredom was a good thing when it came to flying. Thankfully, after her apprehension had faded, sleep had come. Counselling had been a big help. At least now she could close her eyes without the nightmares invading the darkness. But she knew they were in her head somewhere, dreams that made her sweat with fear.

  The aircraft was now descending. Suryei glanced at Joe, asleep in the seat beside her. She’d given up trying to analyse her feelings for him, and they’d both needed the intimacy while recovering at a facility she guessed was in Hawaii. At first it had been painful, even difficult, finding positions to make love that didn’t aggravate either her injuries or Joe’s, especially when they’d had to find out-of-the-way places for privacy.

  The bandages were off her forearms now. The burns had been worse than she’d thought. They’d given her skin grafts at the hospital and the results were astonishing. Another week and it would be difficult to see how badly she’d been burned. She saw in her mind the flames that had caused the injury, but the truly ghastly details had been packed way down deep in her subconscious where the nightmares lived.

  Both Suryei and Joe had contracted a mild case of malaria in the jungle, fortunately the kind with no long-term effects or damage that couldn’t be treated easily with drugs. A few of Joe’s scratches had become septic, but even the nastiest of them was now healing well.

  For Joe, not surprisingly, the broken rib was causing the most problems. The bullet had torn up the muscles in his shoulder pretty badly when it had exited, and he still grimaced when he moved the wrong way. It would be a good three months with plenty of physio before he was fully fit and back in the gym.

  Joe and Suryei had seen the papers from Australia while they were recovering. The pictures of the two ‘survivors’ were everywhere. The woman playing her was pretty. The man had an ear missing, an injury the papers said was sustained in the crash.

  Joe’s clever idea to take their names off the passenger list would allow them to return to some semblance of a normal life. Suryei gazed out the window. She went overseas so often that her friends no longer asked where she was going or when she’d return. And these days she worked freelance, so there was no employer to answer to. But her family could prove difficult. They’d been worried sick about her and would be waiting at Arrivals. When Suryei had phoned her parents to let them know she was still alive, they had first gone into shock. Anger had followed. Then joy. They’d thought she was dead. The itinerary she’d left them had listed QF-1 as her outbound plane. Qantas had refused to tell them whether their daughter was in fact a passenger on the flight, but Suryei’s silence had confirmed their worst fears.

  Suryei’s explanation of all this had been thoroughly constructed and rehearsed beforehand. She would say that she had changed arrangements at the last minute, getting on an earlier flight with a different carrier. At Bangkok, she’d headed straight for the jungle. She’d still be there, deep in the hills with her camera, if not for an accident with a kerosene lamp that had burned her forearms. She’d known nothing about the Qantas plane until she’d returned to Bangkok. She had then called her parents immediately, knowing they’d be worried.

  The Australians and Americans at the recovery facility had provided both Joe and Suryei with relevant hotel and credit card accounts and receipts to cover their last couple of weeks. Their flight details had been amended on the Australian immigration server. Suryei had even been supplied with rolls of film exposed with rare shots of wildlife unique to the jungles of Thailand. Her story would stack up.

  Joe’s was not as tight, but then it didn’t have to be. He had no one close enough to worry about him, just a father who lived in Perth, on the other side of the country. If anyone asked, he would say that he’d decided to holiday in Malaysia, travelling up to Thailand instead of going to England. A last-minute change of plans. He’d done that plenty of times before. No big deal. What’s all the fuss about?

  In a month they’d both be taking up work in the US. Joe had been ‘offered’ a job within the NSA at their HQ in Maryland. Suryei had also signed with the local bureau of a national news service they both suspected of being just another strand of the NSA’s intelligence-gathering net. They had been given time to get their things in order and would be back on a plane again in a month’s time. Suryei made a mental note to check whether going to the States by sea was possible.

  The aircraft lurched as the flaps extended fully. Suryei’s hand unconsciously went to the Bic lighter suspended on a simple silver chain from her neck. As she’d promised herself, she’d made it into a good luck charm. She rubbed her fingers against the smooth plastic and slowly rolled the friction wheel under her thumb, finding the action reassuring.

  There were plenty of instances of people who had missed planes, trains or boats, and had avoided death because of it. And just like them, Suryei would marvel at her lucky escape. She smiled at the thought. Very few people would ever know exactly how close to the truth that was.

  The wheels of the 747 hit the runway hard. The jolt made Suryei jump. Joe woke with a start. ‘Jesus!’ he said, eyes wide, expecting the worst.

  Sydney, 0800 Zulu, Monday, 18 May

  ABC Radio 702: ‘A spokesman for Boeing Corporation revealed today preliminary findings into the crash of Qantas Flight 1 that killed a total of four hundred and ten passengers and crew, ruling out terrorism as a possible cause. It is believed that the section of the fuselage called the Electronics and Equipment Bay, which houses vital junctions for the aircraft’s hydraulic systems, was struck by a small meteorite.

  ‘A Boeing investigator says such a missile could have been travelling at close to 60 000 kilometres per hour, vaporising the section of the plane it struck. The investigator says the wreckage of the plane recovered from Sulawesi is consistent with this theory.

  ‘A spokesman for Boeing says the chances of an aircraft being hit by a meteorite are around a hundred million to one but that, given the number of jets flying and the many millions of air miles flown each year, a strike by a meteorite was just a matter of time.’

  Author’s note

  Time is a difficult beast to tame when writing a book like this, where events are happening in different time zones simultaneously. For example, something can take place in the morning in Sydney, Australia, and affect events in Hawaii the morning of the day before.

  To help overcome the confusion, I’ve adopted the standard twenty-four hour Greenwich ‘clock’. This was previously known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and is now officially called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In military parlance, however, the letter designator for this clock is Z, or Zulu.

  If I were to adhere strictly to f
orm, 10 am on April 28 in Sydney (Eastern Standard Time) should be written 28041200Z (Sydney is +10 hours UTC).

  Once you get used to reading time in this fashion, it’s actually less confusing than it might at first seem. But it becomes less so when juggling several time zones at once. In order to cut down on the mental arithmetic, I’ve omitted the local times in the section headings. But for the sake of general interest, the local times of the major places in this story are:

  Sulawesi – UTC plus 8 hrs

  Bali – UTC plus 8 hrs

  Hawaii – UTC minus 10 hrs

  Maryland – UTC minus 5 hrs

  East Timor – UTC plus 9 hrs

  Jakarta – UTC plus 7 hrs

  Canberra – UTC plus 10 hrs

  MORE BESTSELLING FICTION AVAILABLE FROM PAN MACMILLAN

  Matthew Reilly

  SCARECROW

  IT IS THE GREATEST BOUNTY HUNT IN HISTORY

  FIFTEEN NAMES

  There are 15 targets, the finest warriors in the world – commandos, spies, terrorists. And they must all be dead by 12 noon, today. The price on their heads: almost $20 million each.

  ONE HERO

  Among the names on the target list, one stands out. A Marine named Shane Schofield, call-sign: SCARECROW.

  NO LIMITS

  And so Schofield is plunged into a headlong race around the world, pursued by a fearsome collection of international bounty hunters – including the ‘Black Knight’, a notoriously ruthless hunter who seems intent on eliminating only Schofield.