‘Inbound, connect to the aircraft’s oxygen system. Three minutes out, the red jump lights at the rear hatch will give us the signal and we’ll switch to bottled oxygen.’
Wilkes nodded. SOP.
Mahisa put down the pen and vented his JSLIST suit, pulling it in and out at the neck like a bellows to circulate the air inside it. ‘I notice your men have orange chemlights and reflective strips on their helmet and parachute container. We use green. Just follow us in,’ said Mahisa. ‘The terrorists must have a runway of some considerable length if they are intending to launch a drone. We’ll be making for that if we can pick it out.’
‘So will the terrorists,’ Wilkes observed.
‘Yes. The enemy might hear our chutes open, even if they can’t see us. And if they have sophisticated radar, they’ll be able to pick us up long before we exit.’
Well, thought Wilkes, Mahisa was living up to his first impression of the man. He was an honest, straight talker. Frankly, there were better ways to approach the camp. It was right on the sea. A submarine insertion would have been the safest method for the attacking force, but there was no time. They had to go in hard and fast with guns blazing, and hope to demoralise the enemy.
‘Okay, so we’re on the ground. What next? We’ve got different comms to you and your people, we speak a different language, our signals and training are foreign.’ All this was Wilkes’s major concern. This op had been thought up by politicians and cobbled together at the last minute. There were real operational considerations that appeared to have been overlooked, such as how were the two groups of soldiers going to take this camp without whacking each other in the confusion on the ground?
‘My men will head into the encampment’s centre to disorient the terrorists’ command HQ and, hopefully, discourage any organised defence. I was thinking that your men could secure the landing strip itself and work around the perimeter of the encampment.’
‘Okay, but how do we prevent blue on blue?’ said Wilkes, his major concern.
‘Do not advance into the centre of the encampment until after first light,’ said Mahisa. ‘And then, enter the camp only on my command and by a route marked with chemlights. I’ll need your tactical radio frequency so that I can brief you on developments in the camp itself.’
Wilkes took the marker pen and wrote his frequency in large numerals on the whiteboard. All that sounded reasonable, he thought. Mahisa’s plan would keep the Kopassus and the SAS separate until they could be integrated without anyone getting trigger-happy.
One of the Kopassus men interrupted the briefing and handed Mahisa three JSLIST suits. The captain passed them to Wilkes, Monroe and Ellis.
‘What’s our time at the DIP?’ asked Monroe.
Wilkes raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s a DIP?’
‘Hey, I thought you were experienced jumpers,’ said Monroe. ‘Are you sure you amateurs know what you’re doing? A DIP is a desired impact point.’
‘Oh, you mean time on target,’ said Wilkes, smiling.
‘Whatever,’ said Monroe, waving a hand dismissively.
Despite the hard time he was giving Monroe, Wilkes had heard the term DIP before. It was American. If Atticus knew the jargon, did that mean he also knew how to HALO jump? It didn’t matter, anyway. Wilkes had long since given up telling Atticus what he could and couldn’t do.
‘We should hit the target at zero five four zero,’ said Mahisa.
‘Sunrise is…?’ asked Monroe.
‘Zero six hundred.’
‘Perfect,’ said Wilkes, forgetting about Monroe’s experience or his lack of it. ‘We’ll be coming out of the night sky, with just enough light to see by.’ But then, maybe it wasn’t so perfect. If the navy arrived at zero seven thirty, the ground battle would be more than an hour and a half old. A lot could happen in that time, and if it was still going on, most of what was going on would be bad.
‘Can we count on any air support?’ Wilkes asked.
‘No.’ Mahisa shook his head. ‘No one wants the VX accidentally atomised by a stray dumb bomb.’
Fabulous, thought Wilkes.
‘Any other questions?’ asked Mahisa.
Wilkes shook his head. Actually, he had a barrage of them, but Mahisa wouldn’t be able to provide any answers. Mostly, the questions concerned what resistance they’d be meeting at the encampment and those answers were in the laps of the gods.
Perhaps the same questions were also buzzing around Mahisa’s brain because he said, ‘Tom, if you’ll excuse me. There’s something I want to do before we go.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘You should know that the God of Islam is not the God of the men we go to fight. Theirs is a manmade abomination created to justify the evil in their black hearts. Do you believe in God, Tom?’
Wilkes shook his head. ‘No.’ A straight answer to a straight question.
‘Then you are an infidel. That, to the vast majority of Muslims, means that you are a non-believer. It doesn’t make you my enemy. But I feel sorry for you; that you have been denied His love and His wisdom. Maybe, one day, you will see the light, my friend, and I hope that light is the God of Mohammed, may His name be praised.’ Mahisa put his hand on Wilkes’s shoulder.
‘Maybe,’ said Wilkes with a smile. He watched the captain join his men at prayer, laying small rugs on the hard concrete floor.
Watching the soldiers face Mecca and commune with the God of Islam touched Wilkes in an odd way. Even if they were wearing JSLIST suits, the sight gave him an inkling of hope, like the small crack of light that escapes from a closed door. He was proud to serve with these men and for a moment he felt that he was one of them.
The interior of the Indonesian air force C-130 was even noisier than the Australian version, and the sweat that had poured out of Wilkes when on the ground in the JSLIST suit had become cold and clammy now with the temperature one degree at eighteen thousand feet. All the men were wearing helmets and oxygen masks not unlike those worn by pilots, a necessity for clear thinking above altitudes of fourteen thousand feet above mean sea level, unless one had time to become accustomed to it. The helmets and masks and the noise of the turboprops prohibited conversation. Occasional hand signals were exchanged but the isolation left each man alone with his thoughts.
Wilkes tried to think about the jump ahead rather than allowing his mind to wander over the situations that could face them on the ground. HALO jumps were potentially dangerous, especially when there were so many men jumping in a relatively small block of night sky, all heading to the one destination.
He looked across at the row of men sitting opposite. In the JSLIST suits and with their tac radios off, Wilkes didn’t know who was who. That anonymity would amplify once they landed. They’d be working independently of the Indonesians because of the language barrier. The Kopassus were also on a different radio frequency. Add the twilight to the communications separation, and the fact that they were expecting fierce resistance…well, fuckups were guaranteed…Jesus, concentrate on the JUMP!
Wilkes got his mind back on track by again checking over his gear. His preferred weapon, the 5.56mm Minimi light machine gun, hung from his side by its strap and was secured by the parachute harness. Wilkes’s usual insurance policy, the cut-down Remington 870 pump, modified in the garage and loaded with heavy #4 buckshot, was attached to his right leg with Velcro strips, barrel pointing down towards his boot. Wilkes also carried half a dozen M36A2 frag grenades that weren’t at all kind to humans. His oxy bottles were attached to his parachute harness, and readily accessible. He moved his hands carefully over his kit, accounting for various items and making sure the lot was secure. The oxy mask prevented him from looking down, but he couldn’t do without it and that was that. His gloved hand told him his ripcord was in place and weapons secured. He looked at the altimeter strapped to his wrist: still bang on eighteen thousand feet AMSL. He ran the coordinates of the target area through his mind together with remembered wind speeds and forward throw details.
Across the other s
ide of the plane lined up on pulldown seats, Wilkes could see that his men were going through similar routines, touching gear with their hands, mentally ticking it off. Lance Corporal Ellis and Troopers Littlemore, Robson, Beck, Morgan, Coombs and Ferris carried the usual assortment of weaponry: Minimis, M4A2 carbines with the underslung M203 grenade launchers, Heckler & Koch MP5SD nine millimetre submachine guns, H&K sidearms and M36A2 frag grenades. For once, Atticus was happy to fit right in, and strapped to his parachute harness was a plain, ordinary Minimi. Maybe that was the best way to distinguish between his men and Mahisa’s: by the weapons they carried. The primary Indonesian weapon appeared to be the American M16A1 and the locally made FNC80s, a type of M16 lookalike.
Canberra had wanted this to be a joint exercise – Australians and Indonesians working together – and Jakarta had agreed, perhaps because the threat to the two nations was equally split. Wilkes could see the logic but the practice worried him. He turned his tac radio on briefly and, through his earpiece, heard Atticus Monroe humming a tune: ‘…oh, when the saints go marchin’ in…’ Well, at least someone was happy about things, thought Wilkes.
The interior white overhead lights had been replaced by a dull, blood-red glow so that the soldiers’ night vision wouldn’t be impaired. The flight from Jakarta to the exit point was a mercifully quick one and red parachute jump lights beside the rear hatch lit up the back of the plane. Three minutes to exit. All the men jacked out of the aircraft’s oxygen system and switched to their portable bottles. The ubiquitous roar from the C-130’s turboprops became a high-pitched scream as the plane’s rear ramp lowered on its hydraulic struts. The smell of burnt AV-TUR, exhaust from the turboprops, found its way into Wilkes’s oxygen mask. It was a smell Wilkes had always liked: the perfume of action. He watched Captain Mahisa stand, illuminated by the red glow, and move to the back of the ramp. All the soldiers stood. The temperature inside the aircraft had dropped below zero. The green jump lights suddenly began to flash and a large number of men stepped into the void behind the ramp and disappeared – no speeches, no fanfare, no bullshit. A second later, the remaining Kopassus fell into the blackness.
Wilkes counted to four as he walked to the back of the ramp and turned. His men were right behind him in a tight knot. He grabbed the shoulder straps of the two men facing him, and the three of them fell away from the aircraft. The rest of his men followed a second later. Wilkes and the two men beside him quickly assumed the high arch position and stabilised their descent. No one somersaulted or jumped off with a pike and half-twist, the usual horseplay. None of his men had jumped in a JSLIST suit and there was a concern that the hood, even though heavily taped out of the way, might somehow catch their slipstream and act as a sail, flipping and rolling them out of control with disastrous results.
Wilkes looked up and watched the black shadow of the C-130 diminish as he fell away from it. He saw his remaining men drop from the back of the plane, Ellis the last to leave. The men separated quickly, controlling their respective flight paths, heading away at right angles to each other and then lining up with the aircraft’s track. The airflow buffeted Wilkes like a hundred small fists as he shot through nine thousand feet, chasing the minute glowing bars of green chemlights winking faintly below.
Fifteen seconds later, Wilkes glanced at his altimeter. He counted off another ten seconds before pulling the ripcord. He felt the buffet as the airflow pulled his drag chute clear of the parachute container and then…BANG. It was as if a massive hand had reached down from above and wrenched his harness. He looked up and was reassured to see a patch of stars obliterated by the canopy deployed overhead. A vague premonition of dawn, the faintest green glow, gathered on the horizon to Wilkes’s right. The wrist altimeter read four thousand feet. Bottled oxygen was no longer required, so Wilkes tore off his helmet and oxy mask and attached them to the parachute harness on his side. The green chemlights of the Kopassus below were closer, and brighter, a set of glowing dashes that led all the way to the ground. By now, the first of the Indonesians would have touched down and bundled their chutes and unclipped their parachute containers, leaving the lot where they landed.
With some difficulty, Wilkes reached behind him and pulled on the hood of the JSLIST suit. It came away after several tugs. He jammed the hood into his parachute harness and then grabbed hold of the parachute’s risers. The two men he’d jumped with were slightly above and beside him. Good training. Although he couldn’t see them, he knew the rest of his men were also just where they should be.
The ground lay approximately a thousand feet below, as black as a blacksmith’s anvil and every bit as unforgiving. He located the pair of NVGs attached to his belt with Velcro straps and released it. Slipping the unit’s harness over his head, he flipped the lenses down in front of his eyes. The blackness under his feet suddenly became two pools of green light with the terrorist encampment plainly visible. He could see the Kopassus landing beneath him, flaring their rectangular parachute canopies above the airstrip. There didn’t appear to be any gun battles going on, which could only mean that, somehow, they’d managed that most vital of tactical advantages – surprise. But that, surely, would not last too much longer.
Wilkes slipped off the NVGs. He didn’t want to land with the unit in front of his eyes because if he hit the ground heavily, the device could get smashed into his face, blinding him. Also, there was the threat of VX and, with the terrorists’ camp getting closer by the second, it was time to put the JSLIST’s hood on. He hung the NVGs back on his belt and pulled out the hood with its incorporated gasmask and slipped it over his head. The smell of the rubber, charcoal and sweat filled his nostrils.
Now almost overhead of the target area, the fluorescent strips on the soldiers landing below had formed a spiral invisible from the ground. And then he saw the airstrip itself in the dim first light of the pre-dawn, a light scab of grey on the skin of the earth. The camp was barely visible but he could still make it out, off to the right of the strip. It was big, easily capable of housing more than two hundred men and, from this altitude, well laid out – like a proper military compound. As he drifted closer, the huts became clearer. They appeared to be mostly built from some kind of sheeting with corrugated steel roofing – demountables – and the whole operation was obviously well funded.
The strip lay directly below him. Wilkes was the first of the Australians to land. Small piles of discarded equipment dotted the ground like gopher holes. The Indonesian soldiers were still hurriedly gathering in their chutes while others were running at a crouch towards the encampment. And then the ground suddenly appeared to accelerate towards him. Wilkes bent his legs and flared the chute four metres above the rolled, hard-packed dirt of the strip. He hit the earth, legs bent, and his breath was punched out of him.
Wilkes stood quickly and gathered in his parachute as the air left its foils and it began to roll sideways. When it was in his arms, he dropped the bundle at his feet, released the harness and also let the parachute container fall to the ground along with the oxygen bottles, face mask and helmet. With the parachute released, his Minimi was freed. Time to gather his men amongst the moving grey shapes. Get this show on the road. He made the hand signal for ‘on me’. A group of beings that looked more like insects than men quickly formed up around him.
‘Sound off,’ said Wilkes through the tac radio.
‘Ellis.’
‘Monroe.’
‘Robson.’
‘Coombs.’
‘Morgan.’
‘Beck.’
‘Littlemore.’
‘Ferris.’
‘Any problems?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Yeah,’ said Littlemore. ‘Who’s Monroe?’
‘Okay,’ said Wilkes, ignoring Littlemore. ‘Just to recap,
Atticus stay with me. Littlemore, you too. Ellis, take Beck and Ferris and check out that shed at the end of the runway, then work around the back of the camp. Robson, Morgan, Coombs, take the shoreline. Keep me up to speed on what y
ou find. When you’ve done that, reassemble here.’ The distinctive sound of an FNC on full automatic rattled through the morning. ‘Let’s move it.’
Mahisa and his Kopassus squadron had a few minutes’ head start and the assault on the encampment should have been in full swing by now, but things were strangely still. Except for the burst of fire from the FNC, the place was as quiet as a grave.
‘Let’s rock,’ said Monroe.
‘Yeah, sure…’ Wilkes replied, distracted. There was something odd.
The three parties separated, leaving Wilkes, Monroe and Littlemore amongst the piles of discarded gear. Wilkes tucked low and ran a short way along a well-worn path illuminated with green chemlights that snaked towards the huts, Monroe and Littlemore behind, careful not to spook the Kopassus who were conducting hut-to-hut searches. He watched a couple of paratroopers drag two men from a hut by their hair. The terrorists appeared to be alive, but barely. Both of them were gripping their stomachs, rolled into tight balls.
‘Jesus, boss,’ said Littlemore, ‘are you getting that smell or is my filter fucked?’
‘Could be. You’re not supposed to smell anything through these,’ said Monroe. ‘Maybe you got one of the faulty ones – a dud.’
‘Lucky me.’
There was an incredible stillness. A camp like this full of terrorists would be on high alert. There should be lead and tracer flying all over the place. And something else strange; there were no animals, no dogs or cats wandering around.
Several men in JSLIST suits appeared at the head of the track that began where the first of the huts were erected. They were walking towards Wilkes, Monroe and Littlemore, their rifles sweeping through the arc. It occurred to Wilkes that they could be terrorists. If there was VX in the air, there was a good chance the bad guys would also be wearing chemical warfare suits. Wilkes gave the hand signal for his men to go into a crouch. He took a bead on the man leading the group but rested his finger on the trigger guard, prepared to wait until the last possible moment. This kind of potential friendly fire incident was exactly what he’d been concerned about.
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