by Jake Avila
‘What do you mean, they?’
‘Boerman took the evac flight with Hartono.’ Even as he said it, Douglas registered the obvious with a groan of dismay.
‘Kaboro let him go, too?’ Mia shook her head. ‘This keeps getting better.’
Mia looked up sharply as the rhythmic beat of the chopper reverberated outside. Checking her watch, she frowned.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Douglas.
‘The return flight to Angoram should have taken at least another twenty minutes. They’re back too soon.’
Chapter 21
As the ghostly form of the giant fig took shape in the cracked windscreen, Lieutenant Kaboro rubbed his smarting eyes. It had been a long and sleepless night, his strained senses alert to lurking threats outside in the jungle, and now within. Without comms, Hartono’s dubious claim that they had dropped Goki at Ambunti after making radio contact with the medical services could not be verified, and Kaboro had been sorely tempted to arrest them on the spot. Staying his hand was the spectre of Sir Julius. The defence minister was a powerful and vindictive man who obviously had a financial stake in the expedition, whatever its true purpose was.
Muted conversation on the bow drew Kaboro’s attention. Singkepe and his corporal were sharing a cigarette. The other sentries were scanning the riverbanks. It had been unnaturally quiet since the accident. That no locals had been sighted suggested trouble was indeed brewing, and Kaboro was counting down the hours to high tide.
A door banged loudly and Kaboro flinched. Ensign Faiwalati came into view, carrying a tray of steaming coffees. The genial young cook distributed them to the grateful soldiers and Frank Douglas. Kaboro was still smarting from their exchange last night. Douglas had accused him of gross incompetence, demanded he physically restrain the Indonesians, then wanted to take their helicopter. While Kaboro understood the man’s concerns, there was no point inflaming the situation.
Kaboro chuckled as the irascible Australian took a sip of the too-hot coffee and spat it out with an oath.
At that moment, the tray of coffee abruptly crashed to the deck and Faiwalati fell to his knees. At first, Kaboro was outraged. Douglas must have struck him, for the cook was rasping like an asthmatic trying to breathe. Then Kaboro saw the long, thin stick protruding from his throat.
It was the opening drop of a monsoonal cloudburst of arrows. The deluge fell upon the Albany, salvos shattering or ricocheting off steel decks and superstructure. One ripped through the open bridge window and thudded into the captain’s seat beside Kaboro. The long arrow was made of fire-hardened cane grass with duck feather flights. Sporadic gunshots boomed like accompanying thunder. A porthole on the lower deck exploded in a shower of glass. Sparks flew as a slug caromed off the windscreen frame.
‘We’re under attack!’ Kaboro screamed at the men below.
By the time he reached the deck, Faiwalati was dead, an expression of hurt surprise frozen on his genial face. Kaboro was horrified to see most of the much-vaunted Long-Range Reconnaissance Group were huddling behind any cover they could find.
‘Regroup!’ he yelled. ‘Find a target!’
Ululating screams and whistles immediately brought an accurate volley of arrows down on his head. At least two spotters were directing fire. On the bow, Singkepe was directing short bursts into likely-looking branches and thickets of kunai grass, in the hope of flushing them out.
The PNGDF was one of the few services in the world which faced attack from primitive weapons. Kaboro recalled the advice of a wizened highland instructor, a survivor of tribal conflicts from a time when it was acceptable to build a skull pile outside your hut, who had said, ‘The arrow you see won’t hit you, the one you can’t, will.’ To reinforce this, he’d shot blunt arrows at them as they dodged and weaved. It had been a painful lesson. Unfortunately, with the volume of projectiles arcing through the mist, it wasn’t much help.
Kaboro headed aft in a low crouch along the port side of the ship to rally the defence. Two of Singkepe’s soldiers were mindlessly hosing the grassy bank with their M16s.
‘Pick your targets!’ he roared. ‘Conserve ammo!’
Near the stern, he encountered the body of Singkepe’s signaller. An arrow had severed his jugular and a huge blood slick covered the deck. Sidestepping the treacherous mess, Kaboro grabbed the dead man’s M16.
Under the edge of the helicopter pad, the Indonesians were taking cover.
‘Get below!’ Kaboro yelled at Sura. ‘It’s not safe up here!’
Without waiting for a response, he pressed on to the starboard side. Here, the arrows scattered across the deck were so thick that he lost his footing and almost fell.
‘Space yourselves,’ he barked at two of his sailors huddling behind a vent peppered with bullet holes. ‘Find a firing position and defend the ship.’
Catching sight of an arrow winging its way towards him, Kaboro ducked to let it bounce off the steel bulkhead above. When he stood up again, a blast of hot buckshot tugged his shirtsleeve.
Kaboro spotted the shooter – an old tribesman crouched down by the water’s edge, grinning gleefully while he reloaded a home-made shotgun. Kaboro shouldered the M16 and fired a three-round burst. The old man was still smiling when the high velocity 5.56 mm bullets tore his head apart.
Crouched behind the thick wall of Boerman’s body, Sura clung tightly to his belt while he scanned the scene with a practised eye.
‘There’s no more than twenty of them,’ he told her.
‘How do you know?’
‘Rate of fire.’
‘Shouldn’t we get below?’ Hartono’s eyes were wide and staring, and his breath was foul with fear. During prayers, one of the first arrows had missed him by centimetres and thudded into the tail of the Jet Ranger.
Ignoring him, Boerman turned to Sura. ‘The mist will soon clear. You have to let me do something.’
Sura chewed on her lower lip before shaking her head.
‘We can’t risk exposure until the ship is free . . .’ Extended firing made her pause. ‘Let Kaboro do the fighting, it will whittle down his forces.’
Boerman snorted in contempt. ‘Listen to their fire control. These idiots haven’t got a clue. We’ll be picked off one by one.’
As if emphasising his point, a bullet smacked through the helicopter’s skid, leaving a puckered hole. Sura suddenly saw the Avenue Montaigne slipping away.
‘What do you propose, then?’
Boerman’s face took on an evangelical cast. ‘Regain the upper hand and flush them out into the open. To do that, we need height.’ He nodded at the helicopter.
‘Do it, Jaap.’
Boerman reached out and seized hold of Hartono’s shirt front.
‘Have the chopper ready to go in three minutes. You hear me?’
He took off in a fast, crouching run and Sura watched him go with pride. Jaap was a firebrand, often a fool, but when it came to the business of killing, he was in his element.
On the other side of the high riverbank, a natural berm provided a protected firing platform for the archers, who did not even flinch as bullets cut the air above their heads. Instead, they nocked another arrow in their black palm bows and awaited instruction on further targets. The men directing them with whistles and clicks were almost invisible in the long grass and trees. However, they were still vulnerable to a lucky shot.
Daniel was proud to have these men as wantoks. That they would risk their lives for his son made his heart swell with blood obligation. But he was worried about his father, who had gone to take potshots at the ship with his twelve-gauge. He’d heard its characteristic loud boom once, but since then nothing, and his father was not responding to their secret bower bird trill. Daniel hoped his father’s gun had simply misfired; home-made guns of galvanised water pipe were not only unreliable – they occasionally burst, with catastrophic results.
A sudden burst of high-pitched whistles and coded calls alerted Daniel to a prime target at the front of the ship.
A white man. No doubt this would be the captain responsible for killing Nathan.
Daniel took the enchanted arrow from his quiver and nocked. Calmly he drew back the bamboo bowstring with two leathery fingers. Visualising the trajectory, he released, and the black arrow surged skywards through the mist, feathered flights spinning like fireflies. At its apex, it turned slowly, and then plummeted out of sight. Blessed by the shaman, guided by the spirits of his ancestors, Daniel knew it could not miss. An immense weight lifted from his soul. His beloved Nathan was avenged.
Waking to the loud rattle of an automatic weapon, Nash sat bolt upright and gasped. Just about every part of his body was throbbing, searing or smarting. Somewhere, someone screamed an order. Running feet thrummed on the steel deck above.
‘What’s happening?’ he cried out. ‘I can’t see!’
‘It’s payback.’ Mia’s voice was close to his ear. ‘Wait a moment, your eyelids are stuck together.’
With a damp cloth she removed the dried pus from his eyes, and when he could open them, he saw his body was covered in plasters and antiseptic ointment where she must have tended to him.
Someone pounded on the cabin door and a voice cried, ‘Faiwalati is hurt! Doktor, plis, plis can you come?’
‘Mi kamap.’ Mia got to her feet. ‘Kwiktaim!’
Nash reached for his shorts on the end of the bunk.
‘Don’t bother arguing,’ he growled at her disapproving expression. ‘I’m not an invalid.’
On the first rung of the ladder, he began to question his bravado. The skin across his back felt as if it had been flayed.
The gunshots grew louder, more percussive, as they reached the deck. Cautiously they stuck their heads outside the forecastle door. Poor Faiwalati was obviously beyond help, but another transfixed body lay under the crane in a sea of broken arrows.
‘Oh Jesus, it’s Frank.’
Douglas lay splayed on his right side with one arm stretched out. The other hand was clutching feebly at a long arrow embedded in his chest.
‘Don’t pull it out –’
Mia broke off as a bullet struck the top of the doorway and whined away. Nash was bracing himself to run the gauntlet when Mia clamped a hand on his shoulder.
‘You can hardly walk.’
Before he could argue, she dashed across the open deck to crouch beside the stricken Douglas. Loud whistles were followed by a volley of arrows which crashed down around her, snapping and skipping away. How they missed, Nash would never know.
‘Get out of there!’ he yelled, appalled by her exposure.
When she ignored him, he limped as fast as he could across the exposed deck and seized hold of Douglas’s ankles.
‘No!’ she shouted as he began to pull. ‘There’s risk of internal bleeding.’
The raw skin on Nash’s naked back cringed as another arrow thrummed past.
‘Too bad!’ he shouted back. ‘We’re getting out of here!’
Grunting with the pain, he dragged the stricken Douglas along the deck, while Mia did her best to cradle the embedded arrow and stop his head banging on the steel.
When they reached the relative shelter of the forecastle door, Nash collapsed in a panting heap while Mia took Douglas’s pulse. As she concentrated, two fingers pressed into his carotid, a curl of lustrous blonde hair fell down over her bumpy nose. Nash noticed that her eyelashes were incredibly long, dark and thick. It struck him that Mia was one of those women whose beauty kept revealing itself in new ways.
She looked up at him with a worried expression.
‘I need somewhere to work on him, Rob.’
He thought for a moment. ‘The mess?’
‘Good. But first I need to remove this shaft before it jags on something and rips him open. Can you find me a hacksaw?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ Her blue eyes blazed. ‘And get me the first aid kit, too.’
With M60 in hand and a thousand rounds of ammunition draped across his shoulders, Boerman stormed back under heavy fire to find the helicopter cold and still. Studded in arrows, it resembled a novelty pin cushion.
‘God damn it, man!’ he shouted at Hartono, who was still cowering under the landing deck. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘He won’t budge,’ said Sura bitterly. ‘He’s a pathetic coward.’
‘I can’t do it,’ Hartono sobbed. ‘Please don’t make me go out there.’
Extending a long arm, Boerman reached in and dragged Hartono out before lifting him up like a bag of garbage.
‘Get that bleddy chopper fired up or I’ll kill you myself.’
With a powerful heave, he flung the smaller man onto the pad.
Kaboro had organised four sharpshooters on the bridge superstructure, but the attackers refused to expose themselves. On the bow, Singkepe was calmly reloading the FN. His corporal, Moses, lay flat on his back, a long stream of blood flowing from a nasty hole in the side of his head. Kaboro’s mouth was dry. At this rate they would soon be annihilated.
‘I’ve got one, definite!’ Singkepe shouted up at him. ‘But I can’t see anything in this damned grass.’
The damned grass . . .
Fumbling with his keys, Kaboro opened the captain’s cupboard and raked the contents out onto the floor. Snapping open the brass flare gun, he inserted a fat cartridge into the breech. If only he’d thought of this before.
Two years in Orlando Emergency had taught Mia much about penetrating trauma. While the long black arrow buried in Douglas’s flesh looked horrific, it was a plug for torn veins and arteries. Best practice was to secure the object and have the patient transferred to a hospital, where scans and an ER surgery team would give them the best chance of survival. But there was no ER, and Douglas wouldn’t survive an evac unless she could stabilise him. Not with blood pressure at around 50 over 120, weak and fluttering.
Nash returned with a toolbox and first aid kit. While he braced the arrow, she took the hacksaw and began cutting a handspan above the puncture wound. The fire-hardened cane was incredibly tough, and its silica-rich fibres kept clogging the teeth of the saw. She made fast and light strokes, stopping every so often to clear the teeth. Then she secured the stump with gaffer tape.
‘Will he make it?’ Nash leaned over anxiously.
How many times had she been asked that question? As usual, there were no easy answers.
‘He needs a hospital, Rob. All we can do now is make him comfortable. Let’s get him to the mess.’
Ricki Hartono was terrified, but in the familiar surroundings of the Jet Ranger’s cockpit he saw his opportunity to get the hell out of there, and worked the controls like a man possessed.
‘C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,’ he chanted, as the turbine spun up with agonising slowness. Numerous arrows were already embedded in the Plexiglas, and he pressed himself against the seat in anticipation of more.
Bang!
An arrow punched through, right in front of his face. Hartono found himself eyeballing a vicious hand-beaten steel arrowhead.
‘Damn you, Jaap!’ he shrieked as another slammed into the passenger door.
With agonising clarity, he recalled all the stupid decisions that had led him to this moment. An idle rich boy with a red-carpet military career and secure postings which had never put him in the line of fire, he’d lived it up with wine, women and song until a gambling addiction exploded the fantasy and beggared his parents. That had led to dereliction of duty under the influence. About to be dishonourably discharged, an eleventh-hour covert offer from the Suyantos had been a lifeline too good to refuse. Hartono burst out into manic laughter as he recalled assuring Goki he was ‘cool as a cucumber under fire’. Ten minutes was all it had taken for him to understand that Ricki ‘Maverick’ Hartono was a show pony – and a show pony he would happily stay, if he could just get away from these fucking maniacs.
The desirable safety margin for warming up a Jet Ranger was four minutes. Hartono’s instinct told
him three was enough, for already the accelerating rotor had been struck by several arrows. Taking hold of the cyclic, he lifted off. A scrambling Boerman barely had time to leap onto the skids before they veered out over the river.
The big man wrenched open the rearmost passenger door and thumped down on the back seat in a sea of ammunition belts.
‘What the fuck was that?’ he snarled, protectively cradling the M60 like a small child. ‘Try that again and I’ll fucking cut your yellow heart out.’
Avoiding eye contact, Hartono ascended rapidly to a height of 250 metres. From there, it looked as if the ship had merely stopped for a quiet nibble of the riverbank.
Boerman leaned through the seats and snapped off several shafts threatening to poke out Hartono’s eyes. Then, he extended his seat belt and looped it around the back of his heavy canvas belt. Cocking the M60, he opened the rear door and placed his boots on the skids.
‘Take me in from behind,’ he ordered. ‘Low and fast.’
Hartono was thinking about questioning the wisdom of this strategy, when a sudden white streak flashed from the Albany. The dense thickets of grass burst into flames which began to spread rapidly.
Boerman grinned. ‘Now we’ll flush them out.’
Hartono gritted his teeth and put the chopper into a dive.
Kunai grass may be green, but its phenolic compounds burn with the fury of petrol. Like lines of Chinese crackers, the stalks exploded, sending shards of burned and burning grass high into the air, trailing plumes of white choking smoke. A terrible crackling roar filled the air, growing louder and louder as the flames sucked in more air.
Someone began screaming in anguish. Daniel looked to the top of the bank where, surrounded by flames three times his height, a man was stumbling in a circle as he was roasted alive. The stench of it was being blown in his direction, and he knew he had to get away.
Daniel began to run in the direction of the dark forest behind. Over the popping and crackling, he could hear the thrash of others fleeing, too. Impeded by the thick stalks, Daniel ditched his bow so he could use his hands to claw a path. He knew there was no way his father could outrun such flames.