Rogue Element Read online

  Unseen, the snake silently parted the bush and made its way to its nest. Suryei shifted her weight, pulling one leg towards her. The snake instantly reacted, rearing up and flaring its distinctive hood.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Suryei when she saw it, louder than she’d intended.

  ‘What!?’ said Joe.

  ‘Cobra!’ For the first time, Suryei saw a bunch of leaves and twigs gathered on the ground just inside the leaf canopy. There were eggs in the centre of the nest and a couple had broken open.

  The snake moved its head from side to side, sensitive to the slightest movements made by Joe and Suryei.

  ‘It’s seriously deadly.’

  ‘Seriously pissed off too, by the looks of it,’ said Joe under his breath, trying to disappear into the foliage behind him.

  ‘It’s a mother, see?’

  Joe saw the smashed eggs in the nest.

  ‘We have to go. Get ready.’

  Joe sat up slowly and the snake reared higher, as if it found his movement a challenge to fight.

  ‘Careful,’ said Suryei quietly. It was difficult for both of them to move. They had cramped into their resting positions. Joe flexed his hands. Blood cracked and fresh, crimson rivulets appeared. He ignored the pain. He slowly and carefully took his axe out of his bag. Suryei moved her foot.

  The snake raised its hooded head and reared back, tensing to strike. It looked at Suryei and then at Joe and then back at Suryei, as if uncertain who to bite first. Suryei moved her foot, shifting a section of vine which sprang back. The snake reacted, striking at Suryei’s feet. It darted once, twice, advancing belligerently. Suryei screamed. Joe tried to fend it off with the head of his axe. Before she realised it, Suryei was up, pushing wildly through the vines, thrashing through the spikes that tore at her clothes and skin. Joe was right behind her. The snake moved its head aggressively from side to side as the threat retreated, and then returned to sentry duty, coiling around its eggs.

  Joe found Suryei collapsed at the foot of an enormous teak. She was whimpering to herself. Her composure had evaporated. She wrenched the shoe off, examined it, and found two neat sets of punctures in the leather upper. She rapidly switched her attention to her foot, and then fell back against the tree, relieved.

  ‘What? What?!’ Joe found her anxiety contagious.

  ‘Nothing, thank Christ!’ Suryei rasped. ‘The bastard didn’t get me.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bitch. You said it was a female, remember?’ Joe picked up the shoe and examined the punctures in it. ‘Saved by Nike,’ he said quietly.

  Suryei stood up and hopped behind Joe. She rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a bottle of water. ‘Shouldn’t we save that for later?’ he said as he watched her pour it over the shoe.

  ‘I knew a photographer once who was taking shots of one of those things in a snake park. He got cocky. Went right up close to take its photo. The flash and the noise angered the cobra and it struck. It missed the photographer but got the camera body instead. The photographer wiped the venom off with his finger. Within an hour, he was fighting for his life. So, I’m washing my shoe, okay?’

  ‘Okay, okay . . .’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just a bit freaked out at the moment.’ Suryei sloshed the water onto the suspect area of the shoe.

  ‘Save some of that water for your arm. You’re bleeding.’ He ripped off the other sleeve, then poured the last of the water into the deep gashes. The sleeve made do as a bandage, and he wound it around her arm a few times.

  ‘So are you,’ she said.

  ‘My blood clots quickly.’ Joe drank the remaining water.

  Suryei noted his physique. ‘I thought you said you were a computer nerd. What’s with the muscles?’ Suryei was instantly annoyed at herself for asking the question. She played it back in her mind and she thought she’d sounded like some boy-happy bimbo. All that had been missing was the giggle.

  Joe caught the rapid swings in Suryei’s mood. He put his shirt back on. ‘I box. Strictly amateur stuff, but I’ve been doing it since I was ten.’

  ‘Great,’ said Suryei.

  ‘I don’t do it to beat people up,’ he said, sensing the sarcasm. ‘I was bullied as a kid. You know, the weedy guy in the playground. Now I just do it to keep fit. It’s a sport.’ He shrugged.

  She didn’t like boxers, was that it? Joe shook his head to clear it. There were more pressing issues at hand. They couldn’t just hide and wait for a rescue that might never come, or come too late. They had no food left, virtually no water and no survival training. They couldn’t just walk out – they had not the slightest idea what direction would lead them to the nearest outpost of civilisation. All they had was each other.

  And then the unexpected happened. A soldier stepped out from behind the bush they’d been hiding in, the stock of the rifle at his cheek, eye positioned over the sight. The scare with the cobra had made Joe and Suryei forget about him completely. He sighted the barrel from one to the other. Joe’s mouth was open. It was like a movie they were watching, rather than something that was actually happening to them.

  The three people just looked at each other, wondering what to do next. The soldier was nervous, shouting something in a language Joe didn’t understand. To his surprise, Suryei answered him. She put her hands behind her head and sank to her knees. The soldier gestured aggressively at Joe to do the same. He didn’t move fast enough. The soldier reversed his rifle and drove the stock hard into Joe’s stomach. The blow caught him by surprise, winding him, but a daily regimen of three hundred sit-ups prevented any real damage. Joe fought for breath, falling to his knees, gagging. The soldier still wasn’t satisfied with his level of compliance. He lifted the barrel of his rifle and pressed the flash suppressor hard against Joe’s cheek, prising his teeth apart.

  ‘No!’ yelled Suryei. The bastard was going to pull the trigger. ‘No!’

  And then the cobra struck. It lunged through the bush beside the soldier’s leg and sank its fangs into his thigh. The man looked at the snake like he didn’t believe it was happening, but then it bit again and again, ferociously, and the reality of the attack suddenly hit him. He screamed and emptied the magazine of his weapon into it.

  Joe and Suryei ran.

  Sergeant Marturak heard the scream and the spray of automatic fire. It took them seven minutes to reach the spot where their comrade was lying on the ground. The soldier was convulsing violently and white froth bubbled from his mouth. The cobra’s shattered body writhed beside him. It wasn’t dead. Bullets had broken its back in several places and it was coiling itself into a knot.

  One of the soldiers gripped the snake from behind the head and sliced it off with his machete. Sergeant Marturak had once before seen a man die from a cobra bite. He felt pity for the private. Fortunately, they carried antivenom in their kit. One of the soldiers administered a double shot of the pale liquid with a disposable hypodermic. The man shaking uncontrollably on the jungle floor was in a bad way. Antivenom or not, it was by no means certain he would survive.

  Marturak cursed softly. He would have to leave one man behind with the stricken soldier. Morale would suffer if he just left the man to his fate. His force was steadily shrinking. Including the two he’d lost in the fire, his squad was now effectively reduced by twenty percent, with four men either dead, wounded, or otherwise out of action. Again, he wondered whether this man convulsing on the ground had walked into some kind of booby trap set by the man he was hunting.

  He questioned the soldier babbling at his feet, but got nothing coherent. One of his soldiers called Marturak over to the base of the tree that dominated the clearing. There was blood. Another found a piece of material hanging on some thorns. More blood. There had definitely been some kind of struggle here. With luck, the injuries would slow the target. Sergeant Marturak now had a rich, red trail to follow. He deployed his diminished forces for the pursuit. Things were looking up.

  Joe and Suryei knew the soldiers were c
lose behind. They heard an eerie, lone bird call carried on the still, early morning air. They moved quickly and carelessly through the living obstacle course of the jungle. Their passage alerted the local inhabitants of this world and sent them scurrying noisily from trees and bushes. The monkeys were the worst. It was almost as if they delighted in giving away Joe and Suryei’s position, which, in fact, was true. The primates were the jungle’s early warning system, and they were remarkably good at their job. The soldiers, however, knew how to thread through the jungle quickly, and relatively effortlessly, with little noise or disturbance. Although Joe and Suryei had several minutes head start, that advantage was whittled away with every step.

  Suryei began to claw her way desperately through the foliage. Joe caught the urgency. The jungle was now full of sound. Bushes and ferns were moving, seemingly of their own accord, all around them. They were being surrounded.

  A soldier appeared in front of them, stepping from behind the trunk of one of the jungle’s giants, and barred their path. He raised his carbine to fire. Not fast enough. Joe swung his axe against the man’s rifle. It discharged harmlessly into the air. Three of the man’s fingers plopped like fat grubs to the jungle floor as the blade of his axe clinked against the weapon’s metal barrel. The soldier looked at his hand in disbelief. He dropped to the ground and tried to pick up his digits with the hand that no longer had any fingers.

  Joe dodged around the tree trunk as automatic fire cracked behind them and slugs fizzed past just centimetres from his body. Joe and Suryei ran blindly, oblivious to the thorns and spikes that tore at them as they raced. The fact that Joe was facing death was apparent to his subconscious. Base survival instincts overwhelmed him. He was merely an organism trying to stay alive, clawing through the kaleidoscope of green, running as a terrified animal might run from a predator.

  Joe suddenly burst out of the bush and into a campsite where half a dozen tents were neatly arranged in a semicircle in a clearing hacked out of the jungle. He stood there swaying, mouth open, brain fighting to come to grips with the sudden appearance of civilisation. Smoke curled from a few low breakfast fires. He smelled coffee. Joe would not have been more astonished if he’d found himself in a shopping mall. Suryei staggered into the clearing, panting, seconds behind him. She stopped in her tracks and looked around in shock.

  They stood, sucking in air, in front of a group of men, all of whom were armed and wearing building-style hard hats. The men were obviously nervous, fingering a range of weapons including rifles and machetes. Their camp was in a slight depression, and the noise from the exploding 747 five kilometres away had apparently passed unnoticed, shielded as they were by a ridge. The few who had been woken by the distant rumble thought it nothing more than the last gasp of the monsoon thundering over the horizon. But all of them had heard the approaching gunfire. Nature was also in an uproar with macaques leaping and screeching in the treetops. The sight and state of the two people spat out by the jungle into their clearing took them totally by surprise. Swaying breathlessly in the middle of their camp were two wild and desperate-looking people, covered in dirt and bloody scratches.

  The group of clean-shaven men, some Asian, some Caucasian, who were lined up opposite them, lowered their weapons in astonishment, mouths agape. There was a crack and the face of the man standing in front of Suryei disappeared in a spray of red.

  Suryei and Joe were running out the other side of the clearing, into the bush, before they were aware of the soldiers charging in behind them. Automatic weapons fire and the screams of men filled the jungle around them. Two explosions boomed. Joe grabbed Suryei’s hand as they ran, frantically looking for an escape from the hell erupting around them.

  Sergeant Marturak now knew for sure that he was chasing two people, a man and a woman, both young. He had seen them. Where had the woman come from? he wondered. He’d taken cover with two of his men behind a conveniently sited berm of earth at the perimeter of the clearing, to assess the situation. His crash survivors had blundered into what must have been some kind of forward survey camp for a logging operation. Sulawesi was full of them. They came in, counted the trees to determine whether the effort required to build the roads and infrastructure needed to pull the logs out was economically viable, and then surveyed the terrain for the road crews to follow.

  The sergeant had no particular view about the rights or wrongs associated with the practice that was stripping parts of his country bare, despite the fact that he thought of the virgin jungle as a second home. These particular people did present him with a problem, however. The loggers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He couldn’t allow the crash survivors access to the outside world, and these people contaminated the integrity of his mission. No survivors. No witnesses. These men had to be killed. Especially now that one of his soldiers had, in the excitement of the chase, blown one of the logger’s heads clean off.

  He unhitched a grenade from his chest webbing and lobbed it twenty metres into the centre of the clearing. It detonated in a hard pulse of grey smoke, disabling at least five of the men with flying shrapnel, while the concussion wave shook dust from the tents, trestle tables and trees that crowded the clearing. Marturak’s eardrums rang with the noise. Another grenade landed to the left of the first, taking out three more loggers. Automatic fire then swept the clearing, cutting the legs out from any men left standing. None of the loggers had managed to get off a single shot, which was as it should be, thought Sergeant Marturak with satisfaction, as the violence of the exploding ordnance bellowed through the jungle.

  Marturak stood and carefully walked into the clearing, safety catch off, ready to shoot. He was a good and careful soldier. Others in his command quickly went from corpse to corpse. Nine millimetre pistol rounds were pumped into the heads of men who showed the vaguest sign of life. The sergeant did a quick count of his section. All present. No deaths, no injuries amongst his own. A satisfying result. He patted a couple of his men warmly on the back.

  He thought about the two people he had been chasing, and had seen at long last. Both were obviously unarmed. And frightened.

  He had the main tent searched. This confirmed his first thought that this was indeed a survey party for a logging company. Several of the dead had blond hair and one was a redhead. It was a joint American–Indonesian venture apparently, according to the paperwork lying around. He shrugged mentally. What did the Americans call this? That’s right, collateral damage. Sometimes it was unavoidable. He detailed five men to pack up the campsite, bury the tents and the bodies, and burn the trestle tables, chairs and papers.

  The sergeant asked them to take particular notice of all communications equipment, instructing his men to smash them before placing them on the growing bonfire. It was important to keep the area cut off from the outside world.

  He’d seen his quarry exit the clearing so he knew which way they were headed. And one of them was wounded, leaving a blood trail that could easily be picked up. They were mortal, after all. It was just a matter of time before he caught and killed them. Marturak allowed himself the hint of a smile. They’d be dead before lunch.

  Sydney Airport, 2200 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  The crowd had not diminished overnight, rather it had swelled, supported now by friends of friends and relatives. Pillows and blankets, provided by Qantas and other airlines, were strewn everywhere together with fast food packaging and empty coffee cups, many stuffed with cigarette butts.

  The news went round like wildfire and soon the newsstand was cleaned out. The morning paper carried the headline ‘Terror in the skies’. The accompanying story, based on hearsay and speculation rather than fact, suggested that Indonesian terrorists had blown QF-1 out of the sky with a bomb secreted in Sydney.

  Mothers became frantic, sobbing and crying for their lost children. The men were angry. A Garuda flight to Denpasar was loading. Several people hyped up on coffee and lack of sleep started abusing the ticketing staff, accusing them of crimes they had nothing to d
o with and no knowledge of. It was something the crowd could focus on, and perhaps gain some obtuse meaning from. More people joined in. They began to tear down the airline’s signage and throw what came to hand at the innocent staff: garbage cans, barricades, food scraps.

  A television crew setting up to interview people for human interest fillers caught it all on camera and did a live cross to the morning news.

  Security arrived again, this time less inclined to be understanding.

  Parliament House, Canberra, 2200 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  Niven woke with a start. Six am. Jesus, must have dozed off. The phone was ringing beside him. He picked up the handset groggily.

  ‘Morning, Griff. Yeah, went home and slept like a baby,’ he lied. ‘Sure, gimme five.’ He hung up.

  The air vice marshal almost did look as if he’d been home, had a good night’s sleep and a hot shower when the ASIS director stepped in to his office trailing the Minister of Defence, Hugh Greenway.

  Niven ran his eye over the minister. He hadn’t yet decided whose team the man was on. Lurch was in his mid-fifties, very tall and stooped. His skin was pale and freckled. He had ginger hair and strong hands. A farm boy. Greenway had intense green eyes and his brow was fine, rather than overhanging like the character in the television show. But nicknames were rarely given to be flattering. Do I trust you? Greenway was a new appointment in a recent cabinet reshuffle. Niven just hadn’t had enough experience with the man to make up his mind either way.

  Barely in the CDF’s office, the minister said, ‘I’ve just got off the phone to Byron Mills. I wanted to tell you both at the same time, rather than double up. There’s good news and bad news.’

  Niven was an optimist. Even so, when offered the choice, he’d always go for the bad news first. It was like eating your greens before anything else, getting them over with and saving the best for last. ‘Give us the bad,’ he said.