Rogue Element Read online

  ‘Ahead of you there, Spike. Shirley?’ he said, raising his voice so it would carry over the thick carpet. ‘Could you get Graeme Griffin in here? And ask Phil Sharpe to come over too.’

  Niven scowled again, this time intentionally. He couldn’t think of one issue he and Sharpe agreed on.

  The PA appeared around the door. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No thanks, mate,’ said Blight, treating the woman who’d been his PA for twenty years no differently to one of the boys.

  The two men made small talk for a couple of minutes while they waited for Griffin and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to arrive, but the conversation was awkward. Both men wanted action, not talk, and were soon lost in the silence of their own thoughts.

  Shirley hurried in with a jug of water and some glasses and left saying, ‘If you need anything, call.’

  The Prime Minister nodded.

  ‘Prime Minister, Spike,’ Griffin said as he entered the office and sat beside the CDF. The ASIS chief was tall and wiry with hard blue eyes softened by deep laugh lines at the corners. He wore his grey hair cropped short, military style.

  The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Phil Sharpe, followed, settling comfortably into a chair under the window. He ran his hands through the thick, mouse-coloured hair that hung down his tanned forehead like rope, repositioning it back on top of his head. He affected a hint of a smile, as if he’d just shared a witticism at someone else’s expense before entering the room. Niven and the minister didn’t get on. Neither man knew why, it was just chemistry, or lack of it. Griffin and Sharpe shook hands and were cordial to each other – ASIS answered to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

  Niven noted that, as usual, Sharpe wore an imported, dark navy suit and a hard white shirt. His tie had been chosen to make a statement. On other occasions, Niven had joked to himself that the statement was probably something like, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m an arsehole.’ The CDF caught a whiff of the man’s aftershave. It was the one he used. Niven made a mental note to pour the remains of his bottle down the sink.

  ‘Prime Minister, if I may start?’ asked the ADF chief. Blight nodded.

  ‘I’ve been doing some checking with both my own people and Qantas.’ He opened an atlas he had brought with him at the marked spread and pointed at Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago. He also pulled out a World Area Chart of Sulawesi, the kind of map aviators use to navigate visually over terrain. The track of the 747 had been drawn on the map with greasy red pencil. The track ended with a red cross. A semicircle, also drawn in red, about eight centimetres in diameter, fanned around from the X.

  ‘The X represents the approximate coordinates of QF-1 at about the time it disappeared from ATC screens, taking into account wind and other factors. We’re not exactly sure of the position because the Indons haven’t released the ATC disks that would give us the precise latitude and longitude. Nevertheless, our people are pretty sure of the plane’s position in the sky when it was reported to have gone missing.

  ‘Now, the 747 will be somewhere within this circle. To suggest it might have come down elsewhere is ridiculous,’ he said quietly but firmly.

  Niven studied the red track that ended in a cross on the map, and massaged his chin in thought. ‘All kinds of different communications link 747s with various traffic control systems and satellites and there’s a shit-load of redundancy built in. These planes don’t just go missing. So when that traffic controller in Denpasar says QF-1’s transponder code went out, along with all its communications gear, well . . . I hate to say it, but there are a few things capable of doing that and most of them make a nasty mess of an aircraft when they go off.

  ‘There is the remotest possibility that QF-1 could have been flying out of control in a wide but decreasing downward spiral, which is why I’ve drawn in this semicircle here,’ he said, pointing to the pencilled area on the WAC. ‘Whether it blew up in the sky or crash-landed, QF-1’s somewhere here.’ He tapped the X marked on the map with his index finger.

  ‘I’m not sure what your point is, Spike,’ Sharpe said. ‘We’re in Indonesia’s hands. It’s their territory, and they do have the men and equipment needed to locate the crash site. It’s frustrating but we’ll just have to wait and see what they turn up. Also, let’s not forget that the plane only went down,’ he checked his watch, ‘maybe eight hours ago, so we can hardly accuse them of dragging the chain. Then there’s the terrain it went down in. Sulawesi is not a very hospitable place; most of it’s covered in jungle and volcanoes.’

  Griffin agreed. ‘A fair percentage of the island has been logged but there are still quite a few impenetrable pockets. It’s the proverbial haystack.’

  Sharpe nodded.

  Niven was undeterred. ‘All of which adds weight to my view. I want to ask the US to use one of their military satellites to scan the area I’ve indicated on the WAC. I can’t believe the Indonesians would object to that. If we scanned five nautical mile segments, there’d be enough resolution to see a crashed 747 and cover around one hundred square miles in only twenty passes. The satellites I’m talking about have a two-hour period, so the entire area would be covered in around forty hours.

  ‘And there was a lot of fuel on board the aircraft. Ground fires in this area would show up like searchlights on infrared film.’

  Blight winced as the picture of people burning in firestorms flashed through his mind.

  ‘Good idea. We might even find the site on the first or second pass,’ said Griffin.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Niven. ‘As I said, the Indonesians could hardly object. It would save them a hell of a lot of money and, of course, get the plane found as quickly as possible. Good for them. Good for us. Everyone wins.’ Niven’s enthusiasm was infectious.

  ‘Alright,’ said the PM. ‘If there’s one thing I hate, it’s sitting around on my arse. Our ambassador in Washington can handle the liaison.’

  ‘Okay, so what about the question of terror?’ Niven asked. It was the thought on all their minds.

  ‘What about it?’ said Sharpe.

  ‘I jumped to that conclusion too, Spike, but so far there’s not a shred of evidence to support it,’ said Griffin.

  ‘And aside from that, terror just doesn’t feel right,’ said Blight, rubbing his temples. ‘Not on this one. It’s all too quiet. Terrorists make grand media statements, don’t they? The USS Cole, the Pentagon, New York, Bali, that awful strike in London. A plane going down in the middle of the night, just disappearing like this . . . does it fit the terrorist model?’

  ‘I know, Prime Minister, I don’t want to believe the worst either, but until we hear otherwise, we can’t eliminate it completely, can we?’ Niven had national defence issues to consider and he wasn’t going to turn his back on them.

  ‘Christ,’ Blight said, frowning. ‘I guess not.’ The PM had slumped into a ball behind his desk. He was short and thickset, his body fashioned by thirty years of hard labour on the waterfront. Large hands with fingers like sausages spoke of physical power, and his skin was leathery from the sun. Until recently, a robust belly had hung over his belt, the product of years of supporting local breweries, but the minders had worked on him for the sake of his television profile, employing trainers to reduce it.

  The press called him ‘Bloody-hell Blight’, or ‘Blue Blight’, for his love of colourful language, and that was one characteristic the spin doctors had been unable to change. The average man in the street loved him for it, though. He was human, a welcome change from the years of cocky conservatism.

  Central Sulawesi, 0600 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

  Joe Light swatted ineffectually at the swarm of mosquitoes. Feeling nauseous and utterly helpless, he peered down on the crash site from his new vantage point on an adjacent hill. The plane was far enough away for the detail to be lost but the overall picture was still terrible. He put the compact Bausch & Lomb binoculars he’d found still tangled in their duty-free wrapping to his eyes and centred the old couple in the lenses.
He waved exaggeratedly at the old bloke. The man and his wife were now propped under the shelter he’d built for them, scavenged from bits of aircraft aluminium.

  Their names were Jim and Margaret. Jim had been in shock and it had taken a while to get his name out of him. Margaret was unconscious when he’d left, probably from the agony of her broken leg.

  Joe had gone searching amongst the debris for other survivors, and for painkillers for Margaret. He hadn’t found either. At first he’d been uncomfortable sifting through other people’s luggage but the pangs quickly passed. The passengers had no further use for their things. That change in his outlook coincided with the find of the binoculars.

  Joe took a deep breath, filling his lungs. The air here was hot and moist and mercifully clear of the smell of jet fuel and roasted flesh. The equatorial sun and high humidity were already going to work on the hundreds of broken bodies lying around. Down at the crash site, a sickly-sweet smell had begun to rise from the ground. The first signs of decay.

  Joe looked up at the sky. Unbroken grey cloud sat overhead like dirty cotton wool. Where was help? Why wasn’t this place swarming with rescue operations? He then realised he had no idea where ‘this place’ was. He knew that it certainly wasn’t Australia – the captain had told them when the last of the Australian coastline slipped by beneath the plane. That had been quite a few hours before the jumbo fell out of the sky. Was he in Malaysia, or Indonesia? Burma, Thailand? Geography was never his strong suit.

  The aircraft’s landing had stripped the area of trees. He saw that their runway was actually a depression surrounded by hillocks and the plane was lucky not to have hit one. Lucky? Only three passengers had survived the crash out of . . . he didn’t know how many. That was hardly lucky.

  The terrain they had landed in was relatively low lying. He surveyed the horizon. Wherever they were, it was remote. He could see no smoke from fires, save from the bits of aircraft still smouldering. No signs of population or civilisation. If there were people in the vicinity they were doing a bloody good job of making themselves scarce.

  He turned around, keeping the binoculars to his eyes. Off in the distance was the perfect conical base of a gigantic mountain that towered above the rest, its summit disappearing into haze and cloud. He let the rucksack slip from his shoulder and the bottles of water spilled out onto the ground. He’d found the bottles, along with some food in packaged trays, after rummaging through a section of the galley searching for other survivors. The galley that had been ripped from the fuselage and thrown 400 metres up a ravine.

  He’d also found a piece of wing flap attached to an aluminium rib. The implement looked like an axe. He swung it through the air. Felt like one, too. Joe used it to pick through the debris. It was also pretty effective at hacking through the vegetation on the hillock. He wanted to clear away a section of it and set up a campsite for himself and the two old people, well away from the bodies and the aeroplane, although God only knew how they were going to lug Margaret up here with her broken leg.

  The hillock wasn’t far from the crash site – about six hundred metres – but it was a difficult trek, much of it through tall, thick razor grass that did its best to flay the skin from his bones. He looked at the deep scratches crosshatching the flesh on his forearms. A collection of bugs fought with flies and mosquitoes to get at his blood. Joe shuddered. At least I’m alive, he reminded himself again, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot of that going on around here at the moment.

  It was Joe’s second trip to the hillock. It had taken a good half hour to reach it the first time, threading through the dense, clawing bush. It was easy to get lost in the gloom. The jungle was virtually impenetrable. A thick mat of wet leaves, fronds, grasses and vines fought with trees and saplings for any light blinking through the canopy overhead. It wasn’t made for human passage, especially a human more at home in the cafés of Sydney’s Paddington.

  The best way through the jungle was on all fours, close to the ground, where there wasn’t enough light for the vegetation to grow too thickly, or in the tops of the trees. Indeed, he thought he heard the chatter of monkeys overhead, but the sound stopped before he could get a fix on the origin. He came across a trail through the thick vegetation, more like a tunnel, and he tried using that for a while, but it led diagonally away from his intended destination.

  It had quickly become obvious to Joe, and Jim, that they had to move away from all the death. Every section of the aircraft big enough to provide shelter was either too sooty, too oily, or covered in gore. Within a day, most of the dead would begin to bloat and the smell of decomposing flesh, already thick in the air, would be unbearable. The most obvious section of the aircraft for them to shelter in would have been the nose and forward fuselage, but it was like an abattoir in there and his mind recoiled with horror at the memory of it. He had checked out where his seat, 5A, had been. It was missing, of course, plucked out from the seats in front and behind, some of which still contained the bloody, torn remains of their occupants. He found his computer, but he had no use for it and so left it behind.

  Within hours of the crash the jungle had started reclaiming the ground it had lost to the 250 tonne chunk of aluminium that had ploughed through it. Decomposition was good for the jungle. That was how it sustained itself, perpetuating its existence; plants and animals dying and rotting back into the soil to provide nutrients for future flora and fauna: a continuous cycle of life and death. The crash had provided this cycle with an enormous shot of blood and bone, fertiliser, and the jungle was hungry to make use of it. This was no place for the living. A feeding frenzy was in progress. Nature would surely kill them and add their flesh to the feast if they hung around. They had to leave, and quickly, despite the fact that there was also a logic to staying put: if rescue came, where else would it go but to the scene of the crash?

  Joe parted the foliage in front of his face and the devastation of the crash below was plain to see. He scanned it with the binoculars again and steeled himself not to become nauseated by what he saw. Joe then lifted them to the haze beyond. A city could be out there for all he knew, but if there was, he couldn’t see it. Joe felt alone, forgotten, marooned. What the hell to do next? Where to go? Where the fuck is everyone?

  The jungle was comparatively sparse on top of the hillock. He’d found a couple of blankets and intended to use them as an awning strung between the saplings. There was plenty of cloud shielding them from the full strength of the sun, but he knew that strong equatorial ultraviolet rays were bouncing around under them. The blankets would provide more complete protection. Joe’s skin was pale and he’d never been a beach-goer, preferring to spend his time bathed in the radiation from a computer screen, or practising his left/right combinations in the gym.

  Using the makeshift axe, Joe dug a pit in the earth to keep the bottles of water cool. There were eleven 250 ml bottles. Nearly three litres. Joe tried to remember how much a person needed to drink each day to prevent dehydration. Was it one litre or two? Did your body weight make a difference? Joe had no real idea except that it was probably bound to be more than a cup when it was so bloody hot. He wondered if Jim would know.

  Food was important too. He’d had the presence of mind to salvage a couple of trays while sifting through the wreckage. He’d forced himself to do it though the thought of eating made him feel sick.

  While moving through the jungle, he’d come across a creek that separated the aircraft remains from the campsite. He was about to drink from it, scooping up a handful of water, when he smelled kerosene. He decided to try finding more bottled water amongst the wreckage instead.

  Joe considered some of the other things he would need to make the new site a bit more ‘liveable’. Then it occurred to him that help might be a simple phone call away, so a mobile phone would be a lifesaver, his, if they had come down in a service area. He imagined making the call. ‘Hello, yes, can you please put me through to the people who handle crashed 747s . . .’ It was then that something in Joe
gave way. Hot tears filled his eyes and he slumped to the ground.

  Joe lay on his back and looked up through the leaves at the sky. He couldn’t recognise the sound at first. And then the helicopters flew right over the top of him. After a moment’s shock, he jumped up, waving and yelling.

  The Super Pumas flew in a loose formation. They skimmed the hillock Joe was setting up camp on and then swooped low across the crash scene, the rotor downwash creating eddies of loose rubbish. They made several passes over the depression, probably scouting the best place to land, or perhaps looking for survivors from a higher vantage point. He continued to jump and throw his arms about in an attempt to catch their attention, but they were focused on the carnage below rather than the hills above.

  Joe followed them with his binoculars, hands shaking. The giant choppers settled on the ground, rocking on their wheels. Doors slid open and soldiers in full camouflage gear jumped out. Joe wondered vaguely why they were carrying weapons, then dismissed the thought. They’re soldiers, soldiers carry guns. He could hardly contain his excitement and his sense of relief. Rescue had arrived.

  The soldiers fanned out into the wreckage, obviously looking for survivors. Joe lowered his binoculars and leaped about shouting desperately in the hope that someone might happen to glance up in his direction. No one did.

  One of the soldiers discovered Jim and Margaret. Through his binoculars, Joe could see them talking. There were lots of animated arm movements. Jim was obviously excited at the arrival of the soldiers. He pointed to Joe’s hillock. That’s right, Jim, tell them there’s one more of us. ‘Up here! Here!’ Joe waved as the soldier looked in his direction. He ran backwards and forwards across the hill, vaguely confused about what he should do next, stopping every time he lost the image of the rescue party in the binoculars to refocus it.