Rogue Element

The captain checked his watch. ‘Fifteen to twenty at the most. There’s quite a bit of wind out there. Once we get up into the hills and it starts swirling about…? Hard to know whether there’ll be a headwind or a tailwind.’

‘Tell the avos to set us down here,’ said Wilkes, indicating a position on the photo midway between the two sets of mystery contacts. ‘Also, a few copies of these would be good. I can hand them out to the lads.’

‘Yes to the first,’ said McBride. ‘And I can do better than copies on the second.’

The American again disappeared forward to the comms desk. A minute later, a video screen flickered into life and the first of the two satellite photos appeared.

‘Bastards have left the in-flight entertainment a bit late, haven’t they?’ quipped Morgan over the intercom.

The marine handed the sergeant a remote. ‘Press this button to change views. There’s a laser you can use as a pointer, here,’ he said, indicating another button. Wilkes pressed it. A red dot appeared on the ceiling.

‘Incoming!’ joked someone, the dot reminding all of them of laser sniper scopes.

Wilkes shifted between the images a couple of times to get the hang of the technology, and began briefing his men on the revised intel.

The V22 climbed steeply as it crossed a deserted white sand beach and rose above the palm covered hill rushing to meet them. The Osprey banked forty-five degrees right and lifted towards a deep ravine cut between two towering cliffs. The whine of the turbofans crashed off the volcanic faces and ricocheted throughout the valley.

Inside the V22 Osprey, the air-conditioning was turned off. Time to acclimatise.

Central Sulawesi, 0758 Zulu, Friday, 1 May

Suryei ran her hand over Joe’s back. Blood seeped from the innumerable weeping sores left by an army of leeches. Her dirt-blackened thumb flicked the lighter’s small friction wheel until the gas caught. It was now on the highest setting but the flame flickered low. She managed to sizzle one last grey-black tube the size of a small cucumber, sending it spinning to the ground before the Bic went out for good. She put it in her pocket. If she managed to escape from this with her life, she’d recycle the lighter into a good luck charm.

‘I’ll pick the rest off with my fingers.’

‘I can take it,’ said Joe, forcing a smile.

They had climbed a low ridge in an attempt to confirm their bearings but, again, it proved a useless exercise. Joe hoped they were going in the right direction but feared that they were just turning blind circles, going nowhere. They could wait an hour or so and see which way the sun dipped, but that was a luxury. Staying in the one place might come with a mortal head wound. Several times they had heard, or imagined they’d heard, footsteps behind or beside them in the dense bush. They had to keep moving in the direction they thought was the right one. Without proper bearings it was a flawed plan, but its simple purpose was giving them a goal to strive for, even if that was just to put one foot in front of the other.

Suryei was starting to doubt her ability to go on. The muscles in her legs ached so badly from the constant effort of walking that she dared not stop in case they cooled down and cramped solid. But they had to rest, even if only for a few minutes every now and then, to remove the swarming, crawling parasites that hitched a ride and feasted until they dropped off, bloated.

Joe found a large tick behind Suryei’s ear that hurt her like hell when he removed it. It was so drunk with her blood that the little bugger could hardly waggle its legs when Joe held it upside down and examined it in the palm of his hand. Suryei hoped that there weren’t more of them hiding in her hair and armpits. They injected a nasty poison to keep the blood from clotting. It could bring on nauseous attacks, vomiting, and the sweats: all the good stuff.

She examined Joe’s scalp and found it clear. Leeches were Joe’s bane. They seemed to like his blood. He had two on his skin for every one found on hers. Following him along a trail, Suryei had even watched them standing up on the ground and turning their blood-sucking mouths in his direction as he passed.

And, of course, there were mozzies everywhere. One landed on Joe’s back and wasted no time burrowing its proboscis deep into his flesh. Malaria. There was plenty of it about in this part of the world. It started with symptoms that were a bit like flu, with fevers and chills. Things went downhill from there. They had warned her about it on East Timor.

She felt okay, all things considered, but it was impossible to know what was happening inside her body. People often came down with diseases weeks after they arrived home, which meant that both Joe and she could have something now and not know it: dengue fever, filariasis, viral encephalitis. She knew all the names. She shivered, wondering what the tick had left behind after having had its fill.

‘How’re you feeling, Joe?’