Rogue Element

He forced his mind back to the present. Soldiers had been exchanging fire for the last thirty minutes. Each shot seemed to make the hammer in his head pound harder. The soldiers in Suluang’s regiment were besieged by the same men they’d overwhelmed the day before, almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier. There was more noise than anything else — more bark than bite — plenty of expended ammunition. There were a few casualties, but no serious attempt to kill or maim had been made by either side. The soldiers on both sides of the barricades knew the outcome of the ‘battle’ before it started. Suluang was gone, shot by his own hand, and nothing would bring him back. The snake’s head had been removed. The firefight happening around Masri was more an expression of grief by Suluang’s men than anything else, the snake’s body writhing in shock.

Understandably, Masri thought, Australia had had a large say in how the operation would go. He was aware that simultaneous manoeuvres were in full swing against other regiments and squadrons loyal to the traitors he had given up to the government. The air force squadrons, unlike the army units, would surrender without a fight because their battles were fought in the sky. They would be overrun on the ground. The rogue naval squadrons would also be surrounded and neutralised. The cancer had to be removed.

It was time. Masri said a few brief words into the intercom and the APC rolled. The mechanised cavalry rumbled forward. They arrived as a phalanx at the front gate of Suluang’s barracks and brought their guns to bear on various structures within the gates.

Masri looked down with surprise at the blood that suddenly welled from under his arm. He wondered what was going on, but only for an instant. A stray, ricocheting FNC80 round had found a gap in the Kevlar plates of his body armour. It bored through his chest and severed the aorta. He died with a look of surprise on his face, slumped like a stuffed doll in the APC’s hatch.

White flags appeared at the gates of the barracks and the soldiers met and embraced, smiling, just as they had done the day before when the roles of victor and vanquished had been reversed.

Jakarta, 0235 Zulu, Saturday, 2 May

A-6 was finished with this business. Maros in Sulawesi, and now Jakarta. Enough was definitely enough. She craved normality. But at that moment what she wanted even more desperately was sleep. It had been a long night and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been horizontal.

A-6 had arrived in Jakarta in the early hours of the morning from Maros, after being urgently summoned there to the Australian embassy. They briefed her on the coup. Indonesia, they said, was on the verge of falling to extremists in the military. They also told her about the plane, the Kopassus, the survivors in the jungle, each new twist and turn raising the bar of her astonishment considerably. When the briefing had finished, she was speechless. But once the reality of it had started to sink in, A-6 began to feel proud of the small but not insignificant part she’d played in helping to unravel the plot, and prevent it from coming to pass. The knowledge fortified her for the role the Australian ambassador, Roger Bowman, pressed on her.

She’d been asked to help take members of Jakarta’s powerful student body through an overview of the plot. A-6 was not a negotiator or a diplomat, but she had been drafted into this particular enterprise, she’d been told, because she looked and talked like an Indonesian, conveying the facts with an integrity that a white Australian public servant could never hope to match. She had conducted the meeting jointly with Achmad Reza, an Indonesian politician she’d never met or heard of before. The students seemed to trust him, however, holding him in high regard.

* * *

Achmad Reza sat somewhat dazed by events as he sipped sweet tea at a cafeteria inside the parliament and reviewed the last few hours in his mind.

Standing in front of the student delegation, armed with satellite photos and the alarming contents of the disk showing Australia redrawn as part of Indonesia, Reza had felt well out of his depth. At stake was nothing less than the future of Indonesia and even, conceivably, the stability of the world. Redressing this evil was too much responsibility for one man to shoulder. His countrymen had plotted and killed in an outrageous bid for power. The ultimate outcome of their actions was beyond his ability to predict. All that could be done now — all anyone could do — would be to ride events as they bucked and kicked sickeningly to a conclusion.