Rogue Element

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.

The soldier turned to face Jim and Margaret and fired his weapon into them. One long and lazy automatic burst. Joe didn’t hear the weapon discharge but the recoil was unmistakable. Jim slid slowly sideways. Margaret convulsed briefly. The soldier changed magazines then pointed his rifle in Joe’s direction. He took in the scene open-mouthed, unable to accept it as reality. What the hell was going on? Puffs of smoke chugged soundlessly from the small black hole sighted directly at him. Two bullets passed close enough for him to feel their pressure wave against his skin, leaving a pair of neat holes in a fleshy green frond beside his neck. Joe dropped the binoculars then froze, every muscle locked in a spasm of fear.

The helos rose from the ground on their swirling columns of rubbish and flew away, leaving behind the soldiers and their guns.

Denpasar, Bali, 0600 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Working at the control tower at Denpasar Airport, Bali, was no different from working in the control tower of practically any airport in the world. It wasn’t as busy as LAX, Narita, Schiphol or Heathrow, and it certainly wasn’t as good on your resumé as any of those other world-class facilities. But Denpasar had other advantages, especially when Japan was in the grip of winter, Abe Niko reminded himself.

Niko enjoyed sending tropical island paradise-style postcards home to Tokyo, just to annoy his friends grinding it out in the freezing rat race there. They all thought he was so fortunate to be living in such a place. And they were right. There’d been the bombings, of course, and that had changed things for a while, but life had returned to normal, especially with the European and Asian tourist trade. People had such short memories.

Through the week he didn’t get to see much of the Bali he had fallen in love with as a tourist years before, but he knew it was there, spread out below his tower, and that made all the difference. Of course, Denpasar itself was hardly a paradise. It had to be one of the noisiest, dustiest, hottest and, he had to admit it, ugliest cities he’d ever seen. And that’s why he lived far away from it, in the centre of Bali, where the grit gave way to the green of lush jungle, and a thousand feet of altitude took the edge off the heat and humidity.

Niko threaded his Honda Accord through a thicket of two-stroke motor scooters that meandered across the road, blowing blue smoke, ignoring the painted lanes. When he’d first arrived in Bali, he’d thought the traffic a living example of chaos theory. Very few road rules appeared to be obeyed, which offended his sense of order. Once a traffic controller, always a traffic controller, he had joked to himself.

But then, as he became used to it, he realised the rules of the road were sensed, as if by some form of telepathy. Riders on motor scooters seemed to know when a vehicle was approaching around a blind turn and would pull back onto the correct side of the road at the last moment. To survive, one just had to be in tune with it. Until one could do that confidently, driving in Bali was a dice with death.

Abe Niko made his way to the outskirts of the city, through the prawn farms and furniture factories, and only started to unwind when he turned his car off the main road and began the climb. The people up in the hills were more relaxed than the city dwellers. They had a calmness, a serenity about them, that was lacking in the population in Denpasar. They were more in touch with Balinese traditions and culture, embracing their animist beliefs. And it wasn’t just a show put on for tourists either.