Rogue Element

Suryei realised that her pants were open at the front and that someone, unnoticed, had draped a camouflage shirt over her shoulders. Joe was also now wearing an Australian regulation army shirt. She looked around. A couple of the men had stripped down to khaki singlets. ‘Thanks,’ she said, accepting the offer.

‘You’ll have us knitting tea cosies next, Ellis,’ said Wilkes, humour and impatience mixed in equal measure. ‘We don’t have time for that.’

Ellis nodded and produced a small tube from his medical kit. He put a few drops of the liquid on the open flaps of her pants. ‘Don’t get this on your fingertips or it’ll stick them together,’ he said quickly. ‘Superglue — originally developed for battlefield wounds… liquid stitches.’

And then Suryei was aware that the mood in the clearing had suddenly changed. Within an instant, all the Australian soldiers, except for Corporal Needle-and-thread and the medic, had disappeared. The medic put his finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Then he cocked his head to the side, concentrating. He nodded and spoke softly into a small boom mike which, until now, had been folded back away from his mouth.

Several pairs of Indonesian soldiers, including Sergeant Marturak, converged on the clearing where they’d left one of their number to care for the snakebite victim. The men met up unexpectedly in the thick jungle drawn by the sound of the gunshot, and the surprise rendezvous, coupled with their nervousness, nearly resulted in a firefight. Had they been aware that enemy soldiers were also in the immediate area, they would almost certainly have started shooting at each other.

The Indon soldiers were wary. Nervous. Three days in the jungle tracking a foe that had eluded their best efforts — and killed or incapacitated a number of their comrades — had made them tense. And cautious.

There was a single silenced shot, phut. One of Marturak’s men fell, and then suddenly the jungle was alive with the sound of automatic FNC80 fire.

One of the Indonesian soldiers walking in a crouch beside Marturak collapsed forwards into fern trees as a small fountain of blood plumed from the back of his head. Marturak’s surprise only lasted an instant. He dropped to the ground with the rest of his men and emptied his magazine in what he thought was the general direction of the shot. He then changed magazines.

Were they under friendly fire? Another of his men fell down beside him, much like the first, with one shot removing half his skull. The shot sounded different. It was-n’t like the familiar noise made by his soldiers’ weapons. The combination of confusion and stress was not allowing his brain to draw the correct conclusion that perhaps these weren’t his own men firing on them. He called out again to cease fire but his words were cut to pieces by a thirty-round burst fired by one of his men off to the left.

The blanket of fire put down by the familiar-sounding FNCs was reducing in intensity. Marturak realised that his men were being cut down. He worked towards what cover he could find on his belly, snaking through razor grass. It was impossible to see what was going on. He had to keep his head down or lose it. Moving constantly meant survival. If he stayed where he was, he would eventually be encircled and death would pour in from all sides. Marturak glanced left and right. He had a man on either side of him that he could see. They were his men. Beyond that, he had no idea what was left of his force.

Retreat was the only answer. Was it possible that the two survivors from the plane crash had found themselves weapons and were now hunting them? No, impossible. He then reminded himself that the fire coming from unseen sources sounded different. It wasn’t Indonesian issue, whatever it was.

That meant there were other soldiers in the jungle. Marturak tried to piece together the action of the last few minutes. His men had fired possibly upwards of three hundred rounds, yet he had heard only several of the deadly ‘popping’ sounds. Silenced weapons. He was aware that at least two of those shots had found targets. Head shots.

Marturak’s mind was starting to work now and the picture it was painting did not augur particularly favourably for his future health and well-being. It had to be some kind of Special Forces group. But whose? He called to his men that he would cover their retreat to trees ten metres behind. He came up on one knee and sprayed the jungle ahead of him in a forty-five degree arc. He kept the trigger squeezed against the guard until the magazine ran dry. He dropped flat to the ground and fumbled with another magazine. Silence. Perhaps he’d been lucky, taken the opposition by surprise and killed the lot of them.