Rogue Element

‘Hey,’ said Joe, giving the man’s arm a gentle nudge. The old man looked up with moist, rheumy eyes. ‘Your wife. We have to fix her leg.’ It was obvious from the man’s blank look that he hadn’t heard him, or that shock had prevented him from understanding.

‘Your wife’s leg is broken,’ Joe repeated, directing the man’s gaze to the bizarre angle of the limb, poking up under her skirt. The old man nodded finally. He wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders in a bear hug as they lay there on the ground. Joe held her lower leg, wrapping his arm firmly around her foot and slowly, firmly, pulled back.

The woman’s scream launched a flock of birds come to watch the grim spectacle from the safety of a nearby tree. They flew off, squawking, into the humid, grey morning sky.

Maros, Sulawesi, 0350 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

The young woman manoeuvred her tricycle through the narrow street. It was difficult to see over the top of the oven perched on the front wheels, stuffed with ears of corn. She had to lean out far to one side to see. She moved from one side of the trike to the other, hanging out like a sailor on a trapeze, tapping at the horn continuously to warn the dogs that slept dangerously close to the edge of the road, or to someone ahead on another bike, that she was closing in on them from behind.

It was practically midday and she was very late, not that she had a boss she had to check in with. But the world she lived in had a good ten hours head start, frantically trying to keep its head above the poverty line. People were slicing fruit, carrying bricks, hacking open coconuts, selling, hawking, scrabbling, feeding children or pigs, mending clothes, making clothes, firing bricks and roof tiles, planting rice, fertilising, tilling, serving, sharpening, sweeping, living and dying — all by the roadside. Indonesia was the busiest, most industrious country on earth. It had to be, thought the young woman. Everyone had a job, except for the very young, the very old or the enfeebled. In fact, most people had two or three jobs, just to keep themselves clothed and fed. And they all helped each other, supported each other, and in a way that neighbours back home rarely did. There was a fellowship here, a genuine community. There had to be something going for Maros, because it certainly wasn’t the town itself. It was hot, dusty, noisy and smelly. One would have to have been born here to love it, she thought. She still found it hard to believe that such a shithole could produce such a friendly people.

The young woman arrived at her usual spot and parked the trike. She dismounted and hurriedly set up her stall, tearing husks from the ears and placing the corn in the portable oven. She noted that a competitor a little further back down the road, Sekrit, had already sold about a third of his load. She waved to him. Half those sales should have been hers, she thought angrily.

And then she laughed. What did she care, really? She wasn’t in the hot corn business. She was so deep under cover that sometimes she forgot who she was, and what she was doing. There were some soldiers from the base meandering down the road on foot. She held up her corn, kernels burned black by the oven’s heat, and shouted her singsong sales pitch at them. Her corn was the freshest. Her corn was the tastiest. Her corn was the cheapest. None of which was true but that hardly seemed important. Everyone exaggerated; it was part of the pitch.

There were more soldiers than usual on the road, and some of them seemed edgy, in a hurry. She tried to engage a soldier in conversation, but all she got was a terse, barked reply for her to hurry and to stop chattering like a monkey.

A-6, as her employers in Canberra knew her, was the perfect spy. Her skin said Indonesian, but her heart was Australian. Despite frantic attempts to remedy the situation, Australia didn’t have enough HUMINT — spies — in Indonesia, certainly not enough to provide reliable intelligence on a nation that stretched across some 17 000 islands and embraced more than 219 million people. Most of the assets it did manage to have on the ground had a similar profile to A-6.

She didn’t stand out. In many respects, she was unimpressive, being of average height and weight. She was neither ugly nor particularly attractive. She spoke Indonesian like a local. She also had a deep love of her adopted country, Australia, and an equally deep sadness for what she believed Indonesia had become. A-6 wrapped another ear in newsprint and handed it to the soldier, who rudely flicked a note at her.

A truck ground to a halt in front of her stall, blowing a cloud of road grit into her face. A couple of soldiers jumped down from the cabin. They were the Kopassus, the elite. She’d been wary of these men from the start. They were haughty, dangerous.