Rogue Element

At first A-6 enjoyed the cloak and dagger stuff. It was easy being a spy in the new millennium. All she had to do was call in detailed reports of troop deployments in and around Hasanuddin AFB. For this she was given a satellite phone. The techies back home were a bit concerned about that at first. The handset was nothing special. It looked just like any old Nokia. The dish, however, was more obtrusive, even though it was small, about the size of a small dinner plate. A woman with an old mobile wasn’t in the least unusual, but a satellite phone? It turned out not to be an issue. Satellite TV was everywhere in Sulawesi, or throughout Maros at least. It was cheap, easy entertainment. It was almost unusual not to have it and a dish sat on even the poorest roof.

The phone could be used as a normal mobile but to use it as a satellite phone, she had to key in a ten-digit code. The handset then scrambled her voice into a random binary code and transmitted it on a scattered frequency to a military communications satellite. It was important that her calls could not be intercepted, unscrambled or traced without considerable effort. It was just prudent to be out of sight when she phoned in her reports. No big deal, she’d thought, although finding privacy in Maros was difficult.

Her run-in with Sergeant Melon demonstrated how serious and dangerous espionage was. And the current amicable relationship between Australia and Indonesia could turn ugly in a heartbeat, as it had often enough in the past. If she was caught when things were tense, there was the likelihood that she would be taken away and shot, unless there was political mileage to be gained by parading her through the courts. And then they’d shoot her.

A-6 wondered what it would be like to be a normal woman again, going to parties, the beach, nightclubs. It would be nice to dance, meet boys and have a normal life. The danger was all getting a bit too close now, especially given the continued contact with Sergeant Melon.

A-6 gave herself another six months. After that, she would review her situation. But in the meantime, something unusual was definitely going on in town. She heard the choppers before she saw them: two large Super Pumas came in low and lifted the tiles off several roofs, flinging them into the narrow, dank lanes. They cruised unhurriedly overhead at barely a walking pace. A-6 put a hand over her nose and mouth to protect her lungs from the dust picked up by the powerful downwash of the rotor blades, and squinted up at the aircraft through the stinging cones of sandblast. She was just in time to see that the helo was full of Kopassus soldiers before Sergeant Melon pushed the door shut. The aircraft then accelerated quickly into a climb.

The thump of the Super Pumas faded to a distant beat before A-6 started up her trike. Something of interest was happening somewhere if two Super Pumas full of Indonesia’s crack soldiers were hurriedly being airlifted to… where? She would try to find out, but didn’t like her chances. The Kopassus weren’t the most talkative people and asking direct questions could prove unhealthy.

Exmouth Gulf, 0455 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

The Joint US-Australian Facility at Exmouth Gulf in the far north of Australia received the transmission from A-6. The report from the asset was brief and processed by one of the US Air Force Security Services Signals Intelligence personnel.

The report read: ‘A-6 Stat. 39. 29040440/29040453/TM VS-K UN/S 20–30 H2 B360 ENQ/D U.’ It came off the printer and the corporal looked at it blankly. The sequence was decoded, but it still might as well have been Latin for the Sig Op had no ‘need to know’, therefore the significance of the string of numbers and letters was opaque to him.

It had to be one of the most boring jobs in the world, he told himself. Right up there with working on an assembly line, sticking widgets in boxes all day long. From morning till night he looked at shit that meant nothing to him. Then, at the end of the day, he went home to fuck-all nothing out here in the desert. No bitches except for really ugly ones, but at least there was plenty of beer to improve their looks. Lots of flies, though. Sticky motherfuckers that wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The corporal took another look at the sequence on his screen. The one thing he did know was that Stat. 39 meant Station 39, or ‘somewhere in Indonesia’. Another godforsaken shithole, no doubt, he told himself.

So much for ‘join the air force and see the world’. If he was outside, he would have spat.

He sent on the slip — the coded sequence — via sealed hardline intranet to NSA, Hawaii, and copied the information to the local intelligence services as per the standard operational bullshit.

NSA, Helemanu, Oahu, Hawaii, 0457 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April