Rogue Element

Ruth was now on the lookout for anything from Indonesia and had coded her etray accordingly. The slip popped into the box and launched a flashing red exclamation mark on her desktop. She read it. The message didn’t clarify anything for her but it certainly added to her disquiet. Something was definitely going on down there, she thought. Ruth pondered the significance of the information for a minute before snapping out of the trance. She dragged and dropped it into the box she’d created especially for Bob Gioco. Ruth shook her head. That inner voice was screaming at her, but she couldn’t make out what it was saying.

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, 0500 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Bob Gioco, NSA Group Analyst for South-East Asia, was gazing sleepily at his computer screen when the slip arrived. One in the morning. It was time to go home and he was dead on his feet. It had been a shit of a day, and he had a headache squeezing his head like a tight helmet. The icon popped up yet again telling him something had arrived for his attention. He clicked on it and the slip came up in a box: ‘A-6 Stat. 39. 29040440/29040453/TM VS-K UN/S 20–30 H2 B360 ENQ/D U.’ It got his attention. Indonesia. Anything from that part of the world did at that moment. There was that Qantas plane down in the area. Perhaps it had been found.

Bob translated the figure groups in his mind: A-6, an asset shared with an Australian intelligence service, with a report from Station 39, that’s Maros near Makassar (formerly Ujang Padang) in Indonesia — on the southern end of Sulawesi. A-6 made the observation on the 29th of the 4th at 0440 Zulu time, and thirteen minutes had passed before she made the report at 0453. He glanced at his watch to check the date and time. Maryland was five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Coordinated Time as it was now known — fourteen hours behind Sulawesi. Whatever this report was about had happened just twenty minutes ago in a small town on a forgotten island off the world’s radar screen. In other words the system was working, thanks to intel sharing and this A-6 asset who was obviously one on-the-ball individual. Gioco ignored his headache, sipped his decaf cappuccino and considered the information contained in the string of numbers and letters.

Okay, A-6 has had a TM VS-K or a troop movement confirmed visually of Kopassus units. She was UN/S or unsure of numbers but 20–30 is the estimate. They are in H2, two helos, departing on a bearing of 360 (north). ENQ/D — enquire question/destination, which means she has no idea where the helos are going. The observation, she thinks, is U — unusual.

Yes it was a bit U, but only a little. The Indonesian forces had been active for months now. And besides, there were much more interesting things going on, like that missing Qantas jumbo. The activity A-6 was reporting was in the right area, he observed again. Perhaps the Indonesians were sending in Kopassus troops to help find the thing. They were jungle-trained specialists. There was plenty of jungle on Sulawesi. It made sense. Kind of. But there was something…

The debate going on in Gioco’s mind was whether this had anything to do with terrorism. Planes did occasionally crash for reasons that had nothing to do with nutters prepared to die for some cause and take as many innocent civilians with them as possible. Terror was now the prime suspect whenever and wherever a plane went down. Indonesia… Hmm… Gioco distractedly chewed the end of a pencil. He knew the Australians had always been leery of the place — a big, sprawling country with porous borders, a succession of less than democratic governments, a fractious military, and a questionable human rights record. And recently, the realisation that terrorist groups linked to al Qaeda were flourishing there, hiding out in Java’s rugged mountains.

South-East Asia had been targeted by the US as a potential terrorist hotbed, but not so much Indonesia. It was more the Philippines people here were concerned about. Then Bali happened. Was this 747 thing more of the same? Gioco absently made popping sounds with his mouth while he mulled through things. He tapped the pencil on his desk, a syncopated beat. There was nothing solid here to go forward on. He decided to give this one the benefit of the doubt, unless something else turned up to change his mind, of course.