Rogue Element

He moved cautiously to where the nose section of the aircraft had come to rest. A shot punctuated the quiet as a soldier made sure of another passenger. The noise did not distract the sergeant, who was comfortable around the sound of firearms. Marturak first inspected what was left of the cockpit. The force of the impact had concertinaed the section to around half its original size. There was nothing recognisable left of the flight crew. Something crunched under his boot — a small plastic model of an F/A-18.

Remarkably, some of the seats and lockers were still in place. The sergeant levered himself up inside the giant tube and, using the jagged ends of aluminium ribbing jutting from the severed end of the fuselage as footholds, climbed easily into the first-class section. Careful not to lose his footing on the slippery human remains, he made his way towards the seat he had been briefed to specifically search. He hoped to find the occupant still strapped in, and alive, so that he could learn the passenger’s identity before killing him, but the seat was gone.

However, a computer and other electronic equipment had become entangled in the seat beside the one he was searching for. He freed it. The casing was cracked. He pressed the on button to see what would happen. Unbelievably, it booted, albeit noisily. The screen named the owner but required a password to continue. Sergeant Marturak checked the drives. There was a disk in the slot. He smashed the computer with the butt of his rifle, recovering the disk, then tossed the remnants into a nearby smouldering fire giving off the smell of rancid barbeque pork.

He placed the disk in his webbing and made his way to the open end of the fuselage. A knot of soldiers were standing around laughing, smoking pungent clove cigarettes as a defence against the stench of death that hung over the place. Marturak barked an order. The men jumped, making their way to the sergeant. The young men effortlessly swung up through the wreckage and into the nose section. Marturak issued another staccato command. The soldiers checked the corpses littering the area, looking through pockets for identification.

The sergeant climbed down to a point where he could jump to the ground. He then trotted up to a higher vantage point and squinted through his Persols at the hill being searched for the survivor. The jungle was thick but the hill didn’t seem too far away. It wouldn’t be long till his men reported from its crest that the last surviving passenger had been killed, and he would then be able to make his radio report that the crash site was secured.

* * *

Once the jungle had obscured his retreat, Joe got to his feet and charged into the bush that hemmed him in on three sides. There was nowhere to go but downhill towards the killers! He stopped several times to listen to the jungle through his own heavy panting. He sucked in the warm, damp air to settle his racing heartbeat, and then held his breath, reaching out with his senses.

The jungle was not a quiet place. There was a bird — he thought it was a bird but he couldn’t be sure — making a sound like fingernails dragging across a blackboard. The sound filled the jungle, combining with the press of the foliage to give him a profound sense of claustrophobia. It made his head swim. He was close to panic. A few hours ago he was a first-class passenger. Now he was being hunted, part of the food chain.

He touched his cheek and felt the swollen, angry skin. The side of his face had puffed up like a soufflé. What had caused the itchy swelling? Then he saw the large spiky green caterpillar hanging from a thick thread centimetres from his face. He pinched off the grub’s bungee and angrily swung it away into the leaf litter on the jungle floor.

He had to get moving again. But which way? Joe was disoriented. The hill’s fall-line was his only signpost. He traversed across it as much as the jungle allowed, taking a bottle from his rucksack and throwing back the contents as he half ran, but mostly crawled, sweat pouring down his face and stinging his eyes. He broke a stick from a tree and held it in front of his face, guarding against further assaults from the wildlife.

Joe managed to find a rhythm as he moved through the clawing bush. A machete would have been helpful. Then he remembered his makeshift axe. He dropped the stick and removed the axe from his rucksack. He thought he was beginning to tell the difference between bush he could charge through and vegetation he had to go around. And then he ran through a clump of leaves and into the solid trunk of a tree. The force of the collision nearly knocked him out. He bounced off the tree and found himself on the ground. His nose hurt badly enough to make his eyes water but he knew it wasn’t broken. He’d had plenty of bloody noses from boxing and the pain was reassuring, like meeting up with an old friend.