Rogue Element

Now they’d woken from their brief few hours of hibernation to discover themselves without any kind of tactical advantage whatsoever. The enemy was at the gate. All he had to do was turn, brush aside a few leaves, and the bush would present him with a prize. A spike from the vine had penetrated Joe’s Converse shoes. He felt pinned like a moth to a board, vulnerable and pathetic.

Joe braced himself for the bullets, hypnotised by the sight of the soldier. A rabbit in the headlights. He held his breath and waited for death to spit from the muzzle of the man’s rifle. But the bullets didn’t come. Instead, the soldier propped his gun against a fern and urinated into the bush. He appeared to look everywhere but at them. Yellow fluid coursed down one of the vines. It ran down another branch, and dripped onto the ground. Eventually, a small puddle formed at Suryei’s foot. She dared not move. The smell of the urine was sickening. Steam curled from it. Suryei felt like retching. Groaning occasionally with relief until he finished, the soldier buttoned his fly, picked up his rifle and rested the butt in the crook of his elbow, barrel pointing towards the jungle canopy high overhead. He then moved off, cautiously.

Joe began to say something but Suryei put her forefinger to her lips. They lay motionless and silent for at least half an hour. Suryei spoke first, in a whisper. ‘We don’t know whether that man was on his own. If we leave here now, we might walk straight into a whole bunch of them. We’ll have to stay here till nightfall.’

A whole day… Joe frowned at that but he didn’t have an alternative suggestion. ‘Thought for sure he’d see us,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ agreed Suryei in a low whisper. ‘But it’s darker in here than it is out there. Those little binocular things high on his head were those night vision goggles I told you about. If he’d been wearing them…’ She drew her finger across her throat.

Joe took his first good look at Suryei. He realised that he really didn’t have a clue what she looked like. They’d met in the perpetual twilight under the jungle canopy and complete darkness had come down fast. She was curled in a loose foetal position beside him. He knew she was Asian but her accent was Australian. Her almond eyes were closed and he could see her abdomen rising and falling as she breathed. She was petite, smaller than he’d thought. Her face was covered in sweat-soaked mud and dust, and her black shoulder-length hair was matted with leaves, twigs and dirt. He imagined that she could be quite attractive, but it was difficult to tell. Given our current situation, why am I even wasting energy thinking about things like that? he wondered. Here I am, being hunted and shot at, starving, possibly about to die in the fucking jungle, for Christ’s sake, considering whether or not this woman’s hot. What did her looks have to do with anything anyway? She has saved my life at least once. Isn’t that enough? Still, his mind wandered on. He concluded that she was between twenty and thirty, but even that was hard to be sure of.

* * *

Sergeant Marturak was as good as lost. He knew exactly where he was geographically, but he had not the slightest idea where his quarry had gone. It was as if the jungle had opened up and swallowed his objective whole, without a trace. Again he wondered who he was up against. An ordinary person with no jungle training would have been overtaken by now, no question about it. The jungle was a dangerous and inhospitable place for the inexperienced. He reminded himself that it also presented an almost infinite number and variety of hiding places. The man could be holed up somewhere, too frightened and scared to show himself. Marturak had initially hoped that the survivor may have gone to ground in the tunnel beaten into the jungle by the wildlife, but the two men he’d sent up into it had reported no contact.

He knew the young man on the hill had seen him kill the old couple. That’s what had frightened him into the jungle, and the volley of automatic fire hadn’t helped either. He now cursed his own lack of patience. He should have trawled for any and all survivors first, then killed them as a group. That way he could have then simply radioed for the pick-up and by now he would be back at the barracks. He’d been overconfident, and there was never any value in overconfidence. But it was too late to dwell on earlier tactical errors. The question now was how to make good on this mission.

It was an important operation, of that he had no doubt. The crashed aircraft was a Qantas 747–400 and it had come down here in secrecy. He could make a lot out of successfully completing this job and he was not about to let the opportunity slip through his fingers. He whistled softly, imitating a species of bird common to Java but not found on Sulawesi, and caught the attention of the soldiers on either side of him.