Crystal Coffin (13 page)

Before the army, life was simple. Before Timor, he could sleep.

Locklin cantered from the waters that lapped Scrubhaven and rode towards the boathouse, determined to make life simple again. It shouldn't be too hard, he decided, as the spirit in him turned to demon. Maitland and his friends were, after all, untrained civilians.

Lieutenant General Pete Broxton, Commander and Chief of the Australian Defence Forces in East Timor, stepped but of a Blackhawk onto the helipad of the UN military hospital in Dili. With him were four military guards and both the colonels he'd appointed as the board of inquiry into the death of Corporal West.

Broxton was not happy. ‘Where's my soldier?' he said, carrying a newspaper under his arm like a loaded weapon.

‘Down here, sir,' an orderly said, ushering him into the security wing.

Lieutenant Colonel Allen met him halfway down the hall and Broxton's guards recognised Allen as the Senior Medical Officer of 1Brigade by the insignia on his otherwise ordinary doctor's whites.

‘Has he said anything?' Broxton asked.

‘As I told these gentlemen earlier, Pete,' Allen said, indicating Broxton's silent travelling companions, ‘it's just too soon to interrogate him. Private Harvey says he doesn't remember anything and it's going to take enough out of him just airlifting him back to Darwin, without dragging that out of him as well.'

Broxton frowned. ‘You think he might not survive the trip?'

‘With his injuries,' Allen said, rubbing his top lip, ‘there's always that chance.'

‘All the more reason we should talk to him now,' Broxton said. ‘I can't risk losing that information.'

Allen disagreed silently, leading the visitors to the next hall without their guards and Broxton smiled, seeing the doctor relax as soon as he was away from the loaded weapons.

‘The boys of Charlie Six were good men,' he told Allen. ‘Lord knows why, but they're only covering up for each other.'

‘They're not men, Pete. They're kids. Hell, one of them still has a provisional driver's licence.'

‘Hey, old friend,' Broxton said, keeping his voice low. ‘I don't like the idea much myself, but you're an army quack. You know that some of them get hurt.'

‘I know,' Allen said, pushing his fists into his pockets. ‘It's not that. It's … I don't know. I guess it's all the fuss that's being made to find out who broke their orders to go and get them.'

‘This isn't holiday camp,' the General reminded him. ‘Orders without discipline are just pizza and fries.'

‘I know. I want to know what happened in that village as much as anyone, but we're obviously getting nowhere by putting such a rush on it. Maybe when they're healed more. It'll be another week in Darwin before Rogers can put weight on his knee and Mulhany's lucky to be walking at all, but —'

‘We lost one out there,' Broxton cut in. ‘I won't sit around on my haunches waiting to see if we lose another one. I want to know what happened out there and I want to know now.'

‘All right, all right,' Allen said, realising he felt the same way. ‘But I tell you Pete, as the doctor who had to patch up those boys, not to mention the civilians who came out with them, I don't give a fig damn if we never find out who got them out of there, or how. I'm just glad they did.'

Broxton coughed to hide his smile. ‘Well, colonel,' he said, stiffening his shoulders. ‘Everyone's entitled to their point of view. I hope
your
opinion won't affect your performance on the board of inquiry.' He shook the doctor's hand. ‘Congratulations,' he added. ‘You've just been appointed.'

‘Oh great,' Allen said, deflating. ‘More good news.'

He pointed out which doors led to the makeshift intensive care unit and a nurse handed Broxton a white coat. She held his newspaper while he put the coat on and was surprised when he asked for the paper back.

‘But it's a clean room, sir,' she said. ‘We can't —'

‘We can this time, Penny,' Allen interrupted. If the Commander and Chief needed a newspaper in there, they'd just have to sterilise the place again afterwards.

‘He'll still be groggy,' Allen apologised. ‘We had to give him a sedative half an hour ago. There's a nurse in there waking him again now.'

‘Good,' Broxton said. ‘He might let something slip if he's tired.'

One of the colonels, a tall man with a square jaw, crossed his arms. ‘Excuse me, sir,' he said. ‘If this boy is already reluctant, what makes you think you'll have any more luck with him than we did with the rest of Charlie Six?'

‘Because of these,' Broxton said, rubbing the stars on his collar. ‘Because I'm not on the board of inquiry, and because I've got the secret weapon.' The general waved the newspaper, then held it behind his back while he looked through a plastic circle that served as an observation window.

Inside, he saw a pimply-faced soldier connected to a NASA-like panel of monitors. A nurse adjusted his bedding, jacked him up on two extra pillows, and scowled at both colonels and the general as she pushed out through the doors.

‘Okay,' Broxton said, going in. ‘Let's see what's eating my men.'

Harvey's eyes were closed and Broxton rested his hand on the boy's shoulder, thinking that maybe Allen was right. Nineteen was young enough to be his own son, and in a way he was. The Lieutenant General had 5763 Australian sons and daughters in East Timor, one less than a fortnight ago, and he was responsible for the lives of every one of them. It wasn't his orders that put this boy in intensive care, but that didn't stop his gut from aching just looking at him.

Private Harvey and the others who'd been with him had been abandoned by an overriding, bureaucratic monolith that called itself the United Nations. While pampered officials moved into hotel suits in a floating offshore resort, collected their tax-free six-figure incomes and evicted East Timorese refugees from schools and churches to make room for their computers, office desks and swivel chairs, these men had been written off by bickering policy makers. In the end, the orders that had been given had been misinterpreted.

It was true that UN forces were peacekeepers, not peace enforcers. Their priorities were to rebuild the economy without widening the conflict. They couldn't do that without first personally evaluating the extent of the devastation. And they couldn't do that until their fleet of luxury four-wheel drives had arrived. In the meantime, civilians were expected to hold their breath and pray the rebel militia wouldn't take advantage of the cease-patrol opportunity the UN had handed them. Australian forces were expected to stand back and watch as defenceless villages were systematically attacked and raided. Or were they?

Caught in the middle were the reconnaissance units — like the one being investigated now — that had been out on patrol when the UN had announced their overruling decision. The result: one dead and four injured — three of them critically and yet still miraculously alive.

While the Australian media screamed for answers to the question why, Broxton just wanted to know how.

‘Private Harvey?' The patient's eyes rolled open to look into the face of a man who was both youthful and ancient.

‘Yes, sir?, I do.'

‘You know who I am?'

The private focused weakly on the general's breast insignia and nodded.

‘Yes sir, I do.'

‘Then you know why I'm here?'

‘Yes sir, I have a pretty fair idea, sir.'

‘And why exactly is that?'

Private Harvey tried groggily to interpret the trick in the question that had to be there somewhere in the face of his most senior commanding officer. His head throbbed from drugs pumping oxygen to his extremities, blurring his vision and making the lieutenant general's rank insignia appear larger, closer and more vivid than it really was.

‘Excuse me?' he said, forgetting to add ‘sir'.

If Broxton noticed, he didn't show it. ‘You heard me, son. In your own words please.'

Harvey looked at the circle of plastic faces outside the door. ‘In my own words, but for the record for them as well?'

‘They can't hear you out there, son, but we have to begin somewhere. Let's start with the record first, shall we?'

Harvey took his time constructing a sentence that summarised the situation as he saw it, without swearing — which wasn't easy, considering how he felt. ‘You're here because one of us is dead, sir, and you need to make sure it doesn't happen again.'

‘Sounds fair enough to me, wouldn't you agree?'

‘Yes, sir,' he said tiredly. ‘I guess.'

‘Then you can understand that I need to know what happened out there. Corporal West, your patrol commander,' he added with emphasis, ‘is dead. You got on well with him, I believe. Don't you think his family has a right to know what happened?'

Harvey nodded, closing his eyes so he wouldn't cry in front of a general.

‘The army has a right to know too, soldier. So does every Australian taxpayer, not to mention the Timorese people and everyone else with a stake in this emotional corner of the world.' Broxton waited, watching his words penetrate the boy's resistance.

‘Corporal West was an exceptional soldier,' he continued. ‘We know that. A great bloke too from what I hear, so it's nice to think he died saving you and the others. But we all know that's not what happened. Dr Allen says he had to be dead at least two hours before the Blackhawks picked you out of there. Now, you were one of the few men conscious at the rendezvous, so I want to know who called them in.'

I'll bet you do, Harvey thought, surprised that he'd deleted an expletive from his own thoughts. ‘With respect, sir, I've already been debriefed by the interrogation squad out there in the hall and like I told them, I missed it, sir. And as for being conscious during that whole thing, well, it hurt so much, sir. My lights may have been on, but there was nobody home.'

‘You don't even
suspect
who got you out?'

Private Harvey bit down on the f-word. The two colonels outside had asked him if he'd
seen
who got them out and since he'd been in and out of consciousness for most of the extraction, he'd been able to skirt around the truth without actually lying. Now he wished he could scratch his legs. The plaster where his kneecaps had been blown away by militia and later reconstructed by surgeons, itched like a living hell — and the question made it worse.

Soldiers didn't lie to their commanding officers. Yet commanding officers weren't supposed to issue orders to abandon their men needlessly, either. Both acts were the same betrayal of loyalty in his eyes and maybe the lieutenant general understood that, but Harvey knew he was also expected to report certain events, just like this one, to UN officials.

Harvey sighed, realising he was close enough to death to have a coffin somewhere with his name on it. But he wasn't brain dead yet. Even the company's mascot lizard could figure out that if the UN discovered an Australian soldier had ignored orders to cease patrol and return to base, and had then gone on to kill eleven men and capture another one — in spite of their quasi cease-fire directive — they'd have the excuse they'd been looking for to expel Australian forces from the troubled province.

No Australian soldier who'd ever cleaned up after a village massacre could stomach the idea of abandoning the East Timorese like that, and Private Harvey was positive the lieutenant general would understand that much. He scratched a pimple at the corner of his mouth and a small cluster of them on his forehead. He rubbed his sagging eyebrows and flicked the sweat from the tip of his nose.

‘No, sir,' he eventually lied. ‘I do not know who got us out.'

Broxton slumped into the visitor's chair at Harvey's bedside and let out a heavy sigh. ‘All right, son. Off the record then, what do you
think
happened.'

Off the record with a four star general? Harvey almost choked.

‘I think we were lucky, sir. Very bloody lucky.'

‘If you were lucky, you wouldn't have been ambushed to start with.'

Harvey laughed before he realised it, and it hurt so much his stomach growled. His ribs and stomach, fractured by four rounds of M16 munitions, were strapped tight now with bandages to restrict his movements.

And he could still taste the lie on his lips, far worse than he'd imagined. Slick like a foul slime, its venom bled into his gut, making it churn louder and hurt more. There was only one way to be rid of the guilt, he realised, but in this case, the truth wouldn't make anything better. ‘Hypothetically, sir,' he said, as his hands started shaking, ‘and completely off the record?'

Broxton nodded, motioning for him to wait while he slid a curtain around Harvey's bed. ‘In case any of them can lip-read,' he said, try to encourage him as he sat down again.