Rogue Element (15 page)

‘So . . . what are you saying? The Soviets spirited the plane away somehow, in collusion with the US?’

‘Strange that there was no Mayday call, nothing. Why? Because the plane was obviously still under control and still flying, despite the missile hit. I believe it landed on Russian soil.’

‘The Americans do love a conspiracy,’ said Griffin as he crossed to the door.

‘And sometimes the facts shouldn’t be ignored, no matter where they take you.’

Griffin shook his head.

‘Griff, a bit of paranoia in these uncertain days is good for the health. Just keep an open mind. I think we’re in for some turbulence on this one.’

The ASIS chief smiled, shook his head and closed the door.

The phone rang. Niven answered it. ‘Okay,’ he said, and hung up. Greenway had said to turn on the news. He tapped the button on the remote and the screen warmed, the picture resolving rapidly into focus. Virtually a full-blown riot was in progress at Sydney Airport. Terrified Indonesian staff from Garuda Airlines were being evacuated by security staff. One of the women had blood streaming from her nose.

Then the police began breaking up the crowd, dragging people away kicking and screaming. A repugnant scene.

‘Shit,’ Niven said aloud.

Captain Radit ‘Raptor’ Jatawaman lit the afterburner and the F5 Tiger 11 sprang forward. The acceleration pushed the pilot back into his seat, taking some of the pressure off the tightly adjusted five-point harness. His eyes focused on a point at the end of the long runway as the world shooting past his peripheral vision became increasingly blurred. There were only a couple of knots of headwind floating
down the airfield into the aircraft’s nose, and the sky above was a cloudless blue; a beautiful day to fly. The sweep hand on the airspeed indicator hit the right number. Raptor fed some gentle back pressure on the stick and the F5 rotated off the strip.

His eyes scanned the dials that monitored the turbine’s health. Everything was as it should be. The old fighter responded well to his input. It climbed away easily from the suck of gravity without any weapons or external fuel tanks attached to underwing hard points. Raptor cycled up the undercarriage quickly before the aircraft’s airspeed exceeded the manufacturer’s maximum limit for leaving those bits exposed to the airflow. He went through the checks listed on a thigh-pad on his g-suit. He deselected the afterburner. Without the additional savage thrust it provided, the F5 settled into its best rate of climb. Raptor called the tower to inform the controller that he was climbing to his cleared altitude before initiating the standard crosswind turn. The tower then cleared him out of controlled airspace and into restricted military airspace.

It had not been long since Raptor had flown the Tiger. He’d departed the squadron less than two months ago after getting the call to fly Falcons. F-16s. The Tiger was a good little fighter but it was starting to show its age, especially in its avionics suite, which had to be three or four generations behind the state-of-the-art. Although it was still one of his country’s primary front-line fighters, Raptor, and everyone else in the air force, knew the Tigers would be merely target practice against the more advanced fighters of the region. The transfer to an F-16 squadron was like a gift from God. It was every Indonesian fighter pilot’s dream to pilot the legendary Falcon. And he, Raptor, had been chosen.

The F5 he was flying had been in the workshop having some minor problems in its avionics package debugged, and was now ready to come back on the flight line. Surely one of the regular F5 pilots could have taken it for a test flight? It seemed odd to him that they’d asked him to do it. No one else available, they said. Still, he didn’t really mind, and he was still current on the type. The F5 was a sweet aircraft and he was happy to take one out for a spin for old times’ sake
.
He thought he’d probably pack in a few loops and rolls too. He applied pressure to the stick and felt the aircraft respond. Yes, it was light and nimble; a nice little package.

He lit the afterburner for the thrill of it. Fuel was instantly dumped in the turbine’s tail pipe and ignited. The gas from the ensuing controlled explosion exited furiously in an orange cone, forcing Raptor back in his seat as the fighter leapt forward.

A little back pressure on the stick and the F-5 climbed vertically to 15 000 feet. Raptor deselected the burner and levelled out. He aileron-rolled the aircraft first, deflecting the stick slightly to the left. The Tiger’s roll rate was so fast that the aircraft’s nose was still slightly above the horizon, where it should be, when the wings returned to the level position. Next, he pulled back on the stick until four gs registered on the accelerometer. The aircraft’s nose came up steadily, and then continued over until it was flying wings level with the horizon, inverted. Raptor kept the stick position constant and the Tiger continued to scribe a giant vertical circle in the air. The gs started building again as it dived back to its starting position at the base of the circle. The aircraft buffeted slightly, which brought a smile to Raptor’s lips – he’d just flown through his own turbulence
created at the loop’s beginning, indicating a perfectly symmetrical manoeuvre.

Next, he joined high and low yo-yos together, pulling five and six-g climbing and descending turns, creeping up on clouds then blasting holes through them exuberantly. He was congratulating himself on having the best job in the world when a small explosion rocked the Tiger and filled the cabin with smoke. The smell of an electrical fire found its way into his oxygen mask. The stick felt heavy and he deflected it slightly to the right to see how the aircraft would respond. Something was very wrong. The Tiger continued to roll to the right once the stick was centred. Indeed, the stick position had no effect on the aileron’s deflection. They had locked up solid. The fighter rolled once, twice, three times around its longitudinal axis before the nose started to dip, and the arc scribed by the nose became more elliptical.

Raptor tried to reduce the roll rate by using a little left rudder and retarding the throttle. This worked to some degree, but the plane continued to roll. Too much rudder input would cause a cascade of other stability problems he could well do without, so Raptor kept his foot pressure to a minimum. He found that he did have some control over the aircraft’s pitch but not to a significant degree.

A Mayday call was made in the calmest voice he could muster, giving his position and a brief account of his difficulties. ATC responded that it would immediately dispatch SAR to his position.

Raptor wrestled the aircraft down to 3000 feet and still it rolled around its longitudinal axis. He kept his cool and his spatial orientation. Raptor was a good pilot, but this aircraft was determined to drill a hole in mother earth and
there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Raptor waited until the Tiger was at the top of its roll before pulling the yellow and black striped rubber ejector release handles between his legs. He tugged hard. Nothing. He tried again. A sudden explosion should have sent him and his seat skywards to safety, away from the metal coffin spinning to its doom. Raptor fought the Tiger all the way to his death. The aircraft hit the sea nose low and inverted. The impact tore the aircraft, and his body, into very small chunks.

Air Force Colonel Ari Ajirake received the report of the death of one of his pilots at breakfast. The lieutenant, who phoned him with the news, thought his commanding officer took it well.

Bob Gioco stared at the computer screen as he ate dinner.

A musical chord sounded on his computer announcing the arrival of another slip in his etray. He opened it and read the accompanying note. ‘Hello, Bob. Add this to your Sulawesi jigsaw and see if the picture starts ringing your alarm bells too. Ruth S.’

It was not unheard of for an IAE to make a personal approach to an analyst, but it was not entirely regular either. Ruth Styles. That’s right, Gioco remembered her now. Formidable old duck, but she seemed to like him and that made it easier for him to like her. He apologised to the ether for thinking of her as a battleaxe. He scanned the information troubling the woman sitting in a bunker on
the other side of the world. A company called Tropical Pulp and Paper had lost one of its forward survey teams in the jungles of Sulawesi. Apparently, the campsite had made its routine report that morning and everything was fine. An hour later, they were off the air. Totally. Nothing from the camp’s VHF or UH frequencies, the sat phones were dead as were all computer comms. Alright, so something was definitely rotten in Denmark. Or rather, Sulawesi.

Bob stared at the slip. He pinned it on his virtual noticeboard and read through some of the others. There were around thirty or so that he’d highlighted with a red electronic exclamation mark, the ones he thought he should keep an eye on to see what, if anything, developed.

There was something about a group of mercenaries training on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. An unusual virus had again jumped from the pig population to humans in a remote part of Malaysia. Unionists had sabotaged some stevedoring gear in a port in Western Australia (but there was a counterclaim by them that the damage was actually caused by company thugs). A number of schools had been torched in a systematic attack in Sydney. There was plenty of military traffic, some interesting, some routine, some plain odd. There were the reports from A-6, the Australian agent in Sulawesi. Sulawesi . . . He reread her first one about a squad of Kopassus troops heading north. He then read the second report, as it seemed an addendum to the first. He decided on a whim to dig a little deeper into this one.

He checked the radio interceptions from the helos that transported the troops. They were buried amongst millions of small data files, which could nevertheless easily be found by the NSA’s Cray X1 supercomputers. He read
through the slips. Two helos out of Hasanuddin AFB asked for taxi and airways clearance, so as to deconflict with private and commercial traffic. There was no further radio work from the aircraft at all except for an airways clearance when they re-entered controlled airspace approximately 180 minutes later. It must have been a special ops sortie or there would have been at least some en-route radio work. Gioco thought about it while he fished some egg from his dinner. Indonesian noodles, by coincidence: Mee Hoon. Okay, so a couple of helos landed somewhere, disgorged their troops and returned empty. He absently picked out a ring of calamari, and remembered his earlier assumption that perhaps the soldiers were off to search for that downed Qantas plane.

Something clicked in Bob’s brain. The report on the Qantas plane. Jumbo jets did not just vanish. He checked the time of the aircraft’s disappearance: 2036 Zulu. The time rang a bell. He called up all relevant radio work from that time of the day and in that area of the world. The Crays crunched the numbers. It took less than a minute before the required information was on his desktop. He had an F-16 Falcon out of Hasanuddin at around 2015 Zulu on a sortie. It was airborne for around forty minutes before landing back at base. From takeoff to landing only minimal radio exchanges, all of them just radio clicks, which could have meant anything, including a faulty radio.

2036Z – 4.36 am local time: the precise time the 747 went off the screen. The event was right in the middle of some of those unusual ‘clicks’. Was it possible? Things were starting to race in Gioco’s head. A picture was coming together and it was a particularly nasty one.
Is this
what Ruth’s driving at?
Would Indonesia blow a civilian aircraft out of the sky? No. They wouldn’t, would they? He put the lid back on his dinner and pushed it to one side.

He was sure the clue lay on his desktop somewhere. He reviewed all the slips for the last thirty-six hours, looking for anything to do with Indonesia, whether he’d flagged them with an exclamation mark or not. It took him a good two hours. There was the death of the air traffic controller, which, the way things were going, was looking a bit too coincidental to pass as an accident.

Then a reminder for his early morning meeting popped up on his desktop. He’d forgotten to dismiss it as ‘done’. COMPSTOMP. He traced the unease that had started to gnaw away at him to the morning’s meeting. He reviewed his notes:
Watchdog found intruder in CS982/Ind. server. Watchdog traced hacker, Cee Squared, and system notified server owners.

He cross-referenced CS982/Ind. against the registry of Fido Security clients, COMPSTOMP’s venture into the free market, and discovered, just as he had feared, that computer system CS982/Ind. belonged to the Indonesian army. Then he noticed the time of the intrusion. Around 1830 Zulu or – he added the eight hours for the time zone in his head – 3.45 am local time. Could it be . . . ?

Gioco got on the phone to Research. ‘Hello, Gioco, SEA Section. Can you get me the passenger manifest for a commercial aeroplane flight? . . . You can? Qantas QF-1 departed Sydney, April 28 . . . Yes, the plane that’s gone missing . . .’ There was a pause while Gioco caught the response. ‘Yeah, I know. Tragedy. Okay, great.’ The list of passengers would be posted to him on the internal mail system. It would take around ten minutes. In the meantime,
he contacted COMPSTOMP. He wanted Cee Squared’s name; he wanted to know the name of the hacker responsible for setting off the Watchdog in the Indonesian army’s server. He was known to them, they had his ‘fingerprint’. That also meant they’d have his real name, address and probably even his favourite breakfast cereal on record.

Bob jotted the sequence of events down on a piece of paper. He hoped that something would be so totally out of place that his growing fear about the fate of QF-1 would dissolve. He wrote:

Gioco had to admit that the events listed could be circumstantial, especially the logging camp’s radio silence. He appeared to have quite a few incidents happening within a suspiciously short period of time. The glue was missing, an element (or elements) that would tie all these loose incidents together into something cohesive and incontrovertible. Still, there was enough there, on paper at least, to raise his interest.

Gioco checked himself for an instant. Was it really possible that the Indonesians would splash a 747? He whistled quietly.

The phone rang. ‘Thanks a lot,’ was all he said as the identity of Cee Squared came down the line. The icon for internal mail appeared on his screen at the same instant. It was the passenger manifest of QF-1. He scanned the 394 passenger names on it.

Jesus H. Christ! He couldn’t believe it. There it was! The implications of what he’d just discovered hit him like a pile-driver. The flimsy string of events he’d lined up instantly hardened into something more concrete. He had his glue. Gioco sat in his chair for a good five minutes blinking at his computer screen, in a mild state of shock, again hoping that a glaring inconsistency in his logic would put the facts in a less ominous light. None presented itself. Was this the work of religious fanatics? Was Indonesia in the grip of some kind of fundamentalist boil-over? Perhaps this was just the beginning. Shit!

What had Cee Squared found in the TNI server that the Indonesians were so desperate to keep quiet? He added the clincher, the hacker’s real-world name and allocated seat number, to his notes:

Was it possible that Joseph Light and Joe Light were different people? Yes, possible, but improbable. Gioco considered letting Ruth Styles in on his deductions. He never would have been able to piece it together without her. No, he realised, he couldn’t. She would have to remain
in the twilight – aware that something was going on but uncertain of exactly what it was. Instead, Gioco picked up his handset, heart in his mouth, and dialled the Director of SIGINT.