Rogue Element (25 page)

Joe and Suryei struggled up the steep incline. The vegetation was too thick to penetrate so they trudged up a cut left by an eon of monsoonal rains. Joe pushed aside a clump of bamboo overhanging their path and his hand erupted in pain. He peered at the bamboo and saw that it was covered in white hairs. On closer inspection, the hairs turned out to be fine needles that undoubtedly carried poison. He swore and held his hand at the wrist, squeezing it. He slid backwards. The ground was unstable, black mud and they both stumbled as they struggled against the sucking at their feet. Their legs and arms were black, and their faces were streaked with mud from their attempts to wipe away the stinging sweat that constantly dribbled into their eyes.

Their lungs were dry and their breathing hoarse with the effort of keeping muscles supplied with oxygen. Suryei rasped with every painful step. One step forward, half a step back as their feet lost purchase. They paused halfway up the ravine to catch their breath and give their legs a rest, chests heaving. The sun winked through the sparse covering overhead, sending the temperature soaring every time the direct light struck them.

Joe’s axe had become heavy with the caked mud. He found a stick to prise it off, but the wood was rotten and the stick buckled and splintered. He used his fingers instead.

Suryei reached inside the rucksack on Joe’s back and removed two bottles of water, now at body temperature. Handing one to Joe, she guzzled the tepid contents and
wanted more. Joe did the same, but insisted they preserve the rest of their supply.

Despite the exertion required to climb, it had been Joe’s decision to again strike for the higher ground. He had his reasons and he still thought that they were sound. They had no compass and therefore no means of orientation. Beneath the jungle canopy it was easy to wander around in circles. If they were to arrive at a specific point in the jungle, namely, the 747 crash site, they would need to continually check their bearings against features that rose above the canopy, such as the volcano and the escarpment now at their back and curving around to the right.

The visibility was very much better than it had been when he had first opened his eyes in the middle of this bad dream. The clouds had rolled away and the air was clear of the mist that had shrouded the horizon. They were a good 500 metres below the crest of the ridge so there was still plenty of climbing to be done. The realisation made him light-headed with frustration. He wondered what they would see when they reached the top. He hoped they would be looking down on the remains of QF-1 and a rescue team sifting through it, rather than the bunch of killers trying to turn them into fertiliser.

He wondered what had happened to the soldiers. If the theory he and Suryei had pieced together was true, very likely they were still on their trail. But where the fuck were the bastards? He wished he’d had some military training, some kind of knowledge that would allow him to predict the soldiers’ behaviour.

‘They’re still out there looking for us,’ said Suryei, reading his thoughts.

Joe nodded while he stared, trying to pierce the canopy
spread out around them with the force of his gaze. Somehow, they had managed to slip away from professional killers, men who were no doubt trained in jungle warfare and survival. It was pure fluke. But they couldn’t just continue to blunder around, and perhaps making a beeline for the 747 wreckage wasn’t so smart either. It was difficult to think straight with, among other things, the cloud of mosquitoes swarming about him, buzzing, humming, biting, distracting him, pissing him off.

What to do, what the fuck to do? And where, exactly, was the plane? They could guess, but that was all. The soldiers had seemed to know the general bearing Joe and Suryei were taking. They probably knew that their quarry would run into the mountains and that scaling them would be impossible. Would they then assume that they would double back and make for the wreckage? Without maps, guides or supplies there were really no other alternatives. It was likely, then, that the soldiers would just lie in wait for them somewhere.

‘Suryei, where do
you
think the plane is from here?’ Joe asked.

Suryei thought about it for a few seconds. She raised her arm and pointed in a direction roughly forty-five degrees to the left of their current line of march, up and over the ridge. ‘Over there, I reckon, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.’

Joe didn’t agree. Before the soldiers arrived and added to this nightmare, he remembered surveying the horizon with binoculars. A flash of memory, like a moving postcard, flared in his mind. In the picture he clearly saw the volcano and the escarpment, and suddenly he knew exactly where the plane was. He just had to reverse the
positions of those two dominating features, and put them behind his back. ‘I think it’s more in that direction,’ he said, holding his arm out like a street sign forty-five degrees to the right of Suryei’s reckoning. ‘You’re going to have to trust me, but I’m sure I’m right.’

‘I’m worried that we’re not on the same page about this,’ said Suryei.

‘I know, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure.’ He squatted on his heels and smoothed a square metre of mud with his hand, flicking off the excess that stuck to his palm. He then sketched out a map using a small stick.

Suryei crouched and scowled at the ground.

‘Look, we’ve been wandering around in a natural kind of bowl with the plane wreckage here. The snake and camp we ran into was here and here,’ he said, marking various points with crude icons. ‘And this is our track so far.’ Joe etched their wanderings with a dotted line. ‘All of it’s contained within this escarpment, the hot springs, and there’s the volcano.’ Their situation presented by the mud map was suddenly obvious.

‘If you were to set an ambush for us,’ Joe continued, ‘where would it be?’

Suryei considered the lines and squiggles in the mud. Then she took Joe’s axe and scratched a few Xs on it. ‘Here,’ she said, simply.

‘I agree.’

‘How nice. Only, we’re trapped,’ she said.

‘Well, the scale of things on this map is deceptive, but I think if we’re not careful we could walk into one.’

Suryei nodded.

‘Those mountains, the volcano, they’re a natural barrier. The soldiers must realise that. We’re just edging
around the base of the really difficult steep country because we don’t have any other options.’ Joe stood before continuing. ‘Those soldiers are just waiting for us.’

‘Okay, assuming you’re right, and I think you are, what do you suggest?’

‘Fucked if I know, to be honest,’ said Joe, scratching his head vigorously with both hands, scraping crawling things off his scalp with broken fingernails. ‘We can stay more or less here, go back, go sideways, just any way but forwards.’

‘What if we move in a big circle, an opposite circle to the one we’re making now?’ said Suryei.

‘Double back?’

Suryei rubbed out Joe’s track and replaced it with her alternative suggestion. ‘I know it sounds obvious but, yes, basically. Cut across here at right angles and rejoin our original path out from the crash. Then, we should be able to come up on the 747 from behind.’

Joe thought about it. It made sense and was perhaps their only option. ‘Okay, sounds reasonable. We’ll continue to the top of this ravine and confirm our bearings, then slip across hard left.’

‘But what if those assassins think we’ll do that and set a trap for us?’

‘Jesus, Suryei –’

‘I know. I’m just asking what
you
think. I don’t want to die here, you know.’

‘Okay, well, we can double think this, or double-double think the options, but no matter what we decide to do, we could think ourselves into a trap.’

‘I know that too, okay?’ Suryei’s shoulders had slumped.

‘Suryei, I –’

‘Look, whatever. Let’s just get it fucking over with.’

Joe was too tired to argue.

Despite her exhaustion Suryei did feel less anxious about their revised plan. Their last one, simply making a beeline for the plane wreckage, didn’t take into account the people with guns. She felt a little more confident now and it took some of the heaviness out of her step. Still, it was a wickedly steep climb. Sheer determination kept them going, just one more step. Half an hour’s near vertical climbing brought them exhausted to the summit.

It did them no good. The canopy closed in overhead and any view of the surrounding country below them was obliterated. Joe flopped to the ground with disappointment and exhaustion. He was filled with self-pity until he saw that Suryei had continued to move into the trees. She was no better off, but she wasn’t complaining. She just kept going. He caught up to her. Suryei looked at him and smiled – albeit wanly. They walked in silence along the ridge for a time. The low ground rose to meet them and they found themselves back in the thick of the jungle. Maddeningly, the climb had been for nothing. They hadn’t managed to catch even the barest glimpse of the surrounding terrain.

Joe found a tree he thought he might be able to shin up. Around ten minutes later he was back beside Suryei, panting and weak with exhaustion from the climb and lack of food. ‘We’re okay. Our track is about right.’ He shouldered his rucksack and they walked slowly.

‘Do you do a lot of computer hacking?’ asked Suryei after they had regained their rhythm. They did their best to pick the path of least resistance through the jungle but, now that they were back on low ground, the jungle pressed in on them from every side.

‘A bit. It’s a sideline.’

‘It’s stealing, though, isn’t it?’

Joe looked at Suryei’s back. She didn’t turn her head when she spoke. He wondered how much was conversation, and how much was accusation. Probably both. Talk was dangerous. He had no idea how far noise carried but, without conversation, he felt alone. Perhaps Suryei felt the same. Her question, if it was an accusation, was almost impossible to defend because he knew she was right.

At seventeen, he had gone to work for a software giant in the States, because that was the Mecca if you were seriously gifted. Joe was regarded as one of its brightest stars, but he was easily distracted. Within a few months he’d decided that the money the giant corporation earned was obscene. He created a virus he called Ethiopia which, when activated, consumed any word on the hard disk that was even remotely reminiscent of food, and left a small thumbnail image of a young black child with a distended belly in the space. Joe incorporated the virus into the operating system he was helping to write. The trigger for Ethiopia was keying the word ‘lunch’ into the system’s appointments book. Over 50 000 copies of the new operating system had been shipped before the virus revealed itself.

Joe was quietly but forcefully shown the back door, while the corporation went into damage control. That’s when Joe also discovered that he had a talent for hacking, particularly as the giant’s employees had designed so many systems in use. He knew the way these people thought, and that was the key, getting inside the mind of the programmers. So Joe went to work as a freelancer, spying for companies wanting information from competitors.

The pay was good. And the conditions were great, because he could work from anywhere. Joe wasn’t an information anarchist, an idealist. It just started out as a way to make a buck, nothing more. But then his conscience had kicked in. He was taking something that didn’t belong to him, and that was wrong. So he stopped hacking and started authoring games, and providing critiques on others for various magazines. Most of the people who created computer games were maverick types like him, and he enjoyed their company. It was a more benevolent way to make a living, and one that didn’t keep him awake nights.

‘Yes, it’s theft. That’s why I don’t do it any more.’ Joe pushed a fern frond out of their way, careful to use his axe and not his hand or arm.

‘So why’d you hack into Suluang’s computer?’

‘That was different. I had the chance to strike back at those thugs . . . I should have thought about it a bit harder before I dived in.’

‘Hey, I’m not having a go at you. There aren’t many individuals who get the chance to strike back at a whole system. You’re lucky, you had a weapon. In Dili, I thought I had that too – a weapon – being a journalist, keen to write the truth. And then reality hit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I landed with the first troops to secure Dili airport. There was a ute burned out behind a hangar. In the back were half a dozen blackened human skeletons. On the side of the ute, someone had painted, “Welcome to East Timor”. I wasn’t prepared for that.’ Suryei bit her lip and tasted blood as the brutal memory crashed into her mind.

‘The authorities didn’t regard the scene as a mass grave. That seemed ridiculous to me. I mean, how many murdered
people have to be dumped in a confined space before it’s considered a mass grave?’

‘Sounds like a sick riddle,’ said Joe. He looked at Suryei and saw that the memory was still fresh and that it upset her.

‘Yeah . . . anyway, I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer. There was a grave of over thirty bodies outside one village I visited. The people were so scared they didn’t tell anyone about it till months after we arrived. These stories, and many others like them, were embargoed,’ Suryei said bitterly.

‘We heard rumours of mass graves wherever we went. Mostly, they were just that – stories. But every now and then . . . The village well you mentioned was nothing special. In East Timor, it was the militia’s favourite dumping place for bodies because a rotting corpse or two also poisoned the water. And if it didn’t physically, it sure as hell poisoned the well in people’s minds. It’s hard to drink from a place that’s your family’s grave.’

The picture of the old lady and her dead grandson flashed into Joe’s head. ‘Did you end up hating the Indonesians?’ he asked quietly.

‘No. It’s not just the Indonesians, it’s humans. Us. All of us. We’re an incredibly brutal species.’

‘It must have been rough coping with what you saw and heard.’

‘I toughened up.’

Joe thought about Suryei’s determination, her will to survive. Yes, she’d toughened up. ‘Why East Timor? Why’d you go there?’