Merkava Mk IV — Israeli main battle tank
METFOR — Meteorological forecast
Minimi — General-purpose machine gun
Mossad — Israeli external security organisation
NBC — Nuclear biological chemical (warfare)
NCO — Non-commissioned officer
NVG — Night vision goggles
OA — Opening altitude
PC3 — (Orion) Anti-submarine warfare aircraft
PDA — Personal digital assistant
PFC — Private first class
PNG — Papua New Guinea
Prowler — Unmanned aerial vehicle
RAAF — Royal Australian Air Force
RHIB — Ribbed-hull inflatable boat
RPG — Rocket-propelled grenade
SAR — Search and rescue
SAS — Australian Special Air Service Regiment
Sayeret — Israeli special forces
Shin Bet — Israeli internal security and counterterror organisation
SLAP — Saboted light armour piercing round (armour piercing bullet)
SOP — Standard operating procedure
S70 A9 — Blackhawk helicopter
S70 B2 — Sea Hawk helicopter
TACBE — Tactical beacon — low power signal device and transceiver
TCCC — Transnational Crime Coordination Centre
TDC — Throttle designator control
TNI — Tentara Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian army)
TNI-AU — Tentara Nasional Indonesia — Angkatan Udara (Indonesian air force)
TOW — Tube launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missile
TSS — Tank sight system (external video cameras)
UAV — Unmanned aerial vehicle
USCENTCOM — United States forces in the Middle East region
VHF — Very high frequency
VX — Nerve agent
WMD — Weapon of mass destruction
X — Executive officer
XO — Executive officer
Zefa — (Cobra) AH-1 helicopter gunship
Z80 — Computer chip
Epigraph
What an excellent slave of Allah: Khalid bin Al-Waleed, one of the swords of Allah, unleashed against the unbelievers!
Fight and slay the pagans (infidels) wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.
Make God laugh. Tell Him your plans.
Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea
‘This looks bad,’ said Sergeant Tom Wilkes of the SAS, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, thinking out loud. He was referring to the road ahead. It snaked up across the mountainside, a ribbon of orange mud that sucked at the tyres of the Land Rover and slowed the convoy’s progress to a walking pace. Wilkes repeatedly ran the flat of his hand across his short-cropped brown hair, vaguely reassured by the rough prickling on his palm. It was a habit he wasn’t aware of, something he did when he was stressed or concerned.
‘How did I know you were going to say that?’ said Ellis, used to his sergeant’s mannerisms. The jungle of the New Guinea highlands lay around them, heavy with the daily monsoonal downpour that had only just let up. The green mass pressed in on the road, overhanging it, trying to suffocate it, reclaim it. The Land Rovers bounced over tree roots that gave the tyres momentary purchase before the wheels sunk to their axles once more in the cloying mud. It was the perfect place for an ambush. Wilkes turned around briefly to check on the passengers cramped together in the back seat.
Bill Loku, the member of parliament for these parts, had been happily pointing out various landmarks in the low country, but as the altitude had increased, so had his unease. He said, ‘Mi gat wari. Mi laikim stap.’
‘He’s worried, wants to stop,’ said Timbu, the translator.
‘Not here, mate,’ said Wilkes looking out the window. ‘We can’t turn around.’
Loku sat in the back of the Land Rover with Timbu, Lance Corporal Gary Ellis and Trooper James Littlemore. It was hot, cramped and uncomfortable, but there were more pressing concerns than mere comfort. The politician looked decidedly tense, eyes darting left and right, shoulders bunched and rigid. Everyone felt it — the certainty of being spied on, watchful eyes hiding in the jungle, waiting for the right moment. Not everyone was happy with the government’s performance, and in these parts unhappiness was apt to be expressed in a most violent way. It was Loku’s first return visit to the highlands since taking up full-time residence in Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea.
Wilkes could only just penetrate Loku’s accent, and the fact that he slipped in and out of the local pidgin English didn’t help his understanding any. But Wilkes didn’t need to be a linguist to know when a man was shitting himself. ‘Isn’t this where those coppers were shishkebabbed?’ asked Ellis innocently.
‘Yep,’ said Wilkes, turning around and giving the lance corporal a frown that said, ‘Put a sock in it’. Ellis was baiting the pollie, only Loku’s English was awful and it was unlikely he knew what ‘shishkebab’ meant anyway. Ellis was talking about an incident that had happened two days ago. A police vehicle had been cut off on this very spot. The two policemen had been found a few hours later by more police sent to investigate the radio silence, their horribly mutilated bodies speared many times. They had also been decapitated: headhunted. The whole area was regressing. Violence had gripped the country during these elections and many feared that total anarchy was just around the corner.
‘Tell me again why we’re here, boss,’ said Ellis.
‘It’s called “being a good neighbour”,’ said Wilkes. They’d been given the speech already — all the public relations reasons why — by the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, back in Townsville before deployment. The government of Papua New Guinea, anxious to have full and free elections with as little intimidation from disaffected people as possible, had called on Australia for assistance. On one level, the newspapers said Canberra felt obliged to help, because Papua New Guinea had been an Australian protectorate up until 1975, whereupon it had become a nation in its own right. But the truth was, PNG was dangerously unstable and what if the place became a failed state right on our doorstep? Well, the politicians were predicting dire consequences for Australia if that happened. Apparently, it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it.
So, Australia had responded to the call with a program that included a full troop of SAS soldiers for protection purposes — thirty-two men plus an S70 A9 Blackhawk helicopter. Not much of an assistance program, really, but this new request for military aid was nevertheless not an easy one for Australia to fulfil. Nearly all its limited numbers of elite Special Forces troops and transport squadron aircraft were committed in actions elsewhere — Afghanistan, East Timor, Thailand, the Philippines, the Gulf, the Solomons, South Korea — and it had become necessary for the Australian Defence Force command to recall soldiers resting up after tough deployments in order to put this meagre force together. Tom Wilkes had been one of those given the short straw, barely recovered from his last gruelling mission. Sergeant Wilkes involuntarily traced the rude scar that ran from his ear, snaked around his cheek and ended under his neck, the permanent calling card left by an Indonesian bullet that had ricocheted off a rock, splintering into fragments and flaying his skin. The heat and humidity were making the scar itch. The stitches had only been removed three weeks ago and the nightmare in the jungles of Sulawesi was still fresh in Wilkes’s mind.