Rahim saw this in the brief instant before death ended for all time his ability to observe anything.
Duat heard the news on the radio first, the short-wave signal swinging in and out of reception, but what he heard quickened his pulse. Babu Islam…VX…weapon of mass destruction…Jakarta or Darwin… He confirmed it on the Internet and then on satellite television. There was mass hysteria at Jakarta’s railway stations and surrounding airports as people climbed over each other to leave the city. There had been shootings and riots, and one 747 had exploded when a man, maddened at having been denied a seat on a plane out of the city, had somehow managed to drive a van onto the apron and crashed it into the jumbo as it refuelled. The United States donated two hundred thousand NBC suits to the city — all the spares they had — a number totally inadequate to protect the population. There had been many casualties and deaths at one dispersion centre when stocks of the protective suits had run out.
Duat shrugged off any responsibility for the victims of the violence. The Prophet is preferable for the believers even to their own selves. The quote from the Qur’an came back to him easily. The people of Jakarta, if they truly loved Mohammed, should rejoice. They had been granted the opportunity to give their lives for the creation of a state dedicated to Allah’s greater glory. There were similar reports from Australia of death and mayhem evoked by the prospect of a VX attack on Darwin. And that was certainly good news.
But how, he wondered, did the authorities know that Babu Islam possessed VX and the drone? What else did they know that they were keeping to themselves? Did they know the location of the encampment? The time to act was now, and not just because the security of the group’s plans might possibly be in the process of breaking down. Several men and women had recently died of the mysterious disease. Many more were sick. Rahim, the only man in the encampment with even rudimentary medical knowledge, had himself died of a heroin overdose. And now Hitu Hendra was seriously ill and the whole plan was at risk of unravelling. The encampment would have to be abandoned and the sooner the better. He walked to Hendra’s hut and found the man sitting in the shade of a tree, sweat pouring from skin turned the grey of rotting meat. A foul stench rose from him.
‘I am sorry for the smell, Emir,’ he said when he saw Duat’s hand cover his nose. ‘I no longer have the energy to keep myself clean.’
‘Can I help you up, Hitu?’ asked Duat, deeply concerned for the success of his plans when he saw the man’s deteriorating condition.
‘Yes. If I sit down too long I fall sleep and then the nightmares come.’
That frightened Duat, for he too had started having the most frightful dreams, something others had complained of as the sickness overcame them, and he was also finding it increasingly difficult to keep food down.
Duat held Hendra under an arm and helped him to his feet. He was light and his skin felt waxy, turning blue with bruising under his fingers as he watched. ‘The weapon must be launched against the infidels now, Hitu. We have no time left.’
Hendra managed a nod. The pressure of Duat’s fingers hurt his skin, but without the support to help him stand he knew he would collapse. ‘The weather is improving,’ he said. Duat noticed that a stack of printed meteorological reports was wedged under his other arm. ‘I believe the conditions we want will be with us the day after tomorrow. Allahu Akbar.’
‘Allahu Akbar,’ said Duat, lifting a ladle from a bucket of water to the man’s lips. God is great.
Nam Sa River, Myanmar
The US Blackhawk, cleared through Thai airspace, landed Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes and Lance Corporal Gary Ellis on a remote hilltop just inside the northern Thai border with Myanmar. Monroe had wanted to ‘tag along’, but Wilkes had vetoed it. Their partnership in Israel was a temporary one and Wilkes was no longer seconded to the CIA. This particular leg of the mission required stealth, something that seemed to go against the American’s grain. Commander Niven had shrugged when Monroe had complained. ‘Sorry, but the call is Warrant Officer Wilkes’s,’ he’d said. Monroe was pissed about it but Wilkes was sure the friendship would survive.
Wilkes and Ellis crossed into Myanmar just after sunset, when the air had cooled appreciably and smelled of rain and composting humus, of decay and regeneration. They made good time to the planned observation point twenty-five klicks inside Myanmar, because most of it’d been spent on the back of an elephant, the animal’s swaying flanks rustling the grasses and leaves with a slow four/four beat.
‘American, American,’ the old elephant handler had said when Wilkes and Ellis bailed him up a handful of klicks into their trek. After his initial surprise at seeing two heavily armed soldiers from the West, the man had smiled with a mouth full of glistening black teeth and said, ‘Rocky, Rocky,’ and jabbed and hooked at the air. American? Well, it was close enough so Wilkes let it pass and, besides, he’d be paying with US dollars, the universal lubricant. He brought out a fistful of greenbacks and struck a deal on the spot.
There was not much to do on the elephant and it gave Wilkes time to reflect. Despite everything going on, his mind kept wandering back to Annabelle. He still couldn’t understand how they’d managed to hit the wall so hard. They’d talked a couple of times on the phone but the conversations had been strained. She’d moved to Sydney and, as usual, he was somewhere he couldn’t reveal. The fact that Belle was in Sydney was good, and bad. Townsville wasn’t under threat but, probably irrationally, he felt better about her being further away from Darwin.
Wilkes and Ellis arrived within two kilometres of the observation hill with time to spare. Their handler readily accepted an additional cash bonus, and somehow Wilkes managed to convey that there’d be more to come if he could keep the pachyderm’s motor running and take them back to the border before sunrise.
The night swallowed the elephant as it turned noisily, snorting through its trunk, and headed back down the trail, the handler waving at the soldiers and tapping the beast’s ears with a stick. Wilkes and Ellis both verified the time. The moon would rise above the hills at 0446, so there were plenty of hours of complete darkness to use as cover as they completed their tasks. Wilkes heard a coughing sound carried on the faint breeze. ‘Tiger,’ he said just above a whisper.
‘I know,’ said Ellis, who had a brief flash of himself hanging helplessly from the mouth of a large cat as it trotted proudly off to its cubs, and he shuddered. Eating a bullet was one thing, becoming an animal’s dinner was something else entirely, and he gave the pistol grip of his silenced M4 an involuntary squeeze to reassure himself.
Wilkes picked up on Ellis’s nervousness. ‘It’d be more scared of you than you are of it,’ he said.
‘I doubt it, boss,’ said Ellis smiling, his teeth almost fluorescent against his painted, camouflaged skin. He adjusted the NVG’s harness over his head, tightening it, and switched on the unit’s remote light source. One eye filled with green daylight, the jungle trail ahead now clearly illuminated and defined.