‘What’s the OA?’ asked Wilkes, studying the figures.
‘Our opening altitude is three thousand five hundred feet. You and your men will exit last. Your OA is up to you. Your chutes have a mean descent rate of around fifteen feet per second.’
‘Yeah, but with all the gear we’ll be carrying, it’ll be more like twenty feet per second.’
‘So you’ll be dropping slightly faster than my men,’ said Mahisa.
Wilkes nodded.
Mahisa considered that and then continued. ‘Give us six seconds to exit. How you get your people on the ground is your business.’
Wilkes and his men had done this so many times before, he didn’t need to think about it too hard. He did not, however, want to be anywhere near the Indonesians. He hadn’t trained with these Kopassus and had no idea of their capabilities. ‘We’ll follow four seconds later and exit in a packet. We’ll open at four thousand five hundred. I’ve had a look at your nav boards. They’re different to the ones we use,’ Wilkes said politely. In fact, they seemed downright primitive. ‘You happy with them?’ The navigation board strapped to a man’s chest housed a variety of electrical, magnetic and pressure instruments enabling the jumper to ‘fly blind’ and still hit the target zone. Jumping out the back of a plane at night required some deft in-flight manoeuvring when under the parachute canopy, more so if it was a HAHO jump, a high altitude high opening jump, and a particular landing spot was to be reached with certainty. But in this instance, it should be a pretty simple exercise. There were no waypoints to hit on the descent and the winds were predictable. Wilkes decided not to carry a nav board, and would rely instead on the altimeter strapped to his wrist and the occasional stickybeak through his NVGs.
‘Compared to your system, ours is a bit old fashioned, but it works,’ Mahisa said, jealously casting his eye over the high tech Australian nav board lying on a parachute container.
‘What about oxygen?’
‘Inbound, connect to the aircraft’s oxygen system. Three minutes out, the red jump lights at the rear hatch will give us the signal and we’ll switch to bottled oxygen.’
Wilkes nodded. SOP.
Mahisa put down the pen and vented his JSLIST suit, pulling it in and out at the neck like a bellows to circulate the air inside it. ‘I notice your men have orange chemlights and reflective strips on their helmet and parachute container. We use green. Just follow us in,’ said Mahisa. ‘The terrorists must have a runway of some considerable length if they are intending to launch a drone. We’ll be making for that if we can pick it out.’
‘So will the terrorists,’ Wilkes observed.
‘Yes. The enemy might hear our chutes open, even if they can’t see us. And if they have sophisticated radar, they’ll be able to pick us up long before we exit.’
Well, thought Wilkes, Mahisa was living up to his first impression of the man. He was an honest, straight talker. Frankly, there were better ways to approach the camp. It was right on the sea. A submarine insertion would have been the safest method for the attacking force, but there was no time. They had to go in hard and fast with guns blazing, and hope to demoralise the enemy.
‘Okay, so we’re on the ground. What next? We’ve got different comms to you and your people, we speak a different language, our signals and training are foreign.’ All this was Wilkes’s major concern. This op had been thought up by politicians and cobbled together at the last minute. There were real operational considerations that appeared to have been overlooked, such as how were the two groups of soldiers going to take this camp without whacking each other in the confusion on the ground?
‘My men will head into the encampment’s centre to disorient the terrorists’ command HQ and, hopefully, discourage any organised defence. I was thinking that your men could secure the landing strip itself and work around the perimeter of the encampment.’
‘Okay, but how do we prevent blue on blue?’ said Wilkes, his major concern.
‘Do not advance into the centre of the encampment until after first light,’ said Mahisa. ‘And then, enter the camp only on my command and by a route marked with chemlights. I’ll need your tactical radio frequency so that I can brief you on developments in the camp itself.’
Wilkes took the marker pen and wrote his frequency in large numerals on the whiteboard. All that sounded reasonable, he thought. Mahisa’s plan would keep the Kopassus and the SAS separate until they could be integrated without anyone getting trigger-happy.
One of the Kopassus men interrupted the briefing and handed Mahisa three JSLIST suits. The captain passed them to Wilkes, Monroe and Ellis.
‘What’s our time at the DIP?’ asked Monroe.
Wilkes raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s a DIP?’
‘Hey, I thought you were experienced jumpers,’ said Monroe. ‘Are you sure you amateurs know what you’re doing? A DIP is a desired impact point.’
‘Oh, you mean time on target,’ said Wilkes, smiling.
‘Whatever,’ said Monroe, waving a hand dismissively.
Despite the hard time he was giving Monroe, Wilkes had heard the term DIP before. It was American. If Atticus knew the jargon, did that mean he also knew how to HALO jump? It didn’t matter, anyway. Wilkes had long since given up telling Atticus what he could and couldn’t do.
‘We should hit the target at zero five four zero,’ said Mahisa.
‘Sunrise is…?’ asked Monroe.
‘Zero six hundred.’
‘Perfect,’ said Wilkes, forgetting about Monroe’s experience or his lack of it. ‘We’ll be coming out of the night sky, with just enough light to see by.’ But then, maybe it wasn’t so perfect. If the navy arrived at zero seven thirty, the ground battle would be more than an hour and a half old. A lot could happen in that time, and if it was still going on, most of what was going on would be bad.
‘Can we count on any air support?’ Wilkes asked.
‘No.’ Mahisa shook his head. ‘No one wants the VX accidentally atomised by a stray dumb bomb.’
Fabulous, thought Wilkes.
‘Any other questions?’ asked Mahisa.
Wilkes shook his head. Actually, he had a barrage of them, but Mahisa wouldn’t be able to provide any answers. Mostly, the questions concerned what resistance they’d be meeting at the encampment and those answers were in the laps of the gods.
Perhaps the same questions were also buzzing around Mahisa’s brain because he said, ‘Tom, if you’ll excuse me. There’s something I want to do before we go.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘You should know that the God of Islam is not the God of the men we go to fight. Theirs is a manmade abomination created to justify the evil in their black hearts. Do you believe in God, Tom?’
Wilkes shook his head. ‘No.’ A straight answer to a straight question.
‘Then you are an infidel. That, to the vast majority of Muslims, means that you are a non-believer. It doesn’t make you my enemy. But I feel sorry for you; that you have been denied His love and His wisdom. Maybe, one day, you will see the light, my friend, and I hope that light is the God of Mohammed, may His name be praised.’ Mahisa put his hand on Wilkes’s shoulder.
‘Maybe,’ said Wilkes with a smile. He watched the captain join his men at prayer, laying small rugs on the hard concrete floor.
Watching the soldiers face Mecca and commune with the God of Islam touched Wilkes in an odd way. Even if they were wearing JSLIST suits, the sight gave him an inkling of hope, like the small crack of light that escapes from a closed door. He was proud to serve with these men and for a moment he felt that he was one of them.
The interior of the Indonesian air force C-130 was even noisier than the Australian version, and the sweat that had poured out of Wilkes when on the ground in the JSLIST suit had become cold and clammy now with the temperature one degree at eighteen thousand feet. All the men were wearing helmets and oxygen masks not unlike those worn by pilots, a necessity for clear thinking above altitudes of fourteen thousand feet above mean sea level, unless one had time to become accustomed to it. The helmets and masks and the noise of the turboprops prohibited conversation. Occasional hand signals were exchanged but the isolation left each man alone with his thoughts.