‘Tom, excuse me. I must get a message off. I am truly sorry but I must radio my superiors immediately.’ Mahisa turned excitedly and chatted with a subordinate, who then ran off to shout at the men handling the unit’s communications. Wilkes understood the captain’s relief. His family lived in Jakarta — wife, three children, mother, father, sisters, brothers; the whole extended family. The panic that had hit the Indonesian city in the wake of the news that a deadly nerve agent could be on its way had already caused much death and destruction there.
The SAS soldiers followed the Kopassus back along the chemlit pathway towards the encampment.
‘Tom, James and I are going to join an Indon patrol and have a look around,’ said Atticus in Wilkes’s earpiece. ‘You cool with that?’
Wilkes turned and nodded. ‘Just make sure you’re home before dark and don’t talk to strangers.’
‘Okay, Mom,’ said Monroe.
Five men split from the main group and headed off in the direction of the beach.
The number of Indonesian troops milling about in the centre of the encampment was starting to swell as the men completed their sweeps. From the body language alone it was evident that most were bewildered by what they had seen. Wilkes, like everyone else, was in the dark about what had happened here and, not understanding Bahasa, he was not party to any intelligence gathered by Mahisa’s men. Altogether, not a particularly ideal situation. But what Wilkes and his troop did know was disturbing enough: that the drone had been launched but the cavalry had arrived too late to save the day, and that within a short period of time, an Australian city would have the dubious honour of being the first in the western world to host the arrival of a weapon of mass destruction.
Two of Mahisa’s men pushed through the gathering knot of soldiers and presented something to their CO — a couple of empty syringes. Wilkes couldn’t hear what was being said, and nor would he have been able to understand it if he could, but the men were excited about something.
‘Tom, we have located the VX!’ Wilkes heard Mahisa say, his voice cracking through the static in his earpiece. ‘There are two drums, two halves of the agent probably, plus what may have been a third mixing drum. And then there are these,’ he said, the empty syringes presented on his gloved palm. The word ‘Atropine’ was stencilled in red on the syringes. ‘From these, would it be reasonable to assume one, possibly two people in the camp knew they had been poisoned by the agent?’
‘So then we should have a couple of comparatively healthy terrorists lurking around someplace,’ said Wilkes.
‘Unless one of them was the man who appears to have been whacked,’ said Ellis. ‘He’s in the photos with Duat. Do you reckon he could have been the brains behind the UAV?’
‘Possible.’ The same thought had occurred to Wilkes. If the terrorists believed they were about to get pounced on, silencing the man who could tip off the enemy on the drone’s flight plan made plenty of sense. ‘What about Duat? Has he turned up yet?’
‘Negative, boss,’ Ellis said. ‘We haven’t found him. Can’t speak for the Indons.’
‘Us neither,’ said Mahisa. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t here?’
‘Or he left in a hurry ’cause the party was turning to shit,’ said the voice of Atticus Monroe. ‘We found their armoury. You won’t believe how many explosives these people have. Enough to prosecute a small war. Something odd…a couple of heavy cases of something have been dragged down to the waterline. Recent, too. The tide hasn’t washed away any of the tracks. There’s one boat there — they probably had another.’
‘Looks like we got ourselves a fugitive, boss,’ Ellis said, trying and failing to imitate Tommy Lee Jones’s southern drawl.
‘Great,’ said Wilkes. Duat could certainly have helped them with their enquiries, but it appeared he’d given himself the antidote and scarpered, leaving them to deal with a drone loaded with VX winging its merry way to Darwin.
‘Boss.’ It was Littlemore’s voice in his earpiece. ‘Come have a look at this. Walk to the first intersection and take your first left. Found their comms suite.’
Three minutes later, Wilkes, Monroe, Mahisa, several Kopassus and most of Wilkes’s troop were standing on a veranda groaning with enough technology to monitor a moon shot. Much of it, however, had been smashed. ‘Any of this junk work?’ Wilkes picked up the remains of a CPU and tossed it back onto the bench.
‘Give me a minute, boss,’ said Littlemore. It was impossible to tell who was who under the JSLIST suit, but the voice at least was unmistakable. Wilkes pictured Littlemore’s flame-red hair matted against his skull under the suit’s hood. Now that the sun was up, the temperature inside the chemical warfare suits had soared. ‘Most of it’s trashed, boss. I’d say someone guessed we were coming and tossed a few grenades in here.’
The hope was that there’d be information lying around that would help locate the drone, but it was a faint hope.
‘Anyone for a game of snooker?’ It was Morgan. ‘Look what we found under the corner pocket.’ He and Robson stepped up on the veranda and one of the men tossed a brick made from epoxy resin on the bench. A corner had been knocked off and white powder crumbled from it. ‘They make the tables and sandwich these between layers of slate. I don’t reckon the stuff in the middle is lemon sherbet, either,’ he said.
‘Jesus,’ said Wilkes. The heroin. This was Jenny Tadzic’s big unanswered question. The encampment was an epicentre for the export of death and destruction — guns to Papua New Guinea, drugs to the streets of Sydney and Melbourne and, soon, nerve agent to Darwin. At least evacuation in the northern city was well underway.
Littlemore had started up one of the electrical generators that powered the suite and was fiddling with various remotes. ‘About the only thing working is the telly, believe it or not.’ He turned it on. The set took a few seconds to warm up. ‘Jesus, boss,’ he said when the picture materialised. ‘I think you’d better come and have a look at this.’
Wilkes crossed to the monitor and his heart leapt into his mouth. Standing in front of the camera on the empty streets of Darwin was the last person he expected to see there.
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Annabelle Gilbert felt like one of the little ducks that go back and forth in a shooting gallery. There was potentially a WMD on its way and yet here she was, waiting for it to arrive. What the hell am I doing in this place? She lay in the unfamiliar bed struggling in vain for the release of sleep, and just succeeded in pulling out the sheets and making things even more uncomfortable as she tossed and turned. The heat had a lot to do with her inability to get comfortable. Something had happened to the hotel’s air-con and the mercury had begun to rise immediately thereafter. The blokes had been unable to fix it quickly and the hotel maintenance staff had long since gone south, so the technicians gave up trying, lest they do permanent damage to the system. The windows in all the rooms had been taped up and covered with plastic sheeting. A small, noisy fan pushed close, fetid air around the room, clicking noisily as it swept from left to right. ‘Five star, my arse,’ she said quietly.
Annabelle took her mind back to the previous day — the airport, the NBC suit, the chaos and then utter stillness of Darwin itself. At the briefing downstairs in the dining room, the army had actually been pretty decent about things. The restrictions had been waived on reporting the scenes at the airport, for example. The army had taken on board Weaver’s point about personal video cameras. They’d basically been given the run of the place, except for the military establishments, which was fair enough. Lance Corporal B. Face — whose real name was Victor Kidde, though his friends called him Billy — and the armed escort had been their constant companions for the day. But the attached security was a waste of time and manpower because Darwin was a ghost town. The place was truly creepy. A city with absolutely no people in it was a depressing, spooky place. There were no cars, no sounds, no movement at all. It was just like one of those mock towns built in the fifties by the American army to destroy with its A-bombs. Woolworths had been utterly cleaned out, stripped bare. The windows were broken and the shelves had mostly been ripped down. Anything in the way of food had been taken, clothes, even the mannequins had walked, although some of these had been torn apart and were lying broken in the road, arms outstretched like people calling for help. Annabelle shook her head. Her imagination was working overtime. Sleep was going to be impossible.