Rogue Element (38 page)

The radio journalist sat in the press lounge at Kingsford Smith Airport. Other journalists from across the media spectrum surrounded her. This was the best show in town, without a doubt, and there was genuine expectation in the room.

The two survivors of QF-1 were coming home. They’d spent a couple of days in hospital recovering from their ordeal, and were likely to be physically and mentally exhausted for a while yet. The journos had been instructed to keep their questions brief and not to overstress them. This could be one of those great survival-against-all-odds stories the public ate up.

Here in this very room, the survivors, both in their twenties, would be reunited with their families. It promised to be quite an emotional scene. Amongst all the sadness of so many people lost, everyone hoped some joy would come out of the reunion about to take place.

The RAAF Hercules transport which had brought the two home was taxiing to its holding point on the apron. Several medical staff rushed to the door as its engines spooled down. The door was flung open and a knot of people instantly formed at the base of the mobile stairs. A young woman appeared at the doorway of the aircraft, smiled and stepped into the sea of doctors, nurses and officials. A man followed, head bandaged, and joined the turmoil.

The radio journalist switched her view to the monitor. It was already happening up there on the screen. Bloody TV bastards always got first access. No doubt a report was going out live on the networks, interrupting children’s shows, soap operas, and home-shopping programs. The thought really annoyed her. The brief flash the journalist
managed to get of the young woman standing at the doorway of the plane surprised her. She was beautiful. Asian.

A door opened behind the dais, diverting the journalist’s attention from the TV screen, and several worried-looking people filed in. The parents, obviously. One set was Indonesian. The radio journalist checked her briefing notes. That’s right, she remembered now. The girl who’d survived was Indonesian, an Australian citizen but born in Indonesia of Indonesian parents. The girl’s mother had a tissue out and was dabbing an eye. The energy levels in the room surged. Double doors off to one side banged open and the two survivors, surrounded by medicos, RAAF personnel, diplomats, cameramen and Qantas execs, burst in. The parents were instantly on their feet, rushing to comfort their children. Flashes went off, video lights blazed. It was beautiful.

Elizabeth had been given the new name of Tuti Murthi, and she was feeling tense about it. This was a serious acting job. Being Suluang’s lover was comparatively easy. The people looking at her with sympathetic faces wanted facts, tears,
feelings
.

Tuti had been well briefed, as had the agent playing her fellow survivor, Vince, the man who had helped her deal with Suluang. So were the alleged parents up on stage, who were as much Tuti’s parents as she was a QF-1 survivor.

They had to put on a good show. They would all have to endure the spotlight for a couple of days, then it would be announced that a magazine had bought exclusive rights to their story. The tale would be written, pictures taken, then they’d all beg to be left alone to get on with
their lives. She’d get on a plane and disappear.

The journos were getting ready to ask their questions. Tuti was not going to enjoy this. She looked forward to the moment when she could write the name on a piece of paper, screw it up, throw it in the bin, and move the hell on.

Niven watched the show on TV. All the major networks covered it, interrupting their regular shows with the reunion. The two stand-ins were doing a great job. There was a tap on the door.

‘Come,’ said Niven.

‘Good, hoped you’d be watching,’ said Griffin as he put his head round the door. ‘Mind if I sit in?’

‘No, take a seat.’

Griffin sat and smiled at the news report. ‘This was a great idea. Yours?’

‘No, actually. It was Joe’s – Joe Light’s.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Griffin said.

‘Seriously. Had it completely figured out. He pointed out that, as the passenger manifest hadn’t been released, all we had to do was take his and Suryei’s names off it and, bingo, it could never be proved they were on the flight.’

‘Shit, that’s clever. So simple. The guy should be working for us.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ said Niven.

Joe and Suryei had been put on a plane home. Flying wasn’t something either of them was keen on, but they weren’t given a choice. Fortunately, the flight had been uneventful, even boring, and she decided that boredom was a good thing when it came to flying. Thankfully, after her apprehension had faded, sleep had come. Counselling had been a big help. At least now she could close her eyes without the nightmares invading the darkness. But she knew they were in her head somewhere, dreams that made her sweat with fear.

The aircraft was now descending. Suryei glanced at Joe, asleep in the seat beside her. She’d given up trying to analyse her feelings for him, and they’d both needed the intimacy while recovering at a facility she guessed was in Hawaii. At first it had been painful, even difficult, finding positions to make love that didn’t aggravate either her injuries or Joe’s, especially when they’d had to find out-of-the-way places for privacy.

The bandages were off her forearms now. The burns had been worse than she’d thought. They’d given her skin grafts at the hospital and the results were astonishing. Another week and it would be difficult to see how badly she’d been burned. She saw in her mind the flames that had caused the injury, but the truly ghastly details had been packed way down deep in her subconscious where the nightmares lived.

Both Suryei and Joe had contracted a mild case of malaria in the jungle, fortunately the kind with no long-term effects or damage that couldn’t be treated easily with drugs. A few of Joe’s scratches had become septic, but even the nastiest of them was now healing well.

For Joe, not surprisingly, the broken rib was causing the most problems. The bullet had torn up the muscles in his
shoulder pretty badly when it had exited, and he still grimaced when he moved the wrong way. It would be a good three months with plenty of physio before he was fully fit and back in the gym.

Joe and Suryei had seen the papers from Australia while they were recovering. The pictures of the two ‘survivors’ were everywhere. The woman playing her was pretty. The man had an ear missing, an injury the papers said was sustained in the crash.

Joe’s clever idea to take their names off the passenger list would allow them to return to some semblance of a normal life. Suryei gazed out the window. She went overseas so often that her friends no longer asked where she was going or when she’d return. And these days she worked freelance, so there was no employer to answer to. But her family could prove difficult. They’d been worried sick about her and would be waiting at Arrivals. When Suryei had phoned her parents to let them know she was still alive, they had first gone into shock. Anger had followed. Then joy. They’d thought she was dead. The itinerary she’d left them had listed QF-1 as her outbound plane. Qantas had refused to tell them whether their daughter was in fact a passenger on the flight, but Suryei’s silence had confirmed their worst fears.

Suryei’s explanation of all this had been thoroughly constructed and rehearsed beforehand. She would say that she had changed arrangements at the last minute, getting on an earlier flight with a different carrier. At Bangkok, she’d headed straight for the jungle. She’d still be there, deep in the hills with her camera, if not for an accident with a kerosene lamp that had burned her forearms. She’d known nothing about the Qantas plane until she’d
returned to Bangkok. She had then called her parents immediately, knowing they’d be worried.

The Australians and Americans at the recovery facility had provided both Joe and Suryei with relevant hotel and credit card accounts and receipts to cover their last couple of weeks. Their flight details had been amended on the Australian immigration server. Suryei had even been supplied with rolls of film exposed with rare shots of wildlife unique to the jungles of Thailand. Her story would stack up.

Joe’s was not as tight, but then it didn’t have to be. He had no one close enough to worry about him, just a father who lived in Perth, on the other side of the country. If anyone asked, he would say that he’d decided to holiday in Malaysia, travelling up to Thailand instead of going to England. A last-minute change of plans. He’d done that plenty of times before. No big deal. What’s all the fuss about?

In a month they’d both be taking up work in the US. Joe had been ‘offered’ a job within the NSA at their HQ in Maryland. Suryei had also signed with the local bureau of a national news service they both suspected of being just another strand of the NSA’s intelligence-gathering net. They had been given time to get their things in order and would be back on a plane again in a month’s time. Suryei made a mental note to check whether going to the States by sea was possible.

The aircraft lurched as the flaps extended fully. Suryei’s hand unconsciously went to the Bic lighter suspended on a simple silver chain from her neck. As she’d promised herself, she’d made it into a good luck charm. She rubbed her fingers against the smooth plastic and slowly rolled the friction
wheel under her thumb, finding the action reassuring.

There were plenty of instances of people who had missed planes, trains or boats, and had avoided death because of it. And just like them, Suryei would marvel at her lucky escape. She smiled at the thought. Very few people would ever know exactly how close to the truth that was.

The wheels of the 747 hit the runway hard. The jolt made Suryei jump. Joe woke with a start. ‘Jesus!’ he said, eyes wide, expecting the worst.

ABC Radio 702: ‘A spokesman for Boeing Corporation revealed today preliminary findings into the crash of Qantas Flight 1 that killed a total of four hundred and ten passengers and crew, ruling out terrorism as a possible cause. It is believed that the section of the fuselage called the Electronics and Equipment Bay, which houses vital junctions for the aircraft’s hydraulic systems, was struck by a small meteorite.

‘A Boeing investigator says such a missile could have been travelling at close to 60 000 kilometres per hour, vaporising the section of the plane it struck. The investigator says the wreckage of the plane recovered from Sulawesi is consistent with this theory.

‘A spokesman for Boeing says the chances of an aircraft being hit by a meteorite are around a hundred million to one but that, given the number of jets flying and the many millions of air miles flown each year, a strike by a meteorite
was just a matter of time.’

Time is a difficult beast to tame when writing a book like this, where events are happening in different time zones simultaneously. For example, something can take place in the morning in Sydney, Australia, and affect events in Hawaii the morning of the day before.

To help overcome the confusion, I’ve adopted the standard twenty-four hour Greenwich ‘clock’. This was previously known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and is now officially called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In military parlance, however, the letter designator for this clock is Z, or Zulu.

If I were to adhere strictly to form, 10 am on April 28 in Sydney (Eastern Standard Time) should be written 28041200Z (Sydney is +10 hours UTC).

Once you get used to reading time in this fashion, it’s actually less confusing than it might at first seem. But it becomes less so when juggling several time zones at once. In order to cut down on the mental arithmetic, I’ve omitted the local times in the section headings. But for the sake of general interest, the local times of the major places in this story are:

Sulawesi – UTC plus 8 hrs

Bali – UTC plus 8 hrs

Hawaii – UTC minus 10 hrs

Maryland – UTC minus 5 hrs

East Timor – UTC plus 9 hrs

Jakarta – UTC plus 7 hrs

Canberra – UTC plus 10 hrs

MORE BESTSELLING FICTION AVAILABLE FROM PAN MACMILLAN

Matthew Reilly
SCARECROW

IT IS THE GREATEST BOUNTY HUNT IN HISTORY

FIFTEEN NAMES
There are 15 targets, the finest warriors in the world – commandos, spies, terrorists. And they must all be dead by 12 noon, today. The price on their heads: almost $20 million each.

ONE HERO
Among the names on the target list, one stands out. A Marine named Shane Schofield, call-sign: SCARECROW.

NO LIMITS
And so Schofield is plunged into a headlong race around the world, pursued by a fearsome collection of international bounty hunters – including the ‘Black Knight’, a notoriously ruthless hunter who seems intent on eliminating only Schofield.

The race is on and the pace is frantic as Schofield fights for survival, in the process unveiling a vast international conspiracy and the terrible reason why he cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to live . . .

He led his men into hell in ICE STATION. He protected the President against all odds in AREA 7. This time it’s different.

Because this time he is the target.