Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes felt as if he were on some wild theme park ride with a never-ending ticket. After Myanmar, the Eurocopter had flown them to Bangkok, where Jenny Tadzic had disembarked with the agents they’d rescued from General Trip’s holiday camp. There, a Royal Australian Air Force C-130 was waiting for him and Monroe on the apron, its turboprops spinning and a clearance to take off granted. The LM stood on the aircraft’s ramp motioning them to get a hurry on. Wilkes and Monroe jogged over.
‘Hey, boss, s’up?’ Lance Corporal Gary Ellis walked down the ramp towards them, grinning.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ said Wilkes, just a touch confused.
‘Hey, that’s the kind of welcome I was getting from the missus just before we called it quits,’ Ellis yelled over the noise of the Herc’s spinning props. ‘The rest of our blokes are in Jakarta, waiting for us.’
‘Jakarta?’ Wilkes was surprised, and curious. ‘What gives?’
‘Those coordinates you sent back from Myanmar, boss. Someone in Canberra had the bright idea to put us on standby in case you turned up with the goods. We’ve been hanging out for a few days with the Kopassus. Do you know a Captain Mahisa? I hope so, ’cause he says he knows you.’
The LM motioned the men to take their seats on the bench that ran down the plane’s fuselage, and buckle in.
‘The coordinates put the terrorist digs on the southern end of Flores. That means the target is more likely to be Darwin. Jakarta falls outside the drone’s standard range. Just. But the terrorists could have modified the thing, so no one’s taking any chances. Also, the weather looks like it’s going to come good any day now, and you know what that means…People are shitting themselves like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘So what are we doing about it?’
‘Kick freckle, boss. A dawn HALO drop. Like, in half a dozen hours.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Wilkes in disbelief.
‘Nah, fair dinkum.’
Ellis talked Wilkes and Monroe through the essentials of the planned high altitude low opening parachute insertion. They’d be jumping out the back of an Indonesian C-130 with the Kopassus, possibly men from the same battalion Wilkes and his men had fought against less than six months ago – Ellis had been reluctant to enquire. The irony of the partnership Wilkes found hard to shake. But that was the world they were living in: today’s enemy, tomorrow’s best bud. He felt the scar on his cheek and snorted. A Kopassus bullet had given it to him. He’d completely forgotten about it, probably because the scar had stopped itching and he hadn’t been in front of too many mirrors recently. Wounds heal – just like relationships. The Hercules accelerated down the runway with the usual deafening, high-pitched scream transferred into its passengers’ earholes. Wilkes sat back, squashed plugs into his ears and closed his eyes.
‘Hey, sleeping beauty. Rise and shine,’ said Atticus Monroe what seemed like only seconds later, shaking Wilkes roughly.
‘What?’ said Wilkes, momentarily disoriented.
The slight nose-up attitude of the C-130 lowered along with a drop in the engine note. They’d begun to descend.