Crystal Coffin (19 page)

The children were being herded with the women towards the creek.

His heart pounded high in his chest, knowing, as they did, what was planned for them. The women cried, struggling with their last load as screaming children clung to their legs in the rain.

It was 7.30pm and night was falling.

Locklin chewed on his lip, knowing he was about to give up the best chance he had of rescuing his mates. He didn't need to remind himself of the reason they'd been brought to East Timor. As he watched the huddled group of frightened children, it was obvious. He squatted in the underbrush and pulled his Steyr to his shoulder.

He looked down his Ninox sights and felt for the steel button on the bottom of the weapon's trigger. He pulled the button outwards and his semi-automatic rifle switched to being fully automatic. He was now holding the equivalent of a very noisy submachine gun, but at least it would sound like the weapon they were about to use.

Giant stood guard over the group with his stolen Steyr, smiling while the women set their final stretchers down. The women gathered the children behind them, crying and begging for the little ones to be set free while an eight-year-old boy shouted defiantly from behind his mother's skirt.

The three militiamen stepped abreast of each other, Skinny with an AK47, while the others fumbled with the safeties on their stolen Steyrs. Skinny was the closest and as Locklin targeted an infrared sight on Skinny's temple, the other two stepped in line with him. In one rapid burst, Locklin realised he could drop all three of them like dominos.

He let the air out of his chest to halt his breathing and steadied his aim.

The three men pulled their weapons to their shoulders. They levelled their muzzles at the crying villagers. The rain fell heavier and the women begged for their children's lives. A shout rang out from behind their skirts and the eight year old squeezed out and bolted for the bush.

Locklin fired and the militiamen fell dead before they could swear. He snapped the safety back on his Steyr, shouldered his weapon and bolted after the boy.

‘Hide!' he shouted in Tetum, as he ran past the women. ‘Up there!' And he pointed to the ridge on the far side of the creek.

He followed the boy's muddy footprints a hundred metres, realising he was headed for the track leading down the range to the next community. And something else was already after him.

Paw prints of a medium-sized dog were imprinted over the small toes that were headed south.

Locklin lengthened his stride as he cut what he hoped would be an intercept course through forest country that was unfamiliar to him. He spotted the head of the child bobbing over the top of the long grass as he passed through a small clearing inside the forest and realised that if the boy made it to the bigger clearing at the top of the ridge, he'd be in full view of Cleverboy with the submachine gun on the seven o'clock gate. Locklin veered left, accelerated and tackled the child at the edge of the top clearing.

The boy rolled under him with the momentum and bit hard on the hand that Locklin clamped over his mouth.

‘Australian! Australian! Shhh!' Locklin whispered hoarsely into the boy's ear. And as the boy relaxed, a fierce set of teeth snarled less than five centimetres from his ear. A large yellow paw scratched at Locklin's arm and another paw placed the full weight of the dog on his shoulder as it growled even closer to his cheek. It grabbed the back of Locklin's collar, its teeth brushing his neck as it incapacitated the soldier on the ground. Locklin couldn't roll over to fight the dog without hurting the child or leaving him vulnerable to the hungry animal. And as his mind raced, he heard another set of footsteps.

He braced himself, expecting to feel a bullet in his back.

Instead, a woman panted quietly to catch her breath as she called the dog to heel.

He rolled slowly off the boy to look around and the woman landed beside him, kissing the child who wrinkled his nose and tried to pull away. Then she kissed Locklin, smothering his hands in wet kisses before sobbing against his chest. He rolled to his feet, pulling them both with him. And as he withdrew them to the safer depths of the forest with the dog following, he realised that she had a belly full of baby. He asked her in her own dialect if she was okay, and she nodded.

But the night was dark and growing darker.

He circled the village wider than ever, using his night-vision goggles to help guide the frightened fugitives over the rough terrain. He carried them across the creek downstream and picked his way carefully back along the ridge to where he expected the others to be hiding. He passed them without realising it until he felt something tap his helmet. It was a small stone that rolled down over his shoulder and as he turned, he saw the old woman from the cooking fire signal him from a thorny thicket.

He smiled to see that the children were out of the weather now. The women had been busy, draping the thicket with large waxy leaves from a sugar palm to keep off the rain. They were all shivering, but at least they were alive.

‘Obrigado, obrigado!' the women echoed in grateful whispers and he pushed his finger to his lips. He didn't need their thanks, he needed their silent cooperation.

‘Any come looking?' he asked in a language that he knew mainly in theory.

They shook their heads. ‘None come, none come, none come,' the whispers circled.

‘Good,' he said. ‘Did you get their rifles?'

And again, their heads shook. ‘Hide,' said one in Tetum. ‘We ran and hide.'

‘We don't know guns,' said another. ‘Only run.'

He nodded. They were frightened mothers, Locklin reminded himself, with frightened children to get to safety and they'd done that, despite everything they'd been through. He tried to reassure them with an awkward smile.

‘Can anyone tell time?' he asked, finishing his sentence in English because he didn't know the Tetum phrase. He brushed the mud off his watch and pointed to it. ‘Time?'

The boy's mother nodded. ‘I learned some English,' she said, touching the face of his watch. ‘I learned time in church.'

He smiled, not realising how much he'd missed hearing his native tongue in the last few hours and gave her his watch. Then he unpacked his field radio and realised he had a new problem. There was no moon, no starlight at all. His Ninox goggles compensated the heavy black by intensifying the translucent eerie greens at lower light frequencies to a level that was sufficient to recognise shapes and movement, but he only had one pair, and two people that needed them.

He took out a slim-line torch from a side pocket on the radio's bag and fitted a red lens cap to it before taking off his goggles. He couldn't leave them on. They would intensify the dull red light to the equivalent of a blinding flare.

By itself, the torch provided just enough glow to see the receiver and the numbers that he needed the woman to dial, without ruining their natural night vision or being too obvious to anyone who might be hunting them in the dark forest. He looked over his shoulder towards the village and realised that was a possibility.

Shorty may have heard the weapons fire. He would have been expecting a reasonable burst anyway to dispose of the women and children, but eighteen minutes had slipped by since Locklin had reduced eleven of his men to eight. Shorty would have figured on close to twenty minutes for his men to feed the giant croc and hike back up to the village which, Locklin realised, meant that if they hadn't been missed already they soon would be.

‘It's just like a phone,' he said, setting up the radio, but from the look on her face she didn't know what a phone was. ‘Wait ten minutes,' he said pointing to his watch again. ‘Then lift this, push this, and talk into this.'

She nodded, pointing to everything. ‘Lift this, push this, talk this.'

‘Yes,' he said, smiling to encourage her. ‘You say, ‘Charlie Six to Sunray' and then tell them what happened.'

‘Charlie Six to Sunray, yes. I tell them Lock … lin,' she said, carefully pronouncing the surname-only badge on his chest, ‘Locklin saved us.'

‘
No!
' he said urgently. ‘Don't mention
me
. I'm not supposed to …' How could he explain it? ‘I'm not supposed to be here. You'll get me in trouble. You'll get the
whole of Australia
in trouble,' he said, not really exaggerating. ‘You can tell them we're here. Tell them we need help, but if you tell them what I did, Australia will have to leave East Timor, okay? Other countries will take over then.'

Her eyes widened in disbelief but he knew she understood. Her smile sagged to a frown. ‘You will come back for us?'

He touched her shoulder, meaning no. ‘I have to help my friends. You wait until the shooting stops. When the choppers fly over, you come down. It should be safe then.'

‘What do I tell them? They will ask who saved us.'

‘Tell them … tell them a dead man saved you,' he said, thinking quickly.

Worry filled her eyes, but he didn't have time to explain. She kissed her finger and touched it to his ear.

‘Be safe and listen to our thanks on every wind,' she said.

He nodded and headed quickly back to the village. He crossed the creek again, eyeing the croc and giving it a wide berth as he saw that all three targets were still lying beside their weapons. They hadn't been discovered yet.

Working quickly, he collected the weapons, removed the firing mechanisms and cast them into the water. He couldn't use the Steyrs anymore, but then neither could anyone else and since he already had enough firepower to do the job without rattling when he ran, that was more important.

The bodies of the three militiamen were next to be taken care of. Bodies with bullets meant soldiers with guns and the last thing he needed was Shorty jumping to that conclusion.

Locklin hefted the first body over his shoulder and carried it to the water's edge. No search party would hang around long if they couldn't find a trace of the execution squad or its victims, not this soon after dark. They had a village to hold, and not many men to do it with. With luck they might assume the women had been taken upstream to be shot. Without luck, they'd bolt back and either fortify and make ready for attack, or shoot their hostages and make a run for the border.

He waded into the creek a few steps, past the pine-scented buffer that he'd set up earlier, and rolled the first body into knee-deep water. The splash and the fresh scent of blood immediatly attracted the predator's attention. Before Locklin could repeat the process with the second body, the croc had performed its death roll around the corpse, dragging it into deeper water. It snapped off a few chunks to satisfy its appetite, and then disappeared with its catch to stash the fresh meat under a submerged log to rot for a few days and make it easier to pull apart later. When the croc returned to the surface, it appeared to be smiling. In the water, it could smell enough meat to last a full cycle of moons.

Locklin slipped into the underbrush, hearing the second of the three bodies disappear. He hoped it wouldn't be long before the same thing happened to the third, but he didn't have time to wait around to make sure. Any second now, the Communications Hut back at base would be getting a distress message. He'd left the boy's mother with the children and other women on the same ridge that he'd rigged with the makeshift antennae earlier, so he knew she'd get a good reception. He also knew the brass couldn't refuse a cry for help from civilians, regardless of the weather.

The sky would be full of Blackhawks in about fourteen minutes and unless he did something now, the body of his patrol commander and the others might be not be discovered until they were decomposed. He couldn't carry all of them, he realised, but he could carry one.

Locklin hauled Westy over his shoulder and circled downwind of the east gate, having second thoughts all the way. He could wait for the Blackhawks. Procedures dictated that at least two armoured escorts would accompany an aeromedical evacuation flight, and after getting the call in from a native woman on military equipment, the brass at HQ should have been sufficiently jumpy to leap straight for the textbooks. They'd want their men out safely if possible, he knew, but he also realised they wouldn't risk the political stability of the entire region to do it.

Two armoured escorts, he thought hopefully. Between them, they could put eighteen men on the ground and provide enough air support to wipe out a fifty-man enclave in a few minutes. This village had only nine targets left. But to succeed against semitrained adversaries without casualties, the rescue team would need a plan and time to organise it. Locklin had denied them that time. His mates were dying now and by ensuring a civilian was the one to call for help, he felt sure the brass would be keen to get control of the situation.

They'd be careful, he realised. Militia usually hightailed it and ran after an encounter with Australian forces, but with casualties as bait, the village could just as easily be used as a trap. Landing forces would have to secure the village before attempting to evacuate any wounded, and again he couldn't afford them that time.

There was only one way to make sure his mates got the fastest medical attention possible without getting anyone else killed, and that was to secure the village himself. Then he caught his breath and repositioned the heavy weight on his shoulders.

He crossed the short clearing between the forest and the bananas, and let the body of his commander down between banana suckers overlooking the northwest gate.

He crawled through sweet potato vines and heard more screams from his mates. This time it was Rogers, suggesting loudly that his captors had mothers who were four-legged and barked. Someone else started shouting. Then he heard four shots from a Steyr and more screams, reminding him again that waiting wasn't an option.

‘Hang in there guys,' he said under his breath.