Expatriates (20 page)

“The only things of value which we have at present are our arms and our courage. So long as we keep our arms we fancy that we can make good use of our courage; but if we surrender our arms we shall lose our lives as well.”

—Xenophon, The Persian Expedition

E
ven after nearly one hundred truckloads of supplies had been stockpiled at the FLBs, the tents had been erected, and the camouflage nets strung in position, Caleb Burroughs still didn't feel quite “ready.” Each night became progressively more tension-filled along the coast in the Top End, with wild rumors circulating of Indonesian and Malaysian Army landings. The only sleep they got came from the utter exhaustion of working sixteen hours a day.

The same night that there was the first confirmed report of a landing at the Bay of Carpenteria, there was a false alarm on the perimeter of Site G, caused by two feral pigs. A nervous guard felt convinced that Indonesian Kopassus troops were probing their lines. He “dialed Triple Zero” to let loose two full 30-round magazines from his Austeyr, pulling the trigger all the way back to the full auto position in long bursts. The next morning, following a reprimand of the guard, the debate centered on how to roast the 70- and 100-kilo pigs without generating smoke that could be seen from the air. They ended up eating boiled pork, cooked over gas burners, which didn't provide quite the same festive atmosphere of the boar roast that most had expected.

Before the Indonesians arrived and forced the FLBs to hunker down in stealth mode, Caleb's unit was able to distribute gear to some of the local Stay Behinds. The gear included camouflage nets, hand grenades, satchel demolition charges, Claymore command-detonated mines, and dozens of cases of CR1Ms. There were also a few L1A1 rifles available for veterans who lacked combat-capable rifles of their own.

More than ninety-five percent of the population had already fled from the Darwin area. Evacuation was recommended, but not required. Those who remained were mostly scrappy bogans and a few assorted eccentrics. Some of them claimed they were too set in their ways to leave their homes. There were also some naïve internationalist idealists who hoped they could carry on their lives under Indonesian rule. Caleb was worried that some of the latter might talk too much to the Indos. Therefore, everyone involved with the FLBs was warned to keep the FLB locations on a strict “need to know” basis. Similarly, the Stay Behind fighters were warned to avoid all contact with the starry-eyed idealists.

Randall Burroughs and Bruce Drake both accepted job offers with the same commercial explosives company near Brisbane that had recently turned to making military demolitions. With Chuck's urging, Ava Palmer and her parents evacuated to Adelaide and lived with relatives. Rhiannon Jeffords and her daughter, Sarah, accompanied them, with Rhiannon driving the rusty Datsun ute. The truck made it to Adelaide despite a leaking radiator that had to be refilled seven times en route.

Thomas Drake packed up his guns and relocated to his hunting property, which bordered Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. He fully expected to die fighting the first time an Indonesian patrol entered his property, but that never happened.

Wyndham was occupied six days after Darwin. The town had been completely abandoned. Driving the Tanami Road in their Range Rover towing a trailer loaded with gas cans, Alvis and Vivian Edwards relocated from the Kimberley region to Geraldton, but soon after moved on to Perth, where they both worked at a small factory that made camouflage nets for the war effort.

Other than the troops at the FLBs, the only regular Australian Army troops still in or near Darwin were seven widely scattered two-man Stinger missile teams. These teams were directed to lie low, hiding in abandoned houses or bivouacking in small camouflaged tents, waiting for opportunities to shoot down Indonesian aircraft. The teams each had eight Stinger RMP missiles with passive infrared seekers. These missiles were man portable—about the size of a bazooka. After firing, a new missile tube could quickly be mounted to the gripstock, allowing another missile to be launched in less than a minute. The shoulder-fired Stinger was added to the Australian Army inventory shortly before the Crunch to supplement the heavier and more bulky Swedish RBS-70, which was launched from a pedestal mount. This procurement was dubbed Project LAND 19—Interim MANPADS. Because of their compact size, the more portable Stingers were particularly suitable for guerilla warfare. Meanwhile, the larger RBS-70s were all used in the defense of the large cities on the southeastern coast.

The main goal of the Indo-Malaysian invasion was to seize intact all of the oil and natural gas fields in the northern half of Australia, along with their associated ocean shipping terminals at Darwin, Weipa, Townsville, Broome, and Dampier. The largest population center in the Top End was Darwin. It needed to be secured first before the petroleum facilities.

The Stay Behinds were a thorn in the Indonesians' side from the beginning. Snipers like Quentin Whittle would fire just one or two shots from long range and then disappear into the jungle. Indonesian infantry platoons dispatched to find them were nearly always frustrated. Through the use of foxholes with well-camouflaged covers, the pursuing soldiers would walk right past the snipers and spend an entire day fruitlessly searching the jungle, returning exhausted. The next day there would be another shot, another dead Indo soldier—usually an officer or NCO—and the process would be repeated. On the few occasions when a fleeing sniper would engage his pursuers, the Indos often found themselves out-ranged. At distances between four hundred and seven hundred yards, their 5.56 rifles lacked the requisite accuracy when they were up against a man armed with a .243 or .308 bolt action with a 9-power scope.

Meanwhile, the Stinger teams took a deadly toll on any low-flying aircraft. The rate of attrition grew so high that the Indonesians' few remaining aircraft were effectively grounded. The few planes that found shelter from the sappers in the six-pointed star revetments on the south side of the Darwin airfield were eventually picked off by the Stinger teams whenever they would take off or approach for landings. Only ship-based helicopters were safe, and then only if they stayed well offshore. The combined efforts of the Stay Behinds and the Stinger teams turned the campaign in northern Australia into a ground war for both sides.

“Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.”

—Federico García Lorca

C
olonel Reynolds arrived at Site G just as stocking the three FLBs was nearly finished. He arrived in his personally owned Audi Q5 luxury sedan that had been turned into an ersatz staff car using some flat tan paint with a few irregular wisps of flat olive drab.

Over the course of two days, Reynolds inspected each of the three sites. He thought their site selection and layouts were quite clever and made very few suggestions for improvements. He did recommend erecting a few additional camouflage nets and constructing overhead cover for some of the recently dug perimeter foxholes.

He also wanted to address as many of the Stay Behinds as possible. He repeated essentially the same briefing three times for groups of between six and forty men. He was quite upbeat. He wanted to encourage active resistance and to reassure the Stay Behinds that they'd be given the logistics support they'd need.

One key portion of his briefing was a rundown of instructions from the top command. “We can be as aggressive as we'd like. The PM has said that ‘the gloves are off.' The rules of engagement are
loose
. You can fire on any invading soldier at any time. You can destroy any materiel that they might find particularly useful, but please use discretion in destroying telephone or pipeline infrastructure. You may use flame weapons. You may use dynamite, plastique, and even fuel-air explosives. Your only limitations are: No use of chemical weapons—other than irritants—no use of biological weapons, no radioactive dirty bombs, no poisons, and no use of
contact-initiated
mines or any explosives with a time delay greater than thirty minutes. This is all designed to minimize any collateral damage and to assure the safety of the citizenry when everyone returns. You can do whatever you'd like in the way of command-detonated explosives, but you
cannot
use traditional booby traps that could go off days or weeks later. So get cracking and make the Indos pay
dearly
for trying to take Australian territory.”

Samantha Kyle had become the top-grossing independent systems installer in the Northern Territory, and she excelled in both sales and installation. Samantha was an attractive and slim redhead of average height who walked with a cane. She never had to play the sympathy card to book orders, but she often suspected that customers opted for a lot of add-ons to their systems after noticing her prosthetic legs.

Her disability was self-evident and most new customers, upon seeing her uneven gait, would ask about it. They each got the same thirty-second summary: “I was a RAAF communications specialist with the 114 MCRU—that's a Mobile Control and Reporting Unit, stationed at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. On one of my few convoy trips outside the wire, the five-ton lorry I was riding in got blown up by an IED—a command-detonated mine. I lost both of my legs, below the knee. It doesn't affect my ability to do installations. I just have to be extra careful when I'm up a ladder. No worries.”

Samantha was an independent sales rep for OzCyberHomeAndOffice, a systems integration company that sold hard wire and wireless automation systems from major makers like INTEON, UPB, X10, Z-Wave, and ZigBee. These systems allowed home owners to control everything from lights and burglar alarms to lawn sprinklers remotely—either from a laptop or from a smartphone. Home automation was gaining popularity in Australia. As system prices fell, Samantha's customer base widened. It was no longer just rich doctors and lawyers who had their homes wired.

Samantha was one of just a handful of women who attended the Stay Behind briefings. She met with Caleb Burroughs after the briefing in Palmerston City, just south of Darwin. She was nervous at first and addressed Caleb formally as “sir” and “Warrant Officer Burroughs,” but Caleb's informality and his genuine Top Ender manner quickly put her more at ease. Samantha told Burroughs that she was familiar with Robertson Barracks. She explained that as a disabled veteran with a Gold Repatriation Health Card, she visited there regularly. She made Caleb blink when she said, “Look, I know Robertson quite well. We need to be ready to blow part of it up if the enemy gets too possessive, with appropriate size devices, as needed. This isn't a job for time fuses. We need to be able to do it by command detonation. I have the technology to make that work.”

She presented her “shopping list” to Caleb. He was taken aback but, to his credit, recovered quickly after she told him her thoughts and outlined her plan.

After describing her qualifications and the particulars of the systems she had been installing, Samantha talked her way into being issued forty complete M18A1 Claymore antipersonnel mines—the largest number issued to any Stay Behind. Along with them came forty-four electric blasting caps. The green plastic 3½ pound mines used C-4 plastique to propel hundreds of steel ball bearings in a sixty-degree arc. The front of each mine had
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY
molded into the plastic.

“I know wireless home automation systems forward and backward, but my knowledge of explosives is limited,” Samantha explained. “Can I get the help of someone who really knows explosives, for a day or two?”

“I know just the man for the job,” Caleb replied. He loaned her Chuck Nolan.

—

T
he 1st Brigade Headquarters was the most impressive building in the Robertson Barracks complex. Built in 2006, the two-story structure had a large open two-level reception terrace that extended toward a reviewing stand and parade ground on the far side of Malaya Street. Samantha felt confident that the Indos would try to occupy the building. General officers of any nation, she surmised, would have a weakness for teak paneling.

Atop a stepladder, her first look above the ceilings showed that they were insulated in conformance with the recent rulings for public buildings that had been promulgated by Standards Australia. Normally, she dreaded the sight of itchy fiberglass insulation in an attic crawl space, but she was thrilled to see so much of it in the brigade headquarters building since it would conceal her upcoming handiwork.

Chuck handled arming all of the mines, inserting a blasting cap into one of the pair of provided cap wells of each mine. They used all forty of the Claymores, facing them downward beneath the batts of insulation. There were two for the brigade commander's office—one each for the inner and outer offices—sixteen for the various staff offices, eleven for the small conference rooms, ten for the main assembly hall, and one for the men's washroom that was closest to the brigade commander's office. Samantha did not want to risk missing her primary target.

Emplacing and wiring the controller and the Claymores took her two long, exhausting, and sweaty days, even with Chuck's help. Rather than using the reels of brown two-conductor wire that were provided with the mines, she opted to use Romex type insulated wire that had been liberated from a post facilities workshop. This wire, she judged, would attract less suspicion if the Indonesians searched the attic spaces. By tapping into power junction boxes in the attic and putting all of the mines as well as the controller underneath the insulation, she hoped they would be missed unless there was a detailed inspection.

The controller that she had available supplied only 230 volts, AC, but she reckoned that voltage would work just fine to set off forty blasting caps wired in parallel. The Ensign-Bickford blasting caps were designed for 30 to 60 volts, DC, as the triggering voltage. Just to make sure they'd work with the available voltage, she and Chuck did a test outside the office of an adjoining building on Lighthorse Drive using a spare blasting cap. The cap lead wires were inserted in the receptacle at the end of a yellow AC extension cord. The other end of the cord was plugged into one of her web-based controllers. After the shunt for the cap was clipped, she touched it off using a command from her iPhone. The noise made by just that one blasting cap was louder than she expected. It shattered a window and made her ears ring. When she saw the broken window, she said, “Uh-oh. There I've done it. Destroying government property. Tisk-tisk.” As she pocketed her iPhone and began to coil up the extension cord, she joked, “Steve Jobs is probably doing turns in his grave about now.”

Chuck mimicked a television narrator's voice and said, “The new, improved iBomb—yep, there's an app for that. Making the world a better place.”

Laughing at Chuck's impression, Samantha said, “If you log in with the password and bring up the Palmerston Beach House web page and then click ‘Air Conditioning On,' the Indos will be the recipients of quite a fireworks show. We'll wait, of course, until the maximum number of Indonesian field-grade officers are present.”

Chuck nodded. “Yes, it would be wise to wait.”