Sparrowhawks

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

SPARROWHAWKS

By David Shaw

It was in 2007 that the newly installed Indonesian military government faced despair. There seemed to be no hope of recovering from the economic shambles left by the deposed civilian government. With a third of the population on the brink of starvation and the country falling apart, something desperate had to be attempted.

Like the Generals in Argentina planning the Falklands invasion, the Indonesian rulers needed something which was within their limited reach. An objective they could rally the nation behind. Above all, a conquest which could be turned into hard currency to keep Indonesia a solvent country. The only possible target was the huge area of North Western Australia known as the Pilbara. Almost as big as Texas, yet scarcely populated, it held offshore gas fields and incredible mineral wealth.

To make such a conquest the Indonesians had plenty of men and rifles and plenty of shipping to move them. Slow, unwieldy masses of civilian shipping which their Navy would find difficult to protect, just as the Indonesian Air Force would be outclassed from the outset by the Royal Australian Air Force. Not that the Australians were in much of a position to fight a war either. They had the task of protecting a continent with an army which had about the same firepower as the New York Police Department. Not only that, but it was as if the NYPD had to repel an invader landing in California.

As one Indonesian general remarked realistically at the first mention of the conflict, it would be a war between a dying giant and a crippled dwarf. If the giant could only manage to collapse on top of the dwarf it would be enough to suffocate the smaller opponent and win the match.

There was never the slightest thought that Indonesia could overrun all Australia. When the military planners in Jakarta sat down with their maps they never even imagined the possibility of marching to Canberra, no more than the Japanese had ever dreamed of marching into Washington when Pearl Harbor was being planned. Like the Japanese, what the Indonesian military staff wanted to do was to seize the natural resources their country desperately needed and then to build a chain of defences around them which their enemies would break their heads and hearts against.

Of course the Australians' reaction to the invasion of Australia were of secondary importance anyway. The only people whom really mattered were the Americans and the Japanese. Secret talks in Toyko were satisfactory. Provided there was no major interference with exports of vital raw materials from Australia the Japanese would not actively interfere.

As for the Americans, the best way of hampering any decisive US reaction was by pulling as many strings in the United Nations as the Indonesians could manage. In this, as the largest Muslim country in the world, they could count on the active support of the many other Muslim countries. To further internationalise the issue Indonesian military intelligence began making arrangements for a provisional Aboriginal government to be established in the remote Kimberley area of Western Australia. This government would exist just long enough to appeal to the Indonesians and to the de-colonisation committee of the UN for help in freeing themselves from the white Australian colonialists who had stolen their land.

The plan which evolved therefore had political and military dimensions, and each served to hide the other. As far as the diplomats were concerned Indonesia would be landing military forces in the Kimberleys as part of the world de-colonisation program. To the Indonesian military the Kimberley landings were an minor side-show: their objective was the Pilbara area with its massive offshore natural gas installations and its billions of tonnes of iron ore, together with all the mines, towns, ports and railroads which made it possible to export a hundred million tonnes of iron ore to Asia's steel furnaces every year.

The Indonesian staff concluded that what they needed and what they thought they could achieve by conventional military means was control of the north west Australian coastline from Carnavon to Broome, and inland to a line extending through Shay Gap, Nullagine, Marble Bar and Newman. This was the area destined to become part of 'Indonesia Raya', greater Indonesia. The only Australian defence forces actually available on the ground to protect this huge area were a couple of companies of part time volunteer soldiers. Deployed along the Pilbara coastline at full strength and at equal distances apart, each man would have been responsible for defending about two kilometres of shoreline - or something over a mile each. This force did not greatly bother the Jakarta planners.

It was when they considered possible Australian military counter moves that their faces grew grave. To the north was nothing of concern. Only a single all weather road ran through the rugged Kimberley area. After the Indonesian paratroopers whom were to land in the Kimberleys had finished having publicity pictures taken with the liberated Aboriginals they should have no problem in keeping the Wyndham - Broome road closed.

In any case trying to send an army into the Pilbara via the Northern Territory was like trying to invade Athens from Oslo using just one single second class road. Rule of thumb logistics suggested that the Australians would need to assemble more than 6,000 vehicles and 25,00 tonnes of stores to even begin a counter attack. Most significantly of all, one and a half million litres of fuel would have to be accumulated, and every drop of it would have to be delivered by road from the Eastern coast. The Northern Territory obtained its usual supplies of fuel from Malaysia and the Indonesian navy could easily make sure that supply line was closed off by mining Darwin Harbour. The comforting conclusion was that it would take weeks for the Australians to be able to mount any meaningful response via the Northern Territory.

To the east was the Great Sandy Desert and the Gibson desert. Scouting parties might come out of them, minor harassment raids, but nothing of any consequence.

No, it was the southern flank which caused great argument and the consumption of many clove cigarettes as the Indonesian generals pondered over their maps. Perth was their problem. Perth was a railhead, Perth had an RAAF base and a major civilian airport, Perth was the terminus of the only major road between Eastern and Western Australia. Perth had a naval base, with surface ships and submarines based in its harbour, Perth was home to the Special Air Service Regiment. It was from Perth that the Australians would counterattack, as soon as their military units could be railed, flown and driven from the populous eastern states. Of course the Australian units would still have to travel another thousand kilometres before they could reach the fringes of the battle area, but there were two all weather roads which led from Perth into the Pilbara.

Not only that but another sealed east-west road between Geraldton and Mount Magnet meant that the Australians could quickly switch their forces laterally between the northern coastal highway and the Great Northern highway which ran inland and parallel to the coastal road from Perth to Port Hedland. Which meant in effect meant two gaping gaps in the otherwise effective shields of long distance and harsh terrain that the planners relied on to hamper any counter-attack.

There was no satisfactory military solution to the threat from Perth. Not until until Lieutenant-Commander Mochtar Sudomo of the Tentara Nasional Indonesion-Al presented his novel suggestion. All that needs to be said of this junior naval officer is that he was a product of one of Indonesia's wealthiest families, that he loved handling both ships and aircraft and that because of this dual love he had been fortunate enough to serve as an attached officer on a foreign aircraft carrier, HMS Invincible.

And it was during his service on the Invincible that Lieutenant-Commander Sudomo had developed a fixation. He was, in the old phrase, a man with a bee in his bonnet, a bee whose buzzing disturbed not only him but also those he constantly bored with his notions. And now, as the most minor and unimportant member of the planning staff, Sudomo finally saw a chance to let his bee loose.

"What", he asked, "About the Darwin option?"

And since nobody knew what he was talking about, Sudomo recalled for his seniors what had happened when a major tropical cyclone had hit the Australian tropical city of Darwin in the 1970's. How the city had been devastated and how the entire resources of the Australian armed forces had been needed to save the civilian population from starvation and disease.

Wouldn't it be extremely convenient if a similar disaster could strike Perth just as the invasion in the Pilbara was happening? Of course cyclones were not to be whistled up on command but to shatter a city was easy to plan. Not by the old fashioned methods of just dumping bombs at random but by precise surgical strikes at key targets. First of all the obvious naval and military ones, and then those civilian infrastructures which allowed urban life to exist: power stations, fuel farms, water and sewage pumping stations, airports, locomotive running sheds, telephone exchanges, administrative centres, major police stations. Destroy all these things in one swift blow and the Australians would be far too busy trying to save the population of Perth from disaster to have any major resources to send north. After all, as the planning staff were well aware, Perth was four times further away from most of Australia's population than Alaska was from the rest of the United States. The logistical overstretch would be incredible.

Sudomo's suggestion was met with the deep respect that all right minded Asians reserve for the truly mad. Oh, the idea, as far as it went was brilliant: what Sudomo's demented mind had forgotten was that nothing except an American aircraft carrier was capable of carrying scores of sophisticated strike aircraft to within flying range of the world's most isolated city. Far from owning aircraft carriers, Indonesia was a bankrupt country fighting for survival.

Sudomo's response was that it was his fellow planners who were losing touch with reality. What was needed was a mere handful of modern explosives, nothing else. The only requirement was that they should be detonated in the right places at the same time.

"Then you are asking us to mount a major special forces operation," said the most senior general present. "No, not a major one but a huge one, the sort of thing which even the Soviet Spetsnaz at the height of their powers would have thought too difficult to attempt. To keep the preparations for such an operation secret would be impossible, especially for our forces in a city almost totally populated by Europeans."

"But you could prepare such a target list, sir?" Sudomo asked politely, provoking at last some smiles around the table. The general was a well known patron of the Burswood casino in Perth. Given a notebook, a pencil, a hired car and a map and he could provide such a target list in an afternoon's outing. So could any officer at the table. God, it was such a simple thing that even a woman could do it.

It was then that Sudomo was finally able to release his bee, to explain his obsession, and the smiles faded to be replaced with deeply thoughtful expressions. For Sudomo had taken advantage of his time with the Royal Navy to learn everything he could about the Falkland Islands' war, not only about the Invincible's part in that war, but about every single facet of the fighting. After all it was the only major battle between ships and aircraft fought in sixty years.

And whilst he was on leave in England Sudomo had, purely by chance, become involved in flying microlight aircraft. And it was slowly but surely that Sudomo became convinced that the British had missed a great chance in the Falklands' war by not sending a squadron of microlights south on both of their carriers. Microlights could have patrolled around the perimeter of the fleet carrying radar decoys to lure Exocet missiles away from the ships. So to could helicopters, in theory, but only at a hideous cost in fuel and in maintenance work, whereas a microlight cost about the same as a jeep, was as easy to service, and could stay in the air for hours on a couple of jerry cans of fuel. Of course a microlight pilot trying to evade an Exocet would have been in a nasty situation but men were cheap.

And, again, at San Carlos Bay, the British ships had been taken by surprise time and time again because they lacked airborne early warning radar, large aircraft fitted with surveillance radars which could have seen over the horizons and over the mountains to warn of incoming Argentine jets. A screen of scouting microlights deployed around San Carlos would have done an improvised job with human eyeballs and flashed radio warnings to the fleet. Of course they would only have been effective in clear weather but then again the Argentine air force had only been able to attack effectively in clear weather.

As he thought deeper and deeper about the matter Sudomo had become ever more convinced that in the microlight concept was a useful weapons system. Above all, he admired their flexibility. Microlights were the only other type of fixed wing aircraft which could operate off carriers configured with ramps for Harrier type jump jets. And on land they could fly from almost any open space.

Look at the Goose Green battle, with a battalion of British paratroopers trying to force their way past Argentine defence positions with scarcely any fire support at all to help their attack. Suppose a squadron of microlights carrying 66mm rockets had been available, landing just behind the advancing British troops to re-arm from supply helicopters before resuming their task of smashing the Argentinian bunkers from the air? Wouldn't it have been so much easier than the desperate battle it turned out to be?

And if a few microlights had been shot down, so what? For the cost of one modern military helicopter you could buy fifty microlights. And that, Sudomo had decided, was something well worth thinking about. It was why he had spent so much time trying to get the Indonesian military interested in the possibilities offered by microlights - and it was why he was now explaining how microlights could carry the war to the enemy in a way nothing else could.

His idea had many detractors, especially those who believed that a light aircraft would be so weather limited as to be useless. Sudomo had responded by pointing out that a modern microlight would have about the same flying characteristics as the biplanes that the British had used on their aircraft carriers in World War Two. The same biplanes which had operated from the smallest of escort carriers in weather conditions which no other planes could have flown in. In fact, on at least one occasion, when a gale was blowing along the flight deck of a carrier a Swordfish biplane had taken off and the aircraft carrier had steamed off leaving the aircraft behind, hanging in the wind like a kite. But the same biplanes had crippled the Bismarck, wrecked an Italian fleet at Taranto and racked up a deadly series of kills against surfaced U-boats with unguided rocket projectiles.

How well Sudomo argued was seen on a fine November morning when the first glimmers of the rising sun lit the rust streaked sides of an old merchant ship approaching Fremantle. Flying a Panamanian flag the 'Jayasagara' looked like any normal container ship, although in fact all the containers on the deck were opened ended and linked to each other like cells in a bee hive. Another similarity with a floating hive were the swarms of tiny planes beginning to launched from the flat deck welded onto the top of the uppermost row of containers. The microlights wobbling into the air over the bows of the ship were Indonesian designed and built, the dreams of Mochtar Sudomo made real.

Not only real but strong, produced from moulded Kevlar, the same kind of material used to make bullet resistant vests. A man could walk or even jump on a the wing of one of these tiny planes and do it no damage. In a reverse arrangement to conventionally designed aircraft the eighty horsepower engine and attached propeller was mounted behind the pilot's cockpit. One of the great benefits of this arrangement was the superb view forward that the Bajaj offered its pilot. And in terms of flexibility it was exactly what Lieutenant-Commander Sudomo had asked of the designers. Weighing 500 kilograms fully loaded a Bajaj could take off from 50 metres of tarmac or 70 metres of open ground.

It was because of their small size and their rear mounted engines that the microlights were affectionately given the same title as the mechanised rickshaws which sputtered around Jakarta's streets. The Bajaj's performance was exactly what might have been expected. A maximum speed of 180 kilometres an hour, a cruise speed of 160 kilometres an hour and an ability to climb to 5000 metres - and, remarkably, with a full load of fuel, 180 litres, a Bajaj could stay aloft for over 11 hours, though that was a feature that was unlikely to be used often. An interesting point was that their engines ran on ordinary unleaded car fuel, as it was hoped that large stocks of such fuel would soon be captured.

In effect, a Bjaj had a performance rather inferior to some World War I fighters. They did however did carry items that earlier generations of pilots would have been astonished by. The small but tremendously efficient radio sets, the computerised weapons sights with their built in laser range finders, and what would have indeed been black magic to the old timers, global satellite positioning receivers.

The most important differences between the old and the new nestled underneath the wings of each Bajaj. Sudomo believed in simple weapons for a simple aircraft. After many trials the Indonesians had decided to manufacture under licence the CRV7 rocket produced by Bristol Aerospace of Canada. In one way the CRV7 was nothing more than a rocket motor weighing 6.6 kilos to which a variety of 70mm warheads could be attached. There was no fancy guidance system of any kind, a CRV7 simply travelled in a straight line in the direction it was fired. Nor was it meant to be anything more than a cheap weapon for aircraft to attack ground targets. What made it so potent was the sheer power of its solid fuel rocket engine.

The CRV7 had an effective range of over four kilometres, three times that of any other rocket in its class, travelling over a kilometre in the first second of rocket burn. Fitted with a tungsten tip a CRV7 could penetrate the armour of any tank in the world - even the soft steeled training head would go through 15 centimetres of steel plate or half a metre of concrete. Best of all was the accuracy such velocity made possible, greatly reducing the effects of wind drift and gravity drop.

Each Bjaj carried six CRV7's and a CETME 5.56mm light machine gun for anti-personnel use. Repeated demonstrations had proved that it was a combination which floated like a butterfly and hit like a pile driver. And here were over two hundred Bjaj's being ranged on the deck in four aircraft flight elements as the lifts carried them up, each element in turn flying off as soon as the previous formation had departed. It was a scene of frenetic activity which gratified Lieutenant Commander Sudomo.

Lifting up his eyes to the horizon he could see the tops of the highest buildings in Perth just visible above the early morning haze. Everything seemed calm, as it should be, since this was a Sunday with all that implied in the usual institutionalised lethargy of an Australian weekend. Sudomo smiled briefly as he thought of the alarm call the slumbering city would soon be getting.

But apprehension gripped his heart, though not for his precious microlights or his fliers. He was sure now that they would do their job and as long as that was achieved the loss of his entire force would count for nothing to the Indonesian general staff. Nor did he doubt that the initial invasion force landing from disguised bulk ore carriers at Port Hedland and Dampier would be successful. Sudomo's prayers were for the four Hercules just about to land at the Tindal air force base near Darwin with RAAF insignia over painted on their Indonesian markings.

After all the transports had stopped their rear ramps would drop in unison and Fast Attack Vehicles would come racing down them, each of the converted dune buggies carrying a heavy machine gun or a multiple grenade launcher. Mad Max time, with one Hercules lingering a little after the others to retrieve those Kopassus soldiers who might survive after they had destroyed everything they possibly could. A truly vital mission indeed for truly brave patriots.

The first Australian to see the Indonesians coming that morning was Paul O'Byrne, making an early morning check flight of his Cessna 172 before returning to Jandakot to pick up the advertising banner he was contracted to fly along the beaches that day. It was not a job he relished but at least it gave him a chance to enjoy the beauty of the early morning high above Fremantle.

A beautiful morning, until he looked down and saw the sea speckled by scurrying brown shapes that looked like a nest of disturbed cockroaches. Astonished, he banked and stared down at the tiny aircraft below with their totally incongruous 'lizard skin' camouflage. They had to be painted like that for use in the bush, so they had to belong to the Air Force, but he'd never heard that the Australian Air Force used microlights. And what the hell were they doing here?

Four of the aircraft crossed the coast near the signal tower, then abruptly swung to port and dived towards Fremantle harbour, skimming dangerously low over the old passenger terminal building and then flying at right angles over the open water towards a container ship moored up at the north wharf. Streaks of light shot out from underneath their wings like laser beams and flickers of white water showed up in a rough line about twenty metres away from the side of the ship.

The fact that Paul couldn't understand what he saw was in itself perfectly understandable. One of Sudomo's priorities was to close down the harbour and the most effective way of closing an harbour is to sink ships that are already moored alongside the quays. The problem was that the Indonesian diplomats were willing to pay compensation for sunken foreign ships but desperate to avoid the deaths of any foreign seamen. So Sudomo's pilots were using a technique that the British had developed long ago, firing solid tipped missiles at a shallow angle into the water just in front of their target, knowing the rockets would curve up with their motors still burning and with enough force to slash a hull open below the water line. Within twenty minutes every ship in the port of Fremantle would be sitting on the harbour mud. Witnesses near the scene never forgot the agonised bleating of the thousands of drowning animals aboard a live sheep carrier as it went down metre by metre.

But long before that particular execution was over more microlights had joined in the general slaughter. Their targets were the tugs, the pilot launches and the harbour fire and salvage vessels, and they had no compunction at all in using high explosive warheads on those vessels.

Paul saw the wreckage flying high into the air from the far end of the harbour, he saw the black clouds of smoke coming from the fuel farms in North Fremantle, he saw white smoke rising from the Special Air Service Regiment barracks behind Swanbourne beach. And still he hesitated to call Flight Services and report what he thought he was seeing. As he explained later:

Look, if I'd seen a bunch of UFO's flying by and little green men waving to me I'd have been astonished but at least it would have been a concept I could get my mind around. But a war starting in Fremantle on a Sunday morning - who would ever have believed that?

Eventually he called the air traffic controller at Jandakot field, a friend of his. His friend didn't believe what Paul was saying, not until he himself saw a flight of brown coloured microlights diving towards the tower. And then the tower suddenly stopped transmitting and as Paul looked towards Jandakot he saw yet more smoke curling up into the crisp blue sky. His mother was English, and once she had told him about the annual Guy Fawke's night celebrations in England, with blazing bonfires and calls of 'gunpowder, treason and plot!' He was finally realising that from now on Australians would always have their own good reasons to remember November and the burning rewards of a treacherous plot.

By this time Sudomo himself was airborne, leading the last primary strike element of his force towards his most important and most vexing target. Pearce Royal Australian Air Force base was the most important target because it had the only military aircraft immediately available on the West coast of Australia. They might only be Aeromacchi trainers but they could carry bombs big enough to sink the Jayasagara as she fled north. More importantly, Pearce was where the F/A 18's, F 111's and Orions would want to operate from when they arrived. For that reason every iota of damage that could be done to Pearce was worth doing. But there were targets within the target that must not be harmed unless absolutely necessary, and again, because of infuriating diplomatic limitations.

As he turned over the ship Sudomo was startled by the rapid change in her appearance. The Jayasagara's rear superstructure had been cut down to deck level months before and a steering position installed in the bows, and now the crew were pulling down the dummy superstructure which had camouflaged the alterations. As lengths of scaffolding were slipped into the sea and plywood panels went spinning away on the wind the Jayasagara was being razed to deck level. Indeed, she looked remarkably like the old flush decked Argus, the mother of all aircraft carriers, the 'floating flat iron'.

Still, that was a good omen, for the Argus had been in front line service from 1917 to 1946. Nor was there any denying the need for speed in clearing away the obstructions so that the Bajajs could land back on board. Listening to his radio, Sudomo knew that the first wave of attackers were already returning, desperate to re-arm and get back over Perth for more slaps at the arrogant but now totally bewildered white men.

Everything seemed to be going perfectly. The success at Fremantle had been repeated at Stirling naval base: the Australians had no major warship in the West which wasn't either sunk or badly damaged. Equally satisfying to hear, the Schiess Defries dock lift at Australian Shipbuilding Industries had been ripped apart. Any RAN warship needing underwater repair work would have to travel to Adelaide across the watery wasteland of the Great Australian Bight.

As for the civilian targets, the power stations, telephone exchanges, fuel reserves, emergency service centres, it was a case of complete destruction, as it should be. The Bajajs faced no opposition, no danger, except from flying debris from their own targets. The laser range finders were extremely valuable in making sure that pilots were given urgent warnings to press their firing buttons whilst still at the limits of safety.

In fact, although he didn't know it, one of Sudomo's microlights had already been shot down, although in a way which was to become a cause celebre in Australian politics for years to come. One of the direct participants was Provisional Sergeant Njoto, who was flying a Bjaj detailed to attack secondary targets in Fremantle Harbour. With utmost care he had made two passes over the waterfront, firing a pair of rockets on each pass into the gantry cab of an overhead container crane. Each of his remaining rockets had been fired with equal care into a straddle legged container mover. And, finally, finding a group of waterside workers huddled up behind a container, Njoto had sent them fleeing with his machine gun until the few survivors had jumped into the sea.

Later on, during his captivity, Njoto was astonished to find that this particular action had made him strangely popular amongst the more politically conservative elements of Australian society. But at the time it was a bad career move because Bill Rodgers was staying in a North Fremantle pub and his room's balcony looked out over the junction between the Swan river and the harbour. Mr Rodgers was a professional prospector, in the city on legal matters about a disputed gold claim and also giving his family a holiday at the same time. And Mr Rodgers had a 7.62mm semi-automatic FN Browning rifle which had been taken apart and smuggled into his room.

It was in his room because of the prevalence of car theft in Perth, which made it unwise to leave it the family land cruiser. And the reason why Bill owned an illegal weapon was not because he was a gun collector, or a sporting shooter. As Bill stated afterwards, he'd broken the law and kept the gun because it was a necessary survival item in the bush.

Which was why Sergeant Njoto suddenly found himself flying low and slow within range of perhaps the only man in Perth ready to fight back at a minute's notice. Worse than that, he was being shot at by somebody who'd handled firearms all his life. Mr Rodgers fired eight rounds in the time that Njoto was doing a leisurely wingover near the Stirling Highway Bridge. From most men it would have been a wild barrage: from a marksman like Bill Rodgers each round was based on an instinctive feeling for target lead, bullet drop and wind drift. Three of his shots hit the Bajaj without causing any great damage.
But the seventh round was right on the money.

Njoto was still trying to accept that he was under intense and accurate ground fire when his left thigh blew out a spray of blood. In the moment before he fainted the pilot chopped the aircraft's throttle and pulled the emergency handle.

Bill and everybody else watching were totally bewildered by the white cloud which suddenly appeared above the microlight. None of them knew that such aircraft carried a parachute in the centre wing section big enough to lower the aircraft to the ground, nor that a ballistic rocket was used to throw the canopy upwards so it could be opened even at minimum altitude. But as the Bjaj splashed down into the river some fishermen in a nearby launch recovered their wits quickly enough to get the pilot out before the microlight sank to the river bottom, leaving a tuft of white nylon bobbing on the surface to mark its resting place.

Mr Rodgers then ran down to the river bank and waved urgently to the launch. When Njoto was carried ashore Bill immediately gave him the first aid treatment which saved the sergeant's life. But it was there and then events happened which passed into Australian legend.

The first was that on both sleeves of Njoto's flight overalls was a red and white flag. And not one of the thirty or so people who quickly crowded around him could identify it; not one of those Australians knew the flag of their nearest neighbouring country, a country of over two hundred million people. They all knew by then that they were at war but the only way they could find out who they were at war with was to ask the police.

Which they were soon able to do, as a patrol car quickly arrived and arrested Bill Rodgers for owning and using an illegal weapon. Of course the officers responsible were in a state of total shock, like a housewife who keeps trying to make a cup of tea in a cyclone after her roof has blown away. But when the population of Perth eventually found out what had happened to Bill Rodgers there was mass fury.

Being confronted with the knowledge that for the foreseeable future the city's living standards were going to be much worse than in the great depression was bad enough; to learn that the only man who'd hit back at their tormentors had been thrown into jail led to a uncontrollable riot. Not only was Bill Rodgers forcibly released from custody but the magistrate who'd committed him was left badly beaten inside her own courtroom. The philosopher who'd pointed out that civilisation never survived the loss of three meals in a row was being proved right yet again.

Sudomo of course knew none of this yet. From his formation eight Bajajs broke away and climbed upward to provide air cover for the fleeing Jayasagara. Tiny aircraft they might be but each of them carried four Stinger missiles which could home in on a jet exhaust, and each Stinger could travel at twice the speed of sound for five kilometres. Bajajs might never be hawks but they were sparrows with sharp claws.

Sudomo had no trouble finding his target. The days of struggling in tiny cockpits with large maps were gone. All he had to do was to follow the arrow in the GPS receiver and watch the distance wind down until he was over Pearce. His first concern was to check the damage inflicted by the first wave of attackers, and he scarcely glanced at the row of still burning MB 326 trainers. What he checked, flying as low as and slow as he could were the most important things of all, the control tower, the radar installations, the general engineering building, the power-plant workshop, the avionics workshop, the base calibration section. Not the fuel tanks though. Not until he'd finished his task could he risk masses of smoke obscuring the base.

As far as he could see, everything was as well wrecked as he could have hoped it to be. Making another series of low circles he tipped over his wing tip and began triggering the camera mounted in it.

"Jihad Leader, Blue One. Group of enemy with small arms engaging you near armoury building. Request permission to engage."

"Blue One, Jihad Leader. Breaking off now, Blue flight cleared to attack."

Sudomo rolled out of his turn and watched the four plane element of Blue flight come diving in. Facing them on the ground were four or five men firing Steyr assault rifles which would have been ideal in Vietnam but were ridiculous for Australian conditions.

The sun, still only at a low angle above the horizon, glinted on sprays of brass cartridge cases falling away from underneath each attacking microlight. They might only be the same 5.56 pop gun calibre as the Steyrs used but at least the rounds were the high powered SS109 type, effective out to 600 metres when used in a long barrelled machine gun. Each of the Bajajs fired for about two seconds and the ground around the defiant Australians seemed to boil as something like a hundred and fifty rounds impacted in it, many of them kicking up tiny clouds of dust or stones. The men in the centre of this tiny maelstrom sprawled down in untidy heaps as if gravity had suddenly become too heavy for them.

Sudomo nodded approvingly. The CETME was a scaled down version of the Spandau MG 42, small enough be carried in suit case, yet with the same incredible rate of fire as its fearsome parent, the best infantry machine gun ever invented. What he couldn't understand was why the Australians would leave millions of Rupiahs worth of military equipment lying around without even a few proper AAA guns to defend it all.

However, that wasn't his problem: his problem was the row of red and white painted trainers drawn up in a neat line next to the wrecked Aeromacchis. So far none of these planes had been touched and if it was at all possible they weren't going to be harmed. The reason for their preservation was that they weren't Australian planes at all, but S.211 trainers of the Republic of Singapore Air Force, and the Indonesians were desperate not to be put into a position of firing on Singaporean aircraft. It was a damned nuisance that the RSAF as well as the RAAF used Pearce as a training airfield.

But it would be an even bigger nuisance if the Australians commandeered the S.211s, bombed them up and came after the Jayasagara. The ranking Singaporean officer might not allow that to happen but who could tell? There were only two safe courses of action to take. Either to make sure nothing could take off from Pearce or destroy the S.211s. And the first option was what the diplomats and the general staff were demanding.

"Yellow One, Jihad Leader. Prepare to start digging on my mark."

Sudomo carefully selected the runway intersection where he wanted the first cut, flew over it at right angles and dropped a smoke bomb ten metres downwind of the target area. Yellow One swung the nose of his Bajaj around until it was in line with the drifting line of smoke, his engine at minimum revs. At near stalling speed and with the wind checking him the microlight's ground speed was only about forty kilometres an hour.

Peering down at the tiny perspex panel between his legs Yellow One saw the smoke bomb pass through the cross hairs, then the edge of the runway appeared. He pushed his firing button and the six CV7's fell off in pairs, all of them within two seconds. Each of them deployed a drogue chute which left the rocket below hanging nose down and falling towards the concrete five hundred feet below. Half a second later and the CV7's ignited, the flash of the exhausts instantly destroying the nylon lanyards connecting them to the drogue parachutes. Each of the missiles then sliced down through the top layers of the runway material and exploded beneath them. Pieces of fractured concrete as big as table tops heaved up out of the previously smooth surface.

Sudomo nodded approvingly. Not only at the obvious damage to the runway, but at the holes which must have been blasted in the ground underneath it, invisible to the eye but ready to collapse underneath any heavy aircraft which ran over them. His eye was suddenly caught by a stream of tracer rising near the airfield perimeter. It seemed to be coming from a machine gun firing from the back of a open bodied four wheel drive vehicle.

"Blue Leader, Blue Three and Blue Four. Deal with that - two rockets each, select proximity fuses." Blue Leader sounded rather bored with the Australians' bad manners in attempting to spoil a well rehearsed show.

Two of his flight dipped down and both fired two CV7's. Each of the rockets was fitted with a proximity fuse, a miniature radio transmitter and receiver which activated the warhead thirty metres from any solid object. The CV7's exploded in the air above the vehicle, lashing the ground with red hot shrapnel. The defiant four wheeled drive seemed to jump up, then nose down as its front tyres exploded, finally disappearing in a cloud of white smoke.

"Jihad Leader, Top Gun Leader. Message from Papa. Left Hand has clapped, Right Hand has clapped."

Top Gun Leader was flying high cover over the Jayasagara, and it was his altitude which was allowing him to relay the message from the communications centre on the ship by line-of-sight VHF. What the coded message meant was that two companies of Indonesian paratroopers had seized their targets to the north. A hundred and twenty men at Mount Magnet and another hundred and twenty at Geraldton. Both ends of the lateral road running inland from the coast were sealed off. Better yet, both sealed roads between Perth and the Pilbara were blocked. Now the paratroopers would loot each town of stores and vehicles and - most importantly - of fuel, and set up inland bases for the Bajajs to fly to from the Jayasagara. The ship would remain offshore until it was sunk, using four old Russian built helicopters to ferry CV7's and 5.56 ammunition to the bases as the Bajajs fought to the death in support of the airborne troops.

Though the road blocks were not primarily his operations, Sudomo had played a part in the planning of them. Two contributions in particular were his: one was that the paratroopers should take with them a supply of 800 litre fuel bladders designed to fit into the back of any standard sized Australian pick up vehicle, so that captured petrol could be easily transported to bush air strips without needing specialised tankers.

The other and perhaps more important idea of his were the four crates to be dropped with each company. Inside each crate was a disassembled Bajaj. Within twenty minutes of landing each of the Bajajs would be unpacked, assembled, fuelled, armed and ready to fly. The paratroop commanders might not have very many men but at least they'd each have their own little air force to help them until reinforcements could arrive.

Sudomo eased himself in his safety straps, reached down to readjust the lie of his testicles in the tight flying suit and eyed the runway below to select the site for his next smoke marker. All in all, it was turning out to be a day to remember.

THE END

(Although this is, of course, a piece of pure fiction the author happily acknowledges the inspiration provided by the 'Rattler' light military aircraft designed and built by the Luscombe Aircraft Company of the United Kingdom).

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