Rogue Element by David Rollins

The average man in the street loved him for it, though. He was human, a welcome change from the years of cocky conservatism.

Central Sulawesi, 0600 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April
    Joe Light swatted ineffectually at the swarm of mosquitoes. Feeling nauseous and utterly helpless, he peered down on the crash site from his new vantage point on an adjacent hill. The plane was far enough away for the detail to be lost but the overall picture was still terrible. He put the compact Bausch & Lomb binoculars he’d found still tangled in their duty-free wrapping to his eyes and centredthe old couple in the lenses. He waved exaggeratedly at the old bloke. The man and his wife were now propped under the shelter he’d built for them, scavenged from bits of aircraft aluminium.
    Their names were Jim and Margaret. Jim had been in shock and it had taken a while to get his name out of him. Margaret was unconscious when he’d left, probably from the agony of her broken leg.
    Joe had gone searching amongst the debris for other survivors, and for painkillers for Margaret. He hadn’t found either. At first he’d been uncomfortable sifting through other people’s luggage but the pangs quickly passed. The passengers had no further use for their things. That change in his outlook coincided with the find of the binoculars.
    Joe took a deep breath, filling his lungs. The air here was hot and moist and mercifully clear of the smell of jet fuel and roasted flesh. The equatorial sun and high humidity were already going to work on the hundreds of broken bodies lying around. Down at the crash site, a sickly-sweet smell had begun to rise from the ground. The first signs of decay.
    Joe looked up at the sky. Unbroken grey cloud sat overhead like dirty cotton wool. Where was help? Why wasn’t this place swarming with rescue operations? He then realised he had no idea where ‘this place ’ was. He knew that it certainly wasn’t Australia – the captain had told them when the last of the Australian coastline slipped by beneath the plane. That had been quite a few hours before the jumbo fell out of the sky. Was he in Malaysia, or Indonesia? Burma, Thailand? Geography was never his strong suit.
    The aircraft’s landing had stripped the area of trees. He saw that their runway was actually a depression surrounded by hillocks and the plane was lucky not to have hit one. Lucky? Only three passengers had survived the crash out of . . . he didn’t know how many. That was hardly lucky.
    The terrain they had landed in was relatively low lying. He surveyed the horizon. Wherever they were, it was remote. He could see no smoke from fires, save from the bits of aircraft still smouldering. No signs of population or civilisation. If there were people in the vicinity they were doing a bloody good job of making themselves scarce.
    He turned around, keeping the binoculars to his eyes. Off in the distance was the perfect conical base of a gigantic mountain that towered above the rest, its summit disappearing into haze and cloud. He let the rucksack slip from his shoulder and the bottles of water spilled out onto the ground. He’d found the bottles, along with some food in packaged trays, after rummaging through a section of the galley searching for other survivors. The galley that had been ripped from the fuselage and thrown 400 metres up a ravine.
    He’d also found a piece of wing flap attached to an aluminium rib. The implement looked like an axe. He swung it through the air. Felt like one, too. Joe used it to pick through the debris. It was also pretty effective at hacking through the vegetation on the hillock. He wanted to clear away a section of it and set up a campsite for himself and the two old people, well away from the bodies and the aeroplane, although God only knew how they were going to lug Margaret up here with her broken leg.
    The hillock wasn’t far from the crash site – about sixhundred metres – but it was a difficult trek, much of it through tall,