Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (2 page)

KING TYRANT LIZARD

Henry Vickers sat motionless, watching the road and beyond it the forest where the tyrannosaur had escaped. Trucks hauling logging crews and their equipment snarled past him, raising a pall of reddish laterite dust: rain forest soil stripped of its cover, baked to a bad grade of limestone, and churned to grit by vehicles come to clear yet more land.

Vickers’ eyes were slitted, and he’d tied a blue-checked bandanna over his nose and mouth. The three khaki-clad police were in their dwelling across the road, ignoring the heavy traffic.

A metal-roofed shelter shared duty as a waiting room for the small landing strip as well as being the customs post on the Malaysian side of the border with Indonesian territory. Bornean sunlight had warmed the air inside to blood temperature, but Vickers was used to heat.

He was used to waiting as well. A successful hunter was first of all patient, willing to accept the things he couldn’t change and which made up most of his life. It seemed to Vickers that unchangeable things made up most of everybody’s life, though a lot of people tried to pretend otherwise.

The other passengers on the ancient DeHavilland Buffalo that brought Vickers to the border were locals, returning from the bazaars of Kuching. Immediately after landing, they had dispersed with their purchases: incredible loads of plasticware, batteries, and the miscellaneous paraphernalia of civilization. One man walked a well-used step-through motorcycle into a trail through the jungle wall. Vickers couldn’t imagine where the fellow would run the bike, assuming that it ran at all.

Because of the logging trucks, Vickers saw the shadow of the aircraft before he heard its engines. Winged blackness rippled over the sun-washed strip, paused, and shifted back abruptly. Vickers stepped out of the shelter, angling his head so that his hat brim shaded his eyes as he looked upward.

The plane was a shining tilt-rotor, transitioning from forward flight into a hover above the landing strip. The aluminum fuselage and stub wings bore a blue umbrella over stylized green trees, the logo of the Borneo Scheme.

Vickers had met Louise Mondadero, the Scheme’s Field Director, fifteen years before when she was a senior ecologist working for the government of Kenya. They’d gotten along well enough to keep in touch, even after Louise took over the Borneo Scheme.

Her phone call two days before had been a surprise to Vickers, though. Almost as great a surprise as the call’s contents.

When the twin nacelles locked into their vertical position, the tilt-rotor began to descend behind the wash of its props. Two of the Malaysian police got up from their hammocks to watch.

Vickers ducked into the shelter for his satchel and battered gun case, all the luggage he had brought with him from Nairobi. He started for the tilt-rotor as it touched down. To Vickers’ surprise, the pilot shut off his turbines. Louise had emphasized that haste was essential, and Vickers was ready to go.

The pilot, a young man wearing a multi-pocket cotton shirt and shorts, flopped down the left cockpit-access door and jumped to the ground. Ignoring Vickers, he strode instead toward the busy roadway. The feathered props continued to spin twenty feet in the air, slowing only gradually.

Dr. Louise Mondadero got out from the other side of the cockpit. “Tom!” she called, her clear voice carrying over the truck noise and the dying moan of the turbines. “This isn’t the time!”

Louise had cut her black hair short, and she looked noticeably older than she had when Vickers last saw her five—six, dammit—years before. As she trotted after “Tom,” she clapped a straw hat on her head. Sunlight made her sweat, though the dark olive complexion from her Brazilian ancestry—roughly equal measures of Mediterranean, African and Native American bloodlines—was impervious to sunburn.

Vickers opened the tilt-rotor’s side hatch and tossed his exiguous gear inside. Six tube-and-fabric seats were folded against the sidewalls. There was a wooden crate containing tools and ropes in the cabin, but it looked more like litter than cargo.

“Henry, I’m terribly sorry,” Louise called back over her shoulder. “We’ll be leaving in a moment.”

Vickers gave her a neutral smile. He sauntered after her, paying no attention to the implied order to wait. Ninety percent of a safari guide’s problems involved his clients rather than the wildlife. Vickers figured that made him a lot more of an expert in whatever wild hair had gotten up the pilot’s ass than Louise herself was.

The pilot was already across the road, shouting at the customs police and gesturing toward the vehicles crossing the border unimpeded. Vickers didn’t know a word of the standardized Malay dialects spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia (much less the local tribal languages), but it was easy enough to read what was going on.

The people on the ground had been paid off. By the time complaint could be made at a level higher than the bribes had gone, the damage would be done.

The police were blandly indifferent. The third Malaysian official got up from his hammock and smiled at nothing, watching the one-sided discussion out of the corners of his eyes.

As Vickers reached the near margin of the road, Louise Mondadero put a restraining hand on the pilot’s arm. He broke away from her and stepped directly into the path of an oncoming flatbed. The truck’s engine was still lugging on the slight grade. The driver managed to stop short of the human obstruction without fishtailing.

The pilot opened the cab door and shook his fist in the driver’s face. Following vehicles had to stop, creating a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere.

A white mini-pickup pulled out from the end of the line. It accelerated toward the blockage.

Vickers eyed the leading truck. The pilot had been saved from having to jump—or worse—by the fact this vehicle’s cargo consisted of four turboprop engines and skeletonized alloy girders, a bulky load but not especially heavy. When joined, the girders would form the framework of a gigantic aerostat to float pallets of logs from the jungle more efficiently than tractors could drag them. The next truck in line carried the folded gas bags and the tanks of pressurized gas for inflation.

Vickers waited for the dust to settle—literally—before he joined the pilot and now Louise at the truck cab. The truck cast a gritty shroud forward when the driver braked his wheels. The cloud was reddish and opaque, more like a desert sandstorm than a human phenomenon.

Of course the moonscape to which logging operations reduced the land was inhuman as well . . .

Louise got the pilot down from the truck’s running board by a combination of cajoling and her actual weight dragging on his wrist and shoulder. The name tag pinned over the pilot’s left breast pocket read tom o’neill. He was a short man in his mid-twenties, with black curly hair and a handsome face now distorted by an Irish temper.

Since the pilot was under control, Vickers turned to face the white pickup as it skidded to a stop. The driver and the two men in the open box were soldiers in dark green utility uniforms without markings of any kind. They carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns.

The passenger in the cab wore a dark business suit and an open-necked silk shirt. A pale blue handkerchief matching the shirt protruded from his breast pocket in a neat triangle. The man’s hair was straight and black, and his dark Malay features would fit any age from Vickers’ forty to sixty or older.

“Yes?” he said in English. “What is the trouble here, please?”

“Are you in charge here?” O’Neill demanded. He wasn’t in the least cowed by the man facing him, which did nothing for Vickers’ opinion of the pilot’s common sense. The gunmen were cheap muscle, a type common in or out of uniform. The man in the suit was something else again, and a great deal more dangerous.

“I am Mr. Nikisastro,” the man said. “I must ask you to leave my trucks alone, yes? Our permits are in order. If you—”

O’Neill bunched his right hand into a fist. A soldier lifted his submachine gun to strike with the extended butt. Another racked back the bolt of his weapon to charge it for firing.

Vickers grabbed the collar and shoulder of O’Neill’s shirt with his left hand and jerked the pilot backward. Vickers was only a little above medium height and slim, but there was deceptive strength in his flat muscles. He pivoted so that he stood with his back to the logging official and guards, facing O’Neill, whose shoulder he still gripped.

“You Javan land-rapers have no business here!” O’Neill shouted. “All the forest here is controlled by the Borneo Scheme!”

“We are not in the forest,” Nikisastro said. “And may I call to your attention the fact that your Borneo Scheme is not a government but rather a pact among several governments—of which mine is one. If you have a problem with our presence, your headquarters in New York should take it up with the proper officials in Jakarta—or with the government in Kuala Lumpur, since this is Malaysian territory.”

“Tom,” said Louise Mondadero, “we have business to attend to. Let’s go.
Now.”

O’Neill grimaced. He swatted at Vickers’ hand. Vickers let go of the pilot and eased a half-step back.

O’Neill had to let off steam somehow, and he’d calmed down enough that he wasn’t going to hit a man who might have him shot. Therefore he chose Vickers as a target, which was fine. That’s what the guide was for, to take the anger of paying customers so that they wouldn’t let it out on one another.

Vickers supposed he was going to be paid for this. It wasn’t something he’d asked about when Louise called him in a panic across seventy degrees of longitude.

“You think we don’t know what you’re doing, but we do!” O’Neill said. “And we’re going to stop you!”

The trucks of the last half of the column were now jammed bumper to bumper, all the way down the last switchback before the border crossing. Diesel engines rumbled and pinged in a background as loud as ocean surf. There must be forty vehicles in all, counting those which had passed earlier.

“Tom . . .” Louise said, but O’Neill was already on his way back to the tilt-rotor. Vickers and Mondadero followed the pilot.

One of the guards called a gibe in Malay. Nikisastro silenced his man with a command as sharp as a whiplash. The first of the stopped trucks clashed back into gear.

“Good to see you again, Louise,” Vickers said in a neutral voice.

Louise stopped with her hand raised to lift herself into the aircraft’s cockpit. She laughed, took off her hat, and wiped beaded sweat from her face with the woven brim. “Henry, I’m glad to see you, too. Things are in a hell of a mess, a
hell
of a mess, but I’m really glad to see you.”

She banged the cockpit door closed and walked around to the cabin to join Vickers instead. O’Neill lit his right turbine. Warm air puffed from the downturned exhaust.

Louise clicked two adjacent seats out from the fuselage. Vickers strapped his satchel and gun case to the cargo net furled on the opposite side of the cabin. Louise looked over.

“That’s all you brought?” she asked.

“All I need,” Vickers agreed. “I was surprised that you were able to get me visas and permits so quickly. I had no trouble at all.”

“That was the Scheme’s New York staff,” Louise said with a smile of pleasure. “Sometimes they make me crazy, but they’re really very good.”

O’Neill had both turbines spinning. He looked back into the cabin. “Are you . . .” he began. He saw the gun case. “That’s your gun, is it, Vickers?” he said.

Vickers nodded. “Yep,” he said. “I was telling Louise that I didn’t have the problem I expected getting it through the various customs.”

“Too bad,” said O’Neill. “Well, maybe the baggage handlers will have broken it.”

He turned back to the controls. The turbine whine increased to a throbbing howl. The tilt-rotor lifted straight up without the short run-out Vickers had expected. Vickers sighed. This wasn’t a new problem either. There was always somebody on a photo safari who didn’t understand how dangerous and unpredictable large animals could be. He, or more often she, objected to the rifle the guide carried just in case.

But it wasn’t a problem Henry Vickers had expected in the present circumstances, when the beast being hunted was a tyrannosaur.

The tilt-rotor swung smoothly into transition mode. The wings and the engine nacelles on their tips pivoted so that the props pulled the aircraft forward through the air rather than up into it. O’Neill didn’t have the sunniest personality of Vickers’ acquaintance, but his handling of the controls was deft. Vickers could forgive a lot if somebody did his job well.

The tilt-rotor banked slightly to turn toward the standing forest. The highway formed one division of the Borneo Scheme, a ragged red pencil mark separating variegated two-hundred-foot treetops on one side from scrub and gullies on the other. The boundary was as obvious from the air as it would have been on a map.

The Scheme was an intergovernmental compact. Under its terms Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia agreed to halt the destructive exploitation of much of the interior of Borneo in return for billions of dollars in development aid from the West. The money wasn’t a significant factor in the agreement of tiny, oil-rich Brunei, but its sultan enthusiastically supported the creation of an internationally administered buffer between Brunei and his larger neighbors.

The forest canopy provided a deceptively even cap over broken terrain. When the protective cover was gone, heavy rainfalls ripped down the hillsides and clawed ravines through the soil.

On the other side of the highway, the Borneo Scheme administered medical and biological research funded by the West, though there was no attempt to bar the indigenous natives. Nomads continued to wander and hunt in the rain forest as they had done for tens of thousands of years, and after debate the more settled farming tribes had been permitted to remain as well. So-called slash-and-burn agriculture as the natives practiced it was a sophisticated long-fallow system of successional farming which didn’t involve primary forest.

The logging convoy had halted within a mile of the international border. The leading trucks had started to unload their heavy equipment. Vehicles escaping from the traffic jam snorted down the road to join them. Louise stared at the encampment through the cabin window opposite until the aircraft leveled out and hid the scene.