Her Master's Voice

Her Master’s Voice

Sherry is a lonely wife in Singapore, filling her days studying yoga under an Indian guru who loves women. The guru and her friend Ranji are helping her become the woman she secretly wanted to be, but there is a price to be paid for her new femininity.

How will she admit to her husband what she and Ranji have been doing? But he finds out and she is trapped on a tropical island, alone with the man she has wronged.

He has other worries; he has been targeted by Islamic terrorists. Soon Sherry and her friends from Singapore and Indonesia are fighting for his life with all determination and feminine charm they can manage.

Sensuality Rating:
SCORCHING
Genre:
Action/Adventure/Multiple Partners
Length:
91,000 words

HER MASTER’S VOICE

Jacqueline George

MENAGE AND MORE

Siren Publishing, Inc.

www.SirenPublishing.com

A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

IMPRINT: Romance

ABOUT THE E-BOOK VERSION:
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HER MASTER’S VOICE

Copyright © 2008 by J. E. George

E-book ISBN: 1-60601-269-X

First E-book Publication: November 2008

Cover design by Jinger Heaston

All cover art and logo copyright © 2008 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Printed in the U.S.A.

PUBLISHER

Siren Publishing, Inc.

www.SirenPublishing.com

DEDICATION

To the friends and colleagues who have made my stays in South East Asia so memorable.

HER MASTER’S VOICE

JACQUELINE GEORGE

Copyright © 2008

Chapter 1

Five in the morning and already Singapore was stirring to a new day. The black, starred velvet above could never shine clearly through the haze and lights of the busy city, and now it faded further as grey light crept up from the east. Moonbeam Walk dozed quietly but the rush of passing cars on nearby Holland Road was getting more frequent. By six o’clock the sound would be continuous and it would stay that way until very late at night.

Behind the open bedroom windows of No. 8, Sherry and Tim slept in twin beds. Tim had kicked his sheet off and lay nude on the rumpled bed. Sherry, tightly swathed in her sheet, lay rigidly on her back like a corpse awaiting burial. In her sleep she had pulled the sheet up about her ears and only the top of her short, blonde hair showed on the pillow.

On the point of five o’clock, the alarm screeched and Tim reached out to silence it. Not allowing a drift back into sleep, he dragged himself up to sit on the edge of the bed and looked unhappily across the room. Sherry did not stir. Moving automatically he made for the bathroom.

Still nude, he crept downstairs. His packed bag waited for him, along with his uniform and boots all ready to go. He slipped into his navy blue shirt and slacks, and sat to pull on his socks and Redwings. Patting his shirt pocket to check his ticket, passport and wallet, he quietly unlocked the door. He took his bag out into the dawn twilight to wait for his taxi.

The taxi hurried him north across the island, past lines of cluttered Chinese shop-houses and patches of near jungle, to Seletar and his Indopet plane. He supposed the big bosses in Indopet had managed to put together some sort of bent deal that allowed them to fly their charters into the military field at Seletar rather than the main airport at Paya Lebar. Tim regretted it. On mornings like these he would have liked to start the day with a cooked breakfast at the airport. Seletar could only offer coffee and Danish.

The check-in was basic, only old fashioned scales with a huge dial and a baggage trolley behind. An efficient but distant Chinese man checking tickets and issuing boarding passes. Two bored Immigration officers collecting visa slips and cursorily stamping passports. In the institutional lounge, passengers had begun to gather; all men in working clothes with little or no hand baggage. They sat silent and morose, preparing themselves for another stint in the oilfields of Kalimantan. Tim did not recognise anyone and made for the coffee table.

He sat and dozed until an Indonesian stewardess in severe uniform appeared at the exit doors and, without checking boarding passes, ushered them out to the tarmac and the waiting plane. He stayed awake long enough to eat the cold fried rice that Indopet substituted for breakfast and then slept his way across the Java Sea and the island of Borneo.

BalikpapanAirport always came as a shock to arriving passengers. Not so much the heat. That was similar to Singapore, but the total lack of concern from the Indonesian authorities for creature comforts. Tim shuffled across the tarmac to the corrugated iron shed called Arrivals. Inside, the air was stifling and the passengers stood sweating in line while immaculately uniformed Immigration officers carefully studied each passport. The harsh, spicy reek of kretek cigarettes filled the air and this more than anything else reminded Tim he had come back to his second home.

He pushed his way out of the Arrivals shed through a clamour of taxi drivers and looked for someone else in a Krumbein Oilfield Services uniform. At the back of the crowd stood Alfred, the office driver. He had a large envelope in his hand and a bottle of Pernod, and he smiled happily.

“Hello, Mr. Tim. Mr. Lefevre say you go taxi to Camp Dua, OK?”

Oh shit, Tim thought. Pierre strikes again. Now instead of a comfortable half hour in a chopper or the old Grumman Goose, he was stuck with three hot and tedious hours in a local taxi, winding around the potholes in the narrow strip of asphalt that passed for a highway in this part of Indonesia. He tore open the envelope in disgust and found, along with the job programs and invoices for signing, a hand-written note from Pierre.
Sorry but I could not get a seat on the chopper today. You must go by taxi. The head is for CB4. Please give it to Max. See you, Pierre.
Well, bless him. Pierre had known for at least the last two weeks that Tim was scheduled back today, and he could not get a seat? Tim did not believe it.

“What head is this, Alfred?”

“In taxi already,” said Alfred, leading him off to the car park. The taxi looked no older than Tim but in much worse shape. Two Indonesian rig hands waited next to it, along with the driver. In the boot the cylinder head of a GM Detroit diesel lay half hidden by small boxes of spares, all firmly sealed with blue Krumbein tape. Pierre obviously wanted an escort for the cargo and had volunteered Tim. Probably, the rig hands were just a little private enterprise by the taxi driver. Or by Alfred.

The taxi crawled slowly through the crowds on the road out of town, picking its way around pedestrians and animals and being passed continuously by suicidal riders on small Honda motorcycles. As the ramshackle shops turned into houses and then died away altogether, the traffic became lighter but the potholes that exposed the red-yellow clay of the road foundations dictated how fast traffic could move. Tim settled down to watch the passing villages and their rice paddies, clusters of small wooden huts shaded by coconut palms.

It was already late afternoon when the taxi lurched up to the gate of CampDua. Tim went to persuade the Indopet security guards to allow the taxi to deliver the cylinder head right to the jetty. Raymond waited for him in the shade by the river.

Raymond was his crew captain. Big for an Indonesian and fleshy, Raymond kept the crew working and the barge running. His straggly moustache was always ready to smile, but just as ready to stare with disapproval at any crewman who slacked. A stare would fix the problem and, following Indonesian culture, compliance with Raymond’s wishes brought the reward of respect. The crew recognised Raymond not only because of his position as captain, but more importantly because he had the disposal of all the empty plastic containers from
Sea Sprite IV
. After a substantial acid job he might have five hundred or more plastic jerry cans to sell.

Tim turned a blind eye to the enterprise and did not accept a cut of the proceeds. Under the unwritten rules of Indonesian black business, he should automatically receive half, the boss’s share. Raymond would then take half of the remainder and divide the balance equally amongst the crew. By foregoing his share, Tim had the undying support of all of them and they presented him with a carton of beer as a gesture after each big sale.

While Raymond got the rig hands to manhandle the cylinder head onto the
Sea Sprite IV
whaler, Tim went to the radio room to sign in with PetroFrance. That done, he took a seat in the bow of the boat, and Raymond guided them out into the muddy waters of the Mahakam Delta. Low in the water, the whaler found the current difficult. It took some time and skill to cross the wide stretch of river in front of CampDua and reach the nipa swamp that made up the delta itself. Raymond eased them into a narrow channel with branches hanging well over the water, a short cut the larger crew boats could not take.