Sword of Allah (4 page)

‘The Indonesians came back again a couple of months later with still more guns, wanting more drugs. This time they struck a deal with the larger village. The following day, a raiding party wiped out the smaller village – everyone – men, women and children. Fewer warriors use the traditional weapons around here anymore. They all want carbines. A lot of people are dying– it’s very sad.’

Wilkes nodded. Sad was an understatement. ‘Ask the chief why his village doesn’t have rifles yet,’ he said.

Timbu put it to the chief, who hawked loudly onto the ground before answering.

‘The chief says it’s the road. It scares off the traders. That’s why this village is one of the last in these hills to get
them. But the chief thinks his village will get rifles soon. They must have them to deter attacks.’

The chief began to talk again, smiling, patting Morgan and Littlemore on the back. Timbu said, ‘The chief wants us all to be his guests tonight, and he is sorry that he didn’t make us feel welcome when we first arrived. He didn’t know we were such good fighters.’

Wilkes scratched his forehead. He wasn’t keen. This wasn’t supposed to be the SAS show. He looked at Loku and Pelagka. Bill Loku took over, speaking up in pidgin, smiling, using plenty of friendly gestures and back-patting of his own to get his point across. Striking up a rapport with these people was his reason for being here. Politicians – the same everywhere, thought Wilkes.

Timbu translated for the politicians and the chief smiled broadly, showing a mouth full of red and black teeth, the legacy of a lifetime of chewing betel nut.

But it wasn’t all happiness. The wives, mothers and sisters of the two villagers felled at the treeline by friendly fire began to mourn their dead. They howled over the men. Timbu said, ‘Aside from the emotional loss, losing their men is going to cause those women real hardship. They’ll have to rely on the generosity of the village to survive.’

Wilkes nodded. ‘If it’s not a rude question, Timbu, I’ve been meaning to ask – where’d you learn to speak English like that?’

‘My parents came from this area. Our village got torched when I was a baby. A payback raid over a pig. My parents were killed. An Australian patrol officer found me and adopted me. Went to a private school in Sydney. Political science at Sydney University, then back to Port
Moresby, and here I am.’ He said it as if there was something about his life’s journey that was inevitable.

‘Is “payback” what it sounds like?’ asked Littlemore, who’d never been to PNG before and didn’t know much about the place.

‘Yeah, it’s exactly what you’d think it means. You do something to me, and I pay you back. Unfortunately, the way they practise it here, you pay me back and then I pay you back and on it goes, round and round. Used to be pretty bad before the Lutheran missionaries began converting the area and settled things down. But looks like it’s gonna get bad again with all these guns about.’

‘Yep,’ said Wilkes, looking at the dead highlander twenty metres away curled on the ground in the foetal position, his warpaint running with his own blood. PNG troops laid three other dead warriors beside him. ‘So what are you doing up here, Timbu?’

‘This was my home,’ said Timbu. ‘Not this village, but these hills. Come back every chance I get.’ He looked around, taking in the surrounds, and Wilkes could sense the man’s loss. ‘Now I work for the government as a translator. When I heard Bill was heading up here to kiss babies, I put my hand up to come along. I speak English, Indonesian, pidgin, a couple of these highland dialects and a smattering of menu French to impress the chicks.’

‘Don’t think you’ll find much foie gras round here,’ said Wilkes. He sized Timbu up professionally and decided it would be much healthier to be his friend than his enemy, for Timbu was a big man, five or six centimetres taller than Wilkes, and just as stocky – around a hundred and ten kilos in weight. He guessed Timbu was around thirty to
thirty-two years old, a few years older than himself, and built like a rugby player – maybe a second rower, Wilkes thought – with a good strong face, a broad nose and teeth so white they appeared to be lit from the inside.

‘Boss,’ said Beck, interrupting.

‘Stu?’

‘Got three wounded PNG men. Not seriously. Two flesh wounds – both thigh shots – and a fractured tibia and fibula. The bullet’s still lodged in the bone. Should medivac ’em out.’

Wilkes nodded.

‘We’ve got no morphine, just a basic first aid kit – a few dressings and that’s it.’

Wilkes heard the men crying out when their pain became too much for them to bear. ‘Gary?’

‘Yo.’

‘See if you can get that Blackhawk up here pronto. Tell ’em we need medivac.’

‘On it,’ Ellis said.

‘And while you’re there, see if you can get a patch through to regiment. Give ’em the serial number on this rifle and see what they can do with it,’Wilkes said, tossing Ellis the carbine.

‘Sure, boss,’ said Ellis, who then turned and jogged off to the truck to get on the satellite videophone – the vone – and make the call.

Gunfire cracked from the treeline. Wilkes turned to face the source. It was the men who’d chased the marauders off into the jungle, returning. They seemed pretty happy with themselves, laughing and shooting the weapons they’d won skywards as they strolled back into
the village centre. One man was being carried between two others, his foot a bloody red mass. Beck walked over to meet the approaching war party, Timbu following. ‘Put him down here,’ Beck said. The wounded man was laid on the damp earth and Beck rummaged in his satchel for swabs to wipe away the clotted blood. The warrior stared straight at the sky, eyes fixed and wide. He breathed short, quick breaths through his teeth, flecks of white spittle blowing from his lips. Yet, he made not a sound. ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Beck. ‘I can’t give you too much help, I’m afraid.’ Beck admired the man’s courage and cursed the fact that he had no morphine to end yet another unnecessary battle with pain.

An old woman, naked but for thin baggy cotton shorts, with hair the colour and texture of steel wool, pushed through the tribesmen, muttering. She carried a banana leaf on which were collected small piles of berries, leaves and beetles. She knelt beside the wounded man, placing the banana leaf on his rigid stomach. She gathered the nuts and leaves, put them in her mouth and began to chew. After a minute, she knelt over the man’s face and let a gob of purple spit fall from her lips onto his clenched teeth. He swallowed and, within a handful of seconds, relaxed into a deep sleep. Beck watched on, open-mouthed. The old woman spat the masticated quid on the ground, took one of the insects, a large orange beetle, bit off its head and chewed. She screwed up her face – Beck could only imagine the taste – and spat on the ground again.

‘The beetle’s head contains an antidote to the sleeping,’ said Timbu. ‘But its body is pure poison – a nerve toxin. They mash a few of ’em up and dip their arrows in it.
Handy when your dinner’s up a tree. One scratch with that stuff and it’ll fall onto your plate.’

Beck was intrigued. He knew there were many species of plants and animals that had medicinal qualities undiscovered by western medicine. And he’d seen that beetle many times before throughout the Asia–Pacific region, yet he’d never heard of it having the properties it apparently possessed.

Timbu spoke to the old woman, who replied tersely before pointing at the shattered foot. ‘Apparently you’ve got around twenty minutes before the pain finds its way through the medicine. She says you should remove the bullet before he wakes, because she says she’s not doing this again,’ he said, screwing up his face, mimicking her.

Beck didn’t say anything, silently agreeing that eating live beetles was not something he’d want to make a habit of. He wondered what on earth was in the collection of nuts and leaves that, combined, had acted so fast and so completely to knock the patient out.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Timbu, ‘but you’ll never find out. It’s considered magic and they guard it jealously.’

Beck shrugged and got to work. He poured antiseptic on his hands, and then felt around in the flesh and bone of the man’s foot with his index finger until he found the slug. It was difficult to reach. He cut the skin further with a scalpel, working quickly, and then dug out the bullet, again using his index finger. He could feel that many of the delicate bones were broken. It must have been a ricochet, tumbling elliptically as it penetrated the skin, smashing its way in. The warrior would also have to make the trip in
the chopper to the hospital at Mt Hagen. Beck did the best he could, dousing the wound with antiseptic and applying a pressure bandage to help stop the bleeding and keep the flies off. When the patient woke, the pain would be excruciating. ‘You know, it’ll be touch and go whether you keep this foot, sunshine,’ Beck said to his unconscious patient. Infection would be the major concern, ironically possibly introduced by his probing finger, but there was not much else he could do. When Beck was finished, he sat back on his haunches. ‘Okay, next,’ he said. Timbu told the villagers that Beck was done. The men picked up their wounded comrade and began to carry him off.

‘Better explain he has to go to hospital, Timbu. On the helo. They should carry him over there. Put him with those two blokes,’ said Beck, pointing at the sedated PNG soldiers who were also now miraculously sleeping like babies after having been visited by the beetle woman.

‘Boss, the helo will be here in twenty,’ said Ellis, panting from his run to and from the vehicles.

‘Good,’ said Wilkes, distracted. He’d noticed the TV news crew filming, using the activity of the SAS as background and that was a concern. It annoyed him. He walked over, careful not to be within the camera’s frame.

‘…violence continues to be a feature of these elections, but now there’s something new. The primitive highland warriors, people happily living a simple hunter–gatherer existence for thousands of years, are armed with modern military rifles. And they’re using them…on each other. This is Jim Fredrickson in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, for NQTV News…’

‘How was that, Barry?’ said the journalist to the producer
after a few seconds’ pause to let the tape run.

‘Looked good to me,’ said the cameraman.

Barry gave the thumbs up.

‘Look,’ said Wilkes, walking up to the crew as the man called Barry checked the sound equipment, ‘I appreciate that you blokes have a job to do, but I asked you to keep us out of your reporting.’

‘I know. Don’t worry, Sergeant,’ said Barry. ‘The background is way out of focus – just a bit of colour and movement, that’s all. I can assure you that you and your men won’t be recognisable.’

‘Okay,’ said Wilkes. Anonymity was important to the SAS. If they could be identified by any bad guys, there was always the chance that revenge might be exacted on them through a hit on their friends and family in the future.

‘Hey, now I know where I’ve met you before,’ said Barry. ‘It’s just dawned on me.’

Wilkes cocked his head to one side. The guy did look familiar.

‘Well, we’ve never
actually
met, but aren’t you with Annabelle Gilbert?’

Wilkes didn’t answer. He was uncomfortable about having his professional and private lives mixed.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen you around the station a couple of times. Barry Weaver, producer,’ he said, holding out his hand.

Wilkes reluctantly shook it. ‘Tom Wilkes.’ He remembered that Annabelle had mentioned Weaver in the same sentence as ‘sleazebag’.

‘Look, Wilko, don’t worry about us,’ said the producer, putting his arm around Wilkes’s shoulders as if he’d become his new best friend. ‘We’ll do the right thing by you. And, by the way, I reckon you’d have to be the luckiest man on this planet.’ Weaver jiggled his eyebrows up and down repeatedly – suggestively – so that there was no mistaking
why
he thought Wilkes was so lucky.

The helo arrived with the familiar thump-thump, distracting Wilkes. Ellis came over.

‘That was quick,’ said Wilkes.

‘It was already airborne and close by, boss. Mt Hagen thought it better to pick the wounded up now and ferry them in, rather than turn the bird around and collect a medical crew.’

Wilkes looked at Beck.

‘That’s okay with me, boss,’ said Beck with a shrug. ‘The patients are as stable as I can make them, anyway.’

Wilkes nodded. Fair enough. He walked Ellis out of earshot of the producer. ‘Listen, when the help leaves, find some excuse to get that news crew on it will you?’
Fuck ’em. They had their story, didn’t they?

Twenty minutes later, the Blackhawk lifted off, carrying away the wounded and the news crew. Barry waved goodbye from the helo’s open door. From a distance, Wilkes and Ellis watched. Ellis yelled over the noise of the helo’s departure, ‘Told the producer guy the trucks had broken down and that we were going to have to walk out through this,’ he said, indicating the impenetrable wall of jungle nearby.

‘Yep, that’ll do it,’ said Wilkes, feeling relieved enough to return the friendly wave.

The tribespeople had gathered to watch the wounded
men being loaded into the Blackhawk. They were all familiar with helos. The villagers about to get a ride in it were considered lucky, for this was seen as a real adventure. As the Blackhawk rose from the grass clearing, a small boy started spinning with his arms out, imitating the aircraft, and soon every child was doing it – spinning until they fell over, dizzy and laughing.

The smoke of several fires hung in the village at about waist height. Night fell quickly at this high altitude, and so did the temperature. The soldiers came prepared for it with khaki flight jackets, the same type used by military pilots. Timbu and the politicians threw on jumpers. Most of the locals ignored the cold, going about their business near-naked. Some of the older folk and the youngsters had grey blankets wrapped loosely around their shoulders. The days were hot, but the nights cool.

‘Ples bilong yu?’ asked the chief as he took a seat beside Wilkes.
Where are you from?

‘Mipela bilong Ostrelya,’ said Wilkes, a bit of pidgin coming back to him.