Sword of Allah (46 page)

Wilkes felt more relaxed about the trek this time, partly because they weren’t on the tail of a hostile war party, but mostly because he was in-country on official business at the invitation of the government of Papua New Guinea, and was therefore entitled to carry the M4/203 and the ugly sawn-off Remington pump strapped to his pack. And he was wearing military fatigues.

Atticus and Ferallo also carried M4s, not because the rifle was necessarily their preferred choice of weapon but because it was light and reliable. When Wilkes had told them how hard the going would be, Ferallo was disbelieving. But she was a believer now, stripped down to a navy singlet soaked with sweat. And featherweight though it
was, the Bushmaster M4’s seven kilos loaded had become a dead weight as they trudged the narrow, slippery mud paths that snaked up and down the hills. Yet Ferallo hadn’t complained about the mud, the climb, the weight, the mosquitoes or the leeches, and Wilkes had to admit he was impressed. And surprised.

‘So why would the chief name his son after the cassowary?’ Ferallo asked Timbu.

‘Well, the cassowary is a big, flightless bird. Weighs around sixty-five kilos and stands around one and a half metres tall,’ said Timbu, amused at Ferallo’s naivety. ‘And the thing has a temper. When it’s pissed off, it can be pretty frightening. Has a sharp toenail over a hundred millimetres long that it uses like a dagger. Corner one and it’ll kick you, and maybe disembowel you. Don’t think of it as being like an oversized chook.’

‘Oh,’ said Ferallo, giving Muruk a friendly, respectful smile he readily returned.

Timbu took a long drink of water from his canteen and ate some yam to keep up his energy levels. The interpreter was keen to return to the highlands when Wilkes had put it to him. Resolving unfinished business was just part of it. After the last trek with Wilkes where he witnessed first hand the damage being done by the flood of weapons, Timbu had decided to enter politics, to defend the rights of the highland people, and try to stop the gunrunning.

‘So, Tom. Tell me again why we couldn’t just take a helo in?’ said Monroe, half joking, as he adjusted his pack’s shoulder straps.

For the simple reason that if Duat were at the village or in its vicinity, they didn’t want to telegraph their presence
and spook him. But Atticus knew that and so Tom didn’t feel the need to repeat it. ‘Come on big, tough CIA guy,’ said Wilkes. ‘The walk’ll do you good.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’ said Monroe. Trekking through the bush was hard going and Monroe was a city boy, more at home in the jungle of the concrete variety. But he was first and foremost an adventure junkie, and meeting challenges – especially challenges of the physical and dangerous type – was his ‘thing’.

The conversation trailed off rapidly as they resumed the climb, walking in single file, leaving each with their private thoughts. Wilkes and Monroe had decided to come to Papua New Guinea directly from the terrorists’ camp on Flores. Wilkes’s hunch appeared to be reinforced by the terrorists’ own meticulous records. While most of the detail on the design, construction and flight plan of the UAV had been destroyed, the Babu Islam encampment had been run like a military establishment and spreadsheets were kept on nearly every facet of camp life. Even down to how much rice was consumed.

Within a few hours of securing the encampment, a detailed inventory of the terrorists’ weapons and munitions cache had been found and checked. A single crate of twenty new H&K submachine guns, and boxes of ammunition to go with them, was unaccounted for. And Monroe’s theory that one of two high-powered inflatable boats was missing had been confirmed. Wilkes believed that Duat, stripped of his bank account, and with his terrorist partner Kadar Al-Jahani dead and his army of fanatics killed by the very weapon he’d intended to use on innocent people, had skipped camp as soon as the UAV
was launched, taking something he could readily turn into cash: weapons. And where would he try to sell them? The New Guinea highlands? It wasn’t such a stretch. There he had contacts and he was largely anonymous. He could trade the guns for dope which could easily be onsold for a tidy sum – and he’d sure need one to have any chance of successfully lying low, his highest priority now. Every police and intelligence agency around the world was after him, a wanted man right up there with terror’s pin-up boy, Bin Laden.

Wilkes suddenly collided with Ferallo. He’d had his head down, deep in thought, and she’d stopped on the trail in front of him. He glanced up to apologise and realised the collision was no accident.

‘My spies tell me your engagement’s off,’ said Ferallo, feet apart, hands on her hips.

‘Sorry? I –’

‘You’re a free agent now, Tom. So maybe we can have that drink,’ she said.

‘How did you know about me and –’

‘I’m a spy,’ Ferallo said with a shrug.

‘Oh, right…’ Wilkes was taken aback. An approach like this, in the middle of the jungle, was completely unexpected. At their first meeting, he hadn’t found himself particularly attracted to Gia Ferallo. But she’d proved herself to be competent, tough. And by the looks of things, aggressive. Also, Ferallo knew what he did for a living and she was obviously okay with it. He looked at her again. She was striking – the dark, mysterious type. Very different to Annabelle. And that was a good thing, wasn’t it? ‘Sure, a drink. Here,’ he said, handing her his waterbottle.

Ferallo shook her head and said, ‘I’m going to let you off now, but when this is over, you
owe
me that drink, something in a long chilled glass with ice in it.’ She turned and moved off.

Wilkes watched her disappear, swallowed by the trail. He had to admit that having a drink with Ferallo was actually a pretty exciting prospect, and that realisation caused a twinge of guilt. There was unfinished business with Annabelle. Cancelled engagement or not, she was still very much in his mind. And, at that moment, the image was of an angry Annabelle, an Annabelle looking at him with her arms crossed, frowning, annoyed because he hadn’t told this woman that he wasn’t interested.

The sun was high overhead when Muruk left the trail and led them through a dense patch of low, wet scrub full of spiders the size of a man’s hand with long, delicate black legs. According to Muruk, they were not overly dangerous to humans, apparently, but a bite could leave a nasty wound and permanent ugly scarring. Fortunately, the arachnids seemed more afraid of the large mammals moving through their habitat, and they scuttled away and hid amongst the leaves and branches of the foliage. Muruk was wary of the spiders because he was naked, but the boy was even more leery of what lay on the other side of the scrub.

Wilkes cautiously parted the leaves and saw that Muruk had brought them back to the marijuana field. Women and young children moved through the plants, snapping off thick heads and dropping them into baskets.
Harvest time. It occurred to Wilkes that they’d made far better time on the return journey to this village because they’d used the main paths, arriving in broad daylight rather than at dusk.

‘Now what?’ said Atticus, kneeling beside Wilkes.

The children in the plantation horsed around as children everywhere do, chasing each other, getting in their parents’ way. The one area they seemed to give a wide berth to was the spider bush Wilkes and the rest were hiding in. It was a good place to observe goings-on with little risk of discovery, which was obviously why Muruk had led them here. But observation was not the point this time, it was contact. ‘C’mon,’ said Wilkes as he began to move forward. ‘Time to meet and greet.’ He pushed the mat of leaves aside with the tip of his rifle and a large spider fell to the ground and ran away. A few steps later and he found himself standing amongst the towering marijuana crop, the smell of the cannabis almost overpowering. A young girl squealed and ran away, and a few seconds later, Wilkes, Monroe, Ferallo and the rest were surrounded by naked warriors with spears levelled at them, the barbed tips quivering with the fear coursing through their holders’ veins.

‘Jesus, Tom, thanks for the warning,’ said Timbu. He began to talk to the warriors, who shouted back. The men darted half a step forward, feinting aggressively with their spears. ‘Drop your weapons and packs,’said Timbu quietly, maintaining eye contact with the people on the other ends of the spears, ‘or we won’t get further than this.’

Wilkes slid the pack off his shoulder and slowly, carefully, placed it on the ground. The spearheads were coated
with a black substance that was probably a nerve poison, a theory he was not prepared to test. He lowered his M4 beside the pack and dropped it the last few centimetres. The others followed his example. Wilkes slowly looked behind him. Muruk had not left the safety of the spider bush and was probably, by now, watching the proceedings from another vantage point further away.

A warrior darted forward and took Wilkes’s rifle. He popped out the magazine and half stripped it down before reassembling it. The man knew his way around the Bushmaster and the fact that he was wearing a penis gourd and had a very large boar tusk through the septum of his nose Wilkes found quite disconcerting – something about the clash of cultures, or maybe even the contamination of one culture by another. And Wilkes recognised him. He was one of the men he and Ellis had knocked out when they first scouted the village all those months ago.

‘I know this is going to sound corny, Timbu, but can you ask them to take us to their leader,’ said Wilkes with the calmest voice he could muster.

‘You’re right. It does,’ said Monroe under his breath. All their weapons had now been confiscated and the one that seemed to be giving their captors the most enjoyment was Wilkes’s sawn-off Remington. They laughed at it and threw it up and down, not taking it seriously. One of them snatched it, aimed it casually at a tree and pulled the trigger. The plantation filled with a BOOM and when the blue smoke had cleared a large section of the trunk was missing. The man who fired the weapon let it fall to the ground and rubbed his shoulder vigorously, the shotgun’s vicious recoil having taken him by surprise. The noise brought
more of the villagers to the plantation to see what was going on. One of the men reached forward and placed his hand on Ferallo’s breast and gave it a good squeeze.

‘Ouch,’ she said.

The men behind the spears laughed at Ferallo’s reaction and the release cooled things down some.

‘They couldn’t figure out whether you’re a man or a woman,’ said Timbu.

‘Gee, that’s funny,’ said Ferallo. Still, a sore breast was better than a spear in the guts, she reminded herself. ‘They worked it out yet?’

Another man reached forward to squeeze Ferallo’s other breast, only to have one of the women start shouting at him. The man withdrew from the armed detail and the two, obviously husband and wife, began having a vocal domestic disagreement. ‘Yeah,’ said Monroe, ‘I think they’ve solved that riddle.’

The atmosphere had relaxed somewhat, and children began to dart in and out of the circle created by the ring of armed villagers. One of the men barked a demand and motioned with a flick of his head.

‘I think they want us to go with them,’ said Ferallo.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Timbu. ‘Just smile, everyone, and wave. Look happy. We’re not on Mars, and friendly gestures mean the same here as they do everywhere else.’

‘What about Muruk?’ said Wilkes, waving and nodding at the people who came to stare at the creatures with white skin, something many of the younger highland people had never seen before.

‘Did us a favour,’ Timbu said, following his own advice with a big grin fixed to his face. ‘It’s the payback thing. Best
for us if we’re not associated with Muruk’s village. We can start here afresh. Also, it would have been a big risk for Muruk personally to show his face.’

Wilkes wasn’t questioning the boy’s courage at all. He just wanted to make sure the lad was all right.

‘Don’t worry about Muruk. He’ll be fine. No doubt he’ll catch up with us later.’

‘So what happens now?’ Wilkes asked.

‘They’re doing as you asked, taking us to see the headman. Have you noticed the absence of guns?’

‘Yeah…if anything I thought there’d be more here now.’ A young boy had walked up to Timbu, taken him by the hand and was leading him along. Timbu felt a thrill at that. He loved these people and looked forward to the day when he could defend their rights.

It had struck Wilkes as odd immediately when they’d been bailed up by supia – spears – rather than by Kalashnikovs. The men obviously knew their guns here, though, as the individual who’d begun stripping down his carbine had attested. A return to stone-age weaponry was the last thing he’d expected, especially here at this village.

The entourage grew as the party moved off the well-worn path through the jungle and entered the outskirts of the village proper. The place was no different to Muruk’s home except that, being even more remote, there was no western dress worn at all. The women wore strips of grass around their waists and nothing else, whether young or old, and all the men were adorned with koteka of various sizes. The third millennium had not touched this village until Duat and Kadar Al-Jahani decided to involve it in their plan for a new order in South East Asia.

The place felt different in the daylight, with none of the malice of Wilkes’s previous visit, despite the ring of spears around them. They walked past the drying room where Wilkes and Ellis had spied on Duat and company doing the deal and sealing it with a scoob. Two women sat outside a hut pounding on nuts or berries, delivering alternating blows. The tools being used as hammers were, from the looks of them, Heckler & Koch nine millimetre pistols. The heavy butt ends of the pistols were doing a great job although, obviously, not made for it.

Monroe jabbed him lightly in the ribs. ‘What?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Take a look,’ said Monroe, nodding at three women using AK-47s as large pestles to pound whatever was in the bottom of a stone mortar.

‘Well,’ said Timbu, also watching, ‘now we know what has happened to the weapons.’

‘Hmm, inventive,’ offered Monroe.

The group walked the length of the village, ultimately approaching a raised day bed with a thatched roof overhead, where three old men sat playing a game not unlike jacks, with old bones and animal teeth. The men looked up from what they were doing when the noise of the approaching parade reached them. One of them, the youngest of the three, got up and walked towards them.