by Peter Tonkin
‘Right,’ said Richard decisively. ‘Leaky Creek it is, then! Leaky Creek and a midnight walk. That sounds like a plan to me!’
Father’s hand on his shoulder woke Richard from the brief power nap he had elected to seize between the glories of Leaky Creek at sunset and their proposed midnight trek to the ramin woods. He sat up at once, wide awake and fizzing with anticipation. The adventure so far had exceeded even his wildest hopes, and this promised to be a fitting climax. He glanced out through the net-draped mandi door and froze. Surely there was some mistake. It was daylight out there. Father and Son must have overslept. He looked across at the pair of them, but they were busy waking the others, so he held his peace and tiptoed out on to the deck. Held his peace wisely, as it turned out.
Richard had never seen a moon so massive, hanging so near the earth, in all his life, not even in tropical oceans with the nearest land-lights thousands of miles distant. There seemed to be a weight to the light that settled like silver-dust on everything around. A weight and a welcome coolness, at strange odds with the sultry stirring of the air against his face and forearms. There was that strange almost savoury smell again. He recognized it now - it was pandanus. Father and Son had used a knot of the spicy, almost curry-flavoured leaves in the rich fish and vegetable stew they had cooked for dinner on an incongruous little Primus stove, and then offered the spiked red fruit as a delicious pudding afterwards. But the pandanus were a good way back behind them in the jungle groves standing along the banks of the main river. What stretched in front of Richard now was a long silver creek winding lazily between peaty banks that fell back into scrub-covered plains backed on low slopes in the distance by the woodland of die-straight ramin trees. Beneath its apparently shallow, glassy surface, Richard knew, there were unexpected deeps. In the shadow of the silently coasting boat he had watched strange fish that reminded him of sturgeon that Father had called arwana. He had watched more false gharials with their long bony faces, creatures for all the world like huge otters playing in the depths as they chased the silver-sided fish.
Robin was at his shoulder. ‘I thought it was dawn already,’ she whispered. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that moon?’
‘That’s a good old-fashioned prairie moon,’ added Nic as he joined them. ‘I heard my grandpappy talk about them when I was a kid but I never thought I’d see one. Not one like he used to describe. “Bright as day; you could read a paper by the light of a prairie moon,” he used to say. And I never really believed him. Until now at any rate.’
‘You never have a paper handy when you really need one,’ teased Robin, and Nic laughed a little self-consciously. Richard watched, struck by the way that Nic seemed uneasy at having let his guard down. He thought back to the dark look shot at Gabriella when Nic had not known about the Bugis harbour in Makassar. Of the odd coincidence that both of them had been missing during their one-night stay-over in Pontianac. Like the silver-surfaced river, Nic had hidden depths.
‘We’ll still need flashlights as well as binoculars and cameras,’ warned Gabriella, arriving hill of practicality and determination to be off. ‘We’ll lose the light pretty quickly when we get into the forest, though the moon’s not due to set much before dawn. Father and Son will be coming with us this time, but we’ll need to stick together and take all the care we can.’ She paused until she was certain she had all their attention. ‘We’ll need to be very careful out there,’ she said.
Father and Son added strong high-sided hiking boots to the more traditional clothing they had favoured so far. Clearly impressing the tourists came a far second to dying of scorpion sting or snakebite in the ankle. And it wasn’t just the warm day, as Shakespeare had it, that craved wary walking, Richard thought as he followed Father ashore. As well as hiking boots the two men carried stout-looking sticks about two metres long - the closest thing to a weapon allowed in the national park, unless you were a ranger. Just as the little Primus stove was the closest thing you were allowed to an actual cooking fire.
Richard watched the easy, apparently casual way Father swung his stick across the path, sending the heavy end whispering through the shadows at his boot-tips as he walked. Beneath the more distant sleepy calling of birds and animals of all sorts that came echoing from the woods ahead, a much more sinister slithering, scurrying rustling close at hand warned that they would do well to watch where they were putting their feet. But with the tall Dyak guiding them across such open country beneath such a massive moon, there was no need for torches yet, and Richard for one felt that the closer they stayed to nature for the moment, the more the park would offer them.
The peaty bank soon settled back into the scrub-covered plain and a path through the scrub emerged, hardly more than well-trodden earth between bushes, where the grass had been worn thin. Father followed this, his quarterstaff a-swing. Richard stopped watching where he was treading quite so closely and began to look around. No sooner did he do so than a squadron of huge fruit bats swept overhead like monsters from a vampire movie. Beyond these, a pair of egrets swept across the moon, its brightness turning their whiteness to black in silhouette. A huge heron lazily shifted its roosting place, all long snake-neck and massive wingspan, looking like some kind of dragon in the moonlight. Lower, away across the scrub, little owls hovered like huge moths just above the night-closed flowers of the bushes, silently hunting on the still, warm air.
The ramin forest closed over them surprisingly quickly, seemed to gulp them into its shadowy throat. Father’s footsteps did not falter; indeed, Richard felt them pick up pace as though they were beginning to hurry towards some secret assignation. He looked around, wide-eyed, before resorting to his torch, for as Gabriella had promised, there was weird and wonderful brightness here. Fireflies and glow-worms whizzed and wandered through the trees. Luminous beetles crawled like deep-sea fishes hoping to attract some prey with their chilly brightness. Apparently radioactive lichens glowed on tree trunks to left and right, or swept in branch-shaped clouds above like tiny bolts of frozen lightning. And, at his feet, all along the path, glittering toadstools stood in little skeins and rings like discarded Christmas-tree lights, shining like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, waiting for Titania’s fairies to arrive.
Richard drew in his breath to call Robin’s attention to the beauty of the scene. And froze. For suddenly, in his nostrils there was the faintest odour. The one smell he did not expect in this utterly natural place. The one smell that warned of utterly unexpected presence of other men. Of destruction in this utterly pristine place. Of danger.
It was the smell of smoke.
Richard switched his torch on, shining its bright beam forward. Father was striding even more rapidly now, almost trotting, with his quarterstaff slicing ahead of him, just above the ground, as though testing the shadows for tripwires instead of tarantulas.
The skin across Richard’s belly tightened. Automatically, he was jogging forward too, his first thought to stay close to Father. He was in motion before any other thought occurred, and once in motion, he was not a man to hesitate. He glanced over his shoulder, though, and saw Robin and the others also jogging forward, their torches bright, beams swinging to and fro among the tree trunks, like a little group of Jedi knights rushing to confront Darth Vader’s evil empire.
But what were they going to confront? Richard thought back to the second part of Inge’s lecture all those hours ago. About the concerns of the founders of the biosphere here that their park was under constant threat. How the collapse of the strong centre of the Suharto regime had led to the shattering of power-structures in Indonesia, just as the collapse of communism had in the old Soviet Union. About how local people, long forbidden to touch their tribal lands, the mineral wealth beneath them and the commercial wealth - both forest and fauna - upon them, all too easily fell prey to the more ruthless corporate giants. And the returning of the lands to their natural environments also meant returning them to their native owners - which of course could compound the prob
lem. There were Dyak settlements within these forests and jungles. Fixed ones which worked with the land and those striving to protect it. Villages full of men like Father and Son who could adapt their natural lifestyle a little. For whom a living could be made doing a little hunting, fishing, guiding of tourists. But there were others, Inge had warned, whose lifestyle did not fit in so well, the slash-and-burn farmers whose longhouses were moveable, who wandered at will through virgin forests given to them by their gods; damaging, perhaps even destroying them as of right. And on top of all this, there were the illegals - the hunters, the miners, the loggers, who bribed the guards and rangers, fooled the tribal elders and secretly ripped the heart out of the land.
The smell of burning could originate almost anywhere. Their hurrying footsteps, following Father’s sensitive nose, might lead them to a Dyak longhouse with a legitimately roasting pig. But there was no smell of cooking - merely of burning. Dyak deforestation, then; one of the moveable longhouses Inge had described.
But then there came the unmistakable whip-crack! of a gunshot, from unsettlingly close at hand. Father was running full tilt now, his quarterstaff supplemented by the bright beam of a torch. Through the trees ahead there suddenly came the sounds of shouting, though Richard could make out neither words nor language. The crunch of feet running across dead leaves and brittle branches. The creaking and slamming of doors. Then almost blindingly, even at this distance, the dazzle of big headlights, and the jungle sounds were drowned beneath the full-throated roar of a big motor being fired up. Another, almost at once.
Father was going flat out now, heedless of everything else as he hurled through the juddering forest towards the weirdly dancing bars of brightness and shadow that no doubt originated with a couple of big trucks turning in a clearing. Richard powered up in pursuit. At his back, he heard Nic calling to the women to fall back. Richard knew Robin well enough to know the words would be wasted on her. And sure enough, she arrived at his left shoulder just as Nic arrived at his right.
Side by side, on Father’s heels, with Son and Gabriella immediately behind them, they all exploded into the clearing. They arrived at the same moment as a pair of big trucks barrelled out down a track much wider - and newer - than the one Richard and his companions had followed. Wide enough, certainly, to have removed all the forest cover and receive full benefit of the moonlight. Richard caught a flash of distant tail-lights, high square rear-sections and great piles of logs lashed into place on top of them. Then the trucks roared round a bend and were lost to sight, except for the brightness of their headlights gleaming through the tree trunks. Striped black and gold like the flanks of tigers. Tiger-like also was the receding roar of their motors snarling away to whatever rendez-vous would relieve them of their contraband cargo.
Richard looked around their immediate vicinity and saw at once that the word clearing was exactly right for the place they were hesitating in now. A sizeable stand of ramin trees had been cleared with a vengeance. Chopped and trimmed. Their trunks stood forlornly to ankle height, like gravestones marking what looked like the better part of a hundred trees: damaged, maybe dying. It was their useless leaves and branches that they could all smell smouldering in a great smoking pile in the middle of the clearing, the wood-stove smell somehow fresh and clean in contrast to the stench of powder left on the air by whatever gun had fired the shot. The last few naked trunks still remained laid down - ready, no doubt, to be loaded into another truck on another secret forest-stripping run. And lying on top of these was the orang-utan. Somehow all six torch beams found the creature at the same time and the rest of the clearing faded into spectral moonlight as he was lit up by the unforgiving brightness.
His size and power were only slightly diminished in death. His arms seemed somehow longer, spread wide as they were, along the tree trunks, as though he had been trying to protect them, like a parent guarding its children. Or a monarch defending his birthright. His mouth was half open, showing his teeth, and his pendulous jowls were creased in his dying snarl. His naked, almost hairless chest was marked by a hole in its centre the size of a fist. There was no blood to be seen, though the trunks he was lying on would be thick with it, Richard knew.
‘You know what they use ramin wood for?’ asked Nic, apparently apropos of nothing. ‘Pool cues. Pool cues! That poor bastard of an ape just got slaughtered so that someone somewhere can clear a fucking pool table! Jesus, it makes you weep!’
What had happened seemed clear enough to Richard. The huge orang-utan had appeared here just as it had appeared this morning. It had reached over and taken someone’s bag just as it had taken Gabriella’s. But the reaction had been fatally different. A shot, followed by panic and escape. He was able to work so much out not only because he had an innate ability, honed by all-too-wide experience of violent death, usually among humans, but also because the orang-utan was still holding the bag that it had taken just before it was shot. Some attempt had been made to pull it from the death-grip of the massive red-furred hand. With no success. Its contents therefore had simply been pulled out by an owner desperate to retrieve whatever he could while his companions fired up the trucks ready to escape. The important things would be gone, of course - wallet, keys, ID - but other bits and pieces remained scattered around the pile of tree trunks. One of these, close enough to the dead orang to be bathed in the steady torch beams, was the flimsy of a fax. It lay spread wide open, held in place by the sap of the ravaged trees. Even at this distance, Richard recognized the lists down the main body of the paper. They were shipping schedules, detailing the ports of call of a company vessel of some kind. And beside them there were manifests detailing cargoes, ports of lading and destinations. But he didn’t recognize the letterhead above the lists.
‘Do you know whose logo this is?’ he asked Robin, breaking the silence and the stasis, beginning to move forward towards the dead orang. Robin shook her head.
But Nic answered grimly, ‘Yes I do. That’s the Luzon Logging Company. You were right all along, Gabriella.’
And Father nodded, his pendant Dyak earrings chiming quietly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s Luzon Logging all right.’
Chapter 18: Bambang
What saved them in the end was Sailendra’s latest eco-friendly economic initiative. This was Baya Brand Hand-Fried Organic Red Plantain and Green Mango Chips: a mouthful in more ways than one. Or it would be when the red-plantain harvest was in and they and the green mangoes were sliced and deep-fried in the organic palm oil that was due for delivery soon.
In the meantime, the initiative consisted of an industrial-scale preparation and deep-frying facility housed in an underused section of the cannery. Alongside it was a state-of-the-art chip-packing facility with foil bags already stencilled with the initial logo, and an inert-gas system designed to pump nitrogen gas into the bags with the finished chips. This was guaranteed to keep the chips in an environment where flavour and freshness would last for the longest possible time.
But because inert-gas systems could be hazardous to those who operated them, there was a first-aid kit accompanying it, also of industrial size. It contained two oxygen cylinders designed to revive anyone who had breathed in sufficient pure nitrogen to choke them. And the oxygen cylinders would be equally effective in reviving anyone who had breathed in dangerous quantities of any other toxic gas. Carbon monoxide, for example.
Sailendra did not think this through. He had only the vaguest idea of what was actually happening to him. The bubbles in the paddies made him think of poison gas but what sort it was he had no real idea. He certainly had neither the training nor the experience to be able to say for certain it was carbon monoxide. But that was the only odourless, tasteless deadly gas he had heard of, and so he guessed. And guessed accurately enough. And it was upon that guess he acted.
There could hardly have been anything further from his mind than Red Plantain and Green Mango Chips as he stumbled down the hillside, falling from one paddy to the next. But he did reckon that if the
re was anyone left alive and capable of helping Parang and him on this side of the island, they would probably be in the cannery. And, somewhat vaguer, at the back of his mind lay the thought that if he made it as far as the cannery and found it empty after all, then the brother to the truck stuck on the hillside up above them was parked there. And he knew where the keys were kept.
Luck and several other factors favoured the dying prince and his all-but-dead friend. Because of the dead men and women blocking the sluices, the paddies continued to overflow. The soil downslope was wet and slick, making the burden of Parang’s inert body just that vital bit more manageable. The paddies gave way to banana groves nearer to the cannery and the lethal gas was less thick here - an effect blessedly compounded by the sudden arrival of an ozone-filled onshore breeze. The cannery itself was empty of workers. Alerted by the almost mystical mouth-to-mouth communication system that was all the island had left now that the radio station, phone masts, post office and exchange were under several million tons of landslide, they had taken the two remaining trucks. They had filled them with all the fittest workers from the banana groves and the fruit farms and gone to help in Baya City. They had left the elderly, the women and the children in the village near the point that serviced the farms. The paddies were run by mountain people who rarely came down here, so at the moment only Sailendra knew of the mysterious tragedy they had suffered on the upper slopes.
