Guinea Pigs

by Peter Marriner

  They were lying in a dirt road, heavily rutted as if by heavy machinery and littered with wood chips and other debris of recent forestry extraction operations. All around them was a wall of as yet uncut forest. Behind the truck that had brought them were several others, painted the same anonymous olive drab, from which sacks and boxes were rapidly being unloaded. But if the unhappy captives imagined the General’s orders meant they were to be transferred to another truck, they were soon disabused. The loads from the trucks were being distributed among a line of ragged coolies, each wheeling a bicycle for transport, and at a hail, two of the hard bitten looking fellows wheeled forward their machines, grinning.

  Several of the General’s men seized Jacqueline, lifted her from off Roger and carefully loaded her onto the first bicycle, already part burdened with a couple of fat sacks. Hands, taking her by the arms and legs, settled her into position face down, stretched along its length and someone laughing, smacked her bottom firmly down, so that she straddled the seat, the crossbar under her torso, her breasts squashed upon the bulging sack beneath, with her head projecting beyond the handlebars. Paying no attention to her feeble protests, they fastened her securely, a rope across the small of her back, her wrists lashed down firmly to the front forks, her ankles to the rear pannier supports. But for the way their hands lingered, she might have been just another sack. She felt the hard thigh of the coolie who held the machine hot against hers and he only desisted from his pretence of having to adjust his load of naked female, to allow another more proprietorial hand to fall upon her.

  It was General Bha Duong who inspected the transport.

  “Very good, very secure. Take good care of her!” He slapped the sobbing load familiarly, evidently expanding upon the instruction to the attentive coolie in his own language. Grinning and vigorously nodding, the man produced from somewhere a grubby sheet of green camouflage cloth, throwing it over Jacqueline and the rest of the load, leaving only her head and two bare feet visible at opposite ends. Satisfied, the General glanced upwards at the narrow strip of visible sky, then at the assembled men and bicycles around him. With a gesture towards the forbidding and seemingly impenetrable wall of forest, he shouted an order. The trucks were already restarting their engines, backing and manoeuvring to turn about in the narrow space. The bicycle convoy got more quietly under way in the opposite direction, filing one by one after their leader and disappearing into the trees along a trail almost invisible from the motor track.

  The unfortunate captives, Roger having been secured in similar fashion on the bicycle behind his wife, had little idea where they were being taken, or for what purpose. They might have guessed that the suspicions of General Bha Duong being a protector and organiser of opium smugglers had been justified. The territory, long known as the “Golden Triangle” where opium cultivation flourished, lay far up into the mountains, in much the same area as the General operated with his irregulars. From there the opium came down into the lowlands for processing and distribution, proceeding by just such caravans and over just such secret trails. But so too must the General take up supplies and equipment into the mountains, upon officially approved business though by armed caravans and surreptitious routes. One caravan might well serve both kinds of traffic, coming and going.

  So the depths of the forest swallowed them up, a single file of men and laden bikes along a winding but well planned trail deliberately left barely wide enough to admit their narrow loads. It was a twilight world under the towering trees, the trail finding a way through patches of soggy earth and crossing trickling rivulets, ducking under fallen trunks and pushing through obscuring curtains of dangling lianas. All the way they climbed upwards, the coolies heaving their loaded bicycles, two to each machine at times, sweat running from their spare, sinewy bodies. Yet the labouring caravan made surprising speed, the trail well surfaced and the coolies still fresh. The sacks beneath the two captives helped to cushion them against the jolts and the camouflage sheeting to protect them from thorns and insect bites, but beneath its cover they too, were wet with sweat.

  Regularly the whole caravan halted to rest its propulsive element. The bicycles with their loads, animate and otherwise, were leaned against any convenient tree bole while the men drew together, squatting in companionable groups amid the leaves, straw hats tilted back from drawn faces and hollow cheeks, smoking big American filter tips with evident appreciation.

  Each time the General came back down the line to see how the captives were faring and to add to their sense of helplessness by assuring them that he expected no organised search to be made for them. They would be included in the toll of the dead without a second thought. All available aircraft would be fully occupied by the effort to deal with the rebel soldiers. Certainly several aircraft flew over during that day, but none seemed to be flying particularly low, or conducting a search, so that it seemed Bha Duong’s confidence was justified and that the caravan was drawn under the trees on these occasions as a mere precaution.

  The pace of the caravan that first day was not to be attained again, their captors were evidently pushing hard to get as far up into the hills as possible. The halts were short and their haste gave the coolies little energy to spare for anything else and the General’s personal interest in the captives caused them to treat the hapless pair with initial circumspection. The march stopped only when darkness fell, making only a rough bivouac well off the trail, pushing in under the trees with the bicycles. No fires were made. The two prisoners were kept well separated, tied to handy trees for the night and, since no talking was permitted in the bivouac, they had no means of communicating. The only view of his wife that Roger had obtained all that day had been a glimpse now and then of the pale half moons of her backside under the draped sheet, bobbing above him on the trail and seeming by their pale glimmer in the sub-aqueous leafy gloom, enormously conspicuous. Jacqueline, for her part, only knew that Roger was still following behind by the General’s pitching of his jokes so as to reach her through the intervening leaves whenever as he passed on down at the stops.

  Though never quite as strenuous again, that first day was to be the pattern of those that followed, as the caravan wound upwards day by day, over jungle clad foothills, higher and higher towards the mountains, shunning more public tracks and avoiding valley bottoms where occasionally there were glimpses of huts and patches of cultivation.

  Each day they started from their camp before dawn in a dank and chilly mist. Slowly, as the sun rose, great snow capped mountains appeared, towering in the distance, more and more clearly each day, one piled upon another in jagged confusion. Soon the sun touched the treetops and then the wild gibbons, greeting it, made the forest ring with their calls. Once or twice a deer looming unwarily out of the mist, gazed for one startled moment upon the strange labouring procession invading its solitude and plunged back into the grey obscurity, barking a dog-like alarm call. They travelled these wild un-peopled hills by trails passable only upon foot and saw no habitation larger than the occasional hamlet of huts far below, or on a distant misty hillside. These must have been the source of recruitment of the coolies, who changed every few days. They would make camp and in the morning there would be a new crew ready to move them on for the next stage. One morning they had to wait several hours, the General fretting bad-temperedly. Eventually the new set of coolies emerged out of the forest. They showed signs of inebriation but sobered rapidly before Bha Duong’s wrath. Their obsequiousness and sudden access of diligence made it clear that there was little hope of succour for the captives from that quarter.

  The bicycle pushers seemed to become more Mongoloid in features as the caravan climbed higher and further into the mountains. They were hard-faced brutes in any event, who seemed to accept their duties without question or even much evidence of curiosity. Their treatment of the captives steered clear of anything likely to cause physical damage, but as General Bha Duong relaxed his vigilance and his visits back along the li
ne became less frequent, these underlings whiled away the time on the easier stretches by perpetrating humiliating practical jokes upon their naked and helpless burdens. While the stiff leather triangle of the saddle wedged under the V of her loins protected Jacqueline’s pussy, it still left her bottom extremely vulnerable and her breasts bulged temptingly on either side of the crossbar.

  One of her pushers paused to break off a thick palm frond from the side of the track and worked its cold and splintery butt end into Jacqueline’s anus, so that she carried it for miles, waggling behind her like a long green tail plume. The next day as they waited for the laden line to get into motion, Jacqueline felt the rough scrape of a charcoal stick saved from the camp fire being used to decorate her bare white bottom cheeks with scrawled slogans or obscenities in black charcoal strokes. Trickling raindrops slowly washed the charcoal strokes into smudges and left her with a black rear that lasted until the next night’s camp allowed her a brief chance to clean herself in a stream. The same notions seemed to seize each successive change of coolie and her breasts and nipples were often black and sticky from frequent manipulation by the fingers of coarse oafs pretending to milk her like a cow.

  There was a growing sense of confidence about the caravan’s progress. General Bha Duong confirmed the reason in passing. “Now you are in a country where my word carries respect. Soon you will see me in my kingdom, where it is law!”

  This country of his was a chaotic, cloud-enveloped jumble of precipitous ridges, outliers of the Himalayan chain. It was almost unmapped except by satellite, largely un-administered by governments with more pressing problems and shaky budgets. To some extent the General’s captives were victims of past politics, for it had been lavish American backing that had enabled him to set himself up securely in this remote fastness, where rebels and dissidents of half a dozen allegiances, Chinese, Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, co-existed with bandits, opium growers and arms smugglers, in a kind of political limbo.

  The convoy passed over a wild river flowing at the bottom of a tremendous gorge, by way of a bamboo suspension bridge, a dizzying structure, sixty or seventy metres long and strong enough to carry the bicycles without unloading. After this, as if it were a frontier, the nature of the country changed. The valleys between the ridges were vastly deep, the rivers running almost unseen in impenetrable gorges, the precipitous valley sides thickly clad with clinging trees. The line of bicycle transports was forced to climb upwards by narrow tracks that led them from one small patch of cultivation to another. Yet even though these garden patches were planted and cared for the unhappy pair saw no sign of the cultivators’ dwellings. Unknown to them there had been other captives transported along this route in the past. Long memories of the bands of slavers who used to descend upon these parts from across the Chinese border had accustomed the aboriginal inhabitants to build their house in the forest, well away from the track. It was a practice that now fitted in well with their discreet relationship with the opium smugglers who currently used it.

  The deep valley had been very hot and steamy when the sun arose, the lofty ridges and dense forest cutting off the breeze. The bicycle coolies grew exhausted very quickly in these depths and the caravan was forced to halt and bivouac shortly after crossing the bridge, to wait until the cool of evening allowed them to tackle the steep slopes. It was during this halt that a few of the elusive natives appeared. Their strangeness seemed to emphasise the wildness of this land, stunted dark skinned men with great mops of black hair, in comparison with the coolies, appearing almost simian in features.

  They were nearly naked, with only a brief piece of cloth about the loins, hefting as weapons spears taller than themselves and, like all inhabitants of these jungle-clad valleys, carried in their exiguous belts a great square bladed chopping knife. They knew the General as a powerful personage who gave great gifts to his allies and were not to be disappointed this time. They quickly relaxed enough to express curiosity about the two strange prisoners, whose position and appearance elicited cackles of ridicule, which the General and his men idly encouraged. The oldest of the half dozen, surveying Jacqueline in particular, made a vigorous speech in knowing tones, supplementing his words with gestures. Amid the laughter of his men, Bha Duong translated. “He says that his grandfather told him how, in the old days the Chinese went down with slaves from our people to sell to the lowlanders. Now the slaves are going in the other direction. He says you must be a Thai princess such as he has heard about in old tales, because you are so big and plump.”

  The coolies, intent upon making mischief, pushed forward the biggest and ugliest of the aboriginals, seeming to suggest by the explicitness of their gestures that he was being invited to fuck Jacqueline. The half dozen curly mops shook with mirth, while Jacqueline cowered in horror and shame and her disregarded husband a few yards away ground his teeth in impotent despair. The General laughed with the rest, but intervened effectively nevertheless. Giving Jacqueline a familiar pat, he told her: “I said that you are a wicked witch whom the King of Thailand is sending to be imprisoned under a mountain and you would do frightful damage if you got loose!”

  The speech certainly had the man backing away nervously and his comrades seemed ready to take fright too. But the General quickly gave a demonstration of the witch’s present powerlessness by shoving the fat black cigar he had been smoking, butt first into Jacqueline’s exposed anus, whence it puffed little curls of smoke every time her bottom cheeks were vigorously spanked. It amused and seemed to reassure the locals. Perched up on the bicycle with her naked suntanned bottom stuck out, Jacqueline continued to be the butt of crude humour as the coolies seized upon the General’s mood.

  One snatched up his tire pump, displaying it to his guffawing colleagues and the blankly smiling natives. He removed the General’s cigar butt and replaced it with the cold hard nose of the metal pump, working it in firmly against Jacqueline’s apprehensive wriggles. With a whoop of glee he began to pump hard as if intending to inflate her like a balloon, while the rest standing round laughed at her expression. Jacqueline groaned and protested in fear and outrage as sharp jets of cold air spurted into her bowels, redoubling her wriggles. For the onlookers, the immediate effect of this squirming was to create the illusion that the plump white rounds were rising with every puff, while the air that escaped backwards between pump and anus came as a noisy series of squeaky farts and sent them into hysterical laughter. Rapidly, the heat of friction turned the pumping metal tube into a scorching intrusion that further enlivened Jacqueline’s expressive reactions.

  Fortunately the General called a halt at last, evidently not wishing his captives to be idly damaged. He called the coolies to order and, marshalling the caravan into line again, took leave of the bemused natives. Jacqueline hadn’t even the consolation of having presented a spectacle of which some account might percolate out of the mountains to official ears, for what sort of confused and incredible tale could it be that such primitives would make of their encounter?

  So the caravan forged on, following the high ridges. Whether they were in the same country or another, there was nothing to inform the prisoners. They had passed no frontier posts and few signs of habitation, but the attitude of their captors showed at least that they felt no further care for concealment. One evening the caravan pushed on after sunset, stumbling downhill through groves of bamboo to meet the first houses they had encountered since leaving the lowlands. By the light of the moon they passed through a straggling hamlet of wooden houses and arrived before a sort of inn, a long low building with numerous sheds and lean-tos within a bamboo fence. Inside the enclosure the bicycles were unloaded and the loads checked and carried into one of the sheds, while the current gang of coolies wheeled the bicycles off into the darkness. Dumped on the ground like forgotten baggage, husband and wife were set side by side for a moment, the first time since their capture. By now there seemed little they were able to say and before either could grasp
the chance, they were separated again, Jacqueline being half dragged, half carried after the General into the inn.

  Inside, the atmosphere hit her at once, warm smoky and thick after so long outdoors. A sweetish odour, pungent as burning orange peel, hung in the air, unfamiliar to Jacqueline and uncomprehended only until she saw the men lying on matting-covered benches around the walls. Men not sleeping and yet not fully awake but self-absorbed by fascinating daydreams. Before each stood a small low burning lamp the only illumination and here and there hands moved about the flame casting multiple moving shadows. Faces like skulls carved out of yellowed ivory never moved, even upon the sudden intrusion of a stark naked Western woman into their midst. Their lack of curiosity confirmed the nature of their deadly apathy. The place was an opium den.

  “Very old fashioned people,” Bha Duong said jokingly of the opium smokers. He and his men crowded in, laughing and relaxed, taking Jacqueline with them past the smokers and into an inner room, conducted with much bowing by the old woman who seemed to be in charge of the place. The men were elated, setting aside their weapons for the first time on the journey as if they considered the dangerous part to be past. An old woman set about providing food and drink on a lavish scale, bustling to and fro with multiple plates and bowls. She leered knowingly at Jacqueline with a sly expression upon her round waxen-yellow face, keeping up a flow of evidently obscene witticisms that convulsed the General and his followers. It was evident to the Englishwoman huddled in one corner that her captors meant to make this a night of enjoyment and she could have as little doubt as the old woman why she had been included.

  They were in no hurry for her. The men displayed ravenous appetites, rapidly demolishing the piles of rice and keeping the old woman trotting in and out with fresh side dishes. Jacqueline ate mechanically of whatever was thrust upon her, having learnt the hard way that her captors had no patience with hunger strikes. She was alert for the production of a needle and it was too late that she realised she had been already drugged. As the men fell to drinking noisy toasts and bawling songs, she felt with dreadful excitement the beginnings of an almost forgotten fire in her loins.