The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11)

by Philip McCutchan

He never did know what it was that landed on him from behind.

  He went down without a sound and he dropped his gun and while I got my hands round his throat and squeezed daylight out of him Flair nipped out and grabbed the gun. Five minutes later we were off the pier and turning to head out of the bay for Kimbau, with our engines running dead slow and quiet. According to my chart Kimbau was just over eighty miles off to the north-east and I reckoned that once we opened up on full power we could reach it in four hours’ maximum.

  8

  We watched the sky lightening as we pushed through the night and we made Kimbau in forty minutes under the four hours. There had been no pursuit. That was odd, if one assumed that DO back on Logatau was in this business; for he could presumably have made a good guess where we were heading. Maybe, I thought, and I didn’t say this to Flair, the lack of any pursuit was due to the precise fact that he had guessed accurately and couldn’t have cared less because we were never going to come out again. Which would suit him fine.

  We beached the boat on a wide stretch of untrodden sand lying bright beneath an early-morning sun and for extra security I laid out an anchor, taking it up the beach as far as the cable would allow. While I was doing this Flair was getting our portable stock of food and drink ashore. This would keep us going if our explorations didn’t take us too long. We left the boat all secure and shipshape and we moved up the beach into thickly growing dark trees behind, trees that seemed to climb towards an almost mountainous interior. My chart hadn’t been a lot of use insofar as a land trek was concerned, though it seemed to me that if I used my pocket compass and kept along a bearing of 238 degrees we would hit a native village after about four miles. There were other tiny settlements on the island, but nothing that looked like a white residential area or a harbour. Which all lent colour to my suspicious views on this Dr High. Kimbau was a curiouser and curiouser place for a doctor to hide himself away if he was still interested in practising medicine. It wasn’t only ‘detached’ as Pomfret-Hopton had said; it was bloody remote, and lonely. Of course, it could be that High had simply retired and had found a nice spot to get away from it all, but one way and another that didn’t seem particularly likely.

  *

  Four hours later I wasn’t quite so sure Kimbau was even a nice spot. Despite the marking of the village on the chart there wasn’t even a cleared track through the steeply-climbing jungle. We weren’t wearing much in the way of clothes — I had only a pair of shorts on apart from footgear, and Flair wasn’t wearing much more. But by now those shorts had begun to feel like a heavy, clinging wool blanket. The sub-machine gun weighed a ton, so did the food and drink. We were balls of sweat and we were covered with nasty scratches like claw-marks from the jungle growth and itchy swelling bites from the insect life. Every now and then on flatter ground we stumbled into a swamp and the leeches had a bonanza. We had to waste time de-leeching each other when we emerged. The closeness of the atmosphere and the hot, heavy stink of swamp and rotting vegetable matter was overpowering and we could feel our energy draining away with every step we took. We needed frequent rests. I had no idea in the world how far we had gone, but we just plodded along, climbing the compass bearing and hoping for the best. It was all we could do, and if it hadn’t been for the compass we’d have been there now, wandering around in the circles they say you always get drawn into in a jungle. (I wouldn’t really have known. Apart from a brief spell in one in South America a few years earlier, I had had no experience of jungles. After this, I didn’t want to acquire any more. I told myself I would settle for being one of those nice flash agents who operate with transistors in electric shavers and cufflinks that fire poison gas in girls’ bedrooms in the slick capital cities of the civilized world.) Nevertheless, six hours after leaving that glamorous, sandy beach, we made the native village. The sun was right overhead by this time, of course, and although its rays didn’t penetrate far into the thick greenery, we saw the light in front where it fell into a clearing, and soon we saw that this clearing contained the village shown on the chart. Or if it wasn’t that one, then by dead reckoning it ought to have been.

  “Thank God,” Flair said wearily. She was about all in and I doubt if she’d have made it much farther. I was half carrying her already, in fact. In the village we could, I hoped, get rest and information. I didn’t expect any hostility; these islands were well settled, even if there were no white men (as I’d deduced from the chart) on this particular one, and the old head-hunting yens of the Polynesians, or Melanesians, would have been sublimated … unless of course the reason no whites lived here was precisely because they hadn’t been. This was a nasty thought, but I didn’t really believe in it, for old Pomfret-Hopton would have been bound to have said a lot about it during his learned discourse on Polynesian history and what-have-you. Besides, Dr High sounded as if he could be white and he lived here.

  We staggered and stumbled to the edge of the clearing and I’d never before been so glad to see human habitation. Or rather, that was my first feeling, one of relief and gladness and happy anticipation, but it didn’t last when no-one came out to meet us and a cruel suspicion began to form that the village had been deserted.

  “It’s terribly quiet, isn’t it?” Flair said, looking around. She shivered suddenly in spite of the great heat, and I well understood why.

  “They’ve all gone,” I said wonderingly. “I’d give a lot to know why, too. It can’t be just to post a letter. The answer could be quite revealing.”

  She gave me a scared look. “You mean, what Pomfret-Hopton said about the natives hearing things?”

  “Yes. We’d better take a good look around. Come on.”

  We moved ahead, slowly. I had the sub-machine gun ready to shoot and Flair had my Beretta in her hand. It wasn’t that I expected danger, or no more so than I normally do on any job, but there was such a curious air about that village that it definitely made you feel safer behind a gun. The silence, the stillness — I couldn’t even hear animal or insect sounds — and the overall orderliness. It was like a film set, with the cast and hands gone off for the lunch break. Just as though it would come alive again in the next few minutes. I had the odd feeling it hadn’t been abandoned for long and also that it hadn’t been abandoned in a hurry. If that was right, then there hadn’t been a panic.

  I told Flair this. She said, “That makes it even funnier, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I do.”

  We looked into what I took to be the headman’s hut first, and that was as empty as the open air. Then the long hut where the common villagers would live, with its rows of bunk-like sleeping billets. Holding Flair’s hand I went slowly down the narrow gangway between. Everything was in orderly fashion here too, but there was no-one in that hut any more than anywhere else.

  “What can it mean?” Flair asked. She spoke in a whisper, and again I could understand why. There was something about the atmosphere of that hut that made one keep sounds to a minimum, like in church — maybe so one could have the readiest possible ear for anything extraneous that came along.

  And something extraneous did, very soon after that.

  We had finished searching the hut and had turned to start back for the exit when it happened.

  The daylight vanished, for a start. There was no sound, but the big barn-like doors at the end had shut. I felt Flair hold tightly to me and I felt the tension in her body. “Who did that?” she whispered on a high note.

  I said, “It could have been the wind.”

  “The air’s dead still.”

  So it was. You couldn’t fool the girl. There wasn’t a movement, wasn’t a rustle in the jungle treetops. All the same, a thousand ordinary things could have made those doors shut, I told her, and none of them worth panicking over.

  She said brittlely, “Name some of them,” and I couldn’t. But I did try. I said, “They could have been badly hung and swung shut under their own weight. There could have been an animal …”

  “Circ
us-trained, I suppose?” There were breaking nerves in her voice.

  I said, “Stay here, Flair. I’ll go along and see.” I started ahead, but she pulled me back. “No,” she said. “Don’t leave me. I’m coming with you.”

  I had to let her. She was shaking badly, I couldn’t leave her. We went on for the doors, slowly, silently, our feet making no sound at all on the bare earth floor. Then, just a moment later while we were still a good fifteen feet from that door, we both heard it: from outside, a slow, measured tread as of a small squad of soldiers marching in slow time around the hut. It was a sound, to us in that dark hut, of indescribable menace, the sound of a concentration of evil and of all the abominable magic of ancient Polynesia.

  9

  The sounds continued. I felt Flair pulling me urgently to the back of the hut. I went with her. There was just a chance, remote but possible, that whoever was outside didn’t know we were there. After a while the perambulations stopped and there was a curious scuffing outside the end of the hut where we had hidden ourselves, and after this had been going on for some minutes there was a dry crackle, a sound I didn’t like at all, and then the smell of burning followed by the sudden lick of flame which, consuming the bone-dry material of the hut like the tinder that to some extent it was, reached the roof in a matter of seconds.

  We couldn’t hope to stay in that lot.

  I dragged Flair out from under one of the sleeping billets and we ran for the doors that had been closed on us. I was expecting those doors to resist but the moment I pushed them they swung open and we staggered out into the clearing and the sunlight, half blinded and half suffocated by the thick, billowing smoke. At first, because that smoke was rolling almost solidly out behind us and overtaking us, I couldn’t see who was waiting. But after a few yards the smoke began to rise straight up into the windless sky and I saw them.

  Six men with guns.

  Four of them were white men, two of them were islanders. All were men of grotesque build; they seemed not to be ordinary men. Because of their build they revolted me, almost froze me with a feeling not far short of horror. It wasn’t hard now to see why the native inhabitants of this village had abandoned their homes. The men’s actual bodies, the trunks, were big; they were thick and square and they looked immensely strong, with powerful shoulders, but the guns were held awkwardly in thin arms that were in no case more than twelve inches long and terminated in delicate, long-fingered, thin hands. The construction of those arms reminded me of kangaroos. The legs were a similar build, again no more than a foot in length, and thin and unstable-looking, as if unequal — which in point of fact they couldn’t have been — to the support of those heavy square trunks.

  We stood there staring.

  Flair whispered, “Oh, God, what are they, what are they going to do?” I had no time to say anything reassuring, not that I could have thought of anything that would be, before the strange figures, without a word, moved in on us. They walked in step, and though no order had been given they all moved as one, and slowly, a stolid and very purposeful advance. And uncanny … I heard Flair’s reaction. “Oh no, no,” she was whispering. “Esmonde, stop them, can’t you stop them …”

  The last words came out high, frantic. It was only then that I realized I still had the sub-machine gun in my hands. I lifted it to fire a swinging arc from the hip but they were too fast for me, much too fast in spite of those weak child’s arms. All six men fired and all six bullets smacked against the gun in my hands and the jarring numbed my arms. I dropped the gun. The men came on swiftly and one of them picked up the gun. Flair screamed, a sound of the sheerest terror that ripped like a sword through the crackling of the fire that was the only other sound in that superheated, still air. I felt sickened by the nearness of those men, by the total lack of emotion, of any humanity of any kind at all, in their faces, by the expressionless look in their eyes.

  One of the whites was the first to speak. In a harsh voice, as toneless as his eyes were expressionless, he said, “You’re coming with us, Commander Shaw. Mrs Dunwoodie, too.” It rocked me that they knew our names. He said no more but just as though he had given an order his stunted mates moved in closer to us. One of them took my Beretta away from Flair, who let him have it without a word but cringed away as though she couldn’t bear for her flesh to touch his. We were pushed at gunpoint past the headman’s hut and on towards the edge of the clearing, round which we went until we hit a hacked-out pathway that I hadn’t had the time to find myself earlier. We walked along this for a long way and in silence, climbing once again. We were both soaked with sweat that ran in rivers off our bodies. The feral smell of the jungle enveloped us, the branches, thrusting their growth across the path, slapped and tore at us. Two hours later by my watch the path started to take an even steeper slant and half an hour after that we reached the end of jungle country and looked out over a deep valley below us, a long valley lying between very high, steep hills, on one of which we were currently standing. I fancied that a dried-up riverbed ran through that valley, but it looked as though it had been a long, long while since any water had flowed and the floor of the valley was in fact mainly covered with close-growing scrub and stunted trees. And it smelt; a filthy stink of pure rot rose up to us. Flair, whose face had gone an unhealthy green, began retching. I felt pretty sick myself, but those thick-bodied bastards, who were no doubt well used to it, didn’t appear even to notice it. It smelt as though all the dead bodies in the world lay down there, rotting and putrefying beneath the cover of the scrub.

  We hadn’t long to get our breath back before the man who had spoken earlier said, “Right, let’s get going,” and two of his companions pushed past us to get into the lead. I soon saw why they had done that. They led us towards a narrow, very steep path leading down the hillside, a path that was damn nearly vertical and ran right down like a waterfall into the valley. Those stunt-legged men went down almost on their backsides and they acted as a brake to what would otherwise have been our headlong slide into the scrub. As it was we went down fast and dangerously enough, but our slithering into their backs didn’t seem to worry the guides in the least. They moved on down imperturbably and stolidly, not looking back, just keeping going. It didn’t take us long to reach the bottom and then once again we were back in jungle country, very thick jungle with a number of cleared paths running here and there and twisting back on themselves like a maze.

  I soon saw it was a maze all right, but those boyos had no doubts about their direction. They never hesitated. They led us along those paths and eventually we came out on the far side of the valley, which so far as I could see was just a blank, blank cliffside. I say that because it definitely had more the look of a cliff than a mere hill. When we came closer I saw that it was solid rock. It was very high, with an immense overhang. Frankly, it had a pretty scarifying look. We walked for some way along the bottom of this cliff and then I saw ahead of us a large square opening in the rock. We went into this opening and into a concrete-lined tunnel brilliantly lit by electricity. And on an island such as Kimbau, that really did shake me.

  Still following those two guides, with the others close behind us and breathing down our necks, we went along the tunnel for I suppose around a hundred yards, passing a number of doors leading off left and right, and at the end we were halted by another door with a set of pushbuttons on a panel beside it. One of the men moved up close and reached out with his kid-size arm and poked at a button. A few moments later the door slid silently aside and we were crowded into a lift. The doors slid shut and up we went. When the lift stopped we were pushed out into a long, electrically lit corridor with a composition flooring, brightly polished and very clean, and we went along this corridor, again past many closed doors, until we reached one that stood open. Flair and I were told to go into this doorway and when we had done so the door closed behind us, cutting us off from the stunted men, leaving us alone in a small high-ceilinged space like a sort of lobby with two more doors leading off it in addition to
the one we had come through. Flair by this time seemed too dead beat even to be aware of what was happening. Her face was white and full of strain, with dark smudges all around her eyes. When I took her in my arms I felt her body shake as if she had a high fever. I didn’t know what to say, I had no words of comfort at all. I was pretty dead scared myself.

  I let go of Flair and began to make an examination of the walls and doors. The latter, which of course were tightly locked — so rigidly at top and bottom that they seemed almost one with the walls — had no handles but each had a small round hole set in a metal plate on one side, like a Chubb lock. It was cold — a nasty cold fug, in fact, not unlike an old-style submarine on a long patrol in northern waters. And that was all I discovered — that, and the obvious fact that the lobby was lit by concealed electric lighting thrown from behind a recessed declivity that ran along the tops of the walls. If there was a bug, it would have to be up there somewhere, but in any case the recess was well out of reach.

  Then suddenly a voice that came from God alone knew where said, “In ten seconds the left-hand door will open. Mrs Dunwoodie will go through. Only Mrs Dunwoodie.”

  Flair gave a gasp and held on to me as if she would never let me go. I felt my flesh creep. The voice had been deep and authoritative, quite pleasant, and very English. The seconds ticked away. Then, without anybody needing to make use of that Chubb lock, if that was what it was, the door slid back silently into the wall and looking through I saw a high iron bedstead with the sheet turned back ready for an occupant. Flair’s grip on me tightened; I felt the terrible flutter of her heart, the pressure of her breasts through her thin, sweat-soaked shirt. I knew she would never be allowed to remain with me, but I couldn’t force her away, even though I soon realized it would have been better for her if I had.

  Nothing happened for a further thirty seconds and then, not exactly suddenly but extraordinarily drastically, the temperature in that lobby began to fall. It was quite fantastic and it was sheer murder. First our remaining sweat cooled, then it froze and broke on our bodies. The air felt bone dry in my nose and mouth. Our breath fanned out in intricately patterned, fragile skeins of ice. We were standing in a refrigerator of supercolossal power. We shook violently, shivers that racked us through and through. Literally, I felt my teeth rattle and bang together and I couldn’t stop them.