The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  He understood, in that briefest of brief moments, he got it!

  It wasn’t what he was scared of; it was simply the fact that he was scared. The fear had been eating at him, it was stealing his strength and making him shrink into himself, turning him into the very thing he feared. “Fear of a thing only brings that thing closer to you.” Mike had once said to Ben. Now Ben understood that statement

  He had been narrowing his perspective, blinkering himself with his own feelings and creating his own doom.

  It all hit him in a split second and he reeled from the shock of such sudden awareness.

  ‘SHIT!’ he bellowed out loud, a smile stretching wide across his face, ‘Wow! That was a close one man! I almost lost it there! Whoa!’

  ‘You would’ve made it back,’ said Jill, impressed at Ben’s rapid ability to spring back into his true self’, ‘I just slipped in a little catalyst there, thought it’d speed things up a bit.’

  Jill was being modest and Ben knew it. He would probably have come back from his despair in his own good time, but he had a feeling that it’d be at the moment of death. As his light blinked out he would realise where he’d gone wrong and his last words would probably have been along the lines of, ‘bloody hell, aren’t I just the daftest pillock that I ever knew!’

  ‘Cheers man!’ beamed Ben, happy to not be trudging down the road to his own demise.

  ‘No problem.’ Jill waved the event off with a light flick of her tiny bangle covered wrist.

  They sat silent for a while, grinning to themselves and giggling stupidly whenever they caught each other’s eye. The room seemed brighter, less damp, warmer and the thrill of things to come was very real and very wonderful.

  Chapter 20

  Gin and Shanty Towns

  The plain chugged away grudgingly southwest in the direction of a small Indonesian island that Shoop knew would hide them well. They had been flying all night and the first light of day was springing up over the eastern horizon.

  Turbulence kicked the little five-seated seaplane in the ribs every now and then, shunting Shoop and his crew in different directions. Jim, still unconscious, flopped around like a rag doll, bumping into Dr Komodo who would, in turn, thump him back in the other direction. In the end he got so sick of it that, finding a toolbox under his seat and removing some duct tape, stuck Jim to the side of the plane, using several rolls. The sight of Jim’s mummified body raised a chuckle from the pilot.

  They had time to go over some of their research as they flew, Shoop left it to Dr Komodo, but nothing jumped out at him as being immediately obvious. They were looking for some clue, some sign, anything that would point them in the direction of the vessel. It had been in Singapore somewhere in the late eighteen hundreds, that they knew, beyond that, they had no idea.

  Shoop had managed to convince the independents that they stood an outside chance of tracking the damn thing down but secretly had his doubts. He played his cards very close to his chest. He was in conflict. His sixth sense was buzzing like an angry wasp in a cigar tube but his common sense was screaming at him that their hunt was futile and that all hope rested with George in Scotland. He did his absolute best to ignore the split in his mind and just get on with the job, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult. One thing he couldn’t afford to do was to let his doubt leek out and poison the already fragile fellowship of the independents. He’d barely been able to contain himself during Jim’s little rebellion in the bar. Jim had no idea how close he’d come to being killed. Another mistake like that could throw the whole ordeal into disarray.

  A small piece of good news came to them mid-flight. It was just what they needed. Shoop had idly picked up his tiny computer and glanced at it to find that Carl had escaped the hospital in Singapore. He’d headed north and appeared to be making his way to the border of Malaysia. Border crossings could be tricky, but he had no fear for Carl in that respect, plus, he would be fuelled on by the need for marijuana and they’d have plenty in Malaysia, even if you could get the death penalty for it. It grew wild in some of the bordering regions. Carl knew this because he’d started planting seeds there years ago. Shoop held out hope that Carl would yet redeem his idiocy in Singapore and avoid Tim and the Satellite, along with whoever else was hunting them.

  Even with this good news, though, the doubt he felt was still quite potent. He had to bury it, hide it, keep focused and trust to his instincts. They’d seldom been wrong before and he hoped against hope that they wouldn’t let him down this time. It was the single most important mission of his life and he was feeling the strain.

  The words he’d spoken to George bounced around inside his mind, “success or death” the only two foreseeable outcomes that Shoop could see. It was a harrowing thought.

  He sat next to the pilot at the front of the plane, running everything through his mind in a staunch silence as the sparse clouds edged past the windows, his face unmoved, his body made of stone, his eyes un-flickering. His grimace was deep, but then that was nothing new.

  Dr Komodo, Yan and the mummified Jim were silent as the grave. Which wasn’t surprising from Jim as his mouth was taped shut and he was unconscious.

  Dr Komodo was scanning the surprising wealth of information that they’d managed to gather in such a short time. There were historical records on births, deaths and christenings along with the rise and fall and rise again of the Singaporean wealth. He had thousands of photos to go through and hundred of documents. It wasn’t going to be easy. He couldn’t help but be a little dismayed that Carl’s research had gone missing; there could have been vital clues in it that might’ve tied some thread of evidence together. Their success may well have been halted by Carl’s foolish reactionism.

  If there had been some marijuana around and the experimental chip in Carl’s head had been pacified, then their situation would be infinitely more comfortable as the Satellite and Tim wouldn’t have been alerted to their presence in Singapore. But then, Carl found himself reasoning, there’s no use crying over spilt milk. His mind was attempting to do the same thing as Shoop’s, to get on with the job in hand and to push some doubt far off into the back of his brain. Not all the way, as worry can make a man sharp, but not allowing it to creep too far forward for it to take control. It was a delicate balance.

  Jim was dreaming of the blonde lady in the red Chinese dress. The shapely thigh, the restrained bosom desperate to be freed, the full cushioned lips, green eyes and voice like warm cream liqueur. Strangely, in the dream, a dark cloud hovered almost imperceptibly over head. It was reaching out to him, trying to pour its misery down on him. The dichotomy of desire and doubt battling inside him as he slept, just as Shoop, Dr Komodo and Carl fought with their hopes and doubts.

  Yan, on the other hand, sat rock still. Blank. Thought not an option. He was a machine. He was a cyborg set on its unshakeable course. His thoughts, if there were any, as mysterious and unfathomable as condoms to Catholic priests.

  They bumped their way through the tropical warm air, buzzing through patches of cloud and stretches of night sky, each of them lost in themselves, churning through whatever thoughts they may or may not have been having.

  As the sun came up they started their descent, slowly circling an island, apparently aiming for the smallest airfield ever conceived. It was tarmac and sturdy, but relied very much on good piloting and very sharp brakes.

  This worried Shoop somewhat as they were in a seaplane. The pilot was clearly either drunk, stupid, stoned or a frightening combination of all three.

  Shoop hated hiring unknowns at the last minute, it meant he had to work that little bit harder to make things go smoothly. He’d already had to tell the pilot to dip back below radar range and to try and stay under the cover of clouds as much as possible. He’d had to keep on his back pretty much the whole way.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ barked Shoop.

  The pilot looked like a man who’d taken a damn fine thrashing from life and had taken to drink and drugs
to dull the stinging bruises. His hair was long, greying at the temples and was unkempt, almost to the point of being dreadlocked. It stuck to his clammy tanned face, partially shielding his glazed eyes and harsh weathered features. Shoop’s voice apparently pulled him out of some far off daydream. The far away grin on his face stuck to him as his mind travelled back to the reality of the cockpit.

  ‘Huh?’ he said sleepily as he turned to look at Shoop, ‘Oh, sorry mate, I was miles away. What’s up, do I need to hide under another cloud again?’ He spoke with the lilting upward inflex of a beached out Australian, his soft tones floating through the air, barely audible over the noise of the rushing wind and the engines.

  ‘No I don’t want you to go under another cloud…. You’re aiming at land you dozy pillock!’

  ‘Is that wrong?’ replied the pilot, eyes half closed in a stupor.

  ‘YES its wrong you Muppet!’ Shoop’s words stabbed at the pilot’s ears with threatening venom. ‘We’re in a bloody seaplane you freak!’

  ‘Eh?’ the pilot looked around the cockpit, confused, then looked out of the window and saw the floats that stuck out from under the main fuselage. ‘Oh shit yeah, sorry mate, thought I was in me old flyer there fer a sec!’ his drawling Aussie intonation slipping out of his mouth like a drunk falling out of pub at closing time.

  Shoop broke his nose.

  The pilot woke up a bit from the shock.

  ‘Jeez mate!’ Shoop marvelled at the Australian tendency to refer to people as “mate” even after breaking their noses, ‘what the bloody hell’d’ya do that for?’

  Blood spilled from his face. He tried to catch it with his hand and stem the flow.

  Shoop brought his face close to the pilot’s with death in his eyes. He stared at the man who, at the sight of Shoop’s gritty malevolence, became very shaken and started turning white, even through his deeply tanned skin.

  ‘Keep your fucking hands on the wheel and your eyes on the job,’ hissed Shoop, ‘or you’ll get infinitely worse than that!’

  The pilot looked over his shoulder nervously in search of some support. He didn’t get any. All he received was stony stares from Yan and Dr Komodo. Jim didn’t do anything as he was still asleep and taped to the inside of the plane.

  Knowing that he had nowhere to turn and believing thoroughly that Shoop wouldn’t hesitate to cause him a world of pain, the pilot snapped out of his permanent dream-like state and decided to concentrate on the job at hand. Terrified, he clasped the controls, wide awake now, knuckles white with strain, blood flowing out of his nose and ruining his favourite hemp shirt. He altered course, swinging the plane away from the runway and heading for a small bay just along the coast, just as Shoop instructed.

  Shoop, seeing that the dopey pillock sitting next to him didn’t need any more convincing, sat back and relaxed a little.

  The shanty town rose over the small bay like a junk yard. Corrugated iron and drift wood shacks spattered the lush crawling jungle hillside. Heaven and hell crammed together, each ignoring the other with equal fervour.

  The landing hadn’t been the best but at least they weren’t sitting in a ball of flame slowly sinking into melting tarmac. The pilot was still shivering from his harsh awakening into Shoop’s world. He was pail with fright and blood loss. All he wanted to do was to get the shady characters out of his “bird” and find somewhere to lie down.

  Some time later, after having flown the seaplane to a tiny and remote paradise island, the pilot realised that he’d been doing the wrong things with his life. He’d had a bit of a hard time of it and blamed some of his shortcomings on that, but mostly he fast became aware that this excuse only worked to a certain point. He realised that his life was dissapointing because he’d acted like a moron for most of it. Most of his pain had been subconsciously self-inflicted. The brief glimpse of Shoop’s world and the depths of hell that he saw in Shoop’s face for those brief, yet eternal minutes had made him see, if only for an instant, what real anguish was.

  He gave up hallucinogens, met a nice young native girl on the island and spent the rest of his life farming, producing babies with his wonderful new wife and reading philosophy. Later, he would become the most prolific philosopher since Socrates and the whole world knew his name. People made pilgrimages to find him on his tiny island and partook of his wisdom, yet he still marvelled at what a quirky sense of humour fate had, giggling at it on his death bed.

  The landing had woken Jim up. He thought that he was paralysed for a moment. It took him a few minutes to figure out why it was, exactly, that he couldn’t move his arms, legs, head or body. He was disoriented from the drugged dart he’d caught in the neck and panic took him, but once he’d calmed down a little he realised that he’d been taped to the side of a seaplane. Which made him panic a little bit more.

  Dr Komodo giggled to himself a little as he watched Jim attempt to thrash his way out of his mummification.

  ‘Take the tape off him!’ commanded Shoop, ‘and see if you can take some of that daft facial hair away with it!’ Shoop gave an evil grin.

  The only thing visible of Jim was his eyes, that could be seen through two strips of tape. They darted around in panic at the suggestion that he would loose some of his beloved beard, ridiculous and pencil line thin as it was, he still loved it.

  ‘Don’t even think about complaining!’ sneered Shoop, ‘you brought this on yourself. Don’t think for a minute that any of us have forgotten your lack of spine back in the bar!’ Shoop was deathly serious.

  Jim’s panicked eyes calmed as he accepted the fact that he’d have to atone for his behaviour. He’d dropped the ball and he knew it.

  The duct tape took off his eyebrows and a large section of his beard. The prosthetic nose and chin that he’d used as a disguise in Singapore were torn from him too, leaving patches of his face red and swollen. He looked ridiculous. Even Yan gave a little smirk at the sight, something that the others hadn’t known him capable of.

  They all clambered out of the rickety aircraft, bounded onto a jetty that was little more than some precariously organised planks and set off into the shantytown. They plodded up through the sewage sodden filth that made up a small street leading up from the jetty, walking past a number of make-shift hovel-like abodes as they went where squinting suspicious eyes peered out at them from ramshackle doorways and windows. They were all slight tiny people, lucky if the tallest among them stood over five foot five and were ill accustomed to the sight of westerners, especially westerners of such odd appearance. All they knew was poverty and rags.

  One of the shacks had a couple of battered signs outside it, one looked like a cola brand sign from the fifties and the other was green and had the word “Gordon’s” written on it in white lettering. It was a name Shoop was overjoyed to see. As far as his constant state of rancid misery could be overjoyed.

  ‘Nice!’ said Shoop clapping his hands together and rubbing them. He’d run out of gin and felt good knowing that he could drink its harshness even in this, one of the remotest corners of the globe.

  The sun was crawling higher into the sky as the pilot made his getaway from the small bay. The day promised to be a hot one and still Shoop’s hat never left his head, he just tilted it back a little.

  The owner of the dishevelled bar had to be woken before they could get a drink. He complained for a while, until Yan looked at him for a moment, all ill temper fell from his features after that and for the rest of the day the booze came easily. Shoop threw a bundle of cash at the barman, ensuring that they’d be kept happy, just to make sure.

  Their presence attracted some attention and by mid morning a crowd had gathered outside the bar. Shoop walked outside, pulled out one of his guns, grimaced at the throng and motioned for them to leave. They scattered like wildebeest fleeing a pouncing lioness.

  ‘We’ll be safe here for a while,’ thought Shoop, the pressures of the Sphere easing in his mind. The pilot had risen above radar level a couple of times, and could feasibly have
been seen from an overhead satellite, but they had gone through enough cloud to ensure that they wouldn’t have been able to track them completely. Even if they had a small idea as to which direction they were heading, there were hundreds of islands in the area, all with the potential for hiding. It would be days, probably weeks before they would be found and all they needed was a day or two. They could be off the island and heading in any direction before the Sphere found sign of them.

  The pilot had been a bit of a worry. He may have taken it upon himself to tell authorities of his brief travels with the group. A small glance from Yan had seen to that. He would never be able to talk to anyone, ever, about Shoop and his men again.

  They could relax a little.

  The makeshift bar was much like the rest of the buildings in the village, it was all salvaged wood and metal sheets. The table they sat at was nothing more than stacked crates and the chairs were small section of tree stump. Against all odds, however, there was electricity. The bar housed the only generator in the village, which meant that they had ice for their drinks, this was a blessing as the day grew gradually hotter and hotter. There was a faltering fan on the driftwood bar that fought against the odds to produce the merest hint of cool air but ended up just pushing all the hot air around a bit.

  They were sticky, hot, uncomfortable and dirty, but at least they had booze. Booze made everything better. After a few hours of recuperation they turned their attentions to the research material that they’d gathered in Singapore.

  They’d put it off long enough. It was time to find their fate, either they were going into hiding in some wild jungle or distant mountain, or they’d be given a clue that’d allow them to fight on.