Sword of Allah

by David Rollins

  ‘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 fo
rward 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.

  The man who appeared to be the most senior in their escort handed over one of the rifles, Wilkes’s M4/203. He examined the weapon and passed it back with a quick comment.

  ‘He says it’s not heavy enough to be of any use,’ whispered Timbu. ‘No good for pounding sago.’The interpreter spoke to the old man in the strange language that seemed to Wilkes to have no defined words or phrases, spoken as it was with a flat monotone. Wilkes had no idea how old the man was. He could have been forty or a hundred and forty. He was little, shrunken much like the chief of Muruk’s village. His nose was extremely broad, made even more so by the presence of an enormous boar’s tusk through it. Oddly, his skin was pale in places, as if the colour had been drained from it here and there. Cancer, perhaps, or some skin disease. Also, the man had no teeth, not one, and so his cheeks were concave and his lips puckered inwards. When he wasn’t speaking he habitually rubbed his smooth gums together. A couple of red and yellow feathers rose from the tight grey bun at the back of his head, and the collection of animal teeth dangling around his neck tinkled when he waved his arms about, something he appeared to do whenever he talked, gesturing like an Italian merchant.

  As the conversation with Timbu continued, the chief became more agitated, as did the arm movements. Wilkes guessed it was his normal way of speaking, however, because the people of his village didn’t appear to react to it in the slightest. Eventually, the conversation came to an end and Timbu translated.

  ‘Tom, I told him that you are patrol officers hunting a criminal, a bad spirit who wants to poison people in your land. I told the chief that this bad spirit is the same one who came to his village with guns. The chief agrees that the man was spiritually bereft. One of these guns blew up when his oldest son fired it, killing him. This happened a month ago. The chief has since banned the use of firearms for hunting and for war. There have been many similar incidents in neighbouring villages and because of this, the old man has been able to convince other villages to also stop using them.’

  Timbu turned to the chief and the two spoke some more, the chief again becoming quite animated. ‘You’re going to love this, Tom,’ said Timbu when the chief had finished, finding it impossible to keep the smile off this face. ‘A week ago, this man, the bad spirit, came back with more guns. The chief had no choice but to exact payback. They killed him and ate him.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see why you’d think that’d make us happy,’ said Atticus, when he’d stopped laughing out loud. ‘That’s one way to end a blood feud.’ Somehow, being eaten was a far more satisfying outcome for the likes of Duat than life imprisonment or lethal injection.

  ‘How do we know he’s talking about Duat?’ said Ferallo. ‘He’s not the only one running guns in this part of the world.’

  ‘True,’ said Wilkes, the same thought having occurred to him.

  Timbu put the question to the chief, who nodded and shouted a command to one of the men who’d escorted them from the marijuana field. The man ran off and reappeared some moments later. He passed the chief a human skull, which the old man presented to Timbu. A chunk of bone was missing from the rear of the skull, probably the death blow delivered by machete. Ants had done a good job in a short time, picking the skull clean.

  ‘That could be anyone,’ said Wilkes.

  Timbu repeated that to the chief, who pointed to the absent front teeth in the upper jaw. He then sifted through the teeth hanging around his neck until he found what he was looking for and beckoned Wilkes to take a closer look. It was a front tooth. And it was made of gold.

  Townsville, Queensland, Australia

  ‘Stay tuned. Next up is World Watch. And in tonight’s edition, the ghosts of the crew o
f a US bomber plane that went missing in action in Papua New Guinea during World War Two are finally laid to rest. I’m Annabelle Gilbert, goodnight.’

  Annabelle gave the camera the sort of lingering smile she’d give to a lover, until the producer informed her with the cutthroat signal that she was no longer being transmitted into the homes of thousands of strangers. The smile instantly evaporated and the hot lights were switched off. Annabelle took the earpiece out and unclipped both lapel microphones as the producer said, ‘That was nice, Belle.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Feels good to be back.’ She meant that sincerely. It was something of a relief to return to a familiar set with friendly faces. She’d put in her resignation, but they’d asked her to reconsider on the grounds that the network news executive producer, Steve Saunders, had been fired. She’d said nothing about her reasons for the resignation, but the rumours within the network’s hallways were rife and, of course, Saunders’ reputation preceded him. Apparently, he’d been seeing a pretty young thing in News down in Melbourne. There’d been complications. The girl had fallen pregnant and Saunders had laughed at her when she came to him for some assistance. Unfortunately for Saunders, the girl in question was the chairman’s niece, working at the network incognito, without uncle’s influence until, of course, the pregnancy test returned a positive result.

  The network execs, possibly nervous about additional scandal, had sweetened the deal for Annabelle, giving her the opportunity to film a series of syndicated news specials – the subject matter could be of her choosing. That was great. She could become a national ‘face’ and still keep her base at Townsville. Where Tom lived.

  Annabelle sat in the chair behind her desk while the crew partially broke the set, a corner of which was required for a game show to be recorded later in the evening. She listened to the overhead lights cool, ticking like excited crickets. It was these quieter moments she feared the most, when the same questions that kept coming back and back invaded her thoughts. What about Tom and me? Is there a chance for us? She’d tried to call him but she’d met with the usual operational silence bullshit from the regiment. They wouldn’t even tell her whether or not he was in the country.