An Angel in Stone

by Peggy Nicholson

  “See here, Kincade!” He held up one of Cade’s hard-won boots, which he should have hung from a branch last night. Ngali turned it upside down—and out dropped a green-and-white snake that looked much like a garter snake.

  “Harmless, I suppose?” Cade sat to unzip his mosquito net.

  “Oh, no, Kincade. That one kill you dead before breakfast.”

  For which he’d just lost his stomach. “Does anything ever make you sad, Ngali?”

  “Oh, many things. This girl in Old Long Badu, this most beautiful girl, if she don’t put out her lamp and have me in, this time, I very, very sad.” He sighed, then brightened. “Till I find another girl.”

  They reached Old Long Badu, home of beautiful girls, about ten. In time to see another beauty departing. “See there!” cried Ngali, pointing in the island way with his thumb. “There go your woman up the river. You make her so mad, she leave you?”

  Cade sighed through clenched teeth and stared after two motorized dugout canoes, dwindling into the distance. Even beneath the shade of her tiger parasol, Raine’s hair gleamed like sunlight on the water.

  For a few heartbeats he wasn’t mad; he was very, very sad. And somehow another beautiful girl didn’t seem the answer.

  His mood shifted quickly enough however, once Lia’s cousin Ah San explained that there were only two dugouts with outboards in town this week. And that for some mystifying reason, Raine had rented them both.

  But Cade knew why, if the trader didn’t. To stop him from following.

  A riverboat gives a man time to think. And the more Szabo thought about the blond bone hunter, the antsier he got. Ashaway was a mover and a tryer all right. And for all he knew, she’d sweet-talked those prissy missionaries into flying her to Long Badu. Once the bitch got the jump on him, who knew if he’d ever catch up?

  But no way was he letting her snag his granddaddy’s treasure out from under his nose. Time to start hustling.

  He learned there was an airport, if you could call it that, in Sintang, so he got off the boat there. Lucked into a flight to Putussibau, the last town on the Kapuas you could fly to, then hired a longboat—a canoe carved from a single whopping tree trunk—to take him on upstream.

  His boatman was a surly dude, who got even surlier when Szabo made him push his outboard. Kept saying it was old and tired and it liked to go slow, what was the hurry?

  “This is your hurry,” Szabo had said, showing him his gun. “We understand each other?” He’d twirled the pistol around his forefinger and grinned, then sat, facing the scowling Dayak with the weapon in his lap.

  After that there’d been no more arguments. No more nosy questions about how many children he had, or what he was doing here? He’d had a nice, peaceful, relaxing ride with the green river gurgling past, while he lounged against his pack in the bottom of the boat.

  That night he figured, the way that Dayak kept giving him the Evil Eye, it might be smarter to stick with the boat and make its owner sleep on the beach. Wouldn’t be fun to wake up and find himself stranded, halfway between Putussibau and Long Badu.

  Or to wake up—and find out the natives hadn’t quite sworn off headhunting, the way everybody claimed they had. Sharp as they kept those sawed-off machetes that every man wore, Szabo had his doubts.

  “Kincade, come quick!” Ngali cried the following day, on finding him wandering in the marketplace. “There is a boat come in from Putussibau. A good boat to rent!”

  Who said prayers were never answered? Long Badu was a fine town, filled with fine friendly folk. But Cade had just about reached his limit on parties. At last night’s, the headman had urged him to marry his eldest daughter, settle down here and grow rice.

  Time to move on—past time. Raine had a twenty-four hour lead on him, at this point. But if this boat was fast and they pushed it….

  They found the longboat down at the town dock, where its owner was topping up its two fifty-gallon fuel drums with gasoline. The boatman was a middle-aged man with flower tattoos, the first Dayak Cade had seen who didn’t smile. After a sidelong glance, he wouldn’t even look at them, simply stared off into the distance, while Ngali talked.

  “Is he willing to take us upriver?” Cade broke in after a few minutes.

  Now Ngali’s smile was fading to puzzlement. He waffled one hand. “He say, no, he don’t want to rent his boat. His stomach hurt. And the last man he rent to, he not pay him yet. He got to wait here for his money. Once he paid, he go home.”

  “Tell him I’ll pay him very well to take us upriver. Very, very well. But we need to leave now. You think he might be sick?” You couldn’t drag a man off into the wilderness, if he was ill.

  The man spoke again, darting a glance at Cade, then away.

  “He say…” Ngali scratched his head. “He say the last white man he work for was crazy. Crazy and bad. He think you maybe another crazy man.”

  “Tell him I’m not. Tell him I’m a pussycat.”

  “A cat?” Ngali burst into startled laughter, then voluble speech, finally switching back to English. “I tell him you crazy, but the good kind of crazy. And a friend to Bungan, who is more blond and beautiful than the old men say. I say we pay him very good money to find her and he is a most lucky man. He should pay us to see Bungan, like the moon walking.”

  That speech won them the boatman’s dubious smile and Cade breathed a sigh of relief. Ngali’s freewheeling charm had come through again.

  They all swung around at the sound of heavy footsteps. A lanky white man came loping down the dock. Cade recognized trouble, before he remembered the smirk, and where he’d seen it last. On the plane from New York!

  “Hey, small world!” drawled the newcomer, reaching into the canvas tote bag that hung from his left shoulder.

  Cade barely contained his flinch. With Ngali bumping his arm and this one blocking his way, the end of the narrow dock was too crowded for action. Eyes locked on that concealed hand, he didn’t answer.

  The freckled fingers came forth—and Cade breathed again. The guy hadn’t pulled a weapon, just a black hose with metal fittings at each end.

  “Here you go.” He tossed it down to the boatman, with gestures to illustrate his words. “Better hook it up.”

  No wonder the guy had a stomach ache! This bastard had taken the outboard’s fuel line, so he couldn’t leave. Bad and crazy, all right.

  “So what brings you to these parts?” The man’s smirk didn’t reach his pale eyes. His accent was cracker—backwoods Appalachian.

  “I’m renting this boat,” Cade said evenly. “I understand you’re done with it.”

  “Yeah? Well, somebody told you wrong,” drawled the man, scratching his stomach. He adjusted the strap on his canvas tote—

  And Cade ducked without thinking as it slashed backhanded at his head.

  Ngali’s instincts weren’t as keen. The bag missed Cade and swung on—to slam the smaller man in the temple, with the gravelly rattle of chain hitting bone. Eyes rolling skyward, the Dayak crumpled into the river.

  He’d been offered a clear choice—it was no choice at all. Cursing himself for a fool, Cade dove after the kid. The outboard roared to life while he was still searching the mud.

  By the time he’d hoisted Ngali to the dock and drained half the Kapuas back out of him, the dugout was rounding the upstream bend.

  With a wide merry wave, the cracker vanished beyond the tangled green. Whoever the hell he is, that’s our killer, Cade told himself, as he hauled Ngali to a sit and thumped his back.

  The smirking bastard was going after Raine.

  Chapter 21

  Three days upstream from Long Badu, they came to their first village. Raine’s guides had never ventured this far before, and they didn’t speak the local dialect. Apparently these were Kenyah Dayaks, whereas Raine’s men were of the Iban tribe.

  The language barrier didn’t get in the way of a rollicking good party that night. The only sour note was struck when Raine passed round her photos of dinosaur
bones. Nobody had ever seen such alarming creatures; the children shrieked and fled—while their mothers studied her with grave suspicion. Bungan was supposed to bring better rice and babies, not go chasing after monsters!

  But if they had their doubts, she overcame them when she cured an old woman of “blindness.” Antibiotic ointment reduced the terrible swelling in her eyelids, and by the time the party broke up, the patient was starting to see again. In the morning when Raine went to put on her boots, she found them filled with eggs.

  On leaving the Kenyah village, they also left the second boat behind, though they took along its fuel and propeller. The river had narrowed till the tops of the trees on either bank wove together, high overhead. They motored through a winding green tunnel—a steadily climbing tunnel, broken by stretches of rapids. So far the outboard was equal to the rush of white water, but if the land kept rising, soon they’d be forced to drag the boat up the cascades. One boat with three to work it, made more sense than two.

  Late in the afternoon of the fourth day, they came to a pool, where two branches of the river converged. “Which way?” Raine asked Baitman.

  Her senior guide was a short, broad Dayak with a gorgeous smile and a sunny sense of humor. He’d learned his Aussie-flavored English working on the oil platforms off the south coast of Borneo, and he’d also earned his nickname there. For the first few days Raine had thought this had to be “Batman,” mispronounced. At last she’d learned that he’d been in charge of catching bait, when the bored oilies fished off the rig.

  “To find Punan?” he mocked with a grin. “Raine, I keep saying you this. We not find Punan. The Punan find us.”

  If and only if they want to. That was the catch in this expedition, a caveat that Ah San had kept to himself when he pocketed her money. The Punan were notoriously shy, as well they might be. A couple of generations back, the Dayaks had hunted their small peaceful neighbors for their heads.

  Nowadays a few brave men of the tribe might venture down to the towns for vital trade. But out in the jungle, with their families to protect, the Punan saw scant reason to mingle.

  Raine was going to have to give them a reason. Happy as she was to have the support of two woods-wise companions like Baitman and his teenage brother Dibit, she was starting to wonder if she’d stand a better chance of meeting the Punan alone.

  “Then which way to the mountains?” Ah San had known nothing of the butterfly-shaped lake north of a mountain range, when she reminded him of the map scratched inside the cover of his watch. But he’d claimed to have some vague notion that the Punan who brought him the watch and the tooth, a hunter he called White Dog, might have come from beyond the mountains.

  Or maybe he’d simply been agreeable. Indonesians were famous for giving strangers directions, even when they didn’t know the way.

  “That way,” said Baitman, pointing to the right branch.

  “Why do you say that?” After all, he’d never been here before.

  “The water move faster. So mountains nearer.”

  Not a bad answer, she had to admit. “Let’s go that way, then.”

  “Yes, but tomorrow. This a very good place to stop. Good fishing here.”

  Jam karet was the bahasa Indonesia phrase that translated to “rubber time.” A concept much like mañana. You couldn’t hurry these guys. Time was compressed or stretched to fit the mood; it was never exact. Above all, it was to be enjoyed. Raine had found in her travels that most primitive people remembered this, even if Americans had forgotten. And the only way she knew to keep an expedition on track was to keep its members happy. “Fine,” she agreed with an inward sigh. She just hoped that Kincade was still stuck in Long Badu, fuming and waiting for another boat to come along.

  Once they’d beached the dugout on the right-hand bank, the brothers grabbed their harpoons and took to the river. They reminded her of cormorants, ducking underwater, only to pop up at an unbelievable distance, usually with a fish wriggling on a spear.

  Each catch was announced with cries of self-congratulation—and demands that Raine look up from her reading to applaud. “Fish tonight,” she murmured wryly and looked down again. It had been fish and sticky rice every night so far. Also for breakfast, lunch and snacks. She was starting to dream of hot dogs and hamburgers and—oh, God—what wouldn’t she do for an ice-cream cone?

  Meanwhile, she’d made slow progress with the soldier’s journal. Szabo’s handwriting was tiny and terrible and it was badly faded. With all the splashing in the boat, she didn’t dare read it on the river. Besides, she could hardly tear her eyes away from the passing jungle. More kinds and colors of orchids than she could count, in rafts and swathes and streamers trailing from above. Hornbills and parrots as bright as the flowers; butterflies bigger than birds. Bands of gibbon monkeys whooping through the trees, and yesterday, a heart-stopping glimpse of a clouded leopard draped along a sunny branch.

  Given such distractions, she’d left her reading for evenings, before the dark closed down. So far it had been an unrewarding bore. Szabo had spent ten half-decipherable pages on his basic training. Then five on a last hurried leave home to North Carolina, where his new wife was proudly pregnant. He’d boarded a troopship bound for the Pacific in San Diego, after which there’d been a gap of almost two months when he hadn’t written. Then he’d devoted another two pages to the good-time girls of Honolulu. Then the lack of such obliging ladies in New Guinea, when his regiment was shipped south to that island.

  “I paid a thousand dollars for this?” Raine murmured and flipped a page. And sat up straighter on her rock.

  Well, ’bout time! Some action at last! Captain says we’ve been tapped for a special mission. Pack jungle gear and three weeks’ rations, and we fly out at 1800. If he knows where they’re dropping us, he ain’t saying.

  “Borneo!” she whispered, as if she could warn him down the years.

  A gap of one ruled line on the page showed another jump in time. Then the next sentence was wildly illegible, staggering from one smeared line down to the next, as if it had been written in the dark? She squinted at it, then blinked as something passed before her eyes. “Oh, drat!” The butterflies were back.

  A cloud of blue-and-black swallowtails swirled around her head. Every so often they swarmed, apparently attracted by the salt in human sweat. Short of hysterically swatting, the only solution was a swim and a good soaping. Wearing an Easter bonnet of fluttering iridescent wings and a living blouse to match, she quickly put the journal away. She slipped on her reef walkers, grabbed her shampoo and waded into the river.

  Like the modest Dayaks, Raine bathed with her clothes on, washing them along with her skin. Twenty minutes on shore would be enough to dry them—and start her sweating again. To give the butterflies time to escape, she sank into the cool water by inches, then submerged and swam downstream.

  She stopped at an eddy below a run of white water, glad for a moment of solitude. When she’d scrubbed herself deliciously clean, she stretched out on a boulder, propped her chin on her palms and gazed lazily back toward camp. They had less than an hour till dark, she figured, and still much to do. Dibit was cleaning fish at the edge of the river. Baitman must have gone to cut poles and thatch for the men’s sleeping platform. She needed to hang her hammock, then it was her turn to cook.

  Lulled by the rumbling water, she didn’t hear the boat till it was almost upon her. Twisting onto one elbow, she saw a dugout aimed at the gap between two boulders where the river surged deep and smooth. A Dayak sat in the bow, peering down at the rocks and directing.

  As the stern drew even with her rock, Raine stared at the man who steered the outboard, intent on his route ahead. A crumpled hat protected his face—skin too pale to be native! She bolted upright. “Cade?”

  No way could the driver hear her over the rapids, but he glanced aside—his jaw dropped. He turned ahead, shot the rapids to perfection and the boat glided on. Choosing the right-hand fork of the river, he passed close by Dibit.

>   Baitman came trotting down to the shore. He called something to the man in the bow, who yelled back and frantically waved his tattooed arms. The dugout shot the next run of white water and vanished up the right fork.

  Slowly Raine waded toward camp and her friends who stood waiting. There were two of you on the plane, Cade had said, and she’d put that down to rice wine ravings. But that…that had been Mr. Smirky. In Singapore he’d told her he was headed for Pontianak—and Lia’s mother had been beaten soon after. For information? What had he said in the airport, that he was looking for his grandfather, a soldier in World War II? Raine glanced quickly at the treetops. Dark in less than an hour. He wouldn’t go far.

  “Who was that man?” Baitman demanded, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “You know that man?”

  “No, but I have seen him before. I think…I think he is a bad man.” He’d sat in the seat beneath which she’d stowed her carry-on. Come to think of it—he’d snitched the seat from its ticket holder! No accident, that. God, and he’d come from New York—Lia! “We should move camp, Baitman. Head up the left fork.” If there was one thing her father and Trey both had drilled into her head, it was that you don’t go looking for trouble. Soon enough it would come looking for you. Especially in the wild, you minimized your risks. “We should move right now!”

  Muscles ticked below the Dayak’s broad cheekbones, and his expression turned stubbornly, hopelessly—there was no other word for it—“guy.” In any language, it looked just the same. Testosterone kicking in. Prudence flying out the window. “No, Raine, it too dark to move.”

  She might have bought their expertise, but she hadn’t bought them. Given more time she might have cajoled or persuaded, but within minutes night dropped like the lid of a box. Raine’s one consolation as they moved close around their campfire, cooking and readying for bed, was that Mr. Smirky would also be pinned down by the dark. Only a fool went stumbling through the jungle when the snakes were on the prowl.