by Graeme Kent
‘Youfella luuai bilong Kundu Hite?’ asked Kella.
‘I look after the skulls,’ said the older man in English, nodding. ‘I am Tapi. It will cost you ten dollars to land on Skull Island.’
As custodian of the skulls, Tapi would know the lineage of every chief in the lagoon area. Kella reached into his pocket and produced a note, and handed it to the tall man. The two younger men relaxed a little. Kella took out another ten-dollar note and gave that to Tapi as well. The younger men’s eyes widened at the sight of so much money. Both banknotes vanished into the older man’s skimpy loincloth with a celerity born of long practice. The islander would have perfected his English on the tourists who occasionally visited the lagoon. He opened his mouth to go into his introductory address. Kella forestalled him.
‘Do you live on Kundu Hite?’ he asked.
Tapi shook his head and indicated the adjoining island. ‘On Parara,’ he said. ‘I only come across when we have visitors.’
‘Did you hear gunshots this afternoon?’ asked Kella
‘Three,’ answered Tapi. ‘We thought the spirits of the chiefs were fighting among themselves. We saw a canoe on the shore and a bigger ship with an engine anchored off the island.’
‘But you didn’t come over to see what was happening?’
‘As I said, it was a matter for the ghosts. There are many of them on Kundu Hite. Mortals do not get involved in matters of the gods.’
And another killing on the island would only add to its macabre reputation and provide more tourist money for the custodian, thought Kella.
‘When the big ship left, which way did it go?’ he asked.
‘That way,’ said the custodian, pointing south.
‘How many men were on board?’
‘I saw three.’
Kella pointed at the body. ‘Do you know this dead man?’ he asked.
‘Of course; he is Dontate, a big man in the lagoon. He comes from a bloodline of warrior chiefs. He went out into the world, some say to be a warrior among the whiteys. Then he returned, with much gold. It is sad that he has died so young. One day he might have become a chief of chiefs in Roviana. He was of the bloodline of Chief Ingava of Nusa Roviana, who worshipped the great rock that looked like a dog.’
‘I’ll send someone over to take Dontate’s body back to Gizo,’ said Kella.
‘No, we will bury him here,’ said Tapi firmly. ‘Dontate was a big man; it is fitting that he should lie with the other warriors. He knew that and travelled here when he knew that his time had come. We shall put his skull in an honoured place in one of the shrines.’
Chief Joe Dontate would have liked that, thought Kella. There was nothing to gain by taking his body away. As far as Kella was aware, he had no relatives, and once she got over her shock, the pragmatic and calculating Mary Gui would soon find another man. The authorities in Honiara would regard the hasty burial as irregular and premature, but Dontate would have been long under the coral before they heard about it. Tapi would be discreet about the matter. The custodian had been lying when he had said that he had not witnessed the murder. He had probably been hiding on the island when the Americans had landed. Only an islander would have had the consideration to place stones over the dead man’s eyes to prevent their being pecked out by scavenging birds. But Tapi would never give evidence in a white man’s court. He was a keeper of the secrets. Every tribe had one.
‘Very well,’ Kella said to the three islanders. ‘See that it is done.’
• • •
SISTER CONCHITA WAS waiting for him on the beach at Munda when he grounded his canoe.
‘I thought you were taking Mary over to Gizo,’ he said disapprovingly.
‘I got her a lift in a United Church canoe that put in for diesel,’ Conchita said. ‘Don’t worry, she’s a bright girl and can look after herself. She’ll alert the District Commissioner and then the police in Honiara. Did you find Mr Dontate?’
‘He’s dead,’ said Kella. In a few words he told Sister Conchita of his experience on Kundu Hite. The nun crossed herself.
‘How did you know he would be on Skull Island?’ she asked.
‘I guessed that when I saw the basket of brown derasa clams in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘They were eaten by the Roviana warriors as a vavolo, the death feast they dined on before going into battle against insurmountable odds. Dontate knew that he was going to die. He just wanted to draw Imison and the others away from Munda, so that Mary Gui and any other innocent bystanders wouldn’t get hurt as well.’
‘He was a brave man,’ said Sister Conchita.
‘A warrior,’ agreed Kella. ‘So why didn’t you go with Mary?’
‘I thought I might be needed.’
Kella frowned. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to be busy for the rest of the afternoon.’
He found an axe and a sharp knife in a toolbox in the rest-house and spent several hours amid the trees at the far end of the runway. He cut a dozen branches each about a foot in length and sharpened them into deadly stakes, with points at both ends. Then he went deeper into the bush until he found a kwilla tree. This possessed some of the strongest and heaviest wood of all the trees in the Solomons. He cut off a substantial branch several feet in diameter and three feet long. Carefully he sharpened one end of the branch into a point. Then he carried all the shaped pieces of wood and put them into the bottom of the canoe, together with some lengths of creeper and the knife he had been using. For good measure he fetched a spade from the tool shed and added it to the pile.
Sister Conchita carried across two plates of boiled rice and tinned corned beef from the supply of food she had brought with her. They sat on top of an upturned canoe and ate.
‘I’m coming with you,’ said the nun.
‘Definitely not,’ said Kella. ‘It’s going to be dangerous.’
‘I may be useful. You said you would need someone with her own mana to help protect you so far from home.’
Kella ate in silence for a few minutes. Then he said: ‘That’s not the real reason why you want to come, is it?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Why then?’
‘Because,’ said the nun, ‘you’re heading for Olasana for the wrong reasons. You’re going to the island for revenge because the Americans killed Joe Dontate. What do you call it in pidgin?’
‘Payback.’
‘You’re going there for payback. You mustn’t! You’re a lawman twice over, Sergeant Kella. You’re a policeman and the aofia. You’ve sworn two different oaths in two separate cultures to administer justice.’
‘My kind of justice,’ said Kella. ‘And yours, come to that. An eye for an eye …’
‘No,’ said Sister Conchita, shaking her head emphatically. ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.’
They both started eating again. Then Kella put his plate down on the ground. ‘There are three of them,’ he said. ‘They’ve got rifles and they know how to use them. They’ve gone to Olasana either to look for something or to leave something there, I’m not sure which. They haven’t got much time left. They’ll have to get away from the Solomons fast before they’re arrested for the death of Dontate. By the time they reach Olasana, they’ll only have a few hours of daylight left. They won’t be able to leave tonight because they can’t navigate the reefs and get out of the lagoon in the dark. They’ll probably wait on Olasana overnight and go first thing in the morning. That means I’ve got to get there this evening soon after dark. If you come as well, you’ll only get in my way.’
‘That is my intention,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘I shall get in your way in every conceivable manner if I believe that you are only going to Olasana to kill three men. If you won’t take me there in what, I have to say, is my canoe, or at least the mission’s, then I’ll find some other way of crossing the lagoon to Olasana. If I drown on the way, and I may well do that, the blame will quite rightly be laid at your door, Sergeant Kella. The spirits of the lagoon will want payback.’
/> ‘You can be a considerable nuisance,’ said Kella.
‘So I’ve been told,’ said Sister Conchita.
Chapter Twenty-Three
IT WAS THREE o’clock in the morning when Imison first thought he heard someone moving on the track leading down to the shore. He had been standing outside the fishermen’s hut for several hours, cradling in his arms an M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle of the type used in the Korean War. Baxter and Lopez were sleeping inside the thatched hut. Like an experienced fighter relaxing between rounds, Baxter was breathing deeply, getting all the rest he could. Lopez, on the other hand, was sleeping only fitfully, whimpering and sometimes crying out. It was time Imison woke one of them up to take his place on guard duty, but he scorned the thought. He did not expect either of them to do a professional enough job. Baxter was competent but unimaginative, while Lopez was just a snivelling kid.
He scanned the moonlit sky for some signs of daylight, willing a rescuing dawn to arrive. Now that they had accomplished their mission, as soon as he could see to navigate the launch anchored off the coast, they would board it and head for Bougainville, eighty miles away. On his way to Olasana, he had transmitted an encoded message on the ship’s transceiver to a Chinese trading store on Bougainville. They could be out of the Protectorate’s waters in a couple of days, long before an efficient search could be mounted for them, even if Joe Dontate’s body was found. A light aircraft, usually used for smuggling gold nuggets to Australia, would be waiting to take the three of them from Buin to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. From there a scheduled airline flight would carry them to Fiji, where they would be issued with new passports. You had to hand it to the Agency; it was good at rescuing its operatives from screw-ups. Maybe it had had plenty of practice.
Imison was accustomed to getting out of tight corners in a hurry. He had been doing that for almost twenty years. He had not served in the campaign in the Solomons, as his cover story stated, but he had seen his share of clandestine action. As a young lieutenant, not long out of an undistinguished Midwestern law school, he had joined the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After a brief period of commando training at Milton Hall in Britain, in 1944 he had been parachuted into France as the executive officer of one of the notorious three-man Jedburgh teams, charged with the task of joining up with the French Resistance and causing havoc behind the German lines in the run-up to the Normandy D-Day landings.
Imison had enjoyed his time in France. The combination of violence and intrigue had appealed to him. His natural talent for conspiracy and the remorseless infliction of death, noticed by his recruiting superiors in Washington, had stood him in good stead in the freebooting campaigns in which he was soon bloodily engaged. He had particularly enjoyed his contacts with the French Underground, an organisation so riddled with rival factions, collaborators and traitors as to resemble the court of a medieval Italian city-state in full conspiratorial flow. In addition to guiding nocturnal arms drops from Allied aircraft and participating in raids on isolated German positions, the self-righteous and calculating Imison had taken a particular delight in rooting out and killing those members of the Resistance surrounding him whom he had suspected of being paid by the Germans. Disregarding the need for evidence, the young lieutenant had relied entirely on his own intuition. He had been ruthlessly efficient at this self-imposed task, until one night he had gone too far and stabbed to death a French radio operator he had suspected of being a collaborator. Unfortunately, not only had the radio operator been young and comparatively blameless, if inclined to be a blabbermouth; he had also been closely related to a high-ranking officer in the Free French Army.
After the invasion of Europe, the newly reinstated general in question had wasted no time in launching an investigation into the death of his favourite nephew. Imison’s cold, withdrawn and correct manner had secured him few friends amongst the American and French saboteurs with whom he had been working. Only nominal efforts were made to protect him, and for a time it looked as if the lieutenant might even face a court-martial. Fortunately he was flown back to the safety of a Stateside desk job at the last moment, but the episode was deemed potentially sufficiently explosive to ruin his coveted chances of a transfer in 1945 to the CIA, the natural peacetime successor to the OSS.
Instead Imison had been snapped up as a field agent by the more pragmatic but ever-expanding FBI, looking for men of his calibre, with iced water in their veins and the ability to render total and unquestioning obedience to their superiors. He had achieved notice following an enjoyable period as a field agent interrogating hapless Puerto Rican suspects after the nationalist group Los Macheteras had shot up the House of Representatives in Washington in 1954, and wounded five of its elected members. His zeal for the task, merciless interrogation technique and transparent exultation after the accused nationalists had been given minimum sentences of seventy years apiece had led to his appointment as legal attaché, responsible for liaison with local law-enforcement agencies, in the political and criminal free-for-alls of Mexico and Brazil and a number of similar wild areas of the world. His willingness to leave his desk in the US embassies in these countries and get his hands dirty, or even bloody, allied with his dubious wartime record, had, on the orders of the Director himself, also secured him a number of clandestine missions like the one upon which he was currently engaged.
Again Imison heard the rustling of leaves on the track leading to the beach. He started to go down to check, but restrained himself. Baxter and Lopez were not much, but they were the best he had and probably although not certainly better than nothing. They were also, as far as he was concerned, highly expendable. He walked softly into the hut and kicked both agents methodically as they lay huddled uncomfortably on the ground in their sleeping bags.
‘Get up!’ he muttered. ‘Somebody’s outside.’
At once the two men hauled themselves to their feet and reached automatically for their Garands. Around their shoulders they put slings containing eight-round clips of ammunition. Then they looked to their leader for instructions. Imison had not worked with either agent before their present excursion. The team had been put together at extremely short notice in response to an emergency situation. Lopez was the youngest of the trio, in his twenties, the communications specialist. He could operate a radio, but Imison was prepared to bet money that the boy’s future as a field agent was as limited as that of a snowball in a warm place. Not only was Lopez nervous, he was also unlucky. To add to his misery he was transparently afraid of both of his companions on the mission. Baxter, dark-chinned and taciturn, was tougher, but as far as Imison was concerned, he possessed the damning trait of ambition. Baxter saw covert grey operations of this nature as a short cut to preferment in the Agency. Imison had news for him as explicit as that of a town crier: any kudos from this mission when it was over was going to its head honcho.
‘Who’s out there?’ asked Baxter, checking his weapon.
‘How the hell do I know?’ snapped Imison. ‘We’ll go down the track a way and see.’
They emerged into the clearing. The hut they had been using had been erected by itinerant fishermen intending to spend the night on this deserted corner of the island. The narrow track to the beach had been slashed out roughly with bush knives and was already in danger of becoming overgrown again. The surrounding trees were so tightly packed that it was impossible to enter the bush area without sustaining painful abrasions.
‘Lopez, you take point,’ ordered Imison.
‘Why me?’ whined the youth. ‘I ain’t no soldier boy.’
‘If there’s anybody there, he’s going to come at us out of the bush from the sides,’ said Imison. ‘Baxter and I will be marking those. For Christ’s sake, can’t you do anything right? All you’ve got to do is lead us down to the beach. Surely you can handle that chore?’
‘Take point,’ said Baxter, jostling the younger agent with the butt of his rifle and putting an end to the discussion.
Lope
z muttered mutinously to himself but did as he was told. He had not known Imison and Baxter long, but he had been present when they had followed and shot Dontate, the tour guide, the previous day. He knew that both men were utterly ruthless and implacable, and that if he did not do as he was told, the likelihood of his ending up lying dead on some forgotten island at this arse-end of the world was higher than a hawk. If that eventuality ever came, he told himself, trying in vain to bolster his spirits, he would not just sit with his back to a mound of skulls and wait for the end like Dontate had done.
The three Americans made slow process along the track. The branches of the trees formed a canopy overhead. Every time one of them thought he heard something he would come to a halt, and the other two would stop walking as well while the three men checked out the situation. Lopez was aware of the caution being deployed by his experienced companions, and this only increased his nervousness. Unconsciously he increased his pace. Soon he was a few yards ahead of the other two. Both Imison and Baxter noticed this. Neither called the youngest agent back, taking satisfaction in the knowledge that if Lopez should be stupid enough to trample unheedingly through unknown terrain, then he would be the first to encounter any hazards, making it all the safer for the other two.
Only a few minutes passed before Agent Lopez, as the other two had half-expected, ran into serious trouble. His baby face and scrawny knuckles torn and bleeding, he blundered forward, peering warily ahead of him. Unwittingly he passed between two stakes that Kella had earlier stuck into the ground on either side of the track. A length of vine, concealed like the stakes beneath mounds of leaves, joined the two pieces of wood. Lopez’s boot tripped the flimsy rope. Another piece of the creeper ran from the vine on the ground to loop over the lower branch of a tree, where it was attached to the heavy spear of kwilla wood that Kella had sharpened at Munda. The action released the weapon, which hurtled down through the concealing creepers towards the unsuspecting Lopez below. The young agent did not even hear the projectile falling through the branches. It missed Lopez’s head but smashed into his shoulder with agonising force. The American screamed and fell writhing to the ground.
