Megalania

by Robert Forrester

  And it wasn’t over yet.

  They still had a week left before the helicopter came back to collect them. Furthermore, Dr Campbell, the leader of the expedition, had identified a river system nearby on their satellite images. They were currently in thick jungle, but less than a day’s walk away was a valley, which zig-zagged its way through unnamed mountains. It took some convincing, but Dr Campbell, the expedition leader, had agreed that they could look. It was a day’s hike, but the waterways could harbour all sorts of hitherto unknown fish and other aquatic life.

  It wasn’t easy though. Even with the help of their four local guides, who carried most of the heavy equipment, Suzanna and the other four researchers had to do their fair share of hauling tents and backpacks and their supply of water and food through dense undergrowth in the intense heat and humidity to their new campsite.

  It was late afternoon, before the sound of the trickling river drifted through the trees. They couldn’t see it, yet, but the cool breeze that dusted Suzanna’s sodden face told her it wasn’t far.

  However, before they explored, Campbell ordered they unpack their equipment and rest a while to recover from their hike, something to which even Suzanna didn’t object.

  Sweat streamed out of her every pore. The crushing humidity plastered her hair across her face, and she stank, her roll on deodorant certainly no match for the oppressive heat and putrid stench of the dense forest, but she didn’t care, she was having too much fun.

  Dr Campbell ordered the guides to erect their new camp in a clearing boasting enough canopy to shield from the sun but not too much that falling branches would pose a risk. She slumped to the ground, too exhausted to take off her backpack, but she managed to pull off her shoes and rub her blistered feet.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that. You’ll struggle to get your boots back on,’ Dr Campbell said, standing legs astride and hands on hips. His fifty-year-old face barely showed the strain, beyond its general ruddiness. He looked the same in the sweltering heat of New Guinea as he did in the cold and damp of England.

  Campbell was Suzanna’s postgraduate professor, her mentor. When she graduated at Adelaide, she moved to England to become his research assistant at Whipsnade Zoo. He was a jovial figure, always optimistic and incredibly passionate about conservation and wildlife. In fact, he was a member of the Natural World Defence Organisation too, which is where she first met him, at the annual conference in Sydney.

  She’d been an activist for NWDO, since her freshman year, going out on protests and even conducting a little direct action, all in the name of conservation. Of course, being a fusty old academic, Campbell didn’t hold with the tactics the more militant members such as Suzanna employed, but his membership proved he had the passion.

  Despite her hotheadedness, he had taken to Suzanna from their very first meeting, suggesting to her that Whipsnade would make the perfect research location for her postgraduate studies. She half suspected that he had a thing for her, after all, he didn’t invite any of his other research assistants on the expedition. Not that he would ever show it, he was far too English and reserved for that. Besides, she saw him more of a father figure than anything else, which was natural, she supposed, for somebody that grew up without one.

  The other three in their party were American botanists. Two came from the University of Florida, both youngish men, one called Henry Yates, the other Enrico Samuels. The former looked like a surfer, all tanned and white teeth and was the most amiably of the three, always flashing Suzanna a smile in the morning and at meal times. The other could have been an extra in a Western, stubbly and Hispanic looking. He was quiet, kept himself to himself, but was nowhere near as cold as the only other woman in the group was.

  She was a thirty-something redhead called Elena Hendricks, from Laramie, wherever that was. Suzanna suspected Hendricks hated her, offering only curt nods and acknowledgements whenever they communicated. Perhaps it was because Suzanna was not a botanist, perhaps it was because she wasn’t American, but she believed it was more likely because Hendricks was ten years older than Suzanna and was jealous, especially of the way Henry Yates looked at her. As a result, despite the five of them being alone in the middle of the wilds, other that the four local guides who barely spoke English, Suzanna found the botanists cliquey and spent most of her time with Campbell, who fussed over her like a maiden aunt.

  ‘Do you want some cream for those feet?’ he asked, handing her his canteen of water.

  She shook her head, not having the energy to say thank you, and snatched the canteen and gulped greedily from it.

  After an awkward pause, during which Campbell stared down at her with a broad smile on his face, he turned his attention to the guides, ensuring they didn’t damage the equipment as they unpacked it.

  It took a couple of hours to set the camp up. While Suzanna would hardly have called it luxurious, it had everything they needed—a large shelter strung out over their makeshift lab, which contained their specimen jars, microscopes, laptops and other gear; another sheltered area that doubled as both kitchen and dining area, complete with collapsible chairs and tables; a tent each, although Suzanna’s leaked like a sieve when it rained; and a store area where they kept all their food and water, and which Campbell rarely took his eyes off for fear one of the guides would pilfer more than his rations allowed.

  By the time all this was set up, Suzanna had recovered from their morning trek and decided to go explore the surrounding area and look at the stream she could hear but had not yet seen.

  ‘Then you had better take one of the guides with you,’ Campbell said. ‘And take a radio.’

  ‘Please, stop fussing, Eric. It can’t be more than a hundred yards at the most.’

  ‘It is still far enough.’ He placed his hands on his hips and looked askance at her, suggesting he was more worried about one of the guides ravishing her in the bush than he was her getting lost.

  She sighed, nodded, picked up one of the radios and summoned one of the guides. His name was Kange and spoke the best English, was older than the other three, and smoked the least, which was still like a chimney but more tolerable than his chain-smoking colleagues.

  He took the lead, cutting clear some of the fronds and branches that blocked their way with a machete, while Suzanna kept her eyes on the ground, hoping to spot something unusual, but came across nothing but common centipedes and beetles.

  Still, the stream would be where the action was.

  Or so she thought.

  When she and Kange stepped from the light foliage that surrounded their camp and separated it from the water, she saw something that horrified her.

  The stream was slow running and wide, at least thirty yards across, the perfect habitat for all sorts of fish and aquatic life.

  Yet it was dead.

  Floating on top were scores of fish gently bobbing lifelessly with the flow of water. Clouds of flies buzzed above them. The stench of rotting fish accompanied the sight too, and all around the shore, dead fish lay in varying states of decomposition.

  Suzanna swore, and thrusting her backpack at Kange, ran to the water’s edge.

  It didn’t take long for her to realise what the problem was. Whatever happened to this stream wasn’t natural. Shimmering on top of the water, the unmistakable tell-tale rainbow of oil or some other pollutant.

  Even out here, she thought, one of the least explored regions on Earth, man had managed to leave his filthy thumbprint.

  She swore, the echo of her shout causing a small flock of birds to take to the sky while Kange looked on bemused, a rolled up cigarette hanging from his lips, an eyebrow cocked high.

  She continued to shout and curse and pace up and down, head shaking at the dead fish and film of pollution resting on top of the slowly moving water. Clearly, her rant carried back to the camp, because a few minutes later, Professor Campbell appeared with Yates and another of the guides, the camp’s rifle in his hands.

  ‘Heavens, what’s going on?’ Camp
bell asked. ‘We heard you screaming back at the camp. I thought you’d been attacked.’ He rested a suspicious eye Kange.

  ‘Look,’ Suzanna said, gesturing to the water. ‘They’re all dead. Somebody’s been pouring heaven knows what into the water upstream.’

  Campbell stepped close, peering over his threaded nose at the water. ‘Oh, my!’

  ‘Is that all you are going to say? They’ve destroyed an entire river, not spilled a little milk on the carpet.’

  Yates, at least, seemed to share some of her angst, because he strode up the bank a little, head shaking, before returning with a scowl etched on his bronzed features.

  ‘The goddamn vandals,’ he said. ‘Don’t these people know what they’ve got here? It’s a virtual Garden of Eden and they are destroying it.’

  ‘I doubt there is much we can do about it,’ Campbell said. ‘We’re visitors here.’

  ‘Don’t you people have morals?’ Suzanna said, rounding on one of the guides and jabbing a finger at his chin. ‘This may be your country, but the plants and wildlife belong to the world.’

  The guide looked startled, appealing to Kange for a clue as to why the angry white woman was berating him. They conversed a little in their Pidgin English, until the guide pointed in the general directions of the mountain while saying something she couldn’t decipher.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked.

  Kange, speaking with his cigarette clamped in his teeth, explained, ‘It is not our people that have polluted this water,’ he said, resolutely. ‘Sam-Sam comes from a village not far from the mountains. He says there are Westerners there, mining. Americans. It is them that have done this.’

  A rustle sounded in the foliage behind them, and Hendricks appeared with Samuels and the other two guides.

  ‘What’s going on,’ she asked, giving Suzanna a disdainful look.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on,’ Suzanna snapped. ‘Your goddamn countrymen miners have polluted this entire stream.’

  ‘I suggest we make a formal complaint to the embassy when we get back to Port Moresby,’ Campbell said.

  ‘I’m going to do more than that. If they think I spent all morning walking through that stinking forest for nothing then they’ve got another thing coming.’ She squared up to the guide who’d explained about the miners. ‘Ask him where this mine is and how far it is.’

  Kange translated for him, and after a brief discussion, pointed to the mountain.

  ‘Sam-Sam says the main camp is about twenty miles in that direction, but they have sites all over the mountains.’ Kange looked down at the river. ‘I imagine if you follow this river, you’ll find them.’

  This incensed Suzanna some more and even angered Yates enough for him to whip the baseball cap from his head and throw it down in a fit of pique. ‘They must have no idea how precious this eco-system is. Either that or they are imbeciles.’

  ‘My money is on the latter,’ Suzanna said, staring at the mountains shimmering in the haze in the distance. ‘But they are not going to get away with it.’

  ‘Well, there is nothing we can do about it now,’ Campbell reasoned. ‘It’ll be dark soon, so I suggest we sleep on it.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on it all right,’ Suzanna said, stomping back through the bush to the camp. ‘But you wait until morning.’

  Chapter 3

  When night fell, Harry Kruger opened a new bottle of bourbon, tossing the cap into the wastepaper bin, knowing he’d not need it again.

  The booze was the only thing keeping him going.

  As an operations chief at Alvaston Mining Corp, he’d set up open pit mines in all corners of the globe. He was no stranger to jungles or tropical climates, but Papua New Guinea was something else. The searing heat and humidity he could cope with, portable air conditioners were some of the first equipment he had dropped in, but all aspects of this operation were a constant battle.

  Sipping his whiskey, he walked over to the wall chart. The graph showed the company’s projections and actual amount of gold he’d extracted in the sixth months since the operation began. The two lines had never met, and in fact, were getting farther and farther apart.

  Perhaps you have bitten off more than you could chew this time, Harry, he thought, staring through the Perspex window of his hut at the local workers standing around their tents, cigarettes glowing in the dark as the sound of men drinking in the mess hut filtered across the camp.

  It was if the forest and surrounding countryside was intent on keeping hold of its gold.

  The battle had begun long before Kruger arrived in Papua New Guinea when the company’s satellite revealed the valleys that ran through the mountainous areas in the country’s interior could potentially hold huge alluvial deposits. God only knew how many Papuan politicians the company bribed to get the permits, but when Kruger came for his initial reconnaissance, he knew they’d struggle to get a return on their investment.

  The entire site was cut off from anything that remotely resembled a civilisation. It was 200 miles from the nearest conurbation, and nearly 400 from the capital of Port Moresby, the only place that resembled an actual city in the entire country, and that was by the crow flies.

  In actuality, it might well have been on the other side of the moon. The entire area was surrounded by thick forest, which even the government hadn’t mapped, and every excavator, trommel, jeep, conveyor, worker, hut, tent, generator and wrench had to be airlifted in, an operation alone that cost tens of millions.

  When they started digging, Kruger was faced with every conceivable obstacle, from local workers who held medieval superstitions about witches and demons and would jump at their own shadows, to plateaus of iron ore that ripped up the excavators and drills, not to mention that old favourite, malaria, which even laid Kruger on his back for three weeks.

  Having battled all that, the figures on the wall showed that the company’s estimations were way off. Sure, there was gold in them there hills, but nowhere near as much as they expected.

  The open pit mine now stretched three square miles, but it was yielding barely a couple of kilos a week, not enough to pay for the running costs. The board members of Alvaston were getting antsy, so Kruger had ordered the surrounding areas to be excavated in the hope they could find some larger deposits, perhaps enabling him to move the current operation to a more fruitful site. So far, they’d found only meagre deposits, and as each day passed, the two lines on the graph got farther apart, the company getting deeper in debt, Kruger’s worth getting lower and lower in their estimations.

  Somebody would have to take the blame. When the share price fell, the board members would want blood, and Kruger knew exactly whose vein the company would open to sate their lust.

  He should have stayed in South Africa.

  In Limpopo, gold came out of the ground like wheat from a field. If you dug, you found gold, especially if you knew where the best places to dig were, and Kruger did.

  He started mining back in the days of apartheid, when labour was cheap and white men like him reaped the rewards from the black man’s sweat. That all changed. Unions, worker rights and a growing distrust in foreign owned companies meant that Alvaston’s most profitable open pit mine soon became less lucrative. As a result, the company needed to expand and open mines in all corners of the globe. And who was the best person to send to oversee these operations? ‘Krugerrand Kruger,’ as they used to call him. The man who could find gold in a bucket of manure.

  And for twenty years, Kruger delivered. Finding deposits in South America and China and Indonesia and Siberia and the Congo. But either he’d lost his Midas touch, or the witches and gods of Papua New Guinea weren’t letting him get his way.

  Open pit mining was a simple operation. Excavators churned up the dirt and smashed the rock, the cylindrical trommels separated it all, and sluice pools full of water and oil separated out the gold dust. Simple. Yes! Easy. No!

  For every ounce of gold dust, they churned up and sieved several tonnes of dir
t, all the time expending petrol and diesel, not to mention the cost of labour, which admittedly was pretty cheap in that part of the world. Even so, it was a balancing act to keep the mine in the black—an act he was so far failing at.

  He kept costs to a minimum. Cut corners where he could. He only had five company men with him, Taylor, Bud and Franks, as well as two geologists, young graduates by the names of Stephens and Jackson. For the backbreaking worker, they relied on the locals, but Christ, they were an odd lot the Papuans, and he needed thirty of them to do the job that back home a dozen or so blacks could achieve.

  As the chop, chop, chop of nearing rotor blades sounded, Kruger put down his glass and opened the door to his hut. He hoped the approaching helicopter might bring with it his salvation. As a last ditch attempt, he’d sent Taylor and one of their geology graduates to an exploratory site farther up the valley, about twenty miles from the main camp. Satellite images suggested there was a river, so with any luck it was rich in deposits. And Kruger certainly needed luck.

  He had faith in Taylor. He was a tough Texan who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty and had been with the company almost as long as Kruger had. If there was gold to be had, he’d find it.

  Yet when the helicopter landed, there was no sign of Taylor’s trademark wide-brimmed hat. Just Franks, the pilot, and one of the local workers who Franks frogmarched towards Kruger’s hut, shoving him in the back and barking obscenities at him.

  ‘What’s going on? Where’s Taylor and Jackson?’ Kruger demanded to know, as the pilot and the Papuan reached the porch of his hut.

  Franks, another grizzled American, but with only half of Taylor’s brains, shook his head, removed his baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his greying hair. ‘Beats the hell out of me, chief. When I got there, there was no sign of either of ‘em or the other digger.’

  Kruger looked at the Papuan worker, whose eyes were bush baby wide.

  ‘I found this ‘un skulking in the bushes nearby the equipment,’ added Franks. ‘Can’t make head nor tail out of what he’s saying.’