by Peter Tonkin
Only some local tribesmen had really explored the wild and impenetrable upper areas along the peaks that were the backbone of the island since his grandfather’s time, when they had briefly been full of Japanese and American soldiers fighting the Second World War. And the shy tribal elders had reported wreckage, corpses and strange magic spells that made the ground beneath the feet of even the wariest walker on the jungle tracks explode with deadly force.
‘Well?’ demanded Sailendra as the Toyota leaped down the hill from the palace like a frightened goat.
‘Whatever it is, it seems to be on the western slope of Guanung Surat.’ Parang looked up at the largest, closest mountain looming precipitously on their left, whose lower slopes formed the coast here. Formed the coast for the whole of this end of the island, indeed, its ridges becoming headlands, its valleys becoming bays. ‘That’s what Radio Baya reported just before it went off the air, at any rate. Before it went off the air again. We still have work to do with the new radio station...’
Sailendra closed his eyes, dismissing Parang’s worries about the radio station, recalling the map he had been studying just before the crisis struck. It showed a curving teardrop of land some thirty kilometres long, ten wide at its broadest. It lay like a giant rocky tadpole in the Java Sea. The head of the island was formed by the great mountain of Guanung Surat, which rose precipitously into a series of ridges that reached like the spines of a dragon down to the tail. The map, one that Sailendra had recently commissioned, showed the towns and villages nestling round the coast and reaching hesitantly up into the rainforest. It showed the fisheries and the seaweed farms off the coast, the plantations that were opening up the lower spines below the towering Guanung Surat. It showed the one city, the port and capital of Baya, that they were heading for now. The city nestled at the mouth of the Sungai Baya River which itself came cascading down the mountainside and only gave a couple of kilometres of river plain to build upon before it plunged again into the deep-water bay.
‘It is steep up there on Guanung Surat,’ Sailendra said after a while. ‘Could it be some kind of avalanche?’
The Toyota was at the coast now, swinging on to the best road on the island - the coast road into Baya City itself.
‘It would need to be a big one to make the ground shake,’ said Parang thoughtfully.
‘It’s been known,’ supplied the driver. ‘In the time of my grandfather, when the forests on the upper slopes had been damaged by American bombing. There was an avalanche in the year—’
‘What the Westerners call 1945,’ supplied Sailendra thoughtfully. ‘My own grandfather told me of it. I remember now. But there has been no bombing. The rainforest is untouched.’
‘There is rain like we have never known it,’ pointed out Parang redundantly. ‘It is this global warming everyone talks of and does nothing to stop. I have never known such rain. Nor has my father. Nor has my grandmother, who remembers General MacArthur standing on the beach at Baya.’
The beach at Baya appeared through the driving rain like the blade of a distant scimitar on their right hand now, as the first houses of the city itself appeared on the lower slopes on their left. The dome of the nearest mosque seemed to float hazily in the air above the greenery behind them. ‘We will stop at the police and emergency services station first,’ decided Sailendra. ‘If there is anyone there, we may learn more.’
‘You don’t think the chief of police will have commandeered your helicopter by now?’ asked Parang.
‘I doubt it. He is a suitably law-abiding man and he knows as well as you do that it needs an order of permission from the council for anyone but me to take the chopper up. I really think some of those old men believe the thing is worked by some sort of evil magic.’
‘Change has been slow to come to Pulau Baya, my prince,’ soothed Parang with unusual formality. ‘And now we have so much change happening so swiftly, it should come as no surprise that the wise heads of our elders sometimes yearn for the old ways of their fathers and their grandfathers.’
Even as the secretary spoke, the Toyota swept past the council building like a boat sweeping along a narrow river beside a tribal longhouse; which was, in effect, what it was. A figure leaped out from under the shelter of the overhanging, palm-thatched roof and slid into the beam of the headlights. The driver stamped on the brakes and the Toyota skidded to a halt. The figure wrenched the front passenger door wide and clambered aboard. His sarong and turban were almost as wet as the driver’s but he was also wearing a heavily embroidered traditional jacket that seemed to have some waterproof qualities.
He turned round as the Toyota pulled away and looked back over the seat, his thin, high-cheekboned face twisting with disapproval as he saw what the prince and his secretary were wearing. But the matter of royal responsibilities and traditional costume could clearly wait. ‘You go to take the machine?’ he demanded. He spoke in language as traditional as his clothing. There was no word for helicopter in the traditional vocabulary and he refused either to use the Western alternative or to coin a new one as the others had done.
‘Yes, Chief Councillor Kerian. It will take us to the source of the trouble most swiftly.’
‘I thought as much. The chief of police has been to the Council House demanding the right to employ the machine on just such a mission.’
‘And did you give him permission?’
‘I am the servant of the council,’ answered Kerian formally. ‘Although I lead it, after yourself, of course Prince Sailendra, I cannot speak for it. No, I did not grant permission. He has gone about his business in his own official vehicle.’
‘The Land Rover is a powerful piece of work,’ said Sailendra. ‘It will get him close to what is going on, I am sure. But why have you condescended to join us, Kerian?’
The chief councillor’s reply never came for another figure leaped out into the headlights, gesturing. This one held a flashlight that he waved wildly and pointed towards a temporary road sign saying danger. The driver crushed the brakes to the floor and the Toyota skidded to a stop. The figure pounded at the window and the driver lowered it to reveal the streaming face of one of the young emergency officers trained to turn his hand to fire-fighting, police work or, in this case traffic management. ‘Sungai Baya River has burst its banks,’ he bellowed. ‘The bridge is at great risk from the flood.’
‘We have to reach the heliport,’ called Sailendra decisively. ‘If the bridge is still standing, we will risk it.’
‘Very well, Your Highness. But proceed with the utmost care. And do not expect to come back along this road if the rain persists like this.’
Sailendra nodded and slapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Are you sure you want to remain with us, Kerian?’ he asked as the Toyota eased forward. ‘It would be a pity to wipe out the royal line and damage the council all at one blow.’
‘As far as the landing place,’ grated Kerian. His tone told the others he meant the landing place of the unnameable machine. The Toyota was up to its axles in rushing water by the time it reached the up-slope of the big broad bridge. The driver gunned the motor and eased the rugged vehicle up on to the shaking span. Then, seeing clear road ahead over the hump to the other side, he gunned the motor and raced forwards as though this was the start of a race. And Sailendra, looking upstream as the vehicle roared forward, saw that it was a kind of race indeed. A low wall of water was washing downstream with disturbing Speed. Its oncoming face was brown and strewn with debris. Its crest was ivory yellow and carrying more than mere detritus from the lower forest slopes and the upper city. Any moment now it would smash into the balustrade of the bridge itself. It was impossible to calculate how much damage the weight of muddy water would do to the structure. But, the prince saw with utter, unbelieving horror, such a calculation was totally redundant. For on the crest of the oncoming wave, like battered, shattered, stout and war-scarred battering rams, sat the trunks of four great wild-forest trees.
And, in the moment of stark horror which
was all that time allowed before they hit the bridge with the force of artillery shells, Sailendra realized that, in spite of what he had said and had believed up until now, they had all been carefully cut and trimmed. Someone was secretly logging up on the high mountain slopes after all.
Chapter 7: Land
‘Go!’ shouted Sailendra, tearing his throat.
The driver needed no second bidding. His black Doc Martens kicked against the Toyota’s floor plates. The big vehicle leaped forward on to the downslope of the bridge with enough force to hurl the passengers inside back against their seats. Chief Councillor Kerian and Secretary Parang both felt their backs and necks complaining at the impact. It was Sailendra’s left shoulder that took the force as he stared horror-struck at the oncoming wall of water and the telltale naked logs at its crest.
‘Did you see that?’ he shouted to no one in particular.
‘What?’ shouted Parang, looking over at his prince but not yet registering what Sailendra could see.
‘On the river...’ shouted Sailendra so forcefully that even Kerian turned.
But in that moment, as the two men began to focus their eyes on the outer world, so the Toyota hit the flood-water on the far side of the bridge itself and a great muddy wave obscured their view.
‘What was it?’ asked Parang.
‘Logs! In the water. Logs!' Sailendra slewed round in his seat, looking back up the slope of the bridge they had just come down. The moment that he did so, the first log hit the structure like an ancient battering ram. Both the ram and the bulwark shattered at the impact. The log itself reared up out of the wreckage it had caused but it could have been any tree trunk now, its suspiciously neat and trimmed shape battered away by the sturdy wood and brickwork of the span. Then the others rammed home as well and the bridge, the road, everything was whirled away through the southern section of the city towards the sea. Sailendra offered a silent prayer of thanks that this section of his city was still under construction. Precious few as yet lived downriver in the path of the flood.
‘Logs?’ called Kerian, when some semblance of calm returned after the grinding shriek of the bridge’s death. ‘They just looked like tree trunks to me.’
Sailendra swung round, frowning darkly. He closed his eyes as though he could rewind and replay the memory like a movie on the backs of his eyelids. But he could not. He saw only blackness and the picture would not come again. He had been certain. And now he was less so. But he knew how he could check on what he thought he had seen. Indeed, if there was logging going on secretly high on the mountain slopes, he was about to get into the machine that would help him find it the most swiftly and certainly of all.
The helipad was the newest addition to Pulau Baya’s increasingly busy building programme that was erecting and defining infrastructure all around them to foster and house the economic boom that was seemingly already promised to the island princedom. It was rudimentary, for Luzon Logging had given the chopper and the pilot, not the complete suite of facilities needed to maintain it. And Sailendra was reluctant to break into his carefully calculated budget - especially as it had been so difficult to get so much of it agreed with Kerian’s more reactionary council members. But at least there was a security fence with a manned gate, a modest palm-thatched hangar and a proper concrete pad built out into the bay. The gate opened as soon as the Toyota loomed into the guard’s vision and the helicopter itself was ready to go the instant the four-by-four slid to a halt beside it.
Sailendra knew little about such things but he understood that this was a Bell, among the smallest of their range. It would take three as well as the pilot. But Sailendra suspected one seat at least would remain empty. Still, he had to offer. ‘Councillor Kerian. You are welcome to come and survey the damage...’
Surprisingly, Kerian seemed willing, if not precisely keen. ‘It is my duty, Your Highness,’ he answered ponderously, his voice straining under the triple assault of the Toyota’s motor, the cataclysm pounding on the roof and the gathering pulse of the chopper’s rotors close above. ‘I bear a heavy responsibility for the welfare of the island. Almost as weighty as your own...’
Sailendra was so surprised that it did not occur to him to be suspicious until very much later.
So the three dripping men piled into the Bell and the pilot gunned the motor, lifting off into the battering downpour as they strapped themselves in. ‘Where to?’ he demanded, his baha indonesia words coloured by his native Japanese accent.
‘Up there!’ Sailendra gestured towards the mountain slopes that stood louring over this section of the city immediately on their left.
‘Are you sure?’ The pilot seemed about to enter into a discussion, then he saw the look on Sailendra’s face. He glanced back at the equally grim chief councillor, nodded, and they were off, without the need for radio contact with any airport authorities, flight controllers or air-traffic control, because of course there was none. The game little machine simply shrugged off the weight of water trying to crush it to the ground, skipped across the wind trying to blow its destruction and skimmed across the rooftops towards the all too near hill slopes.
On one side of the river lay the new buildings, still raw and largely untenanted, in stark contrast to the older sections of the city that reached up along the eastern bank. To the west, beyond the foaming torrent, the city looked like a cross between an out-of-town trading estate and a building site, all square, brutal and practical, its concrete brutality chopping into the steeper jungle slopes. To the east, the jungle-clad gradients, still almost steep enough to be called cliffs, closed over the outskirts more naturally, seeming to flow naturally in between the buildings. In contrast to the brutal west bank, on the east, palm-lined domestic thoroughfares broke up into more isolated neighbourhoods. The pattern of the city fragmented into individual buildings that climbed the green-clad buttresses, neighbourhoods becoming villages. Villages becoming individual houses. Houses giving way to mosques and temples. Then all sign of civilization giving way to the rearing green canopy whose only clear feature was the wild, foaming tumble of the swollen river.
Sailendra looked down broodingly. He knew well enough that there were roads, pathways and tracks below that seemingly featureless green on the west bank as well as on the east. In childhood, young manhood and more recently still he had followed so many of them, at first simply exploring what would one day become his, with a sense of pride and possession. Often as not at the side of his grandfather or father. Always with a contingent of bodyguards armed against the wild pigs, the long-horned deer and the clouded leopards that preyed on them. Armed, near the river, against the massive crocodiles. And securely booted - even on horseback - against the snakes and scorpions that swarmed in the undergrowth. In later days he had gone equally well dressed but less well escorted, trying to make some sort of a catalogue or asset list; keen to know his princedom for himself and unwilling to trust the all too helpful strangers who would offer to do the work for him. Strangers like Luzon Logging.
Independently of the bewildering range of precious woods that the trees represented, there was enormous wealth within the jungles. Wealth that needed husbanding and protecting, for it was at once enormously tempting and terrifyingly fragile. It was here he had discovered the sweet-and-sour red bananas they now grew in plantations further south. Here were the almost priceless and irreplaceable orchids whose carefully garnered offspring grew in the carefully guarded commercial enterprises nearer the coast. The various canes growing in the undergrowth, from bamboo to rattan; the fibres, from coir to hemp, old fashioned though they sounded - biodegradable, renewable and saleable again. They’d soon have gutta-percha and gum-dammar back on the market, he thought wryly. Well, they still shipped enormous amounts of Macassar-oil in the newly renamed Makassar away to the north across the Java Sea.
And that was all before he let the chemical companies and the loggers in. But no sooner had the thought arisen in his mind than he saw with simple horror that he had failed his virg
in- rainforest protectorate after all.
‘Parang, do you see that?’ Sailendra called, scarcely willing to believe his own eyes.
‘Loggers!’ spat Parang, as horrified as his prince.
‘Kerian?’ Sailendra was so shocked that he forgot to accord the prickly councillor his full title. No doubt he would pay for the solecism later.
‘How is this possible?’ cried Kerian, seeming as horror-struck as the others.
‘Down!’ ordered Sailendra. ‘As low as you can without landing!’
‘I wouldn’t land there anyway,’ answered the pilot, addressing the prince as informally as Sailendra had addressed Councillor Kerian. ‘If we go down too low we’ll never get her up again.’
But the Bell settled lower on his word, allowing him to make out some details in the streaming darkness. Right along the upper ridge, though still well below the rearing thrust of the watershed peaks that towered above their right shoulders still, a swathe of jungle had been simply torn away.
‘Down more!’ yelled Sailendra, straining to make out detail in the pelting darkness. ‘I need to see...’
The little Bell settled lower, until it seemed to Sailendra that her rotors beat between the tree-tops and her undercarriage hung beside the lower branches, tilting forward as it did so. Then the pilot hit a switch that Sailendra could not see and the Bell’s landing lights came on, illuminating the whole scene like searchlights. The two things combined to give Sailendra a grandstand view through the wildly whipping wipers. Huge tree trunks lay in regimented rows like the corpses after some unutterable disaster arranged for identification and disposal. All along the black-brown nudity of the obscene scar, there was evidence of secretive human activity, though the relentless downpour was doing its level best to obliterate all signs of everything, as though it too was employed by the logging companies. One long, lingering flypast was enough to explain it all to the horrified young prince. At one end, the clearing was opened into a makeshift landing field that looked large enough for a couple of big workhorse helicopters to grab the carefully piled logs and swing them seawards.