by Peter Tonkin
‘Aw! Give the guy a break,’ said Nic cheerfully, stepping out of the lift at her side. ‘This is one heck of an awesome view! Just smell the air -Ambre Solaire! And it’s a genuine pleasure to see you again, Miss Nordberg...’
‘Boys!’ snapped Robin. ‘Sometimes I just despair!
Captain Olmeijer seemed to notice none of the byplay. ‘It is the hydraulic platform that I wish to show to you,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘We offer such a range of water sports and related activities, you see...’
Inge swung round with a flirt of the hips that was just short of a declaration of war and oiled off with Richard on one arm and Nic on the other. The only consolation Robin could find as she fell in beside Captain Olmeijer was that neither of them was in any position to see how little of her unnaturally tanned and shapely rear was covered by the lower handkerchief.
At either side of the pool deck’s rear edge, two expanding gangways stepped down on to the hydraulic platform. They were at their fullest extent now, but were so well designed that the five of them could climb down on to the busy platform. Here Robin abruptly found herself surrounded by tall, tanned, blond young men with sun-bleached hair and easy Australian accents. She suddenly, and with some pleasure, began to suspect that had she not been with Captain Olmeijer they would have been asking whether she had on a swimsuit under what she was wearing - for there were jet-skis and scuba outfits just waiting for her to try them. And any number of hot young men falling over themselves to lend her a hand.
Richard tore his attention away from Inge and looked around. The expanding gangways - like so much else aboard the amazing Tai Fun - had been brilliantly designed by her original French architects. They functioned as outer safety rails - indeed, they were effectively sloping walls - to port and starboard of the platform, so that only the last few metres, where the five of them were standing surrounded by the blond crowd, were completely open. The inner section of the platform was walled by the stern of the ship itself, making yet another U-shaped level below and behind the pool deck. In all available sections there seemed to be a reassuring range of safety equipment. And a glance at the tall and muscular young men surrounding both Robin and Inge assured the thoughtful Richard that they were probably as competent-looking and as well trained as the Baywatch boy on lifeguard duty by the pool. And it was pretty clear that the young man in the Zodiac was not just sitting there for his own benefit. Not even the sudden arrival of Navigating Officer Eva Gruber distracted him.
For a moment it seemed to the amused Richard that there was a kind of race developing to see which woman they could get astride the last jet-ski first. And it seemed that Inge only won because she was already dressed for water sport. But then he saw that she was familiar with the controls of the water-borne motorbike. And the young instructor who had inveigled her astride seemed content to take the passenger seat behind and wrap his arms around her slim waist as she roared off to join the other four skinning across the surface of the somnolent sea.
‘Lucky son of a gun,’ observed Nic, under his breath.
Richard gave a half-smile and looked around for Robin. She had stepped into the Zodiac beside Eva Gruber and begun a conversation with her.
‘I need say nothing here,’ said Captain Olmeijer. ‘This is one area that speaks for itself. Also when we are under power we can water-ski from here and even parascend. This area and the pool are more than enough entertainment for the younger passengers in the day. And as well as lectures and shows for the more mature guests, there are discos for this age group.’
‘Do they still call them discos?’ wondered Nic.
Richard shrugged. He had no idea. But he had two children who might know. At university on the far side of the world. ‘It must be pretty well sound-proofed,’ he observed, ‘I didn’t hear anything last night, at dinner or afterwards.’
‘Like everything aboard,’ said Captain Olmeijer, with that fatal hint of self-satisfaction which always seems to tempt Fate. ‘Everything aboard is proofed against almost everything that can happen.’
Richard wasn’t actually looking at the captain as he spoke. He was watching Inge Nordberg and her companion. No sooner had the curving track of their progress across the silken sea curved in to join the other four than all five fell into formation like fighter aircraft. With Inge in the lead, they formed a chevron, its arrowhead pointing toward Tai Fun’s stern, and in they roared as though they were attacking the ship. Whooping and shrieking loudly enough to be audible even above the racing engines and the foaming crash of the water they spewed out behind them, the ten young riders came racing recklessly home.
When all at once, around them, the surface of the sea exploded. Thousands of slim silver bodies hurled out into the lower air, battering the drivers and their passengers with an all-too- solid shower. Richard realized in an instant what was happening. Something had spooked a shoal of flying fish so badly that not even the threatening rumble of jet-skis had held them under the water. Muscular little bodies anything up to forty-five centimetres long were pelting everyone aboard the jet-skis, and the drivers and their passengers were being battered off their vehicles and tumbling willy-nilly into the foaming water.
Richard ran down towards the edge of the area, coming all too close to hurling himself down into the water. He looked across at the Zodiac and saw with a piercing shock of relief that it was already in motion. With Eva Gruber and Robin both aboard it was speeding out across the fifty metres or so towards the floundering survivors, who were all equally at the mercy of whatever monster was fearsome enough to spook the flying fish.
But then the fish arrived aboard Tai Fun itself in a disorientating and painful wall. More like an avalanche than anything Richard had ever associated with the great waters, they battered in at head height, moving at a fair speed, each one a solid kilo or more of sharp fin, muscle and bone. Richard turned his shoulder to the rain, and saw Nic and Captain Olmeijer doing the same, both simply stunned by the hammering, slithering, slippery squall. But at least they were standing their ground. The younger men were simply running away from the shockingly sudden attack, slipping and sliding as the silvery bodies piled up beneath their feet, flapping, arching and writhing wildly.
Then, as the battering agony began to ease, Richard was able to swing back. And he saw, with a shock almost equal to the onslaught of the fish, that the empty jet-skis were all still headed unerringly homewards towards the platform beneath Tai Fun’s stern. Each of them recently filled to the brim with le Chef’s carefully quality-checked fuel - every cubic centimetre of which could reliably be expected to explode at the moment of impact.
Chapter 11: Slide
Prince Sailendra gaped through the window of the helicopter as it skimmed dangerously low above the gathering catastrophe. The sound of it was enough to drown the battering of engine and rotors and come close to deafening them all. A great section of the forest-pelted soily skin of his island was ripping away as though the mountainside was being flayed under some invisible hunter’s knife. What should have been bare rock, revealed as the land lost its grip, was flooding at a terrible speed with great washes of mud. But it was the way the forest floor itself seemed to rear up and fall away that really staggered him. At least the prince had the grim satisfaction of seeing the culprits’ industrial logging vehicles - huge though some of them were - succumb first to the overwhelming power of the slide.
Beyond words, Sailendra simply hammered on the pilot’s shoulder and pointed downwards towards the distant lights of his city. The pilot obediently turned the nose southwards and opened up the throttles. The chopper skimmed lower, picking up speed. But no sooner had it done so than the pilot was pulling back on the control column, wildly exchanging speed for height. The sliding rainforest below them was exploding. The loggers’ trucks and tractors were overwhelmed like toys. They had no opportunity or occasion to burn or to explode, though thickening tendrils and clouds of steam were warning of some kind of heat down there. But the trees were a different
matter. Towering trunks that had stood for centuries - millennia - were being wrenched from their stands and thrown about like toothpicks. Their trunks and branches shattered in the grip of forces too vast for them to bend to. Like the huge pine trees of the Siberian taiga that explode when the frosts freeze their sap too hard, thirty-, forty-, fifty- metre tree trunks shattered into splinters as though packed with hand grenades.
And all around, the earth itself seemed transformed into thick black oily water. Foaming like the flood crest on the river that had swept away the dam, the mountainside’s soil cover rose in crests, throwing upwards a kind of foam made up of boulders and clumps of living soil the size of Sailendra’s palace.
The chopper soared up out of the dangerous air with the splinters and pebbles rattling against its underside like bullets, but the game little aircraft lost ground to the landslide. The wave of destruction rolled down the hillside at a speed they could no longer match. Only when the slope of the mountainside began to moderate did the wave of destruction begin to slow. Rather than rolling downwards so wildly, ripping everything up before it, the terrible wall of absolute destruction settled. But it did not - could not - stop. Instead it was transformed. The weight of the still-slipping upper slopes might no longer be overwhelming the deeper, steadier soil of the lower slopes above the city, but like the face of a sand dune, the mountainside continued to slide - less wildly, more decorously, but unstoppably, with a terrible inevitability. And after the jungle and the forest, it took the city with it, sweeping everything that had stood there down into the heaving sea.
But as the chopper at last caught up with the advancing ripple of destruction, Sailendra could see all too clearly that this was no sedate affair. The trees, ripped from their roots by the downward pressure of restless soil, still crashed downwards. If they no longer shattered under the strain, they nevertheless added their massive weight to the onward-rolling Behemoth, as the stripped trunks had added the rams of their power to the destruction of the bridge that the weight of mere water might have left standing. The slower, infinitely more powerful rams of the land-borne trees slid up against the still-building outskirts of the new city like a besieging army intent on destroying an all too flimsy fortress.
It seemed to the horrified prince that it was the trees that battered his half-constructed city into a ruined wasteland - though second thoughts and, later, expert advice would suggest otherwise. The trees swept into the part-built blocks as though intent on avenging the desecration of the virgin forest above. They were a wave of darkness, snuffing out street lights, security lights, factory lights. Tearing down and overwhelming city blocks and the infrastructure in between them. The shells of factories destined to produce island-cotton products, training shoes with genuine, locally tapped rubber soles, electrical products and car parts under licence from Japanese and Chinese business partners, the new Baya Radio and Pulau TV studios due to be opened in a month or so, the editing facilities for the nascent film industry - part of the price for using Bandar Laut Bay as a location - all vanished. The new telecommunications centre beside it - with its wavebands and phone lines so recently transferred from the old postwar Telegraph Office. And with it the masts that allowed TV, radio and cellphone communication across the island and between Pulau Baya and the rest of the world. The new electricity-generating plant that had powered all the ruined infrastructure, replacing for the merest glimmer of time the traditional palm-oil lamps. The heliport did achieve a brief flash of deep red fire, made brighter by the surrounding darkness, as the Avgas tanks went up. But then it was washed out into the new marina and both were buried by a million and more tons of mountain soil. And the unstoppable wall of tree trunks became a huge, tangled armada launched out into the Java Sea as though the Bandar Laut - the sea men of the island - had returned to their old Bugis roots. Had taken to their wooden praus and gone pirating once more under the pale eye of the full, fat pirates’ moon. And it was only when he saw the pearl-bright face of it low in the eastern sky that Sailendra knew the rain had stopped at last.
But blessedly, Sailendra slowly came to realize, as though the moon itself was explaining things to him, only the as yet untenanted, almost uninhabited, new city on the west bank of the Sungai Baya River was destroyed. And it was the river that saved the rest - or, if not the river itself exactly, the steep sides of its valley. For the slide had started just below the watershed and the massive eastward tearing of the earth had been brought to a stop high above by the precipitous headwater valley. It had poured its cut logs eastwards into the flood-waters of the swollen river - and a great deal of soil and mud as well. But the water and the valley down which it tumbled had contained it. The great rent in the living topsoil had ripped westward to the edge of the next valley and been contained there too. Only that one great western spur had suffered total destruction - although that was bad enough. And, eastwards of the blessed river, the main part of the old city still stood. Shaken, battered, powerless and flooded.
But it still stood.
‘Where do you want me to go?’ yelled the pilot.
Sailendra dragged his moon-dazzled gaze back aboard the chopper. Kicked his mind into gear. The heliport was out of the question now, he thought. And the Toyota was gone as well. That loss was somehow more personal - almost painful. ‘Wherever you can land. As near to the city as possible.’
Automatically, though still deep in the grip of simple shock, he began to plan and prioritize. Or at least to ask the questions whose answers would order - perhaps - organize things for him. Should he check the surviving city first looking for casualties? His eyes swept over the rooftops as the pilot searched for space to land. There seemed little wreckage except along the edge of the flooding river, though the ground had certainly quaked as the landslide tore down the mountain. Perhaps enough to have registered on the Richter scale like a genuine earthquake. But such things were not uncommon here and the buildings were well adapted. There were no fires visible either, though, in the powerless darkness of the moon-shadows, there were millions of tiny golden flames. Palm-oil lamps.
The west bank had not been utterly unpeopled. There had been workers at the broadcasting facility, at the power station. There had been security guards, others. There had been one or two boats in the marina - though thankfully the main port facilities were over near Bandar Laut Bay. Perhaps his first priority ought to be to arrange help from the old city to search for survivors there. But the river, which had saved so many, seemed to be intent on damning those lost in the rubble, for its flood had widened and its flow intensified. There was no sign of the bridge - or the slope up to it. Or, indeed, much sign of the roadway leading up to the slope. It seemed as if they might need the trusty old pirate praus that had so recently sprung to his mind after all.
Or - Sailendra’s mind began to function more effectively - he could send word to the towns that nestled in the valleys further round the coast. They could probably send help in less time than it would take to get a useful number of people across the swollen flood. But how was he going to contact them? Come to that, how was he going to contact anybody? And, it suddenly occurred to him, the effects of the landslide might well be more than the island could handle unaided. ‘Is your radio still working?’ he asked the pilot.
‘Yeah, I guess so...’
‘Well, it may be the only one on the island that is working. Can you put out a general distress call, please?’
‘I guess...’
As the pilot began to broadcast the first request for help, Sailendra turned to the two men in the seats behind. ‘Parang. You and I must draw up a list of immediate priorities. Kerian, first amongst these must be a meeting of the council. Can you please organize that while I see about more immediate relief work?’ Kerian answered first. ‘Of course. The council must be at the heart of whatever we do now. There is much new work to be done, perhaps even a new direction...’
‘We will discuss that with the council. Parang, as soon as we get down we must go to the emerg
ency services HQ and the hospital.’
‘A pity the new hospital was built over by the glorious new film studios, is it not?’ asked Kerian, getting back into his stride.
‘A blessing that it was not yet staffed or open for business,’ snapped Sailendra.
‘It was full of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, though. Like all the rest of the new buildings. All gone now, through the will of the mountain.’
‘All gone,’ grated Sailendra, rapidly running out of patience, ‘because of illegal logging in the rainforest. That’s what caused all this! And when I find out who was responsible for that...’
‘Not that you ever will now,’ sneered Kerian. ‘There can’t be many clues left, can there?’
‘Prince Sailendra?’ the pilot interrupted. ‘I have a contact.’
‘Who?’ asked Sailendra, realizing with a shock that he had completely disregarded the pilot’s vital conversation because he was pointlessly fighting with Kerian. Now there were some priorities he really did need to get straight, he thought.
‘A ship,’ the pilot answered. ‘The signal’s not too strong. I didn’t catch the name. He’s talking in English and mine’s not too good. Sounds American.’
‘Let me speak to him.’
The pilot passed the headset to Sailendra, who leaned over as far as his seat belt would allow so as not to over-stretch the twist of wire connecting it to the radio. ‘Hello?’ he said in English. ‘Hello?’
‘I hear you strength four,’ came a faint reply. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘This is Prince Sailendra of Pulau Baya. We have an emergency here. We need help urgently...’
‘Sorry to hear that, Your Majesty, what can we do?’
‘What ship are you?’
‘Freighter Miyazaki Maru outbound from Kagoshima, Japan. Did you say Pulau Baya?’