by Peter Tonkin
‘Perhaps I should get out. My weight will only make things more difficult,’ suggested Parang.
‘Now that I have you beside me, old friend, I’d rather you stayed. At the very least you can stick your head out of the window and yell up at Bambang. But I missed you. I thought I’d lost you.’ Sailendra spoke with unaccustomed directness as he swung round to glance over his shoulder. He eased the gear lever into reverse and eased his feet on clutch and accelerator until he could feel the biting point. Holding it there, he took his hand off the gear lever altogether, put his arm along the back of the seat and swung round further so that he could look up the length of the truck and on along the taut rope to the tug-of-war team on the far end of it. ‘Tell them to pull, Parang,’ he ordered.
Parang did as he was told, then settled back into his seat, feeling Sailendra’s arm around his shoulders, like a father protecting his son. The accidental intimacy coming so soon after his near-death experience stirred something in the secretive young man. And the fact that it was Sailendra who had saved him in the end broke through his reserve. ‘You must beware of Councillor Kerian, Your Highness.’
‘Of course I must. I always have.’ Sailendra eased the clutch up as he squeezed the accelerator, feeling the wheels begin to grip.
‘He is more cunning than you know, Sailendra. He has bribed or blackmailed all of those around you. He spies on you constantly, trying to manipulate you. He will destroy you and take power if he can.’
Sailendra did not respond to this, apparently concentrating on easing the truck back, one centimetre after another, up the hillside. There was a distant chanting cheer as Bambang’s tug-of-war team felt the movement. The rope groaned loudly enough to be audible over the growling of the motor. ‘He has bribed or blackmailed all of those around me?’
‘Yes. Even me.’
At first Sailendra thought it was the simple shock of his old friend’s admission that caused the whole world to heave around him. The roaring in his ears could have been surprise as easily as the yelled warnings of the stunned and sprawling men on the road above. The screaming could have been the agony of betrayal inside his head as easily as the protesting of the motor as the wheels were simply shaken off the ground altogether while the whole truck seemed to jump up into the air like a startled cat. But then Parang was screaming himself, and Sailendra slammed back to reality to find the truck sliding wildly out of control down the still-heaving mountainside. Even the treachery of the prince’s closest friend took second place to that.
Sailendra fought to keep the truck facing straight ahead. If it turned side-on to the slope then it would roll. If it rolled, then they would die. It was as simple as that. But keeping the leaping vehicle on anything like an even keel was incredibly difficult. The steering wheel leaped right and left with enough force to numb his hands as the tyres, wheels and axles smashed to bits. ‘JUMP!’ he yelled at Parang, but for once the secretary disobeyed him openly. Then it was too late. The bonnet kicked up as though a landmine had exploded under it. The men were lashed back into their seats, then whipped forward again like a pair of royal cobras striking. The bonnet exploded into smoke - which instantly turned out to be steam. And water droplets which thundered back against the windscreen like a muddy monsoon. The whole rushing wreck of the truck slewed across the topmost paddy and smashed into the solid concrete of its outer wall, sending a tidal wave of water and rice plants thundering down from one to the other below in a strange stepped-chain reaction. Sailendra’s chest hit the steering wheel so hard he sounded the horn with his breastbone. Parang’s forehead hit the windscreen sharply enough to send a spider’s web of cracks across it. Then they slammed back into their seats again.
Sailendra couldn’t breathe properly anyway, but the shrilling of the monitor in his pocket warned him that it was more serious than the fact that he was winded. He looked across at Parang. This time at least his companion seemed wide awake, if bleeding from a rapidly swelling bruise on his forehead. ‘We need to get out again,’ rasped Sailendra.
Parang nodded and opened the door, slopping down into the paddy immediately. Sailendra swung out also, moving like an old man, with the whole of his torso joining the muscle-torn ache of his shoulder. The crowd up on the roadway were picking themselves up, Bambang waving and gesturing. Without the dead weight of Parang, this time Sailendra elected to go upwards. Side by side he and his secretary pounded up along the trench the truck had ripped into the slope. By the last piece of good fortune they were to enjoy for a while, the rope had parted at the tow hook, so that once the labouring men had made it back to the point they had boarded the truck, they could pull themselves up to the road.
Here, with all the ebullience of a group of heroes who have stared death in the face and overcome it, they walked off down the road. Of course Sailendra wished to accuse Parang. To get the facts. To plumb the depth of his treachery and discover whether the secretary/spy would give up any of his councillor master’s secrets. But the prince found it was simply not possible to ask the questions he burned to ask in the presence of Bambang and his good, honest friends. Besides, there were other matters which he could and should discuss with them all. Matters that took precedence even over Kerian and whether he was staging some kind of coup d’état even now.
As the group walked back towards the village with Bambang now in charge of the clean-air monitor, Sailendra discussed with the oldest there the pattern of earth tremors. Whether these had happened before; whether there had been any release of gas before. Whether anything had happened in the memory of the oldest, or in his memory of things he had heard about - reaching back to the moment when General MacArthur had stood upon Bandar Laut beach - that could give them some guidance now. But there was nothing. Pulau Bay had never before been subject to landslips, hot ocean currents, earth tremors or poison gas. Not since the Americans had bombed out the Japanese towards the end of the war - with almost all of these effects. In Sailendra’s opinion, that made what was happening now all the more worrying. By the time the weary troop had straggled back into the village, he had decided that he should get these people to leave their homes, take whatever they could carry, and follow him into Baya City.
But General Mac Arthur’s men had not died in vain. They had brought democracy to Pulau Baya. No mere man was going to order the villagers around - whether he be Prince Sailendra or Emperor Hirohito. Fortunately, the tug-of-war team comprised the majority of the village council, so it was easy and quick to summon a full meeting immediately they arrived at the village. And Sailendra had only to sketch his concerns, for most of them were already familiar with his thinking. Even so, it took some hours of deliberation before the charismatic young ruler got his way. And by the time the villagers had collected their most precious portable belongings and secured their homes against the distant threat of looting, it was sunset.
With Parang on one side and Bambang on the other, Sailendra at last turned to lead the procession of villagers along the road that would take them - eventually - into Baya City. On his back he carried a bundle of holy and historic things from the village’s council chamber. In his right hand he carried a simple wicker cage in which a white parrot preened itself contentedly. The dusty road looked westwards along the length of the island. On their right, the low hills gathered towards the watershed ridge that was the gently curving spine of the island. In a couple of kilometres the road ahead would swing north towards the pass over which Sailendra had driven the truck nearly forty hours earlier. Now it just followed the slope up towards the shady, wooded ridge, perspective foreshortening the gathering hill-peaks until it seemed that the sharp top of Guanung Surat itself was close enough to touch, though it was the length of the island away. And as the big white disc of the sun slid down behind it, it seemed that the great rock tusk was casting its shadow down over them, even over the whole length of the island. Like the head of a saint or a god in a picture, like the head of the Prophet as described to Moslems, the great peak was bathed in a halo of
pure gold fire.
And just then, at the very moment of sunset, came the loudest noise that any of them had ever heard. It was so loud that it seemed to be happening inside their heads. It was so loud that it seemed that it must be happening just beside them, beneath them, behind them. It was so loud that they seemed to feel it the merest instant before they heard it. It was so loud that they only heard the first sharp microsecond of it before their quaking ears switched off.
It combined the crack of a great artillery weapon discharging with the first huge chime of the loudest peal of thunder. It contained the deepest cataclysmic crash of a cave-in just beneath their feet with the explosion of a jet liner smashing to earth just behind them. It was louder than the sounds of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki being detonated at once.
It was the loudest sound that had been heard since Krakatau had exploded.
It stunned the little band of villagers as utterly as it stunned their brave young prince. And in itself, in the instant of its existence, it explained everything that had happened since even before the landslide began.
And into the silence of the deafness that claimed them all for some time afterwards, Bambang said what they all were thinking. Though Sailendra was only able to understand him by reading his lips.
‘The top of the mountain’s on fire,’ he said.
Chapter 20: Makassar
Richard, Robin, Nic and Gabriella only spent a couple of hours in Makassar and they never got to visit either Bira Beach or the Bugis harbour at Paotere. They were hurried on to the plane at the little airport five kilometres outside Tanjung Puting National Park a couple of days after finding the dead orang-utan and then stepped off some hours later at Hasanuddin Airport, twenty-five kilometres outside Makassar, a couple of hours after that. Two hours later still they were back aboard Tai Fun and the beautiful vessel was already easing out of Pelni Harbour with clearance for the fastest possible passage to Pulau Baya.
The minute Richard saw the orang-utan, he knew they were going to miss the boat. Literally. There was no way the national park’s prize exhibit could be slaughtered almost immediately in front of their eyes without the authorities getting involved. And the involvement of every authority he had ever encountered led from dead slow to dead stop. And Tai Fun had a schedule to keep, which, like time and tide, would not wait. But even then, he did not realize how deeply the authorities would want to become involved. And how many different, occasionally unexpected, levels of authority would appear, and from so many increasingly distant places.
The park rangers arrived first, within a few minutes. Brisk and efficient, seemingly hardly surprised by the crisis at all, they left one team to guard the site and begin to question the witnesses while another team went off in pursuit of the lorries. For once - and indeed for the next couple of days - Richard had to take a back seat, something that neither suited nor amused him, and went a good way to explaining the speedier of his decisions and the riskier of his actions later. But, despite his usual accurate insight, an acuity which might have flattered the sharpest of fictional detectives, he had not really had the time or the opportunity to think through the full implications of his acute observations.
It came as little surprise to him, therefore, to find that Father and Son were not quite the simple, taciturn Dyak guides they seemed to be. Men such as Nic Greenbaum did not dash unsupported or unprotected into the wild. Gabriella had arranged the closest the park could offer to undercover ranger guides - men able to offer the most authentic of experiences combined with maximum security. Nic seemed amused if unsurprised by the revelation. He turned to Richard, including Robin in his wide grin.
‘Guys like us’re just too precious to risk, I guess. We’ve earned a kind of second childhood - nurses watching everywhere. It’s like I said. No more fast cars or off-piste slopes for me.’
This observation was made while Father and Son were in deep conversation with the first team of rangers at the site, but it continued a couple of hours later at the ranger camp at Natai Lengkuas as they waited for a more senior team to come and talk to them. But the team could not arrive before the morning, so they slept the first night there and waited. Richard and Robin in one hut, Nic and his lovely nursemaid in the other.
Richard was woken in the dawn after only a couple of hours’ sleep by the howling of the proboscis monkeys in the trees nearby. He rolled over and felt for Robin among the folds of mosquito netting but she was gone. He sat up at once. Very few things indeed got his lovely wife up before full daylight. In fact the only thing he could think of that did it was a cup of teak-dark English Breakfast Tea. She was standing by the slatted shutters of the window across the tiny room, looking out.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I’d hate to say I don’t trust Nic Greenbaum - or Gabriella Cappaldi for that matter - but you know there’s more going on here than meets the eye,’ she said quietly, as though too well aware how easily someone could use the monkey noise to eavesdrop outside their window.
‘I’d been working under the assumption that he’d decided to outbid me or outmanoeuvre me for Tai Fun and the High Wind line.’
‘Me too. With Gabriella nicely placed as his spy, looking for weaknesses and angles he could exploit. I mean, he has the reputation of getting pretty cut-throat when it comes to protecting his investments and expanding his empire.’
‘More of a Caesar than a Christmas tree.’ Richard had been aching to crack one of his puns on Nic’s name for some time.
‘Yup,’ said Robin, without even wincing at the dreadful joke. ‘But I think there’s more to it now. I think we’ve been focusing on his reputation as a businessman so closely that we’ve overlooked some other elements of his reputation.’
‘As a ladykiller? I mean, Gabriella seems more than...’
‘No, you dope. As an eco-warrior. You know he gives a fortune each year to UNESCO? No, of course you don’t. It’s not a boy thing. Well, he does. And I’m guessing he’s not the kind of guy who’s afraid to put his mouth where his money is. More than just his mouth, in fact.’
‘Uh-uhunh,’ he said, as though he had the faintest notion where she was going with this. But then the penny dropped. ‘And UNESCO is in charge of the Tanjung Puting National Park?’
‘Funds it. Takes responsibility for protecting it as far as is needed at an international level.’
‘OK, I read the article. I listened to Inge Nordberg, distracting though that Calvin Klein safari minisuit was. Protecting it from the collapse of strong if unpopular centralization into more fragile local controls. Against people on the ground who feel they have a right to get something out of it at last. But most especially against the international businesses all too willing to bribe them, blackmail them and just plain rip them off no matter what the ecological cost. Big mining, big logging. These Luzon people...’
‘So, here we have a guy who’s not allowed to race his cars any more. Or jump from choppers at the top of mountains wearing nothing but skis and a smile. Who’s had to shelve his “Been There Done That” T-shirt collection. But who’s gone into Indonesia the same way as Geldof and Gates went into Africa, with his own personal commitment as well as all the money he can manage. And now he might just want to get down and dirty to protect all the investments he has made in the environment out here.’
‘The same as he would do to protect any other investment he had made. On the one hand Greenbaum International, Texas Oil and their state-of-the-art green refineries, on the other hand UNESCO and Tanjung Puting National Park.’
The next level of investigators arrived just after the four witnesses had enjoyed a late breakfast, but before Richard had really got to grips with testing Robin’s theories on Nic himself. These were the authorities from Pangkalanbun, the local administrative centre with oversight of the park. The details recorded by the rangers were repeated, expanded, witnessed, notarized, as though some kind of contract was being drawn up here. The process took until about the time Richard estimated Tai Fu
n would be setting sail for Makassar, with all her passengers except four safely back aboard.
‘May we leave now?’ he asked when it became clear that the last of the local formalities was completed. But his question was answered with polite astonishment. Did the honoured captain not realize that even now, there were teams flying here from the local UNESCO offices in Jakarta, who were hoping to link up with a team from central offices in Tokyo? There was some talk of getting a group out from UN Headquarters itself...
‘From Manhattan?’ asked Richard, almost awed. This was a lot of heat for one dead ape. But then, he thought, remembering his conversation with Robin that morning, perhaps there was more going on here than the murder of one orang-utan. The wider the ripples spread, the more likely that this was more to do with Nic Greenbaum. Or Luzon Logging. Or both.
In actual fact the men and women from Tokyo and Jakarta wanted mostly to speak to Gabriella, and so Richard found out that there was more to the entertainments officer than the considerable amount which met the eye. And that her relationship with Nic was even more complex than even Robin had supposed. If UNESCO could be said to run secret agents, then Gabriella was one. And if they employed visiting experts, then Nic was one. And if spies and experts got together in pursuit of suspected eco-sanctions busters then that was what they had been doing.