Savages

by Shirley Conran

  Jonathan thought, Clever little Annie, she knows just how to get me back and leading the team. Only he could teach them how to kill.

  Using a yard of wire from the toolbox—it was about as thick as piano wire—Jonathan tied each end around a wooden toggle about the width of a thumb and five inches long; the toggles were to provide handgrips.

  He looked at the women. “Ready? This takes ten seconds and it’s a silent method. If he ain’t heard you creeping up behind him, he’ll never say another word. Only thing you must remember is to cross your arms before you reach him to make the wire a circle.”

  As he spoke, he demonstrated on Patty. “Creep up behind him, with your arms crossed and your elbows touching each other. On the count of one, you slip the wire circle over his head. On the count of two, you pull your arms apart as far as you can.” He added, “This isn’t a method for someone small, like Suzy, unless the enemy is small too—or he’s sitting down.”

  After garotte practice, Annie suggested, “Let’s gather some wood and see what floats.”

  A thunderous silence followed her words. Annie ignored it. “Let’s see what we can bring back in half an hour,” she said.

  Jonathan stayed in the hut. He was damned if he was going to have the responsibility of picking the wood this time.

  In the stream behind their camp, the women experimented with different woods. “Bamboo is easily the best,” Carey said. As they squatted on the bank of the stream and watched their trial branches bobbing downstream, Jonathan said from behind them, “I’ve seen natives use small bamboo rafts to get down a river.” He seemed to be over his fit of anger, as if the prospect of starting a new raft had revived his spirits. “The things are about two feet wide by nine feet long, and they lash ’em together with jungle vines. I thought bamboo was too flimsy for a big raft. I thought our weight would sink the thing, but let’s try a quick experimental lash up. Nothing seaworthy, just to see if she floats.”

  “Why don’t we use one of our beds?” Carey suggested.

  Impatiently, they waited for night to fall. When they were swimming in the lagoon and the lookout cried a warning, they could quickly hide at the back of the beach or in the cave, but they could hardly disguise a daylight raft-launching operation.

  Just before dark, they hurried down to the beach. Using the flashlight for illumination, Jonathan tied a crosspole at either end of Carey’s six-by-three bamboo bed, then they all waded into the waterfall current, where there were never any stonefish.

  While the other women held the raft steady, Jonathan lifted Annie onto it and handed her one of the paddles. Annie was almost as light as Suzy, and she was a far better swimmer.

  Annie called, “Okay, let her go.”

  Anxiously, the other women watched as Annie floated off, carried by the current.

  There was quiet glee on the moonlit beach, which, only twenty-four hours earlier, had been the scene of their despair.

  Annie quickly managed to control the light raft and paddled toward the south of the beach. Except for Suzy, who was up the lookout tree, the rest of the party moved along the beach, keeping up with the raft, until Annie paddled into the shore.

  Jonathan said, “Now for the big test. Me.”

  The women held the floating bamboo bed, as he scrambled on.

  “Don’t expect to stay dry,” Annie warned.

  Ten minutes later Jonathan brought the raft back to the shore. Again he set off, this time with Annie behind him. They had to position themselves carefully, and every time either one of them moved, water sloshed over the bamboo poles, but it stayed afloat.

  For the next hour the little group practiced maneuvering the raft around the bay, until Jonathan was satisfied that they should build their next raft of bamboo.

  “Do you all agree?” he demanded. “I ain’t going to make this decision by myself.”

  The women nodded excitedly, then dragged Carey’s bed back up the cliff.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26

  The next morning, they all woke at dawn, with renewed enthusiasm, undiminished by the fact that Patty returned from a fishing trip with no fish and only three baby crabs.

  Carey stayed to fish for an extra hour, but didn’t get a single bite.

  So Patty went to check Jonathan’s freshwater fish trap. It was her job to check these lines every morning and evening.

  But the underwater trap was empty, and the lines at the side of the river were not bending toward the water.

  “Sometimes,” said Jonathan, “no matter how you figure it, the fish just don’t bite.”

  “We’ll have to eat the raft supplies today,” Annie said. “We had enough raft supplies to last for five days, but we’ve been eating them for two days.”

  “It’s a pity I’ve never been any good with a fish spear,” Jonathan said. “If we catch no fish tomorrow, I’ll go after a rabbit. Now let’s get started on the new raft.”

  * * *

  The following morning Patty checked the fish trap and lines, which were again disappointingly empty.

  Jonathan sharpened the machete on a rock near the waterfall. Then he took a sharp piece of rock in his hand and carefully nicked the blade of the machete to make a crude saw. One person could use it, two-handed.

  Jonathan tried it out on a bamboo log and nodded with satisfaction.

  When Carey tried the saw, he jumped forward in alarm. “No! Push it away from you, Carey. Otherwise you might slip and saw your belly open.”

  Annie trimmed the lengths of bamboo and dragged the logs to the raft-building site. Patty collected vines; Silvana gathered damit. Suzy switched jobs with whoever was due on guard.

  They always cut just below the bamboo joints, where the bamboo wasn’t hollow, so that each log would be sealed for most of its length. For each usable log they had three or four that splintered. But with practice they improved.

  By midday, when they stopped work, Jonathan was pleased with their progress. He said, “I’ve had another idea. We can lash two bits of bamboo together to act as a rudder. It will be like a rough paddle, and we’ll lash it centrally aft. Then we’ll have a bit of lateral stability.”

  “How will that help?” Suzy asked.

  “Nobody paddles at the same rate, and we don’t want to find ourselves going around in circles.”

  While they were resting, after a meager lunch of dried fish, they heard a low-flying aircraft approach. Immediately on the alert, everyone peered upward, although they could see nothing above the green umbrella-spread of the treetops.

  Jonathan shook his head. “You all know we can’t risk it. It’s playing Russian roulette to wave at that plane. Remember, with any luck, we’ll be off here in a couple of days.” Seeing their unspoken disappointment and Suzy’s brimming eyes, he said, “Back to work, lads! Work!” Work always helped you to forget, work never let you down and it was only work that was going to get them out of this place. They’d had no combat practice this morning; he’d get them back at work as soon as possible.

  He calculated the odds once again. Today was November 27. If they finished the raft in time to embark tomorrow night, they’d have three nights and two days to cover seventy-odd miles of sea before the cyclone season started on December 1. The cyclone season started in the afternoon and was never late. He knew that he would be taking a great risk going to sea so near the Long Wet, but once it started, the Long Wet wouldn’t break until March. Apart from the terrorists and the natives, the jungle would be a sinister health hazard during those three wet months. It was surprising that nobody had yet been taken seriously ill, apart from diarrhea, Carey’s hands, insect bites, scratches. For instance, no sores had yet become dangerously infected. Annie had warned everyone not to scratch, and she bathed all sores morning and evening with boiled seawater. The antiseptic cream had been finished long ago.

  Better get back to work, he told himself. He stood up slowly, then blinked in surprise. The strength seemed to have ebbed from his legs, and they trembled.

  H
e sat down. He definitely felt a headache coming. There is no such thing as anti-malaria immunization, and none of them had taken their daily, anti-malaria tablets since November 13. From what seemed a great distance, he heard Annie’s anxious voice. “Are you all right, Jonathan?”

  His head was suddenly too heavy to lift. “No.” He spoke with difficulty. “Take the equipment away from the lean-to and put me in there. Get Carey. I want to speak to her.”

  Hurriedly, Silvana and Suzy dragged the equipment from under the canvas, which had been removed from the palm-log raft before they buried it.

  With his arms around their shoulders, Patty and Carey helped Jonathan to the lean-to; they laid him on a bed of leaves, which they had covered with fishing shirts. Annie felt his burning forehead and guessed at his temperature, for the thermometer in the first-aid kit had long been broken. She reckoned that it was 103 degrees.

  Annie thought, Plenty of liquids, lots of salt, make some thick fish soup and keep feeding it to him in small amounts. That was all she could think of. Didn’t you turn yellow and shake if you had malaria? Was it like measles or chicken-pox? Could you catch it from other people? No, the right sort of female mosquito had to bite you personally. Why the hell hadn’t anyone put a manual in the first-aid box? She sponged Jonathan’s sweating face and chest and held a cup of water to his lips.

  Carey squatted by Jonathan’s head. He spoke slowly and thickly, as if drunk. “Somebody gotta be in charge, make decisions … Check the lookout … No carelessness … You’re in charge, Carey … Go ahead …” He was silent, then with great effort he spat out the words. “Finish the raft!”

  Jonathan’s skin was wax-pale and glistened with sweat. He shivered violently and talked nonsense in his delirium.

  Annie refused to leave him, so she took on all the camp duties while the others sweated over the raft. They figured it would take one more day to assemble the new bamboo raft, which was far lighter and easier to build than their first one.

  This time, they couldn’t use the canvas awning as a base, because it wasn’t long enough, so they were going to keep the canvas folded on deck, and perhaps soak it in the seawater, to use as a shelter from the sun. The ladder would be discarded too—it was too heavy for this raft.

  In the late afternoon, as Annie crouched by the campfire melting the damit, Silvana came up to her. “Jonathan must eat something more sustaining than smoked fish dunked in water. If Patty can’t catch any fish, she had better try to shoot a rat. Don’t look like that, Annie. I’ve often served you rat stew, and you’ve loved it. Jonathan’s our navigator and the raft’s no good without him, so we’ve got to keep him alive. That’s our priority.”

  For the first time since they had known her, Silvana’s voice had a crisp, sure ring of authority. Nobody dared complain at having been served rat stew.

  It was Carey’s turn to be lookout, so Suzy and Patty, armed with knives, slings and the ax, unwillingly set out to look for a rat to kill. They had become accustomed to seeing rats around and to slinging stones at them if they came into the camp.

  Now, suddenly, there didn’t seem to be a rat in sight.

  They moved inland, parallel to the waterfall river, so that they would be guided back by the noise, and were less likely to lose their way.

  Rats move fast. While Patty thought she might be able to hit a large, slow man with a gun, she decided it would be a waste of ammunition to shoot at a moving rat, and the shot might be heard. The two women had decided that their best chance of getting a rat was to stun it by stoning it, then club it to death. They were not looking forward to the task.

  Slowly the two women moved through the still and silent jungle, the sound of their feet absorbed by the decaying vegetation.

  “I wish we were sure of the boundary lines of the taboo area,” Patty said nervously.

  “We’re safe on the river side until we get to William Penn,” Suzy reassured Patty. “And we won’t move to the south, where we’re not sure of the boundary.”

  The women had named landmarks in the taboo area—which seemed to be the triangle formed by the river, the path and the beach—with names from Pittsburgh. The waterfall river was called the Allegheny; the path that led from the Burma bridge had been christened William Penn Place. They liked to think that they were safe in this Golden Triangle.

  Suzy searched to the right, while Patty searched to the left. Suzy whispered crossly, “They practically hold conferences in our camp at night, but when we want one, there isn’t a damned rat in sight.”

  Suddenly Suzy froze and put a restraining hand on Patty’s arm.

  In front of them, grazing the forest, was a small, dirty gray animal.

  Suzy whispered, “We’re in luck. That’s the hotel’s pet goat. See the red collar? How the hell did it get this side of the river?”

  Patty stood rigid. “I can’t,” she said.

  “You catch fish every evening,” Suzy whispered. “What’s the difference between killing fish and killing this thing? We’ll maybe get thirty meals off that goat—it’ll feed us for days. And it’ll be easier to kill than a rat, because it’s tame…. Patty, it’s your job, you’re our goddamned hunter. Think of Jonathan.”

  Slowly the goat started to move.

  Suzy pulled her fish knife from her belt. “All right, you bitch, I’ll do it.”

  Patty gulped and said, “We can’t risk losing it. You move around to its rear. When I whistle, we’ll both move forward. We’ll both go for the collar, and whoever catches it will have to hang on while the other one whacks it.”

  Suzy moved in a wide semicircle to the rear of the kid, which continued to graze quietly, moving only inches from the spot where they had first seen it.

  The goat stopped nibbling and lifted its head. It saw Patty, jerked back and slowly retreated from her. But by that time Suzy was only two feet behind it. She threw herself forward, her eyes fixed on the red collar, her hands grabbing for it.

  The kid bleated, the bell on the collar tinkled and Suzy swore as she found herself grappling on the ground with the terrified animal. She yelled, “Hurry up, Patty!”

  Patty picked up a stone and smashed it against the goat’s forehead. It seemed to have no effect. The kid continued to struggle.

  “Again!” Suzy yelled.

  Feeling sick, Patty hit the animal and heard bone crunch beneath the stone. The kid staggered, fell, then tried to scramble to its feet again.

  “Quick,” gasped Suzy, “slit its throat.” She pulled the kid’s head back by its little silky ears.

  Patty stabbed it on the left hand side of its chest, in the heart. The terrified animal made a piteous noise as it struggled.

  Slowly, the goat’s cries grew fainter, then stopped.

  Patty threw up.

  “Not over the goat!” Suzy cried.

  Trembling, Patty asked, “Is it really dead, Suzy? Are you sure? It was so helpless.”

  Over the bloody carcass, the two women looked at each other. Patty was white and shaking, and couldn’t speak.

  Firmly Suzy said, “Thank God we’ve got something to eat We’ll take turns dragging it back to camp.”

  * * *

  Silvana quickly skinned the goat. She knew that if they didn’t cook it immediately, it would be rotten within twenty-four hours. While Annie boiled the bones in water to make a broth, Silvana cut the meat into chunks, skewered it onto twigs and dried it over the fire, barbecue style; the trick was to dry and harden the meat without shriveling it.

  It took Silvana and Annie two hours to butcher and cook the goat. Slowly, the enticing aroma of meat filled the camp clearing.

  16

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1984

  Through the clear plastic canopy of the Duck, Harry gazed down at the feathery greens of the forest far below.

  “Queenstown ahead to port,” Johno called back. From above, where you couldn’t see the cracks in the concrete and couldn’t smell the stink of the streets, the reeking river or the swirling filth
in the harbor, Queenstown looked like a charming little toy town. The small port, with its modern jetty, had grown around the natural inlet of the St. Mary River, which breaks through the hills from the west. The hills form a protective amphitheater around the harbor. Once covered by a sandalwood forest, they are now obscured by rising rows of small white buildings, broken by a few dusty palm trees, the gray spire of St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral and the green dome of the Buddhist temple on the north shore. On either side of the stone breakwaters that slant across the harbor entrance, the lace-edged, turquoise sea snakes up and down the coast.

  Harry was sick of the view. For the past eleven days, he had searched the island fruitlessly.

  Colonel Borda, the huge, silent islander who had been appointed director of the search-and-rescue operation, was quick-witted and efficient. The coastline search, both north and south of Paradise Bay, had been conducted by troops stationed at the Paradise Bay Hotel. The inshore area had been searched by a coastal patrol vessel and two police launches, while a helicopter had spent a day dipping over the offshore water. Divers had been sent down at the spot where the explosion had been reported. They had come up with an astonishingly large heap of waterlogged rubbish, much of it identifiable as the remains of the Louise, but without a trace of the bodies.

  When Harry suggested to Kerry that they conduct their own inland search using local Nexus personnel, Kerry refused. Given the unsettled political situation, he wouldn’t send his men out without official protection. Territorial rights were fiercely controlled, Kerry pointed out, and he didn’t want his men eaten. It would be quicker and easier, and promise far more likelihood of success, to offer a reward for information, to tempt the soldiers on Raki’s “goodwill missions” sent to villages all over the island, but this had been forbidden. Kerry had to admit that he saw the logic of this from the official point of view, which was that in a country trying to start a tourist industry, it would be a bad precedent to offer a large sum of money for missing tourists, dead or alive, even if the small print clearly stated that this offer only applied to Nexus executives, and was only open for a limited period. A reward would be tantamount to declaring an open head-hunting season on whites.