by Vince Milam
“Anyone speak English?” I asked. We’d stopped at the edge of their clearing, far enough from the sheltering jungle for an amicable presentation but deep shadows and hanging vines only a short distance away. One of the men stepped forward, a black bandana tied over his scalp and an AK-47 pointed in my direction.
“I do.” Head cocked, he half smiled a gold-tooth display. A solid contingent of armed men backdropped his position.
“I represent people who may want to help you.”
“Help?” he asked.
“Yes. With money and equipment.”
He turned and translated for a gathering crowd. Several returned comments.
“You are offering us money?”
The scar running from his left eye to the corner of his mouth crinkled. His expression came across as a cruel smile. His English was excellent, and bowed legs lent an air of unyielding personality.
“No. Not me. But others.”
He turned and again addressed his camp mates, accepted feedback, and addressed me again.
“Tell me about the money. Explain.”
“Backers. Investors. People who would provide men and equipment. To help find gold.”
I approached my infomercial limits. The gig didn’t call for negotiations. Make contact and confirm amenability.
“I have enough men.”
“But you may not have the right kind. Geologists. Mining engineers.”
He remained silent.
“And you clearly don’t have the equipment.”
He turned and surveyed his kingdom, shrugging as he turned back. One of his men blurted a question. The leader barked a command for silence.
“Why would these people give money? And equipment?”
“For a percentage of the gold.”
“What percentage?”
“You’ll have to ask them.”
“Then why are you here?”
A solid question. “I was asked to meet you. And ask the question. Are you willing to consider a partner? For a percentage of the gold?”
He looked me up and down, spat, and joined his comrades. A long and animated discussion followed. More men joined the crowd until over thirty Indonesians listened, gestured, and spoke over each other. One of the men became the most vociferous, arguing and yelling. The black-bandana leader—and he was a leader among this gang—argued back with short, explosive statements. They’d point in my direction and continue the heated discussion. I turned and spoke with my teammate.
“Follow me.”
Luke’s deadpan expression told me nothing, but he did follow. I walked a dozen paces away from the arguing crowd. We entered the rain forest, stopped, and turned. They could still see us, but we stood steps away from surrounding darkness and thick vegetation. When groups like this conducted crowd-driven animated conversation, a person in my position often became the object of their ire. I sought distance. Distance pressing us against the relative protection of deep rain forest. Where a man armed with a single Glock could be effective. Deadly effective.
Shadows lengthened. Luke scratched his leg with the machete’s bladed tip. I smelled the barn. The final camp, contact made, an offer presented. Now, head home time. With one last stop. Kiunga. The miserable muddy town on the banks of the Fly River. With a gravel runway and decrepit docks, it offered a staging area for mining contingents. There, I’d gather information and compare against the realities of the bush camps. Kiunga would be BS city. Here in the jungle, reality reigned.
The English-speaking man returned from the crowd, which followed on his heels. They began spreading around us. Jungle twigs snapped as they moved through the green. Here and now reality said exit, quick.
“Come on, Luke.” I turned and grabbed his arm, ensuring he walked with me. I wasn’t allowing them to surround us. Not going to happen. Physical positioning translated into leverage, and I would maintain a strong neutral position. Not hostage-for-the-taking.
“Wait.” The leader spoke toward my receding backside, fading from sight. He spoke Indonesian with the others. They stopped their forward movement and waited, armed, in a semicircle around us. I took another dozen paces, creating a further distance barrier, and turned, now a murky object lost among the dark greenery.
“What percentage of the gold?” he asked.
I remained silent, mental synapses firing in overdrive. Something wasn’t right. This guy had already asked the question. And he knew I wasn’t going to toss out a number.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do others wish to help us? This is strange. Most strange.”
Realization flashed. His voice, inflection, and posture indicated I wasn’t the first to approach this gang with keys to the kingdom. Time to confirm my hunch.
“What did the other group offer you? What percentage?”
He smiled. In the dim light, gold teeth flashed.
“I will not tell you this.”
One final point of clarity, then gone, gone. “You have accepted another partner.” A flat statement. No inflection of a question.
“Yes. A partner. But we control this.” His arm swept the surrounding jungle. “And control the gold.”
Unseen birds called and fluttered overhead. I remained silent.
“Can you offer better?” he asked.
“Don’t know.”
He nodded. I returned the same. The conversation was over. We’d left the door open for a higher bidder, and no point elaborating. Luke and I turned again and faded away. The thick brush, massive trees, and hanging vines enveloped us. I halted, listened. Footfalls and brushed-aside foliage indicated movement. Movement back toward their camp. A short while later, more loud arguing voices. This band reeked of bad news. The look in their eyes, their body language. A motivator other than gold drove their actions. And another outfit had already played “let’s make a deal” with them. I’d put it in the report. No skin off my retreating butt. The dank environment provided us security and a means of graceful exit. Five miles to the Sally. We’d make it in under ninety minutes.
Two miles from our riverboat, the danger meter pegged. I sensed it before Luke. He continued for three paces and also stopped, picking up the atmosphere. We weren’t alone. I pulled the Glock.
An arrow, aimed at Luke, flashed past his back and whistled into the surrounding green. Another followed, missing because the Sepik warrior roared forward. Machete held high, he screamed a battle cry, charging the unknown. I followed and sought targets. Visibility was poor, and black-green foliage whipped past as we ran.
“We’re getting the hell out of here, Luke!”
An obvious statement, but one required. Luke would stop and fight if he viewed the enemy. My goal was the Sally. Luke slowed and twirled, eyes wide and wild, seeking confrontation. A warrior’s pirouette, legs spread, turning and challenging. His bright-red teeth displayed with a battle grimace. I caught up with him and gripped his arm.
“No! To the boat. Now!”
He anchored my movement, yielding only when I yelled again. We picked up speed, sprinting. Leaves and branches and hanging vines slapped our bodies. I could see no one, no enemy. That’s when I caught the arrow.
The mind’s eye slowed it. It blended with the background jungle, a linear flying shape. A few milliseconds warning prior to it striking. Enough time for a running torso shift. It struck my left pectoral, high and near the shoulder. It would have hit my heart.
I skidded on the jungle floor litter and fired several shots ahead. Maybe the booming retorts would scare them away. Maybe. My free hand pressed around the flesh at the long arrow’s shaft.
“Break it off!”
I fired three more shots into the rain forest, one ahead and two to the sides.
“Break the damn thing off, Luke!”
He did, snapping the shaft and leaving the arrowhead buried. Six inches of splintered shaft protruded from my chest. Blood dribbled from the entry point. I held out my shirttail.
“Cut it.”
Luke�
�s machete sliced, and I stuffed the material around the shaft and into the wound.
“Move. Now!”
We jogged toward the Sally, one hand holding the shirt material against the wound, the other popping a round from the Glock at irregular intervals. The sounds boomed and reflected off the vegetation, incongruous among the rain forest environment. But it worked. No more arrows came our way.
A new experience. Bullets, yes. Several times. Shrapnel? Sure. Even a few knife wounds. But never an arrow. Its tip was barbed—I’d noted such with the one tribesman’s arrows. It would require a painful extraction. But first get out of here.
A weird sensation struck as we ran. One born of too many battles, too much killing. I didn’t hold any animosity toward the shooter. The archer. Or his fellow tribesmen who’d hunted us down. Would I have shot and killed had I seen them? Yeah, probably. But this was their turf. Property of New Guinea tribesmen. This was what they did. Fight.
Luke continued casting worried looks my way. Bothersome as hell.
“This thing poisonous?” I asked, figuring another mile to go.
He didn’t reply. A half mile later, still running, I asked again.
Luke slowed, and we locked eyes. “No. No poison.”
“How do you know?”
“You are not dead.”
He’d waited before answering the first time. An unknown. Now he, and I, knew.
We broke through onto the riverbank, the Sally, and Babe screaming at his customers.
Chapter 3
The Sally was nudged up the riverbank, a land line tied around a nearby tree as an anchor. Forty feet long, fifteen wide, and a floating miracle. At least fifty years old and made of indeterminate wood. The Sally’s old diesel engine spent decades wallowing her along Fly River tributaries. A small wooden gangplank extended onto the muddy riverbank.
At the top of the gangplank stood Babe Cox, toadlike and yelling.
“Bugger off, ya wooly wankers! Go on!”
A handful of villagers clustered at the base of the gangplank. Babe’s clientele. The Sally was a floating store, carrying sundries. Cheap Asian T-shirts with mistranslated English expressions. Low-end synthetic running shorts. Fishhooks, machetes, matches. And motrus cigarettes—sticky black tobacco rolled tight with newsprint and cut into ten-inch pieces.
Babe traded these rivers for decades and accepted any legitimate currency. Or smoked balls of raw rubber, betel nut clusters, and live animals. At the moment, he wasn’t accepting anything. The store was closed.
“I mean it. Get stuffed!” he said, gesturing toward the small crowd.
Luke and I jogged past the cluster of locals and eased up the rickety gangplank. Babe stepped aside and cackled, “Picked up a souvenir, did ya?” He pointed at the embedded arrow tip and spit bright-red betel nut saliva into the river.
He would know. His sole attire consisted of tattered cotton gym shorts. His skin displayed old wounds from knives, spears, and arrows. Mixed among them, remnants of one tropical skin disease or another. Along with fungal infections and festering insect bites. In his sixties, one eye displayed a permanent squint. His teeth and mouth flared bright red from the betel nut, and his few remaining wisps of hair lifted with the breeze.
“Let’s head downriver, Babe.” I pulled my rucksack and fished out my medical kit.
“Too late. The Sally doesn’t run at night.”
He began wrestling with the gangplank, sliding it on board.
“Get me a mile or two. Tie up on the other side.” The tributary we occupied indicated a tribal demarcation. Whoever occupied the other side may have been as hostile as the current crop of locals. But they hadn’t shot at me. Yet.
“I’ve got no customers over there.” He whined the response, a pleading intonation of innocence and helplessness and poor-is-me. He was anything but.
“I’ve put up with you stopping three times on a contracted nonstop trip here.”
He whined again. “A man’s gotta make a living.”
The adrenaline rush of combat and flight eased off. The pain ratcheted up.
“Untie your tub. Get my butt downriver. Now.”
He bitched and moaned and yelled at the locals to release the land line. I gathered myself and waited for the breathing and adrenaline to normalize. And prepared for surgery. Delta Force operators were trained for managing battlefield wounds. Gunshots, shrapnel, concussive injuries. The training didn’t include arrow removal. I was flying blind but knew enough not to pull it straight out. The arrowhead was embedded deep, and its barbs would rip flesh and cause physical havoc with a violent tugged removal. I’d cut it out. An open deck bench was my operating theater.
Babe shoved a long pole against the bank, freeing the Sally. She began drifting backward. Babe moved about, securing a few loose items. His privates would dangle below his shorts when he bent over. I’d asked him on the upriver trip if it cost extra for the show. He didn’t reply.
I laid out a small bottle of wound wash, gauze, antibiotic ointment, and butterfly bandages. Rolls of adhesive tape and a wrapped sterile scalpel. This would hurt. Big time. But delay wasn’t an option. Do it now, get it over and done.
I stripped my shirt and eased the shirttail material from the wound. Fresh blood trickled down my chest. Babe’s pet jungle kangaroo, two feet tall, hopped nearby, waggled an ear, and watched. I squirted wound wash around and into the wound, then unwrapped the scalpel.
“Whatya doing with that?” Babe asked, wandering past, wheelhouse bound.
I didn’t respond.
“Wait a bloody second. I’ve got experience with those buggers.” He referred to flesh-embedded arrowheads.
Babe Cox wasn’t the type of person I took advice from. But in this case, there was no denying he’d dealt with this issue before. And slicing my own flesh fell low on the Case Lee bucket list. I waited. Luke sat down the bench from me and scooted the tiny roo away with his foot. The animal hopped away from the affront, stopped, and continued staring my way. The old engine fired and Babe navigated to the middle of the river and let the Sally drift, the engine idling. Diesel fumes mixed with the Sally’s resident unreal funk. Rotted wood, years of dried sweat, smoked rubber. An amalgam of use and decay and human detritus.
Babe returned with a lit motrus dangling from this lips, a salt shaker, and three stubbies. Bottles of beer. The Sally held cases of beer, stowed deep in the hold. Babe didn’t sell it. A private stash. He handed Luke and me a warm one and sat next to me.
“Let’s take care of those nasties first,” he said, lifting his chin at my backside.
“What nasties?”
He didn’t answer but sprinkled salt across my lower back. Two soft, wet plops followed. Between my legs and under the bench a pair of fat mottled-brown bloodsuckers writhed their death throes. My involuntary shudder brought a chuckle from Babe. Man, I hate leeches.
“Righto. Now to business.” He spit bits of tobacco and took a deep swallow from the stubbie. “It’s a matter of extension, mate. Ya don’t want to be adding more to the wound.”
His stubbie hand held two large wooden tongue depressors. Placing the beer on the deck, he held one in each hand, displayed for my benefit. The ten-inch newspaper-clad cigarette dangled from his lips, and smoke curled around his face. “These’ll do the trick.”
I turned and checked with Luke. He nodded back, took a swig of beer, and asked for a smoke. Babe took another drag and passed him the cigarette across my torso. I leaned back as his forearm nearly brushed against the protruding arrow shaft.
I was game. Zero personal expertise at such matters and Luke’s nonchalant response toward the suggested surgical procedure added weight to my decision. Which could have been a mistake. Luke passed his childhood tribal rite of passage when tossed from a dugout into a stream loaded with crocs. He was nonchalant about a lot of things.
“Those clean?” I asked, pointing at the tongue depressors.
“Been keeping them between my butt cheeks, Yank.”
“Hold those out.” I lifted my chin, indicating the tongue depressors.
Babe complied, and I washed them with more wound wash. Babe sighed.
“Okay. What’s the procedure?”
“Simple, mate.” Babe shifted the wooden depressors to one hand and plucked his stubbie from the deck for a drink. Three large swallows and he’d emptied it, belched, and tossed the glass bottle into the river. “I slide these down either side of the arrowhead.”
“Into the wound?”
“Where else? You can be a bit dense, ya know that?”
“Then what?”
“Why, stretch her out a bit. Press the flesh away from the bloody thing. She’ll come right out. It’s all about extension.”
“Yeah. Extension.”
“Easy peasy.”
A long way from the magic of easy peasy. One of the wooden depressors could break off, creating a bigger mess. Pulling the barbed arrowhead straight out could tear more muscle and flesh. And the whole exercise would hurt like hell.
“Let’s do it.”
“Lean back. I’ve gotta see.”
Twilight approached and light became an issue. Plus, I wasn’t too sure how well old Babe saw regardless of the lighting situation. But I leaned back and watched.
He separated the wound edges and jammed one of the depressors deep, alongside the projectile. Molten fire would have hurt less. My toes curled, a leg kicked, teeth ground, and sweat popped across my face.
“She stings a bit, don’t she?”
I groaned.
“This one’s a bit tricky,” he said, holding the remaining depressor.
“Well there’s some good news, Babe,” I said between clenched teeth, snorting with pain.
“Don’t get all snotty.”
He pried apart the wound opposite the first depressor, alongside the arrowhead, and squinted hard into the hole. Sweat poured down my face, dripping on my chest and mixing with blood.