‘Rather similar to the attitude of the Scots on North Sea oil,’ I said.
‘No, not at all similar.’ His voice was suddenly sharp. And then to his sister he said, ‘It’s not a question I would make a habit of asking if I were you; some of them are very sensitive on the matter.’ He lapsed into silence then, staring straight ahead, no longer relaxed, the tenseness back in him as though reminded of something he had temporarily forgotten. Abruptly he said, ‘The Provincial Government is over there.’ And he indicated the eastern end of the small bay. After that he seemed to withdraw into himself, and I became conscious again of the oppressive heat building up in the wheelhouse. Even the air blowing in from the open bridge wing doors was heavy and humid. Wisps of cloud were beginning to drift over the green heights as the forest growth gave up moisture to the air.
Anewa Bay was opening up ahead of us, and soon it was possible to make out the details of the shore buildings. The storage sheds and loading wharf for the copper concentrate were on the northern arm of the bay; the power station in the centre and the fuel storage tanks showed as silvery roundels to the south. The only vessel in this very modern-looking port was a small tug moored alongside the wharf. Jona straightened up from the chart table, glanced at his watch and picked up the microphone for the ship’s loudspeakers. ‘Attention, deck crew. Stand by for berthing twelve-thirty hours. I repeat, twelve-thirty stand by.’
Anewa was very different from Kieta. This was the Company port for one of the biggest copper mines in the world, everything mechanically sophisticated, from the pipeline that carried the liquid concentrate across the Crown Prince Range from the mine 16 miles away at Paguna, to the filtering plant and drying kilns. The power for everything, including the mine, even the electricity for the new township of Arawa, came from that one power station with its Japanese turbines humming away close under the green slopes at the head of the bay.
By the time the formalities of our arrival had been dealt with, it was the hottest part of the day, and with no ship loading at the wharf the port fell into a deep sleep, nobody stirring and only the steady roar from the power station turbines and from the drying plant to indicate that the giant up in the hills beyond the Crown Prince Range continued in full production. Just before 15.00 the crew began straggling in twos and threes up the slipway on which our ramp rested to assemble on the quay, waiting for transport into Arawa. Their jet-black skins and fuzzy mops of hair identified them as Buka men. Perhaps that was why Jona refused to let his sister go with them. ‘I’ll have a word with the power station engineer. There’ll be somebody going into Arawa who can give you both a lift to headquarters.’
Above the shimmering green of the rainforest the clouds had thickened, lying heavy over the heights. Teopas joined the little cluster of men on the quay. It began to rain, big heavy drops that seemed to be squeezed out of the humidity that hung over us. Seaward the sky was still a blinding white haze. The truck appeared, one of the two we had put ashore at Kieta. Teopas got in beside the driver, the rest of the crew scrambling into the back for shelter as the rain increased. The truck splashed off down the road past the power station, and ten minutes later Jona came hurrying back along the empty quay under the shelter of a borrowed umbrella. One of the engineers would be going into the hospital at Arawa to visit a patient in about an hour’s time and would give us a lift.
He arrived in a heavy downpour of rain, driving a company car and wielding a large umbrella. ‘Standard equipment at this time of day,’ he said as he escorted Perenna from the bridge to the car which he had parked halfway down the slip. His name was Fred Perry. ‘Same as the old-time tennis star,’ he said without a flicker of a smile. He was Australian, thirtyish and thickset, with sandy hair and sharp features that reminded me of a fox terrier I had once known. He had been with the Company since the first steel girders of the power station had been erected and, with no prompting at all, began telling us the story of its building as he backed up the slipway and headed out on the road to Arawa.
‘You must like it here,’ I said.
He half turned his head. ‘No worse than Tom Price or Parraburdoo. I had a two-year sabbatical up in the iron cauldron country of Western Australia. But I’d rather be in Sydney any day.’
‘You come from Sydney?’ Perenna asked.
‘No, Wagga Wagga.’ And he went on to tell us about the building of the port, all the cargoes of massive machinery that had been shipped in. Once we were clear of Anewa Bay, the forest closed in on us from either side, the rain bouncing on the tarmac, steaming between the primordial green walls, and frogs everywhere – they turned out later to be toads – squat and motionless, soaking up the moisture.
We came to an intersection and turned left. ‘If you’re going up to the mine, that’s the road you take,’ he said. ‘As good a piece of highway engineering as you’ll see anywhere in the world.’ He talked about that for the rest of the way into Arawa, how it had had to take a fifty-wheel transporter to get the 80-ton crusher up to the ore treatment plant. ‘Remember that when you’re driving up. This whole operation is on such a massive scale it’s difficult to imagine what it was like when we started. It was all very primitive then, the people, too. Now we’ve got training and recreational centres, a technical college, everything they could possibly want. The whole concept, right from the very beginning, was that the indigenous people would eventually take over. The concentrator, for instance. It’s the largest in the world and almost entirely operated by local men. The power station, too. They’ve been very quick to learn, though we do lose a lot of them after training. They’re ambitious, and they seem to like doing their own thing. Transport, shops, engineering, construction work, even import-export, any service operation where there’s a demand and they can make money seems to appeal to them. Funny, isn’t it, when you consider that they had very little experience of money before we began this monster operation. Like I say, they’ve caught on bloody quick.’
The forest fell away, the road opening out to a rain-drenched view of buildings widely spaced on the flat of a valley floor. ‘Arawa.’ He pointed out the shopping centre and superstore as we turned right off the Kieta road, left by the swimming pool, then skirted the edge of the residential area till we came to the hospital. The rain was still bucketing down, and when he had parked, he turned to me. ‘It could go on like this for a couple of hours or more. You’ve got a licence, have you? Then you’d better take the car.’ He gave me directions to the Provincial Government Headquarters. ‘Pick me up when you’re through.’ He was seeing a fellow engineer who had been operated on for appendicitis and didn’t seem to mind how long he stayed. ‘Eddie is pretty well recovered now. Eddie Flint. They’ll know at the desk where to find me. And I’ll leave you the umbrella. You’ll need it.’
He ran for the entrance, and I moved into the driving seat beside Perenna. He had told us where we could get instant pictures taken in the shopping centre, and when we had them, I drove to the Provincial Government offices. By then it was near their closing time, but even so the waiting room was still crowded, and we were the only whites.
I noticed him as soon as we entered the room. He was the centre of a little group in the corner by the window, all of them short, barrel-chested men with bare splayed feet like shovels and heavy broad-nosed features. He was dressed in immaculate white shirt and shorts, white stockings and black shoes, but he was of the same ethnic type, broad-shouldered and stocky with a large, heavily boned head. He stood out from the others, not just on account of his dress, but because of the brightness of his eyes, the vitality in his face, his dominant personality. One of his group nodded in our direction, and he turned, his mouth open on a word, staring. And Perenna, beside me, said on a note of surprise, ‘I know that man. I’m sure I do. It’s Tagup. He’s one of the Chimbu tribal chiefs from the Kuamegu area.’ And she started towards him.
The man detached himself from his group and came over to her, smiling now, his hand outstretched in greeting. On the pocket of his wh
ite shirt a silver shield gleamed. I watched the two of them for a moment as they greeted each other, the white girl with the orange-red cap of hair and the black man from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in his white European clothes. They made a strange, contrasting pair. Then, as they continued talking, I went over to the desk clerk and explained our business. He said he would see the Immigration Officer as soon as he was free, and I lit a cigarette and took up a position against the wall where I could survey the room. I didn’t go over and join Perenna. It didn’t seem important, not then, and anyway, they were talking in a mixture of Pidgin and some local language. After a few minutes the man from Papua New Guinea was called away to lead his group into one of the offices, and Perenna rejoined me, excited at this unexpected renewal of contact with the people she had grown up amongst. ‘It was Tagup. A marvellous man! I was telling him about Tim – I knew he’d understand, and I thought he might help me—’ She broke off abruptly, hesitated, then went on quickly in an artificially light voice. ‘He’s one of their fight leaders. I didn’t expect to find men of the Chimbu people here, and he is from a village quite close to Kuamegu. As a kid I used to cheer them on.’ She laughed. ‘It’s rather like a football match really, a sort of fight display, a show. Unless they’ve really got something to fight about; then it’s serious. But he’s a Councillor now. That’s the silver shield he was wearing.’
‘What’s he doing here then?’ I asked. ‘He’s not looking for a labouring job surely.’
‘No, he says he’s come to find out what the magic is the whites have discovered here that is making so much money for the PNG government, and also for the Chimbu people who come to work in Bougainville. He says it’s disrupting village and clan life, that men who are no better than rubbish men – he called them that – come back with money to buy pigs and cassowaries and are able to display more property at the sing-sings than the chiefs and elders.’ The clerk caught my eye and indicated the door marked Immigration. ‘He was very concerned about it,’ she said.
‘Disturbs the village pecking order?’
She nodded, and I pushed open the door for her. ‘It’s a very complex, very paternalistic social structure, and if it is undermined, there’ll be chaos. They’re fighters. They’re a fighting people …’
It was almost 17.30 when our passports were finally stamped and we went out to the car. The rain had eased, but humidity remained heavy, the daylight fading so that we could see lights in Arawa glimmering through the trees. In the bay behind us there was nothing visible at all. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked Perenna.
She nodded. ‘Most days the humidity builds up to rain by late afternoon. It’s different in Buka. Buka is comparatively low, but this is a very mountainous island.’ I knew that from the chart. The Crown Prince Range was over 5,000 feet, and there were other mountains along the spine of the island that were a thousand or more feet higher. ‘As soon as the sun sets and it starts getting cooler, the rain gradually exhausts itself. You’ll see. A couple of hours from now the stars will be out, and it will be a lovely evening.’
We got into the car, and I started the engine. ‘What do you plan to do,’ I asked her, ‘now that you’re here and you’ve got your visa? Will you just stay on the ship with your brother, or are you going to get a job?’
She didn’t answer for a moment, sitting very still and gazing ahead through the clicking windscreen wipers. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured huskily. ‘I had it all planned – when I was on that cruise ship. If Tim was ever well enough to look after himself, I was going to come out here and look after the business side so that Jona wouldn’t have anything to do but run the ship. And when you got me that money … ’ She was smiling. ‘Well, it seemed like an omen, everything suddenly simple and straightforward, and those stamps a symbol of good luck for a change. But now … ’ The smile had faded. ‘Now it all seems different, so many things I don’t understand. Jona, for instance. He’s not a bit as I remember him. He used to be so carefree. And Mac …’ She hesitated, shaking her head. And then, her voice livelier: ‘Better drive back to the hospital. I think Fred will have had enough of his friend’s operation by now.’ She turned to me, smiling again, her mood suddenly relaxed, almost intimate. ‘I’ve got quite a lot of Australian dollars left, and the Immigration Officer said they were just as good currency as the local kina. If we can find a decent restaurant, I’d like you to have dinner with me.’
‘This isn’t our car,’ I reminded her.
‘No. But I’m not spending the evening listening to how they built one of the greatest mines in the world. There’ll be taxis.’ Her hand touched mine. ‘If not, we can thumb a ride or else walk. Or don’t you want to walk me home to my ship?’
Her eyes were laughing, a direct invitation. I put my arm round her and kissed her. The softness of her mouth, the leap of my blood at the feel of her through the thin cotton shirt – I suddenly had other ideas. ‘If he’s tired of his friend, he can always chat up one of the nurses.’ I was trying to recall a suitable place to park. Two blacks passed, a man and a woman, both of them huddled under an umbrella. I put the car into gear and drove out of the parking lot on to the narrow ribbon of tarmac. The glare of headlights showed ahead, tree boles became moving shadows, the lights swung, undipped and blinding. It was a truck, and as I pulled in to the side to let it pass, just before dipping my headlights I caught a glimpse of the driver.
I heard the catch of Perenna’s breath, and suddenly she reached across and flicked the dipper back to high beam. The truck was barely twenty yards away, and I saw him clearly, his teeth showing in a big grin, his broad face frowning in concentration under his woolly head of hair. It was the bos’n’s mate, a man called Malulu, and Teopas was sitting in the cab beside him. The truck roared past us with a sudden burst of acceleration, the same truck that had come down to the port to pick up the crew, and turning my head, I saw the back of it was full of men.
She caught hold of my arm, her head twisted round, her voice urgent: ‘Were they all from the ship? What are they doing here? This road only leads to the Provincial Government offices and on down to the shore. Do you think there’s a café there or a liquor store?’ She was staring at me, suddenly very tense, so that I wondered whether she, too, had seen the glint of metal among the packed bodies. It had only been a glimpse in the red glow of our rear lights and I couldn’t be sure … ‘I think we should go back,’ she said.
‘No.’ I parked the car and switched off the engine. Darkness closed in on us, the trees dripping. ‘You wait here.’
But she was out in a flash. ‘If they’re up to something, I want to know.’
I turned on her, facing her across the roof of the car. ‘Just do what you’re told. Please. Get in the driving seat and wait for me.’ I didn’t stop to see what she did. I just started back down the almost dark road, moving quietly and stopping now and then to listen. I could hear the sound of voices, and then shadows emerged out of the gloom ahead. They were moving in a bunch down the road towards me. I slipped in among the trees and watched as the people from the waiting room hurried past. They were talking amongst themselves, but I couldn’t understand what they said, only that they seemed excited about something, constantly glancing back over their shoulders.
When they were beyond the bend, I stepped back on to the road. My watch showed that it was now after 17.40. They could have been ordered to leave because the offices were closing and their excitement no more than anger at having to return next day. But somehow it hadn’t sounded like that. And when I turned the next bend, and was in sight of the headquarters, there was nobody in the parking lot, the official cars still standing dark and empty and all the lights on in the offices. The truck was parked outside the main entrance. Its lights were off, and I could only just see it. Had I been mistaken? Was this merely some sort of a deputation to the local Commissioner? Beyond the truck a man moved in the shadow of the trees. I wouldn’t have seen him except that the entrance door had been opened and for a momen
t he was illumined in a shaft of light.
I knew then that I had not been wrong. The light glinted on the short barrel of the machine-pistol cradled on his arm. A voice spoke, and he moved towards the door. It was the driver, Malulu. I retreated softly into the shadows, wondering whether to wait for some confirmation of what I was beginning to fear or drive straight to the police. But all I had seen was a man with a gun. Hardly sufficient to convince them of a hold-up, or perhaps the kidnapping of a senior PNG official.
And then a light suddenly blazed out from a darkened room on my side of the building. There was a shout, the sound of feet on a wooden floor, and the window was flung open, a man starting to climb out. He saw me and hesitated. A door banged. He turned his head, his mouth opening in a scream, but the scream was cut short as the outline of his head and shoulders was jerked away from the window. I heard the soft thud of a blow, a gurgling gasp, followed by a dragging sound, then silence.
The light went out, and I stood there, shocked into immobility. Malulu came round the corner of the building and stood looking over the parked cars. Then he went back to the main entrance. I began to move cautiously through the trees bordering the road. As soon as I reached the bend, I stepped out of concealment and began to run.
I met Perenna coming towards me. ‘I thought I heard a shout. That Chimbu chief – Tagup …’
‘Get back to the car,’ I told her. ‘Quick!’
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ She was running beside me. ‘Tagup said they had been ordered out of the office they were in, all of them, by a gang of armed men.’
We had reached the second bend. The car was still there, and no sign of anybody near it. ‘Get in.’ I flung myself into the driving seat and had the engine on and the car moving before she had shut her door. ‘What else did your Chimbu friend tell you?’ I switched the headlights to high beam. ‘Did he know what they were up to?’
Solomons Seal Page 19