Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  Crowe knew more than a little about marine biology, but he rarely had the opportunity to come up with ways to make his knowledge pay off, except through fishing excursions. He had studied oceanography at the US Naval Academy with an eye toward making that a career but events and fate pushed him in a different direction.

  His Annapolis education had overlaid his Louisiana accent with unidentifiable regional tone. Like Jack Kavanaugh, he spoke a number of Asian languages, even the Lao and Meo dialects of Thai. Unlike Jack, he envied the simplicity of the people who managed to eke out livings on Little Tamtung either by fishing or farming.

  As Crowe took another sip of the Yinjang beer, he saw Mouzi sauntering along the pier toward him. She wore a Horizons Ultd T-shirt over her leotard. Lithely, she jumped from the dock onto the portside hull.

  When she stepped onto the deck of the Krakatoa, Crowe said gruffly, “You’re fired.”

  “I quit,” Mouzi countered, undisturbed by the man’s hostile tone.

  “In that case.” Crowe took another bottle of beer from the cooler and tossed it in her general direction.

  Effortlessly, Mouzi snatched it out of the air and unscrewed the cap. “Thanks.”

  “You seen Jack?” Crowe asked.

  Mouzi took a long swallow of the Yinjang before replying, “Last I saw, he was over in Howie’s office with the rest of them pommie bastards.”

  “Why’d you walk off like that? That was pretty damn rude, even for you.”

  Mouzi’s lips pursed. In a soft, almost hesitant voice she said, “Seen that big-arse bloke before.”

  Crowe frowned. “Where?”

  “In Bangkok, long about five years ago. ‘Member me tellin’ you about Nikolai?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He used to take me to a private fight club… that Oakshott hoon worked for one of the local triad bosses. He’d get in the ring and kill them poor slopes he was matched up against, just twist their heads off like they was chooks.”

  Crowe eyed her skeptically. “Are you sure it was him?”

  “Ain’t like he’s easy to mistake for somebody else.” Mouzi touched her right forearm. “He had another name then, but I recognized his tat. Him all right.”

  Crowe tried to think about the implications, despite his heat-fogged mind. He mentally replayed the image of the tattoo. He shrugged. “Lots of people in this part of the world have connections with the triads. And they have tats. You included.”

  Mouzi’s dark eyes flashed with annoyance. “What’s a pommie professor doing with a professional killer as a valet? Don’t that strike you as a mite unusual?”

  Crowe nodded reluctantly. “A mite. But it’s not like the unusual is unusual around here. Let’s just stay out of his way.”

  Tilting her head back, Mouzi gulped down the rest of the bottle’s contents, then uttered a deep, earnest belch. “That won’t be easy.”

  “Why won’t it be?”

  “I heard ‘em talkin’….we’re gonna have a reception over in the Phoenix tonight, so everybody can get acquainted.”

  Crowe frowned. “A meet and greet?”

  The corners of Mouzi’s lips quirked in a grim smile. “Everybody gettin’ to know everybody. Won’t that be nice. Attendance as in mandatory.”

  Crowe pointed the neck of his beer bottle in her direction. “That means you too.”

  Mouzi shook her head. “You just done fired me.”

  “Well, I just done unfired you. If I have to go, so do you.”

  Turning a grunt of exertion into a sigh of ennui, Crowe heaved himself off the deck. Assailed by momentary vertigo, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw Mouzi staring at him curiously.

  “You okay?”

  Crowe didn’t answer at first. He gazed around the harbor-front, appreciating the calm seas but also sensing a storm. The day died slowly, the peach and pink afterglow stretching upward in the soft sky above the island.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he muttered, stepping onto the dock.

  The water of the bay glimmered with the color of burnished aquamarine. He took a quick, almost apprehensive glance over his shoulder at Big Tamtung. The cliff-face was a rich bluish-purple in the fading light, the hue of a bruise. The setting sun looked like a ball of molten wax, burning into his eyes, filling his senses.

  The air was still hot and steamy, so there was no reason for Crowe to feel cold, but he did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Inside the Phoenix of Beauty, the music pounded at Kavanaugh with an almost painful intensity. The heavy, repetitive bass line made the smoke-laced air shiver. People crowded around the bar and milled about the verandah. The girls who worked and lived in the Phoenix flitted in and out of sight like a flock of birds plumed in tight sheath dresses of red, green and yellow silk.

  Kavanaugh mopped sweat from his face. Despite the fall of night, the interior of the club was still sweltering. The air-conditioning had yet to be repaired and the body heat from the crowd in the barroom had built up the temperature to that of a sauna.

  He winced as he passed the glowing jukebox. The moaning and high-pitched shrieking that substituted as lyrics in the Cantopop song punched his eardrums. Cranio stood beside the machine, hands on his ample hips, daring anyone to either complain about the volume or to change the selection.

  Acrid cigarette smoke floated in a haze above everyone’s heads, burning the eye and abrading the throat. Kavanaugh pushed his way between a man and a woman to the bar and gestured to Jarlai. The Malaysian affected not to notice him, but he quickly began mixing a gin and tonic.

  A slender man wearing a flowered print shirt and baggy shorts that accentuated the pipestem thickness of his legs backed into him.

  “Excuse me,” Kavanaugh said loudly to his ear.

  The man twisted his head around to look at him with wide, alcohol-bleared eyes. It was Bertram Pendlebury, with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel. A gold medallion gleamed between his pale, flabby pectorals.

  “Jack!” Pendlebury cried, slapping him on the shoulder. His breath smelled strongly of kava, licorice-flavored Polynesian liquor. “You crooked sumabitchbastard! Havin’ fun?”

  “I just got here so it’s too soon to tell. How about you?”

  Pendlebury’s eyes widened, giving him the aspect of an eager frog. He gestured toward the women moving in and out of the crowd. “Why wouldn’t I be, with all this dark meat in the deli aisle?”

  He whistled sharply, “Hey, mocha-cream! Want to be in my picture?”

  Kavanaugh glanced over and saw a mini-skirted Mouzi scowling at Pendlebury. Her full lips pursed as if she intended to spit at the man. Then she moved on.

  “High-class pick-up material,” Kavanaugh drawled as Jarlai slid the gin and tonic across the bar. “Fortunately for your testicles, she didn’t go for it. Where’s Howie?”

  “You mean Mr. Flitcroft? He’s out on the porch. Everyone has been waiting for you.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  Pendlebury stepped unsteadily away from the bar, reaching for a slim Thai girl wearing a tight cheongsam of silver brocade. Grabbing her by the hand, he went into a frantic series of dance-steps, his knobby arms and long legs flailing like the limbs of an insect caught in the electrified grille of a bug-zapper.

  Kavanaugh sidled through the knot of people and walked through the open French doors to the verandah, avoiding the horde swarming around a buffet table. He couldn’t help but smile. Although here and there he saw an unfamiliar face, the crowd was mainly composed of locals, drawn to the club by the siren song of free food and drink.

  Tiki torches flamed in sconces on the wooden posts and cast a flickering illumination. On the far end of the verandah, furthermost away from the music and the smoke, he saw Crowe, Belleau, Flitcroft and Honoré Roxton sitting around a large table. The giant figure of Oakshott loomed near the railing, a brown beer bottle barely visible within his massive hand. A half-full martini glass rested on a coaster bearing the Cryptozoica logo near Belleau’s e
lbow.

  The heads of Honoré and Belleau were bent over a scattering of photographs and open file folders. The woman didn’t so much as glance up when Kavanaugh pulled a chair away from the table, spun it around, and sat down, forearms resting on the back.

  “Jack,” Flitcroft said. He lifted his glass full of Agua de Azahar, a potent Philippine brandy, toward him in a laconic toast. “You’re late. As usual.”

  Kavanaugh sipped at his gin and tonic. “The time got away from me.”

  Actually, after spending an hour in Flitcroft’s office following the arrival of the British scientists, he had returned to his house to freshen up in anticipation of the party and of becoming better acquainted with Honoré Roxton.

  Now, upon seeing the woman, he wondered why he had bothered. She wore faded denim slacks and a lightweight khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her long sunset-hued hair was tied up in an untidy knot atop her head and wisps of it hung down around her face.

  Honoré looked up, her large green eyes regarding him from behind the lenses of wire-rimmed glasses. “I’ve been reviewing your written accounts of how you found the Tamtungs and your initial explorations, Mr. Kavanaugh.”

  “Jack,” he corrected her mildly.

  She blinked in momentary confusion. “Pardon?”

  “Call me Jack…that’s my name.”

  Her comprehending “Oh” was dismissive. Picking up a sheet of paper from inside the folder, she said, “Over four years ago, you were flying medical supplies out of Kuala Lumpur when a storm drove you and Mr. Crowe off-course.”

  “That’s not quite accurate,” Crowe interposed, chewing on the end of an unlit cheroot. “We flew off-course to avoid the storm.”

  Lifting his martini glass to his lips, Belleau said diffidently, “Irrelevant.”

  “You found yourself within visual range of Big Tamtung,” Honoré continued, “and so you made a flyover. Then you saw what you claimed was a pterosaur, buzzing your plane.”

  She did not ask a question—she made a flat statement. She stared at Kavanaugh from beneath an arched eyebrow, waiting for him to respond.

  He took a leisurely swallow of his gin and tonic. “You’re not calling me a liar or crazy, I notice.”

  Honoré smiled. “The fact that I’m even here and having this conversation proves that I have an open mind. Besides, I’ve been provided a grounding in the basics of Big Tamtung zoology.”

  “Provided by whom?”

  Honoré glanced surreptitiously at Belleau whose bearded face remained dispassionately studious. But Kavanaugh caught the brief eye exchange and he felt a surge of suspicion.

  Flitcroft said, “I’ve let her go over every file that pertains to Cryptozoica, Jack.”

  “I thought you’d destroyed all those records,” Kavanaugh replied.

  Flitcroft uttered a short, patronizing laugh. “You should know me better than that. What seems worthless one year can be very valuable five years later.”

  Belleau stated matter-of-factly, “Particularly when you find someone who is qualified to evaluate their worth.”

  Crowe grunted, then struck a match and set fire to the tip of the cheroot, sending up a wreath of smoke.

  Honoré asked irritably, “Must you smoke, Mr. Crowe?”

  “In the tropics, smokers contract malaria far less often than non-smokers. That’s a scientific fact. Maybe you ought to try it.”

  Impatiently, she fanned the air in front of her face. “That’s because the nasty smoke drives mosquitoes away. There’s your science for you—revulsion.”

  Kavanaugh reached toward the scattering of photographs and flipped through them like a deck of cards. He found the one he was looking for and passed it Honoré. “There. Gus took this shot.”

  She held it up to the light. “A shot of what?”

  “The pterodactyl or pterodon whatever it was. We saw it several times.”

  Honoré’s eyes narrowed as she examined the image. A blurry outline somewhat reminiscent of a crane with outspread wings occupied the center of the frame.

  “I enlarged it,” Crowe said almost apologetically. “Lost some detail but you can still make out what it is…or isn’t.”

  The photograph, taken from below, clearly showed a brown, leathery epidermis stretched tight over membranous bat-like wings. Four curving talons sprouted from the first joint juncture of the wings. The exceptionally long neck terminated in a narrow, sharply pointed beak.

  Honoré Roxton stared at the image, as if she defied its reality. “Of the azhdarchid group, most probably a version of Quetzalcoatlus. They had enormous wingspans, over twenty meters.”

  “It was goddamned big,” Kavanaugh agreed. “Nearly as broad as the Cessna we were flying.”

  “The question begs to be asked—and answered––” Honoré declared. “How a creature that size could avoid being seen for all these many, many thousands of years. Even the so-called flying Kongamato in Africa and New Guinea’s Ropen is reported occasionally.”

  Flitcroft said, “The short answer is that no planes ever came close to the island and there was no reason for any ships to stop by. There’s nothing out here to interest either merchant or fishing vessels. We’re a couple of hundred of miles from the shipping lanes. The closest major port is Sarawak, in Borneo, well over a thousand miles away.”

  “What about satellite surveillance?”

  “The analysts would have to know what they’re looking for,” Crowe said. “There are maybe five hundred islands out here that no one has ever set foot on. The Tamtungs are just two out of God knows how many. A lot of them weren’t even placed on the charts until World War II. For example, the Spratly islands comprise more than 30,000 islands and reefs, and the majority of them have never been explored.”

  Belleau brought the martini glass to his lips. “Oceania has long been the dark continent of archeological, anthropological and zoological research. Keep in mind that barely ten percent of Malaysia’s rain forests have been explored, much less surveyed. The percentage of the land surface of the Earth that is actually inhabited by humans is quite limited. In parts of the tropics there are areas of staggering immensity which no man as yet been able to penetrate. Just because a map is covered with names doesn’t mean that the country is known, darlin’.”

  At the casually spoken endearment, Honoré’s eyes flashed with annoyance. She riffled through the sheets of paper. “There was absolutely no scientific research performed except by layman.”

  She swept a challenging stare over Crowe, Kavanaugh and Flitcroft, then fixed it upon Crowe. “You theorized that the Tamtungs were part of the Laurasian coastline during the late Cretaceous?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Crowe retorted defensively. “You don’t need to be a degreed geologist to guess that the Tamtungs were connected to a larger land mass, either Gondwana or Laurasia. When the land began breaking away and submerging ––probably due to seismic activity and changing sea levels–– the animals gradually migrated to higher ground.

  “Over a period of millennia, Big Tamtung became a closed ecosystem. That’s what most likely saved an isolated group of dinosaurids from extinction. As it is, some of the surviving species have evolved into forms different from what the paleontologists have reconstructed.”

  “Like your so-called ‘Quinterotops’?” Belleau inquired, reading from a sheet of paper. “That’s what you named a type of ceratopsian you saw?”

  Crowe held up a hand. “We counted five horns, so it seemed like the most logical name.”

  Sarcastically, Honoré said, “This whole thing sounds like the plot for a lot of B movies.”

  “Maybe,” Kavanaugh replied with a studied indifference. “But when you don’t claim to know everything about everything, then you’re unwilling to be dogmatic about much of anything.”

  Belleau glared at him from across the table, but to Kavanaugh’s surprise, Honoré laughed appreciatively. “I can’t really argue with that. However, I hope you understand why I fe
el the way I do about following the proper investigative procedures and scientific methodology. The report of your discovery of the island should have been the most momentous of the last three centuries.”

  She paused for a handful of seconds. When she spoke again, her tone held an accusatory, bitter edge. “The Tamtungs should have been presented to the scientific community within days of you setting foot on them.”

  “Why?” Kavanaugh asked bluntly.

  “So universities and private organizations like the Royal Geographic Society could have mounted the proper expeditions with the proper specialists in place. They would have dispatched zoologists and paleontologists and they could have—

  “—Could have, would have, should have,” Kavanaugh broke in angrily. “And me and Gus would’ve been broomed off to a corner while the specialists and the universities and the private foundations made millions—maybe millions of billions—from our discovery.”

  Belleau snorted. “You didn’t discover the Tamtungs, my boy. They’ve been on the nautical charts for centuries.”

  “So what?” countered Crowe. “We were the first to pay attention to them…at least in the last hundred years or so. We were the ones who took all the risks.”

  “And,” Kavanaugh said, “we did what we could to catalogue the animals. We took pictures and filmed them when we could. We have a pretty good idea of what’s there.”

  “Oh, yes.” Honoré held up one of the photographs that depicted a bipedal smudge standing near an out-of-focus riverbank. Aloud she read the handwritten notation on the back: “ ‘We call this one the Stinkosaurus Rex, because it smells like shit.’”

  She sighed. “Truly, a very scientific classification. Thank you very much.”

  Kavanaugh bit back a profane response. “For the first three months, there was only me and Gus…then Mouzi and finally Howie. We did the best we could do under the circumstances.”

  “What exactly were the circumstances?” Belleau demanded suspiciously, hand tightening around his glass.

  “We set up a base camp here, right on this spot,” Crowe answered. “We boated over to Big Tamtung a couple of times a week. Once we had enough photographic and taped evidence, we got in touch with Howie.”