by Jake Avila
‘Don’t want to push too hard with the extra weight on the stern!’ Kaboro shouted conversationally from his position at the helm.
Nash was drinking coffee in the captain’s chair against the aft bulkhead. Beside him was the chart table, in front, the VHF radio. A magical sea breeze poured in through the open windows, as Saworno’s diesels hummed reassuringly. Exhaust was vented below the waterline and a long, smoky wake billowed in the sparkling sea behind them. Up on the bow, Kaboro’s sailors were revelling bare-chested in the cooling spray.
Observing Nash examining the gauges, Kaboro said, ‘Know your way around a ship, Mr Nash?’
‘A little. My father was navy.’
‘Oh, what rank?’
‘First Lieutenant. Navigation officer.’
In fact, Nash’s first memory was of his father’s long brown legs encased in white knee-length socks. Peter Nash had been absent for much of Nash’s early childhood. When his father came home on leave, it was faintly disturbing to find a bearded stranger in his mother’s bed. In the all too brief weeks that followed, his father had behaved like a fun-loving big brother, taking him fishing and sailing, teaching him and Jacquie to surf. He never pushed too hard because they were all getting to know one another again. Then, just as they began to crave his paternal guidance, off he would go again. It got Nash thinking: When Natalie died there had been two major expeditions to Alaska and Switzerland in the pipeline. What might their child’s first memory have been? Would he have even been there to share it?
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Kaboro. ‘Did you say something?’
‘You weren’t tempted to follow in your father’s footsteps?’
‘I thought about becoming a clearance diver, but the rules and regulations put me off.’
Kaboro’s face softened. ‘You sound like my son.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Toby.’ Kaboro pulled out his wallet and showed Nash a picture of a powerfully built young man with a high forehead and startlingly bright eyes. ‘He’s run a little wild, but he’s going to join up and complete a degree programme as part of officer training. One day I hope to see him in command of a vessel like this one.’
Saworno came up and joined them. ‘Everything AOK,’ he beamed, the wind ruffling his thin grey beard. ‘The alarm sensor on the high-pressure leak-off tank is behaving itself.’ He inhaled a few draughts of air and pretended to shiver. ‘It’s too cold up here.’
‘Saworno’s thermostat is stuck on high,’ grinned Kaboro. ‘How does your wife cope in Jakarta?’
‘No air con in bedroom.’ Saworno winked. ‘Wife sleep in living room.’
Kaboro gave Nash a turn at the helm, and the pleasure of focused concentration helped clear his head. Taking the swells head on, lightly bracing for the shocks, and adjusting when things went wrong. No point dwelling or looking back. It was a good metaphor for life.
‘Did your father teach you navigation, Mr Nash?’
‘A little.’
Kaboro indicated the chart table. ‘Why don’t you give me an estimate on how long it will take us to reach the mouth of the Sepik.’
Relinquishing the helm, Nash bent over the map of Papua New Guinea, and with ruler and brass dividers, guesstimated a likely course and distance.
‘What’s our range, Lieutenant?’
‘At this speed? 1600 nautical miles, give or take.’
Nash nodded. ‘If we were able to maintain this speed, I’d say three days. But I figure you need suitable anchorages to get some sleep.’ He examined the coastline for bays and protective islands. ‘Say, five days?’
Kaboro laughed, but not unkindly. ‘Saworno and I will take shifts in the captain’s cabin behind us. My men know how to read a compass and steer. As for your estimate, I make it three to three and half days, if the weather holds.’
On the second night, a squall off west New Britain whipped up three-metre seas, cutting their speed to eight knots. The Albany gave good account of herself, but the weight on her stern made her wallow in the deeper troughs. Kaboro remained welded to the helm, staring out through the beating rain and the foaming combers to ensure they didn’t broach from an unexpected broadside. It was miserable pitching around inside the little ship, and only Douglas avoided seasickness by scoffing meclizine, which added a green hue to his hepatic tint, giving him the waxy appearance of a three-day-old corpse.
With the rough weather, Nash’s nagging self-doubt returned, and he quizzed Douglas about whether there was to be an advance party – the possibility of flying gear up to the Hoosenbeck so that he might be able to grab a few exploratory dives before the pressure of shooting began.
‘Robbie, all I can tell you is how many cans of tomato soup there are in the galley. Sura is calling the shots and when it comes to information, she’s tighter than a nun.’
‘But, Frank, these kinds of dives usually take months to plan. I have to calculate staging, supplies, recovery periods, risk factors, and I don’t even know who I’m going to be diving with.’ Nash shook his head. ‘To be honest, I’m over the information vacuum. Why can’t they bloody well provide me with some details?’
Douglas massaged his temples. ‘Robbie, this is PNG. Half the bloody population is in a raskol gang, and the less people who know your business the better.’
‘Are you saying I can’t be trusted with the facts?’ Nash could feel heat rising in his cheeks.
‘Well, you did tell Kaboro where we’re headed.’ Douglas smiled to soften the sting. ‘Look, I know you’re stressed. But just try to go with the flow. If you don’t like the look of anything, you just tell them no. I’ll back you up.’
When they came in range of mobile networks near Madang, Nash called Jacquie, who happened to be at their parents’ house. On her second round of chemo, she was coping with the nausea well enough to still be chasing work.
‘Only another few rounds to go,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Then I’ll worry about surgery.’
‘You’re bulletproof,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
‘You sound flat.’ Jacquie always read his moods. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘Raring to go.’
‘You won’t do anything too risky, will you, Rob? You’re a long way from help up there.’
He was about to give her some stick about it being all her bloody fault if he did, but he sensed she was more fragile than she was letting on.
‘Don’t worry, Jac. Remember, you’re talking to the second biggest control freak in the universe.’ He grinned at her familiar groan. ‘Love you, sis.’
He was going to ring off, but then his father wanted to talk. This was unusual, for Peter was partially deaf and struggled on the phone.
‘Son, a word about Frank,’ Peter said in his quiet voice. ‘He means well, but he can be a bit . . . flaky.’
Nash found his father’s ambivalence towards his old naval buddy intriguing. Sure, he was rough around the edges, but hadn’t Douglas always looked out for him? For example, the selection trials at his cricket-mad junior school. Nash was an athlete but struggled with ball sports. After a week of Uncle Frank’s tough love – a hail of bouncers and yorkers – he’d managed not to embarrass himself and even ended up playing for the second XI.
‘Dad, you gave me the same advice five years ago, remember?’
‘True, but that time you were running the show, and there were twenty other people looking out for you. All I’m saying is don’t be too reliant on him. Watch your back. If you don’t like the look of something, use your instincts and get the hell out of there. Understood?’
‘Yeah, sure, Dad. I’ll do that. Love you.’
It struck Nash that he had always taken his parents’ support for granted, a birthright for the golden boy. Recalling their farewell at the airport – his father’s frailty, his mother’s sadness, Jacquie’s strained optimism – he realised they must have felt like that every time he’d embarked on a major dive.
It was
dawn on the fourth day when they reached Broken Water Bay in the Bismarck Sea. Dense, white mist obliterated the river mouth, ten kilometres distant, but the Sepik’s brooding presence was evident in the brown water beneath their keel. Kaboro slowed the boat to ten knots and warned his men to look out for trees and other detritus.
The rising sun began clearing the mist, revealing a well-defined river mouth, a kilometre and a half wide, fringed by a low jungle of mangroves on each side. Kaboro handed Nash the binoculars.
‘There is no delta,’ he explained. ‘The river flows fast, and the sea floor drops steeply.’ He indicated a chart showing they were travelling over a vast submarine canyon, bisecting the narrow continental shelf, a feature which swallowed the endless sediments washing down from the mountainous interior. ‘There is a shallower bar one nautical mile upstream,’ Kaboro added. ‘But it won’t be a problem for us – even this late in the dry season.’
As the river narrowed, the gnarled mangrove sentinels guarding the coast gave way to vast swampy flood plains of impenetrable sago forest. Even at this early hour, it was stiflingly humid. Only the raised riverbank levees and the occasional low hill studded in small trees resembled anything like terra firma.
Frank Douglas joined them as they passed a settlement of thatched huts perched precariously on rickety timber legs. A lone naked man in a hollowed-out wooden canoe watched impassively from the shallows. Wisps of steam rose from the river’s surface and hung primordially about him like ghostly streamers.
‘It’s like going back in time,’ marvelled Nash.
‘Yeah, the Stone Age.’ Douglas spat over the side.
‘Half these people have mobile phones, Mr Douglas,’ chided Kaboro.
‘How many are stolen?’
Nash grimaced. ‘Sorry, Lieutenant, he’s always a bit of a dickhead in the morning – aren’t you, Frank?’
Minutes passed in silence, and then the thatched rooftops of another settlement came into view. Nash realised it was the same village seen from a different perspective. The river was a coiled maze of deep meanders, radical U-shaped bends, some of which over time would erode to become ox-bow lakes adjacent to the main channel. It was how the Sepik ran for 1100 kilometres, when the mountains from which it sprang were just one third that distance from the sea.
‘Just how far is it navigable?’ he asked Kaboro.
The lieutenant tapped a long finger on the chart. ‘Large vessels have officially been recorded as far as the May river junction, which is 756 kilometres upriver. However, in wetter years the river rises by as much as eight metres. It is conceivable you could travel much further then.’
Chapter 10
Angoram, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea
The shanty town sweltering in the heat was a mixture of traditional thatched huts and rough corrugated iron shacks. A solid concrete wharf was the only reminder that this had once been the administrative hub of German New Guinea, and for fifty years after that a key Australian outpost.
Kaboro posted two armed sailors on the dock to keep the growing crowd of curious men and women at bay. Dressed in shabby Western clothes, their cheeks were stuffed with betel nut – a mildly stimulating berry– and the concrete was soon covered with the fresh red pulp they spat out. Nash was keen to go ashore and stretch his legs, but Douglas indicated a group of young men, sporting spiked haircuts and sunglasses, in possession of the only vehicle – a surprisingly late model Toyota Hilux.
‘See those jokers over there? Soon as you’re round the corner, they’ll empty your pockets and cut your head off.’
‘Raskols?’
Nash was surprised. They didn’t fit the stereotype of bush-variety bandits wielding home-made shotguns.
An enthusiastic honking presaged the arrival of an old troop carrier with faded police markings. A nervy-looking constable navigated carefully through the throng. Sitting beside him was a thickset army NCO. When the vehicle had come to a halt, he jumped out to release a squad of soldiers from the rear. Five sweaty men unfolded themselves and a mountain of kit. Their M16A2 assault rifles looked suitably dangerous.
The NCO shouldered his way through the villagers and climbed up the ladder to meet Kaboro. With his massive neck and shoulders, he looked like undiscovered rugby talent. Stamping his boot down, he fired off a stiff salute.
‘Sergeant Singkepe, Long-Range Reconnaissance Group.’
Kaboro looked back along the road and frowned. ‘You were supposed to be escorting a fuel delivery for my ship, Sergeant.’
Singkepe’s dense monobrow twitched. ‘The tanker is bogged down two kilometres away. We need help to free it, sir.’
‘And you left it unguarded?’
A tight-lipped Kaboro turned to the rail and whistled loudly.
‘Skius! Skius!’ he called out to the crowd. ‘Nem bilong mi emi Lieutenant Kaboro. Nidim diesel. Plis helpin me. Tenkyu tumas.’
Pidgin was PNG’s default lingua franca, a polyglot language developed in the nineteenth century to deal with the fact there was no common language. The crowd stared impassively, and Kaboro directed his next words to the source of their reluctance – the young men by the 4WD.
‘Koan, nogatt be a lesbaga!’
Douglas chuckled. ‘Lazy buggers – yeah, you got that right.’
The leader of the young men, a brutal-looking fellow with a jagged scar across his forehead, stepped forward insolently.
‘Hamas you baim, captain?’
Kaboro mused briefly before announcing, ‘150.’
The young man grinned as if this was a fine joke. Eventually they settled on 300.
‘And that is what is wrong with this fucking country.’ Douglas shook his head as the soldiers climbed back into the Land Cruiser and headed down the road after the Hilux. Within twenty minutes, they returned with an orange AWD fuel tanker. None of the vehicles was muddy and no one looked as if they had been exerting themselves. If Kaboro was angry at being diddled, he gave no sign of it, and got on with checking the quantity and quality of the fuel. Meanwhile, Singkepe and his troops exchanged pleasantries with the young men and shared cigarettes around.
‘What did I fucking tell you?’ snorted Douglas. ‘That little scam was hatched on the way in.’
Most Westerners found wantokism – PNG’s elaborate social system of allegiances – difficult to rationalise. When villages were marooned islands in the jungle, and your neighbours were out to eat your brains for lunch, it was vital for social cohesion; a man was defined not by what he owned, but by how much he gave away. In a twenty-first-century context it had led to endemic corruption. Money earmarked for roads, hospitals and police cars tended to vanish without trace. While it was a form of wealth redistribution, often those most in need missed out.
By mid-afternoon, the steel superstructure of the Albany shimmered like a barbecue hotplate, and in the near 100 per cent humidity, distractions like reading a book were impossible as pages became sodden and fell apart. Douglas took shelter under a small fan in the galley and nursed a tepid beer, while Kaboro cleaned out the captain’s cabin in preparation for the Indonesians.
It was far too hot for exercise, but after four days cooped up on the boat Nash was stir-crazy. Out on the helicopter pad, he stripped off his sodden shirt. Acknowledging Singkepe’s crack about mad dogs and white men with an ironic salute, Nash proceeded to skip, star jump, squat and run on the spot – anything he could do without pressing flesh to metal – until he could barely see for the rivulets of sweat. A group of locals enthusiastically cheered and clapped every set.
A cool down in the crocodile-infested river was out of the question, so Nash utilised the washing-up bucket to haul up loads of lukewarm water to sluice off.
Suddenly, a loud roar filled the sky as a chopper appeared low and fast over the village. The sleek gold Bell 505 Jet Ranger flared just once before it touched down on the pad Nash had just hastily evacuated. As the pilot decreased power, the Albany’s stern settled lower in the river.
A ti
ny woman alighted before the rotor stopped spinning. Indifferent to the prop wash, she moved with a lithe and confident elegance. Her body-hugging jumpsuit was made of some technological fabric which accentuated her figure, and a small pink headscarf, which was more of a headband, contained her shoulder-length black hair. Waving over Kaboro’s sailors, she had them unload her Victorinox bags, which would not have looked out of place in a first-class lounge. The remainder of the load – several heavy-duty plastic crates – were stacked by the edge of the pad. The woman twirled an elegant finger skywards at the pilot – a darkly handsome Indonesian version of Maverick in Top Gun – and, with a flash of gold Aviators and white teeth, he took off, winging it back in the direction from which they had come.
Douglas welcomed her and then introduced Nash.
‘Mr Nash.’ Her eyes ran over his dripping wet body. ‘I’ve been bingeing your films. Impressive.’
The sing-song Javanese accent made it hard to determine whether this was as insincere as it sounded. Nash responded with a vague compliment about her documentary work. Privately, he hadn’t thought that much of what he’d found on YouTube. A lightweight series called Wild Indonesia, which totally glossed over the fact her country was burning every shred of habitat for palm oil.
Sura looked over the top of her Gucci sunglasses with a faint smile on her face.
‘Still, I imagine the Hoosenbeck will be a challenge, even for you.’
‘Indeed, it will. Which is why we need to begin planning ASAP. I’d like to start with a full inventory of your resources, proposed timeline . . . oh, and of course a script –’
She cut him off to snap at one of the crew sitting on a suitcase.
‘Get off dispela kago!’
‘You can speak pidgin?’ Nash was impressed.
‘My father was once stationed in Papua.’ Her lip curled. ‘They’re like children here, you have to watch them all the time. Speaking of which . . . Ah, there you are, Lieutenant Kaboro. I’m glad you could make it.’