Large turned back and looked at the trainees. If he’d been alone he might have put up a fight, but he had to look after his six charges.
‘Go back to the car,’ Large told them. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘The hell we are,’ Dante stormed furiously. ‘Why do they want the villagers out?’
‘Dante, you’ll do as you’re damned well told,’ Large barked.
The police chief shouted something in Malay, and Mrs Leung translated as Large began backing off.
‘He says they’ll bulldoze a hut if they don’t cooperate.’
On the edge of the crowd, several thugs began manhandling an old lady towards the waiting bus. This caused an explosion of outrage and male villagers ran towards the police. The armoured thugs charged, swinging their batons and clubs. Most of the villagers retreated, but one man stumbled and found himself down on the ground, being viciously kicked and clubbed by three men.
Large was shepherding the trainees down the beach. Kyle simmered with rage and tried to think up a plan, but it was Miss Speaks who waded into action.
Despite being unarmed she ploughed in, displaying extraordinary physical strength as she plucked two of the men clubbing the villagers off the ground and threw them towards a second group who were running to their rescue. The third man lifted a full metre off the ground as Speaks’ enormous boot kicked him in the stomach. She belted him with his own club as he hit the ground.
But just as Large had calculated before her, Speaks knew that no amount of physical strength would keep the men with guns at bay for long. She grabbed the battered villager out of the dirt and threw him easily over her back.
As Speaks ran down the beach towards the Land Cruiser and the rest of the retreating CHERUB party, Aizat picked up a large rock. It belted the unhelmeted police chief full in the face, spattering his nose and slicing his bald head. As the police chief slumped back into the sand, one man grabbed Aizat while another swung a bat, hitting him full force in the stomach.
The other thugs were swinging indiscriminately, knocking down kids and busting old women’s noses. When villagers fell, a second line of thugs fitted disposable plastic cuffs around their wrists and ankles before dragging them on to the bus.
Aizat thought he was going to die as the police chief wedged his handgun in his mouth. Instead, he ordered his colleagues to beat the boy before throwing him into a police van.
The CHERUB party, including Speaks and the man she’d saved from a beating, had reached the Land Cruiser.
‘What’s that?’ Kyle screamed furiously. ‘Why are they doing that?’
‘Why didn’t the villagers just get on the coach?’ Iona asked.
‘Tan Abdullah wants that land,’ Mrs Leung said.
‘Who?’ Kyle asked.
‘Tan Abdullah,’ Mrs Leung explained. ‘He’s been island governor for more than twenty years. You can’t build on this island without his construction firm getting a cut.’
‘Why does he want the land?’ Kyle asked.
‘Tan passed a law saying all the beaches are government land. The villages have been here for generations, but they don’t have title deeds or papers of entitlement. When he gets a chance he sweeps them away.’
‘And a tsunami evacuation is the perfect excuse,’ Kyle said, shaking his head in disgust.
‘This civics lesson is all very fascinating,’ Large shouted, as Speaks shoved the bleeding villager into the front passenger seat of the Land Cruiser. ‘But right now, we need to get out of here.’
Large threw Kyle the ignition keys.
‘We won’t all fit,’ Large explained. ‘You drive with Mrs Leung and the kids. Me and Speaks will run on behind you. It looks like the bulldozer has cleared the way so use the road once you’re clear of the village.’
‘Right,’ Kyle said, as he climbed into the driver’s seat. He looked at the bleeding man beside him before turning behind to look at the kids. ‘Are there six of you back there?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ Dante agreed, as he took a last glance up at the village. It seemed that the hard core of village men had been subdued. Now the thugs were rounding up the women and kids and dragging them off towards the bus. Because of the insurrection, they weren’t even being allowed into their huts to gather up belongings.
The three-kilometre run back to the hotel was nothing for Large and Speaks and they were already running powerfully along the beach as Kyle started the engine and cut across the crusted silt before turning on to the coast road.
Iona and another girl were in tears after what they’d seen and Mrs Leung stretched her arms around their backs. Dante was trying to be a man and not show his emotions, but he felt intensely sad as he sat in the trunk with his face pressed against the shattered rear screen.
‘This whole world is a crock of shit,’ Dante fumed, as he kicked out at the rubber trim over the wheel arch. ‘Stuff like this makes me wish I’d been murdered with my parents.’
15. CAMP
Large tried changing their flights home, but there were few UK-bound planes with empty seats and the earliest they could fly out was the morning of 29 December, only one day earlier than originally planned. With the village empty, the hotel pool out of operation and the silt covered beach potentially contaminated there wasn’t much for the kids to do when they got up.
Newly qualified CHERUB agents are supposed to be jubilant, but seeing their repair work go to waste and the brutal evacuation of the villagers had dented their spirits. They stayed in their rooms, watching TV news and sweltering because the emergency electricity supply didn’t provide enough juice to run the air conditioning.
Downstairs an army of hotel employees and Mrs Leung’s relatives threw out the sodden furniture on the ground floor and shovelled silt and broken glass.
Mr Large chartered a boat from the mainland to visit Mr Pike at the hospital. The bored trainees came along for the ride, and Miss Speaks gave them some of the pocket money they’d accrued while in training so that they could tour the local shops. Officially they were shopping for souvenirs and gifts, but they ended up spending most of their money on pirate DVDs and PlayStation games.
Only Kyle stayed behind, recovering from his jet lag. He woke at noon, took a cold shower and headed downstairs. Mrs Leung sat on a stool by the reception desk drinking black coffee.
‘You’ve been working hard,’ Kyle said, faking cheerfulness as he looked at the cleanly swept tiles and faded paint which gave away the outlines of departed furnishings.
‘The water wasn’t here long,’ Mrs Leung nodded. ‘The heat will dry things out quickly. But I don’t know if it’ll be worth opening again. Do you want lunch? I can get the chef to fix you a sandwich.’
‘I’m not that hungry,’ Kyle said. ‘I ate a bucket-load of fish curry in the village last night. Surely you won’t close the hotel just because of this?’
‘Not just this,’ Mrs Leung sighed. ‘Who’ll want to stay in this old shack when the new hotel opens? Tan Abdullah is building an even bigger resort with an American hotel chain ten minutes’ drive in the other direction. Now the villages are gone, this hotel is all that’s stopping him from controlling a ten-kilometre stretch of coastline.’
‘Villages?’ Kyle said, emphasising the S on the end.
Mrs Leung pulled off her giant sunglasses and nodded seriously. ‘Four that I know of, just on this stretch of coast. They’ve been trying to get the villagers off the beaches for years, and a tsunami threat made a perfect excuse.’
‘Where do the villagers go?’ Kyle asked. ‘Is there any way to find Aizat and the others?’
‘They built relocation camps for the villagers a few years back, but a judge ruled that they couldn’t force the villagers out. They’re set back in the jungle, out of sight of the beach.’
‘Abdullah can’t make you sell this hotel, can he?’
Mrs Leung smiled. ‘I’m not like the villagers. I have paperwork stating that I own my land, so he can’t just kick me off. But Tan’s company has
already made a half reasonable offer to buy me out, and he usually gets his way. If I don’t sell, the health inspector will find cockroaches in my kitchen and close it down, my tax assessment will go through the roof, rubbish won’t be collected, the electricity will fluctuate.’
‘What about the newspapers or television?’ Kyle asked. ‘Do they know these villagers have all been thrown out?’
‘It’s old news to them,’ Mrs Leung said, as she swept away a fly buzzing around her head. ‘Eight, ten years ago there was a big fuss every time someone wanted to relocate a village. But Abdullah kept plugging away, saying tourism creates jobs and brings wealth. He said a thousand people in wooden huts can’t stop progress for the whole island and that all villagers will be treated fairly and given new land.’
‘And are they?’ Kyle said.
Mrs Leung laughed. ‘It might be the same acreage, but what use is land in a jungle clearing to a fisherman?’
‘Not much, I guess,’ Kyle said wryly.
‘I’m past fighting,’ Mrs Leung sighed. ‘I’m sixty-seven years old and I don’t have the money to make this hotel compete with Mr Abdullah’s. I can buy a nice house, visit my grandchildren, make a garden and let handsome young men like you do the worrying.’
*
Both Land Cruisers were in a state, but the one with the dented sides and new front tyre looked a better bet than the one with the shattered back window, crumpled rear and what looked in daylight like serious rear suspension damage.
Kyle was small for his fifteen years and didn’t look old enough to drive. He didn’t have paperwork, so he’d be in trouble with the police if he got stopped and even bigger trouble with Mr Large if he was found out. But the villagers getting kicked out stuck in Kyle’s throat and he reckoned it was worth risking trouble if there was something he could do to help.
The chamber maid he’d resuscitated the day before drew Kyle a map to the relocation camp. The route took him along the coast road towards the village. The bulldozers had done an excellent job of clearing the road. Traffic was rare, but Kyle passed several tradesmen cycling to the hotel site and had to reverse fifty metres and pull into a lay-by, allowing a truck filled with ruined hotel furniture to come past.
He slowed when he reached the village. The beachfront had been blocked off behind day-glow plastic mesh hung off wooden stakes hammered precariously into the sand. Three policemen with assault rifles slung across their chests manned the site.
Two stood guard, while a third dealt with a line of villagers who were being allowed in two or three at a time to recover belongings from their homes. Kyle wanted to stop and offer them a lift, but he didn’t want to attract attention to himself with the police nearby.
Instead, he cruised on, pitying an elderly couple dragging all they could carry. The road changed abruptly, from a single unfinished track into two broad lanes of new tarmac with yellow markings. Alongside were narrower lanes, which confused Kyle until he saw a multilingual warning sign: Golf Buggies Only.
The road had been spared the silt, but the same couldn’t be said for the lawns around the nine-storey hotel building. Acres of newly laid turf had turned to a brown bog and would have to be dug up and re-laid.
But the giant sign still proudly proclaimed Langkawi Regency Plaza & Golf Resort - five star seclusion, opening March 2005. Men hung from balconies painting the half-finished stonework, while a team on the ground threw rolls of sodden carpet into a mound outside the main reception.
The tarmac only lasted a kilometre, with greens and bunkers being dug out of the jungle alongside. Then the trees closed in and the road went back to a single lane.
Away from the police, Kyle felt safe to stop the car and pick up the two teenagers whose baby nephews he’d helped rescue the day before. The girls had thrown clothes and shoes into plastic sacks, along with a portable CD player, bundles of disposable nappies and a cardboard box packed with their few valuables and family photographs.
It was lucky that Kyle had picked up the girls because he almost missed the narrow turn-off leading towards the relocation camp. The unfinished road was steep and went for half a kilometre before opening out into a rectangle of cleared jungle filled with small metal huts. Along the way, Kyle stopped twice, collecting the belongings of three more villagers.
The camp was the size of a couple of football pitches, covered with identical, evenly-spaced tin huts. There were more than two hundred and their brightly painted exteriors reminded Kyle of Lego bricks. After every eighth hut there was a larger building with taps on the outside, and toilets and open-air showers within.
It was all clean and modern. A politician could argue that residents here had better facilities than in their villages on the beach, but nobody with a soul could compare the traditional huts stretched across golden beaches with this field of tin sheds with the jungle looming on all sides.
Kyle was greeted warmly by several displaced villagers as he opened the back of the Land Cruiser and let the locals take out the stuff he’d driven up the hill for them. His main impression was how empty the place seemed, considering that four entire villages had been evacuated here the night before.
He helped the girls carry their stuff to a bright yellow hut, the interior of which was hot and stuffy, in exactly the way that Aizat’s traditionally built hut hadn’t been the day before. The heat made the twins grumpy and picking one of them up was a mistake.
‘I don’t think he likes me,’ Kyle said anxiously, as he thrust the kicking baby back to one of the girls. ‘Is Aizat here?’
The girls didn’t speak English, but a couple of kids who’d trailed Kyle from the car understood and led him by the hand towards a green hut. As he walked he noticed half a dozen mosquitoes stuck to his bare arm and more swarmed around his head.
Aizat lay in the unfurnished confines of hut three, row nine, which had a bright blue exterior. He wore bloodied shorts, with his T-shirt balled up under his head as a feeble pillow.
The police hadn’t bothered to arrest him, but his legs and torso were covered in welts and bruises. Two fingers on his left hand were broken and had been fixed up with a splint, while the backs of his arms were horribly swollen where he’d wrapped them around his head to fend off flying boots and clubs.
‘Bastards,’ Kyle said, as his eyes adjusted from the sunlight outside.
‘I got off pretty light, considering that I bricked the chief of police,’ Aizat joked, though his half-hearted laughter sent a shudder of pain through his body.
‘Where is everyone, anyway?’ Kyle asked. ‘Mrs Leung said they evacuated four villages. I thought this place would be packed.’
‘Would you stay here if you didn’t have to?’ Aizat asked, as he rolled painfully on to his side and propped his back against the wall. ‘Abdullah’s goons let anyone who wanted to leave collect their things first thing this morning. Then they brought in a ferry to take them to the mainland.’
‘Do they have places to go?’ Kyle asked.
‘Mostly,’ Aizat nodded. ‘Almost everyone has a son, daughter, brother, sister or whatever who works on the mainland. Give it another week and all that will be left are old-timers and people with nowhere else to go. The sad part is, our village has been on that land for hundreds of years and it’s gone in one night. Go back in two years and all you’ll see are jet skis and cabana bars.’
‘It’s sick,’ Kyle said shaking his head sadly, as he looked around the bare shed. ‘You’re in no state to get your stuff. Can I sort anything out? Fetch it up here in the Land Cruiser?’
‘Wati’s down there already,’ Aizat explained. ‘She’ll collect some stuff, and I used to sell fish to one of the carpenters working on the hotel. He’s gonna bring the rest up in his van during his lunch break.’
‘So will you move down to Kuala Lumpur to be with your mum?’ Kyle asked. ‘City life will be different, but a bright person like you—’
Aizat interrupted starkly. ‘I’ve no idea where my mother is. She left the village when
Wati was a baby. Met this other guy. Married him maybe. At first we were going to move down there with them, but then she stopped calling. And her letters went down to once a month. Then once every few months. Haven’t heard from her in over a year, but Wati doesn’t know that. She’d get too upset.’
‘So it’s just you and your grandma?’ Kyle said. ‘What about your dad?’
Aizat didn’t answer for several seconds, during which he seemed to be making his mind up about something.
‘My mum worked as prostitute,’ Aizat finally admitted. ‘Ten blokes a night, paid for the motorboat and the best hut in the village. But nobody has a clue who my father is.’
This revelation hung in the empty hut like a bad smell. Kyle tried to say something to make it seem OK, but came up blank.
‘I think that’s why the village was so important to me,’ Aizat said. ‘Wati and my grandma are my only family, but even though I’m young I was someone in the village. I collected the mail, took the fish to market, fixed the electricity. Now what do I do? Apply for a job at Regency Plaza? Put on a silly uniform and say yes sir, no sir, to rich guys?’
‘People in the village relied on you because you’re smart,’ Kyle said. ‘I saw all those heavy-duty books you read. If you did get a job at Regency Plaza you’d probably be managing the place by the time you’re twenty.’
‘I’d sooner eat my own shit than work for a hotel,’ Aizat spat.
‘So is there anything I can do?’ Kyle asked hopefully. ‘I won’t have time after today. We’re flying out tomorrow afternoon, staying overnight in Kuala Lumpur and catching the early flight to London the morning after.’
Aizat shook his head. ‘You’re a good person, Kyle, but unless there’s something you’re not telling me - like you’re related to the Malaysian prime minister, or you’ve got a billion dollars in the bank - I reckon my body’s got to heal and my brain’s got to work out how to get on with my life.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ Kyle said, as he glanced at his watch. ‘Because I don’t mind helping if something needs doing, but I borrowed the Land Cruiser without permission and I don’t want to go back to ditch digging unless there’s a good reason for it.’
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