"Yes, sir."
As he closed the office door behind him, pocketing the little radio transmitter, Sibu Sandakan was wishing he could pass the whole assignment off to someone else. A city boy at heart, he had no wish to camp out in the jungle, sleep beneath mosquito nets and watch each step he took for fear of deadly snakes. The rest of it—the dinosaurs, uranium and geopolitics—was all too much to cope with. He would simply have to watch and wait, be ready with the panic button at the first sight of a monster or duplicity from the Americans, whichever surfaced first.
With any luck at all, he told himself, the whole excursion would turn out to be a waste of time. He could endure the laughter of his friends around the office for a week or two, until they found some new amusement for themselves.
But the alternative was frightening.
Sibu Bintulu Sandakan was worried that he might turn out to be one more endangered species in the trackless jungle, and a flying squad of soldiers would be precious little good to him if they arrived too late.
Pike Chalmers lit his last unfiltered cigarette and crumpled up the empty pack, discarding it with no attempt to find a litter can. The Malays lived like rodents in his estimation, crowded cheek by jowl, the best of them perhaps two generations from the bush. Surrendering the colony had been one of Her Majesty's mistakes—like India, Jamaica, Kenya and the rest—but it was no good crying over spilled milk now. That train had left the station, thank you very much, and it was never coming back.
Pike Chalmers missed the glory days of empire, even though the bulk of it had been before his time. He had been eight years old the year his father died, a victim of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. There were lean times after that, in Manchester, despite a soldier's pension for the widow and her son. It had been only natural for Chalmers to enlist when he was seventeen, but there were no great wars remaining to be fought. Three tours in Northern Ireland were enough, and he had briefly gone the mercenary route in Africa, before discovering that he could make more money killing helpless animals than stalking men with guns who might shoot back. Safari guides were always in demand, and when the namby-pamby "greens" began to flex their legislative, muscles, curbing the majority of classic hunts, the flabby tourists with their cameras still required a man of courage and experience to take them out and bring them safely back again.
But it was killing Chalmers loved. You could forget about the "metaphysics of the hunt," conserving nature with a harvest of the weak, all that manure sportsmen ladled on their game to make it more politically correct. Back in the old days, you went out to shoot a rhino or a tiger for the fun of it, a stylish trophy all the validation any man required. White hunters were admired for their abundant courage, knowledge of the wilderness, the number of their kills.
It was a new world now, and Chalmers didn't like it much. Besides the hunting question, strident activists had poked their noses into everything from sex to smoking. A majority of Yanks had voted for a President who dodged the draft and promised higher taxes to protect them from themselves in any given situation, while at home the royals had fallen into scandal and disgrace.
Pike Chalmers often thought that he was born too late, a man whose time had come and gone before he made his way onto the stage. It would have pleased him to reverse the flow of time, skip thirty-five or forty years back into history and take his rightful place among the men who built an empire girdling the globe.
But why stop there?
If he could work a miracle, why not go back a century, get in at the beginning of the action, killing Zulus, Boers, Afghans. It had been open season in those days. Britannia ruled the waves, and it was easier to pack the white man's burden in a simple hearse than listen to the wogs and kaffirs whine about their "rights."
Of course, there were no time machines, no miracles, but men of daring still got lucky now and then, despite the odds against them. Chalmers reckoned he was overdue for some good luck, the way things had been going in his life of late, and if a handful of his colleagues thought that he was balmy, signing on to join a dinosaur hunt, he knew that most of their remarks sprang out of envy. They were jealous bastards, seeing Chalmers land an easy job of work while they were left out in the cold.
And what if it paid off?
Suppose there was a bloody dinosaur waiting for them out there in the bush. Pike Chalmers couldn't keep from smiling as he thought about the possibilities. He could retire on profits from the book and movie rights, pick up a ghost to hammer out the manuscript for pocket change and relocate to Ireland, where the writers lived tax free. Do all the talk shows like a bloody rock-and-roll star. He could well afford to let the Yank professors write their textbooks filled with charts and diagrams, all kinds of Latin jawbreakers that only another scientist would ever read. The real loot came from exploitation in the media.
Pike Chalmers thought he might be forced to hire an agent if the money started pouring in too fast for him to handle. Life was hard, but he would do his best to cope.
And if he felt like keeping all the glory for himself, then he could see his way to being the expedition's sole survivor. There were a hundred easy ways to die in the Malaysian jungle, even when you didn't have a handy dinosaur around to gobble the remains. This lot were amateurs, babes in the woods. He could dispose of them as if they were nothing, never even break a sweat. Without the profs around, there would be no one to dispute Pike's version of events, whatever that turned out to be. Something heroic, certainly, to keep himself at center stage.
He had begun to shop around for leading men to play his part in the inevitable movie when he caught himself. It was a grave mistake to count your eggs before they hatched, especially if they were dinosaur eggs. Pike Chalmers was no scholar, but he knew the odds were stacked against survival of a species thought to be extinct for umpteen billion years. Simple deductive thinking said the trip would be another paying job and nothing more.
Or maybe not.
They didn't have to find a bloody dinosaur for Chalmers to get something extra from the trip. That Audrey Moreland was a tasty dish, and no mistake. Oh, she was giving him the brush right now, the way her kind so often did, but that was in a posh hotel, when she could call downstairs for room service to fetch her up a glass of bubbly any time she chose.
It was a different story in the jungle, when you said goodbye to feather beds, dry clothes and decent food. The only running water in the Tasek Bera would be rain and jungle streams; her next-door neighbors would be snakes and scorpions and hungry tigers.
Not to mention Chalmers, most dangerous of all.
Before their little trek was finished, Audrey Moreland would acquire a new appreciation of his talents, not just on the trail, but in the sleeping bag, as well. She might protest at first, but who was there to take her part against a real man when the chips were down?
That brought his thoughts back to the new bloke, Dr. Renton Ward. A strange duck, that one. Didn't look like he could tear a piece of paper if he used both hands, but he had turned Pike's crushing grip around, and no mistake. The knuckles of his right hand still felt sore, as if he'd punched a concrete wall. Some kind of trick, no doubt, but Chalmers would be ready for him next time. Keep an eye on that one all the way, damned right, and fix a nasty accident first chance he got.
Pike Chalmers thought of Audrey flirting with the little bastard when she'd only just been introduced a moment earlier. There was no accounting for taste, of course, but she would find her choices strictly limited in two or three days' time. The old fart she was traveling with would never cut the mustard, and their native chaperon… well, he was just another bloody wog.