‘I think they want us to go with them,’ said Ferallo.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Timbu. ‘Just smile, everyone, and wave. Look happy. We’re not on Mars, and friendly gestures mean the same here as they do everywhere else.’
‘What about Muruk?’ said Wilkes, waving and nodding at the people who came to stare at the creatures with white skin, something many of the younger highland people had never seen before.
‘Did us a favour,’ Timbu said, following his own advice with a big grin fixed to his face. ‘It’s the payback thing. Best for us if we’re not associated with Muruk’s village. We can start here afresh. Also, it would have been a big risk for Muruk personally to show his face.’
Wilkes wasn’t questioning the boy’s courage at all. He just wanted to make sure the lad was all right.
‘Don’t worry about Muruk. He’ll be fine. No doubt he’ll catch up with us later.’
‘So what happens now?’ Wilkes asked.
‘They’re doing as you asked, taking us to see the headman. Have you noticed the absence of guns?’
‘Yeah…if anything I thought there’d be more here now.’ A young boy had walked up to Timbu, taken him by the hand and was leading him along. Timbu felt a thrill at that. He loved these people and looked forward to the day when he could defend their rights.
It had struck Wilkes as odd immediately when they’d been bailed up by supia — spears — rather than by Kalashnikovs. The men obviously knew their guns here, though, as the individual who’d begun stripping down his carbine had attested. A return to stone-age weaponry was the last thing he’d expected, especially here at this village.
The entourage grew as the party moved off the well-worn path through the jungle and entered the outskirts of the village proper. The place was no different to Muruk’s home except that, being even more remote, there was no western dress worn at all. The women wore strips of grass around their waists and nothing else, whether young or old, and all the men were adorned with koteka of various sizes. The third millennium had not touched this village until Duat and Kadar Al-Jahani decided to involve it in their plan for a new order in South East Asia.
The place felt different in the daylight, with none of the malice of Wilkes’s previous visit, despite the ring of spears around them. They walked past the drying room where Wilkes and Ellis had spied on Duat and company doing the deal and sealing it with a scoob. Two women sat outside a hut pounding on nuts or berries, delivering alternating blows. The tools being used as hammers were, from the looks of them, Heckler & Koch nine millimetre pistols. The heavy butt ends of the pistols were doing a great job although, obviously, not made for it.
Monroe jabbed him lightly in the ribs. ‘What?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Take a look,’ said Monroe, nodding at three women using AK-47s as large pestles to pound whatever was in the bottom of a stone mortar.
‘Well,’ said Timbu, also watching, ‘now we know what has happened to the weapons.’
‘Hmm, inventive,’ offered Monroe.
The group walked the length of the village, ultimately approaching a raised day bed with a thatched roof overhead, where three old men sat playing a game not unlike jacks, with old bones and animal teeth. The men looked up from what they were doing when the noise of the approaching parade reached them. One of them, the youngest of the three, got up and walked towards them.
The man who appeared to be the most senior in their escort handed over one of the rifles, Wilkes’s M4/203. He examined the weapon and passed it back with a quick comment.
‘He says it’s not heavy enough to be of any use,’ whispered Timbu. ‘No good for pounding sago.’The interpreter spoke to the old man in the strange language that seemed to Wilkes to have no defined words or phrases, spoken as it was with a flat monotone. Wilkes had no idea how old the man was. He could have been forty or a hundred and forty. He was little, shrunken much like the chief of Muruk’s village. His nose was extremely broad, made even more so by the presence of an enormous boar’s tusk through it. Oddly, his skin was pale in places, as if the colour had been drained from it here and there. Cancer, perhaps, or some skin disease. Also, the man had no teeth, not one, and so his cheeks were concave and his lips puckered inwards. When he wasn’t speaking he habitually rubbed his smooth gums together. A couple of red and yellow feathers rose from the tight grey bun at the back of his head, and the collection of animal teeth dangling around his neck tinkled when he waved his arms about, something he appeared to do whenever he talked, gesturing like an Italian merchant.
As the conversation with Timbu continued, the chief became more agitated, as did the arm movements. Wilkes guessed it was his normal way of speaking, however, because the people of his village didn’t appear to react to it in the slightest. Eventually, the conversation came to an end and Timbu translated.
‘Tom, I told him that you are patrol officers hunting a criminal, a bad spirit who wants to poison people in your land. I told the chief that this bad spirit is the same one who came to his village with guns. The chief agrees that the man was spiritually bereft. One of these guns blew up when his oldest son fired it, killing him. This happened a month ago. The chief has since banned the use of firearms for hunting and for war. There have been many similar incidents in neighbouring villages and because of this, the old man has been able to convince other villages to also stop using them.’
Timbu turned to the chief and the two spoke some more, the chief again becoming quite animated. ‘You’re going to love this, Tom,’ said Timbu when the chief had finished, finding it impossible to keep the smile off this face. ‘A week ago, this man, the bad spirit, came back with more guns. The chief had no choice but to exact payback. They killed him and ate him.’
‘Yeah, I can see why you’d think that’d make us happy,’ said Atticus, when he’d stopped laughing out loud. ‘That’s one way to end a blood feud.’ Somehow, being eaten was a far more satisfying outcome for the likes of Duat than life imprisonment or lethal injection.
‘How do we know he’s talking about Duat?’ said Ferallo. ‘He’s not the only one running guns in this part of the world.’
‘True,’ said Wilkes, the same thought having occurred to him.
Timbu put the question to the chief, who nodded and shouted a command to one of the men who’d escorted them from the marijuana field. The man ran off and reappeared some moments later. He passed the chief a human skull, which the old man presented to Timbu. A chunk of bone was missing from the rear of the skull, probably the death blow delivered by machete. Ants had done a good job in a short time, picking the skull clean.
‘That could be anyone,’ said Wilkes.
Timbu repeated that to the chief, who pointed to the absent front teeth in the upper jaw. He then sifted through the teeth hanging around his neck until he found what he was looking for and beckoned Wilkes to take a closer look. It was a front tooth. And it was made of gold.
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
‘Stay tuned. Next up is World Watch. And in tonight’s edition, the ghosts of the crew of a US bomber plane that went missing in action in Papua New Guinea during World War Two are finally laid to rest. I’m Annabelle Gilbert, goodnight.’
Annabelle gave the camera the sort of lingering smile she’d give to a lover, until the producer informed her with the cutthroat signal that she was no longer being transmitted into the homes of thousands of strangers. The smile instantly evaporated and the hot lights were switched off. Annabelle took the earpiece out and unclipped both lapel microphones as the producer said, ‘That was nice, Belle.’