IT WAS THREE o’clock in the morning when Imison first thought he heard someone moving on the track leading down to the shore. He had been standing outside the fishermen’s hut for several hours, cradling in his arms an M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle of the type used in the Korean War. Baxter and Lopez were sleeping inside the thatched hut. Like an experienced fighter relaxing between rounds, Baxter was breathing deeply, getting all the rest he could. Lopez, on the other hand, was sleeping only fitfully, whimpering and sometimes crying out. It was time Imison woke one of them up to take his place on guard duty, but he scorned the thought. He did not expect either of them to do a professional enough job. Baxter was competent but unimaginative, while Lopez was just a snivelling kid.
He scanned the moonlit sky for some signs of daylight, willing a rescuing dawn to arrive. Now that they had accomplished their mission, as soon as he could see to navigate the launch anchored off the coast, they would board it and head for Bougainville, eighty miles away. On his way to Olasana, he had transmitted an encoded message on the ship’s transceiver to a Chinese trading store on Bougainville. They could be out of the Protectorate’s waters in a couple of days, long before an efficient search could be mounted for them, even if Joe Dontate’s body was found. A light aircraft, usually used for smuggling gold nuggets to Australia, would be waiting to take the three of them from Buin to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. From there a scheduled airline flight would carry them to Fiji, where they would be issued with new passports. You had to hand it to the Agency; it was good at rescuing its operatives from screw-ups. Maybe it had had plenty of practice.
Imison was accustomed to getting out of tight corners in a hurry. He had been doing that for almost twenty years. He had not served in the campaign in the Solomons, as his cover story stated, but he had seen his share of clandestine action. As a young lieutenant, not long out of an undistinguished Midwestern law school, he had joined the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After a brief period of commando training at Milton Hall in Britain, in 1944 he had been parachuted into France as the executive officer of one of the notorious three-man Jedburgh teams, charged with the task of joining up with the French Resistance and causing havoc behind the German lines in the run-up to the Normandy D-Day landings.
Imison had enjoyed his time in France. The combination of violence and intrigue had appealed to him. His natural talent for conspiracy and the remorseless infliction of death, noticed by his recruiting superiors in Washington, had stood him in good stead in the freebooting campaigns in which he was soon bloodily engaged. He had particularly enjoyed his contacts with the French Underground, an organisation so riddled with rival factions, collaborators and traitors as to resemble the court of a medieval Italian city-state in full conspiratorial flow. In addition to guiding nocturnal arms drops from Allied aircraft and participating in raids on isolated German positions, the self-righteous and calculating Imison had taken a particular delight in rooting out and killing those members of the Resistance surrounding him whom he had suspected of being paid by the Germans. Disregarding the need for evidence, the young lieutenant had relied entirely on his own intuition. He had been ruthlessly efficient at this self-imposed task, until one night he had gone too far and stabbed to death a French radio operator he had suspected of being a collaborator. Unfortunately, not only had the radio operator been young and comparatively blameless, if inclined to be a blabbermouth; he had also been closely related to a high-ranking officer in the Free French Army.
After the invasion of Europe, the newly reinstated general in question had wasted no time in launching an investigation into the death of his favourite nephew. Imison’s cold, withdrawn and correct manner had secured him few friends amongst the American and French saboteurs with whom he had been working. Only nominal efforts were made to protect him, and for a time it looked as if the lieutenant might even face a court-martial. Fortunately he was flown back to the safety of a Stateside desk job at the last moment, but the episode was deemed potentially sufficiently explosive to ruin his coveted chances of a transfer in 1945 to the CIA, the natural peacetime successor to the OSS.
Instead Imison had been snapped up as a field agent by the more pragmatic but ever-expanding FBI, looking for men of his calibre, with iced water in their veins and the ability to render total and unquestioning obedience to their superiors. He had achieved notice following an enjoyable period as a field agent interrogating hapless Puerto Rican suspects after the nationalist group Los Macheteras had shot up the House of Representatives in Washington in 1954, and wounded five of its elected members. His zeal for the task, merciless interrogation technique and transparent exultation after the accused nationalists had been given minimum sentences of seventy years apiece had led to his appointment as legal attaché, responsible for liaison with local law-enforcement agencies, in the political and criminal free-for-alls of Mexico and Brazil and a number of similar wild areas of the world. His willingness to leave his desk in the US embassies in these countries and get his hands dirty, or even bloody, allied with his dubious wartime record, had, on the orders of the Director himself, also secured him a number of clandestine missions like the one upon which he was currently engaged.
Again Imison heard the rustling of leaves on the track leading to the beach. He started to go down to check, but restrained himself. Baxter and Lopez were not much, but they were the best he had and probably although not certainly better than nothing. They were also, as far as he was concerned, highly expendable. He walked softly into the hut and kicked both agents methodically as they lay huddled uncomfortably on the ground in their sleeping bags.
‘Get up!’ he muttered. ‘Somebody’s outside.’
At once the two men hauled themselves to their feet and reached automatically for their Garands. Around their shoulders they put slings containing eight-round clips of ammunition. Then they looked to their leader for instructions. Imison had not worked with either agent before their present excursion. The team had been put together at extremely short notice in response to an emergency situation. Lopez was the youngest of the trio, in his twenties, the communications specialist. He could operate a radio, but Imison was prepared to bet money that the boy’s future as a field agent was as limited as that of a snowball in a warm place. Not only was Lopez nervous, he was also unlucky. To add to his misery he was transparently afraid of both of his companions on the mission. Baxter, dark-chinned and taciturn, was tougher, but as far as Imison was concerned, he possessed the damning trait of ambition. Baxter saw covert grey operations of this nature as a short cut to preferment in the Agency. Imison had news for him as explicit as that of a town crier: any kudos from this mission when it was over was going to its head honcho.
‘Who’s out there?’ asked Baxter, checking his weapon.
‘How the hell do I know?’ snapped Imison. ‘We’ll go down the track a way and see.’
They emerged into the clearing. The hut they had been using had been erected by itinerant fishermen intending to spend the night on this deserted corner of the island. The narrow track to the beach had been slashed out roughly with bush knives and was already in danger of becoming overgrown again. The surrounding trees were so tightly packed that it was impossible to enter the bush area without sustaining painful abrasions.
‘Lopez, you take point,’ ordered Imison.
‘Why me?’ whined the youth. ‘I ain’t no soldier boy.’
‘If there’s anybody there, he’s going to come at us out of the bush from the sides,’ said Imison. ‘Baxter and I will be marking those. For Christ’s sake, can’t you do anything right? All you’ve got to do is lead us down to the beach. Surely you can handle that chore?’
‘Take point,’ said Baxter, jostling the younger agent with the butt of his rifle and putting an end to the discussion.
Lopez muttered mutinously to himself but did as he was told. He had not known Imison and Baxter long, but he had been present when they had followed and shot Dontate, the tour guide, the previous day. He knew that both men were utterly ruthless and implacable, and that if he did not do as he was told, the likelihood of his ending up lying dead on some forgotten island at this arse-end of the world was higher than a hawk. If that eventuality ever came, he told himself, trying in vain to bolster his spirits, he would not just sit with his back to a mound of skulls and wait for the end like Dontate had done.
The three Americans made slow process along the track. The branches of the trees formed a canopy overhead. Every time one of them thought he heard something he would come to a halt, and the other two would stop walking as well while the three men checked out the situation. Lopez was aware of the caution being deployed by his experienced companions, and this only increased his nervousness. Unconsciously he increased his pace. Soon he was a few yards ahead of the other two. Both Imison and Baxter noticed this. Neither called the youngest agent back, taking satisfaction in the knowledge that if Lopez should be stupid enough to trample unheedingly through unknown terrain, then he would be the first to encounter any hazards, making it all the safer for the other two.
Only a few minutes passed before Agent Lopez, as the other two had half-expected, ran into serious trouble. His baby face and scrawny knuckles torn and bleeding, he blundered forward, peering warily ahead of him. Unwittingly he passed between two stakes that Kella had earlier stuck into the ground on either side of the track. A length of vine, concealed like the stakes beneath mounds of leaves, joined the two pieces of wood. Lopez’s boot tripped the flimsy rope. Another piece of the creeper ran from the vine on the ground to loop over the lower branch of a tree, where it was attached to the heavy spear of kwilla wood that Kella had sharpened at Munda. The action released the weapon, which hurtled down through the concealing creepers towards the unsuspecting Lopez below. The young agent did not even hear the projectile falling through the branches. It missed Lopez’s head but smashed into his shoulder with agonising force. The American screamed and fell writhing to the ground.
Imison and Baxter threw themselves on to the track, bringing their rifles up to their shoulders. Neither of them fired. There was no sign of any attacker. Nothing moved in the bush. After a few minutes they crawled cautiously over to the groaning Lopez. The heavy spear had shattered the young agent’s collarbone and the point had than embedded itself deeply in his back. He was whimpering and beginning to lose consciousness.
‘We can’t carry him to the shore,’ said Baxter. ‘We’d be sitting ducks if anyone’s waiting for us there.’
‘What do you mean “if”?’ said Imison. ‘Drag him back to the hut. We’ll leave him there.’
Roughly the two agents pulled Lopez’s body back along the overgrown path. The journey was an arduous and bumpy one, but by this time the young man had lost consciousness and made no complaint. The two other men got him back to the clearing and hauled his slight body inside the fishermen’s hut.
‘Take the door,’ said Imison. ‘If you see anyone, blast him!’
‘He ain’t going to show himself,’ said Baxter. ‘Whoever he is, this guy ain’t no novice.’
Baxter edged open the door and stared fixedly across the clearing, taking care to keep his body out of any line of fire. Imison heaved Lopez on to a sleeping bag and tore the young agent’s shirt off. Lopez groaned. Imison examined his wounds. Then he walked across to Baxter at the door.
‘How is he?’ asked Baxter.
‘He’ll live. No way he’s going to walk as far as the beach.’
‘We’ll have to leave him here, then.’ ‘I’d already figured that out.’
Imison walked back to the recumbent agent and leant over him while Baxter resumed his vigil at the door. Lopez’s eyes flickered open.
‘Am I dying?’ he asked.
‘You’re going to be just fine, kid,’ said Imison impatiently. ‘Now listen to me. We’re going to clear the way down to the beach. Then we’ll come back for you. Have you got that?’
‘You won’t leave me here, will you?’ asked Lopez.
‘Of course not,’ lied Imison. He had abandoned agents before. If the worst came to the worst, even a green novice like Lopez would probably know enough to keep his mouth shut until the Agency could figure out a way of extracting him.
‘Stay loose, kid,’ he said perfunctorily, and rejoined Baxter.
‘I figure there’s only one of them out there,’ said Baxter, staring ahead. ‘Any more and they would have stormed us by now.’
‘Maybe,’ said Imison. ‘If he is on his own, he knows what he’s doing. He fixed up that booby trap just a few yards from where I was standing and I didn’t hear a thing. Then he deliberately made a noise to spook us and get us all out of the hut.’
‘How do you want to play it?’ asked Baxter. ‘Shall we try to get out through the trees? My guess is the guy ain’t armed, else he would have shot us full of holes by now.’
‘No, that’s what he wants us to do,’ said Imison. ‘This man’s a jungle fighter and we’re not. I say we stick to the path as long as we can. It’s only thirty yards to the beach, and he shouldn’t have had enough time to fix any more booby traps. Once we get into the trees, he can pick us off one at a time.’
‘All right,’ said Baxter reluctantly. ‘At least we can look out for each other on the track.’
‘Especially you looking after me,’ said Imison. ‘I can navigate the launch, and you can’t. Remember, you need me more than I need you, buddy boy.’
Baxter threw Imison a look of unadulterated hatred, but nodded. The two men waited a moment. Then Baxter threw open the door and the two men ran zigzagging across the clearing to the edge of the track. They reached it in safety and began to shuffle uneasily along the path. They passed with particular care the tree from which the spear had descended upon Lopez, and started to edge forward through the overhanging tentacle-like branches. Imison came to a sudden halt.
‘Wait!’ he said.
He sank to his hands and knees and groped at the carpet of leaves on the ground before him. The surface started to yield. He shuffled quickly through the leaves. Soon he came to a latticework covering of long thin branches over a shallow pit. At the bottom of the hole, a dozen sharpened bamboo poles had been stuck into the ground. Anyone walking across the branches would have fallen through the frail covering on to the deadly wooden spikes below.
‘That’s it!’ snarled Baxter. ‘The bastard’s probably booby-trapped the whole length of the path. ‘I’ll take my chances in the trees!’
• • •
SISTER CONCHITA WAITED, cold, tired and hungry, on the beach. She listened to the waves pounding monotonously on the reef like the blows of a mighty hammer on an anvil. As soon as they had landed from the mission canoe on Olasana four hours ago, Kella had ordered her to wait there and not move, while he prepared the track from the shore to the fishermen’s hut. He had then left her carrying a spade and a number of sharpened stakes. Conchita had seen no sight of the police sergeant since. She wondered if anything could have happened to him. After all, even with his local knowledge, he was up against odds of three to one, and the Americans were armed.
Conchita decided that she could wait no longer. She had to know what was going on in the interior of the island. She also wanted to get close to Kella, in case he was still determined to exact vengeance on Imison and the other two. She prayed that his resolve would have slackened by now. If she could only get near to him, she might be able to exert some sort of restraining influence on the possessed Malaita man. It was certainly her duty to try. Placing one foot carefully in front of the other, she started to walk inland through the trees and undergrowth, parallel to the track.
It was hard, laborious going, with even the pale moonlight blotted out by the branches and vines around and above her, but the nun continued doggedly forward. She had read that John F. Kennedy and his crew had kept to the south-east tip of the island when they had been sheltering there, in case there were Japanese troops already on Olasana. They had slept huddled together on the beach. If Imison and the others were intent on retracing Kennedy’s steps for their own reason, they would not be far away from this area.
Half an hour later, her flesh lacerated in a dozen places, her habit stained and torn, she emerged in the clearing. From the hut on the other side she heard the sound of groans. She tiptoed across the intervening ground and peered cautiously in through the open door of the hut. The figure of a man lay on top of a sleeping bag. He was twisting and turning violently, obviously in pain. The nun entered the hut. It seemed to have been occupied recently. In addition to three sleeping bags on the ground, there were several holdalls, some tins of food and a small cardboard box.
Conchita hunted through both holdalls. In one of them was a small flashlight. She switched it on and approached the man groaning on top of the sleeping bag. He was young and scrawny, his ribs prominent as he lay stripped to the waist. Sister Conchita could see that one of his shoulders was twisted and contorted and that his back was bruised and bloody.
She went through the holdalls again but could find no sign of any medical supplies. Fortunately the young man, whom she recognized as one of the tourists in Imison’s party, seemed to be drifting off into increasingly long periods of sleep. His cries and moans were becoming muffled, and eventually ceased altogether as he relaxed and began breathing deeply on top of the sleeping bag.
Conchita looked round the hut. She yielded to her curiosity and picked up the cardboard box. It seemed to be the same box that she had seen one of the Americans carrying ashore on Kasolo some days before. She took off the lid. The box contained half a dozen carved pieces of turtle shell. They were all the same. Each piece of turtle shell was stuck to a larger white flat seashell. On the central turtle shell was carved a rough facsimile of a frigate bird.
Conchita examined one of the shells. There was no doubt about it. It bore a strong resemblance to the carved shell she had taken from the tree house of Teiosi, the magic man she had found dead on Kolombangara. The headman there had implied that the magic man had taken the token from Kakaihe, the murdered guide who had conducted Sister Brigid on her ill-fated search for John F. Kennedy. The shells in the box seemed to be crude copies of the original.
• • •
CONTENTEDLY KELLA COULD hear the two Americans blundering through the bush in the darkness. They were trying to get to the shore, but they kept being forced to make long detours around spectacularly large trees or avoid banks of particularly thorny undergrowth. This sometimes disorientated them, and they would start heading off in a completely different direction to the one they had originally been taking. All the same, throughout it all, the two men still kept together, a sign to Kella that they had undergone some form of military training although obviously it had not been in bush conditions of this nature.
He kept close to the men, waiting patiently for them to grow tired. Once they did that, they would start drifting apart. Then would be the time for him to move in on Imison’s companion. From what he had seen so far, the older of the two Americans was far sharper and more alert than the dark-chinned one. Kella would take out the second man and then concentrate on the leader of the expedition.
For the time being he contented himself with shadowing the Americans, moving through the bush close to them, sometimes to one side and then the other. Now and again he would drop some way behind them. He could always hear them moving and knew that he could catch up with them whenever he wanted to.
It would be as well for him to keep changing his position. Every so often, one or other of the two men would lift his rifle and fire blindly into the bush. The action had no effect other than to disturb birds nesting in the trees or to send an alarmed wild pig snorting through the bush. By now they were on the edge of a tidal mangrove swamp close to the sea. The warm salt water lapped at their ankles.
Finally the gap between the two Americans grew wider. Kella continued to hang back. Another ten minutes passed. By now the two men were out of sight of each other. To make matters better for Kella, Imison had turned in a full circle and was dragging himself back in the direction of the clearing and the hut. The sergeant let him go. He could track Imison whenever he needed to.
Silently he moved through the bush towards the second man. He could see his shadow flitting against the boles of the trees. He glided past the American and waited behind a tree. He picked up a substantial fallen branch and muttered the Lau incantation of revenge, ‘The lightning flashed, why did the thunder not follow?’ The man staggered past him. Kella stepped out and brought the branch down as hard as he could on the back of the American’s head. The branch broke but the man went sprawling forward into the undergrowth, dropping his rifle. Kella stooped and picked it up. The fallen man squirmed round and peered helplessly through the gloom at his assailant. Kella thought of Joe Dontate waiting resignedly for his death on Skull Island. He lifted the Garand. He also remembered Sister Conchita’s entreaties. With no change of expression, he fired two shots.
The FBI agent screamed as two searing rounds went into his leg. His body jerked convulsively. Blood pumped out through the wounds. Ignoring the man, Kella hurried away through the trees, looking for signs of Imison’s progress. He soon picked up his tracks. He was surprised to see that the American definitely seemed to be heading back to the clearing. Kella slowed his pace to let Imison reach the hut.
A quarter of an hour later, he was standing behind a tree on the edge of the clearing. There were signs of activity from the hut thirty yards away. Then the door was flung open, and Imison came out, pushing someone before him. Kella could see that it was Sister Conchita.
‘I know you’re there,’ shouted Imison across the clearing. ‘Come out, or I’ll kill the nun!’