The moon was rising over the lagoon and the coastal fringe of mangroves with their tortured exposed roots on the main island of Malaita. The killman lay among the trees, his eyes fixed on his target. He could hear the bullfrogs croaking hoarsely in the undergrowth. He had been lying there for several hours on a patch of mauve and scarlet bougainvillaea, as the twilight had shaded into darkness. Now it was so cool that he was no longer sweating. Automatically he checked his weapons again: the bolt-operated Arisaka rifle loaded with a clip of five rounds and bearing the impression of the chrysanthemum with sixteen petals, the symbol of the emperor. Attached to his webbing belt he carried a Type 30 bayonet in a frayed scabbard, and four Type 97 hand grenades. Carefully wrapped in palm leaves in the canvas pack on his back were four sticks of dynamite.
He could see no one, but he knew that the enemy lay before him. They were always there, pretending to go about their everyday business but constantly on the lookout for him. By ignoring him they hoped that he would go away, never to encroach upon their comfortable lives again. He would never do that. On Malaita he was as permanent as a conscience. What once had been for him little more than a task to be endured had developed over the years into a nurtured, hatred-fuelled and inescapable mission.
He checked again that he had done everything correctly. He had hidden his canoe securely in the undergrowth a hundred yards up the beach. He had skirted the still almost deserted village and had climbed the path to his target, stopping every few yards to ensure that he was alone. He had chosen his position among the trees and waited for several hours. In all that time no one had appeared within his line of vision. He had found his objective, conquered the terrain and outflanked the enemy. All that remained now was to breach and destroy the obstacle.
The killman decided that the time had come. In his mind he went over the three main duties of a lone infantry raider: to surprise and confuse the enemy, to ransack the location and to destroy goods. He wished, as he always did on such occasions, that he possessed the luxury of the firepower and personnel of a typical Japanese squad at its peak: the machine-gunner, the sniper and the light mortar carrier. He remembered the final instructions to any infantryman: to close with and destroy the enemy.
He muttered the mantra of the survivor – ‘You must leave your farms and become soldiers’ – then picked up his rifle and ran across the intervening ground towards his destination. He reached the building and kicked open the door. He paused, took out a torch, switched it on and placed his rifle against the wall. Then he removed the four sticks of dynamite from his backpack and deposited them along the length of the construction. He had visited it several weeks ago and knew exactly where to place them. He lit the fuses, retrieved his rifle and ran back towards the shelter of the trees.
The dynamite exploded as he reached the edge of the jungle. From some distance away he could hear the shouts of startled men and women in the village below. The killman leant his rifle against a tree and scooped up the first of the percussion-initiated grenades he had left there on the ground. He tapped it on the trunk of the tree and lobbed it across the intervening ground into the heart of the blazing construction. He followed it with the three remaining grenades, each delivered accurately and exploding with a yellow flash, adding to the general conflagration. Then he turned and hurried away through the trees.