The Samurai Inheritance (35 page)

His first priority was to get Fiona and Lizzie out of this place. Keith Devlin seemed to think he could dabble with other people’s lives like some omnipotent god. Well, Jamie Saintclair had a message for him: he could bugger off and think again. The Bougainville head lay comfortably in the rucksack between his feet and he had a feeling its destiny was to do mischief on behalf of the Australian mining boss. He could almost sense its desire to be home and a growing power he hoped was all in his mind. But for Fiona and Lizzie he would have thrown the head to the fishes in the Buka Passage, but he knew he had no option but to play the game out to its bitter end. There was only one problem with that scenario. On a place like Bougainville it meant someone was going to get hurt. He just hoped it would be the right someone.

Doug Stewart concentrated on the road, which deteriorated the further south they travelled. Potholes riddled the dirt surface, spinning tyres had ripped out enormous mud holes where previous vehicles had become stuck and fought their way out of the mire. Every few miles they came to a boulder-strewn stream that needed to be forded at a crawl, with the car bucking like a rodeo pony. Now Jamie understood why only a big SUV would do in this kind of terrain. He counted at least five times they’d come close to being rammed by other cars or mini-buses filled to overflowing with islanders. Andy and Joe seemed unconcerned by the near-death experiences. One took turns on watch while the other got what sleep he could in the rattling vehicle. After two hours on the road, Jamie followed their example and closed his eyes.

He was woken with a nudge from Andy. ‘Grub’s up, mate.’

Stewart pulled up beside a roadside shack roofed with banana leaves, set back from the road in a clearing cut from the jungle. He got out of the car and stretched. ‘Christ, I’m getting too old for this.’ Jamie joined him and studied the wares on display. They mainly consisted of fresh fruit, some of which he recognized and some not, small see-through bags of what looked like potato crisps that turned out to be made from banana, and a bun-like object served on a coconut leaf.

Andy bought enough bottled water and bags of banana chips for the rest of the journey. A shy, bushy-haired boy of about five peeled and sliced a pineapple using an enormous machete with all the ease of a penknife. The pineapple was sweet, juicy and refreshing, and was followed by some kind of smoked fish and finally one of the sticky buns. ‘Tamatama, you likim,’ the boy said, following up with what sounded like a long explanation in the sing-song dialect the locals spoke.

‘Tok Pisin,’ Stewart explained. ‘Pidgin English. The different Boog clans have about twenty languages between them, but just about everybody can get by in English or Tok Pisin. He’s just told you the recipe. Basically its sweet banana, taro and coconut turned into a paste, rolled into a ball and roasted. Give it a try, it’s not bad.’

What Jamie found most interesting about the stop was the puzzling way the other men treated him. It had been the same ever since he’d arrived at Buka. These were Keith Devlin’s men, and by now he thought of Devlin as the enemy. He’d expected to step off the plane into a tense confrontation, possibly to be threatened with violence and then manhandled to a meeting with the mining tycoon. Instead, after an initial wariness, it seemed he was regarded not so much as a prisoner but as one of the team. At first he’d been suspicious. Was he the turkey being fattened up for Christmas? It was a possibility, but he had a feeling Joe and Andy, at least, though consummate practitioners of their art, tactically cunning and physically deadly, weren’t the dissembling type. If they acted as if Jamie Saintclair was one of the boys it was because someone, most likely Doug Stewart, had told them he was one. For the moment, Stewart himself remained an enigma, part middle management executive, part Fifties matinée idol, part superannuated assassin. It was an interesting mix.

When they drove on, Andy was at the wheel with Stewart in the passenger seat, while Jamie sat in the back beside the apparently mute Joe. To ease the boredom Jamie decided to try to tease him into conversation, remarking on the thickness of the jungle beside the road, which, frankly, scared the hell out of him.

‘Jungle?’ Doug Stewart snorted from the front seat. ‘That’s not jungle; it’s more like somebody’s back yard.’ In the rear, Joe nudged Jamie and grinned as Devlin’s security chief continued. ‘You wanna see proper jungle get yourself up country to Bien Hoa in the ’Nam. It once took us three days to cut a two-hundred-yard trail through elephant grass so thick you didn’t have room to swing your machete. The bloody leaves were sharp enough to shave with.’

‘You were in Vietnam?’

Stewart turned to stare at Jamie.

‘Hey, I’m just interested.’

‘Sure, I did two tours in ’sixty-seven and ’sixty-nine.’

‘What outfit were you with?’

The security chief smiled. ‘Now that would be telling.’

Jamie shrugged as if he’d taken the hint. ‘It’s always surprised me that the Australians supported the Americans, but the British didn’t.’

Doug Stewart shook his head. ‘Partly politics, but mainly geography. The war was on our doorstep and the Yanks were our allies. If we didn’t fight Charlie in the ’Nam what was to stop the Chinks rolling over the rest of South East Asia, and where would that leave us? Nah, we needed the Yanks more than they needed us, but they were bloody pleased when they saw what we could do. And don’t you believe there were no Brits in Vietnam. I served beside a few guys who were about as Australian as Yorkshire pudding.’

An hour later the road moved away from the coast towards the mountains and they arrived at the first major road junction Jamie had seen in a hundred miles. Stewart told Andy to stop. As the Toyota rolled to a halt he turned to Jamie. ‘In case you’re interested, this is the road to the Panguna Mine that caused all the trouble a few years back.’ Jamie stifled the urge to tell him all he was interested in was seeing Fiona and Lizzie. The road was different from the one they’d travelled because it was paved and in reasonable condition. It ran for about a hundred metres before it disappeared into thick jungle, and he could see the green-clad mountains that rose just beyond. In the foreground a dilapidated sign announced that it was a No Go Zone, and just beyond it a line of iron oil barrels reinforced the message. He shrugged. ‘Thanks for the tour, but I’d really like to get wherever it is we’re going.’

Stewart grinned. ‘No problem. At least you won’t have long to wait now.’

They resumed their journey, dropping down towards the coast again. After about ten minutes Jamie saw a sight that seemed almost surreal after the endless miles of jungle track.

‘Welcome to Arawa, the Pearl of the Pacific,’ Doug Stewart announced.

It was a town. Public buildings – a hospital, a school, a library – churches, paved roads, a shopping mall, open spaces filled with greenery, and a grid of streets lined by white houses and colonial-style apartment blocks sprawling across acres of flatland in a river valley running down to the sea.

‘It even had its own international airport. Let Mr Saintclair have a look-see, Andy.’

The bodyguard took a left that sent them towards the town square. It was only when you looked closer that you realized this wasn’t so much a town as a ghost town. Every shop and business had been gutted by fire. Most of the buildings – burned-out shells – were only held together by rusting metal beams. The windows of a thousand houses stared out black and empty like the eye sockets of as many skulls. Doors hung by their hinges, roofs had collapsed into the rooms below, and the jungle had reclaimed gardens once thriving with scented flowers, yams, sweet potatoes and taro.

Here and there were a few signs of revival. Someone had opened a bar with a few tables outside. A couple of dozen houses had been patched up, perhaps by their former owners.

‘Difficult to believe this was once the richest town between Sydney and San Francisco,’ Stewart reflected. ‘It had a country club with its own golf course, restaurants and a footy team, the best health facilities money could provide. This,’ he shook his head, ‘truly was Paradise to the people who lived here.’

‘What happened to it?’ Jamie asked. ‘And to them?’

Devlin’s security chief shrugged. ‘Bougainville Copper Limited built it for the mine workers and their families. They turned a coconut plantation into the state capital of Bougainville; Government House was just up the road there. By the Eighties the place was going like a fair. It had its own power plant, shared with the mine, over at Loloho Point across there, a couple of hundred kids were born in the hospital and a couple of thousand taught in the schools. You could buy every western luxury as long as you could afford it. So there you are, the world’s biggest copper mine is churning out millions a week in profit, you have some of the finest mining experts to make sure it continues that way, and probably the happiest workforce in the world. What could go wrong?’

‘They’d forgotten something,’ Jamie ventured.

‘That’s right.’

‘The people.’

‘You have an elite group of white workers living in all this luxury and the only look-in the Boogs get is to clean their toilets; okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the picture. Some slick lawyers have persuaded them to more or less give their land away or if they refused the government just took it. They don’t understand how big a mess this thing is going to cause, and when they do find out the PNG government doesn’t give a bugger because all they can see is dollar signs and they don’t care about the Bougainvilleans anyway. It could all have been sorted out with a couple of million to the right people, but by the time anybody realized it was too late. One of the Bougainville employees at the mine was a clever young fella called Francis Ona. He could see what was happening and what was gonna happen. So he started a war. One thing led to another and the mine closed down, Arawa was abandoned, the PNG defence department brought in troops to destroy the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and when that didn’t work they tried to burn and starve Bougainville into submission. But the Boogs are a lot tougher than they look and here we are.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jamie said as Andy put the big SUV into gear. ‘What will Keith Devlin do that’s any different? How can the Bougainville head cancel out thirty years of history?’

‘I’ll let the Messiah tell you that himself.’ Stewart smiled, but Jamie detected a sardonic edge to his voice.

XXXIX

Keith Devlin had set up home in a former community centre that had survived the destruction of Arawa relatively unscathed. The smell of fresh paint fought for supremacy with damp and the chemical, salt-heavy scent of the sea. The mining boss sat behind a big desk in a room that had been prepared with chairs set out in neat rows for a meeting. Jamie scanned the place for any sign of Fiona and Lizzie, but there was no hint of their presence. An open door beyond Devlin led to a second room with a bed just visible beyond the door, but whether it was his or his captives’ wasn’t apparent. In that moment Jamie felt an utter loathing for the other man that triggered a visceral urge for violence. He must have shown it because Doug Stewart moved in to grip his elbow.

‘Steady, tiger. You’ve come a long way to do something stupid. Listen to what the man has to say.’

Jamie took a deep breath and Devlin looked up from the paper he was studying.

‘It’s been a while, son.’ He smiled. ‘I take it the big prize is in your bag there, because if it isn’t we’ve all wasted a helluva lot of time.’

‘I want to see the girls,’ Jamie insisted.

‘That’s not a problem. Fiona and little Lizzie are down at the beach right now having a swim and a sunbathe.’ He saw Jamie’s look. ‘Yes, I thought you’d be surprised. Your little ladies have been having the time of their lives. The kid’s been great. You can see them in a minute, but I thought we should have a little chat. First things first, though. Let me see the head.’

Jamie hesitated for a millisecond, but what Doug Stewart had said was true. They could take it away from him at their leisure. He laid the rucksack on one of the chairs and unzipped the flap. Devlin watched curiously as he removed a brightly coloured cardboard package about ten inches high by eight wide and handed it over.

‘Jesus.’ The tycoon laughed, but his hands were shaking as he worked at the cardboard. It came apart and he was left with the bizarre little oval of preserved flesh and curly black hair. He looked into the long dead face and it gradually dawned on him what he was holding. With a shudder, he placed it to one side of the desk, rubbing his hands as if he was washing them. He took a deep breath and waved a placating hand towards a seat, but Jamie ignored it.

‘I can understand that you’re angry, Jamie,’ the tycoon said. ‘I can’t blame you for that, but I’ll try to explain what this means to me. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll cut me a bit of slack.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’ On the wall behind him a small green lizard with only half a tail appeared and scuttled to head height. Jamie watched as it stopped and looked around for a second before darting to disappear into a hole in the corner of the ceiling. ‘You’ve had a chance to see a bit of Bougainville on the way here, and old Doug’s filled you in on some of the background?’ At his side, Jamie sensed the security chief flinch at the reference to his age and filed it away.

‘He gave me the grand tour. All green hell, potholes, rust and ashes, as far as I can make out.’

Devlin nodded. ‘Not a bad description, but think of the potential. Think of what this town was like at the height of its success and multiply it by ten across the island.’

‘You’re crazy.’ Jamie didn’t hide his scorn. ‘And from what I’ve heard the people on Bougainville would have to be crazier to allow the mine to reopen. Why should they trust Keith Devlin after what happened with BCL?’

‘Because Keith Devlin would cut out the middle man.’ The mining boss slapped the desk. ‘A fair deal for the islanders and bugger the PNG government.’

‘Won’t they have something to say about that? After all, they sent in the army the last time.’