More Than Paradise Part 12

"Attention, everyone. Time to pray."

v "I'm going to speak to Miles," Charlotte said, surveying their modest tent some hours later as the long day was draining into night.

"This was his idea." Ash thought it was worth mentioning.

"Then he can come up with a better one."

As Charlotte made a beeline for the head of the expedition, Ash strolled to the mess area where one of the leathernecks, Billy Bob Woodc.o.c.k, had dinner under control. She could smell coffee and rations already.

"The lady's not happy?" The hulking, crew-cut Texan smirked as he handed Ash the coffeepot.

Ash found a mug and helped herself. "Can't imagine why."

"Just say the word and she can bunk in my tent." Woodc.o.c.k began doling beans into bowls. "Got ourselves a single woman's paradise here. Two of you and twenty of us."

"Keep it seemly."

Grinning, the ex-marine yelled, "Chow time, bird watchers."

Ash glanced toward the fringes of their campsite where Miles Hogan was being lectured on his antiquated chivalry. He had included a folding bed among their limited equipment so that "her ladys.h.i.+p"

would not have to lie on a camp pad. Ash had been afraid to bring it into the tent.

"Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d." An Australian biologist rolled up. "Any danger we could just leave her behind by accident tomorrow?"

"She's the sponsor's golden-haired girl." The baby-faced British b.u.t.ter y expert shook hands with the few people he hadn't greeted so far, announcing, "Simon Flight, shortly to discover a new species of Ornithoptera paradisea to be named after my humble self. If anyone * 108 *

wants their own winged tribute, I'm accepting bribes and s.e.xual favors."

A few other team members arrived and stood out in the misty rain, gulping down beans. Ash traded her coffee for a meal. Charlotte and Miles were still talking. It sounded heated and the a.s.sembled dinner crowd diligently made conversation as if they weren't paying attention.

Then, magically, silence fell at the perimeter of the camp. Like everyone around her, Ash stopped eating and looked up, half expecting to see Miles at on his back with one of Charlotte's feet planted in the center of his chest. Instead Nitro was cutting a path toward the mess area with Charlotte walking ahead of him and Miles trailing behind. Both had their heads down.

Billy Bob Woodc.o.c.k handed out beans and forks to the new arrivals. They ate in tense silence for a few minutes, then Nitro asked, "Anyone else not happy with their sleeping quarters?"

Amidst the mumbled denials, Ash exchanged a glance with Klaus.

He'd been standing closest to the fray, so he'd probably overheard everything. He looked like he was busting to get it off his chest so Ash nished her beans, drank some more coffee, and casually excused herself, producing a cigar to justify her departure.

She could feel Charlotte's eyes boring into her back as she and Klaus moved away from the mess area.

"Okay, spill," she demanded as soon as they couldn't be overheard.

"Nitro said he'd have the chopper ready rst thing in the morning to escort our lady friend back to Pom if she couldn't cope with the conditions."

Ash cut the cap off her cigar. "I'm guessing she didn't take that lying down."

"She threatened him and called him names."

Ash laughed quietly. Hadn't Charlotte noticed she was talking to a guy who looked like the poster boy for black ops? "I'd have paid to hear that."

"Nitro said she better work on her att.i.tude and if it didn't improve he'd have no problem throwing her out of the chopper. That shut her up."

Nitro didn't come across like a man who made idle threats, and from the pinched look on Charlotte's face as they returned to the group, * 109 *

it seemed like she'd nally caught on. Ash chuckled and lit her cigar.

She didn't offer one to Klaus. He was a health nut except when it came to his favorite recreational drugs.

They lounged against a huge tree trunk and watched several short, sinewy Kwerbans construct feathered headgear. So far the gra.s.s-skirted New Guineans had stayed well clear of the foreigners. They were shy, having seen very few outsiders, and technology made them anxious.

Ash was liaising with them through the local guide NGD had hired, Pak Tony. He looked about sixty and was one of the few Kwerbans who had ventured far enough into the uplands to be of use to the expedition.

NGD was paying him and the village in pigs. Ash would be ying the rst six animals in with a supply run in a couple of weeks' time- a.s.suming she was still in PNG.

Ash called to the guide in Bauzi, one of the fast-vanis.h.i.+ng languages of the tribes around the Tor River, "Is there anything the elders wish us to gather for them from the uplands?"

Pak Tony consulted with a couple of wizened old people sitting just inside the doorway of a wood and ax hut, then said, "The powerful ruler Jared Diamond brought ne gifts when he came many years ago."

"Are they saying a white man was in the Fojas before the Conservation International expedition?"

Pak Tony pointed to a woman deeper in the hut. "Jared Diamond was in this village before she was born."

Intrigued, Ash strolled back to the rest of the group and asked if anyone knew their lost world had been found by another scientist thirty years earlier.

"Sure," Miles said. "Diamond was here in the seventies. Walked in. No chopper, nothing. He had a s.h.i.+t of a time, so no one was in any hurry to follow him." With a quick glance toward one of his colleagues, he queried, "Won the Pulitzer, didn't he?"

Pak Tony approached with something in his hand and displayed it reverently. "Here is one of his gifts."

Ash stared down at an ancient University of California ID card and felt sad all of a sudden. The tribes of this region had been living here for forty thousand years, undisturbed. Now they and the untouched world whose doorstep they guarded would be changed forever by the outsiders they were welcoming. In their innocence, they saw their visitors as marvelous beings from some far-off kingdom. They showed * 110 *

hospitality and expected little in exchange for the wisdom they offered.

They had no idea of the Pandora's box they were opening.

West Papua's rainforests were second only in size to the Amazon and ripe for exploitation by the Malaysian timber barons who were steadily eliminating the rainforests of neighboring Indonesia. Right now, there were no roads into the dense interior and the Fojas were of cially protected as part of the Mamberamo corridor, a territory closely monitored by Conservation International, one of Ash's few reputable customers. However, that didn't mean a whole lot. In this part of the world of cials could be bribed to turn a blind eye to just about anything, and the Indonesian military worked hand in glove with illegal logging operations all over their own country and New Guinea.

Ash had no doubt that logging brokers would soon be beating a path to the Kwerba and their neighbors, trying to intimidate them into handing over timber concessions. China bought most of the sought-after hardwood smuggled out of the country. Ash had heard some 300,000 cubic meters was s.h.i.+pped to Zhangjiagang every month. The illegal timber was cleared through customs using Malaysian paperwork to hide its origins.

The timber barons were felling almost three million hectares of old-growth forest in Indonesia each year to supply demand. Local village committees who permitted timber felling received about nine dollars for each cubic yard of merbau felled on their land. In China, this fetched over $250.

Now, with the Olympics approaching, the Chinese were planning to build a giant timber processing factory in West Papua so they could speed up the deforestation. By the time they were done, most of Indonesia and West Papua's old timbers would be gone, along with the animals and tribes who had depended on the rainforests for millennia.

Ash supposed "progress" was inevitable, yet the methods these illegal operators used bothered her. Not so long ago she'd been hired by Hanurata, a timber company that kept a detachment of special forces troops barracked in its headquarters in Jayapura. These military personnel provided security for logging operations and intimidated locals who showed opposition. Ash had the job of transporting protesters to the nearest jail, where they were supposed to be locked up prior to resettlement. She'd subsequently learned that many had simply "disappeared," tortured and starved to death. The Indonesian military didn't like people who got in their way.

* 111 *

The more Ash saw of logging and mining operations in her adopted country, the less she believed any value came of "modernization." She wondered when hardwood buildings and furniture had become more important than entire cultures of people, and thousands of species of animals and insects? When did cutting down trees for money make more sense than maintaining the planet's climatic balance?

She almost laughed at herself. Lately she'd been thinking like a tree-hugger. She'd even visited a couple of hardware stores back home, wanting to see if American companies were partic.i.p.ating in the disgraceful merbau trade. To her disgust she found that American customers were being duped into thinking they were buying hardwoods logged by sustainable methods. She wondered how her fellow countrymen would feel if they knew the companies claiming to guarantee this exercised no control at all over their suppliers.

There was simply no such thing as legal merbau. Every log supplied to an American company fell off the back of a timber baron's truck in PNG. Ash suspected Americans wouldn't be in such a hurry to install a merbau oor if they knew an entire village had probably been wiped off the map to provide it. And she should know-she'd been handling relocation transport for the displaced for years.

Maybe expeditions like this one were the only hope of preserving one of the world's last untouched areas. If what they found was rare enough and valuable enough, maybe the Indonesians could be convinced that it was worth more to protect the Fojas than to plunder them. Maybe, for once, they would enforce their own conservation laws. A laughable idea, but Ash kept hoping someone high up wouldn't be in government only to line his pockets.

"What exactly are you folks looking for?" she asked. "Are you just here to name b.u.t.ter ies after yourselves, or what?"

Miles Hogan gave an indignant snort. "You may not understand the scienti c signi cance of the biodiversity in this region, but it's inestimable. There are almost no places on earth where the human footprint is nonexistent. Our surveys are merely sc.r.a.ping the surface, but what we aim to do is excite the global scienti c community with the vast research potential of this rainforest."

Ash thought, Sorry I breathed.

Charlotte edged into the center of the group, slipping in front of a couple of the Australians. "I have a speci c task some of you may be interested in, and I'd certainly welcome a.s.sistance."

* 112 *

She went on to describe in technical detail what she was doing on the expedition. It seemed to boil down to a pretty simple task. She was looking for a g tree. Ash found this kind of ironic since they were in what was being referred to all over the media as a "garden of Eden."

None of the scientists seemed to pick up on this.

They were all worked up over the prospect of seeing birds once thought extinct and some kind of tree kangaroo. The Australians had a frog fetish and enthralled the other science nerds with tales of poisonous skins and peculiar mating habits. Ash and the other NGD contractors took advantage of this bonding period to clean their handguns and sharpen their machetes. Between times they handed around the DEET and kept the mosquitoes at bay by helping the Kwerba pile damp mango wood and betelnut leaves on their dirt res. Smoke was the only effective repellent used by the highlanders.

When the scientists began drifting to their tents, Nitro and one of the leathernecks offered to run the watch. Grateful for the chance to get some sleep, Ash checked once more that the Huey was secure, picked up the folding bed, and headed for her tent. She had managed to spend the entire evening avoiding Charlotte, an aim that seemed mutual. But all good things come to an end. She wondered what kind of rst night they would have; certainly not the kind she'd imagined when they met.

* 113 *

* 114 *

CHAPTER TEN.

Charlotte sealed the mosquito nets that shrouded the interior of the tent and hastily exchanged her clothes for a pair of thin cotton knit pajamas that were supposed to provide extra protection against biting insects. She hadn't thought about the malaria risk when she was preparing for the trip. Only when she and Tamsin were traveling in the Australian outback had it occurred to her that she would soon be exchanging arid desert for humid jungle in one of the mosquito capitals of the planet.

Normally, she would have found the constant application of DEET and the need to wear clothing that covered every limb intolerable in this humidity. But such inconveniences were a small price to pay for being in a biologist's nirvana.

Kwerba was a tiny village in the foothills of the Fojas, situated in a clearing surrounded by forest and jungle that seethed with life. Within minutes of arriving, the team had been stunned to see a bird of paradise come marching toward them, apparently interested in the equipment stacked near the helicopter. Miles had immediately waved for the lm crew, and the ornithologists in the party had fallen over themselves to crawl close to the speckle-bibbed brown bird, which, Charlotte learned later, was a species thought to be extinct.

They didn't have to sneak up on it. The bird calmly walked over to one of them and climbed onto his hand. It was the rst of many such encounters that afternoon as they explored the immediate environs of the village. Charlotte could hardly wait for tomorrow, when they would catch their rst glimpse of the Foja uplands. If this location was any * 115 *

indication, they were going to nd themselves in a world unlike any they could have imagined.

She lit the propane lantern and immediately turned it down low to conserve fuel. In the feeble light, she unrolled her sleeping bag and shook out the liner, dubiously eying the tent's groundsheet. This was going to be an uncomfortable night. She was hot already, the tent felt claustrophobically small, and very soon she would be sharing this inadequate s.p.a.ce with another person.

Not for the rst time, she entertained the possibility that she could blow this a.s.signment because the conditions were so unbearable. At the very best of times, with state-of-the-art camping gear and ve-star hotels in the vicinity in case she needed a couple of nights of comfort and a decent shower, she found sleeping in a tent deeply unappealing.

She had partic.i.p.ated in wilderness adventures throughout her life because in her family there was no other option. Her parents and her older brothers liked nothing better than pitching camp in some G.o.dforsaken place, cooking bad food in unhygienic conditions, and drinking water treated with iodine. All in order to see a big starry sky and hear a world without traf c noise. Charlotte thought you could get the same effect watching the Discovery Channel in high de nition while wearing Bose headphones, and save yourself a lot of sanitary wipes.

A voice called, "Knock, knock," and she grudgingly invited her tent-mate to come in. Charlotte knew she sounded snappish, but she couldn't help herself. She just hated that they were the only two women on the expedition and everyone took for granted that they would happily share accommodations.

Ash parted the nets Charlotte had just painstakingly secured and carried a folding bed into the tent. Placing it in front of Charlotte like a prize, she announced, "This is for you. The height of luxury."

"What are you going to sleep on?"

"My trusty three-inch pad. It's in atable."

"Then I'll be ne with one of those, too."

"Oh, no." Ash shook her head emphatically. "I had to schlep this thing all the way up here, and I've already turned down an attractive nancial offer from one of your colleagues to liberate it. So you are going to take full advantage."

"Look, it's not my problem if you people overdid the equipment.

I told that boneheaded a.s.sociate of yours earlier that I don't want any * 116 *

special favors, but he wasn't listening. Apparently he doesn't play well with others."

"Nitro is about getting results." Ash hovered at the tent ap.

"What's it going to be- down among whatever crawls into the tent, or the smart choice?"

Charlotte hesitated, but being a few inches off the ground in a place teeming with insect life had its charm. Grudgingly, she said, "Okay. I'll take it." She moved her backpack aside as Ash unfolded the camp bed.

"Where we're headed, there's not a lot of even ground, so this might not even be an option after tomorrow," Ash pointed out.

Charlotte instantly pictured the two of them lying side by side in the narrow con nes of this tent for the next week, and unease washed through her. Could this situation be any more awkward? Ash had been ignoring her all evening and while Charlotte wanted them to maintain a professional distance, they were now tiptoeing around each other like they had a crime to hide. In such a con ned group, people were going to notice.

Also, irrationally, Charlotte found she resented Ash's impa.s.sive acceptance of the new rules. Her att.i.tude seemed insulting somehow after the experiences they had shared. Yet what had Charlotte expected?

Ash was a woman who had casual threesomes involving "dumb blondes." People who did that kind of thing were shallow. Just thinking about that episode cut loose a riot of emotions that crowded her mind, making her so agitated she was virtually hyperventilating.

She still couldn't credit that she'd stood in that bedroom, throwing Dani Bush out of Tamsin's house, and Ash had been a few feet away the whole time. It was one of those impossible coincidences no one would believe. Certain deluded individuals also attributed absurd signi cance to such strokes of fate, like they were messages from G.o.d. As far as Charlotte was concerned, the message was Warning! Warning!

She sat down on the camp bed and immediately felt foolish about her poor grace in accepting it. To her surprise the mattress was quite comfortable, certainly a step up from sleeping on a pad. Now that she thought about it, she realized she'd overreacted when Ash brought it into the tent. Having spent her entire life proving she could do anything her older brothers did, she was sensitive about being treated like a wuss just because she was a woman. The feeling was even more p.r.o.nounced * 117 *

here, surrounded by males who all thought they were G.o.d's gift to the biological sciences.

Since her college days she'd been on numerous eld trips, but never an expedition like this in such a challenging environment. If she were honest with herself, she had to admit she felt stressed. What if she failed to deliver the results Sealy-Weiss was counting on? What if she couldn't cope as well as the men, or made mistakes that people would attribute to her gender? Charlotte suspected she was probably being neurotic but opportunities like this one seldom went to women and having been given the chance, she wanted to prove herself worthy.

In her eld women earned more PhD's than men, but there were still very few tenured female professors. Highly quali ed women were routinely overlooked for the most coveted teaching posts. Originally, Charlotte had imagined herself teaching, but statistical reality discouraged her. In most of the best schools women only made up twenty percent of faculty, or less, a gure grossly disproportionate to their partic.i.p.ation as students.

Things were somewhat better in the private sector. Talent was more likely to be rewarded and women who could embrace the commercial realities usually did pretty well, which was why Charlotte had ended up at Sealy-Weiss instead of taking the c.r.a.ppy option of tutoring mediocre males who would then be paid more than her. The last thing she wanted on this prestigious a.s.signment was to have Miles and the rest of the expedition members reporting that she was a liability.

She thought through the evening's conversation, trying to gure out how she was perceived by the team. Most of her colleagues had been embarra.s.singly deferential to her. Charlotte pondered that fact.