More Than Paradise (16 page)

Billy Bob Woodcock 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 Þ 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 Þ 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 attitude 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,

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JENNIFER FULTON

it seemed like she’d Þ 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 grass-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 ß ying the Þ rst six animals in with a supply run in a couple of weeks’ time—

assuming she was still in PNG.

Ash called to the guide in Bauzi, one of the fast-vanishing 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 ß ax hut, then said, “The powerful ruler Jared Diamond brought Þ 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 shit 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

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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 ofÞ 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 ofÞ 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 shipped 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.

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JENNIFER FULTON

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 participating 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 ß 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 butterß ies after yourselves, or what?”

Miles Hogan gave an indignant snort. “You may not understand the scientiÞ c signiÞ 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 scraping the surface, but what we aim to do is excite the global scientiÞ 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 speciÞ c task some of you may be interested in, and I’d certainly welcome assistance.”

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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 Þ 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 Þ 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 Þ rst night they would have; certainly not the kind she’d imagined when they met.

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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 Þ 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 Þ 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 Þ rst glimpse of the Foja uplands. If this location was any

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indication, they were going to Þ 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 space with another person.

Not for the Þ rst time, she entertained the possibility that she could blow this assignment because the conditions were so unbearable. At the very best of times, with state-of-the-art camping gear and Þ 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 participated 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 godforsaken 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 trafÞ c noise. Charlotte thought you could get the same effect watching the Discovery Channel in high deÞ 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 inß atable.”

“Then I’ll be Þ 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 Þ nancial offer from one of your colleagues to liberate it. So you are going to take full advantage.”