Garrison Campbell had spent his whole life looking forward to this moment. He stood in a clearing, sweating, bare-chested, hatless and bloody, his work finished for the day. He still held in his hand a slick, heavy parang, a bush knife made from the leaf of a car spring by a native ironmonger in Micronesia. Honed to the sharpness of a razor, it was a formidable weapon. As he reached for a plastic water bottle to douse his blood-smeared, sweaty chest, he heard a rustling of leaves and bushes at the edge of the forest.
“You son of a bitch!” said a female voice. He turned and stared at a young woman. Her white face and her short, dark, wild-looking hair startled him. Her tossed hair was sprinkled with bits of twigs and leaves.
She was holding something at her waist that looked like an assault machine pistol with a wire-frame stock, a mean-looking weapon.
“Put it down!” she said in a loud but quavering voice.
He looked around to see if she was talking to someone else, but they were alone in the quiet, steamy clearing. The only sound came from the incessant buzzing and droning of the insects and the chirping of the tree frogs in the nearby forest.
“I said, drop the knife!”
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “An insane American female in the middle of nowhere.”
“You filthy animal,” she screamed and flipped something that looked like a safety on the weapon before she aimed it at his stomach. When she did that, the smirk vanished from his face.
“Look, lady...” he began.
“How can you stand there after doing something like that!”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But, to be on the safe side, see,” he dropped the heavy knife, raised his hands high and stepped back. “I’m not looking for trouble.”
“You bastard, where is he?”
He was at a loss to know how to respond, he had thought this was a joke, or a mistake, but he realized she was dead serious. Her face, white as a sheet, was smeared with dirt and stained with tears.
He had briefly thought about distracting her and knocking the weapon from her hands, but her eyes held him motionless, a rock-steady gaze that told him she would kill him if he moved an inch.
“He?” he asked, playing for time. “You mean Prof. Ali or the Captain?”
“You know who I mean,” she said in a trembling, hate-filled voice. She had not calmed one iota since bursting through the bush to confront him. She seemed to take his obvious confusion as confirmation of his guilt rather than signifying his innocence.
“You’ve hidden his carcass,” she concluded, and raised the weapon to eye level as she sighted straight down the barrel at a spot between his eyes. Her finger wrapped around the trigger as she tightened her grip and he felt a large bead of perspiration trickle down the inside of his thigh. His knees began to shiver as the blood and sweat that covered his arms and chest dried and a chill swept over him. He felt completely helpless, he could see no way out. She was going to execute him on the spot.
“Jesus, lady,” he said in desperation, as he tried to resolve himself to the thought of death but could think of nothing except her blue eyes. Here he was, Garrison Campbell, a grown man, someone who had faced many other difficulties during a very active life, all of which he had obviously somehow survived, but now had come to the end of the line. At this point he thought of dropping to his knees and begging, but he couldn’t do it. Something to do with my Scots’ heritage, he thought, so he stood there and said, “If you’re going to do it, do it quick!”
