Payback by Graham Lancaster Page B

and the ivory white teeth reflected back from the young black man’s hanging jaw.
    Ferez dropped the thing in horror. And later, as he wrote up his CX report, he had little memory of how he got out of the pit and back to his car.
    *
    The native had been sick for most of the seemingly endless series of flights, but to Bolitho’s relief they had not otherwise encountered any major problems. The journey had gone better than he dared hope.
    They had flown scheduled first to Los Angeles, via Guam. Bolitho would have liked to stop over for a few days on the Pacific island. Guam was still a major US naval and air base where he had been stationed for several months over forty years earlier during the Vietnam War. Having left a local girl pregnant, he now had an idle curiosity before he died to try and find the woman, and his grown up son. He just knew it would have been a son. But thanks to the damned native, Banto, this proved impossible. As the pain grew worse, he knew time was running out for him to tie up the many loose ends in his life.
    From Guam, they had flown to Los Angeles, where Bolitho had his greatest concerns over Banto’s paperwork. LA’s immigration is notoriously tight. Securing a PNG passport for him had not been a problem, speeded along with payment of a couple of hundred dollars to a rascal group with leverage on a consular official. The US entry visa had potentially been more difficult. In the end Bolitho had simply taken an English-speaking rascal who looked tolerably like Banto up to the embassy on Douglas Street. There they had waited patiently in line. Purpose of visit; ‘religious tourism’, supposedly to visit a Bible-belt Christian centre. It had taken just half a day to obtain, and suddenly the Stone-Age Banto was a documented citizen of the world.
    Bolitho kept Banto subdued on the flights, partly with dental Mogadon pills, but mostly with fear. Over the days before leaving, he had beaten the little man into submission, like a dog. He had hit him systematically on his legs, arms and back: nowhere that showed. Bolitho was an artist of fear, capable of both subtle and brutal displays of his age-old profession; a profession that had reached its zenith in the West in medieval times; but one still unknown to the primitive world of Banto. His tribespeople may butcher enemies, they may sever heads, and eat their flesh to show conquest, but, exactly like the Peruvians facing the sixteenth-century conquistadors, Banto had been shocked and horrified by the outsider’s strategic use of cruelty. When holding an enemy for execution, primitive people honour, befriend and respect him before the speedy death. But when the Incas witnessed the torture, the atrocities visited on them by ‘civilised’ and ‘Christian’ men, they were bewildered, believing the uniformed horse-soldiers devils. Banto now also believed Bolitho to be a devil: one to be feared and obeyed for now; one to be destroyed later. For himself. Payback. And to protect his tribe.
    The long journey then took them on to New Orleans, for the final hop down to Belize. Banto, who had never before been more than thirty miles from his village, had now travelled half the world and it had nearly killed him. His incessant fear of Bolitho, too many drugs, lack of sleep, the unnatural air, deafening, strange noises and rich food: it all left him weak and utterly disoriented. The shirt, jeans and sandals Bolitho had made him wear left him too hot, constricted and itchy. Added to which he was suffering an illness he had never faced before: the common cold, an alien virus to which he had no natural immunity, and which, when added to his acute diarrhoea, could yet prove life-threatening.
    Bolitho had seen enough men die on him not to recognise this, and he certainly did not want to face Barton with a corpse. The native was badly dehydrated and running a temperature of over a hundred. He also stank like a polecat for want of his natural toilet, and lack of