Jungle Warfare

Dressed as a sergeant the officer killed the boy in the mess tent’s eaves. Nightlarks sang as the scabbarded black of night unsheathed towards the sticky dark of a pre-dawn rise. Every sense alert, with the crickets, the swell of the ocean and the tide of the wind in the trees masking the approach of any would-be captors, the officer slunk into the night to lick the blood off his hands and cry the sorrows of war into his rusted jeep’s crackling stereo, playing 40s jazz and movie hits of yesteryear. A beautiful day.

Greased palms pass-on bribes, collecting dust from their dues but never drop their stain, dark and bent. Dust swirls, I wait. The desk sergeant apologises and says, ‘Mr Drome will be no more than twenty minutes.’ He said that half an hour ago but I know that if I raise a complaint then I won’t get to see Mr Drome at all. I’m to compile a report on efficiency and the system doesn’t allow for question. It’s taken me time and expense to get this far already and I’m supposed to be internal. Nothing escapes me. I am a hermetically-sealed jar, closed by necessity, containing nothing and never to be opened. I am justification to be pulled-out and paraded lest judicial review ever become a priority and need to be produced. Better that I was just a paper-tick and the whole damned thing exist on ledger only. Why all the tedium when no-one with any real clout exists to come investigating? My balls ache and I remind myself to fuck someone later-on before I will be able to sleep tonight. The one advantage of my position, access all areas.

I close my eyes and wait for Drome.

Blasts of noise waken me sudden as the world steps-forward a gear. Honk! The cars outside arriving, thick and freely now as my stomach lurches and my tongue tightens and dances about excitedly. What is this? What is happening? Honk honk! Like ‘Hark hark!’ I rise and look through the thin blinds to the scene outside.

At least 14 military police vehicles have invaded the driveway. The checkpoint guard who admitted me earlier has a pistol aimed foresquare at his exposed brow, his colleague restrained by burly types. Lanson’s marching-up the crazy-paving to the door as I stare. He passes through the open doorway, nods at me in greeting and punches the desk sergeant, hard, in the face. Dead.

‘Mr Abe,’ he says, ‘the revolution has begun’.