Rupat Island, off the coast of West Malaysia. February, 1964.

alaysia was everywhere to the east and as far down as Singapore to the south. The climate was tropical, wet with lush green jungles, forests, and sun-baked mud. Like most of the countries of Southeast Asia, the Japanese had overrun this country in the late thirties and early forties. After World War II, the English returned for a while, then the communists tried hard to settle in before the British drove them out and to the islands off the coasts. These were islands of bandits and pirates, islands of tropical downpours and low-lying clouds. Many communists were killed by the bandits for no more than their points of view. The communists wanted the bandits to equally share the wealth. These pirates and bandits had the good-hearted nature to share some things, but not their dollars, gold, or women.

An hour before the ferry left for Rupat Island, I asked the pilot to try and reach Freta, and tell her to call Boggs and let him know where I was going. This was just a little bit better than using a carrier pigeon, but I felt comfortable about my chances of getting through to him. Most of the effort would depend on the pilot and his relationship with Freta.

The ferry was mainly wood above the water line with some steel. The owner had found an old Japanese tug and stripped it to the bottom deck. He had then covered the main deck with teak planking, and a wooden cabin was constructed to protect the captain and crew. The rest of the ferry was open and exposed to the sea and blistering sky. Along both the port and starboard sides, bulky steel rings were bolted to the planking to hold and lash down the cargo, if need be. Who could tell how many times the ferry oil-fired engines had been rebuilt? It was either the fuel or the burning engines that drove black, sooty smoke into the already ash-gray sky.

Somehow we got underway and were now closing on the rocky beach. Fishing boats with colorful sails moved away from us as we nosed up against the wooden landing ramp. The smoke drifted up lazily, and the sea gulls dared to land on the water and on the edge of the ramp as the lines were secured to the enormous wooden poles driven into the sandy shore. As soon as I left the ferry, a small girl, pulling a rickshaw, stopped and motioned for me to ride with her. Giving her a fifty-cent piece, I said I wanted to walk. She would have none of it. Worrying about her making a show of my wanting to walk, I got into the rickshaw. It was not built for the average larger American. She picked up the yoke, placed it around her head, and lifted the handles. We were off, heading for the nearby village. She stopped in front of an open marketplace where pots of fish and rice hung over charcoal fires. Woks of hot vegetables were cooking everywhere.

She must have sensed I needed to eat and motioned for me to approach one specific stall. There I could see brown rice and boiled fish already served up on a large green leaf. Not realizing how hungry I was, I found myself gulping down the tasteful food. As I reached for a coin to pay, a hand came from behind me, and an arm clamped around my neck. A strong grip pulled me back and down at the same time. My head was thrust to the right. As I felt the pressure building and started to fall slightly backward, I saw two women where a minute before there had been one. The Malaysian woman gathered up the contraband she had on display around the cooking pot. The other let her head and hair move back while her red eyes flashed out in amusement at my plight. For some reason I savored her smell and loved her presence there. I felt safe, for the venomous secreting drops of death were already dripping from her jack-o-lantern teeth and smile.

The smile, however, was not for me. The welcome mat was out for the man I could not yet see. His jammed arm lifted me off my feet. Going limp, I swung my legs around, knocking over the charcoal fire and boiling pot. The man was without shoes and didn’t stand a chance in the boiling water or burning coals. He dropped me over a bale of eating leaves. It took only a second for me to shake off the headlock and move on my cool, protected feet to a position of offense. My pistol pointed to his head as he came up from nursing his feet. It took a fraction of a second for the bullet to discharge into the cavity of his ear. The bullet bore its way into the middle of his brain, and he went limp. A crowd had gathered; I turned from side to side and around, looking for someone else to come forward. The Angel of Death hissed, and then squeezed my arm; her perfect hands were pushing the dead man’s spirit to another world.

A small, gray-haired man emerged from the crowd and stood with his hands in the air. His fingers were covered with gold rings, and his neck was supporting what had to be a pound of pure gold chain; both of his ears had numerous earrings. He shook his arms and hands forward and back to his chest often, as if he were motioning to heaven; he spoke to the air in what I thought was French. Then his eyes fastened on me.

Trying to make myself understood, I addressed him as well as the crowd. “I do not speak French.”

He spoke again, this time in English. “Allah, Allah is good to us. Save us from ourselves. Friend, you have killed Ling Poe’s servant. These people now will surely kill you for him if I nod my head yes.”

“Then why do you call me friend?”

“Late last night, the great Allah, he whispered to me in a dream. He said he was sending this poor manservant on a trip from which he would not return.” He pointed to the dead man as two other men picked him up and placed him in the girl’s rickshaw. The rickshaw girl adamantly spoke in the language of her people.

The man turned from looking and listening to her back to me. “She said you were fighting with him, and you shot him after pushing him into the burning fires.”

“That is true! The manservant came at me from behind and tried to strangle me.”

“And I cannot believe he did not succeed! What do you want? Why do you come here, what is your name?”

“Some people call me Anubis, Thomas Anubis.”

A look of hesitation crossed his face. He had heard what I said, and he came closer and embraced me, then stepped back. He pulled a pistol from his belt and tossed it to a hireling, speaking to him, as the gun was in the air. The man looked at me, and I saw fear replace his smile. He caught the gun, pulled back the hammer, and turning, quickly shot the girl as she started to run. The bullet passed though her and into the side of the rickshaw. As she slumped to the ground, the fifty-cent piece fell from her hand.

The rest of the people began to flee the marketplace. Sitting on the body of the first dead man in the rickshaw was the shimmering shape of the Angel. Her long-boned arms were draped over the sides, and her beautiful hands rested on the wheels. She knew what I was going to do before I did. She watched as the girl died, then witnessed the killer’s pistol flying once again into the air. I shot the hireling in the bridge of the nose with one of my own little .22 pistols. At first, the shooter seemed to think my bullet was a bee sting. But, before he gave up his spirit, he noticed the blood streaming into his mouth, which had opened in surprise. He quickly died. I looked for her, but the Angel was gone again.

The man of gold reached for another pistol, but thought twice about it. He slowly pushed it back under his belt and into his pants. The sneering look was gone from his face, and a look of admiration came over him. Thunder cracked in the sky. The wind began to howl as a storm rapidly approached. Clouds of dust swirled up from the road and made it almost impossible to see.

Then instantly this passed.

When the dust started to settle, I could see the look of awe and then dread leave the man of gold. The curious people from the crowd began to wander closer to the two of us; they returned with a degree of hesitancy. For a minute, everything was still, as if the silence had outbid the sounds of the marketplace and the impending storm. The reclamation of time was complete.

“You are an American, my friend. What could you want on Rupat? Drugs? No. Gold then? Why do you come here, so far from your home?” His hurried tone indicated the urgency of his questions.

“It is said a woman who worked for my uncle is here.”

“Your uncle must have much gold to send you looking so far!” It was a question mixed with a degree of fear. This man obviously wanted to repossess the fear of those people standing around us. Thunder echoed; lightning split the air; it began to rain, yet no one sought shelter. Lightning struck as close as the wooden ramp behind the gold man. He turned, shuddered at the sight of the burning ramp, then looked at me for an answer as to who I was.

“My uncle is rich in money and power. You know who I am; you know why I have come; you know why you cannot help but look me in the face. You have dreamed I was coming a long time now. Soon after you saw the first murdered child, you started to see my back in your dreams. Now you have seen my face. Pray to Allah hard this day that I do not show you my anger again, or your days will grow to a close, too.” My voice trailed off to a whisper. Only those who were right under our noses could hear my last words.

The man of gold heard them well. I waited to see if he understood and feared who I might be. The rain fell harder and matted our hair.

“What, pray, does this woman look like?”

“She is tall with blond hair and . . . “

“The woman with no fingernails is dead. I saw her body here on Rupat Island two nights ago. Her body was taken out to the sea. It was on one of my boats and taken for the sharks of the straits.”

“How did the blond-haired woman die—what of her child?”

“Come with me, my friend.”

“Oh, now we are friends again?” I said, as we walked away from the others.

“Anyone who spits out death as if it were but chicken bones is my friend.”

We walked to a hutch and sat down on two teak-wood benches. I looked out over the rainstorm, the storm that had come in time to perhaps save my life. I was grateful for the rain like no other time. I said to him, “Then perhaps telling me the truth will set you free for a longer life.”

“We will make, how you say, a deal, Thomas Anubis. Join with me, and we will defeat Ling Poe. Then you can have the child back.”

Pretty was important to Boggs and the others back in Vietnam. I was surprised to hear she was still alive. This news shook me and set me thinking. How I had planned on getting Kathy back was still uncertain, but she at least could have helped. Now I was faced with the foolhardy task of coming up with a plan to free a three-year-old child and then elude the people of Rupat.

“Tell me, for my uncle will want to know, how did the woman die?”

“She died from rejection. She was on the island and had been sold by the bandits to one of the Caduceus headmen. The woman, it seems, was not keeping up with the needs of Ling Poe. He had paid, he said, too much gold for a woman without fingernails only to see the blond hair on his pillow. I heard from the compound that he had beaten her for cutting her nails. She did this everyday. So, now I tell you. She ran out of the compound gate into a truck on the road. As she lay there dying, Ling Poe discovered her and shot her in the head, as you did my servant.”

“Your servant was trying to kill me!”

“If he were only trying to kill you, then he deserved to die.”

“How do I know you are telling me the truth and that you are not a member of the Caduceus?”

The gold man carried a small, sharp throwing knife concealed in his pant leg. He gathered the silk material where it was tight around the top of his thigh and sliced it to the knee on both of his pant legs. Pulling the material away from both thighs, he exposed them. There was no brand. A look of satisfaction crossed his face. While he was not a member of the Caduceus, he still was a killer and a bandit. He may not have shot the little girl next to the rickshaw, but he had ordered her death. Guardedly, still unsure of each other, we sat in the storage house. The rain persisted and tried to drown out our conversation as it pounded the leaking tin roof.

“Will you join with me in a fight against Ling Poe?” he asked.

“What is your name? How are you called?”

“Lay’a is my name.”

“If I am to help you, there are things I must know. Like where is the baby girl? Can you show me?”

“Yes, but it will take time to do this.”

The way into the compound would be easy. Everything was wide open from both the sea and the road. Ling Poe was not the type of a man that worried about numerous things. Each inhabitant of the island for many reasons knew him: he was a collector of gold and women, but his first love was moths. He was one of the most knowledgeable men in the world when it came to the New World Imperial Moth (Eacles imperialism). Ling Poe was also the chief of the Caduceus on Rupat and an impassioned murderer.

“Ling Poe is my uncle and, yes, everyone fears him. He had my father murdered in front of me when I was just a boy. But I did not remain a boy; this was an oversight by Ling Poe. The boy became a man. I hate him! I have spent much of my life planning the death of Ling Poe!”

A point could be made that Ling Poe had all of his life to await his death, but as a chief of the Caduceus, he had done this on countless occasions. Seven knife attacks and three pistol hostilities had been launched against him, and he still survived. Going into the compound might be easy, but as I listened to tales of these earlier attempts, I realized it would take real planning to rescue Pretty and get out alive. This would have to wait.

The rain continued to fall as we made our way to the rickshaw. The dead girl had also been placed in it. Lay’a walked up to her, pulled his knife, and slit her pant leg. He turned to reveal the tattooed mark of the Caduceus. I wondered about Pretty, and thought to myself, what type of a life would she have now that Kathy was dead.

Lay’a spoke up. “I will take you back to the mainland and wait for word of your return to Rupat.” Walking to a small powerboat, the two of us were soon skimming over the waves like a skipping stone.