Kyle looked back over his shoulder as the house’s wooden beams creaked. The Land Cruiser’s back window shattered and the suspension sank into the mud as the rear end braced the weight of the wooden structure. This was the moment of truth. Would the car pushing backwards support the teetering house, or cause it to collapse and possibly crush the babies trapped inside?
‘Enough,’ Speaks shouted.
To Kyle’s relief the big 4x4 seemed to be propping up the house, but sweat was pouring down his brow. The ground beneath the tyres was slippery and he had to strike a difficult balance between skidding forwards in the mud, or pushing the throttle too hard and knocking the house forward on to the scaffolding.
Speaks clambered up the side of the house and wedged her hands under a section of the collapsed roof. The corrugated metal roofing was light, but the wooden frame and joists to which it was attached needed all the strength in her beefy arms and tree trunk thighs.
As soon as there was a decent gap between floor and roof, Dante shot through into the hut’s collapsed interior. The roof and sides seemed to be propped up by pieces of furniture. He found himself with a pair of cheesy thongs in his face, looking under a couch with his lamp illuminating empty cigarette packets and dead cockroaches.
‘What can you see?’ Speaks shouted, straining under the weight of the roof panels.
Dante’s world shuddered as Kyle dabbed the Land Cruiser throttle a little too hard. At the same moment his nose caught an alarming whiff of cooking gas. According to the girls, their baby nephews had been asleep in a cot near the centre of the house.
Dante crawled in deeper. To his relief there was half a metre between his back and the roof over the middle of the house. His helmet-mounted lamp wasn’t needed because sunlight blitzed through small gaps between the collapsed sections.
‘I see them,’ Dante gasped, as he rounded the end of the sofa and spotted a cot.
‘Are they OK?’ Speaks shouted.
Dante had a younger sister, so he knew about babies and was alarmed by what he saw. It was stiflingly hot, and the two tiny boys lay together, covered in a fine layer of dust. He slid his arm between the bars of the cot and touched one boy’s hand. It felt warm and the tiny fingers reacted to his touch by curling into a fist.
‘I think they’re both alive,’ he shouted.
Both boys had red faces, and Dante guessed they’d screamed themselves into a state of exhaustion and passed out in the heat.
‘Bring them out quickly,’ Speaks ordered.
But Dante cursed as he looked up and saw that the wooden sides of the cot were supporting the collapsed wall panel above his head. At a stretch he could reach around the top of the cot and get his arm in to touch the babies, but the gap between the top of the cot and the collapsed wall wasn’t enough to lift their bodies through.
Dante pushed upwards, trying to raise the wall, but it was pinned down beneath the hut’s roof and would take several strong adults to lift off.
‘Get me a saw,’ he shouted.
It was almost two minutes before Aizat brought a small hacksaw from his hut. During the wait Kyle had another accident with the throttle and Dante got horribly claustrophobic as he imagined the walls collapsing on top of him.
The only relief came to Miss Speaks, whose muscles were replaced by wooden props hammered in by the two painters to keep Dante’s escape route open.
Once he had the saw, Dante crawled back to the cot and began using it to cut through a wooden side bar. The noise and dust disturbed the babies and after a brief instant of curiosity the pair began screaming in the confined space less than thirty centimetres from Dante’s head.
The first rail twisted out of the cot frame once Dante had sawed through and he threw it down in the puddle of sweat that had dropped off his brow. He reckoned he’d need to take three rails out to make a gap big enough to get the babies through, but he was acutely aware that by removing rods he was weakening the cot frame supporting the roof over his head.
Back in the Land Cruiser, Kyle had been balancing throttle and brake pedals for five minutes. His knees hurt and his right calf was numb. Despite the pain he was getting a feel for what the car would do, but just as he thought he’d got the hang of it the biggest hornet Kyle had ever seen buzzed through the side window and dive-bombed his head.
Kyle instinctively flinched and in doing so jammed the accelerator pedal hard. The car shot back violently and the onlookers gasped as the entire hut groaned. At the front, one of the scaffolding sections twisted and began to buckle.
‘Kyle, you crazy idiot,’ Speaks shouted. ‘What are you doing?’
He still had the hornet buzzing around his head and after several attempts to bat it away Kyle took a hand off the steering wheel and threw the driver’s door open, hoping that the huge stinging insect would fly out.
Inside the house, Dante was terrified as the tangle of wood and metal over his head rumbled and began to shift. He thought about turning back, but he was tantalisingly close to freeing the babies. Then the props snapped, sealing his exit and bringing the roof even closer to his body.
As Speaks jumped on to the tilting structure and tried to lift the roof again, Dante saw a new opportunity. The jolt had shifted everything and a divine light shone through a hole directly above the cot.
Dante abandoned his saw, hurdled his way into the cot and stood up in the newly formed opening, being careful not to step on the babies down by his feet. The crowd gasped as they saw Dante’s head, but this time it was horror not relief. The entire structure was shifting forwards.
‘Somebody grab ‘em,’ Dante shouted, as he reached down into the cot and grabbed the screaming pair by their nappies.
Speaks was heavy and feared that her weight would collapse the roof, so Iona clambered desperately over the wreckage and grabbed the babies.
The two tiny boys screamed their heads off as they were manhandled and passed down into the waiting arms of Miss Speaks. Iona was about to jump down when she realised that Dante couldn’t pull himself up through the hole and out on to the roof.
Iona was smaller than Dante, but basic training had made her strong and she yanked Dante out of the hole just as the scaffolding holding up the front of the house completely gave way. The onlookers dived clear as the section of roof on which Dante and Iona now stood began sliding towards the ground.
Dante considered jumping off the side, but Iona had a better tactic and he copied her, riding the metal roof panel on which they stood like a giant surfboard as it crashed down into the silt in front of the house.
The hornet had finally flown out, but Kyle couldn’t see around the sides of the house. He had no idea what was going on and felt sick when he saw that the building was collapsing. Then he saw one of the other trainees giving him a thumbs-up.
‘They’re out. Drive off!’
Kyle flipped the Land Cruiser into a forward gear and the big car flexed with relief as it skidded off up the beach. In the chaos, Kyle had forgotten that his door was open and it smashed against a tree trunk, slamming shut and leaving a huge dent in the metal.
By the time he’d moved twenty metres clear the entire hut was straining. The scaffold at the front was dragging it one way, while the release of the Land Cruiser at the back pulled it the other. After several seconds making up its mind, both ends buckled simultaneously and the entire structure collapsed straight down on to its stilts.
Moments later Dante breathlessly approached the two teenage aunts who each held a screaming baby, while an elderly villager carefully wiped the dirt off their faces using bottled water and cotton wool balls, being extra careful that nothing ran into their eyes.
‘You did good,’ Miss Speaks beamed, giving Dante an almighty thump on the back. ‘It’s a shame you’re not on a mission or you might have just earned the fastest promotion to navy shirt in history.’
14. FIRE
The afternoon brought tropical storms, with ping-pong-ball-sized droplets pelting the silt and turning t
he village into streams of ankle-deep mud. The village’s only serious casualties were the broken arm and an elderly man whose back had been speared by a scaffold rod. One small girl had been washed several hundred metres but escaped injury, and a headcount revealed that the kids who’d been playing by the sea had all made it to the huts before the wave hit.
The coast road was blocked, so the two injured villagers were taken to the mainland in a large boat that belonged to contractors working on the hotel. Also aboard was the body of a painter, killed in a twenty-metre fall from their mobile scaffold and recovered from the jungle far behind.
The CHERUB party stayed to help the villagers. Drinking water was drawn from a standpipe linked to a deep well, but the supply was contaminated with silt, so the trainees scouted for dry timber and built a fire to boil it.
Although Langkawi was rapidly developing, with modern infrastructure and tourist resorts, this north-western tip was insulated by the expanse of jungle in which the trainees would have conducted their final exercise. Aizat’s motorboat was the village’s main connection to the mainland and the rest of Langkawi, bringing post, fuel and supplies and taking the fish they caught to the twice weekly market.
Repairing the boat was number-one priority and Kyle provided muscle for two elderly villagers. In less than two hours they’d cut and replaced damaged hull sections with timbers from one of the collapsed houses. By pure luck, Aizat had been servicing the outboard motor and it had remained dry and undamaged on the floor of his hut.
Large and Speaks worked with another group of villagers. Three of the four huts hit by the scaffold were beyond repair, so they were cannibalised and their timbers used to shore up damaged sections of the remainder.
There was no need for plumbers, electricians or carpenters because the elderly men and women had a lifetime of familiarity with homes built by their own hand. The instructors and trainees marvelled at how everyone got on with things and realised how poorly British householders would have coped in a similar situation, huddling in the church hall waiting for the insurance company.
As hours passed and the most urgent jobs got completed, human nature surfaced. Villagers bickered over what job to do next, who would sleep where and whether a note should be kept of what materials had been taken and used from the destroyed huts so that the original owners could be paid. Two women rowed viciously over a DVD player and an almost-new gas hotplate being removed from one of the damaged houses.
But the community held together. As night drew in the sun had baked a dry crust on to the silt and there was a sense of the village getting back on its feet. Three women used the trainees’ fire to steam rice and cook a huge fish curry.
The village’s mains electricity had gone down, but the supply was always erratic and Aizat set up their portable generator, linked to a string of light bulbs.
A television and satellite dish were rigged up near the fire. Tired and aching, the CHERUB party and the villagers gathered around, gawping at images of much greater devastation in Thailand and Indonesia.
Kyle had made friends with a girl of about five, who lay with her tired head resting on his thigh. He noticed how the huts and people in the village where he sat bore extraordinary similarities to the destroyed landscape littered with dead bodies on the TV screen. Some of the worst damage had taken place on the Thai coast, less than a hundred kilometres away.
The presenter on the satellite news channel spoke in Malay, so Aizat translated anything important for Kyle.
‘She just said Malaysia only suffered minor damage from shadow waves. Less than a hundred casualties reported so far. Some damage to resorts along the northern coast of Langkawi island, and tourists are all being evacuated to the mainland.’ Then he added, ‘Good bloody riddance, hope they don’t come back.’
Kyle smiled. ‘You’ve got a thing about tourists and hotels, haven’t you?’
‘The government feels villages like this are in the way of progress,’ Aizat explained, as he looked across and noticed that Wati was dozing off on the ground beside him. ‘Don’t fall asleep until you’ve eaten dinner,’ he warned her. ‘You’ll wake up hungry and then moan at me.’
As Wati rubbed dirty palms in her eyes and yawned, Kyle watched graphics on the TV screen. You didn’t need to speak Malay to understand figures on the maps: two hundred thousand-plus dead in Indonesia, thirty thousand in Thailand, more than ten thousand in Burma and untold thousands on islands across the Pacific. He’d been dragged to an Arsenal match with James once, and realised that it added up to six Highbury stadiums full of people.
The mood lightened as the women began serving bowls of fish curry and rice. Kyle wasn’t used to eating food with his fingers and there was much laughter as he dropped scalding curry-coated fish down his leg and hopped about frantically as he rubbed it off.
Out at sea a large motorboat was coming in on the tide. A group of village natives who worked on the mainland had chartered the boat after hearing about the shadow wave. Kids abandoned their curry bowls and charged out into the surf to greet parents they usually only saw once or twice a month.
Kyle’s little friend was soon in the arms of a mother and teenaged uncle, but Wati came back looking disappointed.
‘Mum works in an office in Kuala Lumpur,’ Aizat explained. ‘That lot work in the factories.’
Wati looked sad as she watched kids with their parents. Most were treated to small gifts or chocolate bars from backpacks, before dragging their parents away to show them the damaged huts.
Many told the story of how Dante and the tourists from the Starfish Hotel had gone under the roof to rescue the twins. Earlier in the day there was work to do and people had got on with it, but now Dante looked embarrassed as he became a star, posing for shots on camera phones, shaking hands and smiling self-consciously.
Kyle stared through the crackling fire as the cooks steamed a fresh pot of rice and began frying fish to bulk up the curry for the new arrivals. Apart from a couple of restless naps on the plane, he’d not slept in more than thirty hours and his muscles ached from clearing debris and lugging wood. But the sense of the community pulling together to repair their homes and resume their lives gave him a warm feeling that made him forget his tiredness.
The tide was coming in and with the coast road unlit and blocked, Large gathered Kyle and the trainees together for the drive back to the hotel. They weren’t flying out for two days, so Large promised that they’d come back and continue to help with the clean-up next morning, while Mrs Leung offered free rooms at the Starfish Hotel to anyone with nowhere to sleep.
The Land Cruiser looked rather battered. The crumpled tailgate wouldn’t open after supporting the weight of the house, so three of the trainees had to clamber over the rear seats to squat in the boot. They were about to set off when a column of headlights appeared on the road behind the village. The lead vehicle was a wheeled bulldozer.
‘Looks like they’ve cleared the road already,’ Large said admiringly. ‘They’re pretty efficient in these parts.’
Behind the bulldozer were two vans filled with police officers and an empty bus. After helping out all day, the CHERUB group were curious about the arrival of the police. They all started getting out of the Land Cruiser again and heading up the beach to see if the cops had any useful information.
A stocky police officer jumped out of the lead truck. He had four stripes on his blazer and held a loudhailer. Villagers were strolling up the beach to say hello and tell him that they were getting by and didn’t need any help, but instead of engaging them the officer yelled through the megaphone.
‘He’s telling the villagers that they have to leave,’ Mrs Leung translated. ‘All beach villages are being evacuated as a safety measure.’
Kyle was surprised by this, but he supposed that there was a slight risk of a second earthquake and it was fairly typical for people to overreact after a dramatic event.
‘I’d better go up there,’ Large said. ‘They said about tourists evacuating
on the news, so I’ll see what they want us to do.’
Kyle, Speaks, Mrs Leung and most of the trainees began walking between the huts towards the road. By the time they arrived, the police chief was arguing furiously with several adult villagers.
‘The villagers don’t want to leave their land, but the police are insisting,’ Mrs Leung explained.
As the senior officer argued, more men were coming out of the back of the van. They looked decidedly unfriendly, wearing riot helmets, body armour and carrying clubs or baseball bats. Most didn’t wear uniform and they looked more like thugs for hire than police officers.
Mr Large pushed his way between the villagers and looked down at the tubby police chief. ‘You speak English?’ he asked.
‘Tourists must return to their hotels and await instructions,’ the chief said resolutely.
‘Why do these villagers have to leave?’ Large asked. ‘They’re capable of looking after themselves.’
‘Safety,’ the chief shouted, looking at Large as if he was simple-minded. ‘Governor’s emergency regulations. This is government land. The villagers must do as they’re told.’
‘This is our land,’ Aizat shouted furiously. ‘Our families have been here for hundreds of years.’
Several of the villagers roared in agreement. More had joined the crowd until practically the whole village was lined up facing the police.
The chief turned towards a group of his men, then pointed at Large. ‘Escort these tourists back to their hotel.’
A group stepped towards Large. He wasn’t easily intimidated, but several of them had handguns on their belts and looked like the kind of chaps who’d use them. At the same time another group of thugs had broken off and begun encircling the villagers.
‘The coach is waiting,’ the chief shouted. ‘You have five minutes to gather belongings. Anyone who resists the emergency evacuation order will be arrested and severely punished.’