Chapter 1

Once Upon a Time:

1996

Bob was in 'town' once for fresh fruit and vegetables three years ago, when a four wheel drive tourist bus arrived full of Japanese tourists. Five of the younger and middle-aged women then disappeared, until he dropped them back to the mainland in his half-cabin cruiser four days later. The four wheel drive bus was made three and a half days late on its itinerary, and the driver had to carry them onto the bus so that they could continue with their journey. None of the women would discuss it, and two were unable to make full use of their legs for at least a day after returning, having over-exerted muscles that they hadn't used since they were young honeymooners.

Ms Hartley thanked each and every one of them personally for the rest it supplied her, but she also wouldn't talk about it. She found that she had become insanely jealous, so all her work of talking the women into seeing the island and her receiving some surcease from Bob's constant lust for her had backfired. The surprise for her when she moved here -- given her knowing what her appearance was as she had a mirror, and was a virgin when she arrived here for good reason -- was that Bob didn't even see that. He still has absolutely no idea what another's physical attractiveness means or what other people mean by it. When Uncle Helen is done up to the nines Bob can be heard to tell him/her how pretty he/she is.

1999

Instead of returning straight home after delivering his niece to her first day of school, Bob headed for the café to share a pot of tea with Tilly's Uncle Helen, who shaves twice a day. The last 'tourist' who thought it was prudent to rob his/her café had his spine broken in four places. He/she had promised the 'local' police constable, via the high-powered radio telephone, that he/she wouldn't kill him before the cop undertook the two-plus hour journey from Bungun River Settlement to arrest the accused thief, then accused attempted thief, then accused quadriplegic attempted thief; that definition changed the longer that the young black constable took to arrive. As black time is indefinable compared to white, it took him three days; unfortunately for the thief.

The deed was well advertised State wide and the worst crime -- the only crime -- the area had had reported since 1949, outside of dole bludging -- which is considered, at worst, the local non-contact sport. Uncle Helen was placed on a six-month good behaviour bond. He/she, its, his/her's sexuality is demonstrably ambivalent, as she has a clitoris almost as long as Bob's mighty three inch (diameter) sun-browned penis, and the cutest little virginal vagina you would ever want to see (in Bob's opinion, who is biased and the only local person to have ever witnessed those physical attributes).

He/she stands a titch over two metres tall, about six-six, and has a heavy set woman's visage, except for the perpetual two-day growth which only takes six hours to grow, and requires shaving four times a day but he/she doesn't bother more than twice. He plucks his/her eyebrows, with naturally long plush eyelashes, and his/her hair is usually permed up sixties vintage bouffant style à la Marge Simpson, although it can make him/her look like a New Guinea fuzzy wuzzy native if it's allowed to grow out a little. That depends on whether the local hairdresser-cum-bottle shop proprietor, marriage celebrant and newsagent Hans Vonnegut is sober or not that week.

He/she is a fashion trendy whose sack-like floral dresses' hemlines are usually just below the knee, and he/she wears army boots that are always spit polished to a mirror-like sheen, and jungle green spats to colour match the verdigris in the copper bangles on his/her wrists. His/her chest has neither a male-type muscularity or a female breast, but are broad and flat breast-like objects, all muscle with very large feminine nipples.

Oh, and he/she is always wearing his/her low slung, high-carat perfect diamond ear rings; about fifteen perfectly matched flawless massive stones under each ear, styled in the French fashion, which almost reach his/her shoulders while hanging from his/her ears. They are the envy of every woman who sees them and they are valued in the vicinity of Aussie two hundred thousand dollars ... each ... wholesale ... in 1995. Arnu and Darling Emmeline Garrigeld, Tilly's mother and her husband (not respectively), had them made especially in South Africa in 1985 for his/her thirty-fifth birthday, and had a friend smuggle them to him/her in their on-board luggage. (For Bob's birthday, Arnu was too embarrassed to send anything to his closest friend, and Darling Emmeline sent her natural brother Bob a card saying 'Happy Anniversary to My Wife'.)

It may surprise the fashion aware that it was her Uncle Helen who ran up Tilly's new school dress, right in the style which he/she makes for herself and out of the same used 1950's curtain material; then again, at the amusement heard in some circles, maybe it would not surprise a soul. It will be shorts and singlets and barefooted for Tilly after that first day on.

"Tilly, how's Junior going with that English composition? He has? Goodness gracious me, three pages. Can you read it?"

The Nam Express: 1961-1968.

How does Bob know these little intimate details about Helen, where he is the sole person other than the subject who does? Harry Harrison, Arthur Garfield and Bob Pearson had the dubious pleasure of doing Viet Nam together. Helen wasn't Helen then, he/she was Harry Harrison, who was 'sick' the day they had that medical inspection. He/she then broke into the centre to fix the papers to make sure that they knew he was male. That was Harry's profession: breaking and entering and safe cracking, with no official police record, and as cunning as the proverbial shithouse rat.

Arthur Garfield's true name was Arnu Garrigeld, but the conscription board would not recognise the seven foot two inch, two point two metre, half Kanaka/half North Queensland aboriginal's tribal name, so they graciously accepted Arthur Garfield in its stead. He neglected to tell them that at eighteen he was an elder of his tribe, which accounted for the interesting patterned scarring all over his body: not teenage gang knife fighting as they had supposed. To them he was an upstart black who wasn't even legally Australian; it was 1961, and the constitution wouldn't be changed to include Native Australians until 1967. He was hearse-shade black and had the looks of a movie star. Bob Fischer, né Pearson, loved the man like a brother.

The local island, discovered (ha, ha) by Captain James Cook in his good ship Endeavour in 1770, was part of his heritage, and he has his family name officially in the government list of gazetted place names, so his name is more Australian then theirs. Humiliation is one of the crosses you must bear when you are superior in every way to the bigots that surround you.

Bob and Harry met Arthur during basic training, then all three were seconded to 1^st Commandos for their skills training, where it was discovered they had little to be taught and were already fitter than the trainers. It was noted in his military files that if they weren't careful, Bob Pearson had the propensity of becoming a psychotic serial killer. Harry could have told them that it was way too late for that. At the age of eighteen years there were only four people that Bob wouldn't kill if prompted to without a twinge of conscience; and to them he was fanatically loyal.

Bob Fischer wasn't Bob Fischer then but as has been noted, Bob Pearson; his previously held surname was no longer a name he would use in polite society. Bob had, at his then age of seventeen, abducted his newly-born baby sister from their mother's home after their mother had been killed in a domestic with one of their many fathers whose surname he and his sister carried, if not his genes. Bob reduced the world's population by one worthless arsehole, and had made it disappear as if the offender, Virgil Pearson, had escaped and was on the run.

His sister was placed in the care of Mother Harrison's Clan, with whom he had shared a profession from eight years of age on instead of going to the traditional schools. The Harrison Clan were a large white tribe of good honest thieves and contract murderers, who Bob trusted more than he trusted the cops, or the child protection people, or church do-gooders, or ... well you can get the picture. He was also Mother Harrison's official protection -- read body guard and lead contract murderer -- but the conscription people would have supposedly put paid to that anyway.

In Viet Nam they were initially attached to 1^st Commando Regiment, then immediately detached so that they could become an unofficial hit squad, usually around the northern capitol Ha-noi, but often along the track hunting out Vietcong and North Vietnamese higher-ranked officers. It is a credit to their skills that they were never detected by the locals. Whilst on duty they only returned to base four times, where they also weren't recognised, and while still being under orders they did their own thing, not having any official chain of command.

At the beginning they didn't know who their unofficial employer was, but when they finally received their violent DCM (Don't Come Monday) from whomevers' attempt to cancel their contract, whomever received a hell of a shock back in reply. The three then altered their focus of interest away from big-wig Vietcong and North Vietnamese military leaders and politicians. The Australian Army were a little ambivalent about receiving back their 'poor little lambs that had lost their way, baa, baa, baa', but who was going to tell them that directly to their faces?

Three more attempts on their lives put paid to a third of the CIA's active population in South Nam. The team had used their usual 'attack is the better form of defence' strategy, and it was then decided, in the same place and by the same personnel that had decided to retire them, that the better part of valour was doing something else ... absolutely ... anything ... else: discretion be fucked. The three killers weren't a party to that decision, so they continued to attack their original management.

Long Tan and Bien Hoa-Long Binh were a cake walk in comparison, as all they were dealing with there were the enemy. Harry did an impeccably undetected B&E on CIA headquarters (a rundown French import/export store-front), and had on paper the client list of unwitting teams which had been targeting them. They also learned about the short pudgy balding guy who was locally attributed to making the decision that they were too high a risk to be allowed to remain operating and alive due to the looming end of their army careers after three full tours without returning home for R & R. After Harry's interference, his safe was also short around three million dollars US; the money tagged to be used to bribe the local government hierarchy.

None of the team wished to go to Washington at that time to finish the job, a decision they would later regret. Arnu intelligently placed the explosives where they would do the most good -- the authorities blamed the explosion on the Vietcong -- and Bob was the sniper who fatally embarrassed the bodyguards of the lowly French import/exporter who believed in making decisions. It was that last death which made the next attack on home soil almost inevitable.

Once repatriated, Bob gathered up his half-sister Emmeline, now seven years old after her brother's three tours of duty. He retired officially as Sergeant Major of the 1^st Commando Regiment, although not in practice. He first had to sit through a short stint in the brig for insubordination and assault against a newly-attained second lieutenant rank, who had been thinking he was God on his first day in Nam. The MPs went to interview the officer to prepare the charges for a quick court-martial, but, unfortunately, he had disappeared and was never seen again. Someone had neglected to tell the man that God is a Sergeant Major.

1968 -- 1975

Bob Pearson, now Fischer, with darling Emmeline Pearson, now Fischer, joined both Helen Harrison and Arnu Garrigeld. They went straight to Arnu's native tribal lands, expecting at least one further assault on them since the Yanks are nothing if not bloody-minded. The last two attempts had been by especially-imported mob freelancers, and they expected nothing less this time. Luckily they had 'persuaded' the freelancers to 'share' their wealth, so they had come back almost a million US dollars better off from them alone, which was a lot of money in 1968.

This last team of three were even better paid. A killing on friendly soil is usually frowned on, and they divulged where their money was while they were being held naked and slowly revolving in a seabed of Irukandji jellyfish, for the promise that Bob and Co would kill them if they told the truth. The pain from the Irukandji is permanent, and even if a victim doesn't die they most certainly will have wished they had. The most common reason for dying after being stung, even if only superficially, is by shock leading to heart attack. Ultra-fit contract murderers do not have heart attacks.

During their time with Mother Harrison and the army, Bob and Helen, working as a torture team, learned that pain by itself was very limited in extracting the truth. People could resist pain, even extreme pain, if they were highly motivated enough. With Arnu in their team and with the aide of the South and Northern Vietnamese Army's Intelligence Branches -- often not cooperatively given -- they learned of the body's neural knots where no resistance could be built up, and any applied pressure was completely debilitating.

The jellyfish stinger could affect every neural knot, including the ones they didn't know about. Their money was liberated by Harry and invested using his expertise with money and its distribution thereof. That hit team immediately became excellent mud crab and lobster bait, mainstays in Helen's café/restaurant -- especially cooked with locally grown Thai chilli and Asian vegetables from local farms. Bob still supplies the muddies and lobster, but thinks that Helen short changes on the chilli; whereas everyone else thinks his chilli is too hot to eat.

1975-1983

Helen and his/her sibling Bob together reared Emmeline as her surrogate mother and father. Arnu, being bent that way, became her lover -- his word in his mind. Anyone else would have called him her paedophile rapist, and in that Darling Emma knew no better, never informing her brother or stepmother/uncle.

Helen's family had done a diligent job of making sure that Emmeline knew who her brother was, especially about his military achievements, as well as how to be one of the best pickpockets on the east coast. On the island, Bob taught her the offensive skill -- almost the art -- of sniping, and also hand-to-hand combat skills, including the assassin skills of which he was so rightfully proud. Young Bob was, in his earliest years of eight to eighteen, a professional assassin held in awe by his contemporaries; an untrained natural, totally conscienceless. He and his team retired at the top of their game, which is the way to go; and so rare in that industry whilst still remaining alive.

Helen found that he/she liked the lifestyle of the top north, though he/she lacked an outlet for his/her expert B&E skills, but our favourite local native Arnu became bored shitless out in the sticks, which was the reason he volunteered for Viet Nam in the first place. For eight years, Bob and Arnu shared his namesake island with Darling Emmeline, which is what all and everyone called her, until one day Arnu and the then fifteen year old girl disappeared.