The Missionary Position: A Tale of Adventure on the South Seas

By J. M. Park

It's the South Pacific of the 1930s, and the Japanese Empire is making its move...

Enter Jack Halloway, a tramp pilot by trade who flies where the money takes him. Unfortunately for Jack that's usually into trouble. So when a beautiful young debutante asks for passage to a remote jungle village where her missionary friend has gone missing, he's not surprised when his little voice starts whispering there's more to her story than she's telling. But times are tough and her money is good, so he takes the job anyway. With a little luck, some good flying and his trusty second mate by his side, maybe he'll even live long enough to tell someone about it.

Told in the tradition of yesteryear's pulp-styled fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. M. Park
• Release date: Jul 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476489056

J. M. Park

J. M. Park is a former navy pilot who spent a fair share of time in remote corners of the world. He's lived on an island in the South Pacific, transited the South Seas and Asia, been a white water river guide in the Sierra Nevadas, traveled Europe on a motorcycle camping and hosteling along the way, and does his best to be anywhere but under a roof. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a master's degree in international relations. He currently resides in the American West. You can find him at : http://www.thejmikepark.com

Book preview

The Missionary Position:

A Tale of Adventure on the South Seas

By

J. M. Park

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by J.M. Park

http://www.thejmparkhangout.blogspot.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, posted on any website, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, scanning, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations in reviews or articles.

For the believers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter 1

(Somewhere in the Philippine jungles, 1937)

I met my ex-wife in a place like this years ago. The tropics of the South Pacific. Philippines this time. A place where Hell’s bellows singe the underbelly of the world, blasting tentacles of flame from deep beneath the earth. And where I’m convinced every volcanic belch is let only to saturate its sorry inhabitants to the verge of misery with hot vaporous plumes of sulfur and ash. A place that when you walk into a bar the first words out of the cute girl’s mouth – once she realizes you’re not local and thus must be pocketing some green – are ‘suckie, suckie…one bucki-eeee.’ And the only thing keeping the jungle from annexing villagers’ lands is the constant roll of foot traffic from passersby on their expeditious ways up tributaries to nowhere looking to do nothing good.

God, I love these places, I think, as my putter-jockey maneuvers our tin johnboat into the yellow glow of a bamboo and rattan village at the water’s edge. He’s a sweaty local chap draped in rags that must’ve been clothes a few years ago, and a smile full of toothless gums and betel nut stains. It’s dark now, not pitch if you’re above the jungle canopy, but down here where trees creep over the water like rafters on a covered New England bridge there’s no light except what emanates from a few low wattage bulbs in the village. Their scant glow – collectively powered by a single gasoline generator no bigger than the motor pushing our boat to shore – barely seeps through upright cracks inherent to the huts’ bamboo and rattan construction; those huts fortunate enough to have electricity, that is. My khaki pants and shirt cling like second skins, tugging at my arms and legs as I shift my weight in preparation for landfall. At least the bugs died off with the sun, I muse.

Lovely, stinking, lively, thieving, sensually diseased Batalaan. You won’t find this village on any map not drawn by hand – that’s a fact. It’s a favorite of the uninitiated. Smugglers and thieves mostly, and the jungle inhabitants who’ve learned to make a buck off them; all content to hideaway in a mud hole forever lost to the world on the shores of a tributary set deep in the bush.

Our boat hits shore in a soft skid and the sandy mud catches it with a muffled sucking sound. In seconds we have it tied off to a stake next to three other skiffs and my putter-jockey’s heading up to one of the three shanty’s lucky enough to be lit looking to lose what I just paid him on a suckie-suckie. I’m not far behind after grabbing my knapsack from under the well, but I’ll be holding on to my money tonight. This evening’s trip is about business, and while it’s true wife number two might end up smokin’ someone else’s pole behind the walls of that wicker furniture they call a bar, I need the money more than I do the pleasure.

The other two huts lucky enough to be lit I know from a previous trip to be the village elder’s – perk of the job, I guess – and what passes as a hotel for the village’s more ‘upscale’ clientele. I walk up the shore and pause by the bar. A lively raucous of toughs’, sluts’, drunks’ and vagrants’ voices carry over the watery air, but none of them sound or look like westerners, so my clients must be in the hotel further up.

I’m a cautious man. Before I enter the hut that serves as the village hotel I pull my .45 out of the bag and slide it between my belt and right butt cheek. I look up and smile at the sign. It reads Hotel Imperiale, impeccably carved in wistful letters set deep in a local mahogany plank before someone nailed it over the ten foot by ten foot hut’s curtained entrance.

Hello? Ay kahit sino ka dito? I say in a loud but discreet manner, grimacing at my horrible Tagalog and wondering all the while why it’s not better given the time I’ve spent in these parts. I hear a stir in response to my call. Room for one more in there? I add in English.

Oh, comes a man’s startled British voice. More sounds of commotion – paper crinkling, wooden crate boxes slamming shut – Just a moment, he says, and I adjust my appraisal from British to American aristocratic. And then, Alright. Come in.

I do – just my head to start – cradling my hand over the pistol in my pants behind me. I realize the rattan wall won’t do much to stop a bullet, but at least its cover of some sort. A man and woman sit at a dinky homemade table in the center of the hut, an oil lamp between them offering a surprisingly bright glow. Three cots, one for each wall, line the room, and I see they’ve picked theirs on opposite sides of the shanty hotel. They look like they’ve just crawled out of the jungle with their mud-splotched trousers and used-to-be-white but now yellow shirts. Even through the grime I can tell the woman is striking, though. She’s got the soft lines and bodacious curves of a Hollywood starlet and all the sudden I don’t mind how the humidity makes all our clothes cling so tight. Her partner – and, Lord, I hope that’s all he is – has a few years on her and besides the dirt and sweat he’s also holding a wadded up jacket in his lap.

You Jack Halloway? he asks.

I’m looking at her when I tell him I am. And you can put your target plinker away. There’s no one out here but me.

A little embarrassed, he undresses his snub-nosed .38 revolver, tossing it and the jacket on the cot beside him. Sorry. Can’t be too careful. Come in. Take a stool, he gestures.

I take the only other stool at the table and feel uncomfortable with the hut’s curtained entrance at my back.

I’m Blake. She’s Lisa. We don’t shake hands. Germs are a nasty thing in the jungle where, unless you know your plants, drugs are hard to come by.

I understand you’re looking for passage.

They nod. Lisa says, A man at the embassy in Manila recommended you. I melt as the husky sound of her voice rubs up against my ears.

That’s where you two are from? I ask, trying to gauge who I’m dealing with a bit better.

Not originally, no, Lisa says. My family owns the Stanfield Planta…

Lisa! Blake shuts her down sternly. That’s none of his concern. I watch him lock eyes with her, but am amused at how she fights back at him with her own powerful glower. She’s not a woman to be controlled so easily.

I smother a smirk and move on. They’re amateurs. Not bad in itself, so long as they don’t pull any stupid tricks that might get me shot at, or worse. Better than some of the other alternatives I’ve dealt with from Hardwick’s assignments – Hardwick being the person I assume she’s talking about at the embassy. Messing around with his sort, agents and operatives mainly, sometimes gets tricky and was mostly work I’d taken when money was tight. Unfortunately, these days that’s most of the time. The sonuvabitch had a knack for getting me shot at, and then the gall to try and short-change me. Last time I saw him I told him not to come asking for my business anymore.

Blake talks