The Missionary Position

Chapter 1

Jayawijaya Mountains, Irian Jaya

1977

“What the hell is that?” Angie grumbled as an updraft jolted her Cessna. She grabbed her binoculars from her knapsack and stripped the newspapers off her windscreen.

Fighting to control the plane and focus at the same time, she cursed as she shook her dark hair from her eyes. ‘I gotta get this cut one of these days,’ she lied to herself again. Angie knew how the men watched her and she knew what turned them on. It had been that way since high school and she’d liked it then, too. But sometimes being a woman was a bother,’ she sighed. ‘Like now,’ she swept her hair back again, cursed her vanity and concentrated on the stone peaks bursting from the forest floor. Cradling a creamy white glacier in the their rocky palm, the mountains held an ocean of ice and snow high above the tropical island’s dense jungle. She scanned the surface, glowing white gold in the rising sun, as the shadow of her Cessna slid across its undulations.

Naked brown natives were fleeing across the glacier in obvious fear. As Angie wheeled her plane around for another pass, she saw armed soldiers cresting the ridge of ice. Dressed in black fatigues, combat boots, black cowls and berets, the soldiers kneeled and took aim at the scrambling natives. They raised their rifles. Her airplane’s engine drowned out the noise, but Angie saw the white flashes burst from their barrels. She swung her gaze back to the natives. Three men staggered and fell. Angie circled the scene again. The natives struggled and rose from the blotchy red snow. They lurched and staggered along the glacier till they finally fell and lay motionless. The advancing soldiers fired point blank into the twitching bodies.

Angie watched in horror. One soldier pointed up at her plane. Her eyes widened. The killers raised their rifles. She stared, mesmerized. They prepared to fire. Angie saw the muzzle flashes. She snapped out of her shock and hauled back on the yoke. The Cessna wheeled away. She banked southeast toward the mission at Dekai. She had to reach Father Frank. Tell him what she’d seen. Frank had lived with the Asmat for ten years now. He’d be royally pissed when he found out the government was hunting his people again.

Dekai, Irian Jaya

The comments on Volente’s Midwestern Missionary Services bulletin board when Angie’d left her base in Sentani had all the optimism of a Paul Thoreaux travelogue. The pilots that flew for MMS were a decidedly more freewheeling group than the pious men and women they ferried back and forth to the interior. Their summaries of airstrip landing conditions posted at the Sentani airfield reflected the kind of humor you’d expect from people who landed small planes on inadequate runways under impossible conditions. The fact that they did the job at all attested to their faith that, in order to take off, fly and live to tell about the landing, God had damned well better be their copilot.

The notation for the landing strip at Dekai read, ‘Pig damage again. Don’t hot dog your landing.’ An ‘amen’ was added by a comic hand for emphasis. Angie remembered smiling at the notice. But after seeing the natives killed on the glacier, what she saw on the ground was no laughing matter.

Father Frank’s mission occupied a ground level hut in an isolated stilt village at the bend in the Atse River. Though populated by the upriver cousins of the area’s indigenous woodworking cannibals, the Asmat, Frank Nunzio’s neighbors had also developed a taste for his brand of Catholicism. But when Angie sighted the deserted landing strip, she knew something was wrong. She circled it once to make sure of her approach and then swung into the wind to land.

Frank and the natives of his congregation had hacked the airstrip out of the jungle. They had sunk a muddy, metal grating into the slime of the forest floor to provide traction for the planes. The steel lattice section the pigs had torn up had been patched with new mud and hammered back into place. But there were no villagers to meet the plane. And that was strange.

The natives believed that the missionary flights brought gifts from the Gods. They never failed to meet one when it appeared in the sky. They’d known about the Gods who lived in the sky long before the white missionaries came to puzzle them with their silly stories. The Asmat remembered how the white warriors spoke to their Gods through the green boxes with the long tails. The village elders had told marvelous stories of presents tumbling from the sky to the sloppy foreign soldiers after they performed their rituals. And like other miracles witnessed by other natives with a need to believe in something other than the Fates or Chance, those rituals became the basis for a new religion.