The Shark God (18 page)

I met the deputy mayor of Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, somewhere in the stratosphere between Fiji and Guadalcanal. I had the window seat. He leaned into my shoulder, peered out into the blue, and exhaled into my face. Rotting carrots. Grass mulch. Compost. The deputy mayor did not wish me a pleasant stay in the Solomon Islands, nor did he recommend a favorite restaurant. But he did roll up his pant leg to show me the bullet wound in his calf. The scar was the size of his thumb and the texture of tire rubber. “I am going to kill the man who did this,” he said. “Fucking kill him.” I didn't reply. I just stared into the
deputy mayor's mouth, which was like nothing I had ever seen. His teeth were the color of rotten cedar, and his tongue lolled beneath a worrying gob of pinkish fiber. A drop of red juice had dried at the corner of his mouth, like something from a Transylvanian nightmare. It was the mouth of a betel nut addict.

I did not want to be breathing recycled air with the deputy mayor. I wanted to be crashing north toward Nukapu aboard a cargo vessel, a mission ship, a yacht, a canoe, crossing the ocean that Henry Montgomery had once crossed, whipped by salt spray and nautical hardship. It should have been easy to arrange a passage to the Solomons from Vanua Lava: Sola is the last jumping-off point for boats traveling north from Vanuatu. In theory, the two nations are just a day's sail apart. Barely ninety-three miles separate Hiu, the most northerly of Vanuatu's Banks and Torres islands, from Vanikoro, the most southerly of the Santa Cruz Group, of which Nukapu is an outlier.

But each time I shook awake the customs officer in Sola—which I did every afternoon for nearly two weeks—he assured me there were no cargo ships bound for the Solomons. Finally, he lost his patience. Why would there be a northbound cargo ship? What in God's name would it carry? Didn't I understand that Solomon Islanders had no money left to buy cargo?

There were yachts, though: a sail grew out of the horizon every day or so. Vanua Lava sits smack in the middle of the trade-wind route that carries yachties from New Zealand and Polynesia to their storm-season havens in the Gulf of Thailand. The Solomon Islands offer the next batch of good harbors on the route. With each new arrival, I would wait for the sails to come down, the anchors to fall, and the dinghies to bob toward shore. I would shave and put on a clean shirt, and then I would catch the sun-ravaged yachties on the beach and tell them my story about Bishop Patteson and my mystery island, Nukapu. We could be there in four days, I would tell them. They could drop me off on the reef
and carry on toward Torres Strait or Papua New Guinea. The yachties were universally horrified by my proposal. Hadn't I heard about the guns? The blood feuding? The pirates? The awful Chinese food? “We're not bloody idiots, mate. The Solomons are no place for children,” one yacht dad told me sternly.

It was September. I was two months into my journey, halfway through my savings, and facing the advent of the storm season. One by one, the yachties all turned west for Cairns. As I watched the last sail disappear, I realized that Sola was a dead end. My only hope of getting to the Solomons was to backtrack: hop the mail flight south through Santa Maria, Espiritu Santo, and Malekula to Port Vila, catch the weekly shuttle east to Fiji, then loop northwest again, three hours by 737 from Fiji to Honiara, on Guadalcanal. After that 2,200-mile detour, after trading the rolling uncertainty of the open ocean for the crystalline detachment of the stratosphere, I would try to reach Nukapu from the north.

Which is how I met the deputy mayor of Honiara, whose first act upon reaching his homeland was to spit a stream of crimson mucus onto the tarmac of Henderson Field, the Solomon Islands' international airport. Betel nut juice is apparently tremendous fun to spit, which is why the most striking thing about the airport was that everything was spattered blood red. The arrivals hall looked like the scene of a mass murder. The rest of the city was the same.

I was met at the airport by Morris Namoga, the manager of the national tourism bureau. Morris was a jovial man with a Rhett Butler mustache and a rugby player's physique. I had faxed him from Port Vila, promising to write happy stories about the Solomons if he helped me. I felt a pang of guilt as soon as I saw his generous grin.

Morris drummed the steering wheel and hummed the Canadian national anthem as we drove into town, trying to distract me from the storm of dust and refuse, the plastic bags that rolled like tumbleweeds across the road, the heaps of garbage that smoldered
like castles after a siege. And this, spray-painted across an abandoned building: Welcome to Hell.

“Haw! haw! Sorry about the mess,” Morris said in English. “The municipality doesn't quite have the means, haw haw, to clean up anymore.”

Honiara was perfectly safe, said Morris, before I had a chance to ask.

“And in case you are wondering, it's not true what they are saying about the deputy high commissioner of New Zealand. She was not stabbed to death. She fell on her kitchen knife.”

The heat was unbearable. Morris didn't seem to be in a hurry, so I suggested we drive out of town and go for a swim.

“Haw haw! I don't think so. No, I don't think so. Well, of course you can go, but it would not be a good idea for me to come with you. Oh, no. Guadalcanal people are still being, shall I say, assertive.”

Morris was from the island of Malaita. Malaitans controlled Honiara, he said, but they tended to get shot at if they left the city.

We passed an open-air cathedral. I could see hundreds of people inside.

“Funeral!” said Morris. “For the national minister of sport. Tsk, tsk. Very sad. Murdered two weeks ago. Father Geve—yes, he was also a Catholic priest—he went back to his constituency to talk to Harold. Not a good idea. You know about Harold Keke, of course.”

I had been hearing Harold Keke's name for weeks. Harold the militant leader. Harold the Guadalcanal nationalist, Harold the warlord, Harold the madman. Keke was all these things. He had been hiding out on Guadalcanal's storm-battered southerly Weather Coast ever since refusing to sign a peace agreement in 2000. Someone had recently convinced a gang of eleven lads from Malaita to go looking for Keke. The boys were given guns and a boat, and they buzzed around the Weather Coast until they found Keke. Or rather,
until Keke found them. He killed them all. That was three months before my arrival. People were starting to think Harold had cooled off, but then he went and put a bullet in Father Geve's head.

“Harold thinks the war is still on, which it certainly is not,” said Morris, wiping the perspiration from his neck. “None of this is good for tourism. Haw! Sorry about the mess.”

Morris left me at the Quality Motel, a fortress of steel mesh and barbed wire overlooking the port. That night I sat with the motel's guards—there were five of them, earnest young men with broad chests and billy clubs. We watched a gang fight in the orange glow of the streetlights below us, and we listened to the radio. The news was read both in English, the official national language, and Solomon Islands pidgin, which floated in a linguistic swamp between Bislama and English. On the news: Harold Keke had sent a communiqué from the Weather Coast, saying Father Geve had died from “lead poisoning.” Lead poisoning! Everyone got a chuckle out of that. Other news: four people were dead and six wounded in a shootout on an oil palm plantation east of the airport. Police suspected the combatants were neighbors. (But how would they know? The Royal Solomon Islands Police had been too scared to drive beyond the city limits for months.) Last item: the police had made a formal request for citizens to please stop stealing government trucks and vans.

The brawl on the street below us ended abruptly when the power failed. Honiara was left in darkness punctuated only by garbage fires and the sparks that rose out of them like fireflies. I heard one disembodied voice howling and bawling late into the night. “Go home,” it cried. “Go home, oh please go home.”

 

People in Honiara did not like to call the darkness a civil war. They did not like to call it chaos, or even conflict. The preferred phrase was “ethnic tension,” as though the past four years had
come like a migraine, a condition of suffering over which no one had any power or responsibility. But it looked like war to me.

The trouble had begun with hatred, guns, and money. Sometime during the 1990s, men on Guadalcanal became irritated with the settlers from other islands who populated Honiara and the rich plains around the capital. The Guadalcanalese were particularly bothered with the thousands of Malaitans who had arrived and prospered in the years following the nation's 1978 independence from England. Malaitans treated Honiara as if they owned it. They ran the businesses, took the government jobs, built proper houses with tin roofs and TV antennas, and they let their young men run wild at night. The locals blamed Malaitans for a string of murders, including one machete massacre on the outskirts of the capital. Malaitans were greedy, crude, and aggressive, they insisted. Malaitan
kastom
was not good
kastom
.

The Guadalcanalese armed themselves. Some borrowed hunting shotguns. Some found leftover World War II rifles, which they oiled, polished, and loaded with salvaged ammunition. Some made their own guns from drainpipes and auto parts. The gun collectors had a vague but passionate notion of “getting their island back”—even though most of them, including Harold Keke, hailed from the Weather Coast, which was nowhere near Honiara. The militants were more interested in money than justice. They demanded $20,000 for every murder allegedly committed by a Malaitan since independence. The prime minister cut a check for the compensation claimants, but it bounced. Chaos mounted. With their homemade guns, their axes and spears, and their anger, Keke and his
wantoks
crossed the island and rampaged along the north coast, chasing Malaitan settlers from their gardens and setting fire to their homes. Thirty thousand refugees—a third of the population of Guadalcanal—fled, seeking shelter in the heart of the capital or crowding onto rusty passenger ships and retreating to the provinces. Most were Malaitan. By June 1999, almost every
settlement on the outskirts of Honiara had been trashed and burned.

It was not hard for Malaitans to take their revenge. During the previous decade, the country's leaders had grown increasingly nervous about a war that was already taking place on the Papua New Guinean island of Bougainville, just an hour's paddle from the Solomons' most westerly islets. The fighting had occasionally spilled across the border, so the Solomons government bought $10 million in automatic weapons from the United States, ostensibly to protect the country from invasion. The guns were held in the Royal Solomon Islands Police armories. Since most of the police happened to be Malaitan, it was a cinch for the newly formed Malaita Eagle Force to make off with two thousand machine guns. The Eagles forced the prime minister to resign and transformed Honiara into a Malaitan fortress. They ripped off a wide-gauge machine gun from the bow of a police patrol boat, mounted it on a bulldozer, and voilà, they had built the islands' first tank.

Not to be outdone, their Guadalcanalese enemies raided a gold mine and made off with a dump truck that, with a little creative welding, became the country's second tank. The two sides blew up bridges and gas stations. They burned down hotels, churches, and villages. They strafed mission stations, and they invaded hospitals and clinics in order to finish off the wounded. Heads were mounted on sticks along the highway. Decapitated bodies began turning up amid the pineapples at the central market. Neither side would admit casualties, but at least two hundred people were killed in the first half of 2000.

Finally the militants squared off at Alligator Creek, just east of the international airport. The creek's coffee-colored waters were streaked with whorls of blood. The tension was revealed as the war it really was. The fighting let up only when a group of men wearing black shirts, black shorts, white sashes around their waists, and copper medallions strung from their necks marched to
the middle of the bridge. The Melanesian Brotherhood had had enough of the killing. They held their walking sticks in the air: sunlight reflected off shards of inlaid abalone, white snake eyes glowed. The
tasiu
prayed for peace. Some fools actually shot at them, but witnesses all agree the bullets were deflected by those magic walking sticks.

After a cease-fire was declared in 2000, Solomon Islanders managed to elect a government. International aid was flowing in. Life in Honiara should have been getting better. It was not. Every month of peace brought more dysfunction, more anarchy, more bloodshed. The economy was in the toilet. Foreign businesses had packed up and left. The government was beyond broke. The villagers who controlled the capital's water source turned off the tap each afternoon to punish the government. Machine guns were still floating around the countryside. Neighbors were settling scores in hillbilly-style shootouts. Schools had been closed. Hospitals were running out of medicine. Malaria was making a comeback. Money did not flow. Phones did not ring. Boats did not sail. Planes did not fly.

With its potholes, ruptured drains, dust, wire mesh, tree stumps, and open sores, Honiara looked like the worst of suburban Mexico City. It had the crude aesthetic of an industrial park and the haggard air of a refugee camp. The sidewalks were crowded with hundreds of makeshift stands selling cigarettes and betel nut, the city's two favorite addictions. The ground was stained indelibly red, like the hands of Lady Macbeth.

I headed down Mendana, the capital's one avenue, past the Anglican Cathedral with its memorial to Bishop Patteson, past the yachtless yacht club, past the diesel generators that kept the air conditioners flowing in Honiara's three office buildings, past the video club where Chuck Norris beat the shit out of the Vietcong again and again on a wide-screen TV, past the spit-smeared walls and unkempt grounds of the National Museum, past the Ministry
of Finance, which cowered behind a giant Slinky of razor wire. I stopped by the office of Solomon Airlines, where a relief map on the wall showed an airport at Nendo Island in the Santa Cruz Group. Nendo was three days' sail east of Honiara, but less than forty miles from Nukapu, my grail, the center of the Patteson myth. Sign me up, I said. Not so fast, said the agent. Santa Cruz was the Hotel California of flight destinations: a plane could get to the group, but it could not return. Nendo had run out of fuel months ago. The only way to get there now was by ship.