posted
Allow me to promote my new novelette (as in a miniature novel, or a long short story depending on how you look at it). I would describe it best as a genre hybrid between spy thriller and lost-world adventure. It's a tale of daring FBI agents, corrupt cops, Moroccan warriors, and savage beasts from the time before the dinosaurs!
The Sultan of Finback Isle Having broken off from the other continents two hundred and sixty million years ago, the landmass known as Finback Isle has protected a unique ecosystem in the equatorial Pacific older than the dinosaurs themselves. Only a near-extinct nation of Polynesian settlers, together with the crew of Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, have ever set foot on the island within the annals of human history.
And then Ibrahim Fawal, a native of Casablanca turned controversial new Chief of Police in Los Angeles, decided to establish his private winter getaway there.
Enter Abdullah and Monique Kalua, a daring husband-and-wife team of FBI agents sent to investigate the LAPD’s accelerated record of corruption and brutality under Fawal;s leadership, including the shooting of Monique’s own close relations. Their mission is to penetrate Fawal’s secret lair and bring him to justice.
Not only must they brave treacherous jungle littered with Polynesian ruins and teeming with beasts from the late Paleozoic Era, but they must also contend with the armed officers of one of the most vicious men ever to head the police of Los Angeles…the Sultan of Finback Isle!
quote:1. Welcome to Finback Isle After slamming his palm on the start button, Abdullah Kalua lowered himself to his PWC’s dashboard, popping his bronze-brown knuckles over the handles. He hooted a lyric from his favorite Hawaiian victory song as the untethered watercraft flew off from the flank of the FBI boat, the latter disappearing as a gray-and-blue speck on the azure surface of the equatorial Pacific.
He grinned with pleasure and rocked his head about, cheering for the breeze that flowed through his wavy black mane. His destination may have lain twenty degrees south and twenty-five degrees east of his father’s home archipelago—as indicated on the dashboard’s coordinate panel—but it felt fantastic to return to the tropics after almost three decades. Balmy as Los Angeles had been, its Mediterranean climate was too dry and the California current too frigid for Abdullah’s tastes.
Monique lagged ten yards behind him. He could hear only the faintest hint of her PWC’s jetting out water.
“Got to speed up, babe!” Abdullah shouted. “You’re being too cautious again!”
She sped up a mere three yards closer to her husband. “We’re taking enough risk with this already!”
“C’mon, girl, that’s what makes it fun! Admit it, who wants to enter this dude’s house the ‘proper’ way now?”
“Well, you sure don’t!”
From the horizon ahead rose a sliver of green beneath a halo of clouds. It swelled into a mass of overgrown hills and ravines grooving down from a flat plateau, with a blinding white band of beach at the bottom. To the left, the beach gave way to rocks beneath a low black cliff.
Holding his hands over his eyes in imitation of a surveying explorer, Abdullah hummed out loud an iconic tune from a certain movie score that John Williams had composed in the early 1990’s. “There it is! Magellan’s Finback Isle! Da-dun, da-da-dun, da-da-dun bong, bong, bong—”
Monique roared out an annoyed groan. “You sure chose the corniest theme for the moment!”
“What else would you have chosen for this particular island? How about the one from Jurassic World? Bong, da-dun, da-dun, la-la, la-la…”
He continued to “sing” out tracks from both films’ soundtracks until the splashing of his wife’s accelerating watercraft drowned out his voice. With a vengeful snicker from Monique, the starboard of her PWC’s bow thrust into the portside of Abdullah’s stern with a banging bump. One of his hands slipped off a handle over the jolt.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! These are government property, remember? Our taxes pay for their repairs!”
Monique pointed ahead with widened, horrified eyes. “Then you really should—watch out!”
The hull of Abdullah’s PWC grazed over the slanted face of a black rocky outcropping. The craft soared high into the air until its bow smashed into the cliff’s upper lip. Flung off his mount’s seat, Abdullah collided face-first onto the coarse trunk of a stout and palm-like giant cycad. The fronds of tree-ferns, club mosses, and pandanus trees clawed him as he bounced all the way down to the mossy floor.
A flock of scarlet honeycreeper birds fluttered in panic beneath the treetops. One screeched before disappearing in a burst of red feathers when a yellow-and-black blur intercepted it in one leap. Abdullah blinked thrice and squinted up from where he lay without spotting the creature again. He wouldn’t know for sure, but there weren’t supposed to be any wild cats on Finback Isle. Right?
Abdullah gave his arms and legs a shake to wake them back up. He winced from the strain of a hundred sores as he raised his torso up to his knees. All those scratches and cuts had ruined the tattoos on his shoulders and pectorals, erasing slices of the Arabic calligraphy that flowed parallel to the swirling Hawaiian lines. The kapa designs on his swim briefs had taken on almost as much damage.
He pounded a fist on the spongy earth. “Allah damn you all. These’ll cost over half a grand for my old uncle to fix. You hear that, local plant life? Half a goddamned grand!”
His voice bounced between the trees until it subsided under the rhythmic buzzing and whining of insects interspersed with the squawks of Polynesian bird life. One thing he did not hear was even the faintest note of his wife’s PWC. Had he fallen so deep into the island’s jungle, far away from shore? Or had the watercraft turned off? Abdullah prayed that Monique had switched it off herself rather than getting into an accident like his own.
Not that she’d dare get herself into an accident like this. The woman had always been too cautious.
Ferns rustled over the crackling patter of paw-like feet over the dead leaves of the forest floor. From the shadows within the undergrowth scintillated a pair of bright green, cat-like eyes. Below them glistened a maw of elongated canines drenched wet with saliva.
Abdullah dug his fingers into the moss beneath him and froze still, the sweat chilling to ice on his brow. There weren’t supposed to be any cats on this island. Much less big cats, like leopards or jaguars. Monique had promised him so, and she wouldn’t misinform her man like that. Would she?
It did not stride to him on the underslung legs of a cat, or any other mammalian creature. Instead, it crawled forth on legs bent outward like those of a crocodile. Its hide, golden orange with black mottling, sparkled with a hairless and pebble-wrinkled texture from the dapple of sunlight overhead. As the animal encircled him, swaying its tapered tail, it brushed his skin with the sniffing nostrils on its long square-chinned muzzle.
This was no cat. This was a lizard with the fangs of a cat, and maybe a dog’s sense of smell on the side. Abdullah had seen something like this in a natural history museum when and he Monique first dated. He forgot its complicated name, but the sign had identified it as living in the Permian period tens of millions of years before the earliest dinosaurs roamed the earth. And it was almost certainly a carnivore that ate—
With a cry partway between a reptilian hiss and a cougar’s shrill roar, the creature launched itself onto Abdullah’s breast. He seized its neck with his left hand, his arm muscles buckling in their struggle to keep the fanged jaws away from his own jugular. Extending his right arm down to his tactical knife, he wriggled his fingers to pull it out by the hilt until the beast punctured his biceps with its front talons.
He pounded against the monster’s flanks with his knees. It did not even flinch once. Its jaws snapped an inch closer to Abdullah’s face with each heartbeat as the strength drained from his limbs. If he had no way of getting this savage prehistoric holdover off him, then he might as well have his mission doomed before it even began. Chief Fawal and his whole force would get off scot free, and everyone they ever wronged—not least of whom was his Monique’s own younger brother, as well as the boy’s husband—would rest in heaven unavenged.
With a cracking bang, followed by a spurt of blood and brains, the leopardine lizard rolled off Abdullah to lay limp on the earth. There stood over it the ebon silhouette of a tall svelte woman with a thick crown of Afro hair, a serpent steam still slithering out from her Glock’s barrel.
Abdullah giggled, half nervous and half thankful. “That’s my girl! I must say, though, that was a risky shot. If you missed, you could’ve killed me.”
Monique lent her hand out to her husband with a smirk. “And you said I was too cautious.”
“I never said you always would be.”
He straightened his back and brushed specks of dirt and blood off his body. “So, what happened to you in the meantime? You found a safe landing place?”
After slipping her pistol back in its holster on the thong of her leopard-print bikini, Monique unsheathed a machete from her opposite hip. “A little to the north, near some old ruins on the beach. Stay close and keep your eyes on the foliage at all times.”
She crouched beside the dead creature’s tail and hacked it off in a double chop.
“What is that thing, anyway?” Abdullah asked. “Some kind of extinct lizard?”
“Don’t you remember seeing these at the museum on our first date? It’s a gorgonopsid. They’re more related to us than to lizards.”
“Right, they’re mammal-like reptiles, from before the dinosaurs.”
Monique hauled the gorgonopsid’s tail onto her shoulder. “They’re not reptiles, either. They’re synapsids, as are all mammals.”
Abdullah shrugged. “Whatever. They should have died out alongside their mainland cousins two hundred and fifty million years ago. Wait, I did get that number right, didn’t I?”
“Almost. Give or take an extra million years or so. Let’s get going, we don’t want another hungry Paleozoic relic overhearing us in this jungle.”
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic