Read Online No Comebacks by Frederick Forsyth - Free Book Online Page B

and stood where the camp fire had been. He looked around at the long grass, the broom and the gorse in its sandy soil.
    'Visha serp,' he called out to the hidden viper. 'O venomous snake, can you hear me? You have done what I brought you so far from the hills of Rajputana to achieve. But you were supposed to die. I should have killed you myself, had it all gone as I planned, and thrown your foul carcass in the river.
    'Are you listening, deadly one? Then hear this. You may live a little longer but then you will die, as all things die. And you will die alone, without a female with which to mate, because there are no snakes in Ireland.'
    The saw-scaled viper did not hear him, or if it did, gave no hint of understanding. Deep in its hole in the warm sand beneath him, it was busy, totally absorbed in doing what nature commanded it must do.
    At the base of a snake's tail are two overlapping plate-scales which obscure the cloaca. The viper's tail was erect, the body throbbed in ancient rhythm. The plates were parted, and from the cloaca, one by one, each an inch long in its transparent sac, each as deadly at birth as its parent, she was bringing her dozen babies into the world.

THE EMPEROR
    'AND THERE'S ANOTHER THING,' said Mrs Murgatroyd.
    Beside her in the taxi her husband concealed a small sigh. With Mrs Murgatroyd there was always another thing. No matter how well things were going, Edna Murgatroyd went through life to the accompaniment of a running commentary of complaints, an endless litany of dissatisfaction. In short, she nagged without cease.
    In the seat beside the driver, Higgins, the young executive from head office who had been selected for the week's vacation at the expense of the bank on the grounds of being 'most promising newcomer' of the year, sat silent. He was in foreign exchange, an eager young man whom they had only met at Heathrow airport twelve hours earlier and whose natural enthusiasm had gradually ebbed before the onslaught of Mrs Murgatroyd.
    The Creole driver, full of smiles and welcome when they selected his taxi for the run to the hotel a few minutes earlier, had also caught the mood of his female passenger in the back, and he too had lapsed into silence. Though his natural tongue was Creole French, he understood English perfectly well. Mauritius, after all, had once been a British colony for 150 years.
    Edna Murgatroyd babbled on, an inexhaustible fountain of alternating self-pity and outrage. Murgatroyd gazed out of the window as Plaisance airport fell away behind them and the road led on to Mahebourg, the old French capital of the island, and the crumbling forts with which they had sought to defend it against the British fleet of 1810.
    Murgatroyd stared out of the window, fascinated by what he saw. He was determined he would enjoy to the full this one-week holiday on a tropical island, the first real adventure of his life. Before coming, he had read two thick guidebooks on Mauritius and studied a large-scale map of it from north to south.
    They passed through a village as the sugarcane country began. On the stoops of the roadside cottages he saw Indians, Chinese and Negroes, along with the métis Creoles, living side by side. Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines stood a few yards down the road from a Catholic chapel. His books had told him Mauritius was a racial mix of half a dozen main ethnic groups and four great religions, but he had never seen such a thing before, at least, not living in harmony.
    There were more villages passing by, not rich and certainly not tidy, but the villagers smiled and waved. Murgatroyd waved back. Four scrawny chickens fluttered out of the way of the taxi, defying death by inches, and when he looked back they were in the road again, pecking a seemingly impossible living from the dust. The car slowed for a corner. A small Tamil boy in a shift came out of a shack, stood at the kerb, and lifted the hem of his garment to the waist. Beneath it he was naked. He began to pee