Singkepe’s dense monobrow twitched. ‘The tanker is bogged down two kilometres away. We need help to free it, sir.’

‘And you left it unguarded?’

A tight-lipped Kaboro turned to the rail and whistled loudly.

‘Skius! Skius!’ he called out to the crowd. ‘Nem bilong mi emi Lieutenant Kaboro. Nidim diesel. Plis helpin me. Tenkyu tumas.’

Pidgin was PNG’s default lingua franca, a polyglot language developed in the nineteenth century to deal with the fact there was no common language. The crowd stared impassively, and Kaboro directed his next words to the source of their reluctance – the young men by the 4WD.

‘Koan, nogatt be a lesbaga!’

Douglas chuckled. ‘Lazy buggers – yeah, you got that right.’

The leader of the young men, a brutal-looking fellow with a jagged scar across his forehead, stepped forward insolently.

‘Hamas you baim, captain?’

Kaboro mused briefly before announcing, ‘150.’

The young man grinned as if this was a fine joke. Eventually they settled on 300.

‘And that is what is wrong with this fucking country.’ Douglas shook his head as the soldiers climbed back into the Land Cruiser and headed down the road after the Hilux. Within twenty minutes, they returned with an orange AWD fuel tanker. None of the vehicles was muddy and no one looked as if they had been exerting themselves. If Kaboro was angry at being diddled, he gave no sign of it, and got on with checking the quantity and quality of the fuel. Meanwhile, Singkepe and his troops exchanged pleasantries with the young men and shared cigarettes around.

‘What did I fucking tell you?’ snorted Douglas. ‘That little scam was hatched on the way in.’

Most Westerners found wantokism – PNG’s elaborate social system of allegiances – difficult to rationalise. When villages were marooned islands in the jungle, and your neighbours were out to eat your brains for lunch, it was vital for social cohesion; a man was defined not by what he owned, but by how much he gave away. In a twenty-first-century context it had led to endemic corruption. Money earmarked for roads, hospitals and police cars tended to vanish without trace. While it was a form of wealth redistribution, often those most in need missed out.

By mid-afternoon, the steel superstructure of the Albany shimmered like a barbecue hotplate, and in the near 100 per cent humidity, distractions like reading a book were impossible as pages became sodden and fell apart. Douglas took shelter under a small fan in the galley and nursed a tepid beer, while Kaboro cleaned out the captain’s cabin in preparation for the Indonesians.