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Indiana Jones and the Waters of Destiny
Indiana Jones had been in more dangerous, more terrifying, more death-defying positions before in his long career as an adventuring archaeologist. At the moment, however, he was not sure if he could remember a specific instance. This was certainly the worst situation he’d found himself in since he retired from teaching and travelling two years ago.
It had started so innocently, as all of his adventures usually did…
“Dr Jones? Dr Jones!” The voice calling after him as he walked across the campus was insistent, demanding, exactly the kind of voice he’d become well-practised in ignoring since he gave up lecturing. The only reason he was even at the university that afternoon had been to bring an old colleague some papers from his personal collection for a dig at the ruins of Alexandria’s Great Library. He lowered his head, trademark brown fedora hat low over his face, and kept walking.
“Please, Dr Jones, just a moment?” The voice was younger than he thought, and feminine, now that he could pick it out from the noise of students and teachers milling about the quad. Chivalrous politeness and self-preservation went briefly to war. Manners won.
He turned, and saw a redhead in a tweed suit, conservatively dressed for a college campus in these times, hurriedly chasing him down while wobbling a bit on heels and trying to hold on to a bundle of papers. Just as she caught up to him, she dropped a large envelope. He bent to pick it up at the same time she did, and as they stood up, he handed it back to her.
“Here you go, Miss—?”
“Doctor, actually. Doctor Eleanor Shaw.”
“Excuse me, Doctor. What can I do for you?”
“My bosses would very much like it if you could agree to accompany me to a formal dinner in Kandahar, as a consultant. Fully at our expense, of course.”
She handed him the envelope, and he took it with his characteristically lopsided grin and a twinkle in his eye. Whether he turned down her offer of not, she was polite, certainly attractive, and she came with a proposition of some kind, not just an interview request or lecturing offer.
“That’s the most unusual dinner date invitation I’ve had in a long…” He stopped when he saw the seal on the envelope. US Department of State, Washington, DC.
“I don’t work for the government anymore, Dr Shaw. I’m sorry.”
“Well,” she said smoothly, “is there at least somewhere nearby you could buy me a cup of coffee? Seeing as I came all this way?”
He knew she was turning up the charm, but his curiosity got the better of him. Besides, how many more zoftig women would be chasing him down after this, he thought. He could feel in his aching knees and back that he was getting too old for this kind of thing.
He’d taken her offer, of course, and travelled with her to Afghanistan by air, rail, and horse caravan. He’d met the warlord the British had asked them to meet and verified that he did indeed have artefacts of early Central Asian Buddhism that needed preservation. Artefacts the warlord was willing to trade in exchange for American and British military support, of course.
The details were up to Dr Shaw and her colleagues. His part in the affair was done, once they had a ceremonial dinner to solemnise the agreement. It was the dinner which had done him in, a simple local dinner which threatened to be the end of the fabled Indiana Jones.
Indy clung on tightly to the wooden rail on either side of him, while he was suspended, half-naked and pale, sweating, trembling with chills, above the brown, sludgy water that bubbled and surged below him. He dared not look down, but if he didn’t, there was no way he would be able to escape the plunge to certain disaster beneath him.
Eyes clenched tightly shut, and praying to a God he was never entirely certain he still believed in, he edged his way carefully towards safety. Sweat poured from his body, making his hands slippery on the worn wooden handrails.
In over three decades of global adventure, this really was the worst lavatory he’d ever encountered.