Chapter 1

 

Zachary Scott was not an attractive man. Indeed, he was decidedly unattractive: tall and lanky, his body looking like the proverbial beanpole, in addition to which he lacked charm and any social graces at all.

This wasn't entirely his fault. His parents were just as unattractive and hadn't been interested in him or his upbringing. His father was interested in only one thing: money - and the power great wealth brings; his mother had been a beautiful model but the disinterest of her husband had turned her into an alcoholic and she spent most of her time in the bottle, quickly ravaging the once almost legendary beauty.

When it became apparent that none of that beauty had descended to her child, she quickly lost interest in him, leaving his early nurture to paid nannies and later, to expensive but disinterested private schools.

As his body developed into the gangling, awkward person he was to become, his school friends increasingly made fun of him, especially as he was near useless as a sportsman although unusually gifted mentally.

He retreated into books, lacking any other comfort from home or school and quickly rose to the top of the academic tree, excelling in many areas including business, language, mathematics and the humanities.

Following school, he was accepted into Harvard University and simultaneously studied business and law, easily coping with the increased workload since he had nothing else to do. As at school, his fellow students either ignored him or taunted him for his gangly body and nerdish behaviour and as before, he coped with it by sinking even further into his studies.

Although his father had never shown any interest in him as a child, upon graduation, summa cum laude, he changed his tune and brought him into his counsels. Jeremiah Scott didn't actually own any businesses. He had made his billions by shrewd investments and seemed to have an uncanny instinct in this field. Zack showed the same flair.

This didn't mean he liked his father anymore. Indeed, he loathed him for surely a child should be able to expect love from a parent, if from no-one else? Not in his case. His mother was a drunkard and his father loved only money. But he hid that hatred very well and learned everything his father knew and that, coupled with his own instincts, made him an even more formidable financial genius than the elder Scott.

At school and university he had been at first disinterested and then afraid to approach girls but, as his late-developing sexuality began to assert itself, he felt the yearnings to be with them and at his final year at Harvard made the first tentative approaches. It was disastrous. He had no idea how to interact with people at large, let alone girls and that, coupled with his physical appearance and unattractive face gave him no chance.

They laughed at him and after a dozen such rebuffs, each further apart than the last, he gave up altogether but he contemplated revenge. Oh yes, he would have women - but on his own terms, not theirs.

And so he sank into the world of finance and stocks and shares and, while helping his father in his own pursuit of more and more wealth, began to build a portfolio of his own.

And what did he do with his spare time? He planned and plotted. He acquired books and magazines devoted to the enslavement and punishment of women. His plans included the acquisition of a tropical island and his program the development of that island so that young women - beautiful young women, would spend their days in utter shame, degradation and pain.

As his warped mind contemplated his island and its people, the ideas flowed freely, aided by books on the Spanish Inquisition and the World War II activities of the Gestapo and the Kempei Tai, not to mention more recently published similar pursuits in parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Films such as Rambo, which included Sylvester Stallone's electrical torture, together with more underground porn flicks on the subject of domination and torture of women, occupied a great deal of his time and he gradually acquired a remarkable expertise, albeit entirely theoretical, on the subject.

Of course his father knew nothing of this. He just wasn't interested. When he wasn't making more millions to add to the billions he now boasted as his personal wealth, he was hobnobbing with the president, cabinet officers and other leaders in government and business. What his son was up to when not in the office at the palatial Washington mansion, he had no interest in.

Zack didn't want to accompany his father on these forays into public life. He had by now recognised his looks and ungainly manners militated against him and he was now extremely shy of going out in public except to acquire more books and films for his now large library on the subject of female domination.

And on the subject of the island, he was well advanced in that direction, too. Not that he thought any of this would ever come to fruition. He was already quite wealthy in his own right but not anywhere nearly rich enough to undertake his dream.

But then, quite without warning, his father suffered a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-three but his heart just gave a massive lurch - and then stopped. The medics tried everything to revive him but it was no use. He was pronounced DOA - dead on arrival - at the hospital and Zack was an extraordinarily wealthy young man at just twenty-six years of age.

His mother hardly recognised that her husband had died and while he had no love for her, Zack set her up in a nice apartment with a permanent nurse who was instructed to allow her whatever she wanted, including unlimited alcohol since the doctors advised him she was already too far gone to effect any hope of a recovery.

He now set about his life's dream. He was going to get his own back on womankind, representatives of which had spurned him all his young life. He pensioned off or simply dismissed his father's servants and then used the family mansion as a base from which he would carry out that dream.

First, he hired his courtiers - the men who would assist him in purchasing the island and setting it up the way he wanted. This he did using the Internet. He also used this tool to find his new 'friends', the men who would come to the island as his guests to enjoy the degradation and humiliation of beautiful young women and, once a year, to partake of their ultimate fate: The Turkey Shoot, the euphemism he used to cover his hunting of naked girls in the wild - a hunt to the death...

 

***

 

With the enormous wealth he now commanded, he achieved all of this in record time. The island was uninhabited and off the beaten track. It was situated in the tropics of the western end of the South Pacific Ocean and was almost totally tropical jungle. It was just over five miles long and two miles wide. Nominally it belonged to the Philippines but he was assured the local governor had no interest in the remote speck on the ocean charts - as long as Zack paid his local 'taxes' personally to the governor himself.

The island had permanent water and a couple of hills and was topographically perfect for his needs with a few caves, bluffs and steep valleys as well as the more gently rolling foothills near the coast. It was also the perfect size. Ten square miles was an ideal area to hunt the prey he was going to stock it with.

He was very careful in his choice of accomplices. They had to be of like mind to him, of course, but also possessed of the stature and muscle to control the girls. This applied to his island staff but there were also those who would roam the world seeking out his prey. In their case, brains were as important as brawn for he certainly didn't want to get caught. Just in case, however, he set up a 'fire-wall' between himself and the island on the one hand and the team of kidnappers on the other. He never ever identified himself, meeting them in disguise and in a variety of locations and even with a voice-disguising insert in his mouth.

Bank accounts were set up in Switzerland from which they would be paid. Delivery of the goods was to be arranged through a maze of contacts and the trail was to be so confused as to defy even the best trackers in the field. Notwithstanding this however, his instructions as to how they were to proceed were also very detailed.

He was to be notified of each prospect via a secure email contact. The girl's family background and contacts as much as her looks were to be very carefully investigated. No-one with connections to power and influence was to be considered unless those contacts were already severed. Zack would dearly have loved to choose snooty upper-crust girls - like those who had spurned him at Harvard, but he wanted to stay free and unless such a girl was a really safe prize, she was to be rejected out of hand.

The final stage in the delivery process was to be by means of a very fast ocean-going cruiser Zack bought for a highly unscrupulous seaman - or rather arranged the financing of by means of another Swiss bank account. It was agreed that the debt would be extinguished over a period by the delivery of each of the girls and even here, Zack was ultra-careful. Bishr was a most competent seaman (and pirate) and he had a healthy regard for his own safety. He recognised that Zack's requirements, while cumbersome, were for his own good as much as Zack's. It meant he had to pick up the girls from at times, most inconvenient places and especially from far afield but it was for the best.

And the intermediate 'handlers' were just as carefully chosen and their modus operandi laid out with as much attention to detail. Zack was nothing if not careful and his mind was well attuned to every last minutiae. No contacts were to know any others on the route and they were instructed to keep it that way. None were to know the details of how the girl had come this far or her future destinations. It sounds overly melodramatic but it worked to cloud the trail just in case a particular disappearance might be pursued with more vigour than was usual in such cases.

The house Zack had built was a cross between a palace and a hotel. The palace was for himself and included quarters for his staff while the guest wing provided accommodation for his friends, those wealthy, jaded, totally amoral men who would join Zack in revenging himself on the girls who had spurned him.

Neither his quarters nor the guest wing included accommodations for the slaves - the girls who would be arriving soon. They would find themselves housed in zoo cages. Really! These were built to resemble monkey cages in a real zoo, complete with walkways all around them and beautiful gardens to complement the whole...

 

***

 

Anne Taylor was an athlete, a gymnast to be precise. She was also a looker. Zack had ordered Bart, Bart Styles to give him his full name, to start in the UK, then move to Bangkok, then Sydney and only then to move to New York for his first four slaves. Bart started on his own, seeking out possibles and submitting their profiles to the unknown Zack over the secure internet address. Anne was the third girl he had submitted.

She was really attractive with an athlete's figure and a model's face. Her hair was brown and wavy and shone with a natural lustre. Her eyes were also a beautiful clear brown and her complexion was so good she never needed make-up. She was middle class and worked as a waitress while putting herself through university, studying architecture.

Zack approved her and Bart, the first in the chain of kidnappers, went into action.

Kidnapping is not difficult nor even risky as long as you observe a few rules: check out your victim thoroughly; work out her behaviour patterns and routine; select a time and place where she will be alone; have the getaway vehicle ready and on hand; get rid of the victim quickly. Bart did all of these things and the 'package', bundled up securely and sedated with a long-acting knockout drug, was delivered to the first of the transport vessels within hours of the kidnap. Over the next few days, Anne was transferred from one means of transport to another: the first was a fast patrol boat hired for a huge sum to take her to the Bay of Biscay where she was transferred to a long-range seaplane that flew her across Europe, the Mediterranean, Arabia and the Eastern Indian Ocean. There she was transferred to Bishr's fast cruiser that took her to the island.

During this rather long journey she was kept sedated although no longer bound and was delivered to Zack more than somewhat bemused as to what was happening to her. He had her taken straight to her cage and deposited unceremoniously inside it to recover from the drug.

As its effects wore off she began to look around her and wonder where the hell she was and why she was there. She had sensed there were men outside the cage looking in at her but she was then still too under-the-weather to bother about them. Now it was different. These uncouth and rather big men stood there grinning down at her as she sat on the concrete floor of the cage.

"Why am I here?" she asked them.

"You'll find out soon enough, slut," replied one of the men. This one was Zack's principal lieutenant, name of Ben Thrower, but he didn't tell her that.

"Let me out. I don't like it in here!"

At this, they all laughed uproariously. "I'll bet you don't - and you're going to like it even less once the boss introduces you to your new life," he said.

At this rather upsetting piece of news she fell silent. She could see little was to be achieved with these men. Better to wait for the 'boss', whoever he was. She looked around her and wondered at the cage. It was large enough, perhaps twenty-five feet square and about the same high. Inside it, a dead tree complete with branches had been embedded in the concrete floor and reached up to the roof high above her head. At one corner there was a bowl recessed into the floor that was kept full by an automatic water valve and in the opposite corner a sort of gully trap, also recessed into the concrete. It too had a water pipe feeding it and she had a horrible sinking feeling that this was her latrine while the other bowl was her source of drinking water.

She glanced up and noted the sturdy metal wire that covered the whole of the roof of the cage. There would be no shelter from the rain. She also took note of the climate. It was hot and sticky and she was still in the winter clothes she had been wearing back in London. She wasn't going to take them off, however, not with those horrible men standing outside and looking in at her.

She glanced out of the cage and noted the obviously new gardens and paths around her cage, and in the distance, other similar cages, also adorned with nothing but a dead tree fixed into the floor and the roof of each cage. What was this place, she wondered again. And what am I doing here?

The men left after a few minutes and she sat there, hungry and thirsty, desperate in her desire to know what she was doing in this ominous situation. She got up and walked over to the bowl, staring down at it. She was very thirsty for they had neither fed nor watered her for the last few hours. She got down on her hands and knees and tried scooping up the water with her hands but then realised the bowl was designed to make this difficult to say the least, being covered with a grille except for a smallish hole at the centre. She lowered her head down to the grille and slurped up some water and while she felt humiliated at having to drink like an animal, at least it assuaged her thirst. That left her hungry but they didn't satisfy this for a while. For quite a long while actually.

Zack came down to have a look at her eventually. He had left it to his men to stare in at her but now he came down himself.

"Comfortable, slut?" he inquired of her.

"Why am I here?" she replied somewhat tenuously, recognising she had no cards to play and discretion might work better than belligerence.

"Why, you are the first of my slave-sluts ... girls I am going to use for my pleasure. Not that it will be pleasurable for you, mind. Girls like you laughed at me and now I am going to enjoy humiliating you - punishing you for the hurt those girls caused me. And then, after I tire of you, you will join the others I am going to acquire and you will all become prey in a Turkey Shoot... You will be released and given a day's start and then I my friends and I are going to hunt you - with real guns. They won't be ink guns either, slut ... they will have real bullets and we will be aiming to kill you, preferably slowly - a bullet to the gut will achieve this nicely." He smiled down at her as he said these words, as if he was telling her she was going to take part in a modelling assignment.

She stared up at him in horror, disbelief etched across her face. "You can't mean it," she whispered.

"Oh but I do. You were unfortunate enough to be caught in my net but you will get no sympathy from me on that account. You women are devils incarnate and those of you who are brought here are going to suffer for all the hurt I have felt over the last few years."

He nodded to Ben who had accompanied his boss to the zoo and the big muscle man now unlocked the cage to stand before the now very fearful girl. All right, Anne wasn't exactly a girl but at twenty-two, she wasn't far past it.

Zack spoke up again. "For a slave, she is vastly overdressed, wouldn't you say, Ben?"

"Sure is, boss. Want me to do something about it?"

"Why not? Yes, let's see her flesh."

Anne backed away from the tall and obviously muscular man now advancing on her. Ben was all of six feet two and while not heavily muscled, he obviously worked out and at twenty-six, was as strong as an ox. He was wearing his usual attire on the island: Runners with short socks, brief silk running shorts and a singlet and this get-up showed off his highly athletic body to a tee. Anne knew she would have no chance against his superior height and strength despite her own athletic physique.

She threw off her overcoat herself, casting it at her opponent while Zack watched from outside the cage, smiling at the contest. By now he had been joined by more staff members and they all stood around the cage watching as their immediate superior pitted himself against their first slavegirl. That he would win was a certainty but each man there thought this obviously well-set-up girl might give him a run for his money.

She did, too. She was agile and very fast and Ben knew this wasn't going to be any cinch - but then he didn't want it to be. Zack had said she was to be given as much rope as she wanted. He was to win, but if it took an hour or more, that was perfectly okay.

He grinned down at her as he followed her around the tree, occasionally reaching out to grab her but never quite succeeding - intentionally. Let her think she had a chance of beating him!