The Exploreress Ch. 01

The pass of Al-Hajib, some two hundred miles north-west of Baghdad, was a bleak and cheerless place that was normally devoid of sound, excitement or even just animal life, save for the few intrepid ants or scorpions that might clamber over the rough stones. But at 11.32 on the morning of 14th May 1913, the pass of Al-Hajib was the location of an extraordinary and shocking spectacle.

A traveller, coming along the ravine floor, would first of all have been intrigued by the sounds. There was a repeated, high-pitched, muffled cry, half a yelp, half a scream, clearly made by a human female, which sounded as if it was coming from inside a blanket.

Then, the traveller would have been alerted by the presence of a fine brown gelding, standing indifferently with its bridle hitched to a nearby boulder.

Coming around the bend, the traveller would have been struck by the most remarkable sight of all. Three dark-skinned men, robed for the desert, were standing around a fourth dark-skinned man who was on his knees on the ground, his robes lifted up above his waist. Scattered all over the ground were numerous articles of feminine clothing. Before the fourth man, bent face-down over a pile of luggage on the ravine floor, was a young white-skinned woman, completely naked but for a dark blue cloth bag that had been tied over her head. Her wrists were lashed behind her back, and the man was kneeling between her parted legs and vigorously butt-fucking her. It was she that was the source of the muffled cries of distress.

The young white woman was named Lucy Wedderburn. She was the 7th Viscountess of Bletchley and she was a trained anthropologist, as well as an associate member of the Royal Society. She was also a sometime employee of the Foreign Office of His Majesty's Government, and it was in this last capacity that she had come to this desolate part of Asia Minor in the first place.

The man kneeling behind Lucy Wedderburn grasped her hips tightly and drove his pelvis deep into her soft behind, causing her to raise her head and moan thickly. The curious onlooker would not have been slow to note that Miss Wedderburn had a remarkably fine body. Although her current position of being face-down over a pile of luggage made it hard to scrutinise her with any great degree of accuracy, she was evidently long-legged and trim-waisted, with firm and pleasingly generous hips, and very pale, lightly freckled skin. The man who was sodomising her grasped the neck of the bag on her head and used it to pull her upper body upwards, off the pile of luggage, thus displaying Miss Wedderburn's splendid young breasts to their best effect, as well as causing her to choke and cough. He put his hands over her breasts and pulled her down on to him, urging his pelvis forward, and Miss Wedderburn made a muffled but quite intelligible moan of "No! Please! No!"

However, the man let out a sigh, and Miss Wedderburn's body shook, and her bagged head dropped forward. She made a deep, breathless moan. The man had evidently consummated his violation of Miss Wedderburn's rearmost orifice, for he knelt there for a moment, breathing heavily, then he withdrew from her and she slumped forward over the pile of luggage, panting.

However, if she had believed that her ordeal were over, she was evidently mistaken. No sooner had the kneeling man stood up and rearranged his robes, than one of the other men knelt behind Miss Wedderburn, reached inside his robes and, after some fumbling, grabbed her around the waist and jerked his hips up against her creamy white buttocks.

Miss Wedderburn raised her hooded head and moaned, this time in fluent Arabic, "Please! In the name of Allah! No more!" Then the kneeling man jerked his hips forward again, and she made other noises that were far less coherent and intelligible.

"Shut up," said one of the standing men, also in Arabic. Miss Wedderburn made a pitiful whimper as she began to be anally raped for the second time, but she gathered her wits about her and gasped again in Arabic, "Please! Why are you doing this to me!"

"Because you are a stupid English bitch, who meddles in things that are not your concern," said the man.

"But...ohhh...but please...why do you use me this way?" she wept.

"You wish to interfere with the work of men," he said, "then we will use you like we would use a man."

"In the name of Allah, please...oooh...oh God, please..."

"Why do you talk to us of Allah?" said the man in German, with a hint of amusement in his voice. "We are good Christians. Unlike you, you atheistic whore."

Miss Wedderburn whimpered in horror and squirmed on the pile of luggage, but it was no good; the bonds around her wrists were too tight, and the man was determined to go on until he was finished.

She had known, when she had ridden around the corner and been confronted by the four armed men, that she was in deep trouble; and her worst fears had been realised when they had ordered her to dismount from her horse. Then they had slipped the bag over her head and held her down while they stripped the clothes off her body. She had struggled and fought and kicked, but they had been too strong, and as soon as they'd got her naked they had lashed her wrists behind her back and dumped her on the pile of her luggage that they had made to provide a platform for her buggering.

Her world had shrunk dramatically, by now, to the darkness and stifling heat inside the bag tied over her head, her parched mouth, the pain of the bonds on her wrists, the overwhelming force of the man's penis in her rectum and the burning humiliation of being sodomised by these men. Her moans of shock, shame and distress were quite genuine. Of all the foul Oriental perversions a young English gentlewoman could possibly have conceived might be inflicted upon her person, this was surely the most unspeakable. In the eyes of these men, Lucy Wedderburn would have preferred a quick death to being stripped nude, trussed, blindfolded and repeatedly buggered.

And yet, there was something about Miss Wedderburn's response to her violation that was turning the men on. She was begging them to stop, but there was a guttural level to her moans of protest that seemed only to inflame their passion the more.

"Oooh, please..." she sobbed in passable German, "Just...please...oooh! OOOH! Why...why are you doing this? What have I done?" Her lovely young body was shuddering and she gasped for breath, as the second man roughly pumped into her rear end. Her violation was all the more poignant for the fact that her head was entirely engulfed by the blue canvas bag, which made her seem even more helpless and vulnerable.

"You hardly know," said the man who had been speaking, "and there seems no point in keeping you ignorant, as you will very soon be dead, and will be able to tell no-one. Those papers you picked up from the desk of the lieutenant-governor's secretary. You remember them?"

"Oh...oohhh...I...I didn't mean to take them...please...have them...ohhh, my God..."

"I will take them, you may be sure," said the man with a smile. "When you are dead, and we go through your luggage, we will take them and nobody will know that that letter ever reached the secretary in the first place. That letter, Fräulein Wedderburn, contains information which could have destroyed the German Asia Minor Oil Corporation's credibility. You did not know that, for you are a foolish girl who is playing a game against men. You thought you were doing something very clever and brave by putting those papers in your bag, when you saw that my man was about to take them himself. But it was not so clever, was it? Look at you now, Fräulein. Sprawled on your belly as we fuck your tight little English arsehole. You were too juicy a fruit not to taste."

The man who was buggering Miss Wedderburn gave a sharp hiss, and then relaxed as he came inside her. She was shaking, and a muffled weeping sound came from the bag that covered her head.

The kneeling man got up, and the man who had been doing the talking took his place. He wasted no time about loosening his robes, and then with a sharp quick jerk, he pulled Miss Wedderburn's hips into his.

"AAAAHHH!" she screamed hopelessly, throwing back her hooded head and writhing uselessly.

"Suffer, you foul English whore," muttered the man as he crammed his penis between Miss Wedderburn's soft, raw, abused buttocks, forcing it into the by now loose and distended socket of her anus. She made indescribable squealing noises as he began to butt-fuck her. "You fucking little stuck-up cunt. How do you like it? How do you like feeling my cock up your arse?" His robes were bunched up around his waist, on the small of Miss Wedderburn's back, and he was leaning into her and closing his eyes with ecstasy as he fucked her oozing, slippery arsehole.

"OHH! Please...NO!" Miss Wedderburn moaned. "Ummmfff...oooh...oh God...oh please...ohhh...oh please, no, not in my...not in my...oooh...my bottom...ohhh...unnhh! Unnhhh! UNNHHH!!" Then she was silent, and she squirmed ever more frantically.

Miss Wedderburn suddenly gave a stifled scream, and it startled the four men; she stopped squirming for a moment, and then her body went utterly limp, and its only movement was the rhythmic juddering transmitted to it from the movement of the kneeling man's hips.

"Consider yourself lucky," said one of the men who had already sodomised Miss Wedderburn, "that you lost your anal virginity to a white man." He grinned at the others, and the men standing around chuckled.

"Well said, Kurt," said another man.

Miss Wedderburn's trussed hands had been concealed beneath the folds of the kneeling man's robes. Which made it all the more remarkable that, of a sudden, her right arm suddenly emerged from beneath the robes and, with a sharp tug and a pull that were almost one stroke, loosened the cord that tied the bag around her neck, and pulled the bag off her head. In the same instant, her left arm emerged from beneath the man's robes holding what appeared to be an expensive American automatic pistol. Her tousled head whipped around and stared over her left shoulder at Kurt, the man who had made the joke about her anal virginity. Her left arm was holding the kneeling man's Colt 1911 upside-down and pointing it steadily at the startled Kurt. It all took no less than two and a half seconds.

"Au contraire," Miss Wedderburn said in a level if rather hoarse voice, and she pulled the trigger.

The .45 bullet entered Kurt's head at the inner corner of his left eye, and as it passed through his skull it created a shockwave that punched a fist-sized hole out of the back of his head, and caused a mist of blood, brain and bone particles to explode backwards out of his cranium. Kurt's knees went, and he sagged onto them and toppled over, no longer Kurt in any meaningful sense.

There was silence, apart from the faint pinging of the spent cartridge as it bounced off Miss Wedderburn's naked thigh, then off a rock, and finally into the sand.

Miss Wedderburn was now pointing the gun between the eyes of the man kneeling behind her, whose erection, still crammed inside her anal passage, was dwindling very rapidly indeed. Her face, now that it was visible, was very pretty indeed; piercing blue-grey eyes, swollen indeed with crying but which fixed the kneeling man with an unblinking stare; a charming upturned nose, lightly freckled; and a mouth that looked like it was quite capable of being pert and dimpled, but which for now was set in a grim straight line. Her hair was black, curly and unruly, and was still mostly in the neat bun that she'd set it in that morning. All in all, it was a face that looked like it should have belonged to the rather frivolous but enthusiastic daughter of a minor English nobleman. Miss Wedderburn should have been serving sandwiches on the lawn between croquet matches, or bouncing eagerly into a room and crying "Anyone for tennis?" She should not have been lying face down, naked, trussed and blindfolded, on a pile of luggage being anally raped by German spies, nor should she then have been capable of undoing her bonds and shooting one of the spies in the head. But this was nevertheless what she had done, and the implications of that fact were becoming alarmingly real to the remaining three men.

"You are not, in fact, the first gentlemen to have had intercourse with me in this particular manner," Miss Wedderburn said in the same level but slightly parched voice, still holding the gaze of the kneeling man, who was starting to sweat heavily. "That honour is reserved for an unnamed client in a Cairo brothel, some, ooh my goodness it must have been all of eight years ago. I would have been eighteen then. So do not flatter yourselves that you have been the first to plough that particular furrow. Others have gone before, and they were more gentlemanly about it."

One of the other men began to move his hand ever so slowly towards the pistol buckled to his belt. Miss Wedderburn did not move, but remained where she was, pointing the gun back over her shoulder with her left arm into the kneeling man's face.

"I would suggest that you make no attempt to reach for a weapon," she said, and licked her lips to get more moisture in her mouth. "If I see anyone doing such a thing, and I have exceptionally good peripheral vision, the first person to die shall be Leutnant von Hardenberg here. The second person to die shall be whomever made the attempt. I am, as you have seen, a very good shot, and the Leutnant was prudent enough to acquire one of these excellent double-action Colt automatics, for which I am grateful to him. My trigger finger is a little anxious, and any sudden moves by anyone will result in the Leutnant's instant death."

"There will be no sudden moves," said the kneeling man nervously, and it was clear that this was intended for the other men.

"Good," said Miss Wedderburn patiently. "Now, Leutnant, moving very slowly, will you please extract your manhood from my person and move backwards ten paces? Still on your knees, please."

The kneeling man pulled his pelvis back slightly, and the faintest tremor of pain flickered across Miss Wedderburn's face. But her gaze did not waver, and she did not blink. The kneeling man shuffled backwards, stowing his genitalia in his robes again, and Miss Wedderburn, keeping the gun trained on his face, cautiously turned around until she was lying back against the pile of luggage, facing the three men. Then she rose slowly to her feet.

Had a curious traveller happened upon the scene at this point, it would if anything have seemed even more remarkable than before, during the period of Miss Wedderburn's brutal violation. Then, three men in Arab robes were witnessing a fourth such man butt-fucking a young, naked white woman. Now, three men in Arab robes were being kept at bay by a young, naked white woman holding a Colt automatic.

"Now," she said in a more pleasant tone, "I would be most grateful if you gentlemen," nodding to the two standing men without taking her eyes off the kneeling man, "would kindly unbuckle your pistol belts and leave them where they are, then step up behind the Leutnant and stand directly behind him. Thank you so much."

"Hans," said Leutnant von Hardenberg in a tone of controlled fury, "I told you to tie her fucking wrists tight."

The two men slowly unbuckled their belts and let them, with the pistols still in the holsters, drop to the desert floor.

"It's not Hans' fault, Graf von Hardenberg," Miss Wedderburn said with a pleasant smile. "I'm sure he's never had the pleasure, as I have, of spending a rainy weekend in a Long Island hotel where one of the other guests happened to be an American gentleman named Mr Erich Weiss -- better known to you all, I'm sure, as Harry Houdini, the Handcuff King. Mr Houdini was a most charming fellow, and was gracious enough to share with me some of the secrets of his extraordinary craft. Step up lively, please, Meine Herren."

"Fick dich," muttered Hans, as he shuffled up behind the kneeling man.

"Oh, but you've already done that, Hans, haven't you?" said Miss Wedderburn conversationally, as she slowly began to walk sideways in a wide arc that circled the three men at a constant distance, but which led her towards the two discarded pistol belts. "Or perhaps it was your other friend that fucked me."

"It was him," said the other man, who up until now had been quite silent. The three men rotated on the spot, keeping their eyes on the naked young Englishwoman, as she stepped over the sand and rocks and stopped when one bare foot touched the leather of a pistol belt. All the time, she never kept her eyes off the kneeling man, nor took the aim of her gun away from his face. As soon as her foot touched the leather of the belt, she bent her knees and, with her free right hand, felt for the butt of the gun. Finding it, she withdrew it, and flicked off the safety catch with her right thumb. She straightened her knees and rose to a standing position once more. Her left arm was still levelling the heavy Colt at the kneeling man. Her right arm, holding a German automatic, hung by her side.

"Well, it was one of you," she said thoughtfully, staring at the kneeling man, "and I have no doubt that the other was awaiting his turn. Whichever one of you had not yet been given a chance to fuck me up my arse, I can only say that I'm very sorry to disappoint you."

She raised her right arm. Hans began to move forward in a pounce. Miss Wedderburn lifted her left arm and fired, hitting Hans in the chest. Hans was lifted back by the impact and sprawled on his back in the dust, his lungs splashed across the ground behind him, dead. The other man had started to dive sideways and she fired the gun in her other hand, hitting him in the forehead and blowing off the top of his head.

The second body crashed to the ground. The kneeling man, Graf Leutnant Ulrich von Hardenberg, was speckled with the blood of the two men. He looked up at Miss Wedderburn, and there was something new in his eyes.

Respect. Shock. And fear.

"I don't think I mentioned," she said, "that I am also ambidextrous."

"I can give you money," he said.

Miss Wedderburn wrinkled her nose thoughtfully.

"It's very kind of you, but I really have no need of the stuff. Not that I'm awfully rich, I'm just more interested in other commodities. Knowledge. Freedom. That sort of thing."

"What can I give you," he said.

Miss Wedderburn lowered the pistols, then she raised the one in her left hand and examined it briefly.

"This would be a lovely present to remember you by," she said. "Beautiful action, tremendous stopping power. I'd be most awfully grateful."

"Take it. What else?"

"What else," she said, and went down on her hunkers ten feet away from him, regarding him. Her shoulders sagged, and he could see how tired she was. Then her face cleared.

"Ah yes," she said with a grave smile, "the letter. Thank you so much for confirming that it was genuine. I had suspected it to be nothing but a ruse, but since you went to all this trouble to retrieve it and to punish me for taking it in the first place, I can see that it was, as our American friends say, the real deal. That's why I didn't resist you, at first. I had to make you think that I was a helpless, fluttering mädchen who was simply bewildered by the whole thing, or you'd never have wanted to tell me what I wanted to know. I shall deliver it into the hands of the lieutenant-governor myself. And I really think," she said soberly, and paused -- and this time all the charm and flutter was gone from her face and voice, and she was suddenly most stern, making him feel like a small, irresponsible boy being told off by a beautiful young governess, "I really think you ought to pay more respect to the rights of small nations to live how they want, and not just treat them as something for you to exploit and pillage. The rest of the world does not exist so that the German Reich can steal its property. You will have to learn that, sooner or later."