by S. A. Beck
“We only want to go one place. Can he take us to the fort of Mars Sans Pitié?”
“Of course! He give you grand tour. You learn everything. He knows everything about Mars Sans Pitié.”
Corbin didn’t go on many vacations, but he knew a tourist hustle when he saw one. It didn’t matter. He needed a boat and if this wiseacre actually could get him one, that was good enough.
By the time they made it to the riverside, Corbin’s civilian clothes were stuck to his body with sweat. It was almost as hot here as Mauritania, with about a hundred percent humidity. The McKay twins must have been broiling in their jackets and ties, but nothing got those two to change into different attire.
The boat turned out to be an oversized wooden canoe called a cayuco, a common mode of transport in West Africa. It looked stable enough for river work and it could hold up to ten people. A whole row of them lay beached on the river, and dozens more plied the waters carrying people and cargo.
“Kid, you got yourself a deal.”
The teenager’s uncle was a wiry old man who studied his customers with a sharp eye. Corbin had to admit they made a strange sight. The boatman’s gaze rested on Orion and Jaxon for a moment and he asked a question in a language Corbin couldn’t identify, let alone understand.
“You speak English?” Corbin demanded.
The boatman turned to him, but kept glancing at the Atlanteans.
“A little, yes.”
“We’d like to go to the fort of Mars Sans Pitié.”
The boatman turned and spat on the sand.
“Why you want to go there?”
“Never mind that. I’m willing to pay well, and I’m willing to pay in dollars.”
They agreed on a price that was far to high for a Third World boat trip, but Corbin was too impatient to haggle.
Corbin and his team climbed aboard and the boatman and the teenager pushed the cayuco into the water, hopped in, and grabbed some oars.
The current was strong and they made good time, soon leaving the city behind. The river grew wider and they smelled the ocean not far to the west. Villages and isolated farms and fishing shacks lined the shore. Fishing boats and ferries plied the river. A freighter moved slowly by, heading for the port in Banjul.
“Too many people,” Isadore grumbled.
Corbin nodded. He had just been thinking the same thing.
“We get this done as quickly and quietly as possible,” he whispered to her, “and if your former foster daughter causes any trouble, get rid of her.”
Soon they came to the island where Mars Sans Pitié had built his fort, too soon for General Corbin’s liking. They were still in a populated area of the river and only half an hour from the outskirts of the capital.
The island stood near the south shore, a small rocky outcropping rising above the muddy water. The fort’s stone walls looked well preserved. They made a rectangle about two hundred yards to a side with triangular bastions at each corner. A few rusty cannons poked from the ramparts, still covering the approach up the river.
The fisherman and teenager steered the boat toward the island. As they drew closer, Orion stirred.
“It’s there. I can feel it.”
Corbin glanced at Jaxon. She didn’t even notice as she stared at the island.
They drew closer. Corbin saw a chain link fence running around the island right where the water met the stone.
“It’s closed?” Corbin said.
“They are developing for tourists. It open in a year.”
“Oh great, take us around the whole island.”
They made a slow circuit of the island. The fort took up much of the space except for the southern part of the island, where there was an open area and a small jetty. A couple of cayucos were docked there and some workmen were clearing away underbrush and repairing a section of the wall that had crumbled. Much of the fort was overgrown on this side, where a bit of soil clung to the rocks and gave life to vines and bushes. The plant life had created cracks in the walls. Vines and creepers crisscrossed the stone.
“Bring us in,” Corbin ordered.
“It is not allowed.”
“Damn it, do as I say!”
“Witnesses,” Isadore murmured.
Corbin ground his teeth. “Fine, don’t go in.”
The boatman hadn’t turned toward the jetty anyway.
Isadore leaned over to her boss. “We’ll come back at night after the workmen are gone.”
Corbin nodded his assent, if not his approval. They took a slow turn around the island. At least two dozen workmen were busy restoring the fort, and Corbin noticed a small shack with two soldiers lounging in front. Great.
A cluster of wildflowers grew in a large tuft at one end of the island, a brilliant display of reds, purples, and yellows. Bees as large as horseflies buzzed around it. Some flew out over the water and one passed close to the boat.
The McKay twins panicked.
“Get it away! Get it away!” they shrieked, leaping around the boat while the unsuspecting bee circled lazily around. The cayuco rocked and the boatman shouted for them to sit down.
“What the hell is the matter with them?” Corbin demanded.
“You didn’t know?” Isadore asked, trying to pull the twins back into their seats. “They’re afraid of bees.”
“Lunatics!” Corbin said, raising his hands in the air. “I’m working with lunatics.”
Jaxon sat in the stern of the boat, watching the commotion with a contented smile.
At last the bee buzzed away, the twins calmed down, and the boatman paddled upstream.
“Whoops, there’s another bee,” Jaxon said.
“Where?” the twins demanded, jumping up again.
Isadore smacked her upside the head, but that only made her giggle.
Once they got back to Banjul, they sat down in their hotel and tried to figure out what to do. Jaxon lay unconscious on one of the beds. Isadore had given her an injection so she wouldn’t overhear anything.
“You sure it’s there?” Corbin asked Orion.
“Yes. It’s an object of power from Atlantis, like that pendant and gold tablet I gave you. I felt it. Jaxon felt it too. I could tell.”
“We’ll get a boat tonight and go over there. It looked like only a couple of soldiers guard the place. We can overpower them easily enough.”
Isadore shook her head. “We can’t, not tonight.”
“Why the hell not?” Corbin demanded.
“Because we’re not ready. We have to plan how to take over the island long enough that we can excavate and find whatever is there. Who knows? It might be under ten tons of rock. We need digging equipment and an escape plan. We need to figure out an escape route back to Mauritania, or a flight to Europe. We also need to figure out what to do with her.” Isadore said, jabbing a thumb in Jaxon’s direction.
“I can sort that if you’re feeling queasy,” Ronnie McKay said.
“And then we have a body on our hands. No, at least not yet. We’ll have to get rid of her eventually, but we’re going to need all day tomorrow to get everything ready. Then we can hit the fort tomorrow night.”
“But we’re so close!” General Corbin raged.
“All the more reason not to get in a hurry,” Isadore said. “The Atlantis Allegiance has no idea where we are. We’re safe for the moment. But as soon as we kill a couple of Gambian soldiers and break into a historic site, we’re going to have a police investigation on our hands. Let’s not rush the job when we’re almost at the end.”
Corbin ground his teeth and didn’t reply. She was right. He was getting too anxious, too hasty. That was a bad thing to do in the field. Some jobs needed time and planning. This was too important to rush in with no clear direction.
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “Let’s sleep on it and get everything ready tomorrow. We’ll hit the fort tomorrow night.”
So they had no choice but to stay in Banjul and get rest before a long, dangerous day. Corbin
found he couldn’t rest, and went out to a bar down the street from his hotel in order to have a drink or two before turning in.
His hotel was on one of the main streets in Banjul’s downtown, and here he saw something he had never seen in Mauritania—tourists. Fat, sunburned sheep with cameras. Corbin detested tourists. There was nothing wrong with taking time off if you needed a break, but aimlessly taking photos of distant places while not learning a thing about those places seemed to him a massive waste of time. It turned out The Gambia was a resort for mostly French tourists who came down for the pristine beaches on the Atlantic coast. That seemed to Corbin to be even a greater waste of time. The south of France had some of the best beaches in the world, so why fly all this way to go to a different one?
He dismissed the tourists from his thoughts and decided to ignore them, but that turned out to be a mistake.
Corbin sat in a bar in a mixed crowd of locals and tourists, listening to African pop music and sipping a delightfully cold beer. He felt grateful to have gotten to a country where alcohol was legal. He mulled over his options, trying to figure out how to get into that fort. He did not notice the sunburned, middle-aged Frenchman staring at him from a table on the other side of the room.
Alphonse Gardinier was no one special, just a middle-management businessman on holiday. A nobody, really, and he knew it. He had a colorless job and a humdrum life in a Paris suburb. Occasionally he splurged on an exotic vacation to have a little excitement outside his usual routine, but otherwise his life was pretty dull and unimportant. Perhaps that’s why he was such an avid reader of the newspapers. He wanted to see what the important people were up to, to keep up on the great events of the world. Le Monde was his favorite newspaper, a conservative, reliable source of information that didn’t challenge his preconceived ideas. He had been reading Le Monde every day for years and had even written a couple of letters to the editor sharing his thoughts on French elections. The paper hadn’t published them.
So of course Alphonse Gardinier had heard the story of the two missing American generals, and had seen their photos on the front page. So it was with some surprise that he saw a somewhat haggard, sunburned man who looked an awful lot like General Arnold Corbin drinking a beer at a bar in Banjul.
Could it really be the same man? He thought the general had been killed or captured by terrorists. This man didn’t look like a prisoner.
The French businessman watched him for a while, unable to decide if this was the same man or not. Then the man ordered a second beer, and when he did so he ordered in English.
American English.
Alphonse Gardinier was a nobody, but every now and then it is the nobodies of the world who change the course of history. The Frenchman lifted up his phone and snapped a photo.
He smiled. If he was correct, he would be famous, at least for a day or two. If he wasn’t, it would make a funny story to tell his friends. The journalists at Le Monde would have to figure out the man’s identity for themselves.
Alphonse Gardinier returned to his hotel room to use the WIFI and send the image to France’s biggest newspaper. Then he went to sleep, having no idea that he had, for a brief moment, become the most influential person on the planet.
Chapter 18
SEPTEMBER 4, BANJUL, THE GAMBIA
11:00 PM
* * *
“You’re coming with us,” Orion said, taking the handcuffs off Jaxon and motioning for her to get off the bed.
Jaxon sat up, her head spinning. Those drugs Isadore kept giving her made her sluggish and dizzy. She’d been asleep for most of the day and had trouble remembering what had happened since she had been captured.
She could remember one thing, though.
When they had ridden in the boat the day before, she had sensed that the Atlantean artifact was somewhere in the fort on that island. The key to Mars Sans Pitié’s power lay hidden beneath its stones.
The Atlantean slaver had created a little empire with nothing more than his own powers, but General Corbin would have a whole army of Atlanteans under his command. He’d be able to do anything.
Jaxon stood, holding onto the headboard for support. She needed to get her head together. She was the only person standing between Corbin and everything he wanted.
But she had seen some things on that island that had given her ideas.
“Don’t cause trouble,” Orion ordered. “If you do, you’ll be killed. And remember what that Englishman said. He’ll kill some children out of spite.”
“Doesn’t it bother you to be working with people like that?”
Orion shrugged. “I do what I’m told.”
Unlike the desert cities to the north, Banjul stayed up late and they had to push through the crowd to get to the riverside. After dark the sidewalks turned from markets into cafes and the locals, mostly men, sat out in the temperate evening sipping coffees and talking over the day’s events. Jaxon stared at these people as she passed, wondering what would happen to countries like theirs once Corbin got in power. She knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with only ruling the United States. He would aim for world domination, and with an Atlantean army behind him, he might just get it.
Then another terrible thought came to her. Even if he didn’t win, even if a coalition of countries eventually defeated him, her people would be looked on as dangerous enemies by the rest of the world. They’d be even more oppressed than they already were.
Orion walked close beside her, holding her hand in a firm grip. She knew at any moment he could tighten that grip and snap her fingers. The McKay twins walked close behind her. Corbin and Isadore walked in front, Corbin carrying a heavy duffel bag that clanked as it shifted. Jaxon was held and boxed in. How could she do anything to stop all this?
She would try, even if it meant her death. She had no more illusions. If Corbin found the artifact she wouldn’t be necessary anymore. She wouldn’t live to see the dawn.
Panic welled up inside her, but she forced it down, concentrated on slowing her breathing. Ironically, she used a yoga breathing technique Isadore had taught her back in California when she was pretending to be her foster mother instead of her guard.
The crowds, the cafes, the blaring music, all seemed surreal as they walked to the river. Panic threatened to take her over again, but she forced her mind to clear and worked on her breathing.
You’re not dead yet, she told herself. On the boat trip you noticed things. You noticed vines, and bees, and lots of flowers.
They passed down one of Banjul’s few paved roads. She saw a tuft of grass had broken through the pavement, nature reclaiming its place in the face of civilization.
You noticed that too. You have a chance. Just breathe, be calm, and wait for the right moment.
At the riverside they found a fisherman stowing away his nets. Corbin offered him some money to take them out on the water.
Once they got away from the lights of the city and were alone on the quiet river, one of the McKay twins slashed the fisherman’s throat and dumped him in the water.
The panic returned. Jaxon closed her eyes and tried to breathe.
When she opened them again a few minutes later, she saw the McKay twins at the oars, while Corbin and Isadore both sat facing her, guns drawn.
“Better cuff her before we get there,” the general said.
Isadore nodded and moved over to Jaxon, who did not resist as Isadore put her hands behind her back and handcuffed them.
Why don’t they kill me and dump me in the water like that poor fisherman? Jaxon wondered. Are they going to keep me for experiments, or maybe they want to make sure they get the artifact first? Perhaps Corbin doesn’t trust Orion’s abilities and wants me as insurance.
The island and fort of Mars Sans Pitié loomed up before them, a dark shadow against the moonlit glow of the river. Corbin turned to Orion.
“You remember where those soldiers are?”
“Yes.”
“Go take care of them. Do it quietly and then
signal us.”
Orion stripped down to his shorts and dove into the water. Within seconds he had disappeared into the darkness.
The McKay twins gave him time. They rowed slowly around the island, well away from shore, and came to the southern side.
A soft sound came over the water. Had it been a cry of pain? It was too faint and cut off too quickly to tell. After a minute they heard a sharp whistle come out of the darkness. The McKay twins rowed to the island.
Jaxon took a deep breath.
Here we go.
They bumped against the rocky beach and Orion appeared out of the shadows, pulling the boat onto dry land with all of them in it.
Everyone clambered out, Isadore helping Jaxon since she couldn’t use her hands.
The island was quiet except for the buzzing of insects. Dimly Jaxon could see the guards’ shed not far off. Two darker shadows lay like inkblots in front of it. None of the others took any notice as they led her up a small path through the overgrowth to the crumbled wall of the fort.
This part of the wall had all but fallen down, and a heap of rubble gave them an access ramp up to the top of the cracked parapet. Orion had to carry Jaxon up the steep and shifting slope.
Once at the top, they stopped to rest. Orion put her on her feet and they looked around the fort, the stone shining softly in the moonlight.
It was a large rectangle, with triangular bastions that stuck out from each corner like arrowheads. The interior was mostly empty except for the foundations of a few buildings that had probably once housed the soldiers.
Jaxon could feel the presence of the Atlantean artifact. It was on the other end of the fort, and a little down, perhaps in a cellar or hidden cyst. Orion sensed it too. He stared in the exact same direction she did.
A little was along the catwalk, past a rusty cannon, a flight of stone steps led down to the courtyard.
Orion got in front and led them down the stairs and across the courtyard to where a doorway opened black as the maw of some nightmare monster.