Citadel of Death (A Captain Gringo Western Book 11)

by Lou Cameron

  “I’ll be all right after you make me come. The servants and me have plenty of guns and Paul said M’Chuma wouldn’t dare advance this far into the coastal settlements.”

  Wilma got on her hands and knees on the tile floor and said, “Do it to me dirty. I like it Greek once I’m really hot!”

  He tried to think of a graceful exit line. But what do you say to a naked lady who’s pointing her derriere at you and fingering herself? He knew he’d had all he really needed and was just showing off, but what the hell, he knew he’d never see her again and they may as well part friends. In her own wild way, Wilma Van Horn had been a gracious hostess to him.

  She welcomed him perversely as he rose on his knees, took a big hip in each hand, and let her guide him into her rosebud anal opening. Even as she leaned back into him, she hissed, “Oh, I think’s it’s too big that way.” It would have been too big if it had been all the way up, for despite the spread of her big smooth rump, she was tight as hell back there.

  He asked, “Am I hurting you, Wilma?” and she said, “Yes, I love it. It makes me feel like a tiny virgin.” So he did his best to thoroughly deflower her, if that was what they were doing. He was pretty sure she’d done this before, too. So he let himself go and she gasped, “Harder, faster, I’m coming!”

  She did, too, although he was damned if he could see why she should. But if Pepe and others like him enjoyed it there, there had to be something to it. He didn’t have to worry about how he was getting there. It felt like he was in some little girl who’d somehow wound up inside a big bawdy blond. He exploded and she popped off to roll on her back, panting, “Put it in the front wav, now!” So he fell forward to subside in her arms as she milked it to the last drop with her vaginal contractions. She was almost purring, sex drugged half asleep on the hard tiles. He was tempted to join her, but he withdrew, wiped himself off on her silk kimono train, and sat on a chair to dress as she murmured, “Oh, don’t go. Let’s take a little nap and do it some more.”

  “Later,” he said, knowing it was a white lie, but she didn’t argue as he rose, strapping on his gun rig. He looked down at her, wistful because he knew he’d probably never see her again and there sure was a lot of her to see. Then he blew her a kiss and ducked out to remount and ride back to town. He’d leave the horse in the livery for them to recover. He’d pay the livery, but keep the rest of his front money. Was it his fault Paul Van Horn had started without him? It was definitely time to haul ass out of this crazy country

  ~*~

  Captain Gringo met Gaston as he was retethering his mount in front of the hotel. The Frenchman said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been?”

  “Later. Is your horse still in the livery?”

  “Oui, why?”

  “We’d better put this one with it and board ship. Van Horn’s gone nuts, too. If nobody’s arrested Birdie and her crew we might be safe in weighing anchor.”

  “Ah, that is why I have been searching for you, Dick. M’selle Birdie is not there. The skipper says she took the first mate and a couple of other crewmen with her.”

  “With her? With her where?”

  “Apparently into the jungle. I would not have let her go, but the skipper could not talk her out of it. She seems to think she can get an interview with M’Chuma, the Ashanti leader and...”

  “Oh ... shit!” sighed the tired American. Gaston said, “Oui, she is obviously mad, if she’s still alive. But there is nothing we can do about it, now. She left hours ago and by now will have reached the treeline. I think her skipper would leave without her and his crazy crew members, if we approached him right.”

  Captain Gringo cocked his head to the sound of a distant ship’s siren and said, “Oh, oh! It looks as if he’s already figured things out for himself!”

  Gaston stepped away from the curb to stare down the street at the moving plume of smoke as the tramp backed off the pier at the far end. He spat, “Species of insects! What do they think they are doing, hein?”

  Captain Gringo shrugged and answered, “Same thing we’d do, if we had the chance. You could have been more diplomatic, but I see you scared him shitless. So he’s leaving while the leaving’s good.”

  “Oui, and leaving us stranded, the cowardly son-of-a-raddled whore! What do we do now, Dick?”

  “We get your horse and ride.”

  “Ah, oui, now you are making sense. The Dutch border is trés far, but with two good mounts and a full day ahead of us—”

  “We’re not heading for Dutch Guiana. We have to overtake Birdie and those idiots with her.”

  “Merde alors, Dick! I just said you made sense! Do you mean to make a liar out of me? The girl and the three men with her are as good as dead. I see no reason to join them.”

  “Come on, I’ll walk this mount with you to the livery. Let’s see, we have three guns apiece and—”

  “And M’Chuma has at least one machine gun and God knows how many spears! This is madness, even for you. I have a good mind to kick some reason into you.”

  “You aim a foot at me and you’ll draw back a stump! We’ve got to try and save them, Gaston. Heroics aside, Birdie can still get us out of here and she’s promised to publicize my case in the press.”

  “Ah, for a moment I thought it was love.” Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “Love’s a strong word, but let’s say we’re a little close for me to want her dead. Come on, move your ass and let’s see if we can save hers!”

  The Ashanti drums sounded a lot louder as they reined in at the treeline, miles from anyone who could possibly be on their side. Captain Gringo stared morosely at the thick undergrowth between the soaring trees and said, “We’d better leave the horses here and leg it in the rest of the way.”

  Gaston sighed, “I agree the jungle is not the place for a horse. It’s not the place for anybody with a bit of sense! Leaving aside the doubtless truculent personages beating those damned drums, we’ll never find them, now. This jungle is not an orange grove, Dick. It spreads for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, non?”

  As he dismounted, Captain Gringo said, “We’re not navigating by sheer guesswork, damn it. We followed the direct trail from town and I see it leads into the Goddamn trees over there. Birdie and those crewmen are green horns, so they’d naturally follow the trail leading toward the drums, right?”

  “Oui, but I hardly think it’s right. This would seem to be the same trail Chambrun walked to his ambush the other day! Permit me to observe that the Ashanti know this trail and have no intention of letting anyone use it!”

  Captain Gringo tethered both horses to a gumbo limbo as he pointed west with his chin and said, “Follow me. I’m not dumb enough to walk up a trail like a big ass bird. We’ll scout parallel to it.”

  “Fine. How shall we be able to follow the trail if we are not on it?”

  “The way Chambrun should have, if he’d been an old Indian fighter. Once we’re under the top story trees, the going won’t be too rough. But the sunlight on the trail allows all sorts of crud to sprout, so we just have to stay on the safe side of the natural hedgerow. Any ambushers should be on our side of the trailside bush, looking the other way for a sucker, see?”

  “Oui, I see. Let us hope they do not see, hein?”

  But Gaston followed as Captain Gringo bulled through the vertical wall of greenery, wishing he had a machete. Most of it was gumbo limbo and sea grape, but the jungle had evolved some son-of-a-bitching stuff that grew like oversized thorny celery and a sneaky little vine that thought it was chicken wire and bed springs, lacing the whole mess together.

  Aside from a well swung machete, the only thing that stunted the rampant growth of tropic greenery was shade. So once they’d forced their way in a ways the underbrush faded into a sickly vine here and a monster toadstool there between the giant trees. The surface between the elephant gray buttress roots was like the floor of a henhouse that hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time. Here and there a fallen branch lay moldering
but aside from being slippery and disgusting underfoot, the going wasn’t difficult. To their right they could see the thick green wall of vegetable excess along the sunlit trail. In every other direction the view simply faded out in the cathedral gloom of the rain forest. High overhead the canopy of spinach green was pinpointed by twinkling stars of sky. But it seemed to be raining gently. There was a constant drip of condensed moisture, sap, and monkey shit. A band of howler monks kept pace with them, shouting insults down from the canopy and occasionally breaking off a twig to drop in their general direction. Between the howls of the simians they could hear the Ashanti drums throbbing through the gloom. Gaston spat and observed, “Merde alors, this is not a friendly forest, Dick.”

  Captain Gringo told him to shut up and swung closer to the trail. With their right flank guarded by the impenetrable hedgerow they were still open to attack from almost any other direction, and someone on the trail might hear them, if they didn’t hear talking on the trail first.

  The ground began to rise gently and the trail they were scouting started swinging in S curves, making for dots and dashes of cover as they proceeded up the slope more directly. They left the howler troop behind, no doubt bragging to one another about repelling an invasion of their territory, so it got gloomier and quieter, save for the distant drum beats and an occasional wet plop. They were about an hour in when Captain Gringo stopped and held a hand up for silence as he stared thoughtfully at the next big bend in the trail. Gaston stepped beside him and murmured, “I hear them. Hornets, non?”

  “Flies, I think. Lots of ’em. Cover me.”

  Gaston drew one of his pistols as he stepped into a buttressed niche and Captain Gringo eased forward, drawing one of his own pistols. He came to the bend, moved around it, and saw the fresh stump of a huge mahogany. As he eased further he saw where the big tree had crashed down across the trail, flattening gaps in the trailside brush. He moved to the log, looked along it and whistled under his breath. Then he signaled Gaston to join him as he followed the log through the break. The narrow trail the felled tree had blocked was a scene of carnage. Bloated bodies in the tropic whites of France lay sprawled in every position, covered with ants and the buzzing of flies he’d heard. Gaston joined him and gasped, “Ah, quelle horreur! This was Chambrun’s column and one can see they had no chance!”

  Captain Gringo stepped out on the red earth of the trail, picked up a spent cartridge and said, “This is a Lebel, French issue. So they got off a round or two going under. The ambushers took their guns, but, yeah, here’re another couple of Lebel brasses. Chambrun had a lot to learn about this kind of fighting, but he and his boys tried. That must be him over there. I see they took his head, but they left his shoulder straps.”

  Gaston shook his head and said, “Now you see why I deserted the legion. Our damned officers always showed more courage than sense. I don’t know what they put in their food at Saint Cyr, but when in doubt a French officer always orders a charge.”

  Captain Gringo shrugged as he moved down the line of soggy shot up and beheaded corpses. He stopped and looked back. Then he nodded and said, “I see how it went. They came to what they thought was a windfall log across the trail. If they had flank scouts out, the ambushers picked them off in silence. As they bunched up behind the log to figure the next move some son-of-a-bitch opened up with a machine gun and that’s all she wrote. Most of these guys never knew what hit them. Look at that rag on the thorn bush there. There was no way to get off the trail and they were butchered like hogs in a bowling alley.”

  He stepped over the legs of a corpse on the trail, glanced down, and said, “Oh, no!”

  Gaston joined him and nodded, “Oui, that is the heel mark of a woman’s shoe. M’selle Birdie got this far and did not like what she saw, since the one footprint in the soft spot there is moving the other way, non?”

  Captain Gringo heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Yeah, there’s a man’s heel mark and he was headed back to Sinnamary in a hurry, too. Birdie and the three dopes got this far, saw how serious things could get out here in the bush and had second thoughts.”

  “Let us follow them, hein?”

  Captain Gringo hesitated, then nodded and said, “Yeah, there’s a time to save the world and a time to look out for your own ass. I don’t know how the hell we’re going to leave Sinnamary without that ship, now. But Birdie will be waiting for us at her place and we’ll work it out.”

  They headed down the trail, spotting an occasional small sharp heel mark as they made better time on the firmer footing. They’d traveled maybe a quarter mile when they came around another bend and stopped, thunderstruck. Gaston made the sign of the cross and murmured, “Mon Dieu, is there no mercy in Heaven?”

  Four human heads were impaled on stakes across the trail. Mercifully the faces were turned to the east, facing civilization, but there was no mistaking the long redhair hanging down from Birdie Peeper’s severed head. The stakes were crawling with ants. The message was obvious.

  Captain Gringo retched, growled deep in his chest, and turned around with a look of cold fury. As he started back up the trail Gaston tugged at his sleeve, pleading, “Let it go Dick. I agree with your feelings, but the odds are simply impossible!”

  Then, as he saw he’d have had as much luck stopping a moving switch engine, Gaston followed, muttering, “Merde alore, this disgusting loyalty is going to get me killed yet!”

  Captain Gringo bulled past the bloated corpses at the ambush and returned to the log blocking the trail. As he started to move sideways into safer ground he glanced over the big bole and said, “Oh, Chambrun’s guy did better than I thought!”

  A French soldier lay face down on the far side of the log, still wearing his head. Half under him lay a naked black corpse with a Lebel rifle pinning it to the trail with its long tri-foil bayonet. Gaston said, “Oui, this soldier advanced well, despite all those bullet holes in him, and at least one Ashanti paid for the ambush with his wretched life. This little scene seems to have been overlooked amid the no doubt confusing aftermath of the attack.”

  Captain Gringo moved thoughtfully up the trail. Gaston said, ‘‘Mais non, Dick. We should not be in this natural trap.”

  Captain Gringo said, “Shut up, I see something else.” He stepped to the thick wall of the undergrowth and hauled a tripod leg he’d spotted from the greenery. A Maxim machine gun and it’s trailing ammo belt was attached to the tripod. As he sat it upright on the trail and dropped to one knee he nodded, yanked the arming lever, and ejected a bent round as he nodded again and said, “Give a greenhorn a gun like this and he’ll jam her every time.”

  Gaston grinned and said, “Incredible! They abandoned a machine gun in working order?”

  “They didn’t know it was in working order. They thought it was busted and who’s going to haul a useless load of scrap metal through a jungle?”

  He looked at the coils of ammo belt and added, “This is a fresh belt. They used one on the French column and screwed up trying to reload. Things are looking up for us, though!”

  He gathered the ammo belt in a coil, shoved his left forearm through it, and unlocked the tripod pin to lift the machine gun bodily from its mount. He hefted it and said, “The water jacket’s empty. Remind me to only fire short bursts.”

  “I’d rather get you to accompany me to Sinnamary. Even with a machine gun the odds are trés disgusting, Dick!”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to admit they’re a lot better than they were a few minutes ago. Let’s go!”

  He moved back to the break with the heavy Maxim over his shoulder and followed the downed tree into the open gloom beyond. Then he started walking uphill, toward the drums. Gaston could hear as well as anybody, so he swore and said, “How many warriors do you think M’Chuma has with him at the moment, my old and reckless?”

  “Don’t know. From what I’ve heard of the Bush Negroes it could be about a thousand all told. I doubt if we’ll find more than five hundred or so at his main camp. Those dr
ums wouldn’t still be beating if they were all assembled in one place. Since they’re talking drums, some sub-chiefs might be arguing back and forth about their next move.”

  Gaston groaned and said, “Not more than five hundred, merde alors! You don’t have five hundred rounds in that gun-belt, you idiot!”

  “Quit your bitching. We have our six guns, too.”

  “Ah, oui, I forgot our side arms. No doubt we can gun the entire Ashanti nation with a couple of braces of pistol fire.”

  ~*~

  M’Chuma, Lord of the jungle and king of the Ashanti sat on his gilded hardwood stool wrapped in jaguar skins and wearing a feathered crown as he listened with a frown to the distant talking drum of M’Fisi’s band. The young chief was surrounded by a bodyguard of warriors stripped for action and leaning on the hardwood shafts of their long spears while his own drummer waited nearby for M’Chuma’s next dictated command. No women or children were at this end of the village, for war was a man’s business. M’Chuma scratched at his balls under the smelly jaguar robes his position made him wear despite the heat. He wanted a woman. But that would have to wait, too. Ashanti warriors fought better with hard-ons, according to tribal tradition, so nobody had any sex for days.

  His drummer turned and said, “M’Fisi says the French are many and that the shelling from the sea has made it unsafe to travel, O King.”

  M’Chuma growled, “I understand drum talk, you fool. M’Fisi is well named. I don’t know what a hyena is, but the elders say that in the old country they were cowardly beasts, too.”

  M’Chuma, The Iron One in his own dialect, turned to one of his captains and said, “If we march alone, many of our women will be widows.”

  The captain, a graceful man of thirty, shrugged and said, “All women will be widows sooner or later if they belong to real men. My king has been insulted. I am ready to die anywhere he sends me.”

  There was a bubble pipe burble of agreement and M’Chuma rose, holding out a hand to his spear carrier. But as he took his spear by its gilded shaft a runner staggered into view, dropped on all fours before M’Chuma, and panted, “Two white men are coming, alone, O Kind and Merciful King. Don’t order my death until you see I do not lie!”