by Bill Craig
Degiorno shrugged and drew a handkerchief from his jacket pocket to mop his brow. “If it gives him the power to rule the world, I suppose it's just too tempting to pass up.”
“You said you just wanted it for the money,” Hannigan accused. “Now you're saying this emerald could give him that much power?”
“It could,” Degiorno replied, his head hanging low. “He certainly seems to think so.”
“You believe in the stone’s power,” Bridget said, but it wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” the Italian admitted, guiltily. “I've... heard things.”
“Then we have to get to it before they do,” Hannigan said, his tone grim.
“Yes,” Degiorno replied, his voice almost too faint to hear.
*****
Captain Morgan raised his cap at the sound of distant gunfire. Damned town was getting too lively for his taste. Getting so a decent riverboat captain can’t get no rest when he's in homeport no more. At that moment, a man appeared in front of him.
Morgan’s eyes widened in shock. It was McKenzie, the priest from the mission way up on the Congo River. Morgan had loaded his boat up earlier in the day with supplies bound for the Mission, a journey of about two days. He had been planning to leave the following morning.
“Father, what the bleedin’ Hell... beg pardon, but what are ye doin’ here?”
“Riding with you to the Mission, My Son,” Niles McKenzie replied in a solemn voice.
“Bloody Hell you say.” Morgan winced again at his use of profanity in the priest's presence, but stood his ground. “I got no room for passengers on my boat. You always fly back with that hellcat daughter of yours.”
“Bridget is no hellcat.”
McKenzie’s voice was soft and low and ominous, and it sent a chill racing down Morgan’s spine. If he didn’t know better, he would almost have thought the priest was threatening him.
“Eh. Well, when are you plannin’ on leaving?”
“Now is fine,” McKenzie replied, untying lines and freeing the boat from its moorings. The riverboat was already being tugged into the current as Morgan came to his feet.
“Now wait just one minute, Padre.”
The priest turned to face him, the look on his face conveying a promise of a lingering death that would bring more pain than an extended stay in the lowest pit of hell.
“No waiting,” McKenzie said his voice as cold as death itself.
Morgan felt himself swallow a huge lump that had suddenly insinuated itself into his throat. “Right. We'll go now.”
He moved to the cabin and fired up the engines. If they ran all through the night, they might reach the falls by late morning. Normally that would be the end of the line for him; the Congo Diamond only ran the lower Congo, while her sister boat, the Congo Ruby, made the long journey between Leopoldville and Stanleyville. But just this once, Morgan thought it might be wise to see the cargo - and the passenger - all the way to the Mission. He didn't want to irritate the strange clergyman any more than he already had. He had already figured it would be smarter to refrain from commenting about the Priest’s adopted daughter, if he wished to live.
*****
“We have a problem,” Bridget told the others as she led them to where her seaplane - a Grumman JF Duck - was docked.
“What’s that?” Hannigan asked.
“The plane only holds the pilot and two other people. There happen to be four of us,” she told them.
“Four of us, three seats, yeah that could be a problem, Kid.”
“Somebody will have to ride on the outside,” Bridget said, her voice grim.
“Gregor, Degiorno. I just drew the short straw,” Hannigan’s voice was flat and cold. “Get in the plane.”
Chapter Six
“Hannigan, you really can’t plan to ride outside the plane for the whole flight,” Bridget argued.
“You keep the plane low enough so I won’t freeze to death and I’ll manage just fine,” Hannigan replied. His grim expression, cheeks suddenly looking sunken and hollow, gave lie to the confidence behind his words, but his blue eyes peered piercingly at her. “I don’t see as how there is any other choice.”
Bridget read the seriousness of his intent. “Then you have to let me tie you down,” she replied soberly. “I don't even want to think about what could go wrong; the wind could cut off your oxygen and you’d die. We'll have to turn you so you're facing backward.”
“I can live with that, Sweet Pea.”
Before he could elaborate further, Bridget grabbed him and pulled him close, pressing her lips hard against his. It was an awkward kiss, passionate but clumsy, and it ended as abruptly as it had begun. When she drew back, her eyes were alive with promise. “Mike Hannigan don’t you dare die on me.”
“Hey, I'm invincible,” Hannigan told her, but then as the impact of her offering hit home, he dropped his false bravado, letting his eyes show her his true feelings as well. “I'll make it, Bridget.”
“I’ll tie him to the strut,” Gregor Shotsky inserted. “Trust a sailor to tie the best knots.”
“I feel safer already,” Hannigan quipped.
Bridget studied the Russian's always smiling countenance. She knew that the two men were friends, but they all owed their present troubles to Shotsky's dealings with the notorious expediter Degiorno. She hoped that Hannigan wasn’t misplacing his faith. She liked the Russian, but she didn’t really trust him, and she totally despised Degiorno. The fat Italian she would never trust!
She took a long coil of rope from the cargo box and handed it to the Russian. Then, as Shotsky started trussing Hannigan up like a Christmas goose, she set about getting the Italian into the floatplane.
Bridget positioned him in the observer's pit, but found herself secretly wishing that the men really had drawn lots to see who would ride outside, and that Degiorno had been picked for that dubious honor. She had seen the way the fat Italian eyed her; it left her feeling dirty. She knew that if she ever mentioned it to her adopted father that the Italian would die, mysteriously and probably very painfully. That wasn't something she wanted on her conscience, not just for a look that had made her uncomfortable.
But if the Italian ever laid a finger on her, that would be an entirely different matter.
*****
“This what you had in mind when you told me about Degiorno?” Hannigan asked Gregor.
“Not really. When I last knew him, Francisco was into running guns and such. This treasure stuff with the Nazis was a new one on me.”
Hannigan ran his fingers through his reddish brown hair. “Those Nazi guys that were after us in the bar were pretty bold.”
“The same thought occurred to me,” Shotsky replied, suppressing his usual grin. “To operate openly in a foreign country, without fear of reprisal? I think the Nazis may prove to be a threat unlike anything the world has ever seen.”
“I’m starting to feel that way myself, Gregor.” Hannigan tested the rope loop around his waist. “Get these ropes good and tight, I don’t want to get beat to death during the flight,”
“Trust me, my friend,” Gregor said.
“You know I do, Gregor.” He grunted as the Russian cinched the line down. “What do you think of her?”
Gregor threw a glance toward Bridget O’Malley who was pre-flighting the Grumman Duck. “She's a beautiful young girl. But a girl is all she is. Be careful, Mike. Women can often lead otherwise clear-headed men to do foolish things.”
“Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em,” Hannigan chuckled as Shotsky pulled the ropes tight.
The Russian was true to his word, and Hannigan found it a little hard to breathe, but he knew the ropes would loosen some when they were in the air. His arms were not secured, and his right hand gripped his pistol as though it were permanently attached. The .45 had a full magazine plus a round in the chamber, and he had reloaded the magazines he had emptied earlier and stowed them in the deep pockets of his vest along with several more. He di
dn’t really anticipate an attack by the Nazis while they were in the air, but he planned to be prepared just in case.
Hannigan was strangely eager to get in the air, to get this ordeal over with. He was using all the bravado he could muster to hide the fear he was feeling. There was a better than even chance that the air pressure alone would beat him to a bloody pulp along the floatplane’s fuselage, or that he would end up with broken bones, frostbite or a concussion.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he muttered to no one.
Yet, such audacity was the only way they were going to succeed in reaching The Emerald of Eternity ahead of the Nazis.
*****
Captain Morgan mopped the sweat from his brow and resettled his Captain’s hat on his rumpled gray hair. He hadn’t thought it possible, but The Padre was crewing his boat better than his regular bunch. The priest was almost machine-like in his movements and speech, like some sort of futuristic robot he had read about in the pulp magazines.
Something told Morgan that The Padre had been in such tight spots before and had acquitted himself well. The clergyman had a certain air of confidence about him, one that bespoke of a dangerous past. Father McKenzie was a man of action, though he hid it well. Some things were just apparent to those who had been there. Morgan knew that sometimes, violent men chose the cloth as a way of atoning for past transgressions, but McKenzie didn't seem to fit that description. Whatever his story, it was evident in the way he carried himself that the Padre was no stranger to danger.
In their earlier acquaintances, the priest had never spoken of his life before the Mission, and Morgan hadn't asked. A man's business was his own, a dictum the riverboat skipper accepted and appreciated. But now his desire to fill in those blanks was stronger than his capacity for discretion.
“Padre,” Morgan asked, “Where did you learn to run a boat like this?”
“During the Great War, Captain Morgan.” Father McKenzie replied, staring off into the jungle, but looking, it seemed, at something thousands of miles away. “I learned a lot during that war,”
“I’ll bet you did.”
*****
Although he was as secure as a man ever was, Mike Hannigan held on for dear life as the Grumman Duck began to accelerate along the surface of the Congo River, picking up speed with each second. He had no idea if he would even survive the flight, let alone emerge as the hero he wanted to be, leading the charge against their foes - against the dogs that had tried to murder Bridget.
Bridget.
Hannigan liked Bridget Ellen O’Malley a lot, maybe even loved her a little bit. …Maybe even more than a little bit.
He held his breath against the buffeting wind that was slamming him against the hull of the Grumman. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he had imagined it would be, but it wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either. Fortunately, the curve of the fuselage kept the worst of the wind from battering him against the metal frame of the plane.
Hannigan winced as he caught a glimpse of treetops whisking by just below his boots. Bridget was way too low for his liking. Still, he had to admit that she seemed to know what she was doing.
A lot of things had happened since he left New York that fell into the category of things he never dreamed he'd do, but this took the cake: being tied to the side of an airplane flying over the wild jungles of Africa!
Of course he also wouldn't have believed he'd meet a gal like Bridget O’Malley! She was nothing like the flappers and floozies back home - helpless and hapless girls who cared about nothing but themselves. As corny as it sounded, Bridget was the embodiment of his dreams; 100% girl, yet able to hold her own with any guy she came across. Bridget was what his dad would have called a ‘top hand’ back in the day. He was starting to look forward to spending more time with her, getting to know her better, maybe even....
Hannigan pushed the thought away. She was easy on the eyes all right, but he had no time for romance. And right now, he was not so much worried about whether she liked him, as he was that she was going to get him killed.
*****
Sturmscharfuhrer Hans Wessel hurried his men from the trucks that had carried them back to the airfield where the Valkyrie was moored. The huge zeppelin dominated the airfield. The big cigar-shaped hull towered above every other aircraft or structure in sight, and the bright African sun gleamed off the silvery-looking hull of the German airship, making it look like the vengeful spirits that were her namesake.
Valkyrie - LZ 131 - was the pinnacle of German engineering. Powered by four 1,200 horsepower Daimler-Benz diesel engines, she was capable of a ponderous but steady 135 kilometers per hour, and her pressurized hull could take her high above the weather, where the air was too thin for modern airplanes to fly. Three hundred meters long, she was larger even than the mighty Graf Zeppelin II, but her lightweight skin of cotton, doped with iron oxide and a substance impregnated with aluminum powder concealed far more than just 250,000 cubic meters of hydrogen gas in twenty individual cells. The Valkyrie carried an entire squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes, which could be launched or landed from the long suspended runway concealed inside the cavernous hull.
Unlike other military dirigibles, which could only carry parasite fighters for their own protection, the Valkyrie was the first true aerial aircraft carrier; an airbase in the sky. Fighters could be transported anywhere in the world, flown high above the range of attack planes and anti-aircraft guns, and launched directly on the target, with plenty of fuel and ammunition to ensure victory. With a fleet of airships like her, the Reich would rule the skies, and thence the world.
He wished that his men could spend more time aboard the magnificent ship but Doctor Ragnarok would have none of it. He was totally focused on retrieving the so-called Emerald of Eternity.
He scowled at the thought of his immediate superior. Doctor Ragnarok was a strange one. He wore a steel mask over his head to conceal his true face from everyone. Yet, he had emerged seemingly from nowhere to earn Der Fuhrer’s full confidence in matters of the occult.
Rumors had begun circulating among the crew of the Valkyrie; rumors that had spread to his own special team of Waffen troopers that attributed the disfigurement to a ritual had gone wrong - a demon he had summoned had melted his face.
Demons. Wessel scoffed at the thought. There was no such thing. No demons, no magic power, no Emerald of Eternity.
If the good doctor’s face had actually been melted, it was from some sort of fire, no doubt by some of the strange electronic devices that the man surrounded himself with. Wessel shook his head.
He was an atheist in the truest sense. A pragmatist that believed in nothing he could not see, touch or quantify in some way. He believed only in the one entity that had never disappointed him: himself. Those poor deluded fools who chose to believe in gods, fairies or whatever else, interested him not in the slightest.
Then again, science certainly held its share of strange phenomena. What if the so-called Emerald of Eternity was not a mystic treasure, but simply a physical object with remarkable properties? The debate was irrelevant; he had his orders. Follow the instructions of Doctor Ragnarok, and find the emerald.
Degiorno's escape bothered him more than he cared to admit. The Italian had found allies - mercenaries perhaps - who had proven unusually effective against his men. There was a shrouded corpse in the back of one truck to prove it. The matter was proving to be more than just an annoyance.
As the trucks pulled to a stop, he was surprised to see Ragnarok himself on the ground striding towards him. The sunlight gleamed off the metallic mask, flashing intensely bright.
“Where is the Italian?” Ragnarok demanded as Wessel stepped from the truck. The doctor’s voice was as cold and metallic as his visage.
“He escaped,” Wessel replied curtly, aggravated with himself for giving his after action report on the tarmac of the airfield.
“How?” Ragnarok asked, his tone conveying his shock. “I thought your men were the best a
t this?”
“He had help,” Wessel snapped. “And I believe that our earlier concerns have proven justified. We need to get airborne if you want to reach the prize before the Italian.”
“What have you done?” Ragnarok demanded.
“The Italian has a copy of the map.”
“Impossible!” Ragnarok raged. “I hold the only copy.”
Wessel moved past Ragnarok, eager to take refuge in the zeppelin. “You should have investigated the Italian more thoroughly. I discovered that he is known to have a perfect photographic memory. He no doubt had duplicated the map within hours after we showed it to him. My spies revealed that he has been trying to recruit men for a journey deep within the jungle. I believe he was going to make a try for the emerald,”
“Stop!” Ragnarok’s voiced crashed out behind him.
Wessel froze. It took him a moment to realize he could not move. There was a strange humming all around him; he could hear it and feel it. Mein Gott, he thought, failing the first test of his unbelief by taking refuge in thoughts of the Divine. How is this possible?
“Let me go,” Wessel managed to get out between clenched teeth.
“You are sure they are going to go after the emerald?” Ragnarok’s voice had taken in the sibilant quality of a snake. Wessel felt his head swivel seemingly of its own volition to look the masked man directly in the eyes.
“Yes!” he hissed, the pain wracking his body almost overwhelming. Then it ceased, gone as immediately as it had come. Wessel felt his muscular control of his body return and the humming vibration was gone.
“What did you do to me?” Wessel croaked, fear filling his body and mind.
“I command your obedience.” Ragnarok said imperiously. “You were insolent. Gather your men and make arrangements for us to depart immediately.”