by Bill Craig
“Only time will tell,” Hannigan grinned back at her. Bridget flashed him a smile and turned back to the controls, taxiing the Duck away from the riverboat and turning it around to have a better longer stretch of river to use for takeoff. She engaged the throttle and the plane leaped forward, the pontoon landing gear sending up huge sprays of water from each side, then the plane was skipping over the surface and finally lifting up into the air, climbing into the bright blue sky.
Chapter Sixteen
Niles McKenzie and Gregor Shotsky were both waiting at the dock when Bridget brought the Duck in for a landing. The two men had struck up a brief if grudging friendship, especially when Shotsky had shown McKenzie some of his makeshift creations. Even McKenzie had been impressed by both the practicality and the innovativeness of the devices. The fact that they were fairly concealable in their true purposes by their appearance was also impressive.
McKenzie felt a grimness settle over him. It was a familiar sensation, one he had felt many times over the years. He was girding himself for battle with forces that he knew were capable of destroying not only his life but his soul as well. His normally dour demeanor became even more so. McKenzie checked his vest and the pockets sewn into it. The vest was of a special design that he had come up with during the Great War and his time with the Fighting Hawks. Vials of holy water were secured in canvas loops sewn across the chest pockets; other mystical talismans were carried in select pockets as well as both a small prayer book and a book of both offensive and defensive spells. It had been many years since McKenzie had actually practiced magic, but he hoped that it was a skill he hadn’t forgotten.
Fighting Evil during the Great War had been more than just facing the Huns. There had been so many different faces worn by Satan’s agents over the years. Some had been conquered by mortal means, others through spiritual or magical means. Somehow, the Fighting Hawks had managed to defeat them all. But it had come at a great cost, not only physically and mentally, but spiritually as well.
McKenzie himself had fled to darkest Africa to work for the redemption of his own soul. Mad Dog Davis had retreated to the coast of Maine and the North woods, and Captain Dane Hawkins had become an explorer and vanished off the face of the Earth.
McKenzie waited patiently as Bridget taxied the Duck to the dock. He almost smiled at the thought. Duck to the dock, it was amusing. He and the Russian moved quickly to toss ropes from the dock to the plane and quickly had the craft moored almost before the hatch slid back and Bridget and the others got out. Bridget and Hannigan both looked almost way too happy. The Italian, however, looked totally miserable. He actually even looked thinner, his clothing now hanging much more loosely than it had a couple of days before.
“He looks a little worse for wear,” McKenzie nodded, indicating Degiorno.
“He wasn’t really prepared for honest work,” Hannigan replied, his hand finding Bridget’s and their fingers entwined.
“He was pretty tame on the flight from the boat. But then I imagine flying through the air without a plane can have that effect,” Bridget said mischievously
“How did that happen?” McKenzie asked, curious.
“While boarding,” Bridget explained, deliberately being vague.
McKenzie shook his head in wonder. It seemed a lot was going on without his knowledge. Maybe even more than he wanted to know.
“Yeah the Italian got his first flying lesson,” Hannigan deadpanned.
“We have most of the supplies loaded onto the old floatplane, but we need to put a few in the Duck,” McKenzie said.
“Then let’s get moving,” Hardluck Hannigan growled.
*****
The silver zeppelin hung in the air, barely obscured by clouds, waiting and watching like some great predatory bird, searching for some sign of the others seeking its treasure. The Valkyrie was ready to attack, poised and waiting for a sign of the others seeking the treasure that had thus far been denied it.
The waiting was the hardest part for the crew, who were growing more nervous around Ragnarok with each passing minute. It was evident to everyone that Doctor Ragnarok was quickly descending into some sort of strange madness as they waited for some sign of the Italian who had stolen the real map to the temple where The Emerald of Eternity rested.
Hans Wessel hated waiting, especially with a madman loose aboard his ship, and that is what he considered The Valkyrie: his ship. She was the new flagship of the Luftwaffe’s new lighter than air class. He had heard rumors from the men aboard from the famed Condor Squadron that an even larger vessel was being secretly constructed--a true floating airbase that could deliver entire armies to any point on the globe. If the rumors were true, Germany would truly be masters of the skies!
For who would be able to stop the formidable might of the Nazi war machine if they could deliver an entire army anywhere on the globe in two days time? Not the British, and certainly not their poor upstart cousins the Americans. The Americans were too frightened to even join in the war effort! They made a lot of noise, but even the bloody Brits couldn’t talk them into sending men or materials to combat the growing Nazi presence in Europe or their growing conquests.
It would only be a matter of time before Germany ruled the world. And when Germany did, it would be through military might, not through some silly religious hoodoo.
“Wessel,” he heard his name spoken in long sibilant snake-like fashion. Hans Wessel turned to see Doctor Ragnarok standing in the doorway of his command room.
“What do you want, Herr Doktor?” Wessel asked sternly, much more sternly than he felt, because the madman before him still frightened him intensely. He had felt the man’s power and could sense what sort of evil he was capable of.
“They are coming, Wessel. Soon they will be within our grasp, and when they are, we will force them to lead us to our prize! They shall lead us to The Emerald of Eternity. Once we have it, no one will stand in our way!” Ragnarok cackled madly, rubbing his gloved hands together.
“How do you know this?” Wessel asked, humoring the mad creature.
“I can feel them, drawing nearer. And He is with them. One I have faced before. This time he shall pay for what he did to me, and he shall pay as no other has by dancing naked in the flames of Hell!” Ragnarok raged.
“Let me know when they are close enough, Herr Doktor, and I will make sure we capture them this time so they will have no choice but to lead us to your precious emerald,” Wessel replied with a smile that never touched his eyes.
“Yesssss!” Ragnarok hissed as he moved away from the doorway. Wessel felt a shudder of revulsion pass through him. He almost pitied Ragnarok, who had slid from being a terrifying being to a jabbering madman in just a few hours.
Wessel found himself wondering if the doctor might not just die and save him the trouble of having to kill him once the silly jewel was recovered.
*****
Hardluck Hannigan checked the magazine for the MAS 36 Carbine and slapped it into place. He was surprised to find that the good Padre had a couple of the French bolt action rifles at the Mission. They had only been adopted by the French Military the year before, so it was only natural that the Belgians would have them, but for someone as anti-violence as the Padre to have acquired a couple had come as a real shock.
There were a good many layers to the priest’s character, Hannigan had discovered, and he was sure he had yet to see them all. He could also sense darkness within the man that few others apparently could see, and it troubled him. McKenzie was a priest, a man of the cloth. Yet there was darkness in his soul that Hannigan found very troubling. Hannigan shook the thought away and went back to examining the rifle.
The MAS 36 carbine fired a 7.5x54mm cartridge and could hold up to 5 rounds in the magazine. It wasn’t a Thompson submachine gun by any means, but it had a lot more range to it! He had a feeling that it would come in pretty handy in the area they were heading into.
Hannigan heard the soft scrape of boot leather on gravel behind him
and he spun drawing the rifle to his shoulder and flipped off the safety as his finger found the trigger. He found himself looking over the sights at Bridget’s suddenly pale face. Hannigan lowered the rifle and blew out a long breath.
“Sneaking up on people isn’t a real smart move,” Hannigan whispered, his whole body shaking at how close a call it had been.
“I see that, now,” Bridget replied, a slight quiver audible in her voice.
“I’m still surprised that your daddy had something like this around. Isn’t he afraid it might tempt the natives?” Hannigan asked, abruptly changing the subject. He did not want to think about how close he had come to almost blowing her brains out through the back of her pretty red head.
“I just came to tell you it’s time to go. Dad wants you to fly with him; I’ll have Gregor and the Italian with me,” Bridget spoke quietly. “Besides, if the tribes get restless, we need to be able to defend ourselves as well.”
“I guess,” was all Hannigan could think to say as Bridget spun on her heel and ran towards the Duck.
Hannigan mentally cursed himself as he followed along more slowly. Bridget was already in the Duck and had the engines going by the time he reached the older smaller Great War edition bi-plane. This one just happened to have floats instead of wheels.
“You ready?” McKenzie asked, as taciturn as ever.
“As much as I’ll ever be,” Hannigan replied.
Moments later both planes were climbing up into the blue African sky. Hannigan wondered if the journey would be worth what he had been put through so far.
*****
Claude DuChamps climbed out of the airplane and was thankful to be back on the ground once more. Antoine Gerrard and Paul Fontaine followed him from the aircraft. They had come in search of a man, a man worth one hundred thousand dollars American. His name was Mike Hannigan. There had been three other men who had gone looking to collect the price on the American’s head, but they had vanished.
Now it was Claude’s turn. He would find where the man had gone once he had disembarked from The African Queen. He already had the name of a man to look for, the local center for criminal activity: Francisco Degiorno.
Chapter Seventeen
It did not take long for both planes to get into the air. Hannigan was riding with McKenzie this time out and he was troubled by his last encounter with Bridget. Yes he had aimed a weapon at her, but she had snuck up on him, something that by this point, she should know better than to do. However, she might not have realized that she had snuck up on him. There was more than one way to look at it, and Hannigan knew he had to figure out how Bridget had taken it. He shook his head. Women, there wasn’t a more complicated species on the planet!
The sun had risen high in the sky and was working its way west. The rush of wind through his hair was much more exhilarating this time since he was actually inside the plane rather than roped to the side of one. On the flight from the boat to the Mission, Bridget had taught him the basics of flying. He had hoped to get time to learn more, but the race for the lost city had taken precedence over a flying lesson.
They were a full day behind the Nazis who by now realized that the map they had was not the original that they had shown Degiorno, but a clever fake that the Italian had managed to slip to them when he had stolen the original. When the Nazis found them, they would not be happy.
This was one of the reasons that Hannigan had been so happy to discover the MAS 36 rifles tucked away under lock and key at the Mission. The weapons gave them some range, range that he just didn’t have with his beloved Colt.
The Colt had been a gift from his father, a weapon his father had carried during the Great War. Back when Wild Bill Hannigan was a member of the famous Fighting Hawks. Hannigan knew he had broken his father’s heart when he had run off to see the world. Someday, he knew, he would have to go back and see his father, make amends for leaving the way he had. Hannigan knew that there were probably a lot of things he had to make amends for.
*****
Claude DuChamps looked irritated as he stood at the door of the Broken Tusk. The bar was closed until further notice according to the sign posted on the door. The Frenchman wondered exactly who had closed the bar. Judging from the number of bullet holes in the walls, he doubted it had been a voluntary closing.
DuChamps felt his sense of frustration mounting. According to his contacts in Sicily, this was supposed to be a simple contract. Find one American working for the Italian and kill him. Now both had mysteriously vanished and no one in the port town was talking. Merde!
The situation was intolerable. He had to find out what had happened here the day The African Queen had docked. The big tramp steamer was already gone, but he knew that Mike Hannigan had not been aboard; going after The African Queen would be of no use!
He had sent his two men to search for information about the American, the Broken Tusk and its owner Francisco Degiorno. So far, they had been unable to turn up any information. It was as if Degiorno and Hannigan had both dropped off the face of the earth! Already trouble was brewing in the port town. Degiorno had been a power in the city’s underworld; now he was gone and a vacuum was left in his place. And since nature abhors a vacuum, there were any number of candidates struggling to take his place.
*****
“There they are!” Ragnarok pointed suddenly towards two small black specks that had appeared in the sky over the verdant green foliage of the jungle. They were barely even visible to the naked eye.
“How can you be sure?” Hans Wessel asked cautiously.
“I can feel Him!” Ragnarok hissed, his voice sounding even more reptilian than before.
“Feel who?” Wessel’s curiosity getting the better of him.
“Him! The one who did this to me, who trapped me in this pathetic shell! Revenge is coming soon,” Ragnarok croaked.
“This person is also after The Emerald of Eternity?” Wessel asked softly, still trying to elicit information.
“Yes you fool! Haven’t you been listening? I said He was coming! Pay attention!” Ragnarok admonished.
Hans Wessel sat back wondering exactly who the mysterious He was. The man obviously had Ragnarok rattled, and rattled deeply.
*****
Niles McKenzie felt a chill race down his spine as the biplane sped over the emerald expanse of the jungle. He closed his eyes and reached out with his senses, trying to pinpoint what had caused the chill. He felt a presence, somewhat familiar yet darkly evil. He had faced it before, he knew it. Then it came to him in a flash. Doctor Ragnarok! The last time he had faced him was aboard a ship full of hostages near the end of the Great War.
McKenzie had thought that the evil wizard had died when he had plunged off the rail of the ship, engulfed in the blue fire of magic. His heart skipped a beat as he realized that he had been so wrong. Fear clutched as his gut as he realized that not only would he be facing the wrath of Prester John, but of the evil Doctor Ragnarok as well.
McKenzie shook his head, knowing that what lay ahead of him would be perhaps the most dangerous battle he would ever face. But he was instantly pulled back to reality when bullets shredded through the wings of the biplane!
*****
Hardluck Hannigan flinched as he saw the fabric along the left wing of the bi-plane explode into wood and cloth particles. Hannigan jerked his head around to look over his shoulder. Two Messerschmitt fighter planes were diving on them from above, guns blazing. Instinctively his hand went for the Colt on his waist, when he realized that the small bi-plane had a machine gun.
Hannigan grabbed the grips on the gun and aimed at the attacking fighters, his finger tightening on the twin triggers.
The machine gun roared and bucked in his fists as tracers blazed back towards the German fighter planes. Flame erupted from the engine compartment of the nearer fighter and the plane veered off, trailing smoke. Hannigan started humming to himself as he tracked the remaining fighter against the broad expanse of blue sky. It took him a moment t
o realize he was humming Glenn Miller’s Pennsylvania 6-5000 as he tracked the German fighter across the sky.
The second ship went into a roll, trying to avoid the stream of tracers but with no real success. Flames exploded from the wings and the German ship roared down in a smoke trailed arc to the jungle below. Flame and debris erupted in a small black mushroom cloud climbing from the vast expanse of green.
Hannigan looked back and saw Bridget pulling slightly ahead of them as a long silvery cigar shape descended from the wispy white clouds above. Hannigan recognized it immediately as the large silver zeppelin that he had spotted the night that The African Queen had arrived in Africa.
The Nazis had found them! Suddenly more fighters emerged from the rear of the zeppelin.
“How?” Hannigan growled as he swung the guns around, firing them out at the approaching fighters. Two more started trailing smoke and went crashing into the jungle below. The same jungle, Hannigan noted that was rushing up to greet them.
“Padre, what the heck are you thinking?” Hannigan yelled, his stomach suddenly flipping over.
“Evasive action!” McKenzie’s voice drifted back to him over the screaming of the engine. Seemingly at the last possible instant, McKenzie pulled out of the dive and Hannigan could see leaves and branches flying into the air as they were broken off by the bi-plane’s undercarriage.
“Holy Cow!” Hannigan exclaimed as one of the attacking planes that had been on their tail hit the trees and exploded in a ball of flames. He drew his beloved .45 and aimed it at one of the approaching Messerschmitt fighters. Thumbing off the safety he lined up the sights and pulled the trigger. He saw the cockpit glass spider-web and the pilot jerk backwards. The nose of the plane lifted and the plane piloted by a dead man plowed into the underbelly of another fighter that was using it’s machineguns to chew up the bi-plane’s wings. The shockwave from the explosion proved too much, however, and it slammed the undercarriage of the bi-plane down into the verdant expanse of trees. The ship lurched hard and something slammed into Mike Hannigan’s head, sending him dropping into a deep dark pit.