“So Audrey isn’t your real name,” I said. “You’re Betty.”
I had made it a habit of following all the main and lower gods, and who left, who got moved, who moved up or down, and so on. I was a poker player and a superhero. It was just part of my superhero job.
I reached across the table, hand extended. She took my hand and I shook hers, saying, “Nice meeting you, Betty.”
“Nice to meet you as well, Poker Boy,” she said, smiling, those teeth perfect in the bar light.
So now that I knew who she really was, there were only two options available as to why she was doing what she was doing. First, it was a bet as I had figured before.
But the second reason felt to be the more likely prospect. Betty wanted to move either up, or sideways, in her job status in the Gambling God Big Casino.
Suddenly I knew the answer. Dave was involved, therefore this wasn’t a bet. This was an audition.
Betty was trying to move over to Poker Room manager and take Stan’s job.
And Dave must have figured that if she understood a major poker player enough to get him to sleep with her instead of playing poker, she might get the job.
Now twice over the last few years since he hired me and told me I was a superhero, I had talked with Stan, both times in the middle of adventures. Usually the Gambling Gods didn’t get involved in my adventures, and I doubted they even paid much attention most of the time.
But I liked Stan. He treated me fairly. I wasn’t so sure yet that I liked Betty. Granted, any normal, heterosexual man would want to sleep with her, but that aside, I didn’t have a good feeling about her.
And she had clearly let me surprise her as well. No one surprised Stan. And he seemed to understand poker players.
Betty clearly understood sex. And since Keno had the worst odds of any game in a casino except the Big Wheel, she understood suckers. And she was playing me as one during this entire exchange.
Poker players hated being played as suckers, even though the payout was sex with a goddess. It still wasn’t worth it.
I took a sip out of my drink and leaned forward over the table. “Betty, you are a stunningly beautiful goddess.”
“Well, thank you,” she said, beaming that beaming smile at me.
“And I think you will make great middle management in the Big Casino.”
“I hear a but coming,” she said, her smile now gone.
“But I don’t think you’d make a good Poker Room Manager. You’re going to have to find another way to move up.”
She sat there staring at me for a moment, her mouth slightly open. Clearly I had hit the nail right on the head. I had read her reasons and motives like I read a mid-level poker player.
“Dave told me I wouldn’t be able to fool you,” she said. “But I don’t understand how you knew without your superpowers. Did Stan tell you?”
“No one told me,” I said. “I’m a poker player. Knowing people and understanding why they do what they do is my job, and how I make my living. And I’m very good at my job.”
She nodded. “Dave told me that if I didn’t understand poker players, I could never have the job. Clearly I don’t. At least not yet. You want to give me a private lesson?”
She smiled such a seductive smile, I thought the glass in my hand might melt. Yet somehow I managed to hold on.
“Sorry,” I said. “I hope you don’t hold this against me.” Actually, I hoped that a lot, but I figured that since I helped Stan keep his job, Stan was going to help me as well if I needed protection from Betty.
“No hard feelings,” she said, still smiling, only with the seductive part dropped. “But tell me, how would I have gotten you into bed if I had known poker players.”
“Just play good cards,” I said, giving her the same advice I gave any beginning poker player. “And never get in the way of a big game.”
She nodded. “And tonight’s a big game for you?”
“It is,” I said. I had really been looking forward to my Christmas poker ritual, especially after the last two years.
She laughed softly, and stood, extending her beautiful, perfect-skinned hand. “Well, Poker Boy, it certainly has been an education meeting you. I’m sorry we’re not going to have that roll in the sheets.”
“Not half as sorry as I am,” I said, taking her hand and holding it.
Her off-kilter laugh echoed through the mostly empty restaurant as she faded away, leaving me with my hand extended into mid-air.
I turned and headed for the poker room.
No one had died on me yet on this Christmas Eve. And I kept Stan’s job for him, which had to be worth a little.
So far, so good.
And I hadn’t even played a hand of cards yet.
What Came Before...
Nineteen-year-old Danny Hawk, his uncle, and his best friend Craig, were in Cairo to look for his missing father. Danny had witnessed the death of his only contact in Cairo, Professor Davis, because the professor had Danny’s father’s journals.
Danny knows that the men who had killed the professor were now after him and the journals. Danny finds the journals and gets his uncle and friend to safety in an airport hotel where he tells them what happened. They decide to keep searching for Danny’s father and try to rescue him.
Along the way, Danny and Craig find some help from a street kid named Bud and twins from South Africa who had worked with Danny’s father.
They managed to escape the men chasing them twice so far, Danny wasn’t sure their luck would hold a third time.
And it barely did. They finally decided to head out of Cairo.
THE ADVENTURES OF HAWK
CHAPTER NINETEEN
September 1, 1970
Upper Lake Nasser, Sudan.
THE FIRST PART OF THE TRIP up the Nile had been fantastic, at least from a tourist perspective.
They had somehow managed to get out of Cairo without being seen and book a boat going south up the river. They had slept the first night on the wood plank floor of one small cabin, taking turns because there was only room for three to sleep. For Danny, that felt better anyway, since the two who weren’t sleeping stood guard.
At every major port, they got off the ship and hid, then changed ships and kept going, sometimes booking a nice tourist ship, other times catching rides on fishing boats.
With every face that looked their way, Danny imagined it might be one of the Hydra League.
Or one of the brown-shirted men who had chased them out of Ed and Ernie’s apartment.
From Cairo, for the first 400 miles, between Abu Roash and El Kula, there seemed to be a mountain range of pyramids along the west bank. Many times, Danny wished he and the others were there to sightsee, but they weren’t. Even the slightest halt at this point might be enough to get them killed.
When they had crossed out of Egypt and into Sudan on a ferry on the great Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam, they had been asked for their passports, but were paid no attention to after that.
Danny had been surprised that Bud even had a passport. Later, Bud told him he had found it in the street a few years back and just kept it. The kid’s name on the passport was Anthony Penn, and it was British, which fit Bud’s accent.
Both of the twins also had British passports, but Danny didn’t want to ask them how they got those. He was just relieved to have no further trouble. It looked like they had made a clean escape.
But that night, as the ferry pulled into Wadi Halfa, Sudan, two men climbed on board. It was just after midnight, but the air was still hot. The night sky was full of stars, brighter than any night sky Danny could remember seeing.
Danny, who was standing guard at the time, knew at once that they had been found. It was the same two men who had killed Professor Davis back in Cairo. He would recognize those two men anywhere, especially with the distinctive snake-rising-out-of-water tattoo on their right hands.
Hydra League.
Danny wanted to be sick. They were six hundred miles u
p the Nile River, yet these two men had found them.
How was that possible?
“They found us,” Danny whispered to the others, waking them. They were on the top deck of the three level ferry, near the rear. “Hydra League men.”
“How?” Craig asked, shocked. “Are they human?”
“I would not bet on it,” Bud said.
Below, the two men split up, one going toward the bow, the other toward the stern.
Danny looked at the lit dock and the large Sudan village beyond. It seemed impossible to reach without being seen. The ferry was about to pull out, and clearly the two men planned on riding along. Once the ferry was into the middle of the huge Aswan Lake, the boys would have no chance of escape.
“We need to get down to the next level,” Danny whispered.
“Then what?” Ernie asked, looking panicked in the faint light.
“We’re trapped,” Ed said.
“When the two come up the stairs to the second level,” Danny said, “we go over the side to the first level. We’ll have to be quick. We’ll only have a few seconds.”
“We’ll need to wait there until just as the ferry is pulling out,” Bud said, nodding. “Then make a jump for it.”
“Exactly,” Danny said, trying to breathe evenly to slow his heart from pounding right out of his chest.
They made a dash for the second deck, moving as silently as they all could on the wooden stairs. On the second level, Bud went on down the stairs to the first level to see where the men were while Danny, Craig, and the twins moved quickly to a place in the middle of the ship away from both staircases.
A moment later Bud came running back. “Get over the side,” he said as he went past Danny and flipped himself over the railing, sliding down a support pole to the first deck.
All four of them followed Bud, with Danny going last. As he slid down, he caught a glimpse of one of the Hydra League killers coming up the stairs near the front of the ferry.
At that moment, a signal sounded, echoing through the night air. The ferry was going to pull out. The engines got louder and the ferry lurched into motion.
“We jump at the last minute,” Danny said, running along the edge of the ferry’s lowest deck. He got to a point near the stern, swung himself over the railing, his backpack on his shoulder, then waited for the dock to come sliding past.
The other four were in the same position beside him on the outside of the rail. He would be the first to jump, and the dock looked like it was getting farther and farther away from the ferry.
He had to wait.
Time it right.
Too soon and he would hit the water, too late and he would do the same on the other side of the dock.
The ferry had really gained speed as he finally said, “Now!”
He jumped with all his strength.
The blackness of the water between the ferry and the dock seemed to be a vast expanse, but somehow, he cleared it, hitting the dock with a few running steps before stopping.
The others did the same. Craig, the last one off, actually hit and rolled, but came up all right.
On the boat, one of the men standing on the second deck yelled something in Arabic at them that Danny didn’t completely understand, since most of it was swearing.
Danny waved at the man like he was a relative going on a cruise.
“Now, that’s not nice,” Craig said, laughing. “You really shouldn’t tease the big man with a gun.”
“True,” Danny said, turning and heading for the city of Wadi Halfa as the ferry vanished into the darkness of the big lake. “But what’s he going to do? Kill me twice?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
September 11, 1970
Upper Lake Nasser, Sudan.
DANNY FIGURED the two men would circle back by land to the city to look for them, so they took another ferry an hour behind the last one and for the rest of the trip up the river didn’t see anyone following them. It took another full week, making good speed, before they had reached Lake Albert. It wasn’t the headwaters of the Nile exactly, but it was close. The river that led to Lake Victoria fed off of Lake Albert.
They stopped on the Republic of Congo side of the lake because of a conversation Ernie had had with a boat pilot a few hundred miles back. It seemed what was called “the path of elephants” by the natives was from the bank of Lake Albert, over a range of mountains and into the deep jungle of the Congo.
The elephants had been using the same path for thousands of years.
Danny had been stunned. There really was a “path of elephants.”
“The area is haunted,” Ernie had told them. “It’s never really been explored. The pilot said it goes through what is called the Land of the Dead. None of the native tribes go near the area.”
Bud had laughed. “Well, at least we won’t have that problem. But we’re going to need someone to guide us.”
Ernie had nodded. “The Captain gave me a name of a guide who would take us along the elephant path to the Land of the Dead.”
In the small village of Bumia, ten miles inland along a mud road from the lake, they had found their guide, a skinny, older man with long grey hair and rotted teeth named Hassett.
At first, Danny wasn’t sure the old man could help them, but then after watching him move around his hut-like home, it was clear the man was still in great physical shape.
Danny had told him what they wanted and his answer had been to laugh. When none of them laughed with him, he had asked simply. “Why would I take you five into the jungle?”
“I’m in search of my father,” Danny said. “And our only clue is to walk the path of the elephants.”
“Path of the elephants?” Hasset asked. “What do you know about that?”
“Nothing,” Danny said. “That’s why we want to hire you to walk it.” Danny had made no mention of the Hydra League or anything else. Hassett had finally agreed and Bud had helped him with the negotiations for Hassett’s fee and buying the supplies they would need.
Twenty-two days and nights of travel after leaving Cairo, they started off into the jungle.
In all his life, Danny had never been so scared. He was leading an expedition into an area of the world that had never been explored.
And he had no idea what he was looking for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
September 15, 1970
Deep in the jungle, Republic of Congo
WALKING THE PATH of elephants had actually turned out to be fairly easy, considering the thick underbrush of the jungle that bordered the half-mile-wide band of brush and trees trampled down by the passage of thousands of elephants twice a year. Danny couldn’t imagine even trying to walk through that jungle. It looked like a two-story green wall on both sides.
Except for watching for the mounds of what Craig called elephant chips, they made good time. And the dried elephant chips made great fuel for fires at night.
They never saw an elephant, either, but did see a few scattered remains of ones, rotting and smelling in the hot, humid air.
Hassett had warned them that if they felt the ground shaking, get off into the jungle fast. Elephants mostly moved along this path slowly, but at times they moved a lot faster, and then they were real dangerous.
At first, the bugs that seemed to be everywhere had driven them all crazy, but as Hassett had said would happen, they all got used to them, and from what Danny could tell, as soon as they did, the bugs seemed to almost stop bothering them.
After five days of hiking, mostly uphill toward what Hassett called Elephant Pass, Danny was getting frustrated. He and the others had no idea what they were looking for. The only clue was the words “teeming masses” in the Hydra Journal entry #3. And in this jungle, it sure didn’t look like they would find any teeming masses of anything except insects.
“When do we enter the Land of the Dead?” Danny asked Hassett just after they started out on the fifth morning.
Hassett laughed, a sort of choking sound that Danny
still wasn’t used to. “Son, we’ve been in it for a day now.”
“Can we stop and talk for a minute?” Danny asked.
Hassett shrugged and pointed to some shade to one side.
With the pack off his back, Danny told the twins that they were all in the Land of the Dead, and what Hassett had said.
“Are there any ruins in this area?” Ed asked Hassett.
“I wouldn’t know,” Hassett said. “Never been off this trail. Never had any reason to go bushwhacking out in that stuff.” He pointed to the high wall of what looked to be solid green that bordered the path of elephants.
“Any high place we could look over the Land of the Dead area?” Ernie asked.
“Sure,” Hassett said. “Later today we’ll reach Elephant Pass. To the right there’s Ishango Peak.”
“Ishango?” both Ernie and Ed said at the same time.
Hassett nodded, surprised.
“Ishango is the name of an ancient people,” Ernie said.
“Rumored to exist before the first Pharaohs,” Ed said.
“Can you get us to that peak where we can look out over the Land of the Dead?” Danny asked Hassett.
“Sure,” he said. “but before I do that, you are going to have to tell me the truth.”
He looked around slowly at each of them, but no one said a word, so he kept going. “Two men have been following us for days, staying behind us, pacing us. What kind of trouble are you boys in?”
Danny thought his heart was going to stop. Craig dropped to the ground and just sat there shaking his head. Clearly, they had been found yet again.
Danny looked at Hassett, then at the twins, who both nodded that they should tell Hassett everything.
“How familiar are you with archeology?” Ed asked.
Hassett did his laugh, then said, “I have a degree in it from Oxford, back before any of you were born.”
Now Danny was even more shocked.
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