The Last Dragon td-92

by Warren Murphy

  The Last Dragon

  ( The Destroyer - 92 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Remo races against time to locate the huge dinosaur reportedly living in the jungles of Africa before a fast-food king can turn it into hamburger meat.

  Destroyer 92: The Last Dragon

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Prologue

  On the first pass, they missed it.

  The earthquake had opened up great red-brown holes in the green African veldt, and the imaging analysts thought it was one of those. But a sharp-eyed photo enhancement analyst named Narvel Buckle saw the black blotches and bands dappling the elongated Halloween-pumpkin orange shape.

  "I think it's alive," he muttered to himself. He told no one.

  On the second pass, twelve hours later, it had moved three meters. Alive. Definitely.

  His curiosity roused. Narvel made another search for it on the third pass. He told the satellite console operator that there were signs of volcanic activity. The government of Gondwanaland, he explained, would pay well for topographic photos of an emerging natural disaster like a volcano.

  "They'll throw it into the package with our quake shots and they can double their foreign aid request," he said.

  That was all he needed to say. The operator signaled the low-orbit Gaiasat camera to suppress all vegetation and bring up the warm end of the spectrum.

  Luck was with Narvel on that third pass. The black-and-orange thing happened to be looking up as the satellite snapped a clear photograph that captured the upward-looking eyes. It was looking directly at the sun, which reflected as twin pinpoints of hot light.

  "I know what that dadgum thing is!" he breathed, nearly dropping his jeweler's loupe.

  And since he worked for a commercial satellite company which specialized in selling natural disaster damage assessment images to foreign countries-whose reputation could be ruined if they dared to put the photos on the international market-Narvel Buckle slipped the entire set into his briefcase, and set about peddling them out of his Chevy Chase apartment.

  The National Enquirer laughed at him; they printed photos just like it every week. This week's issue was headlined BAT BOY FOUND LIVING IN CAVE! The managing editor's eight-year-old son had posed for it, and the computer graphics people had added the pointy ears and filed-to-chisels teeth.

  Did Narvel have any shots of Liz or Madonna sunbathing in the nude? Preferably together? Maybe even kissing? No? Call when you do. Toodles.

  The Smithsonian Institute in Washington kept shunting him back and forth between departments. The paleontology department couldn't have been less interested if he had been trying to sell them osteoporosis insurance.

  "Our interests are restricted to old bones and fossils," a voice that sounded as if it had belonged to one of the latter said.

  "But this is the real thing!" Narvel explained. "You can render it to the bone or something. Like they do with tired old horses to get glue."

  "Try Natural History. I shall see if I can connect you."

  The attempt was a magnificent one. Thirty-seven different people lifted department phones, ranging from anthropology to zoology, and tried to talk all at once.

  Narvel Buckle finally hung up and asked the switchboard to connect him directly. After he explained what the satellite photos had disclosed, the chairman--or whatever he was-of the Smithsonian natural history department inhaled through his nose with a sound like a tiny elephant exhaling through his trunk.

  "Impossible," he added.

  "I got the photos," Narvel retorted. "And they're only two thousand dollars for the set of three."

  "As I said, it is impossible. No such beast could be roaming the heart of Africa."

  "Why the hell not?"

  "For there to be one, there must be many."

  "I don't follow."

  "Follow this simple equation: One creature necessitates two parents. Two parents requires four grandparents. A quartet of grandparents implies a large sustaining population. No such population has ever been discovered on the African landmass."

  "Hey, we're talking Africa here! It's not exactly Vegas."

  "Africa has been satisfactorily explored. And certainly by now, an orbiting satellite would have snapped portraits of specimens such as you describe."

  "That's what I got! High-resolution satellite images. In color. Nine by twelves. Glossies. "

  "Impossible. Sorry. Try the paleontology department. Let me connect you."

  "I don't want to be-"

  Narvel Buckle hung up just as the bone-dry voice of the head paleontologist was saying "Yes?"

  No other museum seemed interested. Narvel thought he had a sale to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, but when they wanted the president of the Gaia Satellite Reconnaissance Company to personally vouch for the authenticity of the photos in question, Narvel had to admit that he was selling his photos under the table. The curator hung up without another word.

  Then someone at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto told him to try the cryptozoologists.

  "The what?"

  "Try the International Colloquium of Cryptozoologists in Phoenix. This is exactly their sort of meat."

  Narvel didn't know what a cryptozoologist was, but he called the number the Phoenix directory assistance gave him.

  A woman answered. She had a pleasant voice that made him think of Michelle Pfeiffer, and as he told his story, he could hear her breathe into the receiver, at first in warm, measured intervals, and then with increasing excitement.

  "We are very, very interested in your photographs," she told him.

  "Five grand for the set of three," Narvel said instantly.

  "Can you supply the longitude and latitude of the sighting?"

  "That'll be $39.99 extra."

  "Done."

  "Deal."

  "One question," Narvel asked.

  "Yes."

  "What the heck is a cryptozoologist?"

  "Cryptozoology is the study of hidden animals," the blondish-sounding voice explained. "That's what crypto means: hidden. We are interested in creatures common zoologists dismiss as mythological, or which are mistakenly believed to be extinct."

  "Oh. No wonder you want these photos."

  Narvel faxed muddy photocopies of the photos that very day and patiently waited for a return call. It never came.

  The check arrived the next day by UPS Express. Narvel waited until the check had cleared before fedexing the three high-resolution color photographs that the Smithsonian Institute had turned down, along with the exact longitude and latitude at which the satellite had snapped the shots. He never heard back from the International Colloquium of Cryptozoologists, and none of the photos ever appeared in print. But Narvel Buckle didn't care about that. He was thinking that he should have asked for ten grand. At least.

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Nancy Derringer was starting to have second thoughts.

  The heart of equatorial Africa was no place for second thoughts, never mind fear. But Nancy, blond as corn silk, willowy as bamboo, and tough as Arizona sagebrush, was experiencing both.

  Those who knew her well claimed she was as fearless as the crocodiles she had spent her short adult life studying.

  As the chief paleontologist and herpetologist for the International Colloquium of Cryptozoologists, Nancy Derringer had trudged through Himalayan snows for Yeti, plumbed deep-water lakes all over the Americas and the British Isles for surviving plesiosaurs, and penetrated abyssal depths in quest of garagantuan cephalopods.

  Africa was a different matter. It was a hothouse for tropical diseases like river blindness and monkey pox, the reputed incubator for AIDS. A
Caucasian had to undergo two months of inoculations before embarking on an expedition into the continent's humid heart.

  They injected her twice against cholera, twice against typhoid, subjected her to a precautionary rabies injection that they warned might do no good if she were bitten in the wild, gave her a tetanus booster shot, and then sugar lumps impregnated with polio vaccine to take orally.

  Nancy had been so anxious to get going she asked to be injected and inoculated all in one day. The doctors vetoed that. No less than four weeks between the yellow fever and hepatitis vaccines. And she would have to go to London for her yellow fever inoculation. It was unavailable in the U.S.

  It had been painful and annoying, and she had taken it all without complaint, sustained by sheer adrenalin.

  The flight from London had gone well. And the stopover in Port Chuma, capital of Gondwanaland, former European colony of Bamba del Oro, and now sovereign nation on the brink of social and economic catastrophe, was interminable.

  Now, trudging through the Gondwanaland bush, popping her daily antimalaria tablets dry, Nancy was nervous.

  She would have preferred a more politically palatable sponsor than the Burger Triumph hamburger chain. But the nature of the expedition was not exactly National Geographic cover material.

  The major colleges had been too broke. She had been laughed out of corporate boardrooms from Manhattan to L.A. Even PBS had said no.

  Until that day she met with Skip King, vice president in charge of marketing for the Burger Triumph Corporation, in his thirty-fourth floor office in their world headquarters in Dover, Delaware.

  She had felt foolish even requesting the meeting. But a colleague had suggested it, and then faxed her one side of a Burger Triumph food bag that looked as if it had been designed by a precocious child. It showed the planet earth and boasted of Burger Triumph's new biodegradable packaging that conserved seven million tons of waste annually, not to mention the gasoline conserved and pollution cut by dispensing with the old cardboard containers.

  "Planet-pleasing packaging" it was called.

  A note scribbled on the fax said, "They're rich, they're environmentally conscious. Why not try?"

  "They're trying to rehabilitate their reputation," Nancy snorted. But she made the call and got an appointment for the very next day.

  There, she had made a short self-conscious presentation and laid the unmarked manila envelope on King's desk. Wordlessly, he had taken it up, unwound the flap-securing string, and shook out the three eight-by-ten glossies that had been taken from an earth observation satellite from a distance of over one hundred miles above Africa.

  King had stared at them for five silent minutes, going through them briskly at first and then slowly the second time. At the end, he set the three photos side by side on his desk and stared at them a long while.

  His face was too sharp to be called handsome. It had a foxy cast to it. Or maybe it was more wolfish, Nancy had thought. The nose, the thin-lipped mouth, even the high-tolerance cut of his jet black hair was too severe.

  He looked up, and his eyes, black as volcanic glass, regarded her without any emotion she could read.

  "You say they're alive?" he asked tonelessly.

  "There is just one, as far as we know."

  "How big?"

  "Judging from the photos, forty feet from nose to tail."

  King looked down and frowned. "Most of it is neck and tail," he muttered in a vaguely disappointed tone. "How big would you say the body is?"

  "Oh, less than half of that."

  "Fifteen feet, then?"

  "At a rough estimate."

  "Tall?"

  "With the neck lifted, we estimate-"

  He shook his head impatiently. "No-how tall from underbelly to the top of the spine?"

  Nancy had frowned. "Possibly eight feet."

  Skip King took up a pencil and began making calculations on a notepad. He crossed out columns of numbers instead of erasing them, and when he got an end figure, he looked up and said, very seriously, "Probably weighs eight tons, not counting head, neck, and tail. Ten tons in all."

  "That sounds about right," Nancy had admitted, thinking, This man is asking all the wrong questions.

  But King seemed so completely professional. Button-down, no-nonsense, and thoroughly unruffled by the prospect of making zoological history.

  "And you want Burger Triumph to fund your safari?" he had asked.

  "Expedition. And we think it could be accomplished for less than two million dollars," Nancy told him.

  "That include shipping costs?"

  "Shipping?"

  "Bringing the beast back alive."

  "Back! How would we get it back? I mean, could we get it back. The government of-"

  "Gondwanaland? Don't make me laugh. It's run by a tub of butter who's backpedaling away from Karl Marx so fast he's trampling his immediate ancestors. BT is a multinational company. We could buy Gondwanaland, if we wanted. Cheap. But it'll be a lot easier to grease a few official palms." He paused for breath, then said, "Miss Derringer, I believe I can get you an approval on this."

  The suddenness of the statement had taken her breath away. Nancy had expected polite interest, and weeks-if not months-of corporate buck-passing until an answer was handed down.

  "Are-are you sure? I mean, arrangements will have to be made about creating a suitable environment for the animal. And there is the question of a receptive zoo-"

  Skip King raised a quieting hand. "Please calm down," he said. "All these things will be taken care of."

  And they were. Within forty-eight hours, Skip King had called. His voice was smooth as champagne.

  "It's set," he said, as if he were talking about a day trip to the Smokies.

  "It is?"

  "The CEO had sanctioned all the funding we need. A suitable transportation vessel is being chartered, and by the time we return with it, a climate-suitable habitation will be waiting."

  "Where?"

  "Somewhere near Burger Triumph World Headquarters. Maybe in it. We have a rather large basement."

  "What!"

  "We have a very large basement. It will be converted into a suitable temporary habitat."

  "As long as it's temporary," Nancy had told him.

  "We estimate we'll be able to leave in three to four weeks."

  "Impossible."

  "Not for us."

  "Us?"

  "I intend to lead this safari, Miss Derringer."

  The statement floored her. But it had been delivered with such calm self-assurance that Nancy had been taken utterly off guard.

  "Do-do you have any experience in this sort of project?" Nancy had stammered.

  "Miss Derringer, special projects are my life."

  "That's not what I mean. I meant field experience."

  "Miss Derringer, I happen to be a graduate of the Wharton School of Business. I'm sure you've heard of it."

  "Somewhere. And if you don't mind, it's Dr. Derringer."

  King had sniffed thinly-the first hint of his true character, Nancy realized now. "And where did you go to school?"

  "Oh, let's see. B.A. from Columbia-"

  "A nice school, I hear. But no Wharton."

  "-received my master's from Texas Technological University, and studied herpetology at the University of Colorado."

  "You studied herpes?"

  "Herpetology," Nancy said patiently, "is the study of reptiles. I've done extensive field work all over the globe for the Colloquium, and additionally I'm a member of the Crocodile Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources."

  "Oh," said Skip King in a tiny voice. "Well, I graduated magna cum laude."

  Nancy suppressed a sigh. Two could play at this infantile game, she thought. "Summa cum laude."

  "Second place is nice, too," King said smugly.

  "Summa cum laude means highest honors, Mr. King. Magna cum laude happens to be second place. And unless you want to co
ntract a wide variety of pernicious tropical diseases," Nancy added firmly, "we're not going until we've been thoroughly inoculated."

  There was a protracted pause on the line. When his voice returned, it was almost a croak.

  "Does that mean needles?"

  "Yes. Long, sharp ones."

  "I hate needles." And his voice was so dead that for a moment Nancy was afraid he would call the whole thing off.

  He hadn't. But now, weeks later, Nancy was beginning to wish he had.

  It had started when he had shown up at the departure point wearing a "Safari Til You Puke" T-shirt.

  Nancy was able to overlook that. But when they reached Port Chuma, he had insisted the native bearers wear Burger Triumph T-shirts and pith helmets-and address him as B'wana King.

  Ralph Thorpe, the British guide, had coaxed the Bantus into humoring King. Behind his back, they grinned and laughed. It was a big joke.

  To Nancy, Thorpe had confided, "I've seen this happen before. Our Mr. King has gone 'bushy.' "

  "Bushy?"

  "Intoxicated by the African bush."

  "But we aren't there yet."

  "Let's hope it wears off by the time we do," said Thorpe.

  It hadn't. It had only gotten worse. And they nearly lost their bearers when, on the first day out, they had broken out the provisions and King had insisted upon keeping the best food for the white expedition members and feeding the natives reheated Bongo Burgers, cheesefries, and flat soft drinks.

  "Why are they spitting out their food?" King had complained. "Each Silly Meal is five bucks American. That's more than these guys make in a week."

  "They are used to real food," Thorpe had warned. "And if they do not receive it, we shall all be fending for ourselves."

  King had relented. And complained and complained.

  That was when Nancy started to wonder if King was not "bushy" after all-just a few fries short of a Silly Meal.

  Now they were walking single file through the bush. Ahead loomed the denseness of the rain forest, packed like green, leafy lettuce and cabled by hairfine lianas and thick creepers. They were coming to the impenetrable Kanda Tract, where even the Bantus seldom ventured.

  Nancy was walking in the rear, with the native porters. She had wanted to take a lead position, but Skip King had vetoed that, saying, "Your place is at the back of the pack."