But it wasn’t the smiling, mustachioed face of Blanchard.
“Morning, friends,” Hudgens said as if he’d run into them in a bar. “It’s been a while. How is everything?”
42
Riley looked stunned. He was definitely not expecting that. “Morning, Commander,” he answered, trying to hide his surprise. “We weren’t expecting you.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well, we got bored and decided to see how you were. Hi, Jack.”
“For the first time, I’m very happy to see you,” he responded.
“And Carmen?” Riley asked urgently. “Is she with you?”
Hudgens motioned forward with his head. “There,” he said. “You should have seen the expression on the guards’ faces when they stopped the van after seeing her lying in the street. And when they tried to help her, she gave them a wink right before she held my gun in their faces and told them to put down their weapons. From the way they looked at her,” he added, amused, “I think it would have worked if she was holding lipstick instead.”
Riley nodded, but before he could say it wasn’t hard to imagine, Carmen’s voice called, “What the hell are you chatting about? Hurry!”
Hudgens complied, throwing a pair of bolt cutters at Riley’s feet.
Riley cut the chains and shackles. “Ready,” he said when he was done.
“Let’s go!” Hudgens urged.
Jack jumped out, but Riley stopped and looked back.
The third prisoner watched the scene with a strange distance, making no indication that he’d like them to free him.
“What’s your name?”
“Pembé.”
“And why’d you get arrested?” Riley asked.
“J’ai frappé mon maître,” he muttered, showing the palms of calloused, cut-up hands.
“What’d he say?” asked Jack, who had also turned back.
“I think he hit his master,” Riley translated.
Riley and Jack looked at each other, and without needing to say anything, Jack went back into the vehicle and cut his chains too.
“No time for that!” Hudgens shouted.
The two sailors ignored him and helped the battered inmate to stand. They climbed out of the vehicle, quickly recognizing they stood in the middle of a busy street. Dozens of onlookers watched them from a distance as if it were a street theater show, and more than one seemed ready to applaud.
Riley was about to ask for Carmen when he realized she was standing next to him. She held Hudgens’s Smith & Wesson .38 in both hands and pointed it toward the police van drivers and the commissar. They sat on the dusty ground with no choice but to impotently watch.
A few yards ahead Hudgens climbed into an olive-green ’38 Ford pickup. “Let’s go!” he screamed, head out of the window. “Get in the back!”
Jack put his arm under the prisoner’s shoulders and helped him to the truck, while Carmen walked backward, still aiming at the police. Riley squatted in front of Blanchard. “I suppose this won’t help convince you we’re innocent, huh?” he asked almost apologetically.
“Not really, to be honest,” the commissar answered circumspectly.
“Thought so. Anyway, tell the judge on my behalf to look carefully at the supposed evidence against us. We’re not killers,” he gestured toward his friends, who waited in the bed, gesturing for him to hurry. “But there is someone out there who is. And you should be worried about him.”
The commissar seemed to listen to his request, but finally said, “We’ll catch you, Monsieur Riley.” He looked at the others. “All of you. There’s nowhere to hide.”
Riley stood and nodded. He wasn’t expecting anything else. “Good-bye, Commissar,” he said. Then he turned, ran to the truck, and jumped in.
As soon as everyone was aboard, Hudgens pressed the accelerator, and they shot away in a cloud of dust.
Next to him, Jack helped Pembé sit on the floor.
Riley couldn’t get Blanchard’s last words from his head.
There’s nowhere to hide.
The olive-green truck with “Transports Gante” written in red on the doors rattled over the sea of potholes that occupied the wide avenue in the suburbs of Léopoldville. No other vehicle passed through the shantytown, and the only witnesses of their presence were Africans taking refuge in the shadows of the few trees present, along with a starving dog or two searching the trash piled on the corners. None of them showed the slightest interest or gave a second look to the truck traversing the streets at full speed.
Hudgens and Carmen sat in the cramped cab while Riley, Jack, and Pembé tried to keep their balance, clinging to sidebars in the bed.
Riley stuck his head in the cab, where Hudgens was handling the wheel with a look of concentration. “Why weren’t you arrested with us?” Riley asked, spitting out the question that had been weighing him down for three days.
Hudgens seemed surprised, as much by the timing of the question as by seeing Riley hanging out the side of the truck.
“I decided to spend the night out, with female company,” he said finally. “It’s been weeks since . . . well, you understand.” He winked. “So I wasn’t in the hotel when it was raided. As for Miss Debagh, there wasn’t an order to arrest her—miscommunication with the commissar in Matadi, maybe, or they didn’t consider her part of the crew . . . who knows? But she kept them from arresting me later, when I tried to get back to the hotel. Then we planned what to do next.”
Just then, Hudgens turned sharply left, forcing everyone to brace themselves hard to keep from falling over. The truck headed down a bumpy dirt road, leaving behind the last barracks and entering the lush vegetation around the city of Léopoldville.
Riley looked severely at Hudgens. “Where are we going?” he asked.
The commander glanced at him before answering. “You already know,” he answered, turning his attention back to the road.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“There’s nowhere else to go, Captain,” he said. “The train line to Matadi is under surveillance, so the only escape route is the river. And the only boat we can take is already waiting for us in the indigenous port, ready to leave right away.”
“Then let’s use that boat to cross the river and go to Brazzaville,” Jack suggested. “There we’ll be in the French Congo, safe from the Belgian authorities.”
“Forget it.” Hudgens was annoyed to have to explain something that seemed obvious to him. “Sure it’s another country, but the police on either bank work closely together. Don’t doubt for a minute they’d arrest us as soon as we reached the shore.”
Riley smacked the truck’s body with rage. It seemed that no matter what he did, circumstances were pushing him toward the sinister jungle from which no one returned.
“God damn it,” he muttered through his teeth. “You finally got what you wanted, huh?”
Hudgens didn’t answer, but his lips turned almost imperceptibly upward.
Ten minutes later and after a final bend in the road, the thatched-roof adobe houses of Port Indigene appeared.
Braking hard, Hudgens stopped the truck in front of the access road. Natives appeared suddenly and helped them out. Then one of the men climbed in the cab and drove the truck back the way they came.
“The police will be searching for the truck,” Hudgens explained when he noticed the surprise on Riley’s face. “They’ll ditch it in a suburb on the other side of the city. That should cost them some precious time.”
Riley nodded in understanding, suddenly realizing Pembé stood next to him. “You’re free,” Riley told him, looking at the scars from the whippings lining the man’s skin.
He nodded slowly and raised his hands in front of his face, as if seeing his unshackled wrists for the first time. Then he swept his gaze across the men and woman who had saved him and nodded thankfully. “Merci,” he said solemnly. “Je ne sais pas comment vous rendre la pareille.”
“Vous ne nous devez rien,” Carmen answered to make it clear
he didn’t owe them anything.
“Hold on,” Riley said. “Maybe you can do something for us.”
Taking Pembé by the shoulders, Riley whispered something in his ear. The Congolese man nodded in agreement, and Riley shook his hand.
When they were done, the other three looked at Riley, expecting an explanation that didn’t come. Then Jack asked him directly. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing much,” he replied. “I wished him luck and happiness.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jack said, knowing he was lying.
“What can I say? I’m a sentimental guy.”
The cloud of dust from the vehicle still hadn’t settled when they left Pembé behind and entered the town that surrounded the bank and bare dock.
There, tied up, was the boat meant to carry them up the Congo—the most powerful waterway in sub-Saharan Africa, an unexplored artery that ran to the continent’s very heart.
Riley stopped to study the odd boat. Its rusty smokestack spouted wisps of white smoke, indicating the engine was running. A river steamer with a flat bottom and a paddle wheel, it had two decks and looked very much like those that sailed on the Mississippi, but smaller and in poorer shape.
Riley could tell it was hardly ninety feet long and about fifteen wide, with a thin lower deck for the fuel, cargo, and crew. On top of it was an upper deck that contained the wheelhouse toward the fore and a little room toward the aft, which must have sometimes served as a cabin. The rest of the space between the helm and the cabin was empty save for some tables with chairs and a dozen hammocks hanging from the ceiling like giant sleeping bats. On the flat roof lay the stores of drinkable water, and above them rose the solitary smokestack on which the registration “C-57D” could barely be seen.
The general impression was of extreme fragility. The ridiculous foot-and-a-half distance between the deck and water, along with the structure of the boat, which apart from the reinforced bow was all wooden and without bulkheads, made Riley feel like he was looking at one of the shacks surrounding them. This one was just more showy, with its amazing ability to float on water.
“What a piece of junk,” Jack scoffed, who seemed to have read his mind.
Riley shrugged. “Could be worse.”
“I don’t see how.”
Then Verhoeven appeared in the bridge window, looking disapprovingly with his good eye at the two ex-brigadiers.
“Come on! Get on board, damn it!” he urged them drily. “There’s no time to lose!” Then he spat a large drop of tobacco waste from his mouth.
Riley turned to Jack and grimaced. “It can always be worse.”
Defeated, they walked toward the ramshackle dock behind Hudgens and Carmen, who had already gone aboard after crossing the flimsy plank serving as a gangway.
Riley waited to get on last, but before he did, he looked one last time at the boat whose paddle wheel had already started turning languidly, making a series of dull splashes. He looked it over, from the torn Belgian Congo flag hanging inertly from its mast to the battered iron bow with peeling white paint. On the side were black letters spelling the ship’s name: Roi des Boers.
The Deal
The Citroën stopped with a metallic groan in front of the pier’s footbridge, and two uniformed men got out. One of them was dressed like a Belgian military police officer, and the other wore the blue clothing and gold buttons of the navy.
César Moreira, watching from the balcony of the Pingarrón’s bridge, went into the ship lounge and sounded the alarm. “We’ve got visitors!” he announced.
His wife’s bare feet sounded on the floor before stopping next to him. “Merde,” she muttered, brushing her hair out of her face. “What could they want now? I thought we were done with interrogations.”
“The one on the right isn’t police,” César pointed out. “He has on a navy uniform.”
Julie felt excited to think he might be an American ONI officer coming to finally get them out of that mess.
But just then, the man in the navy blue stared at the bridge of the Pingarrón and said something to the military policeman next to him. From that distance it was impossible to read his lips, but his expression clearly showed disbelief and surprise.
“He’s English,” Julie said after recognizing the insignias on his uniform. She used the same tone as if she’d said he was an emissary from Beelzebub.
César put his arm around Julie’s waist. “Don’t worry, Juju,” he said. “They can’t do anything to us here.”
The Pingarrón’s pilot knew her husband well enough to be sure even he didn’t believe what he was saying. Nevertheless, she nodded as if it were the case. “Go get Marco,” she said, looking at the meager flower-print dress she had on. Then she added for herself, “I have to go change.”
Julie threw one last look the men’s way before leaving, as the new arrivals greeted the soldiers guarding the dock and headed for the bridge of the ship.
A minute later the two officers were on the deck of the small merchant ship, standing next to the gunwale with their hands behind their backs, waiting for someone to receive them.
The man in the Royal Navy uniform kept looking around pretty openly, wearing a skeptical expression.
“Are you sure this is the ship?” he asked the man with him.
“Oui, monsieur,” the military policeman clarified again, intrigued by the Englishman’s lack of confidence. “You yourself saw the name painted on the bow: Pingarrón.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he admitted, staring at the crude rivets on the superstructure and the scattered patches of carbonized paint. “But to be honest, I was expecting something else.”
Captain Lerroux of the Belgian Congo military police was a tall, stooped man who looked constantly angry at the world. He glanced at the sailor and murmured, “Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
A few moments later, the superstructure’s metal gate opened with a screech and the English officer had to try hard not to laugh.
Looking at him with a resolved, confident air was a small, attractive young woman wearing a worn-out white men’s shirt, rolled-up pants, and an American Merchant Marines captain’s hat that covered her head to her ears.
Behind her followed a mulatto with melancholy eyes who was barely taller and wore blue mechanic’s coveralls with grease stains. Lastly, a giant and definitely dangerous-looking man appeared, studying them like someone mentally weighing a lamb before taking it to the slaughterhouse.
The sailor looked over the strange trio, trying to decide who to address first.
He settled on the girl who’d placed her hands on her hips and was scrutinizing him with clear hostility.
“Commander Fleming of the Royal Navy,” he said, offering a salute. “I’d like to ask permission to come aboard.”
“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Julie responded, glancing at the gangplank the two men just used to get up.
“Your ship has been detained,” Lerroux answered, “so formally we don’t need—”
“You’re right,” Fleming interrupted, addressing Julie and motioning for the military policeman to be quiet. “If you like, I can go back to land and ask permission from the dock.”
The Frenchwoman seemed to think it over a moment but ended up asking with open hostility, “Que voulez-vous?”
“I would like to speak with the man in charge,” Fleming requested as formally as possible.
She crossed her arms and smiled, revealing two rows of white teeth. “Je suis the man in charge,” she said.
Fleming instinctively looked at the two men who stood on either side of the girl. Neither of them made the slightest indication of disagreeing.
The commander of the Naval Intelligence Department was sure they were pulling his leg, but he didn’t care to argue, so he swallowed his doubts and extended his hand toward the girl. “In that case, wonderful to meet you,” he said with a solemn nod. “You must be Julie Daumas, correct?”
She seemed slightly surp
rised, but glanced at Lerroux, who was standing next to the Englishman, looking like he’d swallowed a toad, and remembered that after the series of interrogations they were subjected to, the colonial authorities probably knew everything down to their shoe sizes.
“You are correct,” Julie replied, looking at Fleming’s hand like it was a venomous snake.
The commander pulled it back when he realized she wouldn’t take it and greeted the others the same way. “César Moreira and Marco Marovic,” he said. “Though you might not believe me, it’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
The mechanic rolled his eyes while the Yugoslav coughed loudly and spit over the side of the ship.
“Stop with the histories and tell us why you’re here,” Julie spat.
“I already told you. I need to speak with you—with the three of you, actually.”
“Then do it.”
“In private.” He turned to Lerroux and motioned for him to leave.
“I’m the officer responsible for your security,” the Belgian said, surprised by Fleming’s request. “I can’t leave you alone with these smugglers and suspected criminals.”
The commander put a hand on the military policeman’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about me, Lerroux. I’ll be fine. Our friends won’t try to do me any harm. Right?” he asked, turning toward them.
None of the three answered. But by the way they looked at him, Fleming was sure that if they had the chance, they might strangle him right there and throw his body in the water.
The Belgian just shrugged and decided to take the flagrant lie at face value. “As you wish,” he answered indifferently. Then he saluted Fleming and turned and exited via the gangplank.
“All right,” Fleming said, clapping his hands together. “Where can we sit and relax? We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Marovic reached behind him and pulled out a hunting knife nearly the size of a machete.
“I don’t think that will really be necessary,” Fleming said, slowly raising his hands. “I’m unarmed.”
Darkness: Captain Riley II (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 2) Page 27