Spinosaurus: A Dinosaur Thriller

by Hugo Navikov

  SPINOSAURUS

  Hugo Navikov

  Copyright 2015 by Severed Press

  Prologue: Tshikapa, Congo

  Arthur Mabele dug in the muddy clay of the Vermeulen mines next to the Kasai River, a tributary of the mighty Congo and itself deeper than most rivers in the world. On the other side of the river from the mine is thick rainforest jungle, most of which has never been charted by man, even today. Satellites cannot see through the ceiling of foliage, and there would be little reason to do so anyway—it is a terra incognita, which isn’t worth the trouble financially, and scientists or others interested in penetrating its mysteries are not the kind who get funding.

  But Vermeulen Mining Corp. and other commercial miners of rare earth metals and diamonds do find it very financially rewarding to occupy that part of Congo. Diamonds are dug up by hand by the people of the area, some from holes dug fifty feet into the banks of the Kasai where the water has to be pumped out by methods old when the Romans built their aqueducts.

  So the miners dig by hand, getting maybe five dollars for a gem that, when cut and polished, will bring ten thousand or more. Diamonds are very plentiful in Tshikapa, so supply and demand keeps prices shrinkingly low and lets Vermeulen and other companies buy them for almost nothing.

  Arthur Mabele had been extraordinarily lucky at his mining endeavors, and got his entire family spending fifteen hours a day digging for what passed for treasure there. They lived in the tent city at the mines like everyone else to protect them from the militias that wanted control of Vermeulen’s property, but they had a television set and one of those dishes that gets television from space back at home, plus a box that let them watch everything for free.

  His favorite show when they took days off, which was infrequently, was Cryptids Alive! a show in which the beautiful Ellie White led viewers on a search for mythical creatures that probably actually existed. They had never found one that they could get video of, but that didn’t matter. They were always so close, and that’s what was exciting. It was in English, but that didn’t matter—monsters were monsters, and there were lots of “artist’s conceptions” and Ellie running toward or away from giant cryptids to keep Arthur and his family mesmerized.

  It was night at the mine, too dark to see anything except the security lights on at the Vermeulen building, and Arthur was bone-tired after a day in which he found six rocks—six, enough for his family to have something other than gristle and skin for their meal. But, as sometimes happened, his body was too thoroughly worn out for him to immediately fall asleep, so he left his sleeping wife and boy and girl in the tent as he went out to look at the stars. It was relaxing and reminded him that there was a universe outside the diamond mines, a mysterious universe that enchanted him as much as the mysteries on Cryptids Alive!

  It was also as silent as it got this close to the rainforest’s edge. He could hear the cawing birds and the occasional screech of the monkeys, but the sounds themselves were muffled, swallowed by the thick vegetation. That’s why he could hear a motorboat revving across the river and landing on the mine’s side. That sound was followed by loud whispers and the slap-slap-slap of someone in boots running through the mud of the mine area—they had to know what they were doing, because the bank was marked by deep holes and shallow ones—and then between the workers’ tents, heading for the far side.

  Arthur couldn’t make them out well, except as silhouetted by the company building’s floodlights, but he could see it was two men in military-type uniforms and caps, one of them carrying … a big smooth rock? Something inside a sack? Whatever it was, it seemed heavy and the man carrying it let out a huge sigh of relief when he put it down next to the tent closest to the mine complex’s entry gate. Then, as far as Arthur could tell since they ran off into the darkness, they left through that way. He heard a vehicle start up and drive off.

  Lots of weird things happened in a Congo mine, but this was crazy. The military in Tshikapa never entered the Vermeulen area, it being officially Belgian property, even a poor miner like Arthur Mabele knew that. But the militias who everybody knew wanted control of the mines and to force out the Belgians, they snuck into the mines whenever they could, something butchering the unfortunate workers as a warning not to work for foreigners, to refuse to mine for them so they would leave and the militias could take what “belongs to the people of Congo.”

  The murders certainly didn’t help morale among the miners, but what could they do? They had to work if they were to eat. It wasn’t like the militias were inviting them to dinner so they wouldn’t have to toil for the Belgians.

  Was it a bomb, this thing that the two soldiers had placed next to that far tent? Arthur wasn’t religious and had no interest in being a martyr, but he found a mystery even as probably banal as this one irresistible. He stood up from the crouch he had assumed when he heard the men coming and very slowly and silently placed his bare feet in the mud, then the dirt, as he approached the edge of the tent city, where the object lay.

  With excitement, he peeked around the corner of the tent—pointlessly, he knew, if it was a bomb; it wasn’t like a piece of fabric was going to protect him from an explosion. He didn’t have a flashlight and the floodlights from the building illuminated nothing this far away. So he bent down and put his hands on it.

  It was smooth, like a river rock. Or an egg. He pushed on it a little and it was so heavy it barely even moved. It had a weird, kind of musty smell, exactly like one would expect from a dredged-up river rock—

  HRANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNH!

  Arthur almost fell down at the sound, thinking at first a plane from the town’s little airport had crashed and blown up. But that wasn’t what it sounded like, not really. It was more like a roar. Like a—

  HAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNHHHHH!

  That one was even longer and louder. What in the name of his ancestors was that? He couldn’t see anything in the dark, but he could see just enough to get back to his family’s tent, seeing that many miners had been awakened by the unholy shrieking, snarling, screaming ROAR that he could tell had come from the far side of the Kasai.

  “Get up! Get up! Come with me!” he roused his family in Swahili, grabbing his children by their arms and dragging them out of the tent until they had woken enough to walk on their own. Arthur’s wife was slow to awaken, but once she realized the children were gone, she snapped to and rushed out of the tent to follow her family into the brush on the edge of the tent city.

  Some fires had been lit inside tents, no doubt instinctively at the outset of some kind of chaos, and Arthur could see the fires were around rags around tree branches, the fabric doused with cooking oil to make torches.

  Another blast from what Arthur knew now had to be some kind of animal, and something raged out of the dense jungle. They could feel more than see the giant thing’s stomps, which ceased with a splash.

  The blood froze in Arthur’s veins as he realized what that had to mean: The roaring, epically enraged monster was swimming to the mine side of the river. Their side.

  Men, being men, had massed with their torches near the water’s edge, trying to see what was making the horrifying sounds and making the ground shake beneath their feet. Arthur could see what was going to happen as if it were already a memory, and if he didn’t have his wife and little ones with him, he would have shouted to them to get out of the way, run away, GO!

  But they stayed grouped together, the torches illuminating their patch of ground.

  Then the river heaved and the torches showed Arthur the monster climbing out of the water. The light showed a crocodile’s head on a lion’s body, four legs as thick as an armored car, and, when it crashed down on the screaming men,
making the torches fly and set the tents aflame, the huge fin on the thing’s back. It roared again and now everyone was screaming, some coming out of their tents to run, others huddling and hoping not to be seen.

  None of it did any good. Arthur and his family watched in horror as the Kasai Rex—that’s what it was, a Kasai Rex, the river monster of legend, a dinosaur that never died out, a predator, a death machine Congolese parents told their children about to scare them into good behavior—stomped and ripped and bit and swallowed and ate, the fire spreading all around it but the building-sized creature not even noticing.

  It trampled every tent, killed every single person in the way, until it got to that final tent, the one that the militia had placed the bomb or rock next to, and it let out a roar so loud that it made Arthur’s eyes water even though his hands were clamped hard against his ears. Roared and roared and roared until Arthur, his wife, and his children all had been forced into unconsciousness.

  ***

  When Arthur Mabele woke in the light of the morning, his wife was already awake, shaking from cold and fear but watching over their children, who were still sleeping. The tent city was a smoldering mess of mud, bodies, body parts, and ruined wood and fabric.

  His wife looked at him and said but one thing:

  “Kasai Rex.”

  Arthur nodded. He had never in his life made an international phone call, never tried to find the number for a telephone in America, but knowing his family was safe, he knew it was his responsibility to tell the world so the Kasai Rex, taller than the Vermeulen building and almost as long as the tent city itself, killer of everything it encountered, could itself be killed.

  It took him the better part of a week even to locate a telephone—miners were not welcome inside the Vermeulen building. It took still longer to find where and whom he should contact, and almost three weeks had passed before Arthur could find someone who spoke English and Swahili to place the call for him and interpret his story. But finally he was able to tell what had happened, tell the only people he knew would believe him.

  He called Cryptids Alive!

  Chapter 1

  Before I spill my whole story, I need to ask you a question.

  Humans: the most dangerous animal. True or false?

  They’re the most annoying animal, that’s for sure. Also the greediest, the best at making weapons and making tools that make weapons, the ones who eat the most food when they’re already full, the most superstitious and willing to kill for a little bit of luck or sexual ability, but the most dangerous? No.

  Put a Bengal tiger and the world’s most vicious human in a room and call me when it’s time to mop up what’s left of the human. Put Michael Phelps and a hungry Great White shark in thirty feet of water-hell, give Phelps a spear gun and a wetsuit—and see how many more sharks come around once the Olympic hero has been reduced to a froth of blood. Put a twenty-foot chain around the ankle of the most recent Mister Universe and clamp the other end onto the tail of an 18-foot adult King Cobra. In minutes, it’ll be time for the Mister Universe runner-up to start fulfilling some duties.

  En masse, of course, humans are a different story. We can communicate better than any other animal, organize better, procreate better, build and wield weapons unique to anything else on Earth. We also build rules and laws, concepts of justice, ideas that must be dodged and thwarted if individual humans are to fulfill the role of “most dangerous animal.”

  That is my role. I am a dodger and a thwarter of treaties, handshake agreements, hunting quotas, and any other form of cooperation different states employ to keep men like me from hunting in their forests, their savannahs, their jungles and rivers. I’m proud to say that I have never personally killed any endangered or protected animal by my own hand; there are plenty of men slavering at the opportunity to do that. All I do is lead the humans to the black rhinoceros, whose horn is sheared off the corpse to make into aphrodisiac powder for the Chinese. I help them get close enough to kill elephants with precious ivory in their tusks, the shooters responding to worldwide demand. Same with those seeking silverback gorillas to kill and sell as trophies to the highest bidder.

  I suppose, given our zeal for killing despite the laws of nations and the wishes of millions, that man is the most dangerous animal. It’s just that some men, like me, are more dangerous. We hunt the biggest game, the most protected, running circles around those who naïvely think we give a Sumatran monkey rat’s ass about their rules.

  My name is Brett Russell. I am a most dangerous animal.

  ***

  I know where to look because rare beasts are often the dangerous ones, and the dangerous ones are those that receive the most ink. When I read in “News of the Weird” or El Miami Herald about vulnerable villagers living right along a riverbank on the Amazon reporting lost children who would never wander or linger at the waterline, vanished animals as large as llamas, and even seen wooden fishing boats broken into pieces to get at an open bucket of bait, that’s when I know something big—a ravenous crocodile or even an anaconda, which can reach 26 feet long and 325 pounds in weight—is just asking to be bagged and tagged. Exotic species, perhaps, ones protected by laws that no one losing children gives a damn about.

  Ever hear of Iquitos, in Peru? It’s the largest populated area in the world not accessible by any road. It’s either airplane or boat if you want to visit. Why the hell you would want to visit Iquitos is beyond me, but I don’t get to choose the places I hunt—money does. I just go.

  Its residents are largely uneducated, highly superstitious (as many Catholic South Americans are), and when their prayers and attempts at protection inevitably fail, they mythologize it into a monster “known” to inhabit that area—a cryptid, in science-speak. This is how I get involved in the situation, because I keep my eyes out for any rumor of a cryptid terrorizing an indigenous village.

  My man in that part of the Amazon was Jefry, a gangly Peruvian whom I had personally seen take down a murumuru palm tree using nothing but his outsized hands and feet. I contacted him and he told me the Iquitos villagers, some of the poorest on the continent, had reported to police and Army personnel (often the same people in Peru) that a Yemisch—essentially an elephant-sized, carnivorous, huge-taloned sloth; I looked it up—was disemboweling animals, eating the meat quickly and leaving the disgorged entrails of its victims in the mud or floating in the river. At least one 5-year-old child had reported being chased by something exactly matching the cryptid’s description.

  “What do you think, Jef?” I asked in Spanish after I came down the steps of the charter plane at Vignetta International Airport and the attended put my heavy bags on the tarmac.

  It was cool early morning, the sun just peeking over the horizon, but it was already humid as hell. “We got a Yemisch here or what? One of their heads would look great on the wall of a man cave.”

  Jefry laughed. “Whatever it is, it’s a monster, Mister Russell. Something comes out of the river and steals goats and dogs and tries to eat small children. Then it drags them into the river and … does what it does, you know.”

  “Sounds a lot like a crocodile to me.”

  “You always say that.” He popped the locks on the Range Rover and we got in.

  “I always say it because that’s what it usually is,” I said, taking out a cheroot and reaching for the Rover’s lighter, which had been switched out for a sleek doohickey of some kind connected to Jefry’s iPad tucked between the seats. “Where’s the goddamn lighter?”

  Jefry laughed again. “Nobody uses the lighter as a lighter anymore, amigo. It’s a 120-volt power outlet now. Look, you can keep your electronics charged even as—”

  “Yeah, whatever. You got an app on there that lights cheap cigars?”

  “You come four thousand miles and don’t bring a match?”

  Five minutes from the airport and the road was already crap. This was going to be a fun drive. I said, “I got matches in my checked bags—you can’t bring that shit as carry-o
n onto an airplane anymore, dude.”

  Jefry looked at me with incredulity. “You got two .338 high-powered Winchester Magnums in your luggage!”

  “You can’t light a cigar with a rifle, el jefe.” Oh, wasn’t I just so hilarious? “Anyway, I brought five, since we have three hunters. But again, try to bring those in your carry-on for a commercial flight from Denver to Lima. Same thing with matches and lighters. And hair gel over 3 ounces. All of it goes into the checked bags.”

  Once again, my Peruvian friend guffawed. “So how come you didn’t get a pack of matches at the airport just now?”

  “Number one, that Quonset hut barely had a telephone, let alone traveler’s conveniences,” I said, then leaned in close and crooked my finger for him to bring his ear closer. I whispered, “And number two, cars are supposed to have lighters stuck in their lighter holes, not Steve Jobs’ goddamn pene.”

  Jefry never really stopped laughing this whole time, even when he reached over, popped the glove compartment, and pointed to a full Bic encendedor right there. I smiled despite myself and grabbed it to light the end of my cheroot.

  I couldn’t wait to get my trusty, totally dangerous book of non-safety matches out of my bags and stick them into their familiar place in my back pocket. Lots of room back there anyway, since I don’t carry a wallet—the shit I do and the places I do it, my money and papers are always in a discreet, flat vinyl pouch hanging from my neck.

  We hit a huge pothole and I almost set my hair on fire as we lunged forward. “God, I hate the roads in Peru.”

  “That’s Iquitos, man. You got a car here, you brought it by boat. Only the richest people have cars.”

  “You’re rich?”

  He smiled. “La organización makes sure we get what we need, no?

  “Sí, muchacho.” I thought of the more than $25,000 worth of weapons and two full stocks of different ammunition for each, every rifle sitting in its own rugged, foam-insulated case. The commercial and then charter flights to Iquitos for myself and the three merry hunters. Supplies for as much as a 10-day hunt, since crocs don’t just offer themselves up to grab bait like sharks do. Bribes to local officials to look the other way. All paid for by what Jef called “The Organization,” which was the right way to refer to it, nice and anonymous, since what we were doing was unbelievably illegal and plausible deniability an essential quality.