by Hugo Navikov
That was the Boss’s customary valediction, and I immediately left the comfort of that human-leather chair and left his office. Giving his secretary a nod as I walked to a different elevator, this one going only from the Boss’s office to the helipad on the roof. I didn’t get knocked out by nerve gas, so as soon as the doors opened and I saw the slim redhead leaning against a slick-looking corporate helicopter, my next adventure had begun.
Chapter 4
“Ellie White,” she said with a businesslike smile and her hand extended, which I shook, “Cryptids Alive! Glad to have you as part of the team, Doctor Russell.”
Doctor? My new friend was shockingly attractive, her pale skin contrasting with her flaming hair, and her clipped Yankee syllables gave her a kind of “Lois Lane by way of Vassar” vibe. Since I didn’t know what, if any, part of my cover story she had been informed of, so I said, “Glad to be your … boom-mike operator?”
“If that’s what it takes to get near the Kasai Rex, then you can call yourself the producer if you like!” she said with a laugh, then shook her head. “Actually, no—assistant producer. If soundman isn’t good enough, you could be that. I’m the producer.”
I wanted to give her one of those drawn out “Ohhhhh-KAYYYY…” responses, letting the crazy person know you were not going to contradict them directly but that you thought they were nuttier than squirrel shit. However, there was no reason to be a jerk right off the bat, so I said, “‘Soundman’ is fine. So I take it you know what I’m here for?”
She looked at me with very slightly narrowed eyes. “You’re Brett Russell.”
Now I narrowed my eyes slightly, a little more than hers but still pretty slightly. “That is correct.”
“The Harvard cryptozoologist? We didn’t even know Harvard had one until History sent us a couple of your papers in those journals. We followed up with the university and they confirmed that they do have a program but could say nothing more about it. I understand that the crypto community has to stay secret sometimes, but experiential journals distributed only to academics with nondisclosure agreements? That is impressive, Doctor Russell.”
What the heck was an ‘experiential journal’? “We, uh, we can’t have the media making a field day out of a real and important academic discipline,” I said, and I could see now what had happened: The Organization, which had its fingers in just about every pie ever baked, had worked out an understanding with the venerable institution to … well, lie to the Cryptids Alive! people, maybe even the folks at History, maybe to its owners at A&E, maybe even to its owners, the big bosses at Hearst and Disney. From anything I had ever been able to tell, The Organization had, for all practical purposes, infinitely deep pockets from which it could have conjured anything from equipment to political lobbying to just a shit-ton of money. I don’t know where it got all of that money—correction: any of that money—but they knew how to use it to get and do whatever it was they needed gotten or done.
Ellie gave a smile and a thumbs up to that and said, “We’re on a tight schedule, Doctor—let me have your bag and you hop in the back there and get your ears on.” She loaded my large duffel into the chopper and took her shotgun seat. All systems were go and we lifted off for Denver International with stops in Washington DC, Brussels, and Cameroon. In total, a 26-hour trip. Plenty of time to read on my iPad the papers I had supposedly written, which the Boss had gotten to me just in time for me to cram while we were in the air.
In the dossier the Boss had gotten to me just in time for me not to completely embarrass myself and blow my cover, I learned that Doctor Brett Russell was an academic with degrees from Yale and other Ivy League schools in folklore, zoology, and “Third World studies,” whatever that was. According to the dossier, I had published multiple first-person accounts of cryptid “research” that I wouldn’t think would ever make any academic journal anywhere—but apparently were perfect for the “experiential journals” listed, such as Current Experiences in Cryptozoology, First-Person Academic Cryptid Encounters, and Quarterly of the Observed but Impossible.
The articles themselves were written (by whom? How long had this been in the works? Was I really such a great operative that The Organization waited for me to become available before addressing the endangered croc or whatever it was down in the Congo?) more in the style of Nellie Bly documenting her trip around the world than that of a staid professor publishing his research: “Chupacabra Chase In Chihuahua”; “Hunting Hybrids in Hyderabad”; “Mole Valley Moose-Pig: Serious Signs or Surrey Swill?”
“It really is a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Russell,” Ellie said once we had taken our first-class seats, and oh my God I would be ruined for coach forever. I felt a little bad for the rest of the crew back there, but not bad enough to change seats, especially since sitting here meant also being breathlessly complimented by a beautiful young woman. “Your narrative about nearly finding the Amomongo in the Philippines really made an impression on me! And then the close call with the Maryland Goatman—my goodness, Doctor R—”
“Brett, just Brett,” I said with a smile, and she returned it with her million-watt teeth making the same contrast with her red lipstick that her skin did with her hair.
“Sorry—Brett. But your near-miss with the Inkanyamba Lake Monster reminded me of my own experience almost catching a glimpse of the Lake Chonji Monster in China. I can hardly believe I’ve been producing and hosting Cryptids Alive! for five seasons and have never come across your name.”
I thought quickly and said, “Mainstream science doesn’t show much respect for Cryptozoologists, Miss White—”
“Ellie,” she said, and put her hand on mine on the armrest. My blood pressure rose dramatically, among other things. “And that is so true! Some people even say our show shouldn’t be on an ‘educational’ network.”
“Um, yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’d have to be very brave to host a show on quasi-mythological creatures, I would think.”
She demurely smiled in a way that showed complete agreement with my insightful comment.
“So I stay mostly under the radar, sharing information only with other cryptozoologists concealed, like me, in folklore programs or other tangentially related discipline’s department.” I looked at her seriously and added, “That’s why I can’t have my face on your show, you understand. Harvard would have to disavow all knowledge of me. I’d become a cryptid myself!”
We laughed, and although I spend a great deal of time trying to get information from indigenous populations about whatever chimerical beasts they think are terrorizing them—while simultaneously using their biased observations to figure out what possibly endangered animal we’re really dealing with—this had to be the weirdest conversation I’d ever had. Was she crazy? Did she think I was crazy? Were we bullshitting each other, or was she sincere? I guess it didn’t matter, but I felt like I was talking about the time I almost saw a giant rabbit leaving eggs all over my yard or how I almost tricked midgets dressed in green into giving me a pot of gold.
As much as I liked being touched by Ellie, I got down to business so I could take advantage of the next 26 hours and formulate my plan: “Tell me about Kasai Rex.”
Her eyes sparkled. She took her hand back and settled herself in the plush seat to get in a good “holding forth” position. We were already in the air, so I casually tapped a few times on my iPad to start the voice recorder. “Okay, this may be the one we finally get on camera. There have been dozens of survivors, all reporting the same thing—a monster attacked their tent city, gobbling some people up whole and ripping others in half,” she said with a glee that would have been unseemly if this weren’t her entire raison d'etre. “They all described it the same, without any chance for assembling to make their stories match—they told the Vermeulen teams that came out each time to rebuild the tents and see to the workers’ injuries. And, um, take away the parts of bodies that remained. Every one of them said it was a giant Kasai Rex, or at least as close as they co
uld express it in the pidgin they use with the English- or Dutch-speaking Vermeulen men.”
There’s no need to make stories match when they’ve been told fairy tales since they were children to keep them from going by themselves the river, I thought, but said, “Their stories matched—so how did they describe the creature?”
“Well, huge, number one, and remember, the Congo River itself is largely unexplored—it’s the deepest in the world, so there could be literally anything living there and we wouldn’t know it.”
That was a logical fallacy, but I let it slide. I was sure it would be far from the only one I would be hearing from the host and producer of a show about cryptids.
“And number two, they all said it was kind of red-colored—that’s roughly the same color as the clay they dig in for diamonds, so obviously it must have gotten mud clinging to it when it came fully wet out of the river, since ancient reptiles were gray.”
Don’t laugh. Do NOT laugh. “What …” I started, then had to swallow to keep a straight face, “… um, what makes you think the creature was an ancient reptile?”
“So anyway, my thought about the mud was because such ‘living fossils’ are gray, and thus ancient surviving dinosaurs would be gray, whether land reptiles or amphibians. The survivors also said that the monster had a large hump on its back and moved like a lion. We’ve shot some talking head footage with a retired paleontologist who says there were actual dinosaurs who they think match those descriptions. He, quoted a report … let me find it …” She dug through her soft-leather briefcase and found the paper she was looking for. “Here we go:
It was a large beast, at least 12 to 13 meters long. It was reddish in coloration, with brackish-colored stripes going down. The legs were thick; it reminded me of a lion, built for speed. It had a long snout and numerous teeth. It gorged itself on the rhinoceros, which twitched with life still in it. After the creature had eaten its fill, it returned to the jungle slowly, its belly full of flesh.
“The interview was amazing,” she continued. “It’s like the paleontologist knew exactly what to say that would interest us and our viewers the most! He said that such a species could easily have survived deep in the Congo even though it supposedly had gone extinct.”
“When?”
“About two weeks ago.”
“No, I mean, when did these dinosaurs go extinct? Supposedly?”
“Oh!” she said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Sorry—about 93 million years ago.”
Hearing this educated, gorgeous woman talk like this was like watching a ballerina take a nose-dive into the orchestra pit.
“Doctor Russell? I mean, Brett? Still with us?”
“Just trying to formulate my next question to download all of the information you have for me. It’s, um, fascinating.” I took a goodly breath and said, “But what’s to say what we’re dealing with is some kind of dinosaur still stomping around almost 100 million years after its species died out?”
She gave a chuckle and, I swear, almost started her sentence with “DUH!” She said, “Because that’s what a Kasai Rex is.”
I could tell my eyes were wide and my nod slow, the way you agree with (a) a mathematician showing you an equation involving Greek letters; or (b) a crazy person who you’re going to be sitting right next to all the way to Congo. (You may be able to guess which one was applicable.) “Oh, of course,” I said, “it must be the alcohol affecting my cerebral cortex.”
“Alcohol? But you haven’t had anything to drink.”
“Good point,” I said, and signaled the First Class always-ready flight attendant: “Two whiskey sours, please. And whatever the lady would like.”
Chapter 5
At each stop on our way to Congo, we transferred to an airline with a lower safety rating until I thought about how long it would take to die in the utterly impenetrable African rainforest with two broken femurs. The answer to this, I think, would be both “not very long” and “far, far too long.”
However, against all odds, we did make it to Tshikapa Airport, which was not technically what I like to call “paved.” That was expected, however, since the airplane we took to the dirt landing strip on the Kasai tributary of the Congo River would have given Buddy Holly pause.
Ellie, her cameraman and her boom operator (yours truly) unfolded ourselves from the prop plane and sought out the nearest shade, a little bar with condensation on its bottles from the intense humidity of the steamy forest and river we had arrived in. The Cryptids Alive! actual sound man was to arrive along with all their equipment within the hour, since a single plane of the size servicing Tshikapa couldn’t hold five people and the video equipment at the same time. (Or more people than it had seats, which was four. And two of those on the second plane would be piled with very carefully balanced video and audio equipment.)
Fortunately for us, while the Congolese speak a total of 242 distinct languages, the country’s history as a Belgian colony meant that just about everyone spoke French. Ellie was fluent in French (I was still guessing Vassar) and I was competent. Her thirty-something cameraman, Gregory, who looked like he had been carved out of marble, muscles and all, had a smattering of French, as did the new cameraman we were waiting for, a kid named “Atari” by, I’m assuming, parents who were either stoned or assholes. Maybe both.
“Why’d you guys needs a replacement cameraman?”
“Ugh,” Ellie groaned, and Gregory shook his head sadly. “We are right about to go after the Rocky Mountain Werewolf when our long-term camera guy, Bennie, gets murdered by a mugger who doesn’t take Bennie’s wallet but runs off with all his camera equipment.”
“Yikes. Dangerous work,” I said, but didn’t add creeping around for bullshit.
“And this was our first night in your stomping grounds, in Denver. Atari had just put in for a camera position with History, specifying his preference to work on Cryptids Alive! I guess since this happened through no fault of any of us, I can hope that maybe this Atari can come up with some fresher shots than Bennie. His were getting kind of stale after five seasons.
We each had a tin mug of pombe, the local beer of Tshikapa. It would have been utterly vile to anyone who hadn’t visited villages in Africa and Asia, but the three of us found it pretty tasty. And although I have no doubt we got the “white man’s price,” the beer was still cheap as hell.
The sun was already hot through the trees, even though it was only the middle of the morning. The humid air seemed to shimmer like the moisture was liquid in a pot over a fire.
Gregory was a sharp thirty-something who looked like he had gotten through film school only to find that employment was even better than being a starving auteur. He asked, “So, Mister Russell, why do you need a cover to come check out the Kasai Rex? I got the sound covered—we don’t even use a boom mic—so there must be a reason.”
“Call him Brett,” Ellie said. “No one here needs to know he’s a somebody.”
“’Kay, sure, but how about it, Brett?”
Ellie knew my whole cover story, but the others would get just what they needed to know. “There could be something unprecedented here,” I said to the sound man, “something that might need protection from people wanting to kill it.”
“Hell, I don’t care if they kill it, as long as we can get our camera and mics on it first. I don’t want it to be like with the Yeti, where it must’ve been there like just ten minutes before we found its footsteps in the snow. They led to a crack in the side of the mountain where a Yeti could morph his body to fit, but humans with camera equipment couldn’t. We got to make sure we don’t scare it off like that. So I hear you on not letting the villagers or whatever attack it.”
It sounded to me like the creature was doing most of the attacking, but I stayed silent. I had been in undercover situations before, although it had never been with a troupe of True Believers. “Let’s just get a lay of the land before we decide how to proceed.”
“We?” Ellie said with a crooked smile.
“You weren’t just using Cryptids Alive! to get you into the area unnoticed? You’re staying with us?”
“That depends. Where are you staying, exactly?” I responded with a smirk of my own.
“As close to the action as possible. If the Kasai Rex is trampling villagers and eating people alive, I want our camera set up to roll at any kind of movement and the crew and myself close enough to wake up at any commotion.”
I looked at Gregory with an Is she for real? expression, and he nodded at me with a knowing smile. “Our Miss White is as hardcore as they get, man. It’s kind of inspiring.”
“Oh, lord, Greg, stop. We’ll be staying in tents, just like the miners. If the thing attacks in the night, we’ll have our sodium lamps ready to light up the whole camp.” She saw the look on my face and quickly added, “Don’t worry—we’ll be on the other edge of the tent city, the one opposite the river where there’s a little swell. That way, if the Kasai Rex attacks, we’ll not only have the best vantage point to capture the action, we’ll also be relatively safe.”
Relatively. I definitely noted the word as I heard, then saw, the beater aircraft no doubt carrying Atari and the equipment wobbling in toward a landing on the Tshikapa “runway.”
“Time to see what a Ghost Chasers cameraman looks like,” Gregory said.
Ellie turned to the bartender and asked in French, “How do we get to the Vermeulen diamond mine from here?”
“Voyage du sud-east,” the barman said, pointing down the wide Kasai, which we could only just see from our stools. “Vous aurez besoin d'un véhicule, est-ce pas?”
I lifted my eyebrows at Ellie in languid surprise. “You didn’t hire a car? A Hummer, whatever they use here to lug equipment in 104 degrees and 98 percent humidity?”
She stammered a bit: “I was—I was told the Vermeulen people would be picking us up for the short drive—”