by Hugo Navikov
But what there was, obviously, was a violent militia presence that wanted the riches contained in the Kasai river mud. Clever and amazing as our quartet was, we had undoubtedly gotten lucky that the Captain and his Tennilles weren’t expecting guests of Vermeulen Mining to be carrying weapons. I can’t imagine that would happen again, but I also couldn’t imagine that the militia would be allowed to enter the camp at will. I didn’t see any police presence in Tshikapa, which didn’t surprise me considering we had gone straight from the airport to the mines. We did have to pass through a security gate, however, with two heavily armed guards, one packing an AK-47 and the other a longer-range rifle. They would be able to see anyone coming since the road a mile into the mine area was very straight, and could probably take out anyone threatening before they got close enough even to set off a car bomb or throw a grenade. These guards waved Bonte and his vehicle full of us Americans through without stopping us. My hands were shaking a little, the adrenaline slow to leave my system. (I had killed men before, every time like this one under the threat of imminent violent death, but never three in one go. I could see Ellie’s hands shake, too, from her judicious application of her ninja five-point palm exploding scrotum technique.
I had to shake the violence from my mind if I were to fit in with this crew, but well-justified or not, my killing three men would haunt me just as my self-defense murders of the past always have. I took a deep breath and returned my focus to killer zoological oddities that hated diamond miners, apparently.
The whole situation was beyond weird, but I was with cryptid hunters (ahem) and I myself was an actual cryptid hunter in my way, so I guess “weird” was going to be our modus operandus. There were things going on here that had nothing to do with endangered animals or magical time-travel cryptids. Or mining. What exactly was going on here?
None of this was technically my concern, but I had to admit I was curious as hell about those questions and the bigger one, the elephant in the room: Why was Vermeulen allowing us here? Forget about allowing us—hell, they invited us.
Bonte whisked us to the front of a squat, bunker-like concrete building without signage and with windows so small looking out upon the river that it reminded me of a Mafia boss’s safe house. It was the size of a small-town Wal-Mart, one-story and wide. One entrance I could see, mud encrusted against the doors.
Bonte got out too, and shook each of our hands between taking our equipment out of the back of the station wagon. “Our friendship is sealed in blood now, my Americans. I will die for you if necessary. Just call upon Bonte and I will come.”
As our newly sealed-in-blood friend got in the car and waved goodbye, I took a closer look at the mud spatters and streaks on the bunker entrance. Some of them looked to be about shoulder-high and grouped and smeared like fists had been beating on the door. Pissed-off miner looking for a little respect? Or scared-for-his-life miner seeking shelter during an attack? There didn’t seem to be any blood on the door, which was reassuring in the smallest and mildest way possible.
Ellie made to press the intercom button next to the door, but before she could the door opened and a tall, gaunt figure stood in the doorway. He had slightly longish gray hair, a gray moustache and goatee, and a gray suit that probably cost more than the airplanes we arrived in. “The television crew,” he said and extended a long hand to Ellie, which she shook with a smile. “Vermeulen Mining is delighted to welcome you. I’m Daan Vermeulen, and yes, I’m one of the owners … along with my brothers and sisters, my fellow heirs back in Antwerp.”
We all smiled along with his slight self-deprecation.
“So do come in! And wipe your feet first, won’t you? Living here has produced in me a strong aversion to … mud.”
He spat that last word in a way I could completely relate to. I also enjoyed his accent—Dutch, plainly, but his English was absolutely perfect. Better than mine, probably. We each shook his bony hand as we wiped our feet and entered the safe house. Or company building, whatever. Those fist smears had left an indelible mark upon my mind as much as on the door.
The building was strange as hell. To the right, visible through large windows were the usual trappings of a busy office: desks, cubicles, (white) men and women in business casual seated or hustling from one place to another, a line of mostly open dark-wood doors on the far end of the office for the important people. The ones that were shut sported security keypads next to them.
This office stretched all the way to the back of the building but took up just about a third of its width. On the other side of the hallway carpet runner, completely open except for the presence of support beams, was a huge and empty … well, cavern is the only way I can really convey what it felt like. It was dark, muddy bare footprints commingled with muddy shoeprints, smears against the walls.
I could practically smell the fear, even panic, emanating from that side of the building. I could also see Ellie grin at her crew, no doubt feeling incredibly excited that a cryptid (of course) had caused this kind of fearful reaction inside a concrete bunker. This was what she had been waiting for. This was real at last.
At least that’s what I thought her grin meant. Maybe she was just happy to be out of the mud, I don’t know.
Daan Vermeulen stopped about midway through the building’s depths and opened a door for us on the right. We stepped inside and through the office to his door. (We knew it was his because it had a bright and well-polished nameplate.) He entered a code on the keypad and opened that door for us as well.
The office was nice, which I expected, of course: the smell of well-oiled leather and wood, the desk accoutrements and even a small telescope all in brass, and the tasteful art and lighting arrangement made me feel like I had entered the Explorer’s Club in London.
What really stuck, however, was that the interior dimensions of the room were obviously smaller than what one would expect given the spacing of the other offices along the wall and their apparent depth spied through their open doors.
Vermeulen’s office was reinforced with another foot of concrete on all sides. It made the room even more cozy, but my mind was running with wild surmises. You didn’t need feet of rebar and concrete to keep a saltwater crocodile—or hell, an elephant—from getting into your safe house office. So what was the boss being protected from in here? Angry workers and their families? Everyone had looked pretty sedate when Bonte drove us past the tent city. Maybe the diamonds were stored in this office once the company had paid pennies to the miners for each one. But, in that case, why not just have a reinforced vault? Surely Daan Vermeulen didn’t need to keep one hand on his store of diamonds, Scrooge McDuck–style.
Or was it to protect him from … cue the dramatic music … a KASAI REX?!?
No, it was not.
Mythical creatures are called “mythical” for a reason. That reason is that they do not exist. We have video footage of wild mountain fuzzball cats that no one has actually seen for fifty years. Our satellites have dispelled the myths of Atlantis and alien messages written in flattened cornstalks. (The first is nowhere to be found and the last is too small to see even from very low orbit, hence useless for space navigation. Boom, science.)
What do exist are very hungry, angry, territorial predators that do not appreciate their areas being encroached upon by humans. The Organization has very effective ways, as you saw earlier, of locating these animals—which are, although fearsome, just regular old animals, no need for mystery lizards hidden in the admittedly vast and uncharted Congo jungle and river. And then we extract them so they won’t endanger or be endangered by humans for a long time. Oh, and we try to take down as many poaching assclowns as we can at the same time.
But all this? Daan Vermeulen’s office was essentially a man-vault. That huge space that looked like Woodstock after every attendee dropped bad acid, the lack of windows in the building … something was going on here that I had no faculty to process. I like a situation where I can punch someone in the face, kick them in the balls
or the gut, handcuff and neutralize them. Heck, shoot them (even if it is with a tranq dart, which I have done). And then I like to call in the good guys and get the poachers and our dangerous animals taken to places where they’d stay for years to come.
But … again: This? I had nothing.
Anyway, Vermeulen bade us all to sit in the lovely chairs and sat behind his elegant desk. He steepled his fingers and said with a smile in his slightly Old World accent, “I know what all of you are thinking. Vermeulen Mining—just like DeBeers and all the other big diamond concerns—has been kicking film crews out for decades. We sue reporters and magazines, essentially for telling the truth but getting enough of some detail wrong that we can sue them for libel. And win, mind you. So—”
“Why let in a monster-hunting show?” Ellie interrupted. “Is it because you think we have no credibility, is that it? So anything we show in video or whatever has to be bullshit, since you think cryptids are bullshit? You want to use us to discredit any reports of abuse just by it being shown in the background of our search for the Kasai Rex.”
Daan Vermeulen sat completely still, his fingers still pressed into an A. Then he looked at me and said, “Quite the spitfire, is she not?”
“She takes her job seriously, Mister Vermeulen. As we all do.”
His eyebrows raised in surprise. “Well, then! A united front!” He cleared his throat, unsteepled his fingers, and leaned forward in his chair. “Actually, Miss White, I am also someone who takes his job very seriously. And my job is keeping miners digging in those holes out there and bringing me the diamonds hidden there.”
Ellie leaned forward. “Is part of your job using Congolese militia bullies to keep your miners frightened and working?”
Atari and I looked at each other. Didn’t see this conversation popping up.
He paused to fix his gray eyes on each of us: First Ellie, then me, then Atari, then Gregory. It was an effective thing to do if he meant to keep us listening closely.
“What do you think you know about these ‘militias,’ as you have decided to call them?”
Ellie said, “We just killed three of them on the way here and blew up their vehicle. I think I might have sterilized the leader of their little troupe by ripping off his testicles.”
Vermeulen looked at her with wide eyes and a small smile grew as he gazed at Atari, Gregory, and then me. “This is true? You American cowboys have already starting shooting your guns?”
“Yep,” I said, Gary Cooper–style.
“Ha! Well done! May I ask what the occasion was for this fireworks show?”
“They stopped us,” Atari said. “They dragged me out of the car and were going to shoot me along with Bonte. Black-on-black violence, man, it’s got to stop.”
There was a ripple of amusement, and then Gregory spoke up: “We had to create a distraction so Mister Russell could shoot them down. They were going to kill us all. It seemed they wanted to send a message to your company.”
Vermeulen nodded gravely, his smile gone. “So, Miss White, you see that we are not in league with the terrorists—which is what they are, terrorists trying to force Vermeulen Mining out of the country through acts of violence. On the contrary, we oppose them for our very existence here. They are not like real militia groups, wanting power through social unrest and ultimately a civil war. No, they want the riches of these mines for themselves.”
“And you don’t?” Ellie said.
“If we do not have miners, we do not have a business. Yes, I pay them very little for the rough stones they bring to us, and they don’t get paid at all if they don’t find anything to bring us in the first place. But that is the market here—diamonds are in great abundance, as are buyers, not only us but many local middlemen not associated with my company, and they pay even less than we do. It is simple supply and demand, Miss White.”
“So why are we being allowed in?”
“As I say, I need these ni—” he started to say a very unsavory word indeed, then remembered Atari was sitting right there and altered his verbal course. “I need these people to dig in the mud, go down narrow fifty-foot-deep holes, spend their entire days searching for dusty rocks that they cannot feed to their families. I cannot have them fearing attack by a supernatural monster, especially not when something really is eating miners and stomping their living area flat in a rage.”
“The Kasai Rex is not supernatural, Mister Ver—”
“No, of course not. But whatever is attacking my miners, I need them—and the world—to see that perhaps it is a giant crocodile, perhaps a group of them, perhaps a mass of gorillas swinging on vines who have decided vegetarianism is no longer for them. Perhaps a feral rodent of unusual size. Perhaps an army of them—Sumatran monkey-rats have been known to swarm over river areas when the water level rises, eating everything in sight. Maybe a man-eating anaconda. Whatever it is, it scares many miners from coming to work.”
“And it’s killed a lot of them, too,” Gregory said.
“Yes, well, of course we are concerned about that as well. Dead men cannot dig for diamonds.” He must have noticed the appalled expressions on our faces and added, “That, em, is our first concern, of course. But we need to show the people of Congo that there is no mysterious monster lurking here to eat them. Whatever it is, it’s just animals, and animals can be killed.”
I was sitting right next to Ellie, so I could see her eyes narrow and her jaw stiffen.
Oh, shit.
“So you wanted Cryptids Alive! to come here—you paid for us to come here—because you think we won’t find any actual cryptids? That, totally the opposite—that we’ll basically prove there is no Kasai Rex terrorizing the village here?”
Vermeulen cleared his throat like one does when about to say something you know the other party is not going to want to hear. “Miss White, when my company was developing the idea of bringing in ‘experts’ to calm these simple people’s fears to stop the attrition of our miners, I was given DVDs of your program. You have made a career out of proving absolutely nothing.”
Strangely, Ellie’s head didn’t explode at this comment. She just looked defiant. It was very sexy, indeed. (Am I a sexist pig? No. I would have felt the same way if a man was sitting there looking exactly like Ellie White. She happened to be incredibly attractive—but her defining feature was her will. And I like my women strong. And also women who are actually men who look like hot women.)
“I have gathered the ni—damn my eyes, all apologies. I have gathered the people, the miners, and told them that Cryptids Alive! was coming here to kill the Kasai Rex or prove that it doesn’t exist. These people barely eat; they haven’t seen your show. But they do believe in this monster. I’m sure you noticed the large space on the interior of this building, mud-streaked as if there had been hundreds of panicked diamond miners herded in there.”
I was listening.
“It looks that way because there were. Something came out of the river and ate a few unfortunate men, but we got the rest of the miners inside here inside our protective building until the danger had ceased. They all said to a man that it was Kasai Rex, a giant four-legged dinosaur with jaws like a crocodile and a fin on its back—”
“Kasai Rex doesn’t have a fin,” Ellie interrupted.
“Kasai Rex doesn’t exist!” Vermeulen barked, pounding his fist on the dark polished wood of his desk. “Excuse me. Look, to answer your question of why we are letting you in here, why we asked you to come, is to either show that this monster is real, in which case everyone in the world will come to try to hunt it down—or, and obviously I believe this is the case—that there is no such cryptic monster.”
I could feel Ellie wanting to correct it to cryptid, but she stayed silent.
“Meaning that not only is Vermeulen Mining not putting people’s lives in danger, we are actually protecting the miners by calling in ‘experts’ to examine whether there is unusual danger here, considering that it is Congo. This is a dangerous place. But it’s no
t supernaturally dangerous—”
Ellie shook slightly, but held it together.
“—and miners need to come and work here if they are to survive at all. These so-called militia forces want to take over our diamond operation by forcing us out, killing our miners so no one will come to work here while Vermeulen mining is the business concern, but we protect them by allowing them to live in the tents on-site. Are we Habitat for Humanity, giving aid to the world’s poorest darkies?” He shut his eyes, then opened them and said to Atari, “Please forgive my crudeness, an old habit among us former colonials. But no, we are not UNICEF, we are not Father Christmas, handing out goodies. We are a business in a ruthless and lethal area of the world. But we do what we can to protect our workers … because we need them. And Cryptids Alive! is part of our retention effort. Okay?”
That was a lot to chew on, but Ellie finally answered, “Okay,” and the rest of us gave quick nods to show that we were behind our leader.
“One final thing and then I shall let you go about your work. This is completely off the record and Vermeulen Mining will not hesitate to sue you out of existence if you repeat it.”
“Jeez,” Atari mumbled.
“We have no idea what is out there. Our company has been here since King Leopold in 1901, and none of our mines have ever experienced anything like this. Maybe it is a Kasai Rex. Maybe it is a magical angry unicorn. Whatever it is, we want you to identify it so we can kill it. So film anything you want, talk to the miners, talk to the villagers nearby, just get rid of their fear.” Vermeulen swallowed, his Adam’s apple taking a single bob, and he looked suddenly like a man haunted by ghosts. “If you cannot tell, I am desperate. This is no longer a family business; we are traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. That means we have a board of directors, and our losses from fewer and fewer miners are public record. The diamonds are there in plenty, but people are becoming very reluctant to dig for them when they think a Kasai Rex is going to come and gobble them up. My board wants to sell Vermeulen mining. I have worked my entire adult life and most of my childhood here in Congo, building this company.”