by Hugo Navikov
“On the backs of the poor—” Ellie started, but was almost immediately cut off.
“I have said all I will say on that matter, Miss White. You have your access, you have a place to put your tent, and you all may eat with the office staff at the cafeteria inside this building. Now please go and find out what the holy hell is going on out there.”
Chapter 7
Our first task was to set up the tent. The Cryptids Alive! team, including Ellie, worked like a Swiss watch at assembling their three-room tent that they used when just missing seeing cryptids, and I almost had to laugh at the expensive technological wonder of their huge tent on the swell of the hill, looking down on the slave city in their open-air tarps flung over two sticks and a line of rope. The TV crew didn’t need me for this, so I stood and surveyed our temporary neighborhood.
“So we are literally looking down on the black miners,” I said, taking in what I could see from the higher place, which was a lot: the tent city, the network of dug holes in the red clay of the riverbank, the green Kasai River itself, and thick jungle on the other side that looked practically impregnable.
“Oh, great, we’re the plantation masters,” Gregory said. “I feel like an asshole.”
“Aw, dude, if this up here is the plantation, what does that make me? Uncle Tom the House Boy?” Atari said with a laugh that we all shared, us white folks a little gratefully, I think.
As I tried to get good bearings on where people did what they did here—we were pretty near the front entrance, and Bonte honked and waved when he drove by in that Mad Max station wagon—I noticed something about the jungle just opposite the mine, on the other side of the river. Especially in the noonday sun, the chaos of jungle was dark beneath the treetops, looking more foreboding than ever. But I did notice one thing: there was about a fifteen-foot “hole” in the mad foliage and the mud from that hole to the river was smoothed, as if something had been repeatedly dragged from the trees into the water.
Maybe it was a pair of crocodiles that attacked together, moving side by side into and out of the river after sating themselves on miner flesh. But crocs didn’t really hunt or feed like that. There were plenty of other nasty candidates I’d be looking into tomorrow, both online with our satellite link and on foot in that exact path in the jungle. I planned to go by myself, but if Cryptids Alive! wanted to come with and get some footage, fine by me.
***
We spent most of the afternoon checking the video and sound equipment, and I sent detailed reports of what I had been doing back to The Organization via the uplink. They were acknowledged by the Boss in his usual way, a terse email saying only “Understood. Keep us posted.” I knew there had to be an “us,” of course, or else The Organization wasn’t an organization at all, and their influence and buying power across the globe would be impossible to explain. But I did wonder sometimes who “they” were paying me so handsomely to save endangered animals.
We ate dinner in the Vermeulen commissary, mostly to save the effort of hauling out the cooking stuff and sending delicious smells of cooking food wafting down into the tent city, where they were eating—like slaves everywhere, official or not—pieces of animals and knotty vegetables no one else would eat.
“I noticed something strange,” Ellie said in a hushed tone to us, probably unnecessarily since we were at a table in the corner away from any break-taking employees. “There are exterior cameras all over this building. Every direction is covered. There are flood lights, too, next to each camera. Anything that happens outside the building, they must have on video, at least for the previous 24 hours.”
“Flood lights only get about six to ten feet before the darkness swallows them up,” Atari said. He was a big kid, as I have said, and he was really liking this “take what you want” open commissary. But he stopped shoveling as he thought, then said, “I wonder if you can see the tents from those cameras. That could be helpful.”
“You guys sound like you’re actually hunting cryptids,” I said with a grin, one I wiped the hell off my face when I saw them each look at me with offended expressions.
“Uh, yeah,” Ellie said, and I didn’t like those gorgeous eyes looking at me like that, “that’s what we do. What, do you think we just run around with our cameras and add breathless narration and then just edit together a bunch of nothing for the show?”
I blinked. That was exactly what I thought, of course.
Her voice was no longer hushed. “So because we’ve never caught an Altamaha-ha in focus on camera in broad daylight, that means it doesn’t exist? Have you ever heard of the okapi, Mister Skeptic Asshole? Or the komodo dragon? These were both considered mythical creatures—cryptids, goddamnit—before they were finally documented and studied. Shit, the platypus was considered an obvious hoax when the explorers brought their carcasses back from Australia. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!”
There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.
Gregory squinted at me and said, “Brother, if you don’t support the mission, why are you even here? We could’ve hired a miner to hold the boom, paid him more than he would make in a year here.”
“I do support the mission.” I looked at each of them in turn—this was going to be a disaster if we weren’t all on the same page—and tried to give them my most earnest look, the one I used to give my wife when she’d beg me to stop putting myself in danger. “I have gone after reported ‘cryptids’ all over the world, and all I’ve ever found are rare animals. Endangered animals that I help get relocated from this plague of humans eating up every inch of the wild. Yeah, I think your show is a lot of spectacle and not much substance. But that doesn’t mean I’m not with you guys. We’re going into the jungle tomorrow, in fact.”
“Whoa!” Atari said, just as he was looking sympathetic to what I was saying. “Who put you in charge?”
“Sorry, sorry—I’m going into the jungle across the river tomorrow. During the day, even though it’ll be dark as hell under the trees. You guys probably want to start by talking with the miners and getting their stories, right?”
Ellie had cooled down. “That’s generally how we set the narrative, yes.”
“So you guys go and do that and I’ll do some recon in the jungle, see if I can find any sign of what we’re actually dealing with here. Atari, maybe you can talk to Vermeulen’s people tomorrow and determine what their security cameras can actually see. Then let’s meet at five p.m. right here and compare notes.”
Ellie nodded. Gregory nodded. But Atari just stared at me.
“What?”
“If you’re a sound engineer, I’m the Queen of the Moon.” He didn’t crack a smile as he seemed to peer into me. I bet he was a damn fine cameraman with that kind of visual intensity. “So who are you, really? And what are you using our show for, man?”
I sighed. Of course I couldn’t tell them who I worked for (or that I was working for anyone, in fact), but I could see my cover story was in tatters, so I decided not to exactly lie to them. I could give them some version of the truth. So I said, “That stuff I said about going all over the world, saving endangered animals?”
They all remained quiet.
“I’m independently wealthy, and I choose to spend my fortune—and my time—making the world a better place. I have people monitoring the Internet for chatter about bizarre or mythical animals—cryptids, as we call them, but to these people they are the Chupacabra, the Asian Barmanou, a Black Shuck or a Megaconda. To them, it really is an urban-legend goddamn Man-Bear-Pig that’s eating their children and their pets or their milk-and-meat animals. Next thing you know, they’re shooting or trapping and killing animals that are dangerous only because we took their territory. I save them. That’s what I’m really doing here.”
Atari whistled. “All right, man. That’s noble. Thanks for the truth.”
Ellie looked at me in a mischievous way, saying through her crooked smile, “I thought you had a little too much of the cock-of-the-walk ab
out you for you just to be a sound man.”
“Hey!” Gregory protested, mostly in jest.
“For him just to be a sound man. Obviously you have to be built to be holding that boom and carrying that equipment all the time. Your muscles are bigger than his, anyway.”
I instinctively looked down at my arms. I had muscles, just not all show-off-y like his.
We finished our meal and tucked ourselves in inside the tent, the collegial feeling returned. Between killing three men right in front of them and then planning our day like the former commando I was, I had nobody to blame but myself for blowing my cover.
Since the last thing I saw before going to sleep for the night were Ellie’s liquid green eyes fixed on me and her lips turned up in a sleepy smile, I wasn’t too upset about the way things had worked out.
Chapter 8
In the morning, we ate our high-calorie nutrition bars (Ellie cut hers in half, of course) drank a lot of water, and applied copious amounts of industrial bug spray over every exposed inch of skin. I strapped on my canteens; filled my rucksack with digital cameras, flashlights, rope, and a loaded tranquilizer gun; and pushed my two .45s into holsters that crisscrossed my chest like a bandito. I hate to kill animals, even non-endangered ones, even (believe it or not) humans, but if was going to be them or me, I would have to vote Team Brett.
Even though I wasn’t going to play my part with the Cryptids Alive! scoobies, I was still glad they would be going about their plan for the show, interviewing everyone, getting lots of footage for the “B” roll, and generally acting like the TV production crew they were. This gave me the chance to see what the hell was going on, what kind of croc or team of predatory amphibious killers might be our miscreants.
I got permission from Vermeulen Mining to use one of their incredibly outdated flatboats to cross the slow current of the Kasai. The boat actually belonged to one of the longtime miners on the site, an impressive display of wealth among the barely-scraping-by tent city population, and he rented it to the company for a little extra cash every week. They rarely actually used it, but when you need to cross a river as big as this Congo tributary, you need to cross the river in a boat.
Or a floating whatever the hell this thing was. The friendly and wizened-looking miner—gah, did this old man slip himself into those 50-foot-deep holes to dig for diamonds?—told me in French, “Just push very hard with the oar and it will take you across. Use the oar if you need to not land downriver. Otherwise, just enjoy our Goddess River.”
I gave him $4,500 in Congolese francs as thanks, and his nearly toothless mouth smiled widely at my generosity (in American dollars, it was about five bucks) and he wished me well on my journey across the water. He didn’t ask why I wanted to go into the jungle—who knew why whites did anything, really? He probably assumed it was to find things to sell, since Americans cared only for what money could buy. The miners (and the rest of their ilk in Congo) liked money enough—eating and such being enjoyable—but, as a man in Ethiopia told me once, “Americans would seek money even if money could no longer buy anything.” The super-rich one-percenters back in the States, sitting on their stacks of billions, made this poorest of poor men’s statement stick with me.
In any case, five dollars later I was perched precariously in a boat that sat in the water, not just on it like a raft, keeping me on edge that the slightest sway would start it filling until it sank and I was in the middle of a river filled with lots of hungry things. A good shove with the oar, coupled by the old fellow getting his impressive muscle behind it, sent me halfway across the river before I needed to use the paddle of my oar to arrest getting caught up in the current and send more downriver than across it.
I needed to make just a few strokes, keeping my eyes peeled for crocodiles, hippopotami, and anything else that might feel my creeping boat was encroaching on their turf, and in just a few minutes I had made it to the far bank just a hundred yards or so from the smooth spot coming out of the jungle that was my main point of interest. I’d have to drag the boat upriver for the return journey, so hopefully I would end up landing at the right spot to return to the Vermeulen property.
This was really the first chance I’d had to be alone and take a good look at my surroundings—and any sign of where whatever creature we sought might have been making its home. The mud on this side was much more slippery and wet than I had expected from the mine side, but that was because I was forced to walk right at the waterline, the riot of vegetation threatening to push out over the river. However, after a couple of close calls that saw me very nearly lose my footing, I made it to what I was calling the “hole” in the jungle wall.
Holes like this, I knew, weren’t created by one animal, even a large one, crossing to get into the river. No, this was either a frequently used path for river animals to come and go, or one hell of a big creature had blasted away the trees at this point as it rushed out of—or into—the dense jungle.
I peered around the corner of the hole, and as I had guessed, the brilliant sun ceased to provide much light past about ten feet in. I slowly eased myself around the foliage and into what I could now see was more of a tunnel than a hole.
If I had thought it was humid on the other side of river, far outside the dense jungle, then this was like being waterboarded. How could the air be so still and deathly stifling and yet so full of sound and movement. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the beams of sun filtered through the hundreds of feet of trees, vines, huge leaves, and everything else, I could see little animals—monkeys, rodents, massive insects both in the air and on the ground. The “ceiling” of this tunnel was at least ten feet high, plenty for me to walk upright, and it stretched further back than I could see in the gloom. I didn’t touch a damned thing because I didn’t want to pick up any kind of jungle rot or get bitten by something camouflaged on a tree trunk. Also, I didn’t have to touch anything since this weird tunnel was so wide. There wasn’t a human footprint or bootprint anywhere in the never-to-dry mud. Also, the edges of this “tunnel” were jagged, not what would have been the case if this had been manmade.
And despite the lack of any apparent human contribution to this cleared area, it was cleared. Which meant that something—or, more likely, some things—used this tunnel regularly, not giving the chaos of the jungle the opportunity to grow back and seal the gap, which would take no more than a month of neglect.
But how regularly? Were there human prints in the moist clay but which had been smeared out by the belly or feet or something huge? I crouched down to take a closer look at the mud I had been walking through. There were grooves in it, and the grooves were actually filled with water, telling me that whatever it was that made them came out of the river back into this jungle for some—
HRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!
I knew that sound, which was coming from about twenty feet behind me and froze me in place. It was the low, exhaling growl-roar of a very large crocodile. A few seconds later, it did it again, sounding wetter and angrier this time. I looked up and turned only my head as slowly as possible, and, sure as shit, there was a Nile crocodile staring at me. Staring at me and growling as it did first as a warning, then as an angry blast to petrify its prey, making it easier for the predator to chomp down and consume it.
I had some rope on me, and the tranq gun, and the two guns with bullets in it, but as the croc—an immense beast, this one bigger than the biggest saltwater man-eater I had even heard about—was facing me directly, shots to immobilize it or kill it would be impossible. Even the tranq gun couldn’t pierce the tough skin on the croc’s face. That part of the animal was protected to survive having another croc’s jaws trying to crush it. If this one opened its mouth wide enough, I could shoot the tranq right into the softer tissue of its palate or tongue, but even then I would have to move enough to get that gun out of my bag that the croc would probably think I was about to flee, making him rush up and make me his screaming dinner.
I did turn my boots in the mud to bring my bo
dy around and better face the animal, on the off-off-chance that my staring it down would intimidate it and make it think twice about eating me. It let out another lion’s growl and hissed as it opened its mouth at me, no doubt trying to gauge my reaction.
Wait, hissed? Crocodiles have a kind of hiss, I supposed, but it was more of a guttural exhalation than a snake’s hiss. Yes, I thought, that sounded more like a snake’s warning, not to mention that it came from behind me, not from the croc …
Oh, bloody hell. I turned my head again back to the direction I originally had it, looking into the jungle, not out at the river, which now seemed impossibly far away.
Staring at me from this side, about as far away as the croc was on the other, were the alien eyes of the largest snake I had ever seen. It didn’t even look real, it was so huge. It was almost as tall as I was and seemed to stretch on forever. Was this the fabled cryptid Megaconda, essentially a monster-sized version of the already-monster-sized largest snake in the world?
It couldn’t be. Anacondas, regular ones, didn’t live in Africa, sticking with the smorgasbord available in South America’s Amazon rainforest. No, this was Africa’s version—the rock python. But it was impossible that a serpent of this size lived so close to humans. It would have been spotted! It would have been hunted and killed, definitely. Except the Vermeulen mine had set up shop right across the river no more than a year ago, moving from the previous site that it judged as holding no more diamonds.