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Authors: Paul Christopher

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“Incoming!” Holliday bellowed. And almost before the warning was out of his mouth the Hellfires struck. Used by a skilled operator, the AGM-114 Hellfire could be aimed through the open window of a moving vehicle. In the case of the two missiles aimed at the
Pevensey
, one struck the rear wall of the lounge behind the wheelhouse and the second exploded in the boiler room simultaneously, putting a ragged hole the size of a car door through the bottom of the old barge.
Bakri, standing in the wheelhouse, was vaporized on the spot. As the
Pevensey
suddenly lurched with the impact of the two missiles, Jean-Paul, standing in the bow with his pole, was thrown into the river, and Samir, crouched in front of his frying pans, had his ribs crushed as the stove tipped over on him, then was turned into a human torch as the furiously boiling cooking oil spilled onto his head, neck and chest. Samir’s thin cotton clothing and his hair burst into flame as the blackened, crackling firewood spilled out of the overturned stove and he died, his bubbling scream choked off as his mouth and throat filled with the burning oil.
Sitting on the starboard side of the barge Holliday instinctively threw himself toward Peggy and Rafi, his outstretched arms bowling them over as a hail of cast iron, glass and wood debris flew over them.
Pevensey
, helm gone, swung hard into the current, then almost tipped over as the surging water poured into the gaping hole in her bottom.
Holliday had a brief glimpse of the aircraft as it roared overhead. He hit the river, automatically assessing: a Cessna Caravan 208. Nine passengers, but six or seven was more likely with the Hellfire payload. The water closed over his head as he was pushed down toward the stony bottom, his vision cut in half by the silt-heavy current. Then he remembered.
Crocodiles.
The Nile version, up to twenty feet long and sometimes weighing as much as a ton—bronze, the green-yellow-and-dirty-purple prehistoric horrors—could travel up to forty miles an hour if they were hungry enough. They had sixty-eight cone-shaped teeth and a bite force of five thousand pounds per square inch. They sometimes hunted in packs of five or more and had been known to take down a four-thousand-pound black rhinoceros. An average-sized human being would be little more than a hors d’oeuvre.
Holliday flailed his way frantically back to the surface. He was being swept along with the current along with the remains of the
Pevensey
. He shook the water out of his eyes and spotted Rafi struggling to drag an unconscious Peggy toward the shore. Captain Eddie was already there, hauling himself up the muddy bank. The half-submerged wire kindling basket whirled by and Holliday reached out and levered the hatchet out of the top piece of firewood. On the shore Captain Eddie yelled out a warning.
“
¡Detrás de usted!
Behind you!”
A huge, surging creature was powering its way toward him, massive armored tail swirling, its dead dinosaur eyes barely breaking the surface of the swiftly flowing river. Almost immediately Holliday realized that the grotesque creature had its attention elsewhere—it was racing toward Peggy as Rafi and Captain Eddie tried to haul her out of the water.
Holliday twisted away to one side like a matador playing a bull and backhanded the blade of the hatchet into the creature’s eye. The crocodile reared up, making a terrible, deep-throated bellowing sound. Holliday managed to jerk the hatchet out of the animal’s eye and struck out for the shore as the wounded creature rolled away from him. He reached the shallows and staggered to his feet as Captain Eddie came back down the bank and held out one hand.
“I would advise you to be a little quicker, señor,” said the Cuban. He jerked Holliday up onto the muddy shore, sweeping the big bowie knife out of its sheath. As Holliday stumbled up the bank he turned and saw Eddie lunging forward and driving the heavy blade up to the hilt high between the eyes of the already half-blinded giant that had been seeking its revenge.
The crocodile squirmed and shivered as the knife went into its brain and then suddenly went rigid. Eddie pulled out the blade, reached into the water, grabbed one of the creature’s stubby legs, then half flipped the body, exposing the pale, eggplant-shaded belly. He pushed the bowie knife into the crocodile’s throat and sawed downward, esophagus, heart, lungs, liver and intestine spilling out into the shallows like a hideously foul-smelling stew. He used his boot to push the disemboweled creature’s corpse into the current.
“That should keep his friends busy for a while,” said Eddie, grabbing Holliday’s elbow and helping him up the riverbank. At the edge of the dense jungle Rafi was bending over Peggy, who was sitting up and coughing, her back against the thick trunk of a tree that overhung the river.
“She’s okay,” said Rafi. “Half-drowned but okay.”
Eddie watched the remains of
Pevensey
washing up onshore like flotsam. He turned back to Holliday. “You have some serious enemies, señor. Perhaps you should have warned me.”
“Sorry about that,” answered Holliday, hands on knees as he tried to catch his breath. “I didn’t think they wanted me that badly.”
“I think you were wrong,
Comandante
,” said Captain Eddie. “I think they want you very badly indeed.”
Holliday climbed to his feet, his clothes smeared with mud, stinking but alive. “Where’s the widest part of the river closest to here? I need about fifteen hundred feet, say half a kilometer.”
“We’ve just been attacked with rockets and nearly eaten by crocodiles,” said Peggy, her voice weary. “Why would you want to know something like that?”
“Because that’s how much water a good floatplane pilot in a Caravan needs to land,” said Holliday.
“Twenty kilometers behind us or thirty ahead,” said Captain Eddie, wiping the blade of his knife across his jeans. He slid it back into its sheath.
“How long to get to us here?”
“By boat, four hours, more likely five at this time of day. Twice that by land. There are very few trails, so they would have to stay close to the river, follow its turns.”
“Are they likely to find boats?” Holliday asked.
“Perhaps a dugout or two, small ones, not what they need. There are no villages along that part of the river,” answered Eddie.
“So we’ve got eight hours, maybe, until nightfall.”
“For what?” Rafi asked, crouched beside Peggy.
“To get ready,” said Holliday.
14
 
“Point me toward a good hardwood,” said Holliday, standing in the narrow clearing between the riverbank and the jungle.
“A tree, señor?” Eddie asked a little skeptically. There were thousands of trees all around them.
“A tree.” Holliday nodded. “A hardwood in particular.”
“Miss Blackstock is leaning against one,” said Eddie, pointing. The tree in question was sixty or seventy feet tall, its summit lost in the jungle canopy overhead. Its roots were splayed and thick, raising the trunk like the legs of a massive spider. The leaves were broad, round and a deep, rich green. The branches hung down like a heavy curtain. “It is an iroko tree. There has been much poetry written about it. It is also in danger of extinction.”
“Looks like it’s flourishing to me.” Holliday shrugged.
“It is pollinated only by the strawberry fox-eared fruit bat. The bat is being killed off by farmers velarcutting for their crops.”
Holliday approached the tree and looked up through the tangle of limbs. Rafi and Peggy followed his gaze.
“What are you looking for?” Rafi asked.
“A dead branch.”
“I thought we were trying to get away from the guys on the floatplane,” said Peggy.
“They’ve got weapons and we don’t,” said Holliday coldly. “One way or the other they’ll catch up to us and kill us, so we have to kill them first.”
“With a dead branch?” Rafi said.
“With
that
dead branch,” said Holliday. He reached up with the hatchet and hacked off a leafless branch about three fingers thick. He pulled it down, trimmed one end and held it up against himself to measure. The branch was a little shorter than he was, making it about six feet long.
“We’re going to beat them to death with clubs when they go to sleep?” said Peggy.
“Why don’t you and Rafi help Captain Eddie see what he can salvage from
Pevensey
and I’ll show you,” suggested Holliday, pointing to the Cuban, who was pulling wreckage out of the river.
Half an hour later, after borrowing Eddie’s knife, Holliday’s six-foot stave was further sculpted. Both ends slightly notched, the ends a little more than half an inch thick now, the center a little more than half an inch in diameter. The “front” of the stave was sapwood, with the heavier heartwood on the “inside,” creating a natural laminate. With that much done Holliday went down to the riverbank to see how his companions were doing.
Eddie and the others had retrieved most of the material that had washed up onshore or was easily accessible without arousing the interests of the half-submerged fleet of crocodiles cruising on the edge of the main current. While Eddie and Rafi carried the heavier things higher on the bank Peggy sorted out what they had already gathered. It was an eclectic collection.
Letting his eyes run over the exhibition of junk spread out in the little clearing, Holliday took a quick inventory. There was a pair of two-by-fours with pieces of wallboard and nails still clinging to them—Holliday guessed they were uprights for the boiler room enclosures. The window frame and cardboard shutters; two unopened gift boxes of Ginsu steak knives, twenty-four knives in all; a full-sized ax embedded in a log; a soggy-looking roll of duct tape and an old bamboo fishing rod with a reel of black nylon line still attached.
“Just about everything I need,” said Holliday. “Maybe we really can even the odds a little.” He turned and found Captain Eddie beside him.
“Anything I can do,
compadre
?”
“A fire,” said Holliday after thinking for a moment. “A small one, but nice and hot.”
 
“Going through the files, I can come up with only four really viable candidates to replace Kolingba,” said Allen Faulkener, dropping a stack of blue-and-red-striped top secret folders on Sir James Matheson’s desk. “The obvious choice is Dr. Oliver Gash, late of Baltimore, Maryland, also known as Olivier Gashabi, a refugee from Rwanda in the early days of the genocide. He has the brains, the connections and the innate greed to run Kukuanaland as we see fit, given the right incentives. Number two is Dr. Amobe Barthélemy Limbani, the governor of the Vakaga prefecture before its abrupt name change to Kukuanaland. He presents several serious drawbacks in that he may well be dead; if he’s not we haven’t been able to find him; and last but not least, if he is alive and if we could find him he might well not be bribable.”
“Everybody has a price,” said Matheson. “And if he’s not bribable he’s got something in his past that makes blackmail possible.”
“Not in Limbani’s case. He appears to be clean as a whistle, and besides, there are other problems that may be insurmountable.”
“The third possibility?” Matheson said.
“Ah, the dark horse.” Faulkener nodded. “Francois Nagoupandé. He was vice governor of Vakaga and the man who betrayed Limbani. He lives in a compound in Bamako, Mali, on his ill-gotten gains. He’s terrified that Kolingba will try to assassinate him, so he’s surrounded by bodyguards. Best of all he is a Banda, not a Yakima like Limbani—in fact, his ethnicity was the reason he was appointed vice governor.”
“Is he approachable?” Matheson asked.
“Yes,” said Faulkener. “We have done so already.”
“And his response?”
“Anything that can remove the Kolingba threat and promises a uniform with lots of medals, and he’s your man. Rather like an Idi Amin in the rough.”
“He wants money, too, I presume.”
“By his standards a great deal, but to MRI it would be pocket change. We also have to promise him an escape route and a bank account in Switzerland when the inevitable revolution arrives. He’s an idiot, but he’s no fool, if you know what I mean.”
“We’ll have to strike a special company. Something with a very large initial offering that has long since fallen into decline. One of the early copper mines in the Philippines. Preferably something suitably colonial. Dutch or Belgian. I want us to have absolute control and no transparency.”

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