“That’s gross,” said Dawn when he explained his theory to her. She giggled nonetheless. Perhaps it was too early to tell, but Bucky felt that their relations had improved considerably over the past few days. Not just the capture, but everything that had happened since the group decision to go up after the Diamond Bogo. Perhaps since the fever. That must be it, he thought. I’ve lost a lot of weight, gotten a good tan, and taken a shower every day. Yes, it’s the cosmetic virtues that she values most. What more could you expect from a woman who’d been pampered all her life, desired only for her beauty, who’d been a goddamn cheerleader in high school? Too dumb, too introverted to see that a man might choose slobhood as a sort of costume, just as Donn so carefully selects his faded French jeans and his Abercrombie-casual safari clothes to create an effect. I know the “right” costume as far as these people are concerned, he thought, but I’m damned if I’ll wear it. I gave up uniforms of all kinds long ago. Fuck the Beautiful People!
Yeah, and sometimes you wish you could.
Up ahead there was a flurry of activity. The column halted. Tok ran clicking and husking up to a knot of men in the front. Bucky and Dawn ran up to join them. One Tok lay on the ground, writhing in agony while the others chattered around him, looking woebegone and desperate. Another Tok held a dying snake on the end of a spear. Its head was pinned to the ground, but a definite hood spread and closed under the spearpoint. The snake suddenly shot a double stream of yellowish fluid a full four feet into the air.
“A spitting cobra!” said Bucky.
“Yes,” answered Clickrasp, at his shoulder. “It hit poor Xolz in the eyes. These reptiles have uncanny accuracy. The snake must have been at least ten feet away on the edge of the trail. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. Xolz will be blind.”
“No,” said Bucky. “I remember reading somewhere, maybe in Meinertzhagen, or was it John Hunter, about a remedy. Here—let me in there.”
Clickrasp sibilated an order and the men stood aside.
“Have two of them hold him by his shoulders, firmly, face up,” said Buck. He unzipped his fly, prayed for rain, and then urinated in the snake-struck Tok’s eyes. The surrounding Tok gasped and muttered in outrage. A few raised their spears.
“Tell them not to be upset,” Bucky said, zipping up again. “I don’t know if it’s the uric acid or the ammonia, but something in the wee-wee neutralizes the venom. The pygmies of the Ituri Forest, over in the Congo, do precisely this when one of their hunters gets hit by a spitting cobra. Tell them no insult was intended, merely help.”
Clickrasp spoke to his men, more harshly this time, and they quieted. Already the victim’s eyes—bloodshot and spouting with tears just a minute ago—were clearing. He blinked and sat up, no longer twitching with pain. Bucky soaked his bandana in a pool of water from a rotting tree stump nearby and washed the man’s face.
They camped in the jungle that night, not wanting to move the injured man unnecessarily. Clickrasp explained that the City of the Tok was still a four-hour march away, up in the foothills of the mountain range. The Tok quickly set up camp, clambering up the trees to crack down dead branches for firewood, clacking and chirping when one of them fell in the process (though showing great concern for the poor fellow when he finally stood up); stringing hammocks between the lower limbs (some fifty to seventy-five feet above the ground, Buck guessed); building a huge blaze on the ground, well away from the hammock sites; and then awaiting the return of a three-man hunting party that had been dispatched earlier. Clicky was the leader of the hunting group.
They came back just at dusk, their bone whistles tootling at first in the distance—a happy tootle, Bucky thought, unlike the more ominous, longer-lunged and higher-pitched piping that had accompanied the attack yesterday. Then they appeared through the ghostlike boles of the trees, trotting excitedly, capering and chittering like so many playful children. The bag was surely a mixed one: a clutch of monkeys, brightly furred and gape-mouthed, their eyes rolling loosely, dull in the sockets, the fangs shining in the evening gloom; a scrut of parrots, their feathers already fading in death; a creep of small, loose-skinned, ratlike creatures, plus one truly gigantic rat, with a two-toned black and white tail and huge cheek pouches that flabbered as its body jostled on the Tok’s back; and a mound of bulging scales, fat-sided, shiny, like a medieval pig clad in armor.
“Yes, we’ve slain two giants,” Clickrasp announced to Dawn and Bucky as the pile of dead was stacked. “At least in the Linnaean sense. The outsized rodent there is the giant rat, Cricetomys emini, largest of the true rats. West of us, I’m told, they grow only to about eighteen inches long and two pounds weight. This one will go five pounds easily. Note the large forward-pointing ears, the naked tail black at the base and white toward the tip, the short, sleek, brown fur of the back, shading to vineaceous at the sides and white on the underparts. An eater of fruits, bulbs, and vegetation, it is prized as food throughout its range. Normally found only near human habitation, here it occurs in the wilder reaches as well. Ah, but I grow tedious. Must sound like a bloody zoology professor.” He sighed, rather wistfully, and Bucky thought: Of course, that is precisely what he’d like to be. “The reptilian-seeming creature is a giant pangolin, Manis (Smutsia) gigantea Illiger, called by the Germans das Schuppentier. The Manidae, of course, are an order all their own, with but one family and one genus. Very ancient indeed, but related to the anteaters. Dine the same way. Some visitors to these parts erroneously call them armadillos, but the true armadillos—Edentata and Dasypodidae—are found only in tropical America. Hard to kill, these pangies. You have to get the spear in just right, under the overlapping plates of dermic armor. They’re also quite difficult to clean.” He issued orders and the pangolin was dragged off for butchering. “The smaller rodentlike creatures are red-backed flying squirrels, Anomaluridae erythronatus, common in this neck of the woods. We throw rocks at them.”
He escorted Buck and Dawn toward the fire, leading the way like a diminutive English lord, suffering perhaps from satyriasis but nonetheless determined to exercise good manners. “Yes, the African flying squirrels. They’re not true flying squirrels, you know, not even remotely related to squirrels of any sort. The Anomaluridae are the only survivors of a family now extinct everywhere on earth, save in tropical Africa.” They paused at the fire and Clickrasp smiled up at them. “The same could be said of the Tok. As soon as we have finished dinner, I’ll tell you about us. And about”—he chuckled in a mock-nasty manner—“the lurid anomaly of your Fate!”
That night Buck dreamed his Fate. He saw his head being served, in the manner of John the Baptist, to a horde of ravenous Tok. Firelight played on the Tok huts—hovels built of dung and straw, teeming with vermin—and ugly, huge-headed children sawed at his headless body with dull diamond-bladed knives. Clickrasp stuck a thumb in one of his steaming eyeballs and popped it loose…. He whimpered in his sleep.
“It’s all right,” soothed Dawn, warm beside him under the hide. “It’s all right.”
But she knew it wasn’t.
PART THREE
THE GRIP OF THE NYIKA
22
THE BOGUS HUNTERS
Winjah had seen the dust cloud the evening before but dismissed it as a stampeding herd of game—zebra or hartebeest fleeing a pack of wild dogs, perhaps. Now in the early morning, just as they were about to ford the Kan and begin their ascent of the scarp, they heard the motors. A whining of torque, gritting of gears, faint at first, then increasing in volume, sometimes lost completely as the vehicles—at least three of them, Winjah estimated—disappeared into a donga or behind a jebel.
“Trucks,” he said. “But they’re not ours.”
“Whose, then?” Donn asked.
“We’ll know in a minute,” the hunter answered, pointing to the dust cloud that now rose ragged over the doum palms close at hand. “They sound like military vehicles.” He reached his hand back to Lambat, who stood just behind him, for the .458. It had better not be tro
ops, he thought. That could be very bad. Give an African a machine gun and he’ll kill before asking any questions, just to see the bodies flop. Even the bloody officers, when they’re out in the bush and there’s no one around but vultures.
The first truck rumbled into view, others bouncing behind it, and Winjah saw that it was an ex-U.S. Army two and a half ton with the yellow crossed-scimitars insigne of the Kansduvian Armed Forces on the sloping green hood. Black faces under fatigue caps peered at him over the cab, black arms in olive drab and camouflage pointed. A great flashing of teeth in the dusk, and the glint of weapons. Winjah spat. The saliva was sparse, all right. Then he saw a white face peering through the windscreen.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “There’s a bwana with ’em.”
The truck stopped, three others rolling to a halt behind it, and the white man stepped out. He was tall and big-bellied, with a florid, beefy face only partly hidden by a patchy graying beard. An Aussie-style, flop-brimmed hat with a fake leopard skin sweatband perched atop his minuscule pate. On one hip hung a holstered, pearl-handled revolver, on the other a large bowie knife. He tucked his sweat-soaked khaki shirt into the top of his capacious safari shorts and glowered with tiny black eyes behind a pair of rimless glasses as Winjah walked forward, a polite smile on the hunter’s face.
“Who the hell are you,” the man yelled, “and what are you doing in my hunting bloc?”
“I beg your pardon?” Winjah said, stopping short.
“I said this is my bloc. There’s not supposed to be anyone hunting here but me and my boys.” He gestured behind him toward three teen-agers, tall and vacant-eyed, who had just dismounted from the following trucks. “The general said so himself. God knows I paid enough for the privilege.”
“Well, I’m sorry but I also have papers permitting sole hunting rights in this bloc, until the end of August,” Winjah said. “Unfortunately, the papers were burned by raiders who destroyed our camp two days ago. But duplicates are on file in Palmerville.” He eyed the intruder coldly, the big elephant gun cradled easily, Indian-fashion, in the crook of his left arm. “Where’s your hunter? I’m sure he and I can work out a mutual understanding.”
“I’m my hunter,” the man said. “I don’t need none of you professional parasites to show me how to kill animals. The general said I didn’t. Now you guys just better pack up and get to hell out of here.” His sons stood beside the man, grinning eagerly. One of them scratched his crotch with the muzzle of an Israeli Uzi machine pistol. Winjah noticed that the troops, some thirty of them, were similarly armed. They stood in a loose semicircle, hard-eyed and eager, watching the confrontation.
“Now wait a minute,” Donn interrupted. “Those raiders that burned our camp also kidnaped my wife, along with a friend of mine. I’m not getting out of here for you or anyone, generals included, until I get her back.”
“Lemme take him, Pa,” leered one of the boys. “He’s easy pickin’s.”
“Shut up, Stroth,” the man said. “Just who the shit are you, sonny?” he asked Donn. Donn told him. The man pondered the name for a moment, scratching his beard. Then he suddenly smiled.
“The millionaire race-car driver? Sure. I thought you looked familiar. Why, the boys and me are all racing fans. Go to Indy every Memorial Day, and the sporty car races too. You drove for Shelby in the early days. Donny McGavern, King of the Cobras.” He stepped forward and offered his hand. “I’m Tex Nordquist from Big D, oil and fast foods, and these here is my boys. Strother, Heber, and Fernando.” Donn shook hands all around. “Why didn’t you tell us right off that the coons had nabbed your lady?” the elder Nordquist asked. “We’d be glad to help you get her back, wouldn’t we, boys?”
They retired to the shade of the trucks where one of the boys wrestled down an ice chest full of beer. Coors and Pearl, though Nordquist allowed as how he preferred the Texas brew. He chugged one in three gulps, crushed the can, belched, and went to work on another as Donn explained how the Tok had effected the kidnaping. Winjah listened in silence.
“Yes,” Nordquist said. “The general told us about them little bastards. The Dorks, ain’t that what they’re called? Well, we got plenty of firepower. The general loaned me a whole platoon of his palace guard, automatic weapons, bazookas and all. Plus we got our own secret weapons. Show ’em, boys.”
Heber, Strother, and Fernando ran back to the rearmost truck and dropped the tailgate. Grunting, clanking, cussing. Then the sound of motorcycle engines. They came barreling back to their father, mounted gleefully astride a trio of ugly little three-wheeled cycles with fat, knobby-studded tires. Heber tried to cut a doughnut and spilled on his face in the dust. The other brothers laughed and tried to run over his arms.
“ATCs,” said Nordquist. “Honda All-Terrain Cycles. Ninety cubes, plenty of power to get us anywhere we want up on that plateau. Got another one back in the truck for the old Boss Honcho to ride.” He slapped himself on the chest and grinned proudly.
“They’ll climb the scarp all right,” Winjah said. “But how do you propose getting them across the river? It’s quite deep all along here. The nearest ford is some thirty miles upstream, in the heart of the swamp.”
“We also got us a Zodiac raft with a forty-horse Evinrude,” Nordquist answered. “Ol’ Tex always comes prepared. Like I got me a half a truck of beer along with us, so’s we don’t run dry, and lots of good hot homemade chili.” He cut an echoing fart. “Keeps the bowels a-movin’.”
“Hey Pa,” yelled Strother. “We wanna go hunting on the cycles.” He brandished his Uzi. “Down by the river.”
“Well, don’t wander too far. I’m gonna start the nig-nogs packin’ our gear up the mountain so be back by dinnertime—no later’n noon.”
The boys roared off toward the Kan, whooping and looping, and for the next two hours the rattle of machine-gun fire rolled back from the walls of the scarp, punctuated occasionally by the scream of dying monkeys. Nordquist stalked back and forth from trucks to riverbank, bellowing Texican curses at the blacks who lugged gas drums, cases of beers, cartons of ammo, crates of food, tents, and a Porta-Potty down to the Kan. Donn and Winjah watched from the shade, their own lads gathered quietly around them. Only Otiego was grinning, but then he was always happy.
“Should we go with them?” Donn asked.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Winjah said after a while. “Not for the first few days at least. They’ve plenty of firepower, as OI’ Supertex said, which could come in helpful if the Tok have arranged an ambush for us at the top of the scarp.”
“But Christ,” Donn said, “they’re so dreadful.”
“Texican bluster,” Winjah replied. “I’ve had plenty of them as clients over the years. They’re a pain in the arse, all right, but most of them are plenty brave. And they all shoot well. I just wonder if they know about our friend with the stone in his brow.” Winjah sent Lambat and Otiego to talk with the officer in charge of the Kansduvian platoon, telling them to say nothing about the Diamond Bogo but to sound the man out as to whether or not the Texans were aware of the beast’s existence.
The trackers returned with a folded newspaper clipping. Winjah read it and cursed.
“Listen to this. ‘High in the mountain fastnesses of Kansdu, a tiny African republic that only recently achieved independence, a fortune is on the hoof.’ The News of the Bloody World. It must be on all the news wires by now.” The byline read “Tony Treacle.”
Nordquist confirmed their fears as they stood beside the river, watching the long line of bearers snaking up the scarp, while the Nordquist heirs—returned from their monkey shoot only after they’d expended all their ammo—cavorted on the far shore with their cycles. Huey, Louie, and Dewey, thought Donn. At play.
“Yeah,” said Nordquist, “it was in all the papers back home. Newsweek had a piece on it that said they doubted the story, but Time believed it. That’s why we came. Shee-it, when we left Palmerville the other day, the airport was jammed with hunters. Like openin’ day
in the Big Bend Country. Krauts, Frog-eaters, Eye-ties, but mainly Amurricans like us. All come to hunt the great embogus. Ain’t that what you call a buffalo in nigger? The Diamond Bogus. But the general give me the sole hunting rights to this plateau, and promised he’d steer the other bogus hunters down to the south, around Lake Tok and thereabouts.”
He stared at Winjah and Donn, then spat between his hand-tooled cowboy boots.
“Didn’t reckon on finding you boys here, but since we’re all together we might as well get one thing clear right off the bat. I paid the general $250,000—cash—for the chance to take this bogus. Promised him a helluva lot more, for the future, and you can bet your ass it warn’t no chain of taco stands, neither. These nigs want oil and I got it. So if we connect with the Diamond Bogus, just remember. He’s mine.”
“All I want is my wife back,” said Donn.
“And Bucky,” Winjah added. “If he’s still alive.”
The Diamond Bogo Page 13
