by Hugo Navikov
“Moan amies!” came a jocular voice from the direction of the runway. This must have been Atari, a chubby Black kid, as he and the pilot dragged dollies loaded with production equipment. When they reached the bar, Atari handed the pilot a five-dollar bill like he was a porter, and the pilot seemed happier than a porter ever would have at the tip, shaking all of our hands before heading back to his plane to take a nap, it looked like.
Gregory put out his big paw. “So you’re Atari, huh? Surprised you made it with, y’know, this extra ballast,” the incredibly fit man said to Atari, poking him gently with a forefinger.
“Hell, you weigh more than me, man!” Atari said with a laugh. “And at least if my weight brought the plane down, I could bounce!”
Shit! Quite the introduction! Oh, I liked this kid already.
Ellie shook Atari’s hand and introduced herself and me. When the new cameraman ordered himself a sickly-sweet African Coke, Ellie leaned over to me and said, “Camera guys and sound guys tease each other mercilessly, like two kittens making sure they’re both into fun. They play rough.” We both laughed.
“Here comes the cavalry,” Gregory said, and we all looked to see a beat-up station wagon manufactured, if I had to guess, in the first half of the 1980s. But it had “Vermeulen” stenciled on its side and looked like it would have plenty of room for all of us and our equipment. Also on its side were more than a dozen bullet holes. That was interesting. Behind the wheel was a smiling man with skin so dark his face was almost hard to make out in the Congolese sun.
“TV people, yes?” he said in English. “You come to see Kasai monster, yes?”
“That’s us,” Ellie said in French—no sense in making the poor driver struggle to understand—and her two crewmen loaded up the back of the station wagon. “You’ll take us to the mine, where the workers live?”
“Yes, pretty lady,” the driver said, apparently still taking advantage of this opportunity to practice his English, “I take you people all there, yes?”
“Yes, please,” she said in English and gave the driver a smile that I could tell made him fall in love immediately, “take us there.”
***
Before we could go very far, however—just out of sight of the little bar—a military-surplus–looking open-air Jeep cut right in front of us, four men in green camo and green berets loaded inside. There was also a goddamn machine gun mounted above the windshield. Seeing the belligerent attitude of the men as each hopped out of the Jeep and approached Bonte’s vehicle, the bullet holes in the station wagon’s side suddenly made a lot of sense.
Bonte immediately opened his door and got out to face the men, which to me—and I admit that after a little more than an hour in Congo I wasn’t an expert on domestic relations—seemed like a very bad idea. So I got out as well, Ellie making a move to grab my arm, but I thought that the militia members (there were no official markings on the Jeep, so I assumed these weren’t actual Army soldiers) would be much less likely to shoot a white foreigner than a fellow Congolese national.
The head of the group—I guessed this by his place in the Jeep’s passenger seat and also that he was the one at the front, spewing rapid words in a language I couldn’t even place. Swahili? Kikongo? I didn’t take it as a good sign, because the people of the disjointed country calling itself Congo most often spoke French in order to smooth communications.
This captain of the Jeep didn’t want things smooth. To me that indicated nationalism. Being in an armed Jeep with pseudo-uniforms said to me “militant nationalism.” That’s the kind that gets you dead a lot.
Captain Jeep was rapidly firing words at Bonte, approaching him in a beeline with his face thrust forward. Our driver, for his part, seemed calm and he answered back in what sounded to me like that same language. His answers did nothing to ease the fire in Captain’s eyes, and the belligerent man looked outraged that a white man was out of the vehicle and approaching him as well.
“What’s he saying, Bonte?” I asked under my breath in English, hoping the militia members didn’t know the language well enough to catch the words of my aside.
“Ah, the usual,” our driver said, his nonchalance bordering on somnambulism, “like telling me I am a slave for working for Vermeulen. Threatening to end my life right here, that kind of talk, you know?”
I did, indeed. “Tell him we are not mine executives—we are a television crew here to document worker abuse.” Maybe they were Marxists and would like that particular bite of cheese.
The bulging eyes of Captain Jeep took me in and his men peered into the back of the station wagon and made some kind of report to him as they returned to his side.
“What now?” I asked Bonte through a mostly closed mouth.
“They say there don’t seem to be weapons, just cameras and that kind of thing,” he said quietly to me.
“I have a semiautomatic pistol tucked into the back of my pants.”
“My Uzi is under the front seat.”
So much for no weapons, but the four hungry-looking men had us at a particular advantage: they outnumbered the two of us, for one thing, and for another, their weapons were already in their hands.
Bonte spoke a long sentence to the Captain, during which no one moved.
At the end of the speech, Captain Jeep’s black face broke into a yellow smile and he babbled something that sounded like it was funny to him and his men—they all smiled, too—but perhaps would not as funny to the rest of us. He pointed inside the car, and the sickly grinning henchmen yanked one of the back doors opened and hauled out Atari, whose eyes were wide with fear. Captain Jeep gave him a smile and a “Wassup?” nod, then said something to him in the African language none of us understood. Then they stood him right next to Bonte, which was very not good.
I yelled at the Captain, “Release that man now. You know what now means, asshole? NOW.” Then I added as quietly as possible to Bonte, “What the hell did you say to them?”
Bonte said, “I told him they would be hunted down if they killed a white man visiting Vermeulen.”
“Aw, Jesus.”
“So they say they kill your black man.”
“What was that the boss said to Atari?”
“There are a lot of, what do you call, dialects in Congo. I have no idea what he said.”
“But he thinks the American would? Why, because he’s black?”
“Mister Russell, my good new friend, I have no idea. But he will kill me and also him.”
“Yeah, I get it. But don’t worry. I think we—”
The operatic anger of Ellie White’s voice slashed through everyone’s conversation. “Parlez-vous français, connard?!” she screamed as she got out of the station wagon and came around to yell in Captain Jeep’s bemused face. Douglas also got out, I’m sure damned if he was going to stay in the car in a crisis. “Eh? Eh? PARLEZ, PUTAIN!”
“Nous ne parlons français,” Cappy said with his chin jutting out in defiance of the raging American woman. “Nous sommes congolaise.”
I didn’t need an interpreter for that. We don’t speak French. We are Congolese. In French. It was, how do you say, très ironique, non?
Ellie ignored his proud statement and continued to let him have it in French whether he wanted it or not. (I’m thinking “not.”) “Si vous touchez un cheveu sur la tête de ce garçon, je vais retirer vos testicules et les forcer dans votre anus!”
It was too fast and had too many words in it for me to follow, although I did catch “testicules” and “anus.” I looked at Bonte, who said a bit shyly, “She say, um, she prefers it if your companion is not harmed.”
Captain Jeep’s smile turned a little, turning into a sneer. I could also not help but notice that the three “soldiers” had unholstered their pistols, not seeming sure whether to point them at Atari or at Ellie. She hocked a loogie roughly the size of a quarter and launched it into the Captain’s ugly face.
Now all the henchmen’s guns were pointed at Ellie.
I yell
ed, “Hey! Boss man! How about English? Do you understand English?”
The scowling captain designed to look at me. “A slight little.”
That was perfect. I needed to tell Gregory to cause a distraction, but that might have been just within the militia mens’ grasp of English. So I thought for a second of the most idiomatic phrase I could to get my meaning across, and belted out to the big sound man standing fifteen feet away: “It’s all-eyes-on-Greg ShowTime! Gregor, do me a solid and shit in their Corn Flakes.”
A grin appeared on Gregory’s face and he … well, he then made a sound like a gibbon being sexually violated, jumped up in the air and started skipping in a direction that went slightly behind the four men. None of them could help it (in all fairness, I wouldn’t have been able to, either), but they all turned their heads to watch the sudden madness of the big American.
It was perfect. Ellie moved with incredible precision—especially considering she didn’t know the plan, and it wasn’t much of a plan anyway—and shoved her hand forward and under Cappy’s scrotum and squeezed one of his balls so hard it almost made me throw up. He went down like a sack of rivets, squealing like a pig that suddenly stopped screaming because it was projectile-vomiting.
“Ellie, get down!” I shouted, the heads of the three henchmen already coming back around in confusion, their weapons still in their hands.
I swept my pistol out from behind me and Pop! Pop! Pop! I dropped all three sons of bitches by creating huge holes in their chests, right where vital organs like to live. Ellie, Atari, and even Gregory—who stopped skipping when the shots rang out—stared at what I had just done, and then at me, mouths open, eyes super-wide.
“What the shit, man? What’d you do that for?” Atari shouted in real anger.
That literally stopped me in mid-run. “How can you even ask that? They were about to murder you.”
“I’m Buddhist, man,” he said, looking at the bodies. “We don’t condone killing.”
“Condone—you—what? Just grab their guns and let’s get out of here,” I commanded Atari and Ellie. The Dalai Lama there snapped out of it and swiftly collected the semiautomatics from the dead men while the show’s elegant host kicked the slowly raising gun out of Captain Jeep’s hand, then brutally kicked him in his already mangled balls, making him forget all about anything else in the universe except his agony. She calmly picked up his gun, flipped on the safety, and stuffed it into her pocket.
I was impressed and I said so as we moved to get back into the car, adding, “Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“I’m not a murderer,” she said. “You had to kill those men to keep them from killing us. Thank you, by the way. The Little General no longer posed a threat.”
I sighed and let my chin drop. “Great, one of the world’s most dangerous countries, and I’ve got a group full of conscientious objectors.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Gregory said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to shoot those assholes myself.”
We all laughed, but one voice was missing. Atari said, “Hey, where did Bonte go—”
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
KA-BOOOOOOOM! The air shoved past us, hot as blazes, then swept back the other way.
The four of us ducked down, but we could easily see through the non-existent windows of the Vermeulen station wagon that Bonte must have jumped back and grabbed his under-the-seat Uzi the second the Captain went down. Since I had taken point on putting down the three stooges, Bonte took his machine gun to the Jeep and filled it full of very hot lead, including the gas tank.
The Jeep jumped three feet in the air—Bonte ran away as fast as he could to help not get ripped apart by shrapnel—and fell in a crumpled heap that filled the air with its column of thick black smoke.
We were all sitting in the vehicle by the time he got back from hauling ass in the other direction and swung open the driver-side door and got in. He was out of breath and sweating, but his grin was something to behold. None of us knew what to say, so we just smiled back at him.
Finally he closed his door and started the engine. “I like this job. I don’t like these guys,” he said in French, and got us back on the road. “They try to scare Vermeulen Mining away so they can have all the diamonds. But people think Vermeulen treat people bad? These ‘soldiers’ would make slaves out of every miner. Even when you don’t have much to eat, even when you have to risk Kasai Rex to provide for your family …”
We all sat rapt, listening.
“… even then, you remember when the Belgians didn’t just own a company. You remember the days of rubber trees, when they owned your people. Freedom is everything.”
Chapter 6
We sat in relative silence the rest of the way, but in pretty good cheer for having thwarted whoever those people were from whatever it is they had wanted to do.
It was only a few miles from the airport to the Vermeulen Mining Corp.’s tract near the edge of the river, but it was a bumpy, hot, and uncomfortable few miles. Bonte apologized for not having working air-conditioning in the station wagon, and suggested that we passengers press our faces against the windows, all of which (including the front windshield) lost their glass long ago and now were crisscrossed by metal bars on the outside. He said he would drive faster to provide us with a breeze.
“Do people try to steal diamonds out of your car?” Atari asked, checking out the window cages. Ellie started to translate but Bonte bravely held up his hand to indicate he would try to answer in English.
“No, this car not diamond car. That diamond car.” He pointed at an ancient—but sturdy-looking—armored car parked right at the entrance to the mining camp. “This car …” he said, struggling to find the right words, then switched to French for Ellie to translate: “This car has radio, so I put extra security on it.”
Gregory looked around at the thick forest and wide river surrounding us. “Tshikapa has a radio station?”
Bonte smiled and said, “Nous avons la Voix de l'Amérique pour l'Afrique,” which even Atari could understand, and then “Et de nombreux programmes chrétiens,” which Ellie translated as “And a whole bunch of Christian programs.”
“Oy vey,” Gregory mumbled.
“But it does not matter what stations of radio we have,” Bonte said, still smiling. “I do not listen anyway.”
“No?”
“The radio is broken.”
I put my head down, unable to suppress my amusement. Welcome to Africa.
Passing the armored car, we could see the tent city, comprised of what must have been a hundred A-shaped ridge tents, some with cooking smoke wafting out. We would be staying in a tent as well, but one of more comfortable—and modern—design, built to shelter four people (and which we had brought with us). Again, ours would be on a small rise overlooking the tent city, which stood between us and the river. Any crocodile attack—or magical lizard attack—would be caught on video, and my bags contained the croc-capturing materials I needed. Looking at the muscles on Gregory and Bonte as well as the weight on Atari, I saw that I had the brute force needed (maybe with a few grateful miners helping out) to snag the croc, tie off its snout, and turn the one-ton animal onto its back so it could be tranquilized. So I was confident I could, with the help of my fellows, secure for transport what I had decided was most likely a Crocodylus porosus, a saltwater crocodile that had lost its way and ended up trying to navigate the tributaries of the Congo River. The things were huge and they were fast. I could totally see a population fed stories about the Kasai Rex since childhood “seeing” the cryptid, since the real thing was probably just as fierce.
However, I lacked one very important arrow in my quiver in my potential pursuit of the saltwater man-eater: the species was anything but endangered, officially labeled as one of “least concern” by the scientists watching over the animals of the world.
If it really were C. porosus, my mission here would technically be over and I’d technically have to extract myself back to the States immediately
, my set of skills no doubt being demanded by another Organization priority. Same thing with my second guess at the identity of this monster, which was the most dangerous indigenous African reptile, the Nile crocodile, the largest apex predator in the world after its saltwater-dwelling cousin. It, too, was thriving and thus considered an animal of “least concern” in terms of extinction risk.
Least concern. Words that I simultaneously loved—Hey! An animal not being destroyed by man!—and loathed, since there was nothing I was technically allowed to do to save the creature from being killed (and probably eaten by the starving miners) and even less I could to protect the miners without the imprimatur of The Organization exerting upon the mining company the moral pressure to move their people out of harm’s way, which they wouldn’t do with a non-endangered animal. The Organization also wouldn’t arrange an airlift for a non-endangered animal living in its natural habitat (in this case, the rivers of the Eastern Hemisphere). And if I lied in order to get a chopper team out here—or, more likely, a good-sized pickup truck—then I’d be in hot water with my employer, something I’d really rather avoid.
If the supposed Kasai Rex turned out to actually be a member of an endangered population, however, then I could save it and the villagers whose mine had encroached upon the unidentified mystery animal’s territory.
Before I even worried about any of that, I needed—and I assume Ellie needed as well—to talk to Daan Vermeulen, the head of the diamond-mining company he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his. These Dutch-owned companies operating in Africa kept their cards held very close to their chests. The bare fact that they were allowing a television crew to video the mines and conditions as a part of Cryptids Alive! seeking the killer cryptid was astounding.
Vermeulen must have had quite an interest in resolving the situation, considering how much mining companies were reviled all over the world for exploiting the poor bastards who had to roast animal skins to eat while they dug up millions of dollars worth of rocks for their corporate slave masters. Congo’s diamonds were no longer what they called “conflict” or “blood” diamonds, since there was no Sierra Leone–like civil war using the miners as pawns to move and kill at their pleasure. (Not that it kept wholesalers, retailers, and end customers from snapping up even the bloodiest of blood diamonds.)
