BLOOD-PRICE OF THE MISSIONARY’S GOLD

 

by I.A. Watson

 

 

Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost, / Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.

Hear how the demons chuckle and yell / Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

The Congo, Vachel Lindsay, 1910

 

 

MISSIONARY’S GOLD!

A fortune in missing ore, enough to make a man rich for life if he was willing to kill for it – a beautiful missionary’s daughter a man might die to possess – and a ruthless mercenary soldier who stops at nothing to achieve his desires! Armless O’Neil must find them all before the Congo drowns in a tide of blood!

 

 

The fire caught the warehouse. The thatch burned. Blazing straw floated up to the neighboring buildings. Smoke rolled across the jetty, swathing the over-laden barge in choking fumes.

“Push off!” shouted the foreman. He hefted a double-barreled rifle to ward off any of the locals that might seek refuge in the overfilled boat.

The gunfire was near now. It was a confused four-way firefight between the remaining guards at the imperial compound, workers who’d seized up firearms, brutal Zappo Zap tribesmen that the government had licensed as enforcers and taxmen, and highland rebels come to raid the mining camp of its new-dug gold ore.

An explosion lit the African night. The armory dump by the main gate had gone up. Nearby houses tumbled like playing cards.

The foreman blasphemed and turned his rifle on the oarsmen. “Push us off, you heathens! Row, or I’ll feed your shot-riddled corpses to the fish!”

The boat swayed unsteadily as men scrambled to obey.

A lone figure objected. “Wait!” the young man in the stained white jacket and clerical collar called out. “We can’t just leave! There are people trapped in their houses! The Zappo Zaps are coming to cut their hands off!”

“Which is why we’re going,” the foreman sneered. “You think we can hold off that horde, or whatever rebels have come down from the mountains to pick at King Leopold’s carcass?”

“We just need a little time, to gather the helpless and get them aboard.”

“Time’s up. We’re too low in the water as it is. We go now. Heave, you bastards!”

The whole frontage of the warehouse caught with flame, a bright hot sheet that warmed the faces of the men struggling to row the barge away from the pier. A blazing figure raced from the fiery interior, a dead man running, and plunged into the dark Congo backwater.

“We can’t just abandon everyone, pa!” the foreman’s daughter cried from her place in the crowded gunwale.

“Shut up, girl. And keep your fool head down!”

“We could leave the gold and make more room for people,” the padre argued.

The foreman snorted. “I’ve got my orders, Reverend, and they’re to see this last consignment of the King’s gold safe to Boma.”

The preacher tried to argue but it was no use. The man with the shotgun was determined. The little boat rocked away from the jetty, leaving behind fire and horror.

It was the dying days of November 1908, when international condemnation at the treatment of the natives of the Congo Free State had forced Belgium to annex the country from its own King Leopold. The transition was not going smoothly.

On the shore the first Zappo Zap men reached the banks. The Songye mercenaries were angry at losing out on the last cases of gold from the Koloneke mine. They fired shots across the water at the escaping boat. One of the rowers twitched and fell dead.

The foreman fired back at the black men silhouetted by the blazing village until his shotgun was empty. “Keep rowing!” he roared at the men who kept poor time at the barge’s oars. This was neither the usual transport boat nor the usual crew.

The settlement burned. The miners died. The Imperial Mining Company’s Koloneke enclosure was their pyre. The last survivors drifted away down the twisting river towards Lake Leopold and the great waters of the Congo basin beyond. They carried 170,000 Belgian francs-worth of gold ore with them.¹

The boat was never seen again.

 

***

 

Armless O’Neil had never heard any of that. King Leopold’s Congo Free State was only a grisly memory of decades past, its legacy some fine French-style colonial buildings and a generation of aged black people whose limbs had been hacked off for not meeting brutal imperial work quotas. If the one-handed Irish American had any thoughts for the natives who shared his disability they were not at the forefront of his mind as he faced off against Bull Günter in one of Léopoldville’s seediest waterfront saloons.

The huge German has stripped off his sweat-stained khaki shirt, revealing a tattooed upper body that was beginning to run to fat. He flexed his fingers then sat on the stool opposite O’Neil and placed his elbow on the table.

O’Neil laid a ten franc note on the table beside Günter’s. More money changed hands amongst the spectators. The burly Kraut was a local favorite but O’Neil was tall and strong too, an unknown.

The combatants locked their hands together. Someone counted down from three in French and the arm wrestle began.

O’Neil’s muscles flexed under his short-sleeved shirt. Bull Günter was powerful, pressing like an engine, veins standing out on his shaved head. O’Neil matched him, holding on until the German exhausted his first adrenaline rush of strength.

The wave of shouting was like a solid thing, pounding across the wrestlers. The whole bar watched and waited for this outcome.

Günter bared his teeth in a half-snarl. His beetle brow furrowed. O’Neil scowled back and redoubled his efforts. Now it was the German who strained to keep his arm vertical.

Bull Günter wasn’t used to losing. Perspiration beaded his forehead. He grunted, then swore, and forced his arm forward like an unstoppable piston. O’Neil knew he had to match the German now or forfeit the match. He summoned his own reserves, cajoled his screaming muscles to oppose the impossible force.

The howling of the crowd was only a distant throbbing in O’Neil’s ears now. His world was confined to one tabletop, to the giant who sat across from him, and to the conflict of sinew in which they were locked. O’Neil accepted the pain and kept up the pressure.

Günter was strong but he wasn’t used to a long conflict. His arm trembled. Slowly and surely he was pushed back, his elbow pivoting unwillingly, his arm twisting down towards the beer-ringed surface of the bar table. He swore again, this time in disbelief.

O’Neil chose his moment and slammed the German’s hand down. The room exploded with cheers and shouts.

O’Neil flexed his good hand and closed it around the money. That way he’d already made a fist when Bull Günter came at him.

The Kraut came in with a bestial roar. Armless O’Neil was ready for him. He caught Bull on that bulbous kinked nose, breaking it again, sending the big man sprawling backwards into his supporters.

And just like that, the barfight began.

 

***

 

Ten minutes later O’Neil walked from the establishment into the Congo night. In the bar behind him nobody stirred. The conflict had been fast and furious. Only one man was left standing.

O’Neil wasn’t happy, though. His shirt was torn at the shoulder and he was bleeding at his left bicep where a broken bottle had traced him. He was ten francs richer, but he’d know about his adventure in the morning.

When the man in the shadows moved, O’Neil almost decked him by instinct. Only the stranger’s terrified cower stayed the Irish American fighter’s attack.

“What?” O’Neil demanded belligerently. “What do you want?”

The newcomer’s eyes shifted from the adventurer’s ready clenched fist to the hardened stump at his other wrist and the steel hook that protruded from it. “You’re Mister O’Neil,” he concluded, trying to keep his voice from squeaking. He was a very young man, dressed in clerk’s linens.

“So?”

“D-Daniel Fletcher. I have been instructed to find you. Somehow. It was quite difficult, navigating these wharfside establishments.”

That was one description of the ramshackle collection of bars, gambling huts, whorehouses, and opium dens that ringed the teeming waterfront. O’Neil wondered how the neat young man had survived with his purse intact and his throat uncut.

“You found me. Now tell me why.”

Fletcher nodded, trying not to wince as a trio of drunken teamsters reeled past singing. The youngster’s hand went to his jacket pocket. “I have a message. A job. My employer, Monsieur Carriere of Degarde and Carriere’s, the attorneys, he was told that you could deliver a letter. Upcountry.”

O’Neil’s head was aching now. He needed another drink or a lie down. Maybe both. “There’s post boats go all the way to Lake Leopold, kid.”

“Yes. But no further. This is further. Somewhere in the… the Ubangi highlands.” The clerk’s tongue stumbled on the unfamiliar name, but O’Neil knew the place. Beyond the northern reach of the great Congo River delta the land rose through tangled rain forests to steep grassy plains. Tiny settlements nestled in ridged canyons rich with apes and giraffe and all kinds of wildlife. Some of the tribes had never seen a white man except for the occasional missionary.

“That’s a long way for a letter.”

“Yes. But it must be delivered.” M. Carriere’s clerk drew the sealed envelope from his jacket. It was addressed to Reverend Foster, Kutshu Mission, Ubangi, Congo. “We, um, believe that the Reverend is no longer at Kutshu.”

“Great. So you want me to trek all over the highlands to play postman?”

Young Fletcher mentioned a sum that was sufficient to cover the trouble such a delivery would require. “Half now and half when you return with a receipt from Reverend Foster for the letter.”

O’Neil looked at the envelope. It was parchment-quality, deckle-edged and mildly scented, addressed in a lady’s hand. “What is it?” he wondered.

“It is a final communication from the late Mrs. Dexter of Connecticut, America, to an old friend,” the clerk said somewhat stiffly. “It was her will that the missive be delivered to the gentleman. Mrs. Dexter’s executors engaged Degarde and Carriere to act on their behalf in this matter, and I am sent to engage you. You don’t need to know any more. Will you undertake the commission?”

O’Neil glanced back at the wrecked bar strewn with unconscious men. It might be a good idea to be somewhere else for a few weeks. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “I’ll go get a clean shirt and take a boat out in the morning.”

 

***

 

The Keyes Hotel was little more than a flophouse, but O’Neil liked it because there was no room service to disturb him and the owner was smart enough not to enforce check-out times on a hungover gutter fighter. The downside was that nobody cared enough to stop a rough-looking stranger who walked right past the desk and took the stairs up to O’Neil’s room.

The man was lean and swarthy, some mongrel mix of African, European, possibly Asian. He didn’t care and neither did the men who hired him. All they wanted was his skill with a knife. Sometimes people called him Cutter.

Cutter slipped to the upper floor of the seedy rooming house without making a sound. The threadbare carpet barely covered stained moldy floorboards but somehow Cutter’s tread made no creak. He passed the first door—a linen trader snored inside with his hired whore. He slid past the second, where a fat gun trader slept soundly with his hand on one of his samples.

O’Neil’s room was the third. It was locked, but that wasn’t a problem to Cutter. A moment’s work with a lockpick was all it took.

The room was dark. The mosquito shutters were up, reducing what little moonlight there was to a mere glimmer too insignificant to even cast shadows. But the chamber wasn’t very big. A bed, a dresser, a night-stand, nothing more.

The killer slipped his knife from its sheath and moved to the bed. O’Neil woke and turned as Cutter pressed his blade to the big man’s throat.

“Do not move, Mister O’Neil,” Cutter warned. “You have a choice to make.”

In the dim light from the hallway O’Neil could make out the silhouette looming over him. He could certainly feel the sharp blade pressing into his flesh. “What?” he growled.

“In my right hand I have a knife at your throat. I would be most happy to cut your windpipe and watch you die. In my left hand I have one thousand U.S. dollars.”

“Keep talking.”

“Earlier tonight you were given a letter—a letter that I am required to find. You may give me the letter and receive the thousand dollars, or you may deny me it and have the knife.”

“A thousand bucks or death,” O’Neil considered. “All for one little letter? What’s in there that makes it worth so much?”

“That is not your concern, Mister O’Neil. Your only concern is whether to tell me where you have concealed that missive or to die. I would actually prefer you to choose the latter.”

So that was it! The knifeman thought O’Neil would have hidden the letter. He hadn’t realized that the one-armed mercenary had no idea of the message’s value and that it lay atop the dresser concealed only by the room’s darkness.

“Who sent you?”

The knife pressed deeper, drawing blood.

“I ask the questions, and there’s only one answer that I require,” Cutter insisted.

“You want my answer?” O’Neil asked. “Okay, buddy. Here it is.”

Beneath the sheet, O’Neil held a M1911 single action semi-automatic .45. He discharged three shots through the covers right into Cutter’s chest.

The killer was thrown back by the bullets, hammered away from the man he threatened. He fell back into the night-stand, tumbling it over, sending the tin washbowl clattering to the floor. He left a smear of blood on the wall where he slid down it. Then he died.

O’Neil swung out of bed. He struck a match on the wall and lit the lamp. He checked the corridor for more assassins. There was nobody there.

Nor did anyone come. Gunfire in this part of town wasn’t that rare. The survivors knew it was best to stay in behind a locked door with a shotgun ready.

O’Neil checked Cutter’s body. He pocketed the wad of notes—a little over a hundred dollars rather than the promised grand—but there was nothing else to find. Certainly no helpful signed note from whoever had hired the killer.

“Time to go,” O’Neil decided. He grabbed the letter from the dresser, crammed it into his jacket beside the banknotes, and let himself out via the window.

Housekeeping could deal with the body in the morning.

 

***

 

Madame Rosa’s was quieting down by four a.m. O’Neil paid the full price for a room but declined to pick a girl to share it with him. Right now he wanted anonymity and privacy in a place that was set up to keep quiet about who visited.

Once he’d bolted the door of the little cubicle, he checked out the space. The window was barred to prevent any customer skipping out, but it also prevented thugs with knives from crawling in. He found the spyhole that allowed Madame Rosa to keep an eye on what was happening and plugged it. Only then did he open the parchment envelope and take a look at what Cutter had tried to kill him for.

It was a recipe:

 

2 tablespoons fine chopped Onion

4 cups Potatoes cut into medium pieces

8 oz. of tomato Sauce

2 lbs. Ground Monkey

2 tsps salt

4 cups Water

Pepper

 

Grind monkey to mince, brown in stock pot, drain off grease.

Add tomato sauce, salt, onions and 4 cups of water.

Heat to a simmer boil

Add potatoes

Cook covered on low fire 1½ - 2 hours until the potatoes are done. Stir occasionally.

Pepper to taste

 

“What the hell?” puzzled Armless O’Neil. Lots of guys had tried to kill him before. None of them had tried to kill him for a way to make peppered monkey stew.

Until now.

O’Neil refolded the paper back into the envelope and resealed it as best he could. He lay back on the creaking mattress and tried to figure out his options.

He needed to leave town more than ever now. He’d taken a contract with the kid from Degarde and Carriere’s; that down payment was in his pocket next to Cutter’s roll. And somebody was trying to kill him.

The best thing to do was to head upcountry to find Reverend Foster and give him his mail.

 

***

 

Daniel Fletcher roomed in a very different kind of lodgings house, a neat respectable establishment run by a guardsman’s elderly widow approved by the even more respectable Mssrs Degarde and Carriere. The other boarders were all older, professional gentlemen, fixed in their habits and tastes, sent to represent their firms on this lucrative African frontier. If the young clerk yearned for anything other than their sedate orderly success he dare not voice it even to himself.

Fletcher rose early, as always. M. Carriere generally got to his practice around seven forty-five and expected his clerks to be waiting for him. The guardsman’s widow was up earlier still, preparing a hot English breakfast of fried eggs, sausages, liver and kedgeree. The young clerk could smell it as he descended to the kitchen.

He could smell it burning. Fletcher frowned and hurried to the stove to see what could have gone wrong.

“I think you’ve left the sausages too long, Mrs.…” the clerk began before he noticed the burly man with his arm round the landlady’s throat. A second disreputable intruder was at the table, tearing open the letters that had just arrived in the mail.

He looked up. “Early riser,” the mail-thief noted, in French. He picked up the machete that he’d laid on the tablecloth and approached Fletcher.

“What? What’s this?” demanded the clerk, backing off. He’d have fled except that his landlady was still locked in the other man’s grip. “Who are you people? What do you want?”

“We want the Dexter letter,” the advancing hoodlum growled. “We want to know what was in it.”

“The letter from America? That was confidential—and unopened. I don’t have it anymore.”

“We know that. You gave it to the cripple. We want to know, where is he? And where’s he taking the message?”

Fletcher swallowed hard. “I—I can’t tell you,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. He failed.

The other thug spoke. “You tell us or your ma here will need new teeth, or maybe a glass eye.” He tightened his grip on the widow’s throat.

Fletcher looked helplessly at the two intruders. He might possibly be able to wrestle one of them—he didn’t think so—but the man before him was armed with a wicked eighteen-inch blade and the other held an old woman in a brutal stranglehold. He desperately reviewed his options. He couldn’t think of any.

The lattice heat-screen behind the widow shattered inwards. Armless O’Neil reached through, delivered a kidney-jab to the thug who held the landlady, then hooked him out of the broken window into the back-alley beyond.

Now it was the machete-wielder’s turn to be shocked and perplexed. When he turned away to see what was happening, Fletcher seized up the breakfast table teapot and shattered it across the side of the man’s head. The china broke, splashing boiling water over the thug’s face and eyes.

The man cried out and sliced with his knife. Fletcher tumbled back, got tangled with a chair, and landed on his back on the kitchen floor.

“I’m gonna gut you for that!” the scotched intruder promised, looming over him.

O’Neil came through the broken shutter, past the terrified widow, and barreled into the machete-man. His other opponent lay sprawled in the dust outside, broken nose staining the grey dirt scarlet.

O’Neil dropped the thug to the floor next to the clerk. Fletcher rolled aside as the heavy bravo crashed down beside him in a tangle of tablecloth and broken crockery. O’Neil stamped his boot down to shatter the wrist that held the machete.

The thug howled in pain. O’Neil dropped hard, bringing his knee down on the attacker’s windpipe, strangling any further cries. He drew back the hook on his left stump and pistol-whipped it across his enemy’s face. The intruder struggled no more.

“Armless O’Neil?” Fletcher recognized as the big man rose victorious. “But…”

O’Neil hauled him up off the floor. “Thank you,” the clerk said automatically, as if his rescuer had passed the toast.

The widow edged round her shattered kitchen and fled for aid. O’Neil looked round the devastated kitchen. He rescued a blackened sausage and jammed it in his mouth. “Time to go, I’d say,” he judged. “C’mon kid. You’re with me.”

 

***

 

Léopoldville was a grimy memory. O’Neil stretched back against the stern-rail of the tramp steamer that cut its way up the broad winding Congo River and breathed in air that wasn’t stale with sweat, garbage, and corruption. A formation-flight of colorful herons winged across the water. The blossoming trees were thick with chattering monkeys. This was O’Neil’s Africa, and he loved it.

Daniel Fletcher wasn’t as happy. He clung to the side of the boat as it rocked its way up-country. The young clerk still wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to be there.

“I should have left word for M. Carriere,” he repeated again.

O’Neil settled more, his arms behind his head, and lowered his hat-brim to protect his eyes from the glaring sun. “Like I said, kid, there’s no point giving those goons any more clues on how to chase us. They’ll figure it out soon enough anyhow.”

The clerk was recovering his wits after his scare. The peaceful ritual of his orderly morning seemed a long time ago—every mile up the lush twisting river took it further away—but he was determined to get to the bottom of what had happened. “Who’s ‘they’? Why did those men come to question me? What is going on?”

“You tell me,” O’Neil shrugged. Hoods with weapons coming after him was nothing new. “I was hoping you’d know what the hell got those guys so stirred up.”

Some large animal wallowed on the river-bank. Fletcher had been in Africa for five months now but he’d never ventured outside Léopoldville. He stared at the big grey mammal with a mixture of worry and excitement. This was the Africa he’d pictured when his firm had sent him to the Congo. After months of tedium in Degarde and Carriere’s office he’d despaired of anything else.

Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t know anything. Why didn’t we just wait for the police to come and question those burglars? They could have told us who sent them and why.”

“Those were local goons-for-hire. They wouldn’t be able to tell much, certainly not who really hired them. And in Léopoldville, the cops tend to be a bit… variable about who they blame for brawls.” O’Neil didn’t want to discuss the dead man in his room with the local force right now.

“They wanted Mrs. Dexter’s letter. M. Carriere said it was important to convey it to Revered Foster quickly. That was why he had me ask around for a reliable courier who knew his way around the Ubangi. He never said it would be dangerous.”

“They never do, kid.”

The young clerk tried to find some shade. After years of African heat, O’Neil’s skin was a burnished bronze. Fletcher’s flesh was simply turning an uncomfortable pink. “I don’t see why I had to come with you. This wasn’t part of the agreement.”

“You think those were the only two guys in town who’d take cash to ask you a few questions?”

Fletcher shuddered at the idea of more men like that hunting him. “But I really don’t know anything! Honestly, Mr. O’Neil.”

“Just O’Neil’s fine, kid. And maybe you know more’n you think. Who was this Dexter dame, for starters?”

“She was a rich American lady. She’d been in Africa years ago, back in the Earlies². Went home rich, married, never had children. Her husband died three years ago. She passed away last month. That’s pretty much it.”

“How’d she know Foster?”

Fletcher shrugged. “When the letter was forwarded to us I checked the records. Reverend Foster came as a sponsored Congo-Balolo³ missionary back in 1909. He was originally stationed out in old Koloneke, the mining camp, then later at Kutshu. He’s been here ever since. I guess he could have met Mrs. Dexter back in the day.”

That explained why a dying woman in the U.S. might send a letter to an old preacher in Africa, but not why it should be a recipe.

“I suppose it makes sense for me to help deliver the letter to Reverend Foster,” Fletcher reasoned. “I mean, M. Carriere would probably want me to help out—if he knew where I was.”

O’Neil didn’t stir but his mouth twisted upwards into a wry grin. “You really wanna know why you’re here with me, kid? Really?”

“Yes, please.”

“Because when the old lady was being held by that no-good crumb you could’a run. You didn’t. You tried to help, though you knew you’d get hurt. That’s why you’re out here with me.”

And that was all Armless O’Neil had to say on the matter.

 

***

 

The trader at Akula was a fat, sweating half-breed. His soiled white coat had ugly sweat stains at his armpits and between his shoulder blades. He wore a Moslem fez and shouted incessantly at the scrawny natives who carried merchandise around his dockside hut.

He folded the banknote that O’Neil had made Fletcher give to him into an inner pocket and grinned a half-toothed smile. “You are not the first men to ask this of me lately,” he told them. “Reverend Foster, he is no longer at Kutshu. He moved up-country years ago, into the hills. He comes here, maybe one-time, two-times a year to buy supplies, but that is all.”

“Someone else was asking?” Fletcher puzzled. “Who?”

The merchant remained silent, but his hand opened for another note.

O’Neil instead laid his hook on the man’s shoulder. “Who?” he repeated.

The trader took the hint. “Some Europeans. French or Belgian. They had a truck.”

“How many men? What kind of truck?”

“Six men. Well armed. Military, I thought. Mercenaries. In a big Daimler lorry with canvas sides. They came yesterday.”

“What did you tell them?”

The trader turned aside to yell a stream of abuse in some local dialect at an unfortunate native who was stacking crates in the wrong place; or perhaps he just wanted a moment to decide his answer. “I told them what I told you. Reverend Foster does not live at Kutshu now.”

“What else?”

The merchant considered denying the rest, but O’Neil’s hook on his shoulder convinced him otherwise. “They hired one of my boys to show them the way up to the mountain pass. The way to find the Reverend.”

This high up the branching Congo the great river split into hundreds of weaving tributaries, many still imperfectly mapped. The navigable waterways were more reliable than the few forest roads, though hardly less dangerous to traverse. Some twisted right up into the Ubangi foothills. Beyond were deep forest valleys and high veldt, the uncharted heartlands of the African jungle, territory of lions and apes and serpents and of half-tamed tribes that still resented intrusion from the outside world. Only a local stood a chance of leading outsiders through that green labyrinth beneath those giant trees.

Fletcher glanced nervously at O’Neil. “I don’t like the sound of this. Whatever can be in that letter to bring all this trouble? Who are these soldiers and why are they hunting a simple missionary? What are we to do now?”

The stew recipe was in O’Neil’s pocket, along with his fee and the cash he’d taken from Cutter. He peeled a dozen notes off the wad then tore them in two. He handed one half over to the trader. “I want fast transport and a reliable guide to get me to Foster before those other guys. If that happens then the other half of these notes comes to you. Understand?”

The trader nodded and showed his gap-toothed smile again. “It will be as you say. I have just the vehicle and the man. You will be at the mission hospital first. I swear it on my grandmother’s virtue!”

O’Neil wasn’t reassured by the oath.

 

***

 

Fletcher found the journey up from Akula hard. The narrow waterways became narrower still, choked by vine and forest debris. When the river finally failed them the travelers resorted to a battered Ford truck that stuttered its way along the dirt tracks beneath the thick jungle canopy. Even under the vehicle’s bleached canvas the heat was intense. The mosquitoes were worse.

O’Neil consulted with the trader’s guide, an ancient wrinkled black man who called himself Komolo Joe. They decided to avoid Kutshu altogether and branch off into the foothills, through Batanga and Bulu and so into the highlands. The old guide reckoned that the boy the mercenaries had taken would choose the newer road to the west, but predicted that the rains might make that route slow going in the valley bottoms.

“Do you know Foster?” O’Neil asked Komolo Joe.

“Sure,” the small, bony local agreed. “Everyone knows the Reverend. He runs the hospital.”

Armless O’Neil concluded by this that Foster might be one of the useful missionaries. “What hospital? Where?”

Joe shrugged and grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. “It moves about. The Ubangi is a difficult place. The camp shifts to avoid the raiders.”

O’Neil understood. This far from the civil administration at Léopoldville, the Congo was as lawless as any land could be. It made the old American West look tame. Local internecine warfare was overlaid by smuggling, gold mine claim jumping, forced labor camps, diamond conflict, local warlords’ feuds, and all the woes that came from the constant clash of greedy men in an environment that was already trying to kill them. It spoke well of Reverend Foster that he’d somehow managed to continue his work in the region for over twenty years.

“Where’s Foster now?”

The guide shrugged again, a very French gesture that betrayed his early years as a houseboy. “When we get near we’ll ask.”

Fletcher shifted himself to try and find any way of sitting in the bouncing truck that wouldn’t vibrate him to sickness. “Is it far now?” he asked desperately.

“One, two days,” Komolo Joe answered. Uplands travel was an unpredictable thing. Yesterday Fletcher had watched in horror as the guide and O’Neil had to shoo a rhinoceros out of the road.

Two other locals traveled with them, to help heave the battered truck out of mud holes and to share the driving. The back of the vehicle was packed with supplies, including four big drums of fuel and three spare tires. Joe’s helpers didn’t seem to mind the bone-shaking progress; they draped themselves over the crates and barrels like big cats and dozed as the vehicle navigated the furrowed track. Fletcher gritted his teeth and held on.

And the roads got narrower.

 

***

 

Major-general L’Evesque lowered his Luger but did not holster it.

He checked around the mission camp to see that it was properly taken, then allowed himself a thin satisfied smile when he saw that his men had done well. A mere five armed soldiers under his command had captured the entire settlement. The troopers, their machine guns lodged in the folds of their elbows, covered the cowering patients and their relatives that had been rounded up from the native huts and hospital tents.

There were over sixty people in Reverend Foster’s impromptu village, but none of them were in a condition to resist. The women were thin, sad things, half-starved, terror-eyed under the soldiers’ guns. The men were mostly injured miners, too sick to rise from their pallets. They were missing limbs or suffering from crush wounds, the usual fate of unlucky diggers of the rich seams of diamond and gold under the well-guarded upland industrial compounds. Some wounded patients had to be dragged onto the turf beside the compound’s cooking pit on their pallets. Almost half the patients were aged grandparents or else children; the Congo had one of the highest child mortality rates in the world.

Nobody was going to put up a fight.

“Where’s Lucas Foster?” the Major-general demanded, first in French and then in the gabbled Anglo-French-Swahili amalgam that was the local Lingua Franca. He cocked his pistol. “Bring him to me.”

There was no doctor; the hospital was visited by the circuit medic every month or so. Care here was limited to palliative and recuperative treatments. There were four nurses, two male and two female, all black. None of them spoke.

L’Evesque held his Luger to one of the nurses’ heads. “I said, where’s Foster?”

Nurse Mary Brown screwed her eyes shut and tried not to tremble.

“Last chance, nurse. There’s plenty more people to kill. Someone will talk.”

The plump woman bit her bottom lip and awaited death.

“Three. Two. One…”

“Reverend Foster’s not here.”

The information came not from the kneeling captive but from a woman emerging from concealment in the nearby bush. L’Evesque cast a furious glance at his second-in-command for sloppy work. If the hidden fugitive had possessed a gun she could have taken down several of the mercenaries before she died.

The soldiers covered her now but she was unarmed, her hands half-raised to show she had no hostile intentions. Major-general L’Evesque watched her approach. A white woman—and a beauty! Young, slim, with tied-back auburn hair framing a classically-featured face. The Frenchman’s smile returned. “And you are?”

“Sophie Foster. Reverend Foster is my father. And he’s not here.”

L’Evesque remembered someone mentioning that the missionary had adopted a child. He hadn’t realized that she was still with him, or so delightfully grown up. “Where is the old man?” he demanded.

Sophie Foster spoke calmly, meeting the mercenary commander’s gaze, although L’Evesque could see the fear behind her defiant stare. “He’s doing his round. He’ll be gone for days.”

She was right to fear. Major-general L’Evesque was a man who took what he wanted. When he’d finished with the girl there were plenty of places to sell her for a good profit. No matter how much he stood to make from his mission there was always room for a little more bonus.

“Where is the gold?” he demanded.

Sophie looked puzzled. “Gold? What gold?” She gestured round the impoverished mission camp. “Do you imagine we have money when we have to scrape by like this?”

“You have not received the letter?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Who are you? What do you mean by pouncing on our camp like this and dragging sick people out of their beds?”

The Major-general made a mocking bow. “I am L’Evesque, master of the West African Free Brigade, a soldier. You are my property, and soon my whore. These people are nothing, and soon dead.”

Sophie blanched. “You are just six men. My father has worked here for many years. We have a lot of friends. If you harm me or these people do you imagine you can escape the Ubangi alive?”

“We are not six. We are many. My present force is but a vanguard. After all, I expect to need a lot of manpower when we retrieve the missionary’s gold.”

“I told you. There is no gold. We barely have the supplies we need to look after all these sick and wounded. We rely on the charity of the mining stations and on donations from home. Whatever you think you have come for, it is not here.”

L’Evesque shook his head. “I think it is. And I think that your absent father will be more than ready to give it to me to save the life of his beautiful daughter, is it not so?” The Frenchman leered. “Your life he can save. Nothing else.”

Sophie could have stayed safe hidden in the big thicket where the orderlies had bundled her—but then these soldiers would have begun to kill the staff and patients at the mission camp. What choice had she but to divert the soldiers’ malice to herself? “Evil comes to he that does evil,” she warned.

“In my experience, chère, evil comes to those who don’t have the most men and guns. Here, far from civilization, far from all help, nobody has more men and guns than me. There is nothing I cannot do and no-one who can stop me from taking what I please.”

Sophie stood at bay, surrounded by soldiers.

A single gunshot echoed across the clearing. L’Evesque’s men swung their machine guns round, searching for the danger.

Armless O’Neil strode out of the forest. “Yeah. I think you’ll find there’s me to stop you, Frenchie,” the big adventurer declared.

All the guns oriented on him.

More shots came from the forest—from three sides of the camp!

“You’re surrounded,” O’Neil told the Major-general. “The lady was right. You shouldn’t have tried this with only six guys. I’ve got you outnumbered three-to-one, and my marksmen are in cover. One wrong move and you’re bush meat.”

O’Neil was convincing. Nobody would guess from his fierce Chicago delivery that he was bluffing. Komolo Joe might be a fair shot when he needed to chase off a big cat or mountain gorilla but his men barely knew which end of a rifle to point. Young Fletcher had never fired a gun before in his life. If it came to a firefight they were dead.

Major-general L’Evesque looked the fierce newcomer up and down, noting the muscles under the tattered field shirt, the pistol holstered at O’Neil’s hip, the devil behind O’Neil’s eyes. His gaze went to the hook where the man’s left hand should be. That identified him.

“Armless O’Neil. So Cutter did not succeed in his mission.”

“Is that the guy with the knife? Don’t look for a refund.”

L’Evesque tried to spot O’Neil’s forces in the undergrowth. They were well hidden. “The offer still stands. A thousand dollars for the Dexter letter.”

“I took a contract to deliver it to Reverend Foster. Maybe you can buy it off’a him. You sure aren’t getting it from me.”

The Frenchman’s face darkened. “You do not know to whom you are talking, American. I am Major-general Antoine L’Evesque, commander of the Free Brigade. I get what I want.”

“You’re about ten seconds off of getting what you need, buster,” O’Neil warned. “You’re covered and you’re caught. Put your guns down and stick your hands up—now!”

L’Evesque shook his head. “If you attack me you sign your death warrant, you and your men. I have other forces in these hills—many other forces. We separated to find Foster’s camp but it will not be long before my troops are gathered again. Organized, disciplined, professional soldiers, better than any rabble you might have hired along the way from Léopoldville. Enough to hunt down your people and crucify them one by one.”

O’Neil had to play his hand very carefully. “You got a better suggestion, then?”

The Major-general’s face became sly. “We could be partners. I’ll give you a quarter share in the missionary’s gold.” He gestured to Sophie. “You can be second with the girl.”

O’Neil ignored Sophie Foster’s frightened intake of breath. He kept his eyes on L’Evesque. “How do we find this supposed gold?”

“The letter, of course. The old woman, she was here when the treasure vanished in the riots when Leopold lost power. So was Foster. He’s the last survivor of that ore barge that left the Koloneke docks and disappeared. For some reason he never went back for the gold. My employer thought that maybe only he and the old woman together could find wherever it vanished to.”

O’Neil wondered how monkey stew was going to find a fortune in missing gold, but he asked, “Who is your boss?”

The Major-general snorted. “He was once a manager of the Imperial Mining Corporation. After he’d told me what he knew I decided he didn’t need to be in on the deal.”

“So you’re saying there’s a lost shipment of gold ore out there somewhere and that letter will tell the old missionary where to find it?”

“That’s it. And you can have a part of it.” L’Evesque held out his hand. “What do you say?”

“I say you can go to hell,” O’Neil snarled. “Take your goons and get outta here, before I have my men blow new holes in you! Run and keep running till you reach the border.”

O’Neil would have liked to disarm and capture the mercenaries, but his instincts told him that if he pushed things that far he’d have a firefight on his hands—a gun battle he couldn’t possibly win.

The Major-general’s lips curved into a snarl. “You will threaten me? Defy me?”

O’Neil nodded. “Looks like, yeah. Git.”

“I will take your other hand and nail it in my trophy room,” L’Evesque promised.

O’Neil drew his revolver and kept it on the mercenaries as they gathered together and prepared to move out. “Leave the boy you took as a guide,” he insisted. “And the girl.”

Sophie Foster shook off the hands that were holding her captive and backed away, unsure which menace to avoid the most.

O’Neil watched the soldiers climb back into the Daimler truck they’d arrived in. He didn’t relax even when they left the camp with a screech of tires and a spray of dirt. “Sam. Watch them,” he called to the guide concealed in the undergrowth. “Make sure they don’t come right back with a nasty surprise.”

The wrinkled native bobbed up from the thick grass, nodded once, and loped away into the forest. His two men vanished with him. Fletcher emerged from the trees wide-eyed and breathless, gripping his shotgun with white knuckles.

“What was that?” he asked.

The two white men met in the middle of the mission, surrounded by cowering patients and staff. Sophie Foster looked over them. “Who are you?” she demanded.

Fletcher pulled off his hat. “I’m Daniel Fletcher, Miss Foster, of Degarde and Carriere’s attorneys. This is Mr. O’Neil, who has accompanied me upcountry to deliver a letter to your father. How do you do?”

The missionary’s beautiful daughter relaxed a little. The flustered clerk was so obviously not a threat. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” she admitted.

“This is a rescue,” O’Neil told her. “We’ve been racing those mercs to get to the Reverend. Looks like they beat us to your camp, but we made it just in time.”

Sophie scanned the treeline. “Where are your men?”

“This is it. Me and the kid plus Komolo Joe and his two buddies.”

Sophie looked at Fletcher. “So the entire army that scared off that horrible Major-general was… you?”

Fletcher blushed.

“We scared ‘em off, but not for long,” O’Neil predicted. “That guy’ll be back, and soon. With his troops.”

Sophie nodded. She looked around and called something to the men and women on the ground, speaking a fluid local patois. Nurse Mary nodded and called out more directions to the others around her. People scrambled up from the turf and began to hurry about, striking tents and assembling provisions.

“We’d better not be here when they return,” suggested the missionary’s daughter.

 

***

 

By Nightfall they were gone. The whole camp was struck and shifted four miles through the lush African rain forest. Those who couldn’t walk were carried on canvas stretchers. Even the children and the oldest amongst the company carried as much as they could manage on the desperate trek before darkness fell.

Komolo Joe piled the worst of the sick aboard his truck and sent it back to Akula with his two men. The old tracker joined the evacuation on foot. He kept a careful eye on where Sophie’s people were heading. “They’re taking us south-west. The boy says that mercenary’s main forces are north from here,” he told O’Neil.

Joe had taken the child who’d guided L’Evesque under his wing and had thoroughly questioned the youngster about what he’d seen and heard. The news wasn’t too good: the Major-general had at least thirty more men scattered around the mountains, all well-armed and ruthless.

“It won’t be long before they track us,” O’Neil worried. “They’ll be on our trail at first light.”

“And we’ll be gone by then,” Sophie Foster answered. “This isn’t the first time we’ve had to run and hide to avoid some bloodthirsty warlord.”

O’Neil privately thought that no local bandit gang or tribal war-chief had the discipline, experience, or firepower of L’Evesque’s West African Free Brigade. Escaping him would be a very different problem, even if the three score sick locals were abandoned in the wilderness. What he asked was, “How will your father find us?”

“This is a prepared bolt-hole. When he finds we’ve struck camp this is where he’ll try.”

“When do you expect Reverend Foster to catch up, Miss Foster?” Fletcher ventured. “We must deliver Mrs. Dexter’s letter to him—especially if it contains details of a lost treasure.”

“I don’t know when,” Sophie admitted. “Father went into the hills to check on a woman we think is carrying twins, to see if she needed bringing back to camp to be examined by the doctor when he calls. He could be with us by morning or it might be another day or more.”

The clerk glanced at Armless O’Neil. “What do we do, then? That soldier didn’t seem like the type to give up. He wants that missing gold, and um, and Miss Foster as well. And your right hand.”

“Oh, he might get my right fist,” O’Neil admitted with a savage smirk.

Sophie brushed her glorious hair back from her face. The purple African twilight lit her features. Fletcher thought her heart-stoppingly lovely. A sense of outrage stirred in him that anyone might threaten her, a primal urge to defend her and care for her. For the first time he wished he was more like the big man beside him.

She looked up suddenly and caught him looking. He turned away hastily and made himself busy unpacking his bedroll.

O’Neil watched the young clerk with a tolerant patience. O’Neil would have thought less of him if Fletcher hadn’t noticed the girl and felt himself called to protect her.

The three of them sat together round a tiny campfire in the Congo night. The flames attracted the moths but the smoke deterred the mosquitoes. The fire was banked down so any hunting soldiers that might be seeking the vanished mission hospital couldn’t see it.

“What do you know about this gold?” O’Neil asked Sophie.

“Nothing at all,” the missionary’s daughter admitted. “I know father was here in 1911 when Leopold’s regime fell and Belgium took over the running of the state. He was at Koloneke when it burned, when the Zappo Zaps ran wild and everything went to chaos. He escaped on the last boat out of there.”

“That must have been the ore boat,” reasoned Fletcher.

“I suppose so. But father told me that the boat ran aground and sank in the river mud. In the end only he and one or two other survivors made the trek through the jungle to safety.”

“And only they might know where the ore barge went down,” O’Neil reasoned. “But for some reason they never went back.”

Sophie nodded. “Father doesn’t like to talk about that time. He was horrified by what happened to Koloneke. It tested his faith very much.”

“Mrs. Dexter must have been one of those survivors,” Fletcher supposed. “What if they made up some kind of treasure map between them? Something they both needed to collaborate on to find the barge again?”

“Father did get hold of a fairly substantial donation to start the Kutshu Mission,” Sophie confessed. “I assumed it was just another overseas benefactor.”

“And Mrs. Dexter went back to the States a rich woman!” Fletcher remembered. “What if they both got back to civilization with some of that gold ore?”

“They couldn’t haul that much of it,” O’Neil judged. “Ore means rocks with gold threaded in ‘em. Bulky and heavy. But if it was a big barge there’d be tons of it, worth thousands.”

“And it might still be there today!” Fletcher exclaimed. “No wonder that Major-general is so keen to get his hands on the Dexter letter!”

“Yeah, about that,” O’Neil sighed. “After some killer L’Evesque hired didn’t do his job right I took a look-see inside the envelope. It makes no sense.” He produced the folded missive and handed it to Sophie. “Here.”

Fletcher craned his head curiously as the girl unfolded Mrs. Dexter’s final words. Sophie’s soft lips moved as she read the recipe for monkey soup.

“I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Is this some kind of code?”

“A cypher,” Fletcher suggested. “If we take the third letter… or maybe the capitals mean something?” He pointed to the ingredients. “Suppose those numbers are paces from somewhere? Or miles? Perhaps there’s an anagram?”

Sophie glanced at O’Neil suspiciously. “Are you sure this was the actual contents?”

“I broke the seal myself. And the handwriting on the inside matches the script on the envelope.”

“Pepper to taste,” Fletcher read. “That’s got to mean something!”

“Well if it does we sure as hell aren’t gonna figure it out without the Reverend,” O’Neil decided. He lay back on his roll and stretched his arms out to cradle his head. “Joe’s on first watch. G’night.”

 

***

 

Major-general L’Evesque scowled as he surveyed the abandoned mission site. All that remained were a few ramshackle temporary houses and the detritus of a hasty departure.

“They didn’t take the road, sir,” his watch officer assured him. “Any of the roads. They can’t have got far in the bush.”

L’Evesque silenced him with a stare. These natives of the Ubangi were used to vanishing into the forest when trouble came. They could travel quickly and efficiently if they were willing to abandon the worst wounded.

The communications officer tried to offset his commander’s anger. “Major-general, we have radio confirmation from our man in Akula. O’Neil was alone except for one companion who might have been the attorney’s clerk. He had no men, and hired none on the river except a couple of guides.”

That didn’t improve L’Evesque’s mood. “He was bluffing then. He made a fool of me. Of me!”

The communications officer had the wit to stand to attention and say nothing.

The Major-general turned to his assembled forces. Nearly all his ranging mercenaries had returned. Now forty-one men gathered around the mission clearing waiting for instruction.

“He made a fool of me,” he announced to his troops. Nobody laughed. Nobody dared. “That American, that O’Neil, has a letter that will lead him to a quarter of a million francs of gold ore. The old foreman showed me the shipping manifest before he died. Somewhere out there that lost treasure awaits discovery, and that American seeks to deny it to us.”

L’Evesque paced round the abandoned cooking hearth. “We are going to find him, and then we are going to find it. I’ll grant an extra share to the man who brings me O’Neil’s hand. Another share for the missionary’s girl.”

The mercenaries were combat-hardened men who liked profit. That was the sort of thing they liked to hear.

“I want no survivors to bear tales back to civilization. This is gold that belonged to the Belgian royal family. We don’t want them to send people looking for it. So nobody from the hospital camp survives. Clear?”

A round of yes sirs and ratcheting of firearms signaled the soldiers’ agreement. Nobody in the Free Brigade lasted long if they objected to spilling civilian blood.

“Then make ready to march at first light. We’ll send the trucks down the trails to supply us as we quarter the forest. Threescore refugees cannot move without leaving traces. Remember I want the girl alive. The solicitor’s clerk too, if he’s there. I’ll have some questions for him.” L’Evesque dismissed his troops with one last order: “See that O’Neil dies bloody.”

 

***

 

O’Neil was already up when Fletcher awoke. The big man was whetting his hip-knife and watching the nurses draw water from a small brook to bathe patients in preparation for the day’s flight.

Colorful birds chattered a dawn chorus. An orange-purple horizon promised another bright African day. Fletcher rose with a wince; he wasn’t used to sleeping rough and every stone and nut in the forest seemed to have found its way under his bedroll.

“No snakes, though,” O’Neil pointed out, reading the young clerk’s mind. “They like to creep into beds for the warmth.”

“Thank you,” Fletcher told him insincerely. “That will certainly help me sleep better next time we bed down on some rock-strewn precipice.”

“The mambas are the worst,” Komolo Joe joined in. “They grow to twenty, twenty-five feet round here. One bite sends a man screaming and shuddering to his death.”

“At least then he gets to lie down peacefully,” Fletcher answered with a little smile. The rookie knew he was being teased but he took it with good grace. “To think I used to dream of the romance of Africa! Along with the lions and the gazelles and the giraffes and the monkeys nobody mentioned the ants and the mosquitoes and the snakes and Komolo Joe.”

The old guide spat a wad of tobacco at a passing rodent and laughed.

O’Neil saw the clerk’s gaze running over the people in the camp. In part it was because Fletcher was a conscientious man who had taken it upon himself to keep track of the rag-tag collection of refugees he’d accidentally rescued. But that wasn’t all. “She’s down at the stream, talking to Nurse Mary,” O’Neil told the youngster.

“Ah, right. I mean… she who?”

O’Neil snorted. “Only one she in your mind right now, kid. And good luck t’ you!”

The clerk blushed again. “I don’t think… Miss Foster’s not the sort… She’s very…” He caught his breath. “I’m only me!”

O’Neil counted off on his hand with his hook. “Big hero comes out of nowhere and saves her from the sleazy Frenchman. Chases off a whole bunch of soldiers for her. Evacuates her father’s mission and guides fifty wounded people through dangerous jungle while avoiding murderous villains that hunt ‘em. That’s gotta count for something, Fletcher.”

“But you did all of those things, O’Neil!”

The big man nodded. “But think about it, kid. So did you.”

Fletcher’s eyes widened as he realized how far he’d come.

“Just go say ‘good morning’ to the girl, willya?” O’Neil ordered him. “Try not to fall in the stream.”

 

***

 

The mercenaries made efficient preparation to move on from the abandoned mission hospital. There was one last minute distraction.

“Sir! A vehicle!” one of the perimeter watchmen called.

L’Evesque looked where the soldier pointed. Through his field glasses he observed a battered car navigating the rutted road back to the abandoned camp.

Reverend Foster was returning to his mission.

“Detain it,” the Major-general ordered.

It wasn’t a difficult operation. The Reverend and his driver weren’t expecting trouble. The back of the Buick carried the pregnant woman he’d traveled to visit and her family. Those relatives who couldn’t fit inside the vehicle clung on the running boards outside. A spray of machine gun fire cleared a man and two boys from one side and punctured the car’s tires.

The old clergyman was dragged from the Buick while the other occupants were pushed to the ground at gunpoint.

“What’s happening?” demanded Foster. “Who are you? Why did you kill these people?”

L’Evesque slapped the old man across the face. “I ask the questions! Your camp, where will it have gone?”

Now he’d been dragged into the clearing, Reverend Foster could see that the mission had bugged out. One glance at the uniformed mercenaries told him why. “They could be anywhere by now,” the minister replied. “You’ll never find them.”

The Major-general hit him again. “Wrong answer.”

“The best you’ll get from me,” Foster promised him.

“We shall see. Where is the gold, preacher?”

The Reverend’s brows furrowed. “What gold? The mission funds are…”

Another blow. The old man’s lip was split. “Where is the lost Koloneke gold that never made it to Boma all those years ago?” L’Evesque demanded.

Foster looked at him with incredulity. “Are you insane? That boat was grounded. It sank.”

The Frenchman leaned in. “But you know where. You and an American woman named Dexter.”

“No.”

L’Evesque hit him in the face again, blackening one of the preacher’s eyes. “When she died she sent you a letter about the gold’s location.”

A new kind of pain crossed Reverend Foster’s bloody face. “Diane Fairfax is dead?” He closed his eyes to blink back tears.

“Fairfax?” It took L’Evesque a moment to recognize that the padre had known Dexter by her maiden name. “You will tell me now where you left the gold. What happened to it? What did that woman know?”

“I told all this to the authorities long ago,” Foster protested. “We fled Koloneke as it fell. The barge was heavy with all the ore, even more overloaded with frightened people escaping the Zappo Zaps. As we made our way downriver it became clear that we were dangerously low in the water.”

“And then?”

“There were arguments. Jack Fairfax, the foreman, he wanted to throw people overboard who had no reason to be on a company boat. There were fights. Then some of the hands fell to temptation and decided to take the cargo for themselves. They all had guns. There was shooting. I tried to intervene and was struck down…”

Foster paused, lost in his memory of that gory night so many years ago. Had he ever been that young? He remembered his despair at what men could do to men.

“Go on,” the Major-general commanded.

“While I was stunned the boat went out of control. It ran aground on a mud flat somewhere, then shipped water. It sank—slowly but surely—down into the silt. Jack Fairfax was dead by then. Most of the crew and passengers were dead. Diane Fairfax, the foreman’s daughter, she dragged me to land and saved my life.”

Foster rubbed his face and was surprised when his hand came away bloody. “Diane saved me. But we weren’t safe. We’d not traveled far from Koloneke, only a few miles downriver. The Songye warriors were ranging all along that shore, plundering and killing because King Leopold’s rule was broken. The others from the boat who’d survived the firefight grabbed what they could and fled into the jungle. None of them made it out again.”

“But you did,” L’Evesque concluded. “You marked the spot where the barge had foundered, you and the foreman’s girl. It made you rich.”

Foster shook his head. “I think Fairfax had been skimming profit from the mine for a long time. He was carrying notes and diamonds that turned out to be worth thousands. Diane retrieved her father’s stash from his body. Later she gave me a share of it to found my mission. We fled the Zappo Zaps and hid in the forest. We lost the Songye but we lost ourselves too. We survived on bush meat for six weeks trying to find our way out.”

“But between you and the foreman’s daughter you could find the gold again,” L’Evesque asserted.

“Of course not. It was night. It was chaos. I wasn’t even conscious when the barge went down. There are countless minor waterways along that stretch of the Congo between Koloneke and Boma. Do you think if the sunken ore could be found it would not have been raised by now?”

L’Evesque leaned in close to the clergyman. “You will tell me where the gold is, old man.”

“I don’t know.”

The Major-general’s face darkened. He rose suddenly. “Bring him!” he ordered his men.

The old missionary was dragged after the commander to the place where the family from the hills was wailing on the ground, mourning their dead who’d been gunned down when the car was stopped. Foster’s wounded driver was with them.

L’Evesque pushed his Luger barrel hard up to the pregnant woman’s swollen belly and glared at the clergyman. “Mrs. Dexter sent you a letter, her last action with her last breath. It revealed the location of that gold the two of you knew about, Reverend Foster. You will reveal all you know about it or I will shoot this bitch.”

Any opposition the victim’s family might have made was ruthlessly ended when L’Evesque’s soldiers clubbed them down and stood over them. The pregnant woman whimpered.

“Choose your reply well, priest,” the Major-general warned.

 

***

 

Armless O’Neil was used to trekking through the lush African forest. He’d never had to do it taking an entire mission of invalids with him.

The going was slow. Eighteen of the fifty-one refugees were too ill to walk and had to be borne on stretcher pallets by their kin or by volunteers. A lot of the others were elderly. Three were babes in arms. Everybody had to carry their own meager possessions in addition to what food and medical supplies Sophie had been able to salvage during the quick evacuation.

O’Neil consulted with Komolo Joe and the formidable head nurse Mary Brown and decided that the best route would take the hospital south-west towards the Congo delta. The journey was downhill and there was some chance of getting help from one of the tiny settlements that dotted the verdant valleys. Joe and the boy they’d rescued from L’Evesque scouted ahead to find the best going for the straggling ribbon of escapees.

O’Neil himself preferred the rearguard. That way he could make sure none of the tired, wounded people strayed too far behind the main mass and could watch for trouble in the form of wild animals or the mercenary searchers. He gritted his teeth at the maddeningly slow pace that the column necessarily had to take and stayed alert to every movement in the bush.

Sophie Foster encouraged the weakest and the slowest, moving to each knot of travelers in turn, offering words of support and sometimes a helping hand. All the mission refugees knew her, of course, and in her father’s absence they looked to her for leadership. Despite her youth and her own obvious exhaustion she accepted the challenge.

But it was Daniel Fletcher who surprised O’Neil most. The young clerk rose to the occasion. Fletcher’s keen eye for detail ensured that fresh water was found, that nobody went astray, that everything was packed and carried. By the end of the second day’s travel it was his organizational planning that set the pace of the journey, that saw supplies distributed, that ensured each patient had what was required. Out of his element, exhausted and dirty in an unfamiliar environment, the young man never complained and never stopped working.

By that second evening of the escape the refugees had lost one stretcher case to fever but a baby girl born in the early hours had restored their number.

Fletcher dropped down at last by the banked-down fire at their night camp with a grateful gasp. “You know, I really regret that we didn’t have time to save the coffee when we moved out,” he admitted.

Sophie—who he’d happened to plunk down beside—allowed herself a small chuckle.

“According to Joe we’re about three days off the river,” O’Neil reported. “There’s villages down there that can take in the worst wounded. The others can just melt into the forest there without the danger of being hunted down by L’Evesque’s soldiers.”

“You really think we can manage three more days of this?” Sophie asked worriedly.

“We have to,” Fletcher said. “We have supplies for that long, medicine for longer. The goats from your camp can keep the children fed. We just have to find safe places to hide people.”

“We’ll hit the Congo somewhere between Lusengo and Makanza,” O’Neil predicted. “Not that far from Koloneke where this whole mess started.” He rubbed his stubbly chin and wondered how he’d ended up responsible for a whole mission-full of invalids. “After that I figure we park folks where they can be cared for and get Miss Foster here back to Léopoldville and into the care of the American embassy. That way she’ll be safe while we try and find her pa.”

Sophie was about to object, but Foster chimed in to support O’Neil. “If those mercenaries caught you then they could force your father to tell them anything. And they would be… unkind to you. The best way to thwart them is to keep you safe.”

“But none of this makes sense,” the missionary’s daughter objected. “Why come after father with soldiers just for a monkey stew recipe?”

“I’ve been thinking more about that,” Foster admitted. “What if the code was around the numbers and letters? So ‘2 tsps of fine chopped Onion’ means take the second letter of ‘Onion’ – N – and so on. That would get us…” he stopped to calculate, “…NAARAE…” The clerk trailed off, embarrassed.

Sophie laughed at him; but her eyes twinkled. “Keep up the good work, Sherlock. I think maybe you should…”

She fell silent as the guide boy rushed up to O’Neil. “Soldiers,” he whispered urgently to the big man. “Joe says come.”

O’Neil gestured to Foster and Sophie to stay put. “Keep the camp quiet.” He checked his holstered pistol and hip-knife then shouldered his rifle and followed the boy.

It was dark away from the campfire, but the stars allowed O’Neil to trail after the young guide back to where Komolo Joe lay concealed in a clump of signal grass. O’Neil thought he’d been moving silently but the old tracker heard him and gestured for him to drop beside him. Joe pointed down the hill to where torchlight betrayed the soldiers’ approach.

The patrol was alarmingly near. Six men, following the trail the mission refugees had left. They were less than half a mile from the place where the hospital rested. With them was a native, a Ngombe or Tembo by the look of him; one of the soldiers held the rope they’d tied around their unwilling guide’s neck. The mercenaries were shining their lights at the tracks in the mud and discussing how recent they might be.

“Have they wirelessed in yet?” O’Neil asked Joe. The old man shook his head.

O’Neil looked down at the soldiers and calculated the odds of one man being able to take down six trained fighters with machine guns.

Komolo Joe had done the same math and came up with the same gloomy answer. He tapped O’Neil on the shoulder and pointed up to the trees. “Bats,” he said.

O’Neil knew what he meant. The giant bourma trees were home to thousands of fruit bats. The “umbrella-trees” were ideal habitat because they were unclimbable by monkeys, so the bats nested there.

He pointed his rifle upwards and discharged half a dozen rounds into the dark canopy.

The bats were disturbed. They swarmed. Many of them dropped to ground level, battering around the soldiers on the forest trail. The mercenaries cried out as they were surrounded by thousands of panicking, flapping flying rodents. Their pressed native took his chance in the chaos to dive off amongst the trees.

O’Neil could still see the men by the glow of their dropped flashlights. The patrol flailed around uselessly in the bat-swarm. He reloaded his gun, shouldered it, and began to pick off the mercenaries.

In the chaos he’d taken two men down before the others realized they were under attack. The four remaining soldiers hefted their machine guns and fired randomly into the darkness. The seething colony of bats was stirred to even greater action as some of them were cut down.

O’Neil spotted the man giving orders and dropped him next. By the time the bats had passed on O’Neil was able to take a fourth mercenary down, although this one was only wounded in the leg and lay on the ground screaming for aid. The remaining pair ignored their comrade, having identified where the shots were coming from at last. They concentrated their fire on the grass where O’Neil and Komolo Joe lay concealed.

Except that O’Neil, Joe, and the boy were no longer there. O’Neil had circled round during the confusion, taking advantage of the darkness. He came out of nowhere with a chilling cry, bush-knife in hand, and took down the first soldier as the man turned. The last mercenary spun with his machine gun but slammed straight onto his attacker’s wicked hook. He went down hard, clutching his ripped-open face. Then O’Neil’s knife was at his throat.

“If you like breathing,” O’Neil advised, “Drop the shooter and talk.”

 

***

 

“One of my patrols has not returned,” Major-general L’Evesque told his prisoner. “It seems as though O’Neil and his traveling circus are heading down towards Koloneke and the hidden gold.”

Reverend Foster did not reply. He was handcuffed in the back of a transport truck along with the hostages that the commander had brought along to ensure his co-operation.

“Now I know where your daughter is leading the American it will be easy to cut him off,” L’Evesque promised the clergyman. “And then, when he is caught… I will cut him off!” He made a slicing gesture at his right wrist to indicate O’Neil’s fate. “As for your beautiful daughter…” The Frenchman had spent several hours describing to the preacher what he had planned for Sophie. “Tell me, Reverend, how it is they know where to go?”

“They don’t,” Foster answered. “There is no way they could interpret Diane’s message without me. They must just be making for the region hoping I’ll catch up with them.”

“Explain about the letter again.”

“The Playfair code? It’s a cipher invented by Charles Wheatstone in the 1840s for sending secret messages using pairs of letters based on a key word. That’s what Diane will have used.”⁴

“And the key word? Tell me that.”

Foster knew what his life expectancy would be after giving that information. “I won’t know until I see the letter. I expect Diane will have given me a clue. Something personal.”

“But that will reveal the co-ordinates for the lost gold?”

“I can promise nothing. I haven’t heard from Diane since she left the Congo in 1912. I had word she married but nothing more.”

“If she knew where the gold was, why did she never return to retrieve it?”

“I don’t know. Really. She returned home with half her father’s stash and I believe she married into money. Maybe she thought the risks of returning were too great? After all, it’s not really her gold.”

“It is not.” L’Evesque’s face twisted with an evil smile. “It is mine.”

Foster shook his head. “That gold has too much blood on it already. It was mined by forced labor at the cost of many lives. It was taken from Koloneke during a violent revolution that saw many more atrocities. It provoked the gunfight aboard the barge that caused the vessel to founder. It was surely responsible for the deaths of those survivors who fled on foot into the forests where the Zappo Zaps hunted. It is cursed and damned, Major-general, and any man who goes after it is cursed and damned too!”

L’Evesque did not care. “Cursed, damned… and rich,” he boasted. He turned to his lieutenant. “Gather the men. Everybody. We move out in force to kill O’Neil and take what is ours.”

 

***

 

“They’ll be coming for us now,” O’Neil warned the people of Foster’s mission. “There’s no way we can outrun them, the way we are. There’s no place we can hide.”

“We can’t just abandon these people!” Sophie Foster objected. “They are in our care. In my care.”

“In our care,” Fletcher insisted. “I’m not going to leave them helpless, O’Neil. I—I won’t leave them.” He swallowed hard but stayed resolute.

“I never said we’d abandon them,” O’Neil clarified. “Just that we can’t run and we can’t hide. That leaves one option—to fight!”

“We have three guns,” objected Komolo Joe. The old man meant that there were but three men present who were armed and might reasonably be expected to stand against the soldiers; he was being generous and included Fletcher in that number.

“I’ll fight,” Sophie promised. “I have to rescue my father.”

The two prisoners O’Neil had taken had told everything; how L’Evesque had turned on the former mine manager who’d hired him to trace the Dexter letter, how Reverend Foster was now the Major-general’s captive, what their commander’s plans were for O’Neil, Sophie, and the refugee witnesses. The idea of a code in the letter excited Foster again but his attempts to find it had been futile.

“That Frenchie’s got thirty-five men to throw against us,” O’Neil reminded the others. “That’s hellishly bad odds. I expect he’ll catch up with us before nightfall.”

“So what do we do?” Fletcher worried.

O’Neil glanced back at the crowd of mission refugees huddled in the clearing, waiting to hear their fate. “We use what we’ve got to our advantage and we play the percentages,” he decided. “Heck, we might even have some fun!”

 

***

 

Reverend Foster was living a nightmare. L’Evesque left two guards on the prisoners and the trucks and dragged the clergyman with him and his men into the thick forest to hunt Foster’s daughter and the people who looked to the clergyman for aid. The Frenchman was utterly without mercy. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy cruelty.

What the pastor didn’t understand was why his mission people might have begin to dig a deep hole under the roots of one of the vast umbrella trees in the clearing they’d obviously stopped in the night before.

L’Evesque was intrigued as well when he discovered the hastily-abandoned site. The small tunnel went back ten feet or more under the bole and was clearly newly dug and propped. “It looks as though they were trying to find something,” he pondered. “Buried treasure, perhaps?” Maybe the letter had been decoded without the Reverend’s assistance?

The Major-general sent a couple of men to inspect the working. They blundered straight into the trip-wire that brought the roof down on top of them, burying them in dirt and root fragments. It wasn’t a lethal trap but both soldiers were injured and it cost time to dig them out.

“O’Neil was here very recently,” L’Evesque reasoned. “He set his men mining for something but had to flee when we approached. Therefore he is nearby and the thing he sought is concealed at the bottom of the pit he sabotaged to prevent us deepening.”

“We can round up some locals from the villages and set them to opening the hole up again,” the lieutenant offered.

L’Evesque shook his head. “The villages have heard of us by now. All you’ll find are deserted huts. We’ll have to haul this dirt out for ourselves. Detail half the men to work on that. Two patrols of six to locate O’Neil and his workforce. The rest of the brigade on sentry duty. I don’t want anything to penetrate this perimeter.”

“Yes, sir!”

The Major-general turned to Foster. “What’s down there, Reverend?”

“I don’t know. Really. I suppose… it might be what you want.”

“So the ore was recovered from the mud, then concealed until it could be smuggled out of the Congo,” L’Evesque considered. “Yes, it is possible.”

Foster knew better. He said nothing.

The West Africa Free Brigade dispersed as their commander had ordered. Sixteen of them worked under the lieutenant’s instruction to clear out the debris of the collapsed pit-tunnel and then to extend it downwards.

That was what O’Neil had wanted. Lacking warriors, he had set the more able-bodied of the mission folk to dig a huge distraction. Their labor and L’Evesque’s wishful thinking had now halved the number of men that hunted the hospital—and set them up for the next strike.

The soldiers’ perimeter was secure, but they had not thought to look upwards into the massive, leaf-swathed branches of the mighty bourma under which they dug. That was where Daniel Fletcher and Sophie Foster hid, clutching on to the huge canister of medicinal alcohol that had been brought from the hospital site.

“I guess it’s time,” judged Fletcher, glancing at his watch. “Do or die.”

“I’d prefer the doing part,” Sophie told him with a brave wink. She reached out and touched the clerk’s hand. “Daniel… thank you.”

“Better this than another day sorting M. Carriere’s correspondence,” Fletcher answered. As he spoke he realized it was the absolute truth.

Sophie tore herself from the special moment they shared there in the green canopy. “So then. Ready?”

Fletcher flicked the cigarette lighter. Sophie stuffed the alcohol-soaked bandage into the cap-hole of the alcohol barrel.

“Ready,” said Fletcher, and lit the rag. They pushed the canister off the branch so it dropped onto the digging mercenaries below.

The world’s biggest Molotov cocktail exploded on top of the soldiers, spraying out flame, soaking the men in blazing spirits. In a single second more than a dozen men were turned into searing columns of fire.

L’Evesque whirled round at the sound of the explosion. He was just in time to see half his command eviscerated by explosion and flame.

Fletcher took the machine gun ammunition belt that O’Neil had captured and dropped it down into the conflagration. The heated bullets exploded, sending random shrapnel out at the watchmen who came running at the sound of the blast.

While the soldiers danced for cover from the random detonations, Komolo Joe slipped the safety catch off his captured machine gun. The old man was hidden in a different tree at the clearing’s perimeter. He checked the Reverend was safely to one side then opened fire on the half-dozen guards who’d dodged the inferno at the pit. Fletcher joined in with crossfire from the central bourma.

L’Evesque spotted how he was bracketed but didn’t panic. He ran low and fast and grabbed the bewildered, bound Reverend Foster and pressed his Luger to the clergyman’s head. “That’s enough!” the Frenchman yelled, spitting in his fury. “You will cease your attacks and yield, or this man dies!”

“Oh no!” gasped Sophie. “Daniel…!”

“He’s got us,” Fletcher admitted. “Stop firing, Joe, or he’ll kill the Reverend!”

Major-general L’Evesque dragged Foster to the partial cover of a nearby trunk. “Come down from the trees and disarm yourselves,” he warned. “I am still the master here!”

 

***

 

The patrol heard the explosion and gunfire back at the dig. The platoon turned to respond when one of them spotted Armless O’Neil retreating into the undergrowth.

“Over there! That way! Get him!”

A spray of gunfire failed to reach the retreating fighter. The mercenaries chased after O’Neil down the game track, eager for the reward their commander had promised.

O’Neil waited until they approached the spot where he’d half-buried the big glass jar then turned and aimed his pistol.

The shot shattered the container. Surgical ether sprayed out in a thick pungent cloud, choking the soldiers. The anesthetic made them dizzy, blurred their vision, slowed their reactions.

O’Neil picked his targets carefully and put the men down. He didn’t go for only kill shots. He didn’t need to. Crippled men couldn’t interfere any more in his private war with L’Evesque and stood at least some small chance of survival in the jungle.

He stopped long enough to disarm the living and the dead, then hurried back towards the clearing where the Major-general was waiting.

 

***

 

L’Evesque was not in a good mood. His powerful brigade was reduced to three badly-injured survivors from the inferno at the umbrella tree pit and the one six-man patrol that had returned herding mission refugees from their place of concealment. He took out his temper on Fletcher, hitting the tied young clerk again and again while screaming questions.

“Where is O’Neil? Where is the letter? Where is my gold?”

“Stop it!” cried Sophie. “You’ll kill him!”

“Then tell me! One of you will tell me! Tell me, preacher, or I’ll carve your daughter up before your eyes. Tell me, wench, or I’ll cut pieces from your father and make you eat them!”

“You…” gasped Fletcher, spitting blood, “you leave her alone!”

The major-general hit him again. “I am Antoine L’Evesque! I do what I want! I take what I want! The girl is mine! The gold is mine! Vengeance is mine!” His six soldiers kept their guns on the trembling captives from the mission hospital and on Komolo Joe as the Frenchman raged.

There was a rapid crack that they recognized too late as a gunshot. A mercenary jerked and tumbled dead to the floor.

O’Neil called from the bush. “Your command’s looking a bit reduced, Frenchie!”

The soldiers made a mistake. They took their guns off the hostages and pointed them at the undergrowth.

O’Neil’s rifle put another man on the ground.

L’Evesque was smarter. He seized Sophie by the hair and pressed his gun muzzle into her cheek. “Surrender, American, or this girl will look a lot less pretty!”

O’Neil had reduced the odds to five-to-one. He wasn’t going to do any better. “Okay, you win. I’m coming out.” He stepped from cover, hoping that the Frenchman’s desire for vengeance would be greater than his common sense.

O’Neil wasn’t immediately gunned down. He held out his pistol and dropped it in the grass. He unslung his rifle and threw it away. He undid his knife belt and let it fall.

Two of the remaining soldiers rushed over to him, patted him down, found and removed the second knife in his boot, then pushed him roughly over to L’Evesque.

“Armless O’Neil,” the Major-general snarled. “You will wish you had never crossed me.”

O’Neil shrugged. He wasn’t big on banter.

L’Evesque tossed Sophie over to one of his men. “Keep a gun on her.” To O’Neil he said, “The Dexter letter. Give it to me.”

O’Neil unslung his backpack and bent to unbuckle its flap.

L’Evesque stopped him. “No. No more surprises. I will do it.”

O’Neil glowered and stepped away.

The Major-general unstrapped the buckle. “You will live quite a long time, O’Neil,” he promised as he worked. “Long enough to watch the deaths of these savages. Long enough to see the slow end of your attorney’s lackey. Certainly long enough to witness the ordeals of Miss Foster. You will be helpless to do ought but weep, though. You will have been… disarmed.”

He threw open the pack to find the letter. The angry young black mamba that Komolo Joe had caught for O’Neil earlier sprang out and went for L’Evesque.

O’Neil had used the resources available to him: medical supplies, captured weaponry, and a cunning old guide who knew how to catch anything.

The Major-general leaped backwards to avoid one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. O’Neil took the opportunity to swing round and rip his hook into the guard behind him. He directed the man’s arm as the soldier instinctively squeezed the trigger of the machine gun he held. The spray was high enough to miss the kneeling captives, wide enough to take down two more of L’Evesque’s troopers.

Sophie slammed her head back into the nose of the remaining mercenary that held her. As he staggered back, bleeding, Fletcher hurled himself at the man despite being tied, shouldering him, crashing him over. The Reverend likewise fell on the soldier, keeping him pinned until Sophie could aim a head-kick to quieten the enemy properly.

O’Neil hammered the merc he was wrestling down to the ground but had no time to retrieve any weapon. L’Evesque came at him, blade in hand; the Major-general had also dropped his gun when the mamba had tried to strike.

O’Neil dodged the first wild swing, blocked the second with his hook, and backed away to keep clear of that wicked blade. L’Evesque came after him. The commander was too canny a knife-fighter to allow his adversary to evade his reach.

“You think you can deny me?” the Frenchman demanded, drawing a second blade for his off-hand. “You think you can match Major-general L’Evesque?”

“Major-general of what?” O’Neil scorned. “I don’t see any of your thugs still standing. What kind of leader loses every one of his soldiers to a hospital of wounded civilians?”

“There are always more mercenaries,” L’Evesque growled. “With the missionary’s gold I can buy all the men I want.” He closed in to slash at O’Neil.

O’Neil was still weaponless save for his hook. He dropped and tumbled, rolling clear of the bright blades, coming up in a defensive crouch. And in his right hand—the mamba he’d seized by the neck as he rolled!

The Frenchman pushed in, slicing with one knife while holding the other poised to stab. O’Neil hurled the livid snake at him with lethal precision.

The black mamba locked onto the Major-general’s face and bit down.

L’Evesque cried out. He dropped his blades to drag the serpent off him. It swiveled in his grip and clamped onto his arm, once, twice, injecting more of the toxin that made it one of Africa’s deadliest predators.

L’Evesque dropped to his knees. Saliva bubbled through his lips. He fell dead at O’Neil’s feet.

The snake darted for Sophie. O’Neil caught up one of the Frenchman’s discarded knives and tossed it to skewer the mamba before it struck.

Then the war was over.

O’Neil trudged over to cut the captives free. “Hell of a trouble just to deliver a recipe,” he complained.

 

***

 

Reverend Foster examined the message from Mrs. Dexter – and laughed.

“What?” demanded his daughter, half-indignantly. “We all nearly died for that secret message. What is it?”

“You told the mercenaries it was a Playfair code,” Fletcher remembered. “How is it done? What does it say?”

Foster folded the note up but kept on grinning. “I told the Major-general whatever he wanted to hear, so as to keep his hostages alive. He wanted a secret message. He wanted buried treasure.” He patted the letter. “I never expected this from Diane, though. This is wonderful!”

“You want to explain?” O’Neil asked. He’d been almost killed half a dozen times for that message.

The old clergyman nodded. Everyone had gathered round to hear what was really going on. “This recipe for monkey stew?” he told them, “That’s all it is. It’s an old joke from a very old, dear friend. Diane Fairfax and I, we survived for six weeks together in the jungle, living on bush meat. Monkeys mostly. We used to jest about gourmet cookery with the dratted things. This letter’s not a secret code to some buried treasure. We never marked where the barge went down. We were far more interested in survival, of course. Its location is lost forever. No, this letter is a gracious final message to tell me that Diane forgave me in the end—that she was still my wonderful friend.”

“Forgave you for what?” Sophie wondered.

The minister stroked her cheek. “We were lost and afraid, alone in the bush. We’d faced horrors. I was questioning my faith, everything. We depended on each other for survival. For support. For comfort.” Reverend Foster smiled at his daughter. “Nine months later you were born.”

Sophie’s mouth dropped. “I was adopted. You said…”

“I’d heard my calling once again by then. I knew I had to stay in the Congo and found my mission. Diane wanted nothing more to do with the place where her father had died. So we parted—badly. She returned to Connecticut with her remaining fortune, what she didn’t give to found my hospital, and she left behind our child in my care. Later she married, I hope to a good man. I don’t know if she ever told him about you. But on her death bed she remembered me and sent me one last remembrance of some awful, sweet days long past.”

“So there’s no gold,” Fletcher declared. “All that bloodshed and violence was over nothing.”

“Isn’t it always?” the Reverend asked. “That gold was cursed from the start. It’s well forgotten.”

Komolo Joe nodded. “We will take the last soldiers down to the police post on the river,” he offered. “Will you swear charges against them, Reverend?”

“Yes. Or perhaps this young legal gentleman could offer a deposition?”

Fletcher looked uncomfortable. “Um, well… I wasn’t planning on going back to Degarde and Carriere’s, really, or to Léopoldville right away. There’s all these people who’ve been dragged from their hospital camp that need some help, and I thought… perhaps… they might need some… maybe I could..?”

“Volunteers are always welcome, Daniel,” Sophie promised him. Her eyes were shining.

O’Neil was satisfied. He’d delivered his letter. He’d seen justice done. And there was a healthy wad of banknotes in his pocket. “We’ll camp a little way off from here tonight to avoid the carrion-eaters,” he suggested, “then tomorrow I’ll see you safe back to your mission site.” His thoughts turned to logistics. There were still a couple of L’Evesque’s guards on a line of trucks nearby and he could find a use for those vehicles. There was also a further payment from Degarde and Carriere’s to pick up later on.

“What will you do then, O’Neil?” Fletcher asked him. Somehow the young man’s hand had become entwined with that of the missionary’s daughter.

O’Neil thought that the former clerk had discovered the romance of Africa at last.

“I take every day as it comes,” the big man chuckled. “Right now I’ve got a real craving for some well-peppered monkey stew!”

 

 

THE END