Marten and Demme both rose, their movements almost synchronized. The boat operator spoke first. “You must give me one hour, monsieur. I must buy fuel and provisions for the trip if we are to make no stops. You cannot ask for more than that.”
“And I must contact Stanleyville,” added Demme. “I will collect you in an hour.”
“Say, that’s just fine. It’ll give me a chance to… how’d you say it Mr. Demme? Sample the local fare?” Hurricane grinned broadly then winked at one of the working girls.
Demme affected a supercilious expression, but nodded and took his leave, close on Marten’s heels.
Dodge shook his head. “That was amazing. You really hustled them.”
Hurley’s smile never faltered, but his eyes grew hard. “Just letting them know that we didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. But I’d be lying if I said this is the end of it.”
“How’s that?”
“Like Demme said, the Congo is a rough place. There’s a gang of pirates that pretty much own the stretch we’re headin’ into.”
“Pirates? It’s the twentieth century for God’s sake.”
Hurley chuckled darkly. “Forget about Captain Blood or Long John Silver. These guys are more like Scarface Al Capone; we tangled with them once or twice back in the day. Anyone who wants to run the river either pays ‘em off, or works for ‘em.”
“So which is Marten?”
“Exactly, my boy. Never turn your back on that rat. I’m banking on him leaving us alone since we’re no good to him dead, but who knows? He might decide we’re not worth the trouble and knife us in our sleep.”
Chastened, Dodge sat back in his seat as his companion flagged the barman. Barely on the ground and already I’ve fallen in with pirates and cutthroats, he thought. So much for adventure.
As Hurley ordered food for them both, Dodge let his eyes roam the room, as if by his scrutiny he might be able to identify the pirates in their midst. The room was abuzz with conversations and arguments, but Dodge recognized none of what was said. The Belgian Congo, like most of Africa, was a melting pot of rogues from all over Europe. French and German were the official tongues of the place, but even within those linguistic divisions, there were dozens of dialectic variations.
Then, from the midst of the auditory pandemonium, he heard a familiar utterance. He didn’t know what it meant, but the exclamation — a curse shouted by a man who had just been caught cheating at cards — set alarm bells ringing in his head. He picked the man out of the crowd and mentioned the incident to Hurley.
“What language is that?”
Hurricane focused his attention on the card game. “He’s an Afrikaaner. Probably got caught cheating at cards in Jo’burg and had to sneak up here. Why?”
“The man I took that flying rig from was speaking the same language; I’m sure of it.”
The giant pondered this. “Mercenaries; they’re as thick as flies over here. It’s a good bet that whoever is behind all this hired his men in Africa. Come to think of it, he’s probably set his base of operations hereabouts. It’s a big, lawless place.”
“Then we’re not just here to find Father Hobbs.”
Hurricane shrugged. “We might get lucky, but for now, finding the Padre is our first priority.”
Their discussion went fallow as the waiter arrived with drinks and bowls of a strange, pungent stew. Dodge chewed a mouthful of tough meat, much as he chewed on this latest bit of information. The identity of their foe remained an evolving enigma; a villain with other-earthly technology at his disposal and the means to hire a small army of soldiers-of-fortune, had pulled off the greatest abduction in history, yet his demands were the ravings of a lunatic. Mortal combat with a comic book character? It defied logic. There had to be something else at work, some ulterior motive that was the method behind this seeming madness.
Demme returned within the hour and drove them to the port, where Marten waited. The Belgian had one white mate, who appeared to be cut from the same cloth as his skipper, and a crew of five dark-skinned natives. Dodge noted that the latter group looked positively haggard; their scarred and diseased skin was stretched over emaciated and deformed skeletons. One was missing a hand, another had lost part of his left foot and two others had lost fingers during the short course of their lives. Marten and his second bellowed orders imperiously and although the crewmen reacted promptly as directed, Dodge saw in their eyes that they had long since abandoned hope of earning any sort of reward for hard work; they were slaves, living on a diet of terror and empty promises.
Marten hastened them under the cover of a tin awning as the boat cast off and begin plowing the muddied river. The heavens continued to deluge them and more than an inch of water sloshed about on the deck, but as Marten was quick to point out, the rain kept the mosquitoes at bay and provided them with barrels of fresh water; in the Congo, being soaked to the skin was preferable to the paroxysms of malaria or dysentery.
From Leopoldville, they traveled the broad waterway known as Stanley Pool, a section of the river just above Livingstone Falls. Leopoldville along with its sister city Brazaville on the opposite bank in the French Congo territory had become one of the busiest trade hubs in Equatorial Africa; all of the natural resources harvested from the interior region along the Congo Basin wound up in Leopoldville before being loaded on rail cars bound for the coast.
In the sixty years since American journalist Henry Morton Stanley had explored the Congo basin and laid claim to all that he surveyed in the name of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo Basin — the darkest place on the so-called Dark Continent — had become the chief source of income for its distant European landlord, but that wealth had been yielded up at great cost to the native inhabitants. In the words of Stanley himself: “the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.” Of course, the “savage” occupants of the land prior to the Belgian conquest were not without culpability.
For more than three hundred years, the Kongo Empire had operated a highly profitable trade network in the region, dealing in ivory, copper, and that most evil of commodities, human lives. The flood of slaves sent up the Lualaba River and on to Zanzibar took such a heavy toll on the Kongo Empire that it had almost ceased to exist by the 17th century when Portuguese forces administered the coup de grace by defeating the Kongolese forces at the Battle of Ambuila, and subsequently executing the royal house.
Yet, for all the historic interest in the region, the Congo Basin remained largely unexplored. Although the river — the world’s fourth longest — was almost entirely navigable, the thick rainforests, second only to the Amazon region in South America, turned back even the hardiest adventurers. In his landmark expedition from Zanzibar to the Atlantic coast, Stanley lost more than two-thirds of his army of native porters. Although most of the Dark Continent was in reality very well-lit, divided between the arid Sahara desert and the vast sun-drenched veldt, the Congo was truly benighted, covered by an emerald blanket that eclipsed all illumination. Dodge got a taste of this as their boat rounded the broad curve of Stanley Pool, and the lights of Leopoldville were swallowed up in the rain and darkness.
Morning brought an end to the rain, but the resulting humidity soaked them even more thoroughly. Hurley remained placid, alternately cat-napping and reading a stack of well-thumbed pulp novels he had borrowed from one of the B-10 pilots. Dodge remained with him under the protective mosquito net, likewise motionless, but his languor was more complete; in the thick tropical air, he felt incapable of physical activity.
The mystery of the attack on the White House continued to rattle around his subconscious like a pebble in his shoe, but even more troubling was the matter of Captain Falcon. For three years he had chronicled the exploits of a man he believed to be largely fictional, only to learn that an inverse proportion of the tale was actually true.