The boat was now nearly fifty yards away and in between it and him was a small army of crocodiles. A face, barely visible in the distance, rose into view from the vessel’s deck, and Dodge’s spirits fell again. It was Marten.
The villainous river pilot was bloodied, but his countenance wore the expression of a man victorious. Marten gazed down the visible length of the river for a moment, and then took the helm of his idling craft. The engine was coughing and smoking due to damage from the gun-battle, but it could still turn the screws, and at the skipper’s guiding, the boat turned away from the dock and began chugging upriver.
Suddenly a geyser of muddy water exploded in front of Dodge, and from its midst emerged Hurricane, one arm wrapped around the snout of a thrashing crocodile while the other gouged at its eyes and nostrils. When Hurley saw Dodge, a fierce grin split his face.
“Get to the —”
The hoarse shout was cut off as the leviathan’s struggles took its rider once more under the surface, but Dodge got the message. Most of the crocodiles had relented, preferring the easy pickings from the remains of the crew to this pair of tough nuts. There remained three between Dodge and the shore however, not counting the one Hurricane now fought.
Dodge swam with the current, adding its speed to his own as he angled toward the reedy bank, but it wasn’t enough. The crocs were faster; there was no way he was going to make to shore. Then, salvation hit him in the face… literally.
He jerked involuntarily, once more thinking the worst, but the object that had glanced off his cheek did not belong to the animal kingdom. Quite the contrary, it was a plant, a root actually, of a sapling that had sprouted on a moss clump in an overhanging tree branch and extended its tendrils down to drink from the river. Dodge immediately seized at the fibrous cords, but when he tried to climb, his raw fingers slipped uselessly on the slick surface. He tried lifting himself up to grip the root between his legs, but he couldn’t seem to get his knees high enough. The reptiles, sensing that they had finally run their prey down, closed in.
Dodge marshaled all of his frantic energy into a single effort, stretched his arms as high as they would reach, and hauled on the root. His panic gave him additional strength, but it was the boost he got from planting a foot on the snout of the nearest croc that got him clear of the water. The pack snapped at his heels and tried to grip the root, but he deftly avoided their strikes. Then the unthinkable happened.
Dodge felt himself drop once more toward the water. He tightened his grip, but his descent only hastened. In fact, his grip was secure; it was the tree that had failed. The African mahogany tree, which played host to the plant that now served as Dodge’s lifeline, had drunk mightily over the years from the marshy soil from which its seed had sprung, but the trade off for such abundant and easily obtained moisture was a superficial root system anchored in soft mud. For years it had been canting lazily toward the river as the seasonal floods undermined its foundation; now Dodge’s weight was the final straw.
There was a cacophony of shrieks as a horde of lounging colobus monkeys was evicted from their resting place in the crowned treetop. The small primates were suddenly everywhere, swarming over Dodge as the entire trunk plunged toward the river. Dodge was still hugging the root to which he clung when the Congo embraced him once more.
CHAPTER 7
WALK WITH THE DEAD
The tree’s collapse ended less violently than he had expected. There was no impact to speak of, only a sudden stop, the whiplash subdued by the thick water. The surface continued to boil with hysterical monkeys trying to flee a watery demise, but below all was as still as the grave. Dodge relaxed his grip and tried to swim away but was immediately caught in a tangle of branches. He tried patiently to free himself, but as the seconds ticked by his anxiety multiplied; he was pinned.
From above his head he heard branched snapping-crocodiles! He struggled harder, knowing that if the relentless devourers caught him here, there would be no escape, knowing also that if he didn’t get free, his last breath would be a lungful of the Congo. Suddenly something as hard as iron closed on his shoulder and he was pulled up through the web of tree branches and once more into the light. He fought, twisting his body in order to rip free of death’s jaws, flailing with his fists to beat the beast away, but all to no avail.
“Dodge! Dodge it’s me!”
“Hurri—” he choked on a mouthful water that he had unwittingly drawn, and the subsequent coughing fit distracted him long enough to realize that he was not being pulled to his death by a crocodile. Instead, he was being pulled to safety by Hurley; his friend was perched on the exposed bough of the toppled tree, safe from the river and safe from its deadly denizens.
Hurricane chuckled. “I gotta hand it to you. Pulling this tree down was a stroke of genius. I told you there was a good reason for letting you tag along.”
Dodge spit out the last of the vile liquid, and then his coughing turned to laughter as well. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
They lingered on the tree trunk only long enough for Hurley to shake the water out of his pistols and reload his empty magazines from the wax-coated box of cartridges in his pocket. He bemoaned the loss of their luggage; his bag, along with several more boxes of ammunition, was still on Marten’s boat while Dodge’s duffel was lazily making its way toward the Atlantic. They were stranded in the middle of nowhere with only the sodden clothes they wore. Nevertheless, once his guns were ready, the big man put aside all complaints.
“Let’s make our way to the village. Maybe one of those poor devils is still alive and can tell us what happened.”
Dodge nodded, and it occurred to him that Hurley had probably already embraced the likelihood that his old comrade in arms was one of the ravaged corpses in the burned out mission. He too felt a pang of grief at the loss; though he had never met the man called ‘the Padre,’ Father Nathan Hobbs seemed like an old friend.
They picked their way through the tangle of exposed roots and waded up onto solid ground. The crocodiles appeared to have lost interest, but they remained wary as they pushed into the dense thicket beneath the boughs of the ancient tropical hardwood forest. It took the better part of an hour for them to reach the perimeter of the settlement, where they encountered a palisade of eight foot-long pointed stakes. Some of the upright timbers were scorched from the flames that had devastated the village, but the defense barrier remained mostly intact.
“Maybe there’s a gate somewhere,” Dodge ventured. “We’ll have to walk around until we find it—”
Hurricane made a face then lashed out with one still damp boot. A ten-foot section of the wall toppled like a child’s Tinkertoy creation.
“—or not.”
The gap revealed a different perspective on the massacre of the settlement, but the images were the same. Smoking heaps where huts and wooden structures had stood, and fly-shrouded shapes that could only be the remains of the residents. Hurley’s face was stoic as he pulled a charred stick from the nearest ruin and fanned its coals into a low flame. He then moved among the corpses, driving away the bloated flies with smoke, just long enough to determine if it was Hobbs. There were a dozen in all, mostly older men and women, all of them native Africans.
“They took the able-bodied alive as captives,” Hurley explained. “Slaves.”
The word gave Dodge a chill despite the heavy tropical heat. “Can’t the authorities do something about it?”