Emerald Death (15 page)

                                    *****

Hardluck Hannigan checked the magazine for the MAS 36 Carbine and slapped it into place.  He was surprised to find that the good Padre had a couple of the French bolt action rifles at the Mission.  They had only been adopted by the French Military the year before, so it was only natural that the Belgians would have them, but for someone as anti-violence as the Padre to have acquired a couple had come as a real shock.

There were a good many layers to the priest’s character, Hannigan had discovered, and he was sure he had yet to see them all.  He could also sense darkness within the man that few others apparently could see, and it troubled him.  McKenzie was a priest, a man of the cloth.  Yet there was darkness in his soul that Hannigan found very troubling. Hannigan shook the thought away and went back to examining the rifle.

The MAS 36 carbine fired a 7.5x54mm cartridge and could hold up to 5 rounds in the magazine.  It wasn’t a Thompson submachine gun by any means, but it had a lot more range to it!  He had a feeling that it would come in pretty handy in the area they were heading into.

Hannigan heard the soft scrape of boot leather on gravel behind him and he spun drawing the rifle to his shoulder and flipped off the safety as his finger found the trigger.  He found himself looking over the sights at Bridget’s suddenly pale face.  Hannigan lowered the rifle and blew out a long breath.

“Sneaking up on people isn’t a real smart move,” Hannigan whispered, his whole body shaking at how close a call it had been.

“I see that, now,” Bridget replied, a slight quiver audible in her voice.

“I’m still surprised that your daddy had something like this around.  Isn’t he afraid it might tempt the natives?” Hannigan asked, abruptly changing the subject.  He did not want to think about how close he had come to almost blowing her brains out through the back of her pretty red head.

“I just came to tell you it’s time to go.  Dad wants you to fly with him; I’ll have Gregor and the Italian with me,” Bridget spoke quietly.  “Besides, if the tribes get restless, we need to be able to defend ourselves as well.”

“I guess,” was all Hannigan could think to say as Bridget spun on her heel and ran towards the Duck.

Hannigan mentally cursed himself as he followed along more slowly.  Bridget was already in the Duck and had the engines going by the time he reached the older smaller Great War edition bi-plane.  This one just happened to have floats instead of wheels.

“You ready?” McKenzie asked, as taciturn as ever.

“As much as I’ll ever be,” Hannigan replied.

Moments later both planes were climbing up into the blue African sky.  Hannigan wondered if the journey would be worth what he had been put through so far.

                                    *****

Claude DuChamps climbed out of the airplane and was thankful to be back on the ground once more.  Antoine Gerrard and Paul Fontaine followed him from the aircraft.  They had come in search of a man, a man worth one hundred thousand dollars American.  His name was Mike Hannigan.  There had been three other men who had gone looking to collect the price on the American’s head, but they had vanished.

Now it was Claude’s turn.  He would find where the man had gone once he had disembarked from The African Queen.  He already had the name of a man to look for, the local center for criminal activity: Francisco Degiorno.

Chapter Seventeen

It did not take long for both planes to get into the air.  Hannigan was riding with McKenzie this time out and he was troubled by his last encounter with Bridget.  Yes he had aimed a weapon at her, but she had snuck up on him, something that by this point, she should know better than to do.  However, she might not have realized that she had snuck up on him.  There was more than one way to look at it, and Hannigan knew he had to figure out how Bridget had taken it.  He shook his head.  Women, there wasn’t a more complicated species on the planet!

            The sun had risen high in the sky and was working its way west.  The rush of wind through his hair was much more exhilarating this time since he was actually inside the plane rather than roped to the side of one.  On the flight from the boat to the Mission, Bridget had taught him the basics of flying.  He had hoped to get time to learn more, but the race for the lost city had taken precedence over a flying lesson.

            They were a full day behind the Nazis who by now realized that the map they had was not the original that they had shown Degiorno, but a clever fake that the Italian had managed to slip to them when he had stolen the original.  When the Nazis found them, they would not be happy.

This was one of the reasons that Hannigan had been so happy to discover the MAS 36 rifles tucked away under lock and key at the Mission.  The weapons gave them some range, range that he just didn’t have with his beloved Colt.

The Colt had been a gift from his father, a weapon his father had carried during the Great War.  Back when Wild Bill Hannigan was a member of the famous Fighting Hawks.  Hannigan knew he had broken his father’s heart when he had run off to see the world.  Someday, he knew, he would have to go back and see his father, make amends for leaving the way he had.  Hannigan knew that there were probably a lot of things he had to make amends for.

                                    *****

            Claude DuChamps looked irritated as he stood at the door of the Broken Tusk.  The bar was closed until further notice according to the sign posted on the door.  The Frenchman wondered exactly who had closed the bar.  Judging from the number of bullet holes in the walls, he doubted it had been a voluntary closing.

            DuChamps felt his sense of frustration mounting.  According to his contacts in Sicily, this was supposed to be a simple contract.  Find one American working for the Italian and kill him.  Now both had mysteriously vanished and no one in the port town was talking.  Merde!

The situation was intolerable.  He had to find out what had happened here the day The African Queen had docked.  The big tramp steamer was already gone, but he knew that Mike Hannigan had not been aboard; going after The African Queen would be of no use!

            He had sent his two men to search for information about the American, the Broken Tusk and its owner Francisco Degiorno.  So far, they had been unable to turn up any information.  It was as if Degiorno and Hannigan had both dropped off the face of the earth!  Already trouble was brewing in the port town.  Degiorno had been a power in the city’s underworld; now he was gone and a vacuum was left in his place.  And since nature abhors a vacuum, there were any number of candidates struggling to take his place.

                                    *****

            “There they are!” Ragnarok pointed suddenly towards two small black specks that had appeared in the sky over the verdant green foliage of the jungle.  They were barely even visible to the naked eye.

            “How can you be sure?” Hans Wessel asked cautiously.

            “I can feel Him!” Ragnarok hissed, his voice sounding even more reptilian than before.

            “Feel who?” Wessel’s curiosity getting the better of him.

            “Him!  The one who did this to me, who trapped me in this pathetic shell!  Revenge is coming soon,” Ragnarok croaked.

            “This person is also after The Emerald of Eternity?” Wessel asked softly, still trying to elicit information.

            “Yes you fool!  Haven’t you been listening?  I said He was coming!  Pay attention!” Ragnarok admonished.

            Hans Wessel sat back wondering exactly who the mysterious He was.  The man obviously had Ragnarok rattled, and rattled deeply.

                                    *****

            Niles McKenzie felt a chill race down his spine as the biplane sped over the emerald expanse of the jungle.  He closed his eyes and reached out with his senses, trying to pinpoint what had caused the chill.  He felt a presence, somewhat familiar yet darkly evil.  He had faced it before, he knew it.  Then it came to him in a flash.  Doctor Ragnarok!  The last time he had faced him was aboard a ship full of hostages near the end of the Great War.

            McKenzie had thought that the evil wizard had died when he had plunged off the rail of the ship, engulfed in the blue fire of magic.  His heart skipped a beat as he realized that he had been so wrong.  Fear clutched as his gut as he realized that not only would he be facing the wrath of Prester John, but of the evil Doctor Ragnarok as well.

            McKenzie shook his head, knowing that what lay ahead of him would be perhaps the most dangerous battle he would ever face.  But he was instantly pulled back to reality when bullets shredded through the wings of the biplane!

                                    *****

            Hardluck Hannigan flinched as he saw the fabric along the left wing of the bi-plane explode into wood and cloth particles.  Hannigan jerked his head around to look over his shoulder.  Two Messerschmitt fighter planes were diving on them from above, guns blazing.  Instinctively his hand went for the Colt on his waist, when he realized that the small bi-plane had a machine gun.

Hannigan grabbed the grips on the gun and aimed at the attacking fighters, his finger tightening on the twin triggers.

            The machine gun roared and bucked in his fists as tracers blazed back towards the German fighter planes.  Flame erupted from the engine compartment of the nearer fighter and the plane veered off, trailing smoke.  Hannigan started humming to himself as he tracked the remaining fighter against the broad expanse of blue sky.  It took him a moment to realize he was humming Glenn Miller’s Pennsylvania 6-5000 as he tracked the German fighter across the sky.

            The second ship went into a roll, trying to avoid the stream of tracers but with no real success.  Flames exploded from the wings and the German ship roared down in a smoke trailed arc to the jungle below.  Flame and debris erupted in a small black mushroom cloud climbing from the vast expanse of green.

            Hannigan looked back and saw Bridget pulling slightly ahead of them as a long silvery cigar shape descended from the wispy white clouds above.  Hannigan recognized it immediately as the large silver zeppelin that he had spotted the night that The African Queen had arrived in Africa.

            The Nazis had found them!  Suddenly more fighters emerged from the rear of the zeppelin. 

“How?” Hannigan growled as he swung the guns around, firing them out at the approaching fighters.  Two more started trailing smoke and went crashing into the jungle below.  The same jungle, Hannigan noted that was rushing up to greet them.

“Padre, what the heck are you thinking?” Hannigan yelled, his stomach suddenly flipping over.

            “Evasive action!” McKenzie’s voice drifted back to him over the screaming of the engine.  Seemingly at the last possible instant, McKenzie pulled out of the dive and Hannigan could see leaves and branches flying into the air as they were broken off by the bi-plane’s undercarriage.

            “Holy Cow!” Hannigan exclaimed as one of the attacking planes that had been on their tail hit the trees and exploded in a ball of flames.  He drew his beloved .45 and aimed it at one of the approaching Messerschmitt fighters.  Thumbing off the safety he lined up the sights and pulled the trigger.  He saw the cockpit glass spider-web and the pilot jerk backwards.  The nose of the plane lifted and the plane piloted by a dead man plowed into the underbelly of another fighter that was using it’s machineguns to chew up the bi-plane’s wings.  The shockwave from the explosion proved too much, however, and it slammed the undercarriage of the bi-plane down into the verdant expanse of trees.  The ship lurched hard and something slammed into Mike Hannigan’s head, sending him dropping into a deep dark pit.

                                    *****

            Bridget felt her heart lurch into her throat as she saw the other bi-plane go down into the jungle.  The only saving grace was that she saw no flames, so the bi-plane had not exploded.  That meant that there was still a chance that her adopted father and Hardluck Hannigan had survived!

The survival of the Duck was a wholly different matter.  Two of the fighters sent tracers across her path and Bridget began searching for someplace to set the Duck down.  She didn’t want bullet holes in her precious plane.  The Duck was almost a physical extension of her body.  The plane responded to her lightest touch and in seconds she was setting the floatplane down on a tributary of the Congo.  The huge silver zeppelin dropped down to hover above the Duck.  Lines dropped from the gondola and men began rappelling to the ground… all heavily armed.

            “We may be in trouble,” Bridget told her passengers.

            “You think?” Gregor Shotsky asked innocently as he climbed out of the plane.  Francisco Degiorno had to be bodily removed and he dropped to his knees in pure fear as a man in a silver-colored metal mask approached them.

            “You!” the man in the metal mask hissed as he saw Degiorno.  The Italian curled into a ball, the scent of his fear heavy in the air.  “Where is the real map?” the man demanded.

            “Locked in my safe,” Degiorno replied.

            “You will lead us to the emerald or I will make sure you suffer more than if you were on the lowest level of hell,” the man in the metal mask said.

            “I believe you,” the Italian gasped, his fear so strong it could almost be tasted in the air.

            “You really are a poor excuse for a man,” Bridget told the Italian.

            Degiorno gave her a highly insulting Italian gesture.  Bridget laughed despite the situation.  Deep inside, she was holding onto the hope that both Hannigan and her adoptive father had survived the crash.