“They’re the Naga. According to both Hindu and Buddhist lore, the Naga were a race reputed to be half-human and half-reptile.”
“Ugh,” he said, exaggerating a shudder.
Bai Suzhen gave him a crooked smile. “Although it might seem like a singularly unpleasant combination, the Nagas were supposed to be an extremely attractive race. The Naga maidens were so wise and beautiful that mortal males counted themselves blessed if they were taken for lovers or husbands.”
Flitcroft eyed the tapestries dubiously. “Really.”
“Most Nagas were benevolent toward humankind, but there were a few who were antagonistic. One, by the name of Naga-Sanniya, hated humans so much, later generations turned him into the prince of a pantheon of demons.”
“What was his problem?” Flitcroft asked, interested in spite of himself.
“Heartbreak, mainly.” Bai answered. “He was a lover scorned. According to one version of the myth, a Hindu Brahman named Kaundinya, armed with a magical bow, appeared one day off the shore of Cambodia. A female Naga, a dragon-princess, paddled out to meet him. Kaundinya shot an arrow into her boat. This action frightened the princess into marrying him. Before the marriage, Kaundinya gave her clothes to wear and her father the dragon-king built them a capital city, and named the country ‘Kambuja’—Cambodia. The country thrived and so the princess became known as the white serpent of good fortune. However, the good fortune did not last, because her former lover, Naga-Sanniya, took vengeance on her husband and their children.”
The woman paused and added, “In the Chinese version of the legend, the name of the princess was Bai Suzhen—Madame White Snake.”
Flitcroft grunted and took another sip of juice. “Maybe we should get down to business and talk about Oriental myths later.”
“We haven’t often spoken privately, just the two of us,” Bai said. “Not since we signed the partnership papers. That was several years ago.”
“And now we’re discussing our partnership again…in regards to ending it.”
“Yes,” she drawled sardonically. “That’s what is called irony, is it not?”
Flitcroft blurted, “I had no idea Belleau intended to buy your shares in Cryptozoica Enterprises. I hope you believe me.”
Bai laughed, a sound he had never heard. It did not warm the blood. “You’re a sharp operator, Howard, and your ethics are very elastic, but you’re not a liar…at least not a very convincing one. Besides, if you wanted my shares, you could’ve offered to purchase them at any time over the last two years. I believe you. Tell me––how did this man Belleau insinuate himself into your life?”
Flitcroft shrugged. “He contacted me through an intermediary. His bona fides as a scientist were impeccable, so there wasn’t much to make me think I was being conned. He proposed that through his connections to universities and museums all over the world, he could arrange funding for a film project that would legitimize Cryptozoica.”
Bai said nothing. She stared at him.
Flitcroft gestured in frustration and resignation. “Hey, I believed him, okay? The little bastard wasn’t an entrepreneur like Branson or a media mogul like Murdoch.”
“Unlike our own ambitions,” Bai said. After a thoughtful pause, she intoned, “It’s apparent that forcing you into partnership with him was Belleau’s plan all along. He must have figured that he could back you into a corner and buy your shares, probably at a loss.”
Flitcroft felt the heat of shame and humiliation burn his cheeks. “He outfoxed me, I admit it. But it came out of left field, it really did. I liked his idea of turning Cryptozoica into a living laboratory and offering scientists and universities time-share franchises. It seemed like the perfect way to recoup my losses and fix my reputation.”
“I understand. So, I might as well tell you that Belleau is colluding with the Ghost Shadows triad.”
Flitcroft’s stomach muscles clenched. “If you sell and I don’t—
“––You’ll be a subsidiary of United Bamboo.” The corners of Bai’s mouth quirked in a grim smile. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that millions of Asian businessmen curse that same arrangement every single day of their lives. With your casino and hotel holdings in the States, the triads would look at you like the proverbial golden goose.”
Flitcroft swallowed against the increasing tightness of his throat. “They’ll pluck my brains out.”
“You might say that,” Bai Suzhen commented dryly.
“I suppose I could back out of the whole deal and let the world keep thinking that Cryptozoica was a hoax pumped up to publicize a chain of health spas.”
“That’s one option, but then you might never learn what Belleau and the Ghost Shadows really want with Big Tamtung.”
Flitcroft cocked his head in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
“If Belleau owns all the shares of Cryptozoica,” Bai declared, “even if he’s bankrolled by the Ghost Shadows, it’s obvious he would also own any prior proprietary claims that might pertain to it. For example, if Belleau knows of the medical and health benefits of the island, then he would own majority rights to it. I doubt even the Ghost Shadows know exactly why he’s doing what he’s doing. They just smell money, so they don’t ask too many questions.”
Comprehension glinted in Flitcroft’s eyes, then anger. “What do you suggest I do?”
“What I’m going to do—delay as long as possible. Stall. There are issues here of great power and most likely great profit…either one is much larger than simply reviving Cryptozoica Enterprises as an eco-tourist destination or a health retreat.”
Flitcroft stood up, his face a resolute mask. “Thanks, Bai. I’ll put the arm on Belleau. Maybe you could get some answers from the Ghost Shadows.”
She arose from behind her desk. “I could try, but their vanguard boss isn’t fond of me…after our last meeting, I’m sure he’d be happier if I were dead. He’s on the island. His name is Jimmy Cao.”
Flitcroft opened his mouth to ask a question but immediately closed it when running footsteps thumped noisily on the deck above their heads. Both he and Bai Suzhen glanced up. Faintly, they heard men shouting and calling back and forth.
“What the hell is going on out there?” Flitcroft demanded.
Bai shook her head, her expression irritated, not perplexed. Then they heard several flat cracks and the staccato hammering of automatic gunfire, followed almost immediately by the opening bars of
“We Are the Champions”
from Flitcroft’s pocket.
Saddam Hussein and Howard Flitcroft had converted Radwaniyah Palace into a casino. Howard wanted Kavanaugh to play the roulette table and he agreed before he remembered that he was scheduled to fly a bombing run in his F-14 Tomcat.
So Kavanaugh ran through the palace, looking for the airfield. Instead, he turned a corner and found himself sitting at a ringside table in the White Serpent nightclub, watching Bai Suzhen perform the Naga mating dance.
Surrounded by the pale green halo cast by spotlight, Bai’s lithe arms weaved back and forth like cobras awakening from a nap. With her bare feet planted flatly and firmly beneath her, her hips rolled in tempo with the drumbeats. The gems encrusting her gilded headpiece glittered and gleamed with every sinuous undulation. Tiny finger cymbals chimed in counterpoint to the drumming.
Her and arms and legs flashed in intricate movements within the aura of hazy light. Her body curved, bending forward and backward as if her spine was made of rubber, her long fall of ebony hair touching the floor. Her dance was whirl of primal passions, the movements ancient and maddening.
Kavanaugh watched as she writhed in rhythm with the music, feeling his admiration and lust grow for the woman who danced with such elemental, abandoned artistry. He became aware of trickles of sweat flowing down his face from his hairline.
As if aware of his reaction, Bai Suzhen whirled on the balls of her bare feet, and glared directly at him, her eyes blazing crimson with contempt. A challenge glinted there as well, then she turned her back, defiantly frisking her buttocks at him with an ophidian flourish.
Rising from the table, Kavanaugh crossed to the stage and reached for the woman, his fingers brushing her bare shoulder. At his touch, Bai Suzhen recoiled and spun on him, eyes flaring bright with rage and accusation.
Beneath the conical headpiece of the temple dancer, her face was blunt of feature, with a wide lipless mouth. Her narrow skull held huge, almond-shaped eyes with black slits centered in golden irises. The greenish light gleamed dully from a pattern of tiny scales pebbling her flesh.
Bai pointed at him with one, claw-tipped finger and in a voice like that of an enraged songbird, shrieked,
“If you return, you will die, Jack!”
For a moment that seemed eternal, Kavanaugh could not move. Then the acrid odor of gasoline entered his nostrils and set nausea to boiling in his stomach.
“Jack!”
The shout rang in his ears and it took him a few seconds to recognize the voice of Honoré Roxton. The interior walls of his skull throbbed, as if hammers pounded away at the bone. A vibration, like that of a musical note refusing to fade, hummed against his eardrums.
“Jack!”
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said, dismayed by how raspy his voice sounded. He reached up to wipe away the sweat from his forehead and his fingers glistened with blood.
Turning his head, he saw Honoré’s stricken face behind a spider-web pattern of cracks in the side window. Her tousled sunset-colored mane fell loosely around her shoulders. “I’m all right,” he said a third time, even though he didn’t feel particularly right.
There was numbness on the right side of his face and a fierce ache in his left leg. He fumbled with the catch on the harness, realizing that his body leaned painfully to the right at a twenty-five degree angle. He looked at Crowe and saw that the man had already freed himself of his seat. He turned toward the passenger compartment.
“You okay, Gus?” Kavanaugh asked, pulling off his headset.
“Just grand.” Threads of blood inched from the man’s nostrils. His voice sounded nasal and snuffling. “You?”
“Great.” Kavanaugh opened the harness release and nearly fell atop Crowe.
Together, they stumbled into the passenger compartment. The entire ASTAR listed to one side, so walking upright was difficult. The compartment was a jumbled mess, with Oakshott, Belleau and Mouzi all struggling to get free of the straps. The hatch door gaped open.
“Everybody needs to get out fast!” Honoré Roxton’s thin voice came from outside. She staggered out of the tangled greenery. “This bloody thing could explode any second! It’s leaking petrol like the hind end of a goose!”
“As long as nobody lights a match,” Crowe grunted, helping a cursing Mouzi get free of her harness, “we’ll be all right. Choppers aren’t that volatile, no matter what you see in the movies.”
Oakshott reached over, and with his two massive hands, gripped the canvas straps, and tore them away from Belleau’s torso. The little man half-crawled, half-slid out of the hatch and onto the ground, clutching his satchel in one hand and his walking stick in the other. He would have fallen on his face if not for Honoré’s restraining hand.
“Where’s McQuay?” asked Kavanaugh, blinking back blood that dripped into his left eye from a shallow cut right above it. He opened the release catch on Oakshott’s safety harness and the giant swiftly shrugged out of it.
“He’s out here,” Honoré said tremulously. “He’s not in a good way, I’m afraid. That’s why I got him out first.”
After everyone had clambered out of the wreckage, they stood in knee high grass and breathed hard. The undergrowth stretched away on all sides.
Crowe planted his hands on his hips and muttered, “Well, at least we’re the first human beings to have been knocked out of the sky by a pterodactyl. That ought to count for something.”
Kavanaugh surveyed the ASTAR, feeling a leaden weight gather in his guts. He felt very tired and very afraid. The helicopter lay between a pair of tall resak trees. The bent chopper blades had ripped away the bark and shredded the trunks so they looked like ears of shucked corn. The tail assembly lay several yards away, so bent and twisted that it barely qualified as a piece of machinery. Faintly, he heard the steady plop-plop of fuel dripping from the punctured tank.
He turned toward Honoré. “Are you all right?”
She rubbed her right hip. “A little bruised, but nothing is broken. How about everyone else?”
The rest of the party stated their physical conditions in monosyllables. No one complained of being in pain.
“Where’d you put McQuay?” asked Kavanaugh.
Honoré gestured toward a bed of ferns, where the man lay on his back, stirring feebly. He moaned between split and bloody lips. “He was unconscious when I got him out.”
Kavanaugh eyed her lean frame and then cameraman’s burly physique. “All by yourself? You must do some serious working out.”
She smiled wanly, settling her battered Stetson firmly on her head. “I’m stronger than I look.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Kavanaugh kneeled beside the man, wincing at the flare of pain his left leg.
McQuay’s eyelids fluttered and he whispered hoarsely, “My head hurts.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Kavanaugh said, carefully examining the laceration on the right side of his scalp. Although it had bled profusely, painting the side of the man’s face scarlet, the wound did not look critical.
He did not see the gleam of cranial bone, so he didn’t think a skull fracture was likely. Still, he knew head traumas were tricky and not easy to diagnose or treat.
“I shouldn’t have unbuckled,” said McQuay, “but I wanted to get the shot.”
“Did you?”
He grinned, exposing red-filmed teeth. “Yeah. Hope my camera made it out.”
“It did,” Honoré said. “I don’t know if it still works, but you can check it over later.”
Crowe handed Kavanaugh a flat aluminum case marked with a red cross on the lid. “This came through, too…I have Mouzi testing the radio. I’ll scout around and get an idea of where we are in relation to the Petting Zoo.”
Kavanaugh propped McQuay up in a sitting position so Honoré could cleanse the scalp wound with a cotton swab soaked in liquid antiseptic. Watching her deft, expert movements, Kavanaugh said, “You’re very good at this, doctor.”
“I ought to be,” she replied. “I’ve been out in the middle of nowhere and had to set broken bones with boot-laces and sticks. I even sucked rattlesnake venom out of one of my students.”
“From where?” Kavanaugh asked.
“Texas,” she answered, deadpan, applying a gauze patch to McQuay’s laceration.
Kavanaugh held the patch in place while Honoré wrapped the cameraman’s head with a length of bandage. She examined her work with an appraising eye and said, “Best I can do, under the circumstances.”
From a plastic pill bottle, Kavanaugh shook out two yellow pentazocine tablets into McQuay’s hand. “Take these. It’ll help with the pain.”
Belleau, who had stood by silently watching the display of field medicine, asked, “What’s the plan?”
“If we can reach anybody by radio, then we’ll have one.” Kavanaugh stood up, silently enduring the spasm of pain in his leg.
Honoré stood up with him, eyed his face and then dabbed at his forehead with an antiseptic soaked cotton swab. He flinched away from the sting. “Ow.”
“Don’t be a baby,” she murmured. “Even nicks can become septic very quickly in a place like this.”
Kavanaugh only raised a sardonic eyebrow and the woman responded in kind. Neither said anything, but Honoré did a very poor job of repressing a smile. She applied a small butterfly bandage to the laceration.
“Pardon me,” Belleau announced peremptorily. “Even if we can radio for help, can we be rescued this far inland? There’s not an airstrip here, is there? And not another helicopter within a couple of thousand kilometers?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Kavanaugh replied, “no.”
“You have nothing like a satellite emergency position indicating beacon?”
“Afraid not. The idea was to keep this place a secret, remember?”
“Then what are we going to do?”
“Walk, to begin with,” Crowe declared.
He came striding through the brush, gesturing to the wall of undergrowth behind him. “The Petting Zoo is about a half a mile thataway. Once we get there, the worst case scenario is that we sail downriver to the sea, around the headland and back to Big Tamtung.”
“Sail in what?” Oakshott demanded.
“A Crossover Nautique 226,” Crowe replied. “A cabin cruiser, an inboard tour boat. She’s a sweet ride.”
Mouzi called from the interior of the ASTAR: “Hey, I raised somebody!”
Crowe hurried over to the chopper and crawled into the cockpit. The light on the General Dynamic VHF radio console glowed green, but it flickered.
“Reception is in and out,” Mouzi said, handing Crowe the headset. “But I reached Pendlebury.”
“Better than nobody…sort of.” Crowe heard the voice of Pendlebury filtered through the headphones, shot through with pops and hisses of static.
“—read me? Copy that, over. Read me? Over and out? Ten-four? Breaker, breaker.”
“Stop stringing trucker jargon together, Bert!” Crowe interrupted. “Where’s Howard?”
“On Bai Suzhen’s boat.”
“Call him and tell we have a situation out here. The chopper crashed on Big Tamtung, pretty close to the Petting Zoo site. McQuay is injured. We need to be picked up.”
“How can we do that?” asked Pendlebury. “The chopper is the only way into the Petting Zoo.”
“We’ll walk to the beach if we have to, but first we’ll find out if McQuay is ambulatory.”
Pendlebury’s voice dissolved in a hash of crackles. Mouzi hammered on the radio console with the heel of her hand but the green power light faded completely. Grimly, she said, “I bet the battery casing is busted.”
Crowe took off the headset. “We let them know our situation. Let’s get moving.”
Before leaving the chopper, Mouzi pried open a deck plate and removed several packages—a six-pack of bottled water, a box of power-bars, a cellophane bag of beef jerky, and a vinyl case containing two guns.
Crowe chose the M15 General Officer’s autopistol, checking the action and making sure it held a full magazine. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Mouzi angled the Kel-Tec SU-16 semiautomatic carbine over her shoulder. Made primarily of high-strength polymer plastic, the carbine was perfect for a girl of her diminutive size and weight.
When they rejoined the group, Kavanaugh and Honoré were trying to help McQuay to his feet. “I think I can walk,” the cameraman said. “As long as I don’t have to run from Godzilla or anything.”
Kavanaugh glanced sharply at Oakshott. “A little help from the gentleman’s gentleman?”
The big man looked questioningly at Belleau who nodded his grudging assent. Oakshott stepped over, took McQuay by the right arm and the collar of his shirt and heaved him effortlessly to his feet. McQuay swayed as if he might fall, but Honoré steadied him. She held his camcorder in her right hand.
Crowe turned toward Belleau. “Have you got your satphone with you?”
Belleau patted his satchel. “It’s in here. I tried it already. No bars.”
“When did you try?” Honoré asked.
“While you and Tombstone Jacky were treating Mr. McQuay.”
“What else do you have in there?” Kavanaugh demanded.
“Nothing of any use to you,” Belleau retorted primly. “Personal effects.”
Mouzi’s brown eyes slitted suspiciously. “Why would you bring personal effects on what was supposed to be a three-hour tour?”