Gash gritted his teeth but that only made it even worse. He told himself that the pilot was risking his own life as well, but the broad, gum-chewing face of Flying Officer Emmanuel Osita Ozegbe, eyes hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses, didn’t give him the security he needed. Ozegbe looked about sixteen years old and about sixty pounds overweight, like someone who smoked too much weed, watched too much TV and ate too many Doritos. He’d met lots just like him back in Baltimore. Welfare weenies who’d never get off it until Medicare cut off their legs from diabetes and they went on disability benefits instead.
“Where you want to go today, boss?” Ozegbe said, speaking the standard Sango patois. He spun the helicopter slowly around on its axis. It was only through an incredible application of willpower that Gash didn’t simultaneously soil his pants and puke all over his lap.
“Upriver,” Gash managed, using the same language. “Kazaba Falls.” This was where the rumors consistently placed Limbani.
“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He swung the helicopter around until he had the appropriate compass heading, put the stick and the helicopter into a nose-down attitude and gunned the throttles. Gash was jerked back in his seat and suddenly they were in rapid motion, tearing through the sky a hundred feet above the ground, the great sound of the big Klimov turbo shafts blotting out everything. Except the sound of his own ragged breathing and his companion’s gum snapping.
The helicopter flew like a video game, everything controlled from one complex stick with thumb buttons, finger-grip controls and toggle switches like a Christmas tree. Ozegbe threw it around the sky like a farm boy driving a tractor—there was no finesse or subtlety or sense that the young man was managing a stupendously complicated piece of machinery.
With the stick and the heads-up weapons panels and the virtual dials and controls displayed on little screens here and there in front of him it really was no more than a video game; he was flying some exotic version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and was barely aware that he was actually flying a weapons platform that would have taken out all the pilot’s competition in south Baltimore in a single twenty-minute session with a stop at the nearest New York Fried Chicken to top things off.
“How long you been flying this?” Gash yelled into his microphone. The kid’s eyes stayed glued to the controls.
“Two hundred hours on a flight simulator and another two hundred hours on the full-sized simulator at the Ukhtomsky factory outside Moscow.”
“How much time actually flying?”
“Thirty hours with the instructor. Fifteen hours here. I do a two-hour patrol of the western border once a week. That’s all we have gas for.”
“What about weapons?”
“The missiles are dummies, but the Shipunovs are real.” Ozegbe squeezed one of the buttons on the control stick and the helicopter seemed to shudder as the twin cannons pulsed. From his seat Gash could see the rounds impacting the left-hand bank of the river, sending up huge gouts of mud and water.
A pair of rounds caught a dozing alligator and tore it to shreds before it had time to move. In front of them the Kazaba Falls rose like a wall split by the three tumbling, mist-shrouded cascades of water.
Gash gripped the edges of his seat but the young pilot just twitched the control handle, the nose came up and they rode above the falls to find themselves hurtling along barely twenty feet over the water.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Gash. “Take me back.”
“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He twitched the control handle to the left and they went into a long swinging turn over the jungle. For a split second Gash thought he saw something out of place, a shape that wasn’t quite right among the canopy trees, but he wasn’t about to ask his teenage pilot to go back for a look.
“How often do you patrol this sector?” Gash asked instead.
“Only once in a while. Everybody thinks that Banqui’s eventually going to try to take us out from the west but I don’t think so.”
They headed back downriver, leaving the falls behind them.
“Did he see us?” breathed Holliday, drenched by the spray coming up from the base of the waterfall closest to the village side of the river. Limbani crossed the slippery slabs of slick black slate ahead of him while Eddie came behind.
“The spray hid us, I think,” said Limbani, raising his voice above the pounding of the falls. Directly beside them the sheer cliff rose a good two hundred feet straight up with only a ten- or fifteen-foot path between the edge of the cliff and the roiling whirlpooling water at the foot of the falls.
“Do they patrol often?” Eddie called out.
“Almost never,” yelled Limbani. “That is why I am worried. That and the new moon. They’re getting ready for something.”
“Does that have anything to do with us getting soaked?” Holliday asked.
Limbani didn’t answer. He turned slightly, took a step or two and simply vanished.
“What the hell?” Holliday said.
“Poof,” said Eddie, just behind him. “This guy is a magician, yes?”
“Apparently,” said Holliday. He was glad Rafi and Peggy were back at the main camp taking pictures and taking their first steps at understanding a new civilization. If there was one thing Peggy hated it was small, dark tunnels. He took another two steps, stumbled in sudden darkness and then took a third step. Everything had become silent; the sound of the waterfall had become nothing more than a dull throbbing. “You with me, Eddie?”
“Right behind you,
compañero
,” said the Cuban. “This is the way to
el infierno
, I think.”
“Pretty damp for hell,” answered Holliday.
“Maybe
el diablo
has a sense of humor,” Eddie said. “Gets you wet and cold before he roasts you for eternity.”
There was a scratching sound on rough metal and the flame of an old glass chimney oil lamp blossomed. The lamp was being held by Limbani only a few feet ahead of them. Behind the doctor was a large rusted metal hatchway studded with rivets.
“So where exactly are we, Doctor?” Holliday asked.
“The doorway to the past.” The older man smiled. He spun the wheel on the hatchway and pushed it open, stepping aside to let Holliday and Eddie go through first.
“Mierda!”
Eddie whispered, stunned.
“No way.” Holliday grinned, suddenly finding himself laughing. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. “You really are full of surprises, Limbani.”
They were standing in an immense cavern behind the waterfall, the sides of the cave a football field or more apart, the stalactite-studded rock more than a hundred feet overhead. The rock was streaked with thick, threading seams of what could only be gold, those veins in turn surrounded by even thicker strands of what appeared to be quartz but which Holliday knew were not.
“Gold?” Holliday asked.
“In quartz and diamond matrices. The caves are the far end of the mother lode back at the three hills. King Solomon’s Mines, a greedy man’s Shangri-la.”
Dozens of torches illuminated the sight as at least a hundred of the Pale Strangers worked on the giant object resting in its cofferdam, cradled by more than a score of heavy tree trunks on each side.
“Unbelievable,” said Holliday. “It’s a Viking
snekkja
. What the British called a dragon ship. What the hell are you up to, Limbani?”
The boat behind the cofferdam was sixty or seventy feet long, clinker built from fresh planks, the planks overlapped, sewn, riveted and the spaces stuffed tightly with moss. The workers were almost finished now, thirty rowing benches installed between the gunwales and a raised platform for the helmsman at the rowing oar. The gunwales seemed higher than ones Holliday had seen on replica ships but it didn’t take long to see why. Between the rowing benches were firing positions for rows of ballista, outsized crossbows used in medieval siege warfare, capable of piercing stone walls, killing dozens at a time and even casting enormous fireballs.
“Roche-Guillaume’s idea?” Holliday said.
“Presumably.” Limbani nodded. “The ship itself goes back to Ragnar Skull Splitter, who remained here until his death. According to Roche-Guillaume’s manuscripts the local people had already intermarried with the Romans who came here first. It is as though each explorer who came this way left something of his culture behind. Ragnar’s own vessel was used to bury him when he died of fever, but the design for the pirogues my people used for travel and fishing were of much the same design. This ship, which is called
Havdragoon
in the old language—
Sea Dragon
—was nothing more than those small piroques scaled upward.”
“But why have you built her?” Holliday asked. “Why now?”
“Because war is coming.”
“You can’t be certain of that.”
“As a matter of fact I can. I’ve told you that I had my own spies and the battle is to be very soon. It doesn’t matter who the winner is between Kolingba and his enemies. Either way we will be sought out and slaughtered. We have hidden long enough. With the dark of the moon we strike.” He waved toward the ship. A group of kilted workers were fitting a bloodred curling snake figurehead on the high, delicate stem of the ship.
“This cavern stretches the length of all three sections of the falls. When the cofferdam is opened the cavern floor will fill and the ship will be thrust out into the stream with sixty men at her oars. And sixty more at the crossbows. A hundred pirogues will join us on the downriver journey, each paddler armed with a blowgun and a hundred killing darts.”
“You’re mad!” Holliday burst out. “You’re leading your people to suicide!”
“We never asked for war. We never wanted war. But we will not run from war. I know Kolingba and his mind. Just as I know the kind of men who will be fighting him. It may well be suicide to fight, but is it better to wait like sheep for genocide instead?”
“Tiene razón, mi amigo,”
murmured Eddie. “Better to die fighting than praying.”
“Is that a quote?”
“
Sí
. Fidel, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I guess this time I agree with him.” Holliday turned back to Limbani. “We’ll fight with you, Doctor, but I want Peggy and Rafi kept safe from harm.”
“I think I can manage that.”
“When is the new moon exactly?”
“Tonight.”
30
Time is a fickle concept during battle. Ask most survivors of D-day and they will tell you that it seemed to take forever for the combined American, British and Canadian forces to establish a beachhead, when in fact it took slightly less than three hours, from six twenty-nine a.m., the official start time, to nine seventeen a.m., roughly the time it takes the average office worker to rise and shine and get to work. In that same period of time on D-day there were approximately twenty thousand casualties incurred by both German and Allied personnel, which was almost two every second. So battle time is relative—it seems to take forever to survive and only a split second to die.
Peggy’s photograph of
Havdragoon
, the
Sea Dragon
, bursting through the curtain of water at Kazaba Falls, big square sail set and stitched with its indisputably Templar cross, all sixty of her long oars out and her bloodred dragon figurehead glaring ahead, eventually appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world and on the cover of every magazine. It made Peggy a wealthy woman in her own right, got her unbelievable assignments and introduced a whole new civilization to the world. But all that was in the future.
Both Holliday and Eddie were on the steering platform as the brand-new ship with its thousand-year-old design hurtled through the cave mouth and dropped down into the foaming, churning maelstrom below. As well as Holliday and Eddie, two of the Pale Strangers, Baltazar and Kaleb, manned the heavy steering oar with them, hanging on for dear life as the
Sea Dragon
hurtled down into the water, then rose again like its namesake, the great red dragon figurehead streaming water, its golden teeth seething with froth and a sudden wind from behind them bellying the sails as the sixty oars dug into the deep black river water and drove them forward.
“My God!” Holliday breathed, soaked to the skin but feeling an exhilaration deep in his soul he thought was long forgotten.
“¡Increíble, mi hermano!”
Eddie roared ecstatically.
“Krigsanggen!”
screeched Baltazar and Kaleb beside them, and in that moment they knew they all spoke the same language, whether they understood one another or not. Something had risen from the deep past and propelled them forward and there was no way back.
Sea Dragon
steered easily out of the whirlpools at the foot of the falls and slid effortlessly toward the near bank of the river, the land-side oars rising at a single command from the ship’s undisputed captain, Loki, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, bearded fury who stood in the bow of the ship, his strong right arm hooked around the red dragon’s neck like a lover. He carried not one but two blowpipes across his back and, according to Limbani, could use them both at once and so quickly that the motions were only a blur.