“Do you know Foster?” O’Neil asked Komolo Joe.

  “Sure,” the small, bony local agreed. “Everyone knows the Reverend. He runs the hospital.”

  Armless O’Neil concluded by this that Foster might be one of the useful missionaries. “What hospital? Where?”

  Joe shrugged and grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. “It moves about. The Ubangi is a difficult place. The camp shifts to avoid the raiders.”

  O’Neil understood. This far from the civil administration at Léopoldville, the Congo was as lawless as any land could be. It made the old American West look tame. Local internecine warfare was overlaid by smuggling, gold mine claim jumping, forced labor camps, diamond conflict, local warlords’ feuds, and all the woes that came from the constant clash of greedy men in an environment that was already trying to kill them. It spoke well of Reverend Foster that he’d somehow managed to continue his work in the region for over twenty years.

  “Where’s Foster now?”

  The guide shrugged again, a very French gesture that betrayed his early years as a houseboy. “When we get near we’ll ask.”

  Fletcher shifted himself to try and find any way of sitting in the bouncing truck that wouldn’t vibrate him to sickness. “Is it far now?” he asked desperately.

  “One, two days,” Komolo Joe answered. Uplands travel was an unpredictable thing. Yesterday Fletcher had watched in horror as the guide and O’Neil had to shoo a rhinoceros out of the road.

  Two other locals traveled with them, to help heave the battered truck out of mud holes and to share the driving. The back of the vehicle was packed with supplies, including four big drums of fuel and three spare tires. Joe’s helpers didn’t seem to mind the bone-shaking progress; they draped themselves over the crates and barrels like big cats and dozed as the vehicle navigated the furrowed track. Fletcher gritted his teeth and held on.

  And the roads got narrower.

  ***

  Major-general L’Evesque lowered his Luger but did not holster it.

  He checked around the mission camp to see that it was properly taken, then allowed himself a thin satisfied smile when he saw that his men had done well. A mere five armed soldiers under his command had captured the entire settlement. The troopers, their machine guns lodged in the folds of their elbows, covered the cowering patients and their relatives that had been rounded up from the native huts and hospital tents.

  There were over sixty people in Reverend Foster’s impromptu village, but none of them were in a condition to resist. The women were thin, sad things, half-starved, terror-eyed under the soldiers’ guns. The men were mostly injured miners, too sick to rise from their pallets. They were missing limbs or suffering from crush wounds, the usual fate of unlucky diggers of the rich seams of diamond and gold under the well-guarded upland industrial compounds. Some wounded patients had to be dragged onto the turf beside the compound’s cooking pit on their pallets. Almost half the patients were aged grandparents or else children; the Congo had one of the highest child mortality rates in the world.

  Nobody was going to put up a fight.

  “Where’s Lucas Foster?” the Major-general demanded, first in French and then in the gabbled Anglo-French-Swahili amalgam that was the local Lingua Franca. He cocked his pistol. “Bring him to me.”

  There was no doctor; the hospital was visited by the circuit medic every month or so. Care here was limited to palliative and recuperative treatments. There were four nurses, two male and two female, all black. None of them spoke.

  L’Evesque held his Luger to one of the nurses’ heads. “I said, where’s Foster?”

  Nurse Mary Brown screwed her eyes shut and tried not to tremble.

  “Last chance, nurse. There’s plenty more people to kill. Someone will talk.”

  The plump woman bit her bottom lip and awaited death.

  “Three. Two. One…”

  “Reverend Foster’s not here.”

  The information came not from the kneeling captive but from a woman emerging from concealment in the nearby bush. L’Evesque cast a furious glance at his second-in-command for sloppy work. If the hidden fugitive had possessed a gun she could have taken down several of the mercenaries before she died.

  The soldiers covered her now but she was unarmed, her hands half-raised to show she had no hostile intentions. Major-general L’Evesque watched her approach. A white woman—and a beauty! Young, slim, with tied-back auburn hair framing a classically-featured face. The Frenchman’s smile returned. “And you are?”

  “Sophie Foster. Reverend Foster is my father. And he’s not here.”

  L’Evesque remembered someone mentioning that the missionary had adopted a child. He hadn’t realized that she was still with him, or so delightfully grown up. “Where is the old man?” he demanded.

  Sophie Foster spoke calmly, meeting the mercenary commander’s gaze, although L’Evesque could see the fear behind her defiant stare. “He’s doing his round. He’ll be gone for days.”

  She was right to fear. Major-general L’Evesque was a man who took what he wanted. When he’d finished with the girl there were plenty of places to sell her for a good profit. No matter how much he stood to make from his mission there was always room for a little more bonus.

  “Where is the gold?” he demanded.

  Sophie looked puzzled. “Gold? What gold?” She gestured round the impoverished mission camp. “Do you imagine we have money when we have to scrape by like this?”

  “You have not received the letter?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Who are you? What do you mean by pouncing on our camp like this and dragging sick people out of their beds?”

  The Major-general made a mocking bow. “I am L’Evesque, master of the West African Free Brigade, a soldier. You are my property, and soon my whore. These people are nothing, and soon dead.”

  Sophie blanched. “You are just six men. My father has worked here for many years. We have a lot of friends. If you harm me or these people do you imagine you can escape the Ubangi alive?”

  “We are not six. We are many. My present force is but a vanguard. After all, I expect to need a lot of manpower when we retrieve the missionary’s gold.”

  “I told you. There is no gold. We barely have the supplies we need to look after all these sick and wounded. We rely on the charity of the mining stations and on donations from home. Whatever you think you have come for, it is not here.”

  L’Evesque shook his head. “I think it is. And I think that your absent father will be more than ready to give it to me to save the life of his beautiful daughter, is it not so?” The Frenchman leered. “Your life he can save. Nothing else.”

  Sophie could have stayed safe hidden in the big thicket where the orderlies had bundled her—but then these soldiers would have begun to kill the staff and patients at the mission camp. What choice had she but to divert the soldiers’ malice to herself? “Evil comes to he that does evil,” she warned.

  “In my experience, chère, evil comes to those who don’t have the most men and guns. Here, far from civilization, far from all help, nobody has more men and guns than me. There is nothing I cannot do and no-one who can stop me from taking what I please.”

  Sophie stood at bay, surrounded by soldiers.

  A single gunshot echoed across the clearing. L’Evesque’s men swung their machine guns round, searching for the danger.

  Armless O’Neil strode out of the forest. “Yeah. I think you’ll find there’s me to stop you, Frenchie,” the big adventurer declared.

  All the guns oriented on him.

  More shots came from the forest—from three sides of the camp!

  “You’re surrounded,” O’Neil told the Major-general. “The lady was right. You shouldn’t have tried this with only six guys. I’ve got you outnumbered three-to-one, and my marksmen are in cover. One wrong move and you’re bush meat.”

  O’Neil was convincing. Nobody would guess from his fierce Chicago delivery that he was bluffing. Komolo Joe might be a fair shot when he needed to chase off a big cat or mountain gorilla but his men barely knew which end of a rifle to point. Young Fletcher had never fired a gun before in his life. If it came to a firefight they were dead.

  Major-general L’Evesque looked the fierce newcomer up and down, noting the muscles under the tattered field shirt, the pistol holstered at O’Neil’s hip, the devil behind O’Neil’s eyes. His gaze went to the hook where the man’s left hand should be. That identified him.

  “Armless O’Neil. So Cutter did not succeed in his mission.”

  “Is that the guy with the knife? Don’t look for a refund.”

  L’Evesque tried to spot O’Neil’s forces in the undergrowth. They were well hidden. “The offer still stands. A thousand dollars for the Dexter letter.”

  “I took a contract to deliver it to Reverend Foster. Maybe you can buy it off’a him. You sure aren’t getting it from me.”

  The Frenchman’s face darkened. “You do not know to whom you are talking, American. I am Major-general Antoine L’Evesque, commander of the Free Brigade. I get what I want.”

  “You’re about ten seconds off of getting what you need, buster,” O’Neil warned. “You’re covered and you’re caught. Put your guns down and stick your hands up—now!”

  L’Evesque shook his head. “If you attack me you sign your death warrant, you and your men. I have other forces in these hills—many other forces. We separated to find Foster’s camp but it will not be long before my troops are gathered again. Organized, disciplined, professional soldiers, better than any rabble you might have hired along the way from Léopoldville. Enough to hunt down your people and crucify them one by one.”

  O’Neil had to play his hand very carefully. “You got a better suggestion, then?”

  The Major-general’s face became sly. “We could be partners. I’ll give you a quarter share in the missionary’s gold.” He gestured to Sophie. “You can be second with the girl.”

  O’Neil ignored Sophie Foster’s frightened intake of breath. He kept his eyes on L’Evesque. “How do we find this supposed gold?”

  “The letter, of course. The old woman, she was here when the treasure vanished in the riots when Leopold lost power. So was Foster. He’s the last survivor of that ore barge that left the Koloneke docks and disappeared. For some reason he never went back for the gold. My employer thought that maybe only he and the old woman together could find wherever it vanished to.”

  O’Neil wondered how monkey stew was going to find a fortune in missing gold, but he asked, “Who is your boss?”

  The Major-general snorted. “He was once a manager of the Imperial Mining Corporation. After he’d told me what he knew I decided he didn’t need to be in on the deal.”

  “So you’re saying there’s a lost shipment of gold ore out there somewhere and that letter will tell the old missionary where to find it?”

  “That’s it. And you can have a part of it.” L’Evesque held out his hand. “What do you say?”

  “I say you can go to hell,” O’Neil snarled. “Take your goons and get outta here, before I have my men blow new holes in you! Run and keep running till you reach the border.”

  O’Neil would have liked to disarm and capture the mercenaries, but his instincts told him that if he pushed things that far he’d have a firefight on his hands—a gun battle he couldn’t possibly win.

  The Major-general’s lips curved into a snarl. “You will threaten me? Defy me?”

  O’Neil nodded. “Looks like, yeah. Git.”

  “I will take your other hand and nail it in my trophy room,” L’Evesque promised.

  O’Neil drew his revolver and kept it on the mercenaries as they gathered together and prepared to move out. “Leave the boy you took as a guide,” he insisted. “And the girl.”

  Sophie Foster shook off the hands that were holding her captive and backed away, unsure which menace to avoid the most.

  O’Neil watched the soldiers climb back into the Daimler truck they’d arrived in. He didn’t relax even when they left the camp with a screech of tires and a spray of dirt. “Sam. Watch them,” he called to the guide concealed in the undergrowth. “Make sure they don’t come right back with a nasty surprise.”

  The wrinkled native bobbed up from the thick grass, nodded once, and loped away into the forest. His two men vanished with him. Fletcher emerged from the trees wide-eyed and breathless, gripping his shotgun with white knuckles.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  The two white men met in the middle of the mission, surrounded by cowering patients and staff. Sophie Foster looked over them. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  Fletcher pulled off his hat. “I’m Daniel Fletcher, Miss Foster, of Degarde and Carriere’s attorneys. This is Mr. O’Neil, who has accompanied me upcountry to deliver a letter to your father. How do you do?”

  The missionary’s beautiful daughter relaxed a little. The flustered clerk was so obviously not a threat. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” she admitted.

  “This is a rescue,” O’Neil told her. “We’ve been racing those mercs to get to the Reverend. Looks like they beat us to your camp, but we made it just in time.”

  Sophie scanned the treeline. “Where are your men?”

  “This is it. Me and the kid plus Komolo Joe and his two buddies.”

  Sophie looked at Fletcher. “So the entire army that scared off that horrible Major-general was… you?”

  Fletcher blushed.

  “We scared ‘em off, but not for long,” O’Neil predicted. “That guy’ll be back, and soon. With his troops.”

  Sophie nodded. She looked around and called something to the men and women on the ground, speaking a fluid local patois. Nurse Mary nodded and called out more directions to the others around her. People scrambled up from the turf and began to hurry about, striking tents and assembling provisions.

  “We’d better not be here when they return,” suggested the missionary’s daughter.

  ***

  By Nightfall they were gone. The whole camp was struck and shifted four miles through the lush African rain forest. Those who couldn’t walk were carried on canvas stretchers. Even the children and the oldest amongst the company carried as much as they could manage on the desperate trek before darkness fell.

  Komolo Joe piled the worst of the sick aboard his truck and sent it back to Akula with his two men. The old tracker joined the evacuation on foot. He kept a careful eye on where Sophie’s people were heading. “They’re taking us south-west. The boy says that mercenary’s main forces are north from here,” he told O’Neil.

  Joe had taken the child who’d guided L’Evesque under his wing and had thoroughly questioned the youngster about what he’d seen and heard. The news wasn’t too good: the Major-general had at least thirty more men scattered around the mountains, all well-armed and ruthless.

  “It won’t be long before they track us,” O’Neil worried. “They’ll be on our trail at first light.”

  “And we’ll be gone by then,” Sophie Foster answered. “This isn’t the first time we’ve had to run and hide to avoid some bloodthirsty warlord.”

  O’Neil privately thought that no local bandit gang or tribal war-chief had the discipline, experience, or firepower of L’Evesque’s West African Free Brigade. Escaping him would be a very different problem, even if the three score sick locals were abandoned in the wilderness. What he asked was, “How will your father find us?”

  “This is a prepared bolt-hole. When he finds we’ve struck camp this is where he’ll try.”

  “When do you expect Reverend Foster to catch up, Miss Foster?” Fletcher ventured. “We must deliver Mrs. Dexter’s letter to him—especially if it contains details of a lost treasure.”

  “I don’t know when,” Sophie admitted. “Father went into the hills to check on a woman we think is carrying twins, to see if she needed bringing back to camp to be examined by the doctor when he calls. He could be with us by morning or it might be another day or more.”

  The clerk glanced at Armless O’Neil. “What do we do, then? That soldier didn’t seem like the type to give up. He wants that missing gold, and um, and Miss Foster as well. And your right hand.”

  “Oh, he might get my right fist,” O’Neil admitted with a savage smirk.

  Sophie brushed her glorious hair back from her face. The purple African twilight lit her features. Fletcher thought her heart-stoppingly lovely. A sense of outrage stirred in him that anyone might threaten her, a primal urge to defend her and care for her. For the first time he wished he was more like the big man beside him.

  She looked up suddenly and caught him looking. He turned away hastily and made himself busy unpacking his bedroll.

  O’Neil watched the young clerk with a tolerant patience. O’Neil would have thought less of him if Fletcher hadn’t noticed the girl and felt himself called to protect her.

  The three of them sat together round a tiny campfire in the Congo night. The flames attracted the moths but the smoke deterred the mosquitoes. The fire was banked down so any hunting soldiers that might be seeking the vanished mission hospital couldn’t see it.

  “What do you know about this gold?” O’Neil asked Sophie.

  “Nothing at all,” the missionary’s daughter admitted. “I know father was here in 1911 when Leopold’s regime fell and Belgium took over the running of the state. He was at Koloneke when it burned, when the Zappo Zaps ran wild and everything went to chaos. He escaped on the last boat out of there.”

  “That must have been the ore boat,” reasoned Fletcher.

  “I suppose so. But father told me that the boat ran aground and sank in the river mud. In the end only he and one or two other survivors made the trek through the jungle to safety.”

  “And only they might know where the ore barge went down,” O’Neil reasoned. “But for some reason they never went back.”

  Sophie nodded. “Father doesn’t like to talk about that time. He was horrified by what happened to Koloneke. It tested his faith very much.”