Scimitar still in hand, O’Neil stomped towards Wagner.

  “I thought you said you were Dutch, Wagner.”

  Wagner smirked. “And I believe Captain Roy said that we would be safe upon the Heart. It seems like we were both lied to, Herr O’Neil. Perhaps we should both cut our losses and continue down the water.”

  Harold Prynne rushed past the German. “Genevieve! Where’s my Genevieve?”

  He frantically looked across the deck of the Heart. O’Neil dropped the scimitar and turned towards the father. Harold bent down over the Mahdist corpses. He shoved them aside in search of his daughter, dead or alive.

  O’Neil grabbed him by his shoulder. “She’s not here, Harold. She’s not here!”

  O’Neil met the despondent father’s eyes.

  “Where? Where is she?”

  “They took her,” O’Neil said. “Those bastards took her.”

  Chapter Six

  Wagner looked over O’Neil and Harold Prynne with quiet disdain. He held his Karabiner over his shoulder, as if ready to sling it to his hand and open fire again.

  “I am sorry for your loss, Herr Prynne. Your daughter was a true beauty. But we don’t have time to mourn. I am on a schedule and we need to be on our way to Lake Victoria.”

  Harold turned towards the man. “No, no, that can’t be right. We have to help her.”

  “She’s already in the hands of those insane zealots. There’s no saving her even if we had the time.”

  Harold grabbed Wagner’s lapel. He screamed in the German’s face. “No, you have to! You have to help her! You have weapons!”

  Wagner struck the older man across the face. Prynne sprawled to the deck. His face was already swelling from the blow.

  “We will not be stopping to help your daughter or anyone else. We will unload the corpses into the water and continue on our trip. We’ve already lost enough time on this journey because of the matter with that damnable little boy. We move on now.”

  “No,” Harold said, still on the deck. Tears filled his eyes. “No, I can’t lose my daughter too. No…”

  Wagner took aim at the grieving father’s skull.

  “If you wish to join your daughter, I can send you on your way now, Mister Prynne. I will tolerate no more argument in this matter.”

  “No, no.” Harold’s words came out with the moan of the dying.

  “So be it,” Wagner said. He cocked the rifle and prepared to fire.

  O’Neil stepped between Prynne and the German leader.

  “No, you won’t kill Prynne.”

  “And why shouldn’t I, Herr O’Neil?”

  “Because you will have to kill me first.”

  “I did not suspect an experienced man like yourself to be so foolish,” Wagner said.

  “I’m no fool,” O’Neil said. “I know you killed the Kid and let poor Cookie take the fall for it. That’s how you Nazis work. But Captain Roy is dead and you’re on dangerous waters. Waters you and your men aren’t ready to ride out. Waters that you won’t survive without an experienced hand at the helm. You need me alive, Wagner. Whatever it is you’re after, I am the only man that can get you there.”

  Wagner grimaced. O’Neil knew his words were working.

  “If you want me to captain this boat to the mouth of Victoria, you will do what I say. And I say we’re going to rescue Genevieve before I go another inch.”

  “You are right that I killed the boy, Herr O’Neil. He overheard a conversation that well, let us say, would be best kept confidential. Rest assured I will kill every man on your crew one by one if you don’t do as I say. You will pilot this boat to Victoria.”

  “Kill us all,” O’Neil said. “It won’t make your boat move. The only thing that will make this boat move is Genevieve Prynne.”

  Wagner lowered his rifle. He spit on the ground in front of O’Neil.

  “Have it your way then,” he said. “We will rescue your woman. But if I am to risk my life on this foolhardy endeavor, so will you.”

  Wagner turned to one of his men. “Abel, get Herr O’Neil a rifle. We have a rescue to conduct.”

  ***

  In their hashish-induced haze, the Mahdists proved to be easy to follow through the jungle. Jim was once a simple bushman, and his skills at tracking through the dense foliage could have helped them follow a much stealthier unit.

  With Wagner, Abel and five more Germans on his tail and more back at the ship, O’Neil knew he needed to keep focused. He wasn’t going to have a chance to escape now. He would have to rescue Genevieve and bide his time for a better chance to get away down the line.

  They found the Mahdist camp only about half a mile in. From here, they could easily move around the river’s edge in their search for ships to strike out at.

  The camp was sparse. They had very little cover from the elements outside their loose clothes. They sat in a loose circle around a single burnt down fire.

  Most were asleep, their weapons on the ground next to them. Their hashish haze was gone and with it, their consciousness. O’Neil suspected they could have come through beating on Cookie’s old pots and pans, and most of the drugged out warriors would not awake.

  Unfortunately, five or six Mahdists were still conscious. Two of them stood loosely around the items the group stole from the Heart. In the heart of their stolen haul, bound and gagged, sat Genevieve Prynne. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. It hung loosely down her arm and exposed much of the bodice below.

  O’Neil ducked down at the edge of the Mahdist clearing. He turned to Wagner as the Nazi crouched down beside him.

  “I need to get in close and free Genevieve from those ropes.”

  “How do you plan on doing that? You may be able to get past the sleeping men, but if we shoot down the others, we’ll surely wake up the ones asleep. Even with our rifles, it would be impossible to shoot them all down before they could move in on us.”

  “You’re new to the continent, but one thing we always say here is ‘Africa provides’. Jim, show the man what we’re talking about.”

  Jim opened a knapsack as he dropped it to the ground between O’Neil and the Nazi leader. He pulled out three cannonballs. The balls were hollowed out and a simple fuse was installed on one end.

  “These are an invention of Jim here. They take certain extracts of African plants known for being particularly smoky when burned. Light one of these, throw it out and five seconds later, the world is filled with smoke.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “Have each of your men take aim on one of the Mahdists that are still awake. Jim will hurl the smoke bombs out and once they start to burn, you fire. I’ll hightail it into the smoke and steal back Genevieve before the rest of the Mahdists can see what’s going on.”

  Wagner nodded. “A simple plan, but often the simplest plans work the best.” He turned to Abel and issued the command to take aim.

  O’Neil rested one hand on Jim’s shoulder. He gave it a quick squeeze. Jim lighted a Zippo and brought the flame to the fuse. It instantly burst into flame.

  Jim reared his arm back. He swung it outward and let the smoke bomb fly out into the middle of the camp. Gray-black smoke flooded out of it as it landed amidst the Mahdist army.

  O’Neil took a deep breath and hurled himself out into the camp.

  Chapter Seven

  All visibility was lost to the black smoke. O’Neil pinched his eyes shut and remembered the path he’dhe mapped only seconds before. He charged forward, straight towards the Mahdist camp.

  Behind him, he heard the shots from the soldiers. He could only imagine the Mahdists dropping like flies around him. O’Neil silently counted his steps, only able to estimate how close he was to Genevieve.

  He missed his count by two steps. He ran into the bound woman and sprawled to the ground on top of her. She struggled against him, trying to fight free.

  “Genevieve, stop! It’s me, O’Neil!”

  “O’Neil?” Her voice was cautious, but optimistic.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Now get up so we can get our tails out of here. We have to get moving before anymore of these zealots wake up and decide to have us for dinner!”

  O’Neil’s scimitar made quick work of the rope around Genevieve’s wrist and feet. To her credit, she stayed surprisingly still as he freed her. Once he pulled the rope off her, he yanked her to her feet. The smoke from the first bomb was clearing, even as he heard Jim’s second bomb whistle through the air.

  “That’s our cue to move, lady. Come on!”

  O’Neil yanked Genevieve towards the rest of his party’s hiding place. The Karabiner fire was gone, replaced only by the din of enraged and hung over Mahdist killers.

  Armless O’Neil once again closed his eyes as he ran through the smoke. This time he didn’t just focus on the path back to safety, but also on the sounds from around him. Part of sailing wasn’t just visual but auditory. Decades on the water had given him hearing better than any normal landlubber.

  It was that ability that saved him. He heard the sword whistle wildly through the air. He brought up his own blade just in time to deflect the attack away from him.

  He pulled Genevieve to the ground as he parried another attack by sound alone. The Mahdist was swinging wildly. O’Neil concentrated on the whistle of the blade as it swung towards him a third time. He pushed the blade away, ducked down and swung out with his own scimitar.

  The blade caught the Mahdist in the knees. The zealot, free from the drugs of the previous battle, roared in pain. O’Neil pulled the blade free and rose back to his feet. He swung again. This time he could feel the scimitar cut the foreign warrior down.

  O’Neil didn’t waste any more time. He grabbed Genevieve and yanked her to her feet. Without a look back, he hurtled out of the clearing and back into the jungle.

  As the smoke thinned in the trees, O’Neil opened his eyes. He realized he had missed the Nazis and Jim by about twenty yards. He worked his way through the heavy foliage back towards the rest of the group.

  “We need to go now,” he said before Wagner could speak. “They know this path and it won’t be long before the smoke clears and they follow.”

  Wagner nodded. One gesture took the rest of his men out of their firing positions. They formed up around Wagner as they hustled back for the river.

  “Wait!”

  They all turned to look at Genevieve. She pulled away from O’Neil and bent down over a group of tiny white and yellow flowers.

  “Gen, come on!”

  “This is it,” she said. “This is what my father and I were trying to find. I don’t care what you say; I need to bring it back. It’s my father’s life’s work!”

  “I don’t care if it’s the second coming of the Lord, if we don’t run, we’re going to get very, very dead!”

  Genevieve ripped the flowers from the ground, taking the earth beneath it with her. She grabbed Armless O’Neil’s hook and they ran towards the water, the Mahdists only feet behind.

  They exited the jungle and onto the narrow reef. The Nazi soldiers turned and opened fire, even as O’Neil and Genevieve leapt down to one of the boats, moored against a low wall of rock. Wagner dropped down next to them, followed a second later by Abel.

  Wagner pulled the mooring free. O’Neil and Abel wasted no time n getting the motor running and the boat pointed towards the Heart. The soldiers followed moments later in the second boat.

  The Mahdists hurled themselves into the water after them, but without their prepared ropes, they couldn’t hope to reach the Heart on the other side of the river. Nor could they catch up with the much faster motorboats.

  Still they kept after the boats in the leech-infested waters. O’Neil couldn’t imagine the number of creatures crawling against their flesh. Or at least he didn’t want to.

  The Nazis onboard the Heart made short work of the Mahdists on the rescue party’s tail. Their Karabiners ripped through the water with disturbing ease. O’Neil could see these men were killers.

  He wasn’t surprised. They already killed a boy and let a man die for that crime. It seemed they would do anything to find this Palladium that Genevieve told him about only hours before.

  It took only a few short minutes to get the boats secured back onto the Heart. O’Neil hurried to the helm. The surviving members of the crew were already preparing the ship to move.

  Wagner followed him, only a few steps behind. It seemed clear the Nazi wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t try anything. It served to prove to O’Neil only one thing: Wagner didn’t understand Africa or the water at all. No man in their right mind would want to stay anywhere near an insane Mahdist remnant.

  As he started the boat moving back down the water and towards Lake Victoria, he also knew one other thing for certain. His life would last only as long as Wagner saw a use for him. When the Nazis were done with them, O’Neil knew that the crew, the Prynnes and his own life were forfeit.

  They were as trapped as Genevieve had been in the Mahdist camp. O’Neil didn’t know how he would get them out, but he didn’t plan to stay under the Nazis’ power. It was him or them.

  Armless O’Neil planned for it to be him.

  Chapter Eight

  Outside a stray hippo or two, a few patches of extreme rapids and a nasty run in with some massive and angry alligators, O’Neil found the path down the river the quietest he’d ever experienced. With every passing day of ease on the river, he knew that Wagner suspected him to be more and more of a liar.

  The Nazis were an ever-present force at the helm of the ship. If Wagner wasn’t staring daggers at him, his compatriot Abel was. As much as Wagner seemed cold-blooded, his aide was so much worse. Abel seemed to take happiness from O’Neil’s discomfort. He seemed to almost revel in it.

  O’Neil knew the type. It only took training to teach someone to be an expert at killing. It took an especially sick type to enjoy it the way this man did.

  Genevieve and her father on the other hand stayed mostly to their quarters. They slept there, took their meals there, all while working on something in Harold Prynne’s portable laboratory. O’Neil only saw Genevieve once a day, when she would take a walk around the deck to get a bit of fresh air. Otherwise, she remained sequestered, doing who knows what at her father’s side.

  O’Neil spent his days watching the water go by, always trying to come up with a way to escape the Nazis and find his way to safety. For all his ideas, he knew that he could never take the boat back from them under current conditions.

  He would have to wait until they reached their destination, whatever the strange place near the mouth of Victoria might be. He bided his time as the lake grew ever closer.

  Two weeks passed.

  ***

  O’Neil and his crew slowly brought the Heart in as close as they could to the banks of Lake Victoria. Once they were close to shore, Jim and another man dropped anchor.

  Wagner approached Armless O’Neil from behind. O’Neil turned to face him. He caught sight of Abel out of the corner of his eye. For a moment, O’Neil wondered if he had lost his chance and that Wagner planned to kill him before he left the Heart.

  “This is the place,” O’Neil said. “I took you where you need to go. Now let the Prynnes and my crew go.”

  Wagner smirked. “Don’t be silly, Herr O’Neil.. We need you for the ride home, don’t we? My men couldn’t handle the journey back on our own, I’m sure.”

  O’Neil said nothing. He kept his face impassive, the most stoic poker face he could muster.

  “No, I think you have taken me for a fool. I don’t think your crew needs you any more than I do. They could pilot this ship up and down this river without you or any other man. You and the Prynnes seem to have only one use now: fodder. Isn’t that right, Abel?”

  Abel nodded behind O’Neil.

  “What do you want?” O’Neil asked.

  “The legends of the object I’m looking for—”

  “You mean the Palladium. Let’s not play around here, Wagner. You want me to find your magic statue. And I’m guessing it’s thrown in some kind of trap-filled temple.”

  Wagner seemed taken aback. O’Neil figured he didn’t expect a simple sailor to know so much about his plan. With a grimace, he simply said, “A cave actually.”

  “Your cave then. So you want to send me in so that I can either get your statue or get killed by one of the traps. So who is it that’s coming with me to pick up if I die?”

  “Abel will accompany you, as will your man Jim, and the Prynnes. Abel will bring two of my men as well. I wouldn’t want you or your people to get any ideas about escape. All these men are expert marksmen. None of you would get more than a few feet.”

  “Send Jim and me, but there’s no need to involve the Prynnes.”

  “Oh, I think there is,” Wagner said. “I see the way you look at the girl. I know you will do anything to keep her alive. And that’s why Abel has orders to kill her at the first sign of trouble from you. You will get me the Palladium, Herr O’Neil.”

  “I see. That’s how it’s going to be, is it?”

  Wagner smiled broadly.

  “Your boat is already being prepared,” the Nazi leader said. “I suggest you make ready for land fall.”

  Without another word, Wagner turned and walked away. O’Neil could only clench his fist as Abel watched over him. O’Neil silently made a promise to himself and Wagner.

  Armless O’Neil wouldn’t rest until he saw the Nazi dead.

  ***

  With a machete in his one good hand, O’Neil cut away at the dense foliage off the side of the water. Both Jim and he had been at it for over an hour, only now were they far enough off the shore to be out of sight of the ship.