Free Place of Bones by Larry Johns Page B

seemed, I stretched my stiff and aching muscles. The night had been a bad one, where I had been hoping for a cakewalk. But it had been bad for everyone, not just me. And not least for the men who had nothing to do but squat out of sight below the deck coaming as, impossibly, we pursued our upstream course deeper into Zaire.
    I sniffed the air. God! Two things never change in the rain forests; the trees and the smell of rot and decay. The air is always pungent, sometimes gaseous, and it always contains within it as much taste as smell. I gathered up a wad of spittle and sent it over the side. The water was almost black, and the froth kicked up by the prop was a dirty grey. I glanced back at the other vessels. They were keeping good station, coping well with the pernickety currents and sudden eddies.
    Directly behind me, the closest of them almost touching my legs, in the cargo space forward of the high wheelhouse, sat crouched twenty of my new command; a small sea of as-yet unfamiliar faces, the skin pigment ranging from chocolate-brown to full-blooded ebony. Silent, they were, thoughtful. Clad in jungle-green camouflage fatigues and forage caps, weapons held in their laps as instructed. The whites of forty eyes glinted at me. I nodded at no-one in particular. Every head nodded back at me amidst a growl of acknowledgments. I would get to know some of them later. Some I would probably never even speak to directly.
    Aft of the wheelhouse were twenty more men, plus over two tons of crated equipment, the crates all bearing the hieroglyphic scrawl of Chinese characters. So far Luang had lived up to his promise. The equipment I had ordered, right down to the balloons for the radio aerial, was all there. Also, we had gotten out of the Congo unobserved by anyone; the Loukolela landing stage had been deserted.
    I glanced up at the wheelhouse and could see the vague shapes of two men; Tony Augarde, one of the three Europeans, and the helmsman. Augarde, an Englishman, seemed competent enough, but it was far too early to make judgments on anyone.
    In the second tug were fifty more strange faces, plus several tons of equipment. And it was the same on the trailing vessel. The dumb-barge was strung between them; a seventy-foot monstrosity of riveted steel, little more than a floating hull, whose only serviceable point was that it did actually float. In it was the sheer weight of the equipment and stores - a ten-ton, ex-American army truck plus trailer, the two armed jeeps of similar vintage, the generators, the bales of inflatable Mylar tents, two small portacabins, the vacuum-sealed rations containers, bedding and fly sheets, pots and utensils, the water purifying plant, and everything else a small army needs to survive and fight in the jungle.
    Augarde left the wheelhouse and swung down over the rail, his equipment, festooned in true mercenary-style around his body, rattled and clattered as he landed on deck. The dark faces swung on him now, and watched as he picked his way forward through the clutter.
    “Sixty kays to the Giri, sir, he reported huskily. His eyes were red-rimmed from the night of intense concentration upon a river that was more sensed than seen, and his skin had a pallid look to it, despite a good tan. He had told me he was a West Country man, though his accent, I had thought, sounded vaguely Canadian. He looked as rough as I felt. He added, “Are we going straight through?”
    I nodded. At the good eight knots we were now making, despite the encumbrance of the dumb-barge, which had a nasty habit of taking the laws of river navigation into its own hands at the worst moments, we could be past Bomango by nightfall. The following morning, given some moonlight, we could be at the Giri Rapids, where we would leave the vessels and cut south-east through the forests - a forty kay trek to Makanza. I knew there would be no signs now of the trail I had hacked so long ago. Man-made trails barely survive a few days in that kind of