Our hero knows he’s in serious trouble.

The problem is, there are familiar faces and a question of who is a friend and who is foe made all the more difficult because of the enemy, if it was the enemy, simply because it didn’t look or sound or act like the enemy.

Now, it appears, his problems stem from another operation he participated in, and because of it, he has now been roped into what might be called a suicide mission.

“So, Jacobi, tell me what I don’t know.”

I was taking the track slowly and keeping within a short distance of the cars behind me.  The road was little more than a dirt track, and in places, there were almost un-navigable ruts.  We would not have got a truck down this road.

He looked sideways at me.  “You know as much as I do.”

“That’s not possible.  I know nothing.  You set this up.  Tell me about the leader of this group.  Is he the heard of his own militia group?”

“An area commander of a larger group spread out across the top of the Republic, bordering onto Sudan.  They get their guns and other military hardware across that border.  Where we’re going, it’s their main camp in this location.”

“How many men will be here?”

“Twenty, thirty.  Sometimes they train new recruits.”

“Those militia back there, were they his people?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do, Jacobi.  And I think if you want to come out of this alive, you might consider giving me all the facts.  If they were his men, there could be ramifications if they don’t report back, especially if he was expecting to add to his payday.”

“Even if they were, there’s no communication lines out here.  They would have to report back to the camp first.  And then there’s the possibility with all the money they were supposed to collect, there might be a detour.  It’s why I think they asked for 10,000 rather than the 5,000.  The commander was going to take a cut.  Loyalty only goes so far in these places.”

“No likely surprises?”

“None that I’m aware of.  You killed them all anyway.  Dead men do not get up, walk back to come and inform.”

No, they didn’t.

A mile to go I saw the rear car stop for a few seconds and Monroe and Stark get out and disappear into the bush.  The chances were they could walk through the bush faster than we could drive on the track, and beat us there.

And, then, the checkpoint was in sight, a pair of empty petrol drums with a piece of wood across the road, each end resting on a drum.  Behind the barrier were three men, one I presumed to be the commander, the other two, guns at the ready, his guard.  Behind them was a clearing with several buildings and to one side several huts that might belong to some villagers.  There were a truck and two Toyota tray utilities parked to one side.

All in all, I could see about ten men.

When I reached the barrier, I stopped but left the engine running.  Just before we arrived, I gave the order to hide the hand weapons.  It was risky going in unarmed, but the chances were they’d take the guns if we were wearing them.  This way, if we needed them, there was a slight chance we might be able to retrieve them.

Both Jacobi and I got out.  I left my door open.  Jacobi closed his.

“Sergeant James, I presume.”  Good English, beaming smile, friendly manner.

“I think I know how Dr. Livingston felt.  I am he.”

A puzzled look for a moment, then the resumption of good nature.  He didn’t understand the nuances of British history in Africa.

There was no handshake, none was expected.  Jacobi stepped forward.  “I assume the packages are here, and in good condition.”

“Of course.  I assume that you have brought the exchange material.”

“We have.  Now, if we can just park these cars, we can get on with the exchange.”

“In a hurry, Jacobi?  Somewhere else to be?”

“Yes, as it happens.  I’m a busy man, as you are aware.”

Politeness disappeared from his face as quickly as the sun sometimes went behind a cloud.

The commander looked over towards a hut just back from the road, one I hadn’t seen from the car because it was hidden by a grove of bushes.  Two men came out.

“Move the barrier.”

As they did, he said to me, “Tell your men to get out of the vehicles and come slowly up the track.  My men will bring the vehicles into the camp.  Tell them also not to make any sudden or suspicious moves, or there will be trouble.”

A glance back showed another four of his men, also armed, appearing out of the bush towards the driver’s side of the cars.

I’d brought the radio and gave them the instructions the commander had given me.

Five minutes later we were standing outside one of the huts, the cars were parked neatly in a row, and each of us had been frisked as I thought we would.  The four who acted as drivers were now our guards, not with weapons trained on us, but they could be very quickly.

The commander waited until the guards at the checkpoint had replaced the barrier, then came striding towards us.  I could see he was counting heads and seemed perplexed by the time he reached us.

“There are men missing.  Where are they?”
© Charles Heath 2019-2020

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

It was an understatement to say I was dreading going to Boggs’ place.

In fact, in the hour it took to get through the morning chores I had time to consider how and why I was in this position.  Boggs was a friend.  We were friends at school and as best we could we had each other’s back when the bullies came out to play.

At times that didn’t amount to much because as everyone knows, bullies hunt in packs.  Six against two wasn’t much of an equation.  And it those days, the teachers spent more time hiding from the students than being in front of them.

It was simply a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It didn’t feel like that, not for a very long time.

But, in the end, misfortune can make strange bedfellows, and in a town that depended on a single industry, it soon became apparent that there were more people against the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s than for, and in small-town politics, that was more than an evening up.  Out of school and separated from their acolytes, both Alex and Vince found that whatever influence they had once, was now gone, and all that was left was a grunt, and we were basically left alone.

Boggs was the dreamer.

He had idolized his father and when he went missing it broke him.

This map thing was the first signs of Boggs finally coming back to life, but the problem was, it was all pinned on false hopes.  The Sherriff was right.  Boggs was in over his head, playing with the two most vicious families from around here, and it was bad enough that his father had fallen foul of them, the Sherriff was not about to see his son go the same way.  I was going to try and talk Boggs out of it.

Yet, on the other hand, it was people like us who needed a win, just to show there was still hope in this place.  With threats every day that the factory might have to close, there were dark clouds hanging over everyone’s head.

If the factory closed, there was going to be a very large hole in the local economy and a lot of people in financial trouble.  I’m not sure how finding the treasure might solve all of that, but I suspect Boggs’ had something up his sleeve.

I knocked on the door and his mother answered.  She looked harried.  She was a nurse and looked as though she just got home from the night shift at the hospital.  

“Boggs is in his room.”

“How are you this morning?”

“Tired.  And an afternoon shift, which I might not get to if I don’t get some sleep.  You know where he is.  Try not to make any noise.”

“Will do.”

I came in and closed the door, watching her dash off down the passage to the other end of the house.

She could not work endless double shifts for much longer, but like all of us, it was not out of desire but necessity.  She had implored Boggs to get a job and help, but he seemed oblivious to the problem.  I’d tried to speak to him, but he had that insufferable way of just not listening.

Boggs was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring at the ceiling.

I looed up too, but there was nothing there.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “but you’ve suddenly discovered you’ve got X-Ray vision.”

“If only.  I could use it right now to find something that’s missing>”

“Your cell phone?”  Boggs was always misplacing something, of forgetting it.  I’d lost count how many times he’d misplaced his phone.

“No.  An underground river.”

OK.  That was out of left field.  I had no idea any rivers were missing, or, in fact, they could actually go missing.

Apparently, they could.

“There’s two,” he said.  300 years ago five or take this part of the coastline had several rivers that ran down from the mountain range.  What we now call the hills on the edge of the coastal plain.  There was also a lake, not very large, but it used to have several streams flow into it all year round and had an aqua flow that came out along the coastline.”

“And you figured all of this out from what?  A copy of the treasure map.”

The moment he started quoting rivers, streams, and lakes, I remembered each of those geographical features appeared on several of the map versions.  I had suggested, rather comically, that it would be funny if the treasure was buried in the lake.

It wasn’t all that funny.  It was also possible.

“Imagine this.  Drop anchor out to sea, in other words on the other side of the natural sandbar that formed at the seaward side of the river, get in the longboats and row inshore to the lake, across the lake, up another river to the base of the hills.  Then do a little exploring, north or south, and find a cave.  I reckon the treasure was buried in a cave.  We know there are caves up there, not many, but I think there used to be more.”

“Someone already did a survey with some rather fancy electronic equipment with the same idea in mind.  He found three, not very long, and certainly without treasure.  Two had substantial falls inside, which is why they were buried.”

“There’s more.”

He jumped up off the bed and went over to the robe and opened the door.  Tacked on the back was a copy of an ordnance survey map of this part of the coastline, and a tracing of the treasure map, to the same scale on top.

“As you can see, I think ‘I’ve found the correlation between the real, and what was real 300 years ago.”

Except there’s no rivers and no lake.  And no sand bar as I recall.  There was a small marina in what might have been where the river met the sea, but that’s gone.  They filled it in and build a shopping mall on it.  A huge, now half empty, shopping mall.  A modern wonder 40 years ago that was supposed to bring business and shoppers to the town.  For a few years it did, until another town 50 miles away got the same idea, sold the land for half the price, and made the rents a quarter of what they were here.

They called it progress.

We called it piracy.

“Then we can hardly row our boat inshore and up the stream, if it’s not there.”

I hated to state the obvious.

“But,” he said, looking like the cat who’d swallowed the canary.  “What if it is still there, but we just can’t see it?”

© Charles Heath 2020

It could be said that of all the women one could meet, whether contrived or by sheer luck, what are the odds it would turn out to be the woman who was being paid a very large sum to kill you.

John Pennington is a man who may be lucky in business, but not so lucky in love. He has just broken up with Phillipa Sternhaven, the woman he thought was the one, but relatives and circumstances, and perhaps because she was a ‘princess’, may also have contributed to the end result.

So, what do you do when you are heartbroken?

That is a story that slowly unfolds, from the first meeting with his nemesis on Lake Geneva, all the way to a hotel room in Sorrento, where he learns the shattering truth.

What should have been a high turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point every thing goes to hell in a handbasket.

He suddenly realises his so-called friend Sebastian has not exactly told him the truth about a small job he asked him to do, the woman he is falling in love with is not quite who she says she is, and he is caught in the middle of a war between two men who consider people becoming collateral damage as part of their business.

The story paints the characters cleverly displaying all their flaws and weaknesses. The locations add to the story at times taking me back down memory lane, especially to Venice where in those back streets I confess it’s not all that hard to get lost.

All in all a thoroughly entertaining story with, for once, a satisfying end.

…

Available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2Xyh1ow

…

Our hero knows he’s in serious trouble.

The problem is, there are familiar faces and a question of who is a friend and who is foe made all the more difficult because of the enemy, if it was the enemy, simply because it didn’t look or sound or act like the enemy.

Now, it appears, his problems stem from another operation he participated in, and because of it, he has now been roped into what might be called a suicide mission.

“So, Jacobi, tell me what I don’t know.”

I was taking the track slowly and keeping within a short distance of the cars behind me.  The road was little more than a dirt track, and in places, there were almost un-navigable ruts.  We would not have got a truck down this road.

He looked sideways at me.  “You know as much as I do.”

“That’s not possible.  I know nothing.  You set this up.  Tell me about the leader of this group.  Is he the heard of his own militia group?”

“An area commander of a larger group spread out across the top of the Republic, bordering onto Sudan.  They get their guns and other military hardware across that border.  Where we’re going, it’s their main camp in this location.”

“How many men will be here?”

“Twenty, thirty.  Sometimes they train new recruits.”

“Those militia back there, were they his people?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do, Jacobi.  And I think if you want to come out of this alive, you might consider giving me all the facts.  If they were his men, there could be ramifications if they don’t report back, especially if he was expecting to add to his payday.”

“Even if they were, there’s no communication lines out here.  They would have to report back to the camp first.  And then there’s the possibility with all the money they were supposed to collect, there might be a detour.  It’s why I think they asked for 10,000 rather than the 5,000.  The commander was going to take a cut.  Loyalty only goes so far in these places.”

“No likely surprises?”

“None that I’m aware of.  You killed them all anyway.  Dead men do not get up, walk back to come and inform.”

No, they didn’t.

A mile to go I saw the rear car stop for a few seconds and Monroe and Stark get out and disappear into the bush.  The chances were they could walk through the bush faster than we could drive on the track, and beat us there.

And, then, the checkpoint was in sight, a pair of empty petrol drums with a piece of wood across the road, each end resting on a drum.  Behind the barrier were three men, one I presumed to be the commander, the other two, guns at the ready, his guard.  Behind them was a clearing with several buildings and to one side several huts that might belong to some villagers.  There were a truck and two Toyota tray utilities parked to one side.

All in all, I could see about ten men.

When I reached the barrier, I stopped but left the engine running.  Just before we arrived, I gave the order to hide the hand weapons.  It was risky going in unarmed, but the chances were they’d take the guns if we were wearing them.  This way, if we needed them, there was a slight chance we might be able to retrieve them.

Both Jacobi and I got out.  I left my door open.  Jacobi closed his.

“Sergeant James, I presume.”  Good English, beaming smile, friendly manner.

“I think I know how Dr. Livingston felt.  I am he.”

A puzzled look for a moment, then the resumption of good nature.  He didn’t understand the nuances of British history in Africa.

There was no handshake, none was expected.  Jacobi stepped forward.  “I assume the packages are here, and in good condition.”

“Of course.  I assume that you have brought the exchange material.”

“We have.  Now, if we can just park these cars, we can get on with the exchange.”

“In a hurry, Jacobi?  Somewhere else to be?”

“Yes, as it happens.  I’m a busy man, as you are aware.”

Politeness disappeared from his face as quickly as the sun sometimes went behind a cloud.

The commander looked over towards a hut just back from the road, one I hadn’t seen from the car because it was hidden by a grove of bushes.  Two men came out.

“Move the barrier.”

As they did, he said to me, “Tell your men to get out of the vehicles and come slowly up the track.  My men will bring the vehicles into the camp.  Tell them also not to make any sudden or suspicious moves, or there will be trouble.”

A glance back showed another four of his men, also armed, appearing out of the bush towards the driver’s side of the cars.

I’d brought the radio and gave them the instructions the commander had given me.

Five minutes later we were standing outside one of the huts, the cars were parked neatly in a row, and each of us had been frisked as I thought we would.  The four who acted as drivers were now our guards, not with weapons trained on us, but they could be very quickly.

The commander waited until the guards at the checkpoint had replaced the barrier, then came striding towards us.  I could see he was counting heads and seemed perplexed by the time he reached us.

“There are men missing.  Where are they?”
© Charles Heath 2019-2020