"Oh. No wonder you want these photos."
Narvel faxed muddy photocopies of the photos that very day and patiently waited for a return call. It never came.
The check arrived the next day by UPS Express. Narvel waited until the check had cleared before fedexing the three high-resolution color photographs that the Smithsonian Institute had turned down, along with the exact longitude and latitude at which the satellite had snapped the shots. He never heard back from the International Colloquium of Cryptozoologists, and none of the photos ever appeared in print. But Narvel Buckle didn't care about that. He was thinking that he should have asked for ten grand. At least.
Chapter 1
Dr. Nancy Derringer was starting to have second thoughts.
The heart of equatorial Africa was no place for second thoughts, never mind fear. But Nancy, blond as corn silk, willowy as bamboo, and tough as Arizona sagebrush, was experiencing both.
Those who knew her well claimed she was as fearless as the crocodiles she had spent her short adult life studying.
As the chief paleontologist and herpetologist for the International Colloquium of Cryptozoologists, Nancy Derringer had trudged through Himalayan snows for Yeti, plumbed deep-water lakes all over the Americas and the British Isles for surviving plesiosaurs, and penetrated abyssal depths in quest of garagantuan cephalopods.
Africa was a different matter. It was a hothouse for tropical diseases like river blindness and monkey pox, the reputed incubator for AIDS. A Caucasian had to undergo two months of inoculations before embarking on an expedition into the continent's humid heart.
They injected her twice against cholera, twice against typhoid, subjected her to a precautionary rabies injection that they warned might do no good if she were bitten in the wild, gave her a tetanus booster shot, and then sugar lumps impregnated with polio vaccine to take orally.
Nancy had been so anxious to get going she asked to be injected and inoculated all in one day. The doctors vetoed that. No less than four weeks between the yellow fever and hepatitis vaccines. And she would have to go to London for her yellow fever inoculation. It was unavailable in the U.S.
It had been painful and annoying, and she had taken it all without complaint, sustained by sheer adrenalin.
The flight from London had gone well. And the stopover in Port Chuma, capital of Gondwanaland, former European colony of Bamba del Oro, and now sovereign nation on the brink of social and economic catastrophe, was interminable.
Now, trudging through the Gondwanaland bush, popping her daily antimalaria tablets dry, Nancy was nervous.
She would have preferred a more politically palatable sponsor than the Burger Triumph hamburger chain. But the nature of the expedition was not exactly National Geographic cover material.
The major colleges had been too broke. She had been laughed out of corporate boardrooms from Manhattan to L.A. Even PBS had said no.
Until that day she met with Skip King, vice president in charge of marketing for the Burger Triumph Corporation, in his thirty-fourth floor office in their world headquarters in Dover, Delaware.
She had felt foolish even requesting the meeting. But a colleague had suggested it, and then faxed her one side of a Burger Triumph food bag that looked as if it had been designed by a precocious child. It showed the planet earth and boasted of Burger Triumph's new biodegradable packaging that conserved seven million tons of waste annually, not to mention the gasoline conserved and pollution cut by dispensing with the old cardboard containers.
"Planet-pleasing packaging" it was called.
A note scribbled on the fax said, "They're rich, they're environmentally conscious. Why not try?"
"They're trying to rehabilitate their reputation," Nancy snorted. But she made the call and got an appointment for the very next day.
There, she had made a short self-conscious presentation and laid the unmarked manila envelope on King's desk. Wordlessly, he had taken it up, unwound the flap-securing string, and shook out the three eight-by-ten glossies that had been taken from an earth observation satellite from a distance of over one hundred miles above Africa.
King had stared at them for five silent minutes, going through them briskly at first and then slowly the second time. At the end, he set the three photos side by side on his desk and stared at them a long while.
His face was too sharp to be called handsome. It had a foxy cast to it. Or maybe it was more wolfish, Nancy had thought. The nose, the thin-lipped mouth, even the high-tolerance cut of his jet black hair was too severe.
He looked up, and his eyes, black as volcanic glass, regarded her without any emotion she could read.
"You say they're alive?" he asked tonelessly.
"There is just one, as far as we know."
"How big?"
"Judging from the photos, forty feet from nose to tail."
King looked down and frowned. "Most of it is neck and tail," he muttered in a vaguely disappointed tone. "How big would you say the body is?"
"Oh, less than half of that."
"Fifteen feet, then?"
"At a rough estimate."
"Tall?"
"With the neck lifted, we estimate-"
He shook his head impatiently. "No-how tall from underbelly to the top of the spine?"
Nancy had frowned. "Possibly eight feet."
Skip King took up a pencil and began making calculations on a notepad. He crossed out columns of numbers instead of erasing them, and when he got an end figure, he looked up and said, very seriously, "Probably weighs eight tons, not counting head, neck, and tail. Ten tons in all."
"That sounds about right," Nancy had admitted, thinking, This man is asking all the wrong questions.
But King seemed so completely professional. Button-down, no-nonsense, and thoroughly unruffled by the prospect of making zoological history.
"And you want Burger Triumph to fund your safari?" he had asked.
"Expedition. And we think it could be accomplished for less than two million dollars," Nancy told him.
"That include shipping costs?"
"Shipping?"
"Bringing the beast back alive."
"Back! How would we get it back? I mean, could we get it back. The government of-"
"Gondwanaland? Don't make me laugh. It's run by a tub of butter who's backpedaling away from Karl Marx so fast he's trampling his immediate ancestors. BT is a multinational company. We could buy Gondwanaland, if we wanted. Cheap. But it'll be a lot easier to grease a few official palms." He paused for breath, then said, "Miss Derringer, I believe I can get you an approval on this."
The suddenness of the statement had taken her breath away. Nancy had expected polite interest, and weeks-if not months-of corporate buck-passing until an answer was handed down.
"Are-are you sure? I mean, arrangements will have to be made about creating a suitable environment for the animal. And there is the question of a receptive zoo-"