He should have done a lot of things, but he hadn't done any of them.

Wilson thought, if I had it to do over . . . He caught himself. Yeah, if. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Wilson turned to Gromvitch. "You stay here, we'll go."

"Me?" Gromvitch said. "Why me?"

"Because I said so," Wilson said. "That isn't good enough, maybe I ought to remind you who's boss here. Without me, you'd still be a Legionnaire eatin' desert"

"No," Gromvitch said. "I don't need no remindin'. But that girl-"

"Get it out of your mind," Wilson said. "I'm not in for that. We have to kill them, we do it quick, and we're out of there. We do what we got to do, not what's fun for you."

"Well," Gromvitch said. "Whiskey then."

"Just mind the camp," Wilson said, then turned to his confederates. "Come on, let's get goin'."

Eugene Hanson stood up from the camp chair, adjusted the camera strap around his neck, wiped the sweat from his face, placed his hands on his hips, stretched his back, and studied the jungle. It was dark and green and rich with the sounds of animals and the buzzing of insects. It was humid and uncomfortable. His feet hurt. He'd been bitten by insects on nearly every part of his body and he was weary and sore. Yet, he loved the jungle. His mission and the beauty of the jungle had driven him on his photographic expedition. He wanted photographs that had never been taken before. Photographs of the manlike apes that were reputed to live in this part of Africa.

Outside of legends, the evidence was thin, but Hanson was convinced these man-apes existed. Man-apes were most likely cousins to the Yeti and the Sasquatch. He had researched them for years. Made plaster casts of their footprints. Talked to eyewitnesses. But this trip to Africa, he was determined to prove their existence; determined to push into the interior where no white man he knew of had gone before, and finally, with his cameras, prove once and for all that the man-apes of Africa were more than legend and that they lived near the ruins of an ancient city-the remains of a once-great, black kingdom called Ur.

Hanson grinned to himself, thought: this is a hell of a lot better than a classroom.