by Carr, Jack
“We fought hard but, in the end, it came down to politics. I still think about the boys we lost, both white and black. What do you say we drink one for those boys and their widows?”
Reece looked Rich in the eye and extended his glass. “To them. The brave ones.”
Both warriors sat in silence for several minutes, each paying respect to their fallen brothers.
Reece cleared his throat and said, “How did you end up here in Mozambique, Rich?”
“Well, you were there in Zim. You saw them harass us.”
“I remember it well. Did that start as soon as Mugabe took over?”
“Not right away, no. It was all pretty civilized at first. Bob and his crew were stealing everything they could, of course, but they left us alone for a while. Mugabe sent his Fifth Brigade, men trained by the North Koreans, to slaughter his rival tribe the Ndebele, and the world paid no attention. They tortured, starved, and shot them by the thousands. No one even knows how many they killed, but it was something upwards of twenty thousand people. All civilians, men, women, children, and all because they belonged to the wrong tribe. Where was the international outrage then? Anyway, once they realized that no one gave a shit about what happened inside Zimbabwe, they started taking our farms and anything else that had any value. My brother was smart: he left as soon as the war was over and took his family to the Cape. He started with fuck-all and made himself a bloody fortune. When things started to turn in South Africa, he did the smart thing again and moved to the U.S.”
“Yeah, I met Raife not long after that.”
“That’s about right. What year was it that you visited us?”
“Nineteen ninety-eight. It was the summer before my senior year in college. I’ll never forget it. That place was so beautiful.”
“It was that. Anyway, I stayed on the farm as long as I could. My family had spent decades building it, and I wasn’t about to let the ‘War Vets’ poach all of those animals. I stayed for them, really. It got bad for a couple years after your visit, so I sent the family down south to live to get them away from the violence. They’d seen enough of that. When our farm was burned in 2000, I knew it was over. I took what I could and bid on a concession in Botswana, where we hunted for about ten years. After they shut down hunting there, we found this place. Pretty damn ironic to be back in Moz, where I did so much fighting.”
“So, you’re a man without a country?”
“You know how that feels, don’t you, James?”
Reece paused. Staring into the fire, he nodded and took another long sip of his drink.
CHAPTER 20
REECE WAS WALKING IN downtown Coronado when he saw Lauren and Lucy shopping on the opposite side of the street. Lauren was combing the sidewalk sale rack of a boutique for bargains and Lucy stood next to her, holding on to the strap of her purse. Turning, she saw Reece across the street, her face lighting up with joy. He waved and began to make his way between two parked cars to cross the street. Lucy let go of Lauren’s purse and began to run in his direction. Then everything went into slow motion. Reece could see the taxi and knew that the driver wouldn’t see Lucy until it was too late. Lucy’s path and speed put them on a perfect collision course. Reece yelled at the top of his lungs for her to stop but no one could hear him: not Lucy, not Lauren, not the cabdriver. Lucy kept coming, as did the taxi. Reece began to run toward her but his legs felt like they were mired in concrete; he’d never get there in time. He looked at the taxi driver and recognized the face of a man he’d last seen before putting two bullets into his brain on the streets of LA. It can’t be. When he turned his head, Lucy’s smile was the last thing he saw as the cab accelerated to make impact.
Soaked in sweat, Reece shot up in bed and looked at his strange surroundings.
A tiny voice came through the thatched wall to his right. “Morning, morning, sir.”
“Um, yep, I’m up . . .” was all Reece could muster in response, remembering that he was thousands of miles from Coronado and that Lauren and Lucy were gone forever.
The hangover hit him like a sledgehammer. There was no tumor to blame for this one, just too many beers, a lot of red wine, and more than a few whiskeys. He flung the blanket off his legs and swung his legs over to the floor. Struggling to find his balance, he stumbled into the bathroom. The figure that gazed back at him from the bathroom mirror looked like a homeless guy selling drugs at a music festival.
He wasn’t sure about drinking the water, so he threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt along with some flip-flops and staggered toward the dining area in search of coffee. Even in his current state, he was struck by the beauty of the African sunrise. The orange ball emerging over the treetops bathed the entire scene in a warm glow. The green forest was broken by the deep, sandy riverbed below, where he could see Cape buffalo and what looked like kudu drinking. He assumed correctly that giant crocodiles were somewhere in the water below, waiting patiently for one of the mammals to venture too close.
“How’s it?”
Reece turned to see Louie, walking diagonally toward the common area.
“Hope Rich didn’t bore you with too many of his stories from the good old days?” Louie smiled.
“No, no, it was great. Just wish I’d drank less.”
“Ah, join the club. Let’s get you some coffee.”
Reece followed Louie toward what would likely be a steady stream of caffeine consumed over many hours. Hastings was already seated at the breakfast table when they entered, a coffee mug in his hand and a large topographical map spread before him. “Good morning, James. What are you doing up? I thought you’d sleep for days.”
This guy is pretty cheery for as much as we drank last night. “Yes, sir, good morning to you as well. I’m good, but I’ll be better as soon as I get some coffee in me. Thank you again for last night. Dinner was great and I enjoyed our talk.”
“Ah, I get carried away with the bloody politics. Get some coffee and rest up today.”
“If it’s all the same with you, I think it would be good for me to get out and about.”
“Understood. Then come have a look at the map. I’ll give you the lay of the land.”
Reece filled a mug from an old-fashioned urn and added some sugar and cream, a bit disappointed that there was no sign of honey. He took a seat next to Rich and tried to focus his blurry vision on the map in front of him.
“This, as you know, is the Niassa Reserve. We hunt this block here.” Hastings outlined the boundaries with his thick, tanned finger. “We just finished the paperwork to take over this neighboring block, which will more than double the size of our concession. We are going to be busy with clients over the next few months and we need you to help scout the new block, if you’re up for it.”
“Sure, I’d be happy to. I can’t promise that I’ll know what I’m looking for, but I’ll give it a shot.”
“You’ll have a couple of trackers with you. They know the game better than anyone; they just don’t have a sense of the big picture. Neither of them can read or write very well, either, so I can’t rely on them to give me much of a report. There’s an old camp here on this river; check it out and let me know what kind of shape it’s in. After that, the three of you can spend a few weeks seeing what we’ve got for animals out there. Just having you moving around will help with the poaching. You’ll probably run across some snares and you may even bump into some poachers in the block. I know you can handle yourself if that’s the case. We’ll give you a vehicle and you’ll need a proper rifle, which I’ve got for you.”
“Check. What can you tell me about the poachers?”
“Ah, yes. Two lots of them, really. The first are after bush meat. They put out wire snares, thousands of the bloody things. Some are looking for meat to sell in the villages, but a large number of them are conscripted to feed the Chinese mining and lumber operations that are popping up all over the country. The damn snares don’t know the difference between an impala ewe and a lion. We counter them in two way
s: one, we patrol constantly and pick up every snare we see and destroy it; we even pay bounties for them. The other way we do it is outreach: we try to employ as many locals as we can here in the camp or out in the field and we distribute a good bit of meat to the villages. The staple of their diet is mealie meal; you’d call it grits, ground-up corn that they cook into a slop. They are all protein starved, so we make sure that everyone gets a piece of what we shoot in the unit. If they help protect the game, the game can provide for them. Sustainable is such a bloody greenie word, but that’s what this is if we do it right.”
“Sounds like everyone wins that way,” Reece said. “What about the second group of poachers? Guessing they feed the Asian black market?”
“Exactly. The Chinese are raping Africa blind for her resources. They come in and make deals with the corrupt officials and mine whatever they want. It’s all economic for them; there’s zero return for the communities. Where’s Jimmy Carter now? Sorry, I’m getting political again. As part of that Chinese presence, the demand for ivory and rhino horn has a direct line to the source. We’ve seen sophisticated poaching syndicates, often in bed with the game departments, all over Africa. We don’t have any rhino here, so they’re mainly after elephants. You won’t see any Chinese in the field but they’re pulling the strings. The ivory gets smuggled out along with all of the other resources to feed the demand back in Asia.”
“Sounds similar to the drug problem in the U.S. As long as there is a demand, the cartels will provide the supply. With the demand from Asia, turning the tide on the supply side will be tough.”
“Right you are, James. Unfortunately, right you are.”
CHAPTER 21
Basel, Switzerland
March
COLONEL ANDRENOV REVIEWED THE spreadsheets on his screens and offered a rare smile. The string of terrorist attacks and his investment strategies in advance of them had been far more successful than even he could have imagined. He knew, of course, that the retail markets would decline sharply out of consumers’ fear of terrorism, timed perfectly with the holiday shopping season. His problem was spreading that fear and panic to the United States, where no kinetic attacks had taken place.
His solution came thanks to a group that called itself the “Syrian Electronic Army.” This group of pro-Assad hackers took over the Associated Press’s Twitter account in June 2013 and posted an erroneous “Breaking News” headline about an explosion at the White House that had wounded the president. Despite the lack of an explosion, the U.S. stock market lost $136 billion in equity value in just five minutes.
As a Russian national with plenty of capital, Andrenov had access to his choice of hackers and “bot” accounts. For a few thousand euros’ worth of cryptocurrency, his hackers had been carefully coordinating false reports of terrorist attacks at shopping malls and other retail locations across North America and Europe, keeping the Western world constantly on edge.
As shoppers stayed home, brick-and-mortar stores had lost out on the holiday income that usually put them in the black for the year. The ordinarily chaotic shopping scenes on the Friday after Thanksgiving had been replaced by empty retailers whose shelves stood piled with unsold merchandise. Instead of flocking to movie theaters and restaurants over the holidays, consumers sat at home and fed on the fear stoked by the twenty-four-hour news media. The ripple effect was felt across nearly all sectors of the economy as demand fell.
This was all a predictable result of Andrenov’s carefully planned operations, but the second element was pure luck. Over the past two decades, investors had exponentially increased their use of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These securities offer investors a vehicle by which to profit from commodities, currencies, futures, and other “goods” without actually owning or taking possession of those items. For example, a gold ETF allows an investor to profit from an increase in the price of gold without buying actual gold.
When the stock markets in New York, London, and across the globe declined sharply after the Kingston Market attack, it set off a demand for cash. The problem was that many of the ETFs that had become so popular lacked any true liquidity. They were built on investor confidence rather than actual value. As that confidence shattered, so did the value of the funds. A gold ETF that owned very little actual gold bullion became a nearly worthless investment as institutions and individuals scrambled to cash out. The “ETF bubble” took the market by surprise, just as the housing bubble had done a decade earlier. The entire system collapsed like a trillion-dollar house of cards, catalyzing what would have been a small recession into an event that surpassed the 2008 financial crisis in terms of lost wealth.
Hardworking people saw their 401(k)s evaporate and their pension plans become nearly insolvent. Retailers, who were already teetering on bankruptcy thanks to online sales, shut their doors and laid off tens of thousands of workers. There was a worldwide contraction of credit that stifled growth to a standstill.
Everyone, wealthy and poor, suffered. Everyone, that is, but Vasili Andrenov. He had shorted the equity markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across the European Union months before the attacks. That news alone had caused some uncertainty in the market since he was viewed as such a savvy, if shadowy, investor. Instead of looking to the world like the profiteering terrorist mastermind that he was, he came out looking like an oracle, the kind of mind that could lead a nation out of decline.
Andrenov pulled a tattered volume from the vast collection of first editions in his opulent library. Published in Russian, it was known to most of the world as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was the only relic of the life of his maternal grandfather, a man he’d never met. His mother spoke of her father with awe, influencing young Vasili deeply with the political beliefs of a generation past. Unlike Andrenov’s father and grandfather, who were devout communists, his mother’s father had been an outspoken supporter of imperial Russia. He was a member of the Black Hundreds, an ultranationalist society that espoused a motto of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” The Black Hundreds despised anything and anyone who would challenge the House of Romanov: communists, Jews, and Ukrainian nationalists. The Black Hundreds had fought to suppress Ukrainian language and culture in Odessa, of all places, a feat that Andrenov planned to repeat. Capitalism had defeated the communists, Andrenov’s attack on the world economies had punished the international bankers, and the next phase of his plan would finish the Ukrainians for good. A century after the fall of the empire, Andrenov would rebuild what his grandfather fought so hard to protect.
CHAPTER 22
Niassa Game Reserve
Mozambique, Africa
March
AFTER A HEARTY BREAKFAST and three cups of coffee to get Reece’s brain back in gear, he followed Rich toward the parking area. Rich reached behind the seat of his safari vehicle and retrieved a battered canvas rifle case that he handed to the new arrival. “You can use this rifle. It’s old but it works.”
Reece unzipped the case and pulled the big-bore rifle out to inspect it. It was an old Mauser sporting rifle that looked like it had been carried to the moon and back. The bluing was worn from every visible surface from years of honest use, leaving the steel a burnished silver. The scarred walnut stock was the color of dark chocolate, and only small areas of the checkering at both the grip and forend remained visible. There wasn’t a speck of rust or dirt, though, making it obvious that the rifle was heavily used but never abused. Reece noticed some lettering at the top of the barrel that read “W. J. Jeffery & Co, 60 Queen Victoria Street, London.” It wore several proof marks, presumably from a house in England, and was marked “404 EX Cordite.” He slowly cycled the bolt, which was as smooth as glass, pushing a cigar-sized round into the chamber.
“How many does it hold?”
“Three down, one up the pipe. The .404s are too bloody wide for the standard Mauser but this one feeds like a charm. A gunsmith down in Pretoria took the sides out of the mag box to give it more room so the r
ounds actually ride on the wood. I’ve got a couple of extra boxes of ammo for you, along with a pouch for your belt.” Rich dug around behind the seat and handed Reece a handful of battered yellow and red cardboard boxes with “KYNOCH .404 JEFFERY 400 gr. Solid” printed on the front.
“All solid bullets?” Reece asked.
“Yeah. If you shoot this thing, it means that something is trying to stomp you into jelly. A solid is what you’ll want; the softs won’t penetrate on something like an ele. If you shoot an impala or wartie for the pot, the solid will wreck less of the meat.”
Reece nodded in understanding.
“Carry this thing everywhere when you’re not in camp, eh? You go off to have a shite and a dagga boy with a snare around his leg might decide to have a go at you, right?” Hastings laughed.
“No sling?”
“When bad things happen out here, they happen fast. You want your rifle in your hands, not on your back.”
“Understood. How’s the recoil?”
“Ah, not bad. The bloody English knew how to shape a stock, which helps. It’s like a heavy shotgun load, nothing a big, tough frogman can’t handle.”
“Is there somewhere I can test fire it?”
“Sure, Louie will stop outside of camp on the way out this morning and you can have a go with it. Grab whatever you need from your room; he’s gassing up the truck and will be ready to go in a bit. He’ll have a cold box with food and drinks. Just take whatever you need for the day.”
“Got it. Thanks, Rich. I really appreciate this.” Reece held up the rifle and nodded toward it.
“No worries, eh? Can’t have our new friend getting stomped on his first day. Take the case, too; you’ll want it for the truck.”