The Devil's Horn

by David L. Robbins

  The bakkie pulled onto the dirt road, squeaking on bad springs to halt in front of Good Luck. The skinny shooter said nothing when he jumped into the truck bed, leaned his back against the cab, and laid the rifle across his bony, crossed ankles. He spit between his teeth a last time, not reaching South Africa or Promise.

  Hard Life batted the long lashes of his child’s eyes at Promise, as though he might cry again. She only nodded in reply, to say she did not hate him.

  Hard Life handed the backpack to the driver, who pulled the horns inside the dark cab. With the bloody hatchet, the boy climbed into the back beside Good Luck and pulled his bare knees to his chest.

  The muzzle of an AK-47 appeared on the driver’s windowsill, aimed at Promise. Prickles scurried across her skin. Her hands rose from her sides, she retreated a step, not knowing what to do. A low voice issued from inside the bakkie.

  “It’s alright.”

  The weapon withdrew. The passenger door of the truck creaked open. The truck seemed to right itself when Juma got out, he was so big.

  Juma walked in front of the headlights. In the years since Promise had seen him, his belly had grown, his face had fattened, and his gait had become more roly-poly. Juma’s years of wealth were mounting on him.

  He spread his long arms and big hands, still strong from his time in the mines. Juma waited on his side of the fence, backlit by the truck’s lights. Jewelry sparkled on his wrists. He wore dark, long pants, a white silk pullover shirt, and dress shoes.

  “When my sister called, I did not believe her.”

  “Hello, Granduncle.”

  “Hello, Nomawethu.” He used her family name. It meant with my ancestors. “Come give me a hug.”

  Promise hesitated. Criminals crossed the border like that, on foot, without papers. Juma was a criminal, he should come to her. But Juma had her money.

  She stepped over the remains of the fence into Mozambique, into her great-uncle’s heavy embrace. Her cheek flattened against his soft chest. Promise did not loop her arms around him, she could not have joined her hands. She rested them on the ledge of his waist.

  Juma kissed the top of her head and whispered, “You did well.”

  Promise dropped her hands, but he did not let her go.

  “You have blood on you. Was it hard?”

  She nodded into his breast.

  “I’m sorry. I would have sent better men with you, not these two baboons. But I didn’t believe you would come.”

  Promise stepped back against his arms. Juma set her loose, looking down on her with the wash of white light from the idling truck behind him. He wiped a broad, warm thumb down her cheek to clean a dot of blood.

  “That’s why your grandmother calls you Promise. You keep your word.”

  Juma stepped back, spreading his hands again. He appraised Promise.

  “You’ve become quite a beauty. The bush agrees with you.”

  Promise wanted to stand here no longer. The lit-up vehicle was a beacon, any patrol for kilometers in every direction could see it. Juma was little more than a stranger to her, a patchwork memory of a gigantic man, a rare visitor to the township bringing expensive gifts. Always her grandfather resented the presents, complaining afterward that Juma was not generous but crowing, showing off his dirty money. Her grandmother clucked her tongue and held out both hands to her brother’s visits and gifts.

  “Do you have my money?”

  Juma cocked his head, mimicking disappointment.

  “I wish we had more time to talk, child. Some other time.”

  Juma pulled from his pocket a roll of bills bound with a rubber band.

  “Fifty thousand rand. As agreed.”

  Promise accepted the cash with one hand. Juma reached to his other pocket for a money clip. He detached another sheaf of bills.

  “And ten thousand more, for my family.”

  Promise took this with her free hand.

  Juma clapped meaty fingers around her wrist.

  “I want you to know I met you out here on the border because I didn’t want you coming to me in Macandezulo. No matter what my sister said. I didn’t trust you. You’re a Kruger ranger.”

  Juma laid a white calling card on top of the cash in her open palm.

  “I trust you now.”

  With a squeeze of her arm, Juma released her. He put his broad back to Promise, crossed through the headlights, and left her on the wrong side of the border.

  With Juma, his poachers, and the moon all gone, Promise gazed across a murky vale. She squatted to listen to the far-off lions, the hoots of an owl, and the furtive Kruger. Her eyes readjusted from Juma’s headlights to the canopy of stars. She waited ten minutes, immobile on the dirt road in Mozambique, until she was sure she was unseen.

  Promise took off her sandals to add a new set of tracks. Keeping to the game trail, she walked backward, careful to lay her bare heels into the dirt first before the pads of her feet to make forward-looking strides. Like this, she backed across the border all the way to the boulders. There she climbed on the rocks, where no prints could be recorded, and hopped from rock to rock until she ran out of granite.

  Moving west again, Promise avoided the paths. She moved across open grazing lands that would not remember prints, high stepped through tall grasses to prevent a trail, and avoided sandy soil unless it was to walk backward and barefoot again. She trod through no brush, broke no twigs, stirred no scent from flowers and herbs, the antitracking tricks of the poachers.

  With dawn two hours away, she reached the water hole. The animals knew she was coming, heads were up and awaiting. The hyenas were gone; perhaps they’d followed her to the rhino and were the first to feast. The female lions still lounged above the bank. The elephant mother and child had been joined by a great tusked bull who stood with the baby in the shallows. A tall kudu watched Promise with ears straight out, wary and ready to bolt.

  Five strides from the water, Promise dropped to her knees. She shrugged the rifle off her back. She tucked Juma’s money under the weight of the gun. With the panga she dug a hole in the soft ground. The animals watched, and she watched them.

  When the hole was deep enough to reach in up to her elbow, Promise tugged the black tunic over her head and stripped off her pants. She shoved the bloody clothes into the little pit, then covered them. She tamped the earth down, then eased naked into the pool.

  In the dark, Promise cupped water over her hips and small breasts. She splashed the shore to blend in the hole she’d dug. The bull elephant took this as play and sprayed the youngster before him. The kudu trotted off.

  Promise washed away the dead rhino. She scrubbed her hair and under her nails. The brown water dissolved the flaky blood and cooled her, but saddened her more; with the blood gone, with her clothes buried and tracks disguised, the evidence of what she’d done was left solely in her heart. The burden there seemed greatest.

  Promise stood in the water, dripping. On the opposite bank a lioness yawned and eyed her. How could she go back to the rangers with this guilt? She might as well have kept the blood on her face. The lioness stared at her, unmoving. Promise let the big cat’s remorseless gaze harden her own heart. The elephants ignored her, playing, and this felt like forgiveness. The stars were distant and small, the night vast, and the untamed bush itself seemed to take no notice.

  For another moonless hour she slipped through the bush, naked but for her sandals, machete, rifle, and money. Though Promise hurried, every step was meant to leave either no trace or a misleading one. Her nakedness made her kin with the animals of the Kruger; she was raw like them, she had killed like them. But no creatures made themselves known to her, no birds chirped, no wild dogs barked along her way. Their absence felt like rejection. Promise nodded to the silence as if to say, Fine. She tightened her fingers around Juma’s money. In the northern distance, a tumult erupted, a quick skirmish over the fresh rhino carcass, now discovered. The squabble ended with a wounded shriek, then a hush as the beasts settled down to
tear the corpse apart. Fine. The money in Promise’s fist was the piece she had torn off.

  With an hour of darkness left, she reached her bicycle and the backpack she’d hidden in a jade bush not far from the paved road and river at dusk. She put on her khaki uniform and boots.

  With no traffic, Promise pedaled south in the center of the road, along the river. The breeze felt right again, not against her bare body but only on her face and arms. Her cap and high-laced boots, the bicycle, and the Kruger-ranger patch on her shoulder all signaled her return. Soon she’d be rid of the wad of cash in her backpack.

  Promise rode under the rising curtain of night. The first violet stains of sunrise inked the eastern sky as she braked and carried the bike off the road. She stashed it in a hedge of thorns, left the rifle and backpack, too, and took only the panga.

  She walked a hundred meters into the bush, into an open space lumpy with rounded mounds of clay, some as tall as she. Promise bent close to the ground, searching in the pallid light. Quickly she found the spoor. Promise knelt to the few sausage-shaped droppings. Breaking one open, she flicked at the insides to reveal the undigested heads of termites and ants. The dung was warm against her lips.

  On the edge of the field, a copse of prickly pear cacti twisted out of the ground. Promise squatted near the needles to pluck a fruit. With the machete she carved away the spiny skin to slice the green flesh into quarters, then she swallowed the moisture and pulp. She did not keep watch on the field of termite mounds but shut her eyes and listened.

  Sleep lurked close behind her eyelids. The adrenaline, the struggle and blood of the long night, Juma and his poachers had all left her drained. Promise wavered on her heels but caught herself with a hand to the ground. She opened her eyes.

  The aardvark snuffled like a pig. Noiselessly, Promise moved from behind the cacti to watch the ungainly creature amble to one of the colonies. The beast stopped at the base, sniffed around it, and with its foreclaws began to dig, flinging dirt past its big hind legs. Promise took her panga in hand but held back to let the aardvark burrow deeper and fix its attention.

  The aardvark was an odd-looking beast, with jackrabbit ears, a swinish snout, and the small, dim eyes of a nocturnal feeder; it was muscular but slow, a digging machine with powerful, clawed paws. It scratched in the earth the way a medicine man did for roots, so the tribesmen held the aardvark to be a symbol of healing, even magic, a sangoma.

  With amazing speed the grunting creature dug a burrow, then drove in its long snout. It snuffled and inhaled termites by the thousands, chewing lustily. Pale ribbons streaked the eastern sky; the sun would be full up soon, and the aardvark would go to some underground lair. Beyond the schedule of the beast, Promise was in no rush. She could not return to the Shingwedzi ranger station until afternoon, to play out the lie that she’d spent her day in the township with her grandparents.

  Promise crept up from behind, moving slowly to raise no alarm. One of the aardvark’s ears cocked backward, aware, but the creature kept its nose at the trough. Promise inched closer, crossing into the shower of red dirt the beast heaved behind itself as it raided deeper into the termites’ caverns.

  Coming alongside, she raised the panga high; the bottom of the handle stuck out from her fist.

  Like the dying rhino when Promise was beside him, the aardvark knew only one thing. The rhino ran, and this beast ate. Promise hammered the knob of the machete’s handle down on the skull between the long ears. The aardvark, stunned, buckled its back legs and tried to reel its face out of the hole, but Promise banged the panga down again. The beast dropped to its belly, nose still jammed in the earth. Promise clubbed it one more time. She stood erect while the termites, suddenly saved, crawled up and over the beast’s inert face.

  Chapter 2

  The loadmaster shouted, “Door!” He extended his arms together and opened them like an alligator’s mouth. When he was sure the pararescuemen saw him, he punched the red button, and the ramp of the HC-130 began to lower.

  The ramp’s action vibrated in the steel deck under LB’s boots. White daylight and humid air flooded around the gate’s edges, and the noise in the cargo bay spiked. Blue sky, softened by ten thousand feet of altitude, filled the opening.

  Seated by himself in one of the mesh seats across from LB, Wally shouted something into the satellite phone at his lips, a call he’d been on for five minutes. Wally nodded to something he heard, shouted into the mic again, then came out of the seat to drop one knee to the floor.

  The big plane shuddered over a rough patch of air. Wally, in full jump gear like the rest of the team, braced against the fuselage. LB glanced away, then back, for lack of anything else to watch in the empty cargo bay except for the loadmaster and the three dozing PJs.

  Wally got to his feet. He curled a finger for LB to come over to him. LB mimicked the gesture in return: No, you come over here. Wally upped the game, twirling his whole hand to insist LB cross to him.

  LB nudged Doc in the seat beside him, making Doc lift his head. LB shrugged, as if to say to Doc, Why can’t he walk over here? Doc, one of the oldest hands in the unit, along with LB, raised his eyes before closing them again, not amused by yet another match of wills between LB and Wally.

  LB barely heard himself say, “Okay.”

  Standing to give himself room, he rotated his arm in circles as though waving to someone from a great distance.

  Tall, slender Wally slid on his sunglasses. He aimed a finger at LB across the cargo bay, then stabbed the digit straight down in front of him. Come here.

  Covering the short distance across the deck, LB made a show of each shuffling stride. He didn’t like standing with the hundred-pound burden of his chute, med ruck, body armor, and weapons; he had a tweaky back, the result of weighing two hundred pounds and standing five nine. He’d never done yoga, never stretched, and hated running. Instead, LB lifted weights and ate as much meat as the air force could provide. He collapsed weightily in a mesh seat. Wally followed every petulant move with the ovals of his reflecting shades.

  LB knocked the back of his helmet against the fuselage. He mouthed the word. “What?”

  Wally shouted, “I thought you’d like to know.” “What?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  LB gagged as much as laughed. He would have doubled over, but the ruck in his lap stopped him.

  “Is that what you were doing just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You asked Torres to marry you on the radio?”

  Torres was the director of the PRCC, the Personnel Recovery Coordination Center, at Camp Lemonnier up in Djibouti. She was Latin pretty and air force smart. Torres sent the camp’s Guardian Angels—pararescue jumpers, called PJs, including LB—and their combat-rescue officers, or CROs, like Wally, on missions. She and Wally had been doing touch-and-goes for a year now.

  “I’ll do it again when we get back. But yes.”

  “On your knee?”

  “Alright.”

  “And she said yes? Not ‘Screw you, you’re in a plane’?”

  Wally tried to wave him off. “Okay.”

  LB pushed out of the mesh seat, struggling to his feet. He considered motioning to the loadmaster, a tall, lean boy in a green flight suit and headphones, but LB didn’t know the airman’s name and couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t be sympathetic to Wally. LB could wake young Jamie, but the kid would only clap Wally on the back because he was nice. Quincy, the giant, didn’t care about much except cars, cattle, guns, and rescues; he wouldn’t see the humor. Doc had a wife and four daughters back in Vegas. And a female dog. He could go either way depending on what kind of phone call he’d last gotten from home. LB grew almost frantic for an ally.

  Before he could decide what play to make, the loadmaster dragged his hand across the lined-up knees of three napping PJs, rousing them. Above the open cargo bay door, the scarlet ready light blazed, the five-minute call. Wally, tall and effortlessly balanced, brushed past LB.

  The te
am formed up, facing the open sky. LB, the jumpmaster, shouldered his way to the front. Digging under Wally’s skin would have to wait. LB stashed the urge and concentrated on the job at hand.

  Standing before the team, LB bent at the waist, right hand in front, palm up, and rotated his shoulders, the signal that he was giving the team their final report on the wind. He stood to shout over the noise in the bay. “Winds seven!” He held up seven fingers. LB slashed his arm across his body, left to right, the sign for gusts. Again he shouted. “Gusting ten!” He held up all ten fingers.

  He fingered the radio tucked in his web vest, made sure it was set to the team freq, depressed the “Push to Talk” button clipped to his chest, then pointed at Wally.

  “Juggler, you copy?”

  Wally’s voice crackled in LB’s earpiece.

  “Five by five. How me?”

  “Five by five.”

  Each PJ made the same radio check. LB inched forward to peer down past the lowered gate. From this height, the rounded horizon made a gentle world, a green and manicured place.

  A new voice sizzled in LB’s ear, right on time.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

  The voice stayed under control despite the apparent urgency of the message, a pilot’s trained tone.

  “F-16 flameout. Ejecting at five thousand feet, bravo one-two sector. Minor injuries. Hostiles on ground. Require immediate evac.”

  LB revolved to his gathered team. Wally scowled behind his sunglasses. Jamie, Doc, and Quincy all pointed at LB, the unbroken sky at his backside. Showtime.

  From the cockpit, the pilot answered the F-16 pilot’s distress call.

  “F-16, this is Air Rescue HC-130 Kingsman 1. We are airborne. Guardian Angels are en route to your location. We are in your sector. Keep your head down.”

  LB turned to face the whipping air, the plane’s huge tail fins overhead, and the roar of four propellers. He lowered his goggles, did one deep squat to shrug all his gear into place, then the green light flicked on. He ran three steps, because there was no fourth.