A thorn snicked LB’s battle dress tunic, then his neck.
He groused. “Is there anything, anything, about this op I’m not going to hate?”
They waited, bating their breaths to listen to the living land around them. The wildness of the place hushed itself; LB half expected to hear monkeys and elephants, roars like a zoo. But the Kruger did nothing to welcome or frighten them. And it probably wasn’t the Kruger that had killed the man lying next to the drone.
For long, tense minutes, LB and Wally crouched side by side. LB kept watch on everything down the short length of the nine millimeter’s barrel: the drone, the corpse, the savanna, and the spiny bushes where he hid.
Night fell slowly. With the falling light, the animals of the bush began their calls, grunts, and shrieks. The land was flat, made up of expansive wastes and low vegetation with little to slow the sounds. LB couldn’t gauge the distance of any of it; a howl could be unnervingly close or a mile away. To make matters worse, a body lay close by. LB had no idea how long it would take for something with sizeable teeth and claws to get a whiff and head this way. He handed the Beretta off to Wally, his hands tired of squeezing it.
Wally kept vigil with the gun while LB clipped the NVGs to both their helmets.
Wally whispered, “You think it’s clear?”
“Dunno. Clear of what?”
Wally shifted his boots under him to rise with the Beretta.
“Okay. Stay here.”
LB clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“Whoa. Where’re you going?”
“Torres wants a report. Time’s up.”
LB pulled down hard enough to buckle Wally’s effort to stand.
“We go together. You check the drone. I’ll do the corpse.”
Wally dipped his head at that. LB climbed to his knees, muttering.
“Torres’ll kill me if I come back without you.”
Wally jabbed him with an elbow, then slid the light-amplifying goggles down over his eyes. Behind the pistol, he eased away from the bush.
LB’s first steps into the open, unarmed, were disconcerting.
“If something comes to eat me, shoot it.”
“I’ll just shoot you and keep it busy.”
LB brought down his own NVGs. The lenses used the poor light from the emerging stars and the last shreds of sunlight to turn the world emerald and black. Every waving leaf, the twinkling sky, if anything moved in his field of vision, the sharp relief in the goggles would let LB see it.
He and Wally moved cautiously from behind cover. If whoever killed the man was waiting for them, the killer was ready, hidden, and had the first shot. If there were animals about, LB had no clue what to do about that.
Wally split off to the wreckage. LB approached the corpse.
The man lay on his back. A single bullet in the chest had knocked him backward. LB whirled to look in all directions through the NVGs a last time, then lifted them.
The body was that of a young black man, a Kruger ranger in an olive drab uniform, shorts, boots, and high green socks. Blood ringed his mouth. The chest shot was clean, center cut between the lungs, likely through the pulmonary artery. LB didn’t bother checking for a pulse.
One round, no other marks. The kid had no weapon near him. Maybe an execution up close. Maybe a long shot from a high-powered rifle. The ranger’s eyes were shut; his stained mouth hung open. LB had nothing to drape over him. He disliked leaving a body uncovered. It lacked finality. This mission, like so many over the years, was not ending with a death but just starting.
The young ranger had found the downed drone. It looked like someone had killed him for that. Why?
LB joined Wally beside the wreck. Wally didn’t lift his NVGs to talk.
“What have you got?”
LB related his facts, guesses, and questions about the ranger.
“What’s up with the drone?”
Like LB, Wally swept the wan landscape one last time with the NVGs before lifting them.
“Obviously we’re not the first ones here.”
“Nope.”
“I mean it’s worse.”
“Than a dead guy?”
“The missile’s gone.”
The news sent LB staggering, not backward but toward the drone. He stooped under the wing jammed into the dirt to see for himself. One launcher lay on the ground, badly dinged and empty. The pylon on the intact wing ended without a launcher, just a rail and four half-inch bolts in the dirt.
A jagged hole in the drone’s belly showed where the Denel’s electronic eye had been plucked out.
Without his sunglasses, the concern on Wally’s features was plain. His sockets crinkled at the edges, flexing in thought. The ebbing light drained the blue of his eyes to slate gray. Wally looked worried, something rare for his sunny, can-do disposition. That was why he wore the shades, to mask these gloomier moments.
LB shook his head at the night. The darkened Kruger seemed steeped in all kinds of natural dangers. The two of them had jumped into the vast turf of thousands of wild and uncaged animals. Suddenly, the beasts of the Kruger finally let the pair hear them. A wail drifted in from far away, then a screech, a trumpeting bark, and then one roar, a deep thunder from a big throat that couldn’t be reduced to a point on the compass but seemed to come from half the black world. Could the animals smell Wally and LB’s presence? Had the scent of the ranger’s corpse started to make the rounds; was that roar the dinner bell?
“Wally?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the new plan? We got no missile, no way to blow this thing. And no idea where it went.”
Wally squatted down to his haunches, elbows on his knees, to think as team leader and map out the next step.
“Well?”
“Not a clue. You?”
“What’s less than not a clue?”
“You.”
LB squatted next to him.
“Good. I’m glad you packed your grudge. ’Cause, you know, I left mine on the plane. Don’t want to be out here in the fucking wilderness without a grudge. Now you want to be a pro and figure out what we do next? Or you want to chew me out again?”
Wally scooped some dirt from between his boots. He jiggled it in his fist, then tossed it away like dice.
“You and I been together a long time. Almost twenty years.”
“And?”
“The first time I ever saw you at the Academy, you were everything I wanted to be. Smart, tough, a leader.”
“You were a better jumper.”
“Still am. But I patterned my career after you. Rangers, then the Guardian Angels. You were my hero.”
“Still am.”
“No. You need to get this. You’re not anymore. Torres is. She’s everything I want to be now. Loving, kind, strong. We’re still a team, you and me, and the guys. We’re still brothers. But not like it used to be. You’re not my only team. I’ve come to understand something. It’s hard to say, but I’m sad for you. We’re all you’ve got.”
LB sat with this, respecting Wally’s need to express it, the way a good teammate ought to. Then he rose to walk away and not hear any more. Before he did, he patted Wally’s shoulder. Wally hadn’t said a word LB didn’t know. Long ago he’d accepted it as the price of twenty-two years in the military—much of that spent with lives in his hands, men he’d led, killed, or rescued—and he wanted to ask Wally where to find the ability, the will, the dedication, the time to do something else? How do you bring a woman close and do your best by her, when your best has already been spent on those lives?
Wally gazed up at him with his often-hidden eyes. Wally seemed firm and sorry about what he’d said. But Wally never gave less than his best. Lucky Torres.
Wally got to his feet. Taller, leaner, younger, happier Officer Wally.
“I’m going to get on the sat phone, call it in. See what they want us to do.”
LB let the page turn back to the job. There’d be time later, when they weren’t surrou
nded by a mission, to talk more. Or not.
“Get a fix on where Smokey is. He needs to get here fast and bring a lot of shit. Explosives. I want a weapon.”
LB patted his stomach.
“And make sure he’s got that picnic basket. I’m starving.”
The missing missile changed everything. LB and Wally had no way to destroy the evidence of the drone, no way to track the stolen Hellfire. Smokey or somebody had to bring them the tools and intel to do the job. Or Wally and LB had to leave. And they had no way to do that, either.
Wally dug the sat phone out of his jump ruck.
“What are you going to do?”
LB turned toward the corpse. “Figure out some way to cover up the body. Rocks or something.”
Wally kept the Beretta. He faced the darkness away from LB, as if the sat call to Torres was somehow private. This was LB’s fault—he’d made Wally think that way.
LB knelt beside the dead ranger. He pushed the boy’s mouth closed to keep it from filling with grit or stones. The ranger hadn’t stiffened, he’d only been dead an hour or two.
The voices of the Kruger’s animals made the darkness lush. LB lowered his NVGs to better see the ground and search for stones. He’d build a small tomb of stacked stones around the body, then fill it in with dirt. Without a shovel that was the best he could do until the body was reclaimed. He couldn’t use a chute, their orders were to stay out of sight; a big piece of silk would be a dead giveaway.
LB found the first rock, the size of his foot. He lifted with his legs and turned back to the dead ranger.
Fifty feet away, emerald against the ebony air, motionless as a tree but unmistakable, stood a person, a long blade hanging from the figure’s waist.
“Leave him alone.” The voice belonged to a girl.
LB dropped the rock. He lifted the NVGs.
“Hey. Hi. Who are you?”
“Leave him alone.”
She was small, like the dead boy, but in the dark that was all LB could tell. He took a step toward her. She retreated to keep her distance.
“Okay, okay. Wally.”
Waiting for the signal to come up, Wally’s face glowed from the buttons on the sat phone, making his head look eerie and suspended. He turned at LB’s call. Spotting the girl, he lowered the phone then advanced a few steps. She recoiled. Wally held up a hand.
“Whoa. Hey. We’re Americans. It’s alright.”
She stopped backing away.
“It was your missile.”
Wally spoke too fast; he took more strides her way.
“How do you know that? Who are you? Stay right there.”
She said only, “No.”
“We want to ask you some questions.”
LB raised both arms to draw her attention from Wally.
“Look, it’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you. Just . . .”
She took off.
LB lowered his NVGs and lit out after her. Wally followed. The girl’s green image dashed for the hole in the hedge.
Vexed and sprinting, LB shouted over his shoulder, “Where’d you learn to talk to women?”
He outran Wally’s jumbled curse.
LB reached the gap in the scrub and rushed through. Wally followed, gaining, a faster, long-legged runner. Twenty yards ahead, the girl zigzagged through the brush and low-hanging trees. LB worried if they chased her too far into the night, they’d lose their way back to the drone, even with NVGs. The girl slowed to look back at her pursuers. Rather than dodging the next thick hedge in front of her, she dove straight into it. She disappeared among the branches and leaves shivering in her wake.
LB sped up, figuring to catch her now. He lowered his shoulder to thrust through the hedge and gain on her. Wally, running flat out beside him, crossed his arms to ram into the hedge hard and fast, too.
LB curled an elbow around his face to protect himself. He hit the hedge at the same spot the girl did.
He crashed forward just two more strides before he was stopped in his tracks. His uniform and skin were snared on the longest, sharpest thorns LB had ever seen or imagined. Wally hung next to him, dangling in the spines like a marionette.
The girl had vanished.
Chapter 13
Promise crossed both forearms to protect her face, turned sideways, then hit the acacia hedge at full speed.
Driving through the barbs, she swung her shoulders and torso to keep the thorns from gripping her clothes. A hundred sharp points nicked her bare arms and knees, but she pushed deeper through the nipping branches until she broke free.
Without breaking stride, Promise ran ten more meters, then jumped feetfirst into the shoulders-wide mouth of an aardvark hole. She’d found the hiding place after spotting the strangers’ parachutes descending from high in the pink dusk. The anteater that dug the hole wasn’t home, or the tunnel would have been closed behind him. Promise had thrown in pebbles to be sure no leopard or mamba, lion, or python was napping inside. Skidding on her rump, she slid down the tunnel into the larger den. In the cool dirt darkness she held her breath, smarting over her many small stabs and cuts.
Above, the two Americans crashed into the hedge. The barbs held them fast; she knew this by their curses.
Promise listened to them thrash against the branches and thorns, and when she was sure they’d been snagged, she crawled out of the aardvark hole.
She approached the hedge warily. Spreading the branches apart, she poked her head inside. In the dim light, without an early moon and with only the first stars, she made out the two figures snared in the acacia like flies on a web. The Americans’ every move added to the bush’s grasp on them and the volume of their complaints. Promise watched them struggle. One of them, the stouter of the two, took this as a taunt.
“You think this is funny? It fucking hurts.”
The other man, tall and lanky, held a pistol. He made a show of forcing his gun-bearing hand through the prickles to tuck the weapon inside his belt. He showed her, with a grunt from more pierced skin, his empty hands.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry if we scared you.”
“Alright.”
“We need to talk to you.”
“Go ahead.”
The heavyset one ran out of patience and in a temper raged against the thorns. He planted his feet and leaned forward, as if into a gale, trying to bull through. He did nothing but impale himself more.
Promise made shushing sounds, the way she might calm a calf. The soldier stopped fighting.
“It’s a buffalo-hook thorn. The Afrikaaners call it wag-n-bietjie. It means the wait-a-bit.”
The fighter exhaled and sagged. “No shit.”
The tall one spoke, a less frantic man.
“The way you moved through this stuff. It was amazing. You’re a Kruger ranger.”
“Yes.”
The stout one interrupted. “Can we talk outside the shrubbery?”
“You want to get out?”
“Fucking yes!”
“I have questions.”
The tall soldier told his comrade to be quiet, while still looking at Promise through the thorns and darkness.
“We’ve got questions, too. I swear, we won’t hurt you. I need you to believe me.”
“I can see that.”
“Please, ma’am. How do we get out of this bush?”
“If you chase me, I will run again. You won’t catch me.”
“Not a problem.”
Promise explained how to break the hold of the thorns by twisting away, not barging straight into them. The tall one turned his body as she showed him; he slipped through with better results than the other. That one was too broad shouldered and thick in the legs, impatient and agitated. The tall American emerged first from the acacia; his face bore scratches, but no blood had been drawn. Standing before Promise, he made no move for the gun. The second man fought his way out of the bush, kicking and growling. Promise stole a few backward steps, should the Americans be liars.
Both were
big-boned and powerful-looking men. In the night, their uniforms were gray and white camouflage. They wore helmets with goggles attached and vests stuffed with radios. Snapped branches and leaves clung to the shorter one, the thorns had dug deep into his uniform. While the tall soldier spoke to Promise, the short one plucked himself clean.
“I’m Captain Bloom, United States Air Force. This is Master Sergeant DiNardo. You are?”
“Promise.”
DiNardo looked up from shedding the detritus of the bush. The captain smiled, a handsome face.
“That’s a pretty name. Can you tell me what happened? I mean to the other ranger?”
“We need to go back to him. We’ll talk there.”
Promise walked past the Americans, leading them around the hedge to the drone and Wophule and all the questions and answers.
Howls floated over their heads.
“We are not alone in the bush, Captain. Put your hand on your weapon.”
The Americans followed her to the crash site. The captain tried to speak at her back, while the short one muttered he was hungry, but Promise walked on. The bush in darkness was no place to be distracted. She focused on the trail and the night sounds. The two Americans seemed out of place, a little lost and defenseless, an unlikely sense for soldiers. Why would they parachute into such a foreign and severe place, so secret and urgent, with one small weapon, no tools, and no food?
Heading back to the drone and Wophule’s corpse, Promise’s guilt returned and mounted. She’d not realized how good it felt to run away into the bush, even chased by soldiers, until she saw the wreckage again and the boy gray against the earth. She imagined turning away right now, disappearing into another hole; she would live in the veld until she was devoured or forgotten. But she had killed Wophule, and that would run faster than Promise.
Wordless, she walked through the broken hedge, following along the trough dug in the ground by the downed drone. She did this with familiarity, as if it all belonged to her; she had seen it first, had made this crash the worst thing in her life. It was hers more than anyone’s.
Promise walked past the drone to squat beside Wophule. This might have been gruesome for the Americans, but she did not concern herself with that. Wophule was hers, too, and though Promise would not admit to the soldiers what she had done, she sat beside the boy to claim his death.
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