“Shall we go down to see our missile?”
Allyn followed him inside, down wooden steps to a steel door. Juma pushed into a large, dark expanse. He tugged the chain on a bulb to light a room of hard, gray, windowless walls.
Guns lay everywhere, on the concrete floor, leaning against every wall, stacked in piles. The mounds and rows of rifles and pistols, some long-barreled hunters with scope sights, and the machetes all looked like scrap to Allyn. He’d rarely been around firearms; they’d not been part of his youth in the mines or in business later. Nothing in this room called to his hands, none of the dark metal intrigued him. Nothing, except, there in the center of the room, alone on a scarred wooden table as if guarded by all the other weapons, the Hellfire missile.
A path had been cleared to it. Juma motioned Allyn forward.
The Hellfire seemed a model of efficient lethality. Allyn had grown up with explosives, trained as an engineer, and this rocket was designed to a sleek perfection. Four small fins forward, four larger ones framing the propulsion port in the rear, hard, green steel casing, glass face for guidance electronics and camera; the assembly probably weighed a hundred pounds. He’d seen on the news what this hundred pounds could do, such massive destruction with pinpoint accuracy.
Allyn placed both hands on the chilly cylinder. He chose not to speak his initial thought. It would sound silly, and it surprised him that on first seeing the rocket he considered buying it himself. He’d pay a fair price to Juma and sneak it home to Jo’burg to put in his own basement. Allyn had never been this close to anything more powerful. No machine or number in a bank, no ship or structure, he’d been near nothing the Hellfire could not ruin. But it wasn’t ruin that attracted him; Allyn was not a destroyer. He walked his fingers down the missile like a spider. This was a thing of great worth and purpose. Owning it would be purposeless and valueless. Perhaps that was the appeal, doing something special and perverse, like keeping a tiger. Juma was the master of wicked Macandezulo. It would feel like that.
Juma loomed closer, impinging on him.
“What can we get for it, shamwari?”
Allyn bit back a rebuke. Juma had no romance for the missile or what it could do for them, or to them. The Hellfire was just another item to be sold.
Allyn patted the rocket, wishing it good-bye with regret. He turned for the door, looking past the heaps of niggling guns, little things any man could possess.
“I’ll make a call.”
Chapter 22
Neels and Karskie hauled the wheels and landing struts from the long crash rut. Promise was left aside to watch, as if she couldn’t be trusted even to drag things. The Americans used all twenty sticks of dynamite, coating the drone with tape and explosives, stuffing one stick each into their parachute containers. When they were done the busted vehicle and collected bits looked pitiful and sorry, naively caught up in something beyond themselves, sentenced to die for it.
Neels helped the captain and LB with the fuses, using a big knife from his boot to cut matching lengths, then securing them to the sticks. He seemed to know what he was doing to make them detonate at the same time. Karskie stood to the side like Promise but not near her.
A band of curious eland appeared through the brush fifty meters off, eyeing the scene with a swishing detachment. Promise thought to warn them away, what a ranger would do, but she did not.
The Americans and Neels webbed the drone in gray strands of fuse that funneled down to one igniting piece. Promise grew thirsty, she’d not had water since the night. She called to Karskie, but the big boy said she’d have to ask Neels. Promise imagined Neels shooting her in the back if she wandered into the bush to find a drink.
She could run, lose herself easily in the Kruger. The old man wouldn’t catch her, she had a dozen ways to vanish before he could get her in his sights. Even a superb tracker like Neels would lose ground to her. Promise could survive for days on her own.
Then what? After she’d escaped? She couldn’t go home to Hazy View and Gogo or curl in her cot at the ranger station. She would never again ride with Wophule. Everything she’d ever held close or hoped for had fled when Neels walked out of the dark last night. No, when the drone crashed in Shingwedzi. No, not then. Before, when Gogo asked Juma for money.
No. No. Nothing and no one else. Only Promise. She’d made the choices. Others were poor, had families and dreams, had love like Wophule, but they didn’t take the horn, didn’t call the devil, didn’t call Juma. Promise had left the path of her old life for a terrible and dark trail. It was leading to the one place she’d never wanted to be. On her own.
She saw herself standing inside the web of fuses, all lit and sparking around her, closing in to remove all evidence of her, too.
Chapter 23
Neels huddled with the Americans and Karskie. The girl was left alone. Neels pointed into the bush to make his point.
“As soon as it blows, we leave. I’ve got a two-man patrol out here somewhere in Shingwedzi. When they hear the blast, they’ll come straightaway. I assume you don’t want them to find two Americans standing next to a dead ranger’s grave and a bloody great hole in the ground.”
The captain took a satellite phone from his vest.
“Okay. Give me a few minutes.”
He walked off. The thick, little sergeant indicated the girl.
“What about her?”
“She can’t go with us.”
The sergeant, as if by instinct, slid sideways, blocking Neel’s path to Promise.
“No.”
“If I was going to shoot the little moer, I would have done it. But understand me, Sergeant. I’ve shot men for less. Karskie’s going to take her back.”
The big boy tossed up his hands, defeated before he started.
“No, I’m not.”
Karskie launched into his reasons. Sending her with him would be the same as turning her loose. He could never chase her down, couldn’t shoot her if she made a break. Even if Neels bound her hands, Karskie couldn’t do it.
Neels crossed his arms at the sergeant.
“You want to tell me your opinion?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tie her up, leave her here. When your team shows up, have them take her back.”
“They’ll see Wophule’s grave, and bits of the blasted drone all over the place. She’ll have to lie. If my boys believe her, maybe. She’s a shitty liar. I wouldn’t bet on her chances, they don’t like poachers any more than me. They don’t like dead rangers. And that’s only if something big doesn’t come sniffing around to find her first.”
“Then leave Karskie with her. He’s got a gun.”
Neels laughed at the suggestion. Karskie ignored the insult and shook his head even more vigorously when the sergeant implored him.
Promise strode their way. Neels’s mouth dried as she approached. She stopped short, letting her voice cover the last of the distance.
“Let me go with you.”
The American opened his mouth to reply. Neels cut him off, pushing in front of him to speak directly to the girl. The sergeant was short and bluff and did not move easily.
“Here’s why you’re not going. You’re done. You know that. I’ll see to it. There’s one place left for you, girl, in the whole world. You want us to take you into Mozambique, to your uncle Juma. So you can run to him.”
“I won’t. I swear.”
“You swear. Kak. What have you sworn? Tell me.”
“To kill the man who shot Wophule.”
Neels inched closer to the girl, inside arm’s reach. He could strike her, she knew it, but she held her ground. He leaned in, his nose a hand’s breadth from hers.
Could she do it? Kill a man? The rhino she’d taken down had been a great beast, a bull, dropped by a machete. He kept his voice low.
“Will you, now?”
She whispered, “Yes.”
“What would you do if you were me? Tell me the truth, girl.”
“I’m a poacher. Wophule is dead
.”
“Ja.”
“I’d shoot me.”
“That’s right. But the Yanks over there won’t let me. So now what?”
Promise extended her hand in the small space between them, for Neels to take it.
“I won’t run.”
“And what about your great-uncle Juma? You going to stop me from killing him?”
The girl could have been carved, so rigid was her expression and motionless her hand. Her black eyes, close to Neels, seemed to lose focus only for a moment, then softened on him. He’d seen this look in the Selous Scouts, in Angola and the Kruger, on the faces of the dying and the killers, a hardness that leavened into acceptance, always among the ones who sensed death was coming.
“No.”
Neels gripped her small hand in a forceful, private bargain.
He turned to the short sergeant.
“She goes.”
They waited for the captain to finish his satellite call. The rangy officer walked a small circle, lapping several times; he worked his free hand before him as if to brush away cobwebs. He seemed unhappy with the person on the line and could not sway the conversation. He did not glance back at Neels or his sergeant.
Promise sat beside Wophule, tending the boy’s rock pile before leaving it behind. She filled in gaps where Neels had disturbed it with more sand and stone. The girl would never see her partner again, nor the Kruger, not from jail or her own grave, wherever today led her.
Karskie returned to the hedge, the place where he’d slept the night. He lay down again under the thorns.
The stocky sergeant could not stand quietly on his own. He fidgeted, checked the fuses in the dynamite, examined the Belgian rifle, ate more PowerBars. He watched his captain go round and round on the phone. He sweated badly, mopping and cursing. Neels had been like that once, impatient for the next bit of action, popping like water on a hot pan. Neels had been young and eager, proving himself. Years of reading the spoor of men and creatures had taught him to pace himself; there could be no impatient trackers. But this sergeant was not a young man. What was he proving?
The sergeant caught Neels looking at him. He walked over, as if Neels was the last item left to distract him. The man seemed uncomfortable, as did his captain, both out of place in the bush. Or perhaps their awkwardness came from being in military camouflage without any insignia at all, like a dress-up game.
The sergeant appraised Neels with a confidence Neels read as false.
“You look like you served.”
“A while ago. The Border War.”
“You married? Got a family?”
This would have felt intrusive if it had not been rote, this stumpy sergeant tossing off routine questions between strangers. Neels was expected to answer yes or no, then ask, “What about you, friend?” Or maybe explain that his wife had left him, then they might bond over shared miseries, planning out the beers they’d blather over later. Neels measured the American for a punch and imagined how nice it might feel to do it with no explanation. He crammed his lips together to shut his own mouth, listen to his own breath whistling in his nostrils. Neels walked away. The American wisely said nothing behind him.
Chapter 24
LB threw rocks as far as he could into the bush. He had to do something, move; everyone was occupied but him. Promise hunkered beside the grave, pouring grit on it. Wally argued on the sat phone with Torres, big Karskie had gone back to sleep, and old ranger Neels stalked around, seething at something in his head. LB aimed a stone at a gnarled tree to see if he could scare something out of it, a monkey or whatever, but got nothing. The sun rose fast here in Africa, and the scrubby Kruger, as far as he could see, was going to offer very little today, not shade or water, just dust, brush, and thorns.
The gray drone balanced on its nose and one wing, dull in the rising light, strapped to dynamite and condemned. LB threw another rock at the tree and thought about throwing one at the drone just to shake everybody up. He imagined lighting the fuses but not waking Karskie, just to see how high the fat boy would jump from sleep when the drone blew. Wally showed no signs of winding up his discussion with Torres, the ranger girl looked lost, and Neels snarled into the air, conducting some angry one-sided conversation. LB picked Karskie.
He moseyed over and sat close, waking the boy. Karskie snorted, then wiped his knuckles in his eyes as he came upright.
“We ready?”
LB shook this off.
“Wally’s still working out our orders. Tell me something.”
“If I can.”
“What’s going on?”
“Specifically?”
“With rhino horn. All this killing and money. I mean, in a word, fuck.”
Karskie chewed on his thoughts, waking, considering where to begin. Right off, LB saw he’d asked a bigger question than he’d realized.
“First, understand that for a thousand years, traditional healers all over South Asia have said that horn would give energy, strength, that sort of thing.”
“Supposed to be some kind of aphrodisiac.”
“That was the big myth for a long time. Powdered and drank with water. No one believes it anymore. Now the healers just use it for hangovers.”
“Tell me it doesn’t work.”
“Of course it doesn’t work. A horn’s nothing but keratinized fiber. Hair, like a horse’s hoof. It’s got zero medical properties.”
“How bad is it? How many rhinos are you losing?”
“Over a thousand a year, and that’s just in the Kruger. In the world, there’s maybe five thousand wild black rhinos left, twenty thousand white rhinos. Both have already been declared extinct.”
“Extinct? Come on.”
“The deaths are greater than the birthrate. If we can’t get a handle on the poachers soon, yeah. Extinct.”
“This isn’t about hangovers.”
“No.”
“Who’s buying it?”
“Most of the horn goes to Vietnam. Then China, Korea, Indonesia.”
“What the hell for?”
“There’s a lot of money in Asia these days. The economies in China and Vietnam especially have gotten red-hot. That’s made a rising class of rich, called the new dragons. They spoil their kids with horn, make it a graduation present. They mix it with Cialis and Viagra and Red Bull. They hang horns in their houses to show off their money. It’s a prestige thing, like a Lamborghini or a Rolex. A sign of untouchability. China and Vietnam don’t have rhinos of their own. Why would they care about someone else’s?”
At least a car and a watch, even at obscene prices, did something useful. But to slaughter a rhino, decimate a species, for a worthless energy drink or a trinket was brutally senseless and selfish. LB had never seen a real rhino, not even in a zoo, and now he very much wanted to, particularly if they might be gone in a few years. He scanned the bush that stretched away in sere, ropey shapes, hoping for a hulking, prehistoric, horned beast prancing in the distance. Far off, a few heads popped above a line of trees, just grazing giraffes. LB considered asking Karskie what the chances of seeing a rhino were but didn’t want to sound like a child or a tourist. He closed his mouth but kept open the hope.
He reached into Karskie’s pack for a water bottle, partly to wash away the imagined bitter taste of powdered horn. Near the drone, Neels stared off into the plains with hands balled at his hips, quieter than he’d been, as if watching something disappear. Promise hid her face in her dark hands. Wally had begun to nod into the sat phone, finally hearing words he could agree with. LB wanted to know more from Karskie about the kind of men—and women, like sad Promise—they were about to go after.
“Tell me about poachers.”
Karskie knew plenty.
Poachers crossed in waves into the Kruger, hundreds per week, all from bleak lives, equipped with machetes, sacks, and hunting rifles stolen from farmhouses. Most of them snuck over the porous border with Mozambique, while the rest came from neighboring townships inside South Africa.
The poachers didn’t work independently; large-mammal poaching was an organized crime, backed by international syndicates and big, illicit money.
A typical ring was set up in vertical tiers. It started at the bottom with a triggerman and his team. These were poor villagers who killed the rhino, then cut the horns off whole, with flesh attached to show the horns were fresh. To get the entire horn, including the root below the skin, the poachers had to hack deep into the rhinos’ nasal cavities. If the rhino was still alive when they started cutting, this finished it.
LB gestured to Promise.
“That what she did?”
“Yeah.”
“Geez.”
Karskie continued. The shooter and his team hand delivered the horns to the next level up. This was their only connection to the syndicate, the transporter, the one who recruited them in their villages and was responsible for paying them. The transporter disguised the horn in legitimate shipments to Hong Kong, Hanoi, Jakarta, any number of Asian ports. Sometimes, cargo ships even waited offshore from Maputo, Cape Town, or Port Elizabeth to trade the transporter a load of drugs or diamonds directly for the horns.
LB said, “That’s this guy Juma.”
“He’s the second tier in this syndicate, yeah.”
“Who’s the third?”
“The financiers. These are the big dogs. Transporters are hard enough to catch, but a level three is almost impossible to nail. This guy moves the money. He lives in Jo’burg or Cape Town. He’s got offshore accounts in Dubai and Switzerland.”
The money disappeared into a maze of businesses. It came out as dividends and capital gains, clean and laundered.
The last tier, level four, were the murky figures who received the shipments in Asia, the black marketers. In their hands, the horn was chopped into slabs or powdered, whatever the local market demanded, then sold to the end users. For the past decade, the street price for horn had outpaced pure cocaine, doubled gold, and risen as rhinos became scarcer.
Public campaigns had been mounted all over Asia, trying to raise awareness that their folly was destroying the world’s greatest wild animals. The result was that the number of rhinos and elephants killed each year had exploded.
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