The Killing Game

by Anderson, Toni

  Isolation pressed down on her shoulders. All she had was an estranged father and a grandfather she hadn’t visited in two long years.

  Energetic clouds boiled over the top of the mountains. A spring storm was building, but it was nothing to the growing sense of unease that filled her when she thought of someone lining up her cats in the crosshairs of a hunting scope.

  ***

  Two hours later the sun was sinking into the west. Desperation and the need to hurry pulsed through her blood and made her head pound with frustration. The van got stuck twice but they’d managed to push free of the freshly thawing ground. The shock absorbers were toast. Ahead she could make out the faint outline of pale yurts set deep in the shadow of the mountains.

  A sonorous snore resonated from the back seat where Anji slept. Josef’s cheeks were ruddy from the exertion of driving in such demanding conditions. They’d all taken a turn behind the wheel.

  “Keep going,” she urged as they passed the yurts. To save time they needed to drive as far as they dared toward where she figured Sheba had denned up. Half a mile later they bumped over a rock the size of a football, and her head glanced off the side window. Dammit.

  “I can’t go much further without breaking an axle,” Josef warned.

  “Stop here.” She scrabbled in her bag for a head-torch and flashlight. “We’ll hike the rest of the way.”

  “We go now?” Anji asked groggily, throwing a blanket off his lap.

  “You take the van back to camp and man the radio, Anji.” They needed someone back at base camp in case they ran into trouble. “There’s a cave over this ridge that Sheba used as a den. If the cubs aren’t there—” Her voice wavered. She didn’t want to think what would happen if the cubs weren’t there. The Hindu Kush was no place for babies to wander alone in the dark.

  Even though they’d traveled as fast as they could, it was probably already too late. Swallowing her concern, she jumped out of the van. Josef joined her with a flashlight and radio.

  “Let’s go.” She started along the path, running because it was still twilight and the precious light wouldn’t last long.

  She tripped over a rock and Josef grabbed her arm. “Careful.”

  But she didn’t want to slow down. Despite the icy mountain air, heat poured off her body and her heart thumped like her veins were empty and desperate for blood. So many predators roamed these lands—bears, wolves, lynx, leopards, humans—how could two young cubs survive without their mother’s protection?

  They clambered over large rocks at the top of the ridge and moved cautiously down the steep slope on the other side. The sky shifted to velvet blackness with nothing but ice-encased peaks to cast a faint silvery haze over the lower slopes. Axelle worked her way along a tiny goat path carved in ancient stone. Slippery and dangerous. The narrow beams of their flashlights provided the only clue as to where to put her feet while strung high above a cliff face. She slipped, slamming her knee into a rock. Stones trickled down the mountainside, lending a soundtrack of granite rain to their frantic search.

  Her heart revved. She held tight to Josef’s hand as he hauled her to her feet. “Thanks.”

  “We should go back.” Every crease on his face told her he didn’t want to be here.

  “We’re almost there.” She pulled away. “Two more minutes and we’ll know for sure if the cubs are in that den.”

  Axelle inched along the path, the sound of Josef’s footsteps crunching in her wake. There. A few yards away she saw the narrow opening of the den. There was a tingle between her shoulder blades that made her hesitate, alert for danger.

  They’d rushed here worried the leopard was dead, but if they were wrong, they were approaching the den of a large feline with young cubs. Snow leopards were nowhere near the size of lions or tigers, but she and Josef were balanced on the edge of a cliff face. The leopards could dance down these rocks; she and Josef would smash and burn.

  Josef went to move ahead but she raised her hand to stop him. “Wait.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the boss and I said so.”

  He grunted, less than impressed. She knew how he felt.

  There was no clever way to do this. She inched forward on all fours, the sharp rocks digging into her knees. She held her breath, listening, then shone her beam straight into the mouth of the den. Bare rock reflected back at her.

  Nothing.

  She ran the beam of light across the floor of the entranceway and saw animal bones—standard snow leopard fare. This was definitely a den. She inched forward, Josef close enough she couldn’t turn without knocking into him. A part of her welcomed his body heat in the ever-deepening cold. The other part didn’t like to be reminded about how it felt to touch a man. Memories could be colder than an Afghan winter.

  They peered silently inside the shallow cave. More bones lay scattered on the bare rock and what looked like a bed of fur was nestled against one side of the cave. There were no green reflective retinas or bad-tempered snarls. An outcrop of rock blocked her view of the back of the cave where the cubs might have wandered in search of food or warmth.

  She needed to get in there and take a better look.

  Tension built in her muscles and sweat suddenly slid down the groove of her spine. Her mouth went dry and she forced several swallows to moisten it. Her hands shook. God, the last thing she wanted to do was crawl inside that dark hole and take a look behind that rock. Josef grabbed the belt of her pants before she started inside.

  She dangled like a rag doll. “Put me down, dammit.” She managed to shake off his grip. “I’ve got to see if the cubs are behind that rock.”

  “I’ll go,” he offered.

  “You won’t fit.” Without wasting another moment, she wriggled through the tight opening. Stupid childhood fears would not stop her from doing her job.

  Pressure pounded her immediately and made every pore on her body swell. Memories betrayed her, recollections from a time so long ago the images were more like visions of another lifetime. The silence. The immense weight above her that could shift and crush at any moment.

  Concentrate. She swung the light around but saw nothing except bare rock. Her pulse sped up. Walls pressed in on her. Gnawed bones poked at her palms as she dragged herself across the ground. Dust and dirt flew through the air and she wheezed. The thought of the cave collapsing, of all that mighty rock crushing her, made her mouth parch and her heart drum.

  She breathed in, in, in. Short little breaths that expanded her lungs to bursting. Finally she released the breath and was able to move again. She stuck her hand in the nest of fur. Cold. No remnant of warmth from soft delicate bodies. Josef grabbed tight to her ankle and, despite the bruising pressure, she welcomed the connection.

  She shuffled forward, concentrated on the beam from her headlight as she squeezed through the narrow gap and finally got a look behind the outcrop of rock.

  Dirt, rock, and white bleached bones.

  Disappointment slammed hard into her chest and she swallowed the awful sensation of failure as she shuffled backwards. “Nothing.”

  Josef’s eyes were wide in the glare of her lamp. She brushed the dust and fur that stuck to her clothing, dropping her head to hide the tumult of emotions.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Go back to camp.” There was nothing else to do in the dark. Anger and anguish knotted in her throat.

  Wearily Josef turned and began picking his way along the trail. Axelle wanted to look for the collar but the risk was too high and she hadn’t brought a radio receiver. A harsh wind blew down from the mountain and sliced through the layers of clothing, freezing her to the bone. She hugged herself and trudged onward. The radio squawked and they both startled.

  “I find the cubs. I find the cubs!”

  Anji.

  Axelle grabbed the handset. “What do you mean you found the cubs? Where are you?”

  “They in box in yurt.” It sounded like he was jumping up and down in excitement.


  This didn’t make any sense. The wind gusted in her face as she frowned at the stars.

  “What the hell is going on?” Josef murmured.

  She didn’t know. “Let’s go find out.”

  ***

  Dempsey and his soldiers remained fixed in position as the strangers disappeared over the ridge. To the east, wolves howled, the cries echoing off giant pinnacles that edged the corridor like row upon row of shark’s teeth. Awareness rippled over Dempsey’s skin like hives.

  “What was that was all about?” Baxter whispered into his personal role radio, which connected the four of them over short distances. Dempsey didn’t answer. He sprinted up the craggy face to see what they’d been looking at. It took him less than a minute to climb there and back again.

  “Empty animal den. Some kind of predator,” he told his unit.

  “Two Westerners? In these mountains? In the middle of the bloody night?” Baxter raised a skeptical brow. “They’re either up to no good or they’re bloody loonies.”

  “And yet, here we are, in these mountains, in the middle of the bloody night,” Taz commented dryly.

  “Aye, but we are up to no good,” said Baxter.

  “And you’re a loony,” Cullen added. The Scots’ amusement faded as an oppressive silence swept around them.

  “You really think we’re going to find this guy out here?” Baxter asked dubiously.

  They had eyes in the sky, but in a wilderness this vast?

  “That’s the mission,” Dempsey said, moving out.

  The terrorist they were tracking had connections that gave politicians hard-ons the size of Cleopatra’s Needle. The brass said they were working on intelligence reports that this guy was heading to the Wakhan Corridor through the Boroghill Pass. In Dempsey’s experience “intelligence” was as trustworthy as a three-year-old with a Kalashnikov.

  So far they’d found sweet FA.

  “Tell us again what we’re doing here?” Baxter grumbled.

  “Following orders.” Dempsey hadn’t failed a mission yet—a soldier with his background couldn’t afford failure of any kind, not if he hoped to stay in the Regiment. And although this part of Afghanistan was not a hot zone for terrorist activity, it might be the best hideout for bad guys avoiding the limelight. Men like their quarry who’d supposedly been dead for the past decade.

  “What now?” Taz asked. Tariq Moheek was an Iraqi-born Christian who’d been forced into exile under Saddam Hussein’s regime. His grandmother had stayed in Iraq, enduring Saddam’s iron fist only to be killed in an American bombing raid during the liberation. The guy spoke eight languages and looked like a local—Taz was the best asset the Regiment had when it came to the Middle Eastern crises. Pity they couldn’t clone him.

  Dempsey pulled his pack onto his back and looked at his squad. They wore gear suitable for high-altitude work, no identifying insignia. They were heavily armed, with webbed vests to keep vital supplies close at hand, and they could survive for weeks without resupply, even in this bleak sterile land.

  He didn’t want to be in this high hostile arena for that long. “Let’s follow these clowns and set up OPs.” Observation posts were best constructed during the hours of darkness. “I want to know who they are and what they’re doing.” Good guys or bad? Either way he could use them.

  “What are the chances of finding one old bugger out here when we don’t even know which direction he took off in or if he’s really still alive?” Baxter griped.

  Four-man teams had been dropped at each of the three mountain passes that joined Pakistan to the Wakhan Corridor. Twelve soldiers surveying an area the length of Wales. On the plus side, most of the peaks were too sheer to climb without equipment and most of the valleys were permanently blocked by snow.

  Chances were they were following a man who only bore an unfortunate resemblance to a dead Russian terrorist who, a decade earlier, had left only a finger at the site of the British Embassy bombing in Yemen. And the poor bugger was in for a helluva shock when they found him.

  “If he’s alive, we’ll find him.” Because those were his orders. At his signal they disappeared silently into the night like wraiths.

  CHAPTER 2

  Axelle slipped inside the yurt to find Anji cradling a tiny squalling snow leopard against his chest. Every muscle ached with fatigue, exhaustion scratched at her eyeballs, but she couldn’t help smile at the impossibly beautiful, totally improbable scrap of fur. Then it struck her. If the cubs were in a box in their yurt, then Sheba was unquestionably dead.

  Everything she feared had come true. Except the cubs were alive…for now. “Do you have any yak’s milk we can feed them?” she asked.

  He nodded. The cubs were thin and cold and wouldn’t survive long without nourishment.

  “They were right here, in this box.” The Wakhi man tapped the cardboard box on the floor with his boot, his brown eyes shining as he jiggled the cub like a baby.

  A mewling sound from inside the box had her reaching down and pulling out a soft tawny bundle covered in inky black spots. The bundle cuddled into her chest for warmth. Axelle’s eyes rose to Josef’s as he came in behind her. “I don’t get it. Who brought them here?”

  He held out his hand and she passed him the cub. “I’ll get the fire going while you feed them.”

  The cubs looked at her with bright blue eyes, and Axelle’s heart squeezed as she reached out a hand to stroke a tiny fluffy ear. They reminded her why the work was so important. There were so few of these creatures left on earth, and they were being forced into the narrowest, most unforgiving of margins.

  “What kind of person kills the mother but saves the cubs?” Josef asked.

  It wasn’t rational to destroy with one hand and save with another and yet humans did it all the time. She squatted and opened the door of the little cast-iron stove they’d dragged from Kabul two summers ago when they’d launched this project. She lit a match to the yak dung that was already set. It spluttered and caught, the orange flames flickering and dancing as they licked the pungent fuel.

  She looked up to find both men staring her expectantly, awaiting instruction. She was one of the world’s foremost experts on conserving endangered cats. Poachers weren’t new to her. Death wasn’t new. But this was different. The location made finding the culprit extremely problematic. The remoteness of the area, the geographical and political factors all weighed heavily against their chances of stopping this sonofabitch.

  Her eyes took in the bare walls of the tent. Normally the walls were plastered with territorial zones for each collared leopard. “At least we didn’t have the maps on display when he left the cubs here.”

  “He doesn’t need them,” Josef tucked the cub inside his jacket and eyed her from beneath thick brows. “I think someone is using our collars to track the cats.”

  Axelle opened her mouth to argue, but Josef didn’t let her.

  “Think about it—to find Aslan and Sheba so quickly? Finding two of our collared cats in a couple of days when it took us nearly two months of constant trapping to even see any?” He sucked in a deep breath. “Someone is using our radio frequencies or the satellite feed and picking off our leopards like fairground ducks.”

  “Impossible.” She considered Josef’s words. Unthinkable, but not impossible. “Aslan might not even be dead,” she pointed out.

  Anji spoke hesitantly. “I found his collar today. There was blood on it.”

  Her stomach flipped.

  Josef settled next to the metal stove as the flames finally started to expel heat. “You know how hard it is to catch one snow leopard, let alone two, within forty-eight hours.”

  She was intimately acquainted with the difficulties.

  Most people who spent years living in the wilderness never saw one. It had taken a large team of big-cat experts weeks of careful observation and planning before they’d begun to have any success with their state-of-the-art snaring techniques. However, this poacher could have been here for months, or
he could be a local, or he could be very, very lucky.

  She wrapped her arms around herself as cold swept through her. Even though she wanted to reject Josef’s idea, he might be right. An ominous disquiet slid through her chest. “That means we’ve signed a death warrant for every cat we collared.”

  Dread wove itself into a thick mass inside her lungs and she found it hard to draw in a full breath. The International Conservation Trust’s project had achieved unprecedented success when they’d collared ten individuals last fall. If a poacher targeted all their leopards, they could wipe out a significant proportion of the Afghan snow leopard population in a matter of weeks. It would be her fault. The Trust would never get a permit to work in Afghanistan again—and they might never be able to radio collar another animal in the wild. It would knock conservation efforts back thirty years. More important, her leopards were the ones in the firing line.

  The lanterns flickered erratically as the wind started to howl.

  “Why would this bastard shoot the mother but take the time to bring the cubs to safety?” Axelle shook her head. It didn’t make sense. Her head hurt trying to figure it out.

  Josef held the cub high, its soft belly curved into his palm. It started to mewl as Anji handed him a small bowl of yak milk and a tiny medicine dispensing cup he’d dug from somewhere.

  “These fellows would fetch good money on the black market,” Josef remarked.

  “But he’d have had to feed them and transport them straight away,” Axelle added as comprehension dawned.

  “And he didn’t have time…” Josef met her gaze.

  “Because he isn’t finished yet. Oh, God.”

  “Maybe someone else find the cubs?” Anji suggested hopefully. “Someone who knows about the project and saw the camp? Maybe they find them and bring them here?” He eyed her and Josef uncertainly. There weren’t exactly a lot of passersby, and the people who did travel this region could easily be drug dealers moving their opium hauls or arms dealers supplying the insurgents to the south.