by Bear Grylls
The elephants possessed little of their poise or magical grace any more. Compared to the magisterial animals that he and Narov had encountered deep within Burning Angels cave, these had been rendered into unmoving bundles of lifeless meat.
‘As you can see, they captured and tethered a baby elephant,’ Konig announced, his voice tight with emotion. ‘They used that to lure the parents in. Both the bull and the mother have been shot and butchered. Tusks gone.
‘I know many of the animals here by name,’ he continued. ‘The big bull looks like Kubwa-Kubwa; that’s Swahili for “Big-Big”. Most elephants don’t live past seventy years of age. Kubwa-Kubwa was eighty-one years old. He was the elder of the herd, and one of the oldest in the reserve.
‘The baby is alive, but it’ll be badly traumatised. If we can get to it and calm it down, it may live. If we’re lucky, the other matriarchs should take it under their wing.’
Konig sounded remarkably calm. But as Jaeger well knew, dealing with such pressure and trauma day after day, took its toll.
‘Okay, now for your surprise,’ Konig announced grimly. ‘You said you wanted to see this . . . I’m taking you down. A few minutes on the ground to witness the horror close up. The guards will escort you.’
Almost instantly Jaeger felt the HIP start to lose what little altitude it had. As it flared out, the rear end dropping towards a narrow clearing, the loadie hung out of the doorway, checking that the rotor blades and tail were clear of the acacia trees.
There was a jolt as the wheels made contact with the hot African earth, and the loadie gave the thumbs up.
‘We’re good!’ he yelled. ‘De-bus!’
Jaeger and Narov leapt from the doorway. Bent double and heads bowed they scuttled off to one side until they were clear of the rotors, which were whipping up a storm of dirt and blasted vegetation. They went down on one knee, pistol in hand, just in case there were any poachers remaining in the area. The two game guards rushed over to join them. One gave a thumbs up to the cockpit, Konig flashed it back, and an instant later the HIP rose vertically and was gone.
The seconds ticked by.
The juddering beat of the rotors faded.
Shortly the aircraft was no longer audible at all.
Hurriedly the game guards explained that Konig was returning to Katavi to fetch a harness. If they could get the baby elephant darted and put to sleep, they could sling it beneath the HIP and fly it back to the reserve. There, they’d hand-rear the animal for as long as it took to get it over the trauma, at which stage it could be reunited with its herd.
Jaeger could see the sense in this, but he didn’t exactly relish their present situation: surrounded by the carcasses of recently butchered elephants, and armed with only a pair of pistols between them. The game guards seemed calm, but he doubted how skilled they’d be if it all went south.
He rose to his feet and glanced at Narov.
As they made their way toward the scene of unspeakable carnage, he could see the rage burning in her eyes.
49
As carefully as they could, they approached the trembling, traumatised form of the baby elephant. It was lying on its side now, seemingly too exhausted to even stand. The ground betrayed the signs of its recent struggles: the rope tethering it to the tree had cut deep into its leg, as it had fought to get free.
Narov knelt over the poor thing. She lowered her head, whispering soft words of reassurance into its ear. Its small – human-sized – eyes rolled in fear, but eventually her voice seemed to calm it. She stayed close to the animal for what seemed like an age.
Finally she turned. There were tears in her eyes. ‘We’re going after them. Those who did this.’
Jaeger shook his head. ‘Come on . . . The two of us armed with pistols. That’s not brave: it’s foolish.’
Narov got to her feet. She fixed Jaeger with a tortured look. ‘Then I’ll go alone.’
‘But what about . . .’ Jaeger gestured at the baby elephant. ‘It needs protection. Safeguarding.’
Narov jabbed a finger in the direction of the guards. ‘What about them? They are better armed than we are.’ She glanced west, in the direction the poachers had taken. ‘Unless someone goes after them, this will continue until the last animal is killed.’ Her expression was one of cold and determined fury. ‘We need to hit them hard, mercilessly, and with the same kind of savagery as they used here.’
‘Irina, I hear you. But let’s at least work out how best to do this. Konig’s twenty minutes out. They had spare AKs stashed in the HIP. At the very least let’s get ourselves properly armed. Plus the chopper’s stuffed full of supplies: water, food. Without that, we’re finished before we’ve even begun.’
Narov stared. She didn’t speak, but he could tell that she was wavering.
Jaeger checked his watch. ‘It’s 1300 hours. We can be on our way by 1330. The poachers will have a two-hour start on us. If we move fast, we can do this; we can catch them.’
She had to accept that his was the voice of reason.
Jaeger decided to go check out the corpses. He didn’t know quite what he expected to find, but he went anyway. He tried to act dispassionately: to inspect the kill scene like a soldier. But still he found his emotions running away with him.
This had been no accurate, professional hit. Jaeger figured the elephants had been charging to protect their young, and the poachers must have panicked. They’d peppered the once-mighty beasts indiscriminately, using assault rifles and machine guns to take them down.
One thing was for sure: the animals would have had no quick and painless death. They’d have sensed danger; possibly even known they were being lured to their doom. But they came anyway, to safeguard their family, charging to the defence of their offspring.
With Luke missing three long years, Jaeger couldn’t help but relate. He wrestled with unexpected emotions and blinked back the tears.
Jaeger turned to leave, but something made him stop. He figured he’d seen movement. He checked again, dreading what he might find. Sure enough – unbelievably – one of the mighty animals was still breathing.
The realisation was like a punch to the guts. The poachers had gunned the bull elephant down, hacked off its tusks and left it in a pool of its own blood. Riddled with bullets, it was dying a slow and agonising death under the burning African sun.
Jaeger felt rage burning through him. The once-mighty animal was well beyond any hope of saving.
Though he was sickened, he knew what he had to do.
He turned aside and made his way to one of the guards, from whom he borrowed an AK47. Then, with hands shaking with anger and emotion, he levelled the weapon at the magnificent animal’s head. For just an instant he thought the bull opened his eyes.
With tears blurring his vision, Jaeger fired, and the stricken animal breathed its last.
In a daze, Jaeger went back to rejoin Narov. She was still comforting the baby elephant, though he could tell by her pained look that she knew what he had been forced to do. For both of them this was personal now.
He crouched beside her. ‘You’re right. We do have to go after them. Just as soon as we’ve grabbed some supplies off the HIP, let’s get moving.’
Minutes later, the noise of rotor blades cut through the hot air. Konig was ahead of schedule. He brought the HIP down into the clearing, the rotors throwing up a choking cloud of dust and debris. The bulbous wheels hit the dirt, and Konig began to power down the turbines. Jaeger was about to rush forward to help unload when his heart skipped a beat.
He’d spotted a flash of movement way off in the bush; the tell-tale glint of sunlight on metal. He saw a figure rise from the undergrowth, hefting a rocket-launcher on his shoulder. He was a good three hundred yards away, so there was sod-all that Jaeger could do with a pistol.
‘RPG! RPG!’ he screamed.
An instant later he caught the unmistakable sound of the armour-piercing projectile firing. Normally RPGs were notoriously inaccurate, unless fired at close
quarters. This one tore out of the bush, hammering towards the HIP like a bowling pin on its side, trailing a fiery dragon’s breath in its wake.
For an instant Jaeger figured it would miss, but at the last moment it ploughed into the rear of the helo, just forward of the tail rotor. There was the blinding flash of an explosion, which ripped the entire tail section off the aircraft, the impact throwing the HIP through ninety degrees.
Jaeger barely hesitated. He was on his feet and racing forward, as he yelled orders at Narov and the game guards to form a defensive cordon, putting steel between them and their attackers. Already he could hear fierce bursts of gunfire, and he didn’t doubt the poachers were closing for the kill.
Even as flames sparked from the HIP’s shattered rear Jaeger vaulted into the torn and buckled hold. Thick, acrid smoke billowed all around him as he searched for survivors. Konig had flown in with four extra guards, and Jaeger could tell instantly that three of them were peppered with shrapnel, and very dead.
He grabbed the fourth, who was injured but still alive, hoisted his bloody form and hauled him out of the stricken aircraft, dumping him in the bush, before turning back for Konig and his co-pilot.
Fire leapt through the chopper now, the hungry flames taking hold. Jaeger needed to move fast, or Konig and Urio would be burned alive. But if he tried to brave those flames unprotected, he’d never make it.
He threw off his pack, reached inside and pulled out a large spray can, with COLDFIRE stamped across the matt-black exterior. Turning the nozzle on himself, he sprayed himself from head to toe before dashing for the HIP, can gripped in hand. Coldfire was a miracle agent. He’d seen soldiers spray their hands with it, then play a blowtorch across their bare skin and feel nothing.
Taking a massive gulp of air, he dived through the smoke towards the heart of the flames. Incredibly, he felt no sensation of burning; no heat at all. He lifted the can and let rip, the foam cutting through the toxic vapours and dousing the flames within seconds.
Fighting his way forward into the cockpit, he unbuckled the unconscious form of Konig and hauled him from the HIP. Konig looked as if he’d taken a blow to the head, but otherwise he seemed relatively unharmed. Jaeger was soaked with sweat by now, and choking from the smoke, yet he turned a further time and ripped open the other door to the HIP’s cockpit.
With a final burst of energy, he grabbed the co-pilot and began to drag him towards safety.
50
Jaeger and Narov had been moving at speed for a good three hours now. Sticking to the cover of a wadi – a dry watercourse – they’d managed to overtake the poaching gang, and without any sign that they had been spotted.
They pressed ahead to a thick grove of acacia trees, from which they could get eyes on the poachers as they passed. They needed to assess numbers, weaponry, strengths and weaknesses, in order to determine the best way to hit them.
Back at the helicopter, the poachers had been driven off by the weight of defensive fire, and the injured had been stabilised. They’d called for a medevac chopper, which Katavi Lodge was getting sorted. They planned to lift the baby elephant out at the same time as picking up the wounded.
But Jaeger and Narov had left long before any of that could happen, hard on the trail of the poachers.
From the cover of the acacia grove they watched the gang approach. There were ten gunmen. The RPG operator who’d hit the HIP, plus his loader, would be bringing up the rear, making twelve in all. To Jaeger’s practised eye, they looked tooled up to the nines. Long bandoliers of ammo were hanging off their torsos, and magazines were stuffed into bulging pockets, plus rakes of grenades for the launchers.
Twelve poachers, with a veritable war in a box. It wasn’t the sort of odds he relished.
As they watched the gang pass, they saw the ivory – four massive bloodied tusks – being passed between them. Each man took his turn, staggering along with a tusk slung over his shoulder, before passing it on to another.
Jaeger didn’t doubt the energy expended in doing so. He and Narov had moved light, but still they were drenched in sweat. His thin cotton shirt was glued to his back. They had grabbed some bottled water out of the HIP, but even so they were already running short. And these guys – the poachers – were carrying many times more weight.
Jaeger guessed that each tusk was a good forty kilos, so as heavy as a small adult. He figured they’d be breaking march and setting camp any time soon. They’d have to. Dusk was only a short time away, and they would need to drink, eat and rest.
And that meant the plan forming in his mind might just be doable.
He settled back into the cover of the wadi, signalling Narov to do likewise. ‘Seen enough?’ he whispered.
‘Enough to want to kill them all,’ she hissed.
‘My sentiments exactly. Trouble is, if we take them on in open battle, it’ll be suicide.’
‘Got a better idea?’ she rasped.
‘Maybe.’ Jaeger delved into his backpack and pulled out his compact Thuraya satphone. ‘From what Konig told us, elephant ivory is solid, like a massive tooth. But like all teeth, at the root end there’s a hollow cone: the pulp cavity. And that’s filled with soft tissue, cells and veins.’
‘I’m listening,’ Narov growled. Jaeger could tell she still wanted to go in and hit them right here and now.
‘Sooner or later the gang will have to call a halt. They camp up for the night, and we go in. But we don’t hit them. Not yet.’ He held up the Thuraya. ‘We stuff this deep into the pulp cavity. We get Falkenhagen to track the signal. That leads us to their base. In the meantime, we order up some proper hardware. Then we go in and hit them at a time and place of our choosing.’
‘How do we get close enough?’ Narov demanded. ‘To plant the satphone?’
‘I don’t know. But we do what we do best. We observe; we study. We find a way.’
Narov’s eyes glinted. ‘And what if someone calls the phone?’
‘We set it to vibrate mode. Silent.’
‘And if it vibrates its way loose and falls out?’
Jaeger sighed. ‘Now you’re just being difficult.’
‘Being difficult keeps me alive.’ Narov rummaged in her pack and pulled out a tiny device no bigger than a pound coin. ‘How about this? GPS tracker device. Solar-powered Retrievor. Accurate up to one and a half metres. I figured we might need one to keep tabs on Kammler’s people.’
Jaeger held out a hand for it. Stuffing this deep into the tusk’s pulp cavity was certainly feasible, if only they could get close enough.
Narov held off from passing it over. ‘One condition: I get to place it.’
Jaeger eyed her for a second. She was slight, nimble and smart, that much he knew, and he didn’t doubt that she might move more quietly than he could.
He smiled. ‘Let’s do this.’
They pressed on for another three gruelling hours. Finally the gang called a halt. The giant, blood-red African sun was sinking swiftly towards the horizon. Jaeger and Narov crept closer, belly-crawling along a narrow ravine that ended at a patch of dark and stinking mud, marking the fringes of a waterhole.
The poachers were camped on the far side, which made perfect sense. After the long day’s march, they’d have need of water. The waterhole, though, looked to be a festering mud pit. The heat had dissipated slightly, but it remained stultifying, and every crawling, buzzing, stinging thing seemed to be drawn here. Flies as big as mice, rats as big as cats and vicious stinging mosquitoes – the place was swarming.
But nothing bothered Jaeger as much as the dehydration. They’d drained the last of their water a good hour back, and he had little or no fluid left in his body to sweat out. He could feel the onset of a splitting headache. Even lying utterly still, keeping watch on the poachers, the thirst was unbearable.
They both needed to rehydrate, and soon.
Darkness descended across the landscape. A light wind got up, whipping away the last of the sweat from Jaeger’s skin. He lay in the dir
t, still as a rock and staring into the wall of the night, Narov beside him.
Above them a faint shimmer of starlight flickered through the acacia canopy, with just the faintest hint of the moon breaking through. To left and right a firefly skittered in the darkness, its fluorescent blue-green glow floating magically above the water.
The absence of light was to be welcomed. On a mission such as this, the darkness was their greatest friend.
And the more he watched, the more Jaeger realised that the water – repulsive though it might be – offered the ideal route in.
51
Neither Jaeger nor Narov had a clue how deep the water was, but it would take them right into the heart of the enemy’s camp. On the far side of the waterhole, the light of the poachers’ cooking fire gleamed on its stagnant surface.
‘Ready to go to work?’ Jaeger whispered, gently nudging Narov’s boot with his own.
She nodded. ‘Let’s get moving.’
It was gone midnight and the camp had been still for a good three hours. During their time spent observing the place, they’d not seen a single sign of any crocs.
It was time.
Jaeger turned and slid himself in, feeling with his boots for something solid. They came to rest in the thick, gloopy detritus that formed the bottom of the waterhole. He was in up to his waist, but at least the bank shielded him from view.
To either side, unseen, nameless beasts slithered and slopped about. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t the faintest hint of any flow to the water. It was stagnant, fetid and nauseating. It stank of animal faeces, disease and death.
In short, it was perfect – for the poachers would never think to watch for an attack from here.
During his time in the SAS, Jaeger had been taught to embrace what most normal souls feared; to inhabit the night; to welcome darkness. It was the cloak to hide his and his brother warriors’ movements from hostile eyes – just as he hoped it would prove now.