by Hugo Navikov
The pilot had walked Dan over to us and planted him in the mud, hands cuffed behind his head the same as Peter and Theodore.
The Punisher didn’t shout at them the way the pilot had at Dan, probably because Ted and Peter already looked so cowed and defeated it wouldn’t have been any fun. As I unclipped the GoPro cameras labeled with their name of each man (as well as Jefry’s and my own), he informed them that they were under arrest for poaching an endangered species, the Black Caiman crocodile.
All three reared up simultaneously, protesting that they had shot with paintballs and Dan with a tranquilizer gun—they hadn’t poached anything!
The Punisher chuckled at this, and Jefry and I smiled.
“We have all three of you assholes on GoPro, shooting at and hitting the croc,” the WWF agent said, then rattled off the charges, telling them to be prepared for a matching charge of traveling over borders to commit each act they were being arrested for: “Intent to poach protected wildlife, conspiracy to poach, attempted poaching, not to mention inflicting injury upon protected wildlife. By the way, thanks for collecting the evidence for us.” We wiggled the little cameras and laughed.
“This is entrapment!” Peter said, his temper finally getting the best of him. “They put out an ad in magazines, taking our money and setting up these fake expeditions, and then you arrest us for shooting paintballs? How about these two sons of bitches stole fifty thousand dollars from each of us! This is bullshit. I’ll be out of your shit jail and your shit country in twenty-four hours!”
“Rich boy,” the Punisher said, “you can bribe the judges in Peru all you want. They wear hoods during trials, you know that, right? They’ll take the money and still put your ass on ice for twenty-four years, not twenty-four hours, and you’ll never know which one screwed you over.”
“Besides, who exactly entrapped you?” the pilot said, warming to the fun. He asked this question with a laugh as he and the Punisher got the men to their feet and shoved them toward the helicopter. Then he indicated Jefry and me with a nod. “Those two other poachers nobody will see on the video we give the court, you mean, the ones who got away?”
All three handcuffed men shot daggers from their eyes at Jefry and me. We waved bye-bye to them as I said to the pilot, “We only have ten minutes or so until the big boy wakes up over there. The airlift gonna make it in time?”
The pilot pantomimed cupping his hand around his ear and said, “I can hear them on their way. They’ll find a good new home for Biggie over there, somewhere he won’t be tempted by villagers’ goats or children.” He gave me a thumbs-up, and within a few seconds I, too, could hear the WWF helicopter coming for the croc. (Which was good, because we sure as hell weren’t swimming across the river to get to it.)
“You all work together! There’s going to be a paper trail!” Peter squeaked as they loaded him and his compatriots into the chopper.
“We got nothing to do with their organization, Mister Cock Doc. Nada. But spend lots of your money on lawyers trying to find us—all we are is poachers, too, as far as anyone can see.” I grinned as I said this, then laughed at the looks of despair on the faces of the three mighty hunters as the pilot slid the heavy helicopter door closed.
Before they got in the helicopter themselves—and now I could plainly hear the choopchopchop of the crocodile relocation airlift ’copter closing in—the Punisher asked me in a quiet voice, “Didn’t you say the feeding evidence showed there were at least two crocs picking off animals and maybe little kids from this District?”
I slipped a cheroot out of my front pocket—my too-long-postponed first smoke of the day—and a standard, non-girly, non-“safety” match out of my back pocket. I could scratch it against my stubble, or theirs, or a door frame, anything to make myself look like Joe Frickin’ Cool while I lit my little cigar. I clapped my man on the shoulder and said, “Don’t you worry. We got two fresh and mighty hunters coming in tomorrow looking to bag themselves a Black Caiman, so I imagine we’ll be seeing each other again soon, el Castigator.”
We laughed. Then the men got back to their black helicopter (waiting for the approaching relocation airlift to safely come in and land on the opposite bank near the sleepy croc) and took off for the Iquitos police headquarters, where the three would be booked and in a week or so shipped off to Lima for a very short trial and very long prison sentences.
As soon as they were out of sight, I turned to my magnificent man in Peru and said in Spanish, “Jef, let’s get cleaned up, get some lunch, get you your cut. Then I’ve got to go pay through the goddamn nose to get those rifles cleaned—or replaced, with that son of a bitch throwing his into the water. We have the whole show again tomorrow.”
Jefry laughed at this, nodding at my plan. “But tell you what, amigo,” he said. “You give me my cut first and I’ll buy lunch. Save you a little money for your new toys.”
***
My name is Brett Russell—to anyone who matters, anyway—and I hunt poachers. They are my game and my passion. I’m only sorry that I can’t actually shoot them and put their decapitated heads on my wall, maybe set them into some “fierce” position so unlike their actual stances behind desks or selling cars or poking around in people’s assholes.
I can’t tell you who employs me and Jefry or any of the other associates I work with all over the world. Even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s not the World Wildlife Fund or People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals or even the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, although I sometimes work closely with those organizations. Just think of me as a free radical floating around in the body of the world, turning into an unrelenting cancer that eats away ivory hunters and rhinoceros-horn traders. I don’t care about treaties and agreements between suit-wearing, soft-handed politicos. I care about protecting rare animals from the humans who either go looking for them or find themselves encroaching upon wild areas.
The funny thing—and what infuriates my friends at PETA even as they praise my work—is that I’m also a hunter of animals. I have taken down coyotes in culls in Arizona, shot a huge bear capering near a small town in Idaho, and harpooned a 20-foot, 6,000-pound tiger shark a few miles off the shore of the most popular tourist swimming area in Hawai’i.
Sue me, call me names, whatever, I enjoy hunting. I like to take down other predators. Do I eat the meat, use the bones to make furniture or some shit? No, or in the case of the meat not always (shark flesh is literally soaking in urine the entire animal’s life). But I never hunt an endangered animal, a member of a species in proximate danger of vanishing entirely from the Earth. And I never, ever hunt for money.
Well, not never. The Organization That Will Not Be Named pays me well to hunt poachers, those smug heathens who will drive species to extinction for a fast dollar. But hell, I’d hunt those bastards for free.
Chapter 3
A week after Jefry and I got that second poaching party to shoot at a Caiman—it had taken us three very uncomfortable days of careful stalking to find one—I would have been happy never to see an ounce of mud again for the rest of my life. But I also swore I’d have been happy never to see another blade of long grass after stopping some baddies in the Serengeti; and, if memory serves, after a seemingly endless assignment in dark Siberia that saved two extremely rare Amur tigers and sent four ethnic Mongols to the gallows, I told my boss that I would be ecstatic never to see another goddamn birch tree and even happier never to see another form printed in Russian with English translations so bad I had to assume имя meant “age” and возраст was where I put my birthplace. (My uneducated guesses were rewarded with stern looks and fresh, empty forms.)
Do I feel bad about those Mongols hanging by their necks behind the Yermak Timofeyevich District Court Assembly Building in Tobolsk? Sure, I feel bad at the death of any man, but all operatives like me do is keep them from killing animals they have no business killing—then I turn them over to the authorities and I’m on the next sled to Denver Int
ernational. I can’t say I lose any sleep over the deaths of poachers deep-pocketed enough to hire me to get within rifle shot of a Siberian tiger. These aren’t starving children in Sierra Leone stealing chickens to survive—a capital crime there, by the way—but one-percenter men and women (oh, yes, indeed) greasing palms and hiring guides for $50,000 so they can rob the world of its beauty for their own smug enjoyment.
So to hell with them.
Anyway, I sit at a desk in Denver, The Organization’s front actually a fully functioning and successful international business. This front company employs four thousand people in Colorado and twice as many in countries west, east, north, south, Capitalist, Communist, Socialist, Muslim, Buddhist, Vegetarian, everywhere. Can my flights to Peru, to Moscow, to Addis Ababa be traced back to this front corporation? I suppose so, but it flies thousands of employees every year to the furthest corners of the Earth, so singling mine out would be practically impossible even if anyone knew where to look. I am well hidden by The Organization—so even if some angry poacher’s family hires a $400-an-hour lawyer who hires a $1,000-a-week private investigator who hires a $25-per-tooth-knocked-out thug to shake down the classified page editors of Guns and Ammo or wherever my advertisement appeared to ensnare the unfortunate Great White Hunter in question, the cash used to pay for the ad arrived in an envelope long since discarded.
My desk is one of fifty in the soil of this fertile cubicle farm. I wear a button-down Oxford and tie and (more often than not) wraps and bandages over stitches. I tell my “friends” at the front company that I do extreme sports on the weekends and do rock climbing or some such bullshit when I travel to cool places on the boss’s dime. I have no idea what they do—business stuff? TPS reports? Contracts for things?—and they have no idea what I do. Which is use Rosetta Stone to learn whatever tongue I need for my next “business trip,” play Hearthstone, research new developments in hunting weaponry, look at the pictures on my cubicle wall, eat lunch, go to meetings covering things I have nothing to do with, look at pictures on my cubicle wall …
When I started with The Organization a dozen years ago, recruited right from Army Special Operations without one bit of paperwork before my second tour was even completed, I put random, anonymous faces into the frames, just something there to make my cubicle look like it belonged to an actual person. Then, not too long after what happened, I took the fake pictures down and shoved them in a drawer. After that, I put the frames back up but put ———’s and ———’s actual photos in them. I put up my 8-year-old’s crayon, then colored pencil, drawings of the biggest, fiercest dinosaurs he had read about. I don’t remember any of their names except Tyrannosaurus rex, but he knew every name and could tell you what they ate, when they lived, and when they vanished from the face of the Earth. I also put up some poems my wife had written to me, ones that make me heartsick now whenever I read them.
I had to remind myself of their faces and what they loved every day. But if they thought I would stop, if they thought it would make me quit, then they were as dumb as they were evil. I told my bosses at The Organization that I was available now any time, to go any place, for whatever duration an operation would take.
So the ones who did what they did to scare me, to stop me? They only made me able to work 24 hours a day at ruining them. A man without a family to come home to can’t ever go home. His home died when his wife and son died. They couldn’t get at me, so they got at them.
So who are “they,” the people or group of people who killed my family and left little stuffed rhinos and tigers and gorillas next to them to soak up their blood? I don’t know—no one ever took credit or followed up with taunting letters to torture me. But every time a poacher cries on his knees in front of me, I know I’m doing the right thing, because my doing this was what hurt them. Whoever they were.
But whoever they were knew who I was. That I was “Brett Russell” and was endangering something they wanted. Keeping them from money or power or whatever it was that their poaching was supposed to bring them. But I ask myself whenever I’m in the office, looking out at my fellow cubicle dwellers: How did they know who I am? How could anyone possibly know? And why didn’t they just kill me? I have never been able to see what advantage they could have gained by killing my family, taunting me with the stuffed animals, but not killing me.
I’ve tried to take the detective route and “follow the money,” but no matter how much money I cost the bastards—and there are millions upon millions to be made selling parts of nearly extinct animals to China and the Chinese diaspora all over the world, how could they have found me in the first place? Although I’ve thought about it every single day for eight years, I’ve never been able to see how they could learn my identity considering the multiple layers of obfuscation The Organization puts between its agents (I assume there are others like me, probably sitting in a cubicle like mine in the front business office) and the rest of the world.
There’s never been another incident indicating that anyone knows my non-Brett identity. But one was enough: Now I live and breathe to nail these people, these poachers. I have—and I want—nothing else.
Ping! An email message popped up on my desktop, pulling my attention away from the pictures and out of the dead past. It read:
Party planning committee meeting starting immediately. Don’t forget to bring the fun!
I cracked a smile despite my dark mood. This was my boss—my real boss, my Organization boss—and his way of telling me to meet him for a brand-new assignment. The timing on this might have set a new record, considering I had just gotten back from South America less than a week ago.
Bringing the fun now, I wrote back and got myself to the elevator, nodding at “co-workers” who probably had completely forgotten I worked there. Which was perfect. Go back to your TPS spreadsheet contract things or whatever. Time for me to save the world again.
In no conspicuous haste, I got up from my desk and walked through the office and around a screen that cut off any view of the hallway I was about to use. I walked past a sign reading “Omega Badges Only Beyond This Point,” put there to block anyone who accidentally or purposefully stumbled upon the hidden corridor. The only front business employees who sported an Ω were the security officers who worked for the front company, thus quelling curiosity about the badge requirement. (In fact, no one else in the front company wore badges or ID cards. Each employee—very well-paid employee, I might add—was “chipped” like a cat adopted from a shelter. This electronic chip is what allowed an employee to enter an “airlock” big enough to contain just one person, where he or she would be allowed to go through the second door to the office once the first behind the employee was shut and reset.)
Once I passed the Omega badge sign, I walked a little further past closed doors to empty offices until I got to the one marked “Janitor.” I used a fingerprint-identifier key to open this door and slip into what looked to be a regular broom closet with buckets, mops, and bathroom supplies. At the rear of this small room, obscured by some shelving filled with buckets labeled “industrial cleaner” and other bulky opaque objects, was another door: this was the “executive elevator.” It could not be stumbled upon. Anyone finding it was either an authorized operative or a saboteur-cum-spy.
I pressed the button for the executive elevator. The doors opened immediately, this phone-booth–sized car not going anywhere except to the level of the building where my boss had his office. Even then, one had to have a second fingerprint-activated electronic key to get the doors to close and the elevator moving. In addition, even if two people, authorized or not, tried to squeeze in, the doors wouldn’t close. Like the front-door “airlock,” this was a one-person-at-a-time situation. Once the doors did close, an anesthetizing vapor was automatically released, one against which I—and I assume other operatives as well as the Boss himself—had been injected with a chemical defense that needed to be renewed each month. Anyone not thus protected would pass out in seconds, and the elevator doors
would automatically reopen in order for The Organization’s security team (uniformed exactly like the front business’s security team) to remove the unauthorized user and take him or her to God knows what kind of interrogation.
The Boss either never left the office, which was highly unlikely, or he had his own secure elevator (or, hell, a private set of good old-fashioned stairs) for entering and leaving the building. Or maybe he had a helicopter. Or a Star Trek transporter. I certainly didn’t know, the same way I didn’t know the Boss’s real name (although he of course knew mine).
This may seem excessive, but there were a hundred damned good reasons for every bit of this expensive and time-consuming security: Not more than one person could enter the office, let alone the executive elevator. This meant no invasions of hostiles, whether terrorists, pro-poaching spies, or misguided government jackboots. It also meant that any miscreant attempting to access The Organization would become lost, get gassed, or “be taken to a second location,” something I knew about only by those words but creeped the living hell out of me.
I ran through the gauntlet of security, of course being authorized to use the executive elevator when summoned by the Boss, and the claustrophobia-inducing car rose through an uncounted number of levels to open up on his office suite. His administrative assistant, a Miss ————, welcomed me with a broad smile, but I knew she had a pedal-activated scattergun which automatically pointed at my heart and would pump me full of radium-rich pellets if somehow it missed the primary mark. (The Boss told me all this. Maybe it was a lie to keep me on my toes, but I don’t see why The Organization wouldn’t go the extra mile and outfit his secretary with such a weapon.)
I’m sure my body had been x-rayed and scanned eight ways from Sunday on the elevator ride up, and since Miss ———— knew the Boss had summoned me, she brightly indicated that I could enter his office. I returned her sweet smile, never forgetting that she would kill me in an instant if I somehow messed up the protocol. I hadn’t yet, and I met with the Boss for a briefing before every new assignment.