by Tony Park
‘That kill was unusual, in that it happened so close to the ranch,’ Reynolds explained as he drove. The Land Rover was an old Series II, a museum piece the likes of which Shane hadn’t seen since his childhood. It was older than he was. ‘Most of the poaching takes place on the boundaries of the concession and, of course, inside our neighbouring national park – Hwange. Some of the activity is subsistence, setting snares for antelope or shooting for the pot, and the rest is organised hunting of elephant for ivory or, if they can find one, rhino. I’m sure you’re wondering where you fit into all this.’
Shane nodded again. A small herd of zebra panicked at the clatter of the old diesel engine and scattered.
‘I need you to use the skills you’ve learned in the army and be my eyes and ears, Shane. I want long-range recce – the kind you Aussies are supposed to be so good at.’
Shane had been proud to serve in his adopted country’s military, and he firmly believed the unit he had spent most of his time with was the world’s best at what it did – long-range special reconnaissance – but he bridled at being referred to as a foreigner, when he was, by birthright, a Zimbabwean. He held his tongue, though.
Reynolds filled the void. ‘I want you to train a team of your own and go out and find the skellums that are causing me grief. I want to know when, where and how the poachers are getting in here. Too much of our fight is reactive – we wait for an animal to be killed and then try and follow the poachers out. Usually they’re long gone before we get near them. When you find these bastards, I want you to follow them, fix them, then let me know where they are. I’ll call in the authorities and we’ll catch them before they can do their business.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said.
‘You’ve come highly recommended, Shane. The only thing, and I’ll be honest with you, that concerned me was that you’ve spent most of your life out of Africa.’
Shane nodded. He’d expected this line of questioning. ‘I was born here, Fletcher, and I’ve got a field guide’s qualification, so I know the basics about approaching dangerous game on foot and surviving in the African bush, but you’re the professional hunter of animals here.’
Reynolds nodded.
‘What you want me to organise is a military operation.’
Fletcher smiled. ‘Exactly.’
Shane spent his first two weeks at Isilwane Lodge getting to know every road, fire trail, creek, river and kopje on Fletcher’s hunting concession.
He had thousands of hectares to cover. His days were full of driving in a Land Rover given to him for the job, while his nights were taken up poring over a topographical map planning his next recce.
His guide for the first week was Fletcher’s chief tracker, an Ndebele man of his own age, Lloyd, who was an expert scout with a genuine affinity for wildlife and the bush. Lloyd had been born in Hwange, the son of a ranger, and had worked for the parks and wildlife service for a few years before branching out into the private sector.
Lloyd had explained that given the parlous state of the hunting industry – Fletcher Reynolds seemed to be the exception rather than the rule with his recent ability to lure more foreign bookings – it would not be easy to recruit younger rangers from the national parks to work on Shane’s anti-poaching team. ‘However, the government is retrenching the older men. You should start there.’
It was good advice and Shane wished he could have had more of Lloyd’s time, but the tracker was needed by Fletcher to work on his next safari, which consisted of four Italians who worked for the corporate head office of a luxury car manufacturer.
Dougal, the pilot, occasionally helped Fletcher with flyovers of the concession to check on water points and game concentrations. When he brought the Italians to Isilwane he agreed to give Shane an hour’s aerial tour of the ground he had painstakingly traversed by road. Shane had a map of the property taped to the wall of the two-bedroom manager’s cottage where he lived, behind the main lodge. On it he had marked all of the known poaching incidents from the past twelve months. As Fletcher had predicted, the major incidents, involving elephant and buffalo kills, tended to take place in the north-west of the concession, near the Botswana border.
‘Can you take us down?’ he asked Dougal through the headset microphone.
‘Sure thing,’ the pilot replied. ‘That’s the border post at Pandamatenga below. Zim on that side, Bots on the other.’
They followed a dirt road that paralleled the international boundary. ‘We’re getting close to the national park now,’ Dougal informed him.
Shane scanned the waterless bush through his binoculars. He recognised riverbeds and the border road. ‘There’s a hyena. Unusual to see him out in the middle of the day.’
Dougal nodded and pushed the control wheel forward, bringing them down lower. ‘He’s in a hurry. Must have the scent of something.’
They passed over the loping scavenger and, as had happened when they spotted the elephant kill, it was an eruption of dark, slow-beating vulture wings that pointed out the scene of the crime. ‘Elephant . . . no, wait, too small. It’s a rhino,’ Shane confirmed.
‘Bastards,’ Dougal spat.
That man is too low,’ Charles Ndlovu said as the white Cessna roared overhead.
‘Should we take his registration number and report him?’ Lovemore asked.
Charles had found that since he had taken a conciliatory approach to the Shona, the man had not only become more amenable, but had started asking him for advice. However, when Charles had tried, politely, to suggest that they move on from the Deteema picnic site after refilling their water bottles, Lovemore had dug his heels in and sided with the two younger men, who wanted to rest the night. Charles feared the delay had cost them the rhino. ‘No, Lovemore. I think he is low because he has seen something. Maybe the poachers.’
‘Be alert, you men,’ Lovemore commanded. Charles noticed, with some concern, how their leader’s finger curled with anticipation around the trigger of his AK 47.
Charles scanned the ground. The aircraft was definitely heading in the same direction as the fading tracks of the poachers and the wayward rhino, Chewore. The spoor of man and beast, however, was now the same age. He raised a hand and lifted his head. Mouth open, he sniffed the air.
He caught the first telltale whiffs of the stench. It sickened him. The smell of death was the smell of failure.
Shane leapt from the Cessna as soon as it rolled to a halt, and sprinted for the lodge. Behind him, Dougal had already taken off. If he hadn’t been low on fuel he would have stayed and assisted with the tracking of the men who were responsible for the rhino’s death.
Shane was on his own. A quick word with Fletcher’s housekeeper confirmed the hunter and his Italian clients had wasted no time and had already left in search of game. He grabbed a radio and two spare batteries, then used his key to unlock the lodge’s safe, and fetched the rifle Reynolds had allocated him, an old military 7.62 millimetre SLR. Just like Fletcher’s Land Rovers, it was ancient, reliable and unstoppable. He doubled across the lawn to his own cottage.
His gear was packed and ready to go. It had been since his first afternoon, as he had anticipated the possibility of having to leave with no notice. In his chest webbing were four magazines of twenty rounds each. His web belt carried four one-litre military plastic water bottles and a hand-held radio. In his camouflaged pack was a lightweight one-man tent, poncho liner, food – cans, dehydrated potato and rice, and dried kudu biltong – two more one and a half litre store-bought bottles of drinking water wrapped in duct tape for extra strength, a collapsible shovel, a first-aid kit and a set of night-vision goggles he had purchased on the black market in Baghdad.
From the locked cabinet in his bedroom he took the valuables he was reluctant to leave lying about with his kit – Swarovski binoculars, a GPS, a digital camera and a satellite phone. These, along with fully charged spare batteries for all the gadgets, he stashed in the top of the pack, where he had left space for them.
He flung the heavy rucksack over one shoulder, the webbing and belt over the other, then piled the lot onto the front bench seat of his Land Rover. He left the Isilwane gatehouse behind in a spray of dust and gravel. It was five minutes since he had left Dougal’s aircraft.
Shane navigated from memory, taking the main dirt road south towards the national park gate, then turning right towards Pandamatenga. Before reaching the final bend that would take him to the border post he branched left onto a hunting trail he’d driven just three days earlier. He remembered a spring, less than a kilometre from the line of white stones that marked the end of Zimbabwe and the beginning of Botswana. Perhaps the rhino had been heading for water. He checked the GPS. He was close to the spot he had copied from Dougal’s aircraft-mounted navigation device. He pulled the Land Rover into the shade of a small grove of ilala palms. He shouldered his pack and webbing, clipped on his belt and loaded a magazine in his rifle. He took the GPS from the dashboard and set off to do his job.
It took him less than twenty minutes to find the carcass and he could have done it without the GPS – the circling spiral of vultures waiting for their turn, like jets in a holding pattern at a busy airport, was a better pointer than any modern gizmo. His hunch was right. The rhino had been plugged just fifty metres short of the spring. He watched the hollowed skin and jumble of bones for another fifteen minutes from the cover of a cluster of immature leadwoods. If there had been men nearby, the vultures would have been in the trees. Instead, the rhino’s remains were being noisily picked and fought over. Most of the birds were white-backed vultures, though a lappet-faced, a monstrous thing whose ugly pink and purple head stood high above the others, occasionally bounded through the dust and gore, hopping on both clawed talons, to elbow the others out of the way. The lappet-faced, with its wicked hooked beak, was the can-opener, the one who cut through tough skin so that others could feed on the entrails. Because of his strength and size he also claimed the choicest morsels.
Shane had deliberately moved in downwind of the rhino, so as not to alert the poachers with his scent. As a result, he copped the full force of the rotting stench. He breathed through his mouth and scanned the surrounding bush. The illegal hunters were well gone, he reckoned.
He had established radio contact with Fletcher on the drive out from the lodge, alerting him to the find. He’d been quietly pleased that this kill, at least, was news to his employer. ‘Niner, this is Taipan,’ he said quietly into his hand-held radio. Fletcher had insisted on giving him the callsign Taipan, after Australia’s deadliest snake. Shane had thought it a little corny – and also odd, given that he didn’t expect to be doing any killing in this job. Whatever. As a mark of respect he’d suggested Fletcher be referred to as ‘Niner’ – Australian military radiospeak for the commanding officer of a unit.
‘Niner, over,’ Fletcher replied through static.
‘Found the carcass, but it looks like the bad guys are long gone.’ He read the coordinates from the GPS, then added, ‘I’ll follow their spoor to the border and see if I can pick up anything else, over.’
‘Roger, Taipan. We’re not far behind you. RV back at the kill, over.’
Shane acknowledged, then moved forward, walking slowly, scanning ahead, left, right, and up, in the trees. Just in case. The vultures erupted in a dark cloud as he closed on what was left of the rhino. He shook his head. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and he had seen death in many forms, but this killing more than most seemed incredibly pointless. That men would kill such a magnificent beast for its horn seemed such a terrible waste. However, the man or men who had pulled the trigger had done this not for medicine or ornament, but for money. In that respect, was he much different from them? He circled the kill, looking for spoor. It was easy to pick up. Rafter sandals and running shoes mostly – four men, by the look of it. A scrape in the sand near the bloodied head where a sack had been laid. Cigarette butts. Careless. That told him something. His enemies were relaxed, self-confident, lazy, not expecting to be tracked. There was at least one imprint of the butt plate of an AK 47.
Shane checked his GPS. The spoor headed due west, the shortest route to the border. If the poachers had tried to conceal their tracks on their journey through the national park, they had given up any semblance of discipline. Their path through the long yellow adrenaline grass was as clear as a four-lane highway now. He moved off in parallel. The grass got its name from the risk of bumping into something deadly – such as a lion. He felt the familiar constriction in his chest and the beating pulse in his carotid as he set off. His adrenaline had kicked in and it was because he was hunting something far more deadly than anything on four feet.
The leadwoods and remnants of chewed mopane trees gave way to an open vlei, but Shane skirted the clearing the long way round, sticking to high ground, on his right. He smiled to himself. The basics of his military training would never leave him, no matter what occupation he ended up in. To be above your enemy was an advantage known since the days men fought with clubs and spears. The poachers’ path through the grass was still clear, and he didn’t want to risk being caught in the open if one or more of them were lagging.
Soon he came to a clearing and the first of the white-painted cairns that marked the border. He was just below the crest of a low hill. He dropped to his belly and pulled his binoculars out of his top pocket. To his left and right was a cleared trail – it hardly qualified as a road, though it might once have held such a title. He reckoned the poachers had crossed the border about a hundred metres to his left. He scanned the likely breach, and then looked left and right out over the featureless bush on the Botswana side.
Above the cooing of a dove and the rush of the merciless dry wind through stunted trees, he heard a voice.
He swung the binoculars to where he thought he had heard the sound and concentrated all his senses. He sniffed the air. Smoke.
He slowly raised the radio to his mouth. ‘Niner, this is Taipan. Contact, wait out.’
Reynolds knew what Castle’s message over the radio meant, and understood there was no point calling back asking for more information. The guy would give him more detail when he had it, and Fletcher should not call back before then.
The Italians were excited and nervous, whispering to each other at what seemed like a million syllables a minute. He had tried, politely, to tell them that they would never bag anything if they kept talking.
Lloyd led them from the road, towards the vultures that circled the kill in spiralling thermals. The tracker raised a hand, then pointed with his thumb towards the ground.
‘Shut up!’ Fletcher mouthed at the Italians. Reading the scowl on his face they immediately took heed. He crept forward, bent at the waist, and knelt beside Lloyd, who pointed silently through the bush. Fletcher didn’t need his binoculars. There were three men in sight, wearing a mix of clothing – shorts, T-shirts, one with no shirt at all, just some ratty old green canvas webbing straps crisscrossing his muscled black back. They all carried AK 47s. Fletcher studied them as they circled the kill. It was odd, he thought, that they didn’t seem to be doing anything. The rhino’s horns were gone. So what were the poachers doing hanging around? It didn’t make sense.
He had to risk letting Shane know that he, too, had found their quarry. He lifted his radio and whispered, ‘Taipan, this is Niner. Acknowledge your last and I confirm that I have contact in sight.’
Shane cursed. The voice coming through the radio was soft, but to him it sounded as loud as a car alarm squawking in the bush. He pushed the transmit button once. The voiceless reply would tell Fletcher that he had received his message and – if the old man had half a bloody brain – let him know not to try talking to him again.
He leopard-crawled forward, praying he would not be called again. It confused him, though, that Fletcher could also see the men. He hoped no one started shooting, as not knowing where your friendly forces were in a fire fight was a recipe for tragedy.
He settled behind the fallen trunk o
f a dead tree – probably knocked over by an elephant. A bow in the log allowed him to peer under it. He could see the poachers now, perhaps a hundred metres away. Two sat on another felled tree, another stood. They were arguing with each other. One pointed repeatedly at his wristwatch – another shrugged his shoulders. Someone was late. Their pick-up, perhaps? The one doing most of the talking pulled a satellite telephone out of his khaki cargo pants and flipped up the stubby aerial.
Shane counted two AK 47s and one large-bore bolt-action hunting rifle. The fourth man appeared to be unarmed. He looked the youngest of the quartet – perhaps in his mid to late teens. In the centre of the circle of men was a hessian sack, darkly stained with the blood of the dead rhino.
The talking man spoke into his phone for a couple of minutes, displeasure plain in his voice and his gestures as he waved his free hand in the air. At the end of his conversation, he, too, shrugged and sat down on the log next to the other men. He said something to the youngest, who scurried forward and added more sticks to the small fire in the centre of the clearing. He arranged rocks around the growing flames and pulled a charred, battered metal teapot from a canvas rucksack. Brew time. These criminals were going to stay put for a while.
Shane marked the position in his GPS. He cradled his rifle in the crook of his arm and started reversing from his hiding spot, using his elbows, knees and toes to propel himself – as slow and silent as the careful, deadly puff adder that concertinas its body, rather than slithers, when it is on the hunt. He smiled.
He was back in the fray. And he loved it.
Fletcher’s head whipped around at the sound of a snapping twig. It was one of the bloody Italians. The man was as silly as his tailored four-pocketed safari suit jacket and leopard-print puggaree on his hat. The Italian knelt beside him and Fletcher scowled.