by Tony Park
Shane motioned to Wise and Caesar to fall back, then crawled after them.
‘There are at least three rifles in that group,’ he whispered to them once they had stopped, out of sight and earshot of the poachers’ encampment. ‘The odds aren’t worth us trying to take them out by ourselves.’
‘Why don’t we just open fire on them? We could kill them all before they even get to those weapons,’ Wise interrupted.
Shane’s glare hushed him. After a pause, Shane said, ‘We do it by the book – our book. I know Colonel Gizenga thinks we can get away with shooting anyone we see, but five of those men are unarmed, and we don’t know which five they are. It’s up to the Congolese Army or police to arrest them. Whatever Colonel Gizenga’s rules are, we’re not assassins.’
He outlined his plan, and there were no questions when he finished. Wise and Caesar would retrace their steps and return to camp. Even if their map reading and navigation left something to be desired, they were more than capable of picking up their own spoor through the jungle. Shane would find a good vantage point and, hidden away, keep the poachers under observation until the other two could organise a local police or military force to apprehend the criminals.
Shane always had his two-way radio on his belt, so he would be in communication with the hunting camp as soon as his men returned. While he waited for Wise and Caesar to find their way home, he busied himself crawling in a circuit around the entire poaching camp in search of an observation post.
After an hour on his belly, slithering through mud and over decaying leaves and fronds, he found the perfect location. It was the massive stump of a tree that had been felled some time in the past – long enough ago that ants had been able to hollow out the inside of what remained. Nature – with the help of an illegal tree-feller – had created a mini turret that he could ease himself into and sit in in relative comfort. He looked around him for signs that some forest creature might have had the same thought, but aside from some tiny pellet-like droppings – perhaps from a shrew or mouse – it appeared he would have the hide to himself. He peered out at his quarry through an old knothole in the hollowed stump.
Three men had strung hammocks around the smoking fire and they dozed in the fetid, airless afternoon heat. A young man – more like a teenager – squatted on his haunches and tended the fire. Two others lay sprawled out on the ground, while the remaining two worked slowly at slicing flesh in thin strips from the remains of the carcass. Shane hadn’t been able to see what the dead animal was before – aside from one leg – but it looked like it was probably a buffalo. Shane shook his head when he thought of the tourists who might have paid to see a mighty old bull wandering through the forest, or the money that might have gone back into the village coffers if an American hunter had been allowed to bag the beast as a trophy. He looked at the emaciated forms of some of the men – whether their condition was from malnutrition or AIDS he had no way of knowing – and had a softening of heart. Perhaps they had more right to harvest their own wildlife than some dentist from Chicago. No, he told himself, swinging the argument back in his mind, the three AK 47s and the smoking rack were a strong clue that these were not starving villagers setting snares to feed themselves – this was a professional gang hunting illegal bush meat for sale in the city.
‘Taipan, this is Niner. Radio check, over.’ Shane had connected the external earpiece to his MBITR radio so that the noise of incoming transmissions would be heard by him only.
‘Roger, over,’ he whispered. It was good to hear Fletcher’s voice on the other end. Wise and Caesar had obviously made decent time on their return trip.
‘Taipan, this is Niner. Send sitrep, over.’
Shane gave his summation of all that he had seen in a concise transmission. ‘Estimate they are camping at least for the night, over,’ he concluded.
‘Good work, Taipan. I’ve contacted the G-man and confirm that we will have a reaction force in your location by ten hundred hours tomorrow, over.’
Ten o’clock the next morning! Shane swore silently. It had only just gone four in the afternoon. He had already been sitting in the stump most of the afternoon. He had, as always, enough food and water to last him at least twenty-four hours, but he had banked on a quicker response. They would be lucky if the poachers were still there by the time Fletcher had given him. He knew the ‘G’ man Fletcher referred to was Colonel Gizenga. ‘Say again, over.’
‘I confirm, ten hundred tomorrow, Taipan. Nothing we can do before then as G-man has an operation going on this afternoon.’
There was no point in Shane complaining. He was a soldier and it was his job to follow orders. He looked forward more than ever to the day when he had enough money to buy his own piece of Africa, as he whispered, ‘Roger, over.’
Fletcher closed the conversation by telling Shane to send a sitrep every three hours. Wise and Caesar were manning the radio during the night. Shane kept a watch on the poachers as the dark swiftly infiltrated the jungle. He had assumed they would mount a piquet during the hours of darkness, but was amazed when the last one still awake hefted a log onto the fire, then curled up in front of it and soon started snoring.
Shane faced a long, lonely night. He ate a dinner of two high-energy fruit bars washed down with lukewarm water from his plastic canteen. It was times like this that he wished he had at least one other member on his team, so that two of them could have shared the vigil. It made him think of old Charles Ndlovu, lying buried in the plague-infested dirt of the Victoria Falls cemetery, in a traitor’s grave. The more he thought about Charles the less he understood the man’s reasoning. He remembered the tears of his wife, Miriam, and resolved that he would look in on her and her children as soon as he had the chance to return to Zimbabwe.
With care not to make a rustling noise, Shane opened his backpack – all three of them had carried full loads on the navigation exercise – and pulled out the black nylon case containing his state-of-the-art night-vision goggles. They had cost him a month’s pay from his time as a security consultant in Iraq, but he hoped tonight they would prove to be worth every cent of the five-figure price. He slipped the harness over his head and switched them on. The hitherto impenetrable blackness now shone in an artificial lime-coloured daylight. The embers of the smoky fire glowed as iridescent pinpricks in the centre of his field of vision. The boy lay curled on the ground. He scanned the positions where he had seen the other men lying or swinging in their hammocks. All were still and more than one of them now snoring.
Shane looked again at the assault rifles, standing next to the meat-smoking rack, at least four metres from the nearest sleeping poacher. He couldn’t believe a group of men who hunted and broke the law for a living could be so careless with the most important tools of their trade.
He considered moving in, grabbing the rifles and rousing the men from their sleep. He would have the advantage of surprise, but the men might scatter into the jungle. If they ran, he would be unable to nail all of them – he was quick on the trigger, but not that quick. Besides, shooting unarmed men in the back was not his style.
It was tempting just to take the unattended rifles, he thought to himself; however, when the men awoke and found their rifles gone, they would make a run for it – if they didn’t try looking for him. Either way, they would be long gone before Fletcher and Colonel Gizenga and his men arrived on the scene.
If he simply did as Fletcher had ordered – sat tight and continued to provide sitreps on the men’s position – he would end up as a witness, if not a participant, to a full-scale fire fight. No matter how many men Gizenga could muster, three AK 47s on full automatic would generate a lot of lead, and possibly casualties if the poachers were cornered into a fight.
The motto of the Special Air Service Regiment was ‘Who Dares Wins’. The third option that slowly crept into Shane’s mind was more than daring, it was crazy. A broad grin lit his face in the darkened confines of the hollow tree stump.
He forced himself to wait, th
ough every nerve ending in his body tingled with anticipation, fear and excitement. He checked his watch. Three am. No one had risen to relieve the boy who slept closest to the rifles. Rasping snores competed with croaking frogs and chattering insects to fill the night air. Slowly, Shane slung his rifle upside down across his shoulders and backed out of the tiny hole in which he had hidden for hours.
It was bliss to move again, though as he crawled his legs ached as the blood resumed its normal flow. He lowered himself to his belly and edged towards the jungle clearing, using only his elbows and the toes of his boots to propel himself. The K-bar was in his right hand. If one of the poachers woke now, and stumbled upon him, it would be the last mistake the man would ever make.
Shane heard the rustle of something moving through fallen leaves, behind him and to the right. He froze, and lowered his face into the mulch. As always when soldiering in a jungle there were things just as deadly as the enemy to contend with. He felt the brush of the fabric of his camouflage trousers touching his skin. He held his breath, forcing himself to stay still, though every primal instinct told him to kick and roll away.
He felt the weight of it now, pressing the material against him, transferring its own bulk slowly over the back of his calf. Slithering. He was a brave man, a professional soldier who had faced death many times, but nothing in creation scared him quite so much as snakes. He imagined its forked tongue darting in and out, smelling him, trying to work out what he was. The head reached his other leg now, its first touch as gentle as a lover’s caress. He bit on his lower lip and tasted blood. What would he do, he wondered in sudden panic, if it started to wrap itself around his leg? By the weight of it, and the endless seconds it was taking to cross his legs, he thought it was probably a python. The snake experts said they weren’t poisonous, though they could break every bone in a pig’s body and swallow it whole if they chose to. The snake paused, lying across him like a door stop filled with lead shot. There was no warmth from its scaly body. It was probably drawing heat from him.
Shane listened hard for sounds from the poachers’ camp. He cursed himself for not staying in his hollow tree stump. Who dares wins. What bullshit. Here he was now, almost pissing himself under the weight of a reptile. Still, he resisted the urge to jump up and flee. Slowly, almost cruelly, the snake prolonged its journey, its cold-blooded bulk warming itself on his pounding pulse. At last, he felt the flicking twitch of its tail, and the relief as the weight slid off him. He risked lifting his head an inch and turned to see the diamond-patterned serpent disappear behind a fallen log. He allowed himself a long exhalation of breath through narrowed lips.
Ahead of him the fire’s embers glowed like beacons in the view through his night-vision goggles, which worked by amplifying any ambient light they picked up. He emulated the snake, transferring his weight with serpentine silence and care. Like the python, Shane needed to move quietly in order to catch his prey off guard. He sniffed the air, as the snake had, and watched the lazy smoke that licked the strips of curing meat. It was moving towards him, which was good. In Africa, staying downwind meant staying alive.
Shane made it to the stacked rifles. The drying racks shielded him from view, though not from the hearing of the nearest poachers. He would need to work in total silence. He rose to his knees, scanning left and right to confirm all the men were still motionless. He grabbed the ends of the barrels of two of the weapons with one hand and lowered the third to the ground, before lying all of them down. He dropped to the earth again, alongside the three guns. Even a cursory inspection told him what he had guessed, that the AKs were old and poorly maintained. Still, the Russian Mikhail Kalashnikov had purposely designed a weapon that could be dragged through tropical jungles and dust and bone-dry bushveld without cleaning and still deliver its deadly payload of copper-jacketed death every time. However, Shane knew there were some things even one of these mass-produced third-world killers couldn’t withstand.
He took a handful of dirt from near the fire, where the coals had dried the soil. Slowly he let the grains slide from his fist into the barrel of the first of the rifles. A bit of soil alone might not stop the bullet’s path, so he pulled a water bottle from his belt, undid the cap, and trickled a mouthful down the barrel. He laid the AK with its muzzle up, so the water would mix with the dirt. By morning it should have set hard. Unless the poacher who owned it had a sudden burst of self-discipline and decided to clean his weapon, he would never know his prized possession was hopelessly blocked.
He slid through the leaves and cradled the second assault rifle close to his chest. Slowly, quietly, he removed the banana-shaped magazine full of bullets. At the bottom of the magazine was a metal plate that could be slid off. He kept pressure on the plate as he jiggled it free and allowed the spring to ease itself slowly from the tin box of the magazine. Free of pressure, the rounds started to slide towards the bottom. He laid the magazine down so no bullets would escape. From his belt, Shane drew his Leatherman, and opened the tool so that its pliers were in his hand. He gripped the thin wire of the spring between the jaws of the snips at the fulcrum and squeezed. The spring snapped in two with a tiny ping of breaking metal that sounded as loud to Shane’s ears as a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. He held perfectly still and listed for movement. The poachers snored on as Shane reassembled the magazine. With its spring broken there would be no pressure to feed the bullets into the rifle’s chamber. The first round the firer slid into the weapon would definitely be the last from that batch.
Shane picked up the third rifle and was about to remove its magazine to do something similarly devilish when he heard a cough. He laid the weapon down and rolled to his right so he could peer around the fire pit. He saw a pair of skinny black legs beyond the embers. He swore silently to himself. The man started to walk away from him, towards the edge of the clearing.
Assuming the man was off to answer the call of nature, Shane reasoned he had less than a minute to get away. He rose to his knees, pushed forward the rear sight of the undamaged weapon, and rearranged the rifles into their tepee formation, so that the muzzles rested against one another. He dropped again to his belly and leopard-crawled back towards the hollow tree stump.
The poacher was an old man with a spare covering of tight grey curls atop his bony skull. He wore a pair of ragged cargo shorts and was bare-chested. Back in the relative safety of his hideout, Shane watched as the man scratched his crotch and knelt and prodded the fire. He blew on the dying embers and coaxed some life back into them. Shane smelled the resultant smoke and counted his blessings again that he had moved off when he did. The poacher stood beside the stack of rifles, but did not spare them a glance. He farted loudly and ambled back to his hammock. Shane radioed a situation report to base.
As the first rays of sunlight struggled to pierce the jungle canopy, the old poacher who had almost disturbed him was the first awake. He pulled on a shiny British football shirt – its garish blue an odd choice for working clandestinely in the bush, Shane thought – and started packing an old canvas rucksack with his meagre belongings. Shane was annoyed that he had been unable to spike the third rifle, but consoled himself with the fact that if these men ended up in a fight it would be a pretty one-sided affair.
The old man – Shane presumed he was the leader of the band – roused the others from sleep. As they rubbed their eyes and donned their clothes he kicked dirt on the remains of the fire. Under softly spoken but authoritative orders from the leader, the youngest member of the group started retrieving the dried meat from the makeshift racks and stuffing it into a hessian sack. They were getting ready to move and, at this rate, would be out of the clearing before six o’clock.
Shane pressed the microphone of his radio close to his lips and whispered, ‘Zero Alpha, Zero Alpha, Taipan, over.’
Wise acknowledged him almost immediately, in a soft voice, knowing Shane was still in hiding.
‘Target is getting ready to move. No way, repeat no way, will they be anywhere near this
location by the time you arrive, over.’
‘Standby for Niner, Taipan,’ Wise replied. Shane fumed silently while he waited for Wise to fetch Reynolds. If they had gone with his initial plan, for Wise, Caesar, Fletcher and any soldiers he could muster to return at first light, they might have been able to intercept the poachers while they were on the move.
Fletcher’s voice hissed in Shane’s ear. ‘Colonel Gizenga’s men are in position, Taipan. About one kilometre to the east of your position, line abreast from north to south. I will bring your men and reinforcements in from the west. We’re leaving now, over.’
‘Roger, Niner, but I thought . . .’
‘Save it, Taipan. Aren’t you the one who says no plan survives the first ten minutes? Gizenga’s men finished their operation early and moved into position last night.’
Shane was surprised. He was disappointed Fletcher hadn’t seen fit to contact him earlier, but, as Reynolds had said, Shane knew a good plan was a flexible one. Quickly he told Fletcher that he had managed to sabotage two of the poachers’ three weapons, though at least one could be brought into action again if its owner had a second magazine.
‘Good work, as usual, Taipan,’ Fletcher replied.
Shane brushed off the praise, asking instead, ‘Confirm that you have the west flank and the military has the east, over.’
‘Correct. I’ll send Wise around to the north and Caesar to the south. Your guys will be like a Zulu impi’s horns, encircling the enemy. Either we’ll drive the poachers into the soldiers, or vice versa, over.’
‘Roger, Niner. I’ll follow the target, but tell the army that if they want to set an ambush to warn me first over the radio. I want to take cover if there’s going to be crossfire.’