Wells wondered if he should have Wilfred follow. But if they got close, the guy could go off road, find a patch of soft ground that would trap the SUV. Plus Wells couldn’t imagine that the volunteers were being kept in a town where the Kenyan cops had a presence. No. If they were still in Kenya, they’d be at Dadaab, or in a cluster of huts that wasn’t on a map. Probably close to the Somali border. If the police had cared, they could have made the same calculation, hit every settlement within fifty miles of the border. But either they truly believed Shabaab was behind the kidnapping, or they had received instructions from Nairobi not to look.
“Let’s find where they were taken,” Wells said.
Wilfred lowered his window, shouted to the men across the street. One walked over and had what seemed like an endless conversation with Wilfred before finally wandering back to his buddies.
“It’s around twenty kilometers south,” Wilfred said. “The road takes a turn. A few kilometers before the intersection.”
“That’s all he said.”
“These men, it takes them an hour to answer a question. Country people. Not like Nairobi.”
Wells understood. He’d grown up in the seventies in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, a little town called Hamilton, south of Missoula. Back then the houses on the edge of town still had shared phones—party lines, they were called. The ranchers could make a conversation about the weather last an hour. Why not? The cattle weren’t going anywhere.
—
South of Bakafi the land turned hilly, a blanket on an unmade bed. The road faded until it was little more than potholes in the scrub, and Wells’s legs ached as the Cruiser thumped along. They drove about forty minutes before the road came over a hill and swung hard left. Wilfred stopped and pointed at a mess of cigarettes and water bottles in the road ahead.
The kidnappers had chosen wisely. Wells figured they’d blocked the road with one or two of their own SUVs. A driver coming over the hill would have only seconds of warning. If he tried to swerve past the roadblock, he would risk getting stuck in the hill’s soft dirt or flipping over. But once he stopped, he’d be trapped. Gunmen would have positioned themselves behind the WorldCares SUV, pinning it down.
Wilfred eased past the kidnapping site, stopping a hundred feet away. Wells tucked the Glock into his waistband and walked back under the hammering noontime sun. On all sides, the land was surpassingly quiet. No railroad tracks or cell towers. To the west and southwest, he saw scattered huts, but nothing that qualified as a village, much less a town. East, toward Somalia, the land appeared entirely empty. Southeast, maybe five miles away, Wells saw a few black smudges coasting through the sky. Smoke, maybe. He checked through his binoculars. He couldn’t be sure, but they looked like birds. Big ones. A bunch of them, widely spaced, but all moving southeast.
Rich tourists came to Africa under the illusion they would see the untouched world. But mostly they stuck to national parks or private game reserves as closely managed as zoos. They should have come here instead. Wells squatted down, pored over the road, the land around it. But the police had destroyed whatever evidence the kidnappers might have left. The soft red dirt held at least a half-dozen different tire tracks, dozens of footprints. Maybe the guys from CSI could tell the tracks left by the kidnappers from those left by the cops. Wells couldn’t. Pretending otherwise would only waste time.
Still, this trip strengthened his certainty that Suggs was involved. First, the kidnappers must have known the route the volunteers were taking. Why else wait here, on a road used by only a few vehicles a day? On the flip side, Wells couldn’t imagine why the volunteers would have chosen this route unless Suggs had suggested it. The road barely appeared on the map, and it was terribly slow. They’d covered a little more than 150 kilometers—not even 100 miles—in three hours. Going to Garissa and then south on the gravel road to the coast would surely have been faster, even with roadblocks.
“What do you think?” Wilfred said.
“I think Kenyan cops smoke a lot. Any of these brands unusual? Somali?”
“No, all Kenyan.”
Then Wells realized what he hadn’t seen. No spent rounds, no brass casings. No evidence of a firefight. He double-checked to be sure. Yes. Another sign that the kidnapping had gone off without a hitch. He took one last look around, walked back toward the Cruiser.
“That’s it?” Wilfred said. “We came all this way for that?”
“Sometimes you have to see a place with your own eyes.”
“Now we go back to Bakafi, see if anyone talks?”
“No. South.” Wells felt strongly that the kidnappers had gone away from Dadaab. If they had planned to hide in the camps, they would have taken the volunteers much closer to Dadaab.
“And you think these people around here want to talk to you?”
“Never know unless you ask.”
“I can tell you they aren’t much interested in talking to outsiders. Maybe you tell them you’re an Arab and you want to buy the girls for slaves. Like a vulture coming in after the kill.”
Like a vulture . . .
Wells raised his binoculars and looked at the black smudges on the horizon. They were still heading southeast. They’d shrunk to specks now. But even as he watched, another entered his field of view. This one was closer, close enough for him to see its wings, big and black and jagged, like they’d been sewn on the cheap and could unravel easy as tugging a string. The bird rode a thermal, rising hundreds of feet in seconds, then flicked its wings and circled southeast, same as the others.
“That way.” Wells pointed toward the vulture.
—
The track south ended a half hour later at a T-junction with another, equally unimpressive road. Twenty or so huts lay a kilometer west. Wilfred turned left, east. Toward Somalia, which was no more than thirty barren kilometers away. Wells racked the slide on the Glock, making sure it was loaded. The pistol felt strange in his hand, heavier and bigger than the Makarov he had carried for so many years. But Anne was right. He should have retired the Mak long ago. Now he had an excuse, a new pistol that fate, in the form of a plug-ugly Irishwoman, had pressed on him.
The smudges in the sky were as good as a GPS. They’d all heard the same announcement: Delicious carrion in aisle two. They might be headed for a cow or a sheep or even a camel. But Wells didn’t think so. After another twenty minutes in the Cruiser, Wells could see the birds slowing, organizing themselves into a ragged circle. They were almost directly to the south, maybe five kilometers. Three swung lower, disappearing behind a hill. Soon they popped up again. Wells imagined they’d tried to feed and been chased out by stronger predators, jackals or hyenas or even lions. The big Kenyan national park called Tsavo East lay about 150 kilometers southwest of here. No doubt lions sometimes ranged this far from its boundaries.
The birds rose, riding on thermals, black spurs against the empty blue sky. Wilfred pointed to a faint pair of ruts marked by a cairn of a half-dozen stones. He started to turn into the track, but Wells put a hand on his forearm.
“Go straight. Park over the next rise. Then we leave this and walk.”
“It will take forever. And snakes. There are snakes.”
“We go on foot, no one knows we’re coming.”
“Better to have this.” Wilfred patted the dashboard like a horse’s flank.
“We walk. You don’t like it, stay in the car.”
—
They trudged south through the ugly low scrub. The dirt was soft, almost spongy, swallowing their steps. The refugees walked through hundreds of miles of this to reach Dadaab. No wonder they were starving when they arrived. Wells carried the essentials in his pack: water, a first-aid kit, binoculars, a sat phone and GPS. He’d strapped on a climber’s headlamp, goofy-looking but essential for keeping his hands free if he found himself in a dark hut. The shotgun was slung across his chest, the Glock tucked i
nto his waistband. He’d given Wilfred the Makarov.
“You don’t shoot unless I shoot.”
“Okay, yes.”
The Land Cruiser’s clock had read 14:20 when they left. Wells figured they’d need close to an hour to reach the area directly beneath the vultures. That didn’t give them much time on target if they were going to return to the Cruiser before dark. They walked in silence, Wells a few feet ahead, scanning for smoke, huts, any sign of human habitation.
A high-pitched cackle, an ugly gasping sound, half laugh, half choke, erupted somewhere in front of them. Wells stopped with one foot in the air like Wile E. Coyote. “Hyenas?”
“That’s their song.”
“Pretty.”
“The devil rides them through hell.”
“Save the folk tales for the anthropology professors.”
Wilfred shook his head in perplexity.
“Come on. Unless you want to be out here in the dark.”
Twice more they heard the cackling, and once an answering call behind them. Neither man mentioned it. The vultures floated high overhead, using the thermals, barely flapping their wings.
A half hour later, Wells came over a hill and saw the huts. Four in all. Three small and close to each other. The last larger, maybe fifty meters away from the third. They were mud-brick, hand-built, like a thousand other huts that Wells had seen that day. The big one had a tin roof, angled slightly so the rain would pour off. The other three had traditional branch roofs. No walls or barbed wire separated them from the land around. Hidden in plain sight. No vehicles either. They were gone, or hidden.
Wells dropped to a knee, scanned the compound through his binoculars. In the middle of the compound, he saw a man, or more accurately what was left of him. His arms and legs were chewed to stumps, his belly torn open. Intestines glistened against black skin like stuffing pulled loose from a cheap toy. Two more bodies lay in front of the second hut, similarly dismembered.
“See them?” Wilfred muttered.
He wasn’t talking about the corpses.
The hyenas lay in the shade of the huts, lazing, their bellies swollen. Beards of blood coated their muzzles. Wells counted ten. As he watched, one stood and waddled over to a corpse. The hyena poked and snuffled the body and then clamped its jaws around an arm. It put its paws on the dead man’s chest and lifted its head and grunted and strained, its body shaking, until the arm tore from the shoulder with a gunshot-loud snap. Over the years, Wells had seen human beings destroyed in almost every conceivable way. Even so, the violence done to these corpses tightened his throat.
Wells stood, unslung the shotgun. No need for stealth. Whoever had killed these people had left the camp to the hyenas. “Time to restore our place at the top of the food chain.”
“You want to go down there.”
“When they learn how to shoot, I’ll worry.” Wells strode down the hill. After a few seconds, he heard Wilfred follow. When he reached the base of the hill, fifty yards from the nearest corpse, the animals stood and looked at him. They were motley creatures, with big cupped ears that made him think of fly-eating flowers. Their brown fur was marked with dark spots like an old man’s hands. Their tails angled downward, toward the earth. When dogs put their tails at that angle, they were showing submission. Wells figured hyenas behaved similiarly, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know much about them. He’d have to remember to read up before his next trip searching for volunteer aid workers.
A breeze ruffled the hyenas’ fur and brought Wells the sour stench of the torn, bloated corpses. Over millennia, humans had invented rituals to hide the monstrousness of postmortem decay. But here was death in its truest form, destroying not just the spirit but the body itself.
Wells lifted the shotgun high and shouted, “Go! Git! Go on, now!”
The hyenas were less than impressed. One yawned, its pink tongue flopping out. Another scratched furiously at the dirt like a drag racer spinning his wheels before the flag dropped. The one closest to Wells went back to tugging on a corpse.
“Get lost! Hubba-hubba!” Wells cocked the shotgun and strode closer. Most of the pack padded away. But four stood their ground. The hyena nearest Wells seemed to be the leader. It raised its tail, bared its teeth, growled low in its throat. Wells felt his adrenaline rise. The creature might not be pointing a pistol at him, but its intent was more than clear. It stared at him with unblinking black eyes. It was enormous, three feet tall. As big as a Great Dane but sturdier. It had to be almost two hundred pounds. It had a thick neck and teeth that looked like they could tear steel.
Wells put the shotgun to his shoulder, angled the muzzle skyward. “GO!” The hyena merely licked its lips. “I thought you were cowards.” He squeezed the trigger. The Mossberg bucked against his shoulder and its blast rattled through his skull. He pumped the shotgun, fired again.
Finally, the hyena stepped away from the corpse and turned aside. It looked over its shoulder at Wells and loped off, its tail between its legs. You don’t scare me. The other three holdouts followed, forming a single-file line as they disappeared into the scrub. They moved with an odd precision. The stink of the corpses would lure them back by nightfall, Wells thought. Another reason not to tarry.
Wells topped up the Mossberg with two more shells, slung it over his chest, and turned to the bodies. They looked worse up close, rotting meat covered with quilts of flies. Wells wished for a kerchief to shield his mouth, or even better, some Vicks VapoRub to hide the stench. He squeezed his nose, forced himself to ignore the flies and the stink and look close at the corpses. Their faces had been chewed into unrecognizability, but in their flesh he saw neat punctures. GSWs, as trauma surgeons said. Gunshot wounds.
He didn’t see any rifles or pistols, but brass casings glinted in the red dirt around the bodies. Wells picked up a handful. 7.62-millimeter jackets. AK rounds.
Beside the third hut he saw two more bodies. A piece of torn rubber lay between them. It looked like it had been chewed and then spit out, as if even the hyenas wouldn’t bother with it. A mask. A Joker mask.
Joka-joka-joka call back-back-back.
—
Wells had heard plenty of lies over the years, and told his share. But he couldn’t remember anyone who lied with as much conviction—as much flat-out style—as James Thompson. The man had been close to tears at the press conference in Nairobi. Wells wondered what explanation Thompson would offer for having the Joker’s number programmed into his phone. No doubt it would be a beaut. Wells grabbed the mask, threw it as high and far as he could. Let the vultures have it, if the hyenas wouldn’t.
The first hut held supplies, mostly canned food and water. Cases of peanut butter and jam. Whoever had been here had wanted to be sure he wouldn’t need a fire to cook. At the back, two hot plates with electrical cords and a half-dozen plastic jerricans of gasoline. No generator. Wells wondered if the raiders had taken it.
In the next hut, six cots, their mattresses thin, stained, and lumpy. The dank sour smell of a locker room that hadn’t been cleaned all season. T-shirts and jeans and sneakers and Tusker bottles strewn across the floor. Against the wall, an empty AK magazine, no rifle in sight. Wells imagined the chaos of a surprise night attack, men scrambling for weapons and running outside to die. He rousted the room for notebooks or phones, didn’t find any.
The third hut had only two cots. Wells guessed the leaders had lived here. A wooden chest held shoes and clothes, including a bright yellow polo shirt, size XXL. Wells put it in his pack. Maybe Moss could identify it as belonging to Suggs. Between the cots, a cardboard box held two oversized bottles of off-brand scotch. Nothing else. The whole camp felt temporary to Wells, as though the men who’d lived here hadn’t planned on staying long—evidence for the theory that Thompson and Suggs planned to end the kidnapping quickly, once the media attention peaked.
One hut left, the big one. Process of elim
ination said it was the place where Gwen and the others had been kept. Up close, Wells heard grunting and snuffling and scratching, horror-movie sounds. He reached for his pistol, flicked on his headlamp, stepped inside—
The room was airless and dark and painfully hot. In the headlamp’s stark white light, Wells saw a hyena tugging at a corpse against the far wall. The animal turned to Wells and screeched and Wells stepped backward. He knew instantly he’d made a mistake. The hyena bared its teeth and raised its tail like a battle standard and charged, pouncing across the hut, angling toward Wells. Wells raised the Glock, a classic shooter’s two-handed stance, and pulled the trigger. The Glock had more kick than the Makarov, more than Wells expected. The pistol pulled sideways and the round caught the hyena in its hindquarters. The hyena screamed now, but kept moving. Wells pulled the trigger again—
This second shot caught the beast farther up. Wells expected the hyena to go down. Still it came. Ten feet away now. It opened its jaw wide, its teeth white and vicious under the headlamp’s single eye. Wells knew he had time for only one last shot. He raised the Glock high and, as the hyena leapt, he pointed the pistol into the beast’s open maw and pulled the trigger—
The hyena’s head exploded and its body convulsed sideways. It flopped against the hut’s dirt floor. When it stopped moving, Wells poked it gingerly with his foot. He knew he had killed it well and truly. Yet he half expected it to rise. The devil’s pet indeed. Those fierce slavering jaws. And the stink. A stomach filled with carrion, the meat twice dead now. Wells found himself murmuring the Shahada, the Muslim creed, La ilaha illa Allah . . . There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.
“Holy shit,” Wilfred said behind him. “Score one for the great white hunter.”
The stench of decaying tissue clotted Wells’s throat. He pressed his forearm against his nose and forced himself to walk deeper into the hut. And realized something about the body at the far end. It was white. The face was still largely intact. A man. His mouth open, and his eyes. Wells had never met him, but from photos he knew the frat-boy chin. Gwen’s sometime boyfriend. James’s nephew.
The Night Ranger Page 15