The Devil's Horn (23 page)

Juma loomed closer, impinging on him.

“What can we get for it, shamwari?”

Allyn bit back a rebuke. Juma had no romance for the missile or what it could do for them, or to them. The Hellfire was just another item to be sold.

Allyn patted the rocket, wishing it good-bye with regret. He turned for the door, looking past the heaps of niggling guns, little things any man could possess.

“I’ll make a call.”

Chapter 22

Neels and Karskie hauled the wheels and landing struts from the long crash rut. Promise was left aside to watch, as if she couldn’t be trusted even to drag things. The Americans used all twenty sticks of dynamite, coating the drone with tape and explosives, stuffing one stick each into their parachute containers. When they were done the busted vehicle and collected bits looked pitiful and sorry, naively caught up in something beyond themselves, sentenced to die for it.

Neels helped the captain and LB with the fuses, using a big knife from his boot to cut matching lengths, then securing them to the sticks. He seemed to know what he was doing to make them detonate at the same time. Karskie stood to the side like Promise but not near her.

A band of curious eland appeared through the brush fifty meters off, eyeing the scene with a swishing detachment. Promise thought to warn them away, what a ranger would do, but she did not.

The Americans and Neels webbed the drone in gray strands of fuse that funneled down to one igniting piece. Promise grew thirsty, she’d not had water since the night. She called to Karskie, but the big boy said she’d have to ask Neels. Promise imagined Neels shooting her in the back if she wandered into the bush to find a drink.

She could run, lose herself easily in the Kruger. The old man wouldn’t catch her, she had a dozen ways to vanish before he could get her in his sights. Even a superb tracker like Neels would lose ground to her. Promise could survive for days on her own.

Then what? After she’d escaped? She couldn’t go home to Hazy View and Gogo or curl in her cot at the ranger station. She would never again ride with Wophule. Everything she’d ever held close or hoped for had fled when Neels walked out of the dark last night. No, when the drone crashed in Shingwedzi. No, not then. Before, when Gogo asked Juma for money.

No. No. Nothing and no one else. Only Promise. She’d made the choices. Others were poor, had families and dreams, had love like Wophule, but they didn’t take the horn, didn’t call the devil, didn’t call Juma. Promise had left the path of her old life for a terrible and dark trail. It was leading to the one place she’d never wanted to be. On her own.

She saw herself standing inside the web of fuses, all lit and sparking around her, closing in to remove all evidence of her, too.

Chapter 23

Neels huddled with the Americans and Karskie. The girl was left alone. Neels pointed into the bush to make his point.

“As soon as it blows, we leave. I’ve got a two-man patrol out here somewhere in Shingwedzi. When they hear the blast, they’ll come straightaway. I assume you don’t want them to find two Americans standing next to a dead ranger’s grave and a bloody great hole in the ground.”

The captain took a satellite phone from his vest.

“Okay. Give me a few minutes.”

He walked off. The thick, little sergeant indicated the girl.

“What about her?”

“She can’t go with us.”

The sergeant, as if by instinct, slid sideways, blocking Neel’s path to Promise.

“No.”

“If I was going to shoot the little moer, I would have done it. But understand me, Sergeant. I’ve shot men for less. Karskie’s going to take her back.”

The big boy tossed up his hands, defeated before he started.

“No, I’m not.”

Karskie launched into his reasons. Sending her with him would be the same as turning her loose. He could never chase her down, couldn’t shoot her if she made a break. Even if Neels bound her hands, Karskie couldn’t do it.

Neels crossed his arms at the sergeant.

“You want to tell me your opinion?”

“I don’t know. Maybe tie her up, leave her here. When your team shows up, have them take her back.”

“They’ll see Wophule’s grave, and bits of the blasted drone all over the place. She’ll have to lie. If my boys believe her, maybe. She’s a shitty liar. I wouldn’t bet on her chances, they don’t like poachers any more than me. They don’t like dead rangers. And that’s only if something big doesn’t come sniffing around to find her first.”

“Then leave Karskie with her. He’s got a gun.”

Neels laughed at the suggestion. Karskie ignored the insult and shook his head even more vigorously when the sergeant implored him.

Promise strode their way. Neels’s mouth dried as she approached. She stopped short, letting her voice cover the last of the distance.

“Let me go with you.”

The American opened his mouth to reply. Neels cut him off, pushing in front of him to speak directly to the girl. The sergeant was short and bluff and did not move easily.

“Here’s why you’re not going. You’re done. You know that. I’ll see to it. There’s one place left for you, girl, in the whole world. You want us to take you into Mozambique, to your uncle Juma. So you can run to him.”

“I won’t. I swear.”

“You swear. Kak. What have you sworn? Tell me.”

“To kill the man who shot Wophule.”

Neels inched closer to the girl, inside arm’s reach. He could strike her, she knew it, but she held her ground. He leaned in, his nose a hand’s breadth from hers.

Could she do it? Kill a man? The rhino she’d taken down had been a great beast, a bull, dropped by a machete. He kept his voice low.

“Will you, now?”

She whispered, “Yes.”

“What would you do if you were me? Tell me the truth, girl.”

“I’m a poacher. Wophule is dead.”

“Ja.”

“I’d shoot me.”

“That’s right. But the Yanks over there won’t let me. So now what?”

Promise extended her hand in the small space between them, for Neels to take it.

“I won’t run.”

“And what about your great-uncle Juma? You going to stop me from killing him?”

The girl could have been carved, so rigid was her expression and motionless her hand. Her black eyes, close to Neels, seemed to lose focus only for a moment, then softened on him. He’d seen this look in the Selous Scouts, in Angola and the Kruger, on the faces of the dying and the killers, a hardness that leavened into acceptance, always among the ones who sensed death was coming.

“No.”

Neels gripped her small hand in a forceful, private bargain.

He turned to the short sergeant.

“She goes.”

They waited for the captain to finish his satellite call. The rangy officer walked a small circle, lapping several times; he worked his free hand before him as if to brush away cobwebs. He seemed unhappy with the person on the line and could not sway the conversation. He did not glance back at Neels or his sergeant.

Promise sat beside Wophule, tending the boy’s rock pile before leaving it behind. She filled in gaps where Neels had disturbed it with more sand and stone. The girl would never see her partner again, nor the Kruger, not from jail or her own grave, wherever today led her.

Karskie returned to the hedge, the place where he’d slept the night. He lay down again under the thorns.

The stocky sergeant could not stand quietly on his own. He fidgeted, checked the fuses in the dynamite, examined the Belgian rifle, ate more PowerBars. He watched his captain go round and round on the phone. He sweated badly, mopping and cursing. Neels had been like that once, impatient for the next bit of action, popping like water on a hot pan. Neels had been young and eager, proving himself. Years of reading the spoor of men and creatures had taught him to pace himself; there could be no impatient trackers. But this sergeant was not a young man. What was he proving?

The sergeant caught Neels looking at him. He walked over, as if Neels was the last item left to distract him. The man seemed uncomfortable, as did his captain, both out of place in the bush. Or perhaps their awkwardness came from being in military camouflage without any insignia at all, like a dress-up game.

The sergeant appraised Neels with a confidence Neels read as false.

“You look like you served.”

“A while ago. The Border War.”

“You married? Got a family?”

This would have felt intrusive if it had not been rote, this stumpy sergeant tossing off routine questions between strangers. Neels was expected to answer yes or no, then ask, “What about you, friend?” Or maybe explain that his wife had left him, then they might bond over shared miseries, planning out the beers they’d blather over later. Neels measured the American for a punch and imagined how nice it might feel to do it with no explanation. He crammed his lips together to shut his own mouth, listen to his own breath whistling in his nostrils. Neels walked away. The American wisely said nothing behind him.

Chapter 24

LB threw rocks as far as he could into the bush. He had to do something, move; everyone was occupied but him. Promise hunkered beside the grave, pouring grit on it. Wally argued on the sat phone with Torres, big Karskie had gone back to sleep, and old ranger Neels stalked around, seething at something in his head. LB aimed a stone at a gnarled tree to see if he could scare something out of it, a monkey or whatever, but got nothing. The sun rose fast here in Africa, and the scrubby Kruger, as far as he could see, was going to offer very little today, not shade or water, just dust, brush, and thorns.

The gray drone balanced on its nose and one wing, dull in the rising light, strapped to dynamite and condemned. LB threw another rock at the tree and thought about throwing one at the drone just to shake everybody up. He imagined lighting the fuses but not waking Karskie, just to see how high the fat boy would jump from sleep when the drone blew. Wally showed no signs of winding up his discussion with Torres, the ranger girl looked lost, and Neels snarled into the air, conducting some angry one-sided conversation. LB picked Karskie.

He moseyed over and sat close, waking the boy. Karskie snorted, then wiped his knuckles in his eyes as he came upright.

“We ready?”

LB shook this off.

“Wally’s still working out our orders. Tell me something.”

“If I can.”

“What’s going on?”

“Specifically?”

“With rhino horn. All this killing and money. I mean, in a word, fuck.”

Karskie chewed on his thoughts, waking, considering where to begin. Right off, LB saw he’d asked a bigger question than he’d realized.

“First, understand that for a thousand years, traditional healers all over South Asia have said that horn would give energy, strength, that sort of thing.”

“Supposed to be some kind of aphrodisiac.”

“That was the big myth for a long time. Powdered and drank with water. No one believes it anymore. Now the healers just use it for hangovers.”

“Tell me it doesn’t work.”

“Of course it doesn’t work. A horn’s nothing but keratinized fiber. Hair, like a horse’s hoof. It’s got zero medical properties.”

“How bad is it? How many rhinos are you losing?”

“Over a thousand a year, and that’s just in the Kruger. In the world, there’s maybe five thousand wild black rhinos left, twenty thousand white rhinos. Both have already been declared extinct.”

“Extinct? Come on.”

“The deaths are greater than the birthrate. If we can’t get a handle on the poachers soon, yeah. Extinct.”

“This isn’t about hangovers.”

“No.”

“Who’s buying it?”

“Most of the horn goes to Vietnam. Then China, Korea, Indonesia.”

“What the hell for?”

“There’s a lot of money in Asia these days. The economies in China and Vietnam especially have gotten red-hot. That’s made a rising class of rich, called the new dragons. They spoil their kids with horn, make it a graduation present. They mix it with Cialis and Viagra and Red Bull. They hang horns in their houses to show off their money. It’s a prestige thing, like a Lamborghini or a Rolex. A sign of untouchability. China and Vietnam don’t have rhinos of their own. Why would they care about someone else’s?”

At least a car and a watch, even at obscene prices, did something useful. But to slaughter a rhino, decimate a species, for a worthless energy drink or a trinket was brutally senseless and selfish. LB had never seen a real rhino, not even in a zoo, and now he very much wanted to, particularly if they might be gone in a few years. He scanned the bush that stretched away in sere, ropey shapes, hoping for a hulking, prehistoric, horned beast prancing in the distance. Far off, a few heads popped above a line of trees, just grazing giraffes. LB considered asking Karskie what the chances of seeing a rhino were but didn’t want to sound like a child or a tourist. He closed his mouth but kept open the hope.

He reached into Karskie’s pack for a water bottle, partly to wash away the imagined bitter taste of powdered horn. Near the drone, Neels stared off into the plains with hands balled at his hips, quieter than he’d been, as if watching something disappear. Promise hid her face in her dark hands. Wally had begun to nod into the sat phone, finally hearing words he could agree with. LB wanted to know more from Karskie about the kind of men—and women, like sad Promise—they were about to go after.

“Tell me about poachers.”

Karskie knew plenty.

Poachers crossed in waves into the Kruger, hundreds per week, all from bleak lives, equipped with machetes, sacks, and hunting rifles stolen from farmhouses. Most of them snuck over the porous border with Mozambique, while the rest came from neighboring townships inside South Africa. The poachers didn’t work independently; large-mammal poaching was an organized crime, backed by international syndicates and big, illicit money.

A typical ring was set up in vertical tiers. It started at the bottom with a triggerman and his team. These were poor villagers who killed the rhino, then cut the horns off whole, with flesh attached to show the horns were fresh. To get the entire horn, including the root below the skin, the poachers had to hack deep into the rhinos’ nasal cavities. If the rhino was still alive when they started cutting, this finished it.

LB gestured to Promise.

“That what she did?”

“Yeah.”

“Geez.”

Karskie continued. The shooter and his team hand delivered the horns to the next level up. This was their only connection to the syndicate, the transporter, the one who recruited them in their villages and was responsible for paying them. The transporter disguised the horn in legitimate shipments to Hong Kong, Hanoi, Jakarta, any number of Asian ports. Sometimes, cargo ships even waited offshore from Maputo, Cape Town, or Port Elizabeth to trade the transporter a load of drugs or diamonds directly for the horns.

LB said, “That’s this guy Juma.”

“He’s the second tier in this syndicate, yeah.”

“Who’s the third?”

“The financiers. These are the big dogs. Transporters are hard enough to catch, but a level three is almost impossible to nail. This guy moves the money. He lives in Jo’burg or Cape Town. He’s got offshore accounts in Dubai and Switzerland.”

The money disappeared into a maze of businesses. It came out as dividends and capital gains, clean and laundered.

The last tier, level four, were the murky figures who received the shipments in Asia, the black marketers. In their hands, the horn was chopped into slabs or powdered, whatever the local market demanded, then sold to the end users. For the past decade, the street price for horn had outpaced pure cocaine, doubled gold, and risen as rhinos became scarcer.

Public campaigns had been mounted all over Asia, trying to raise awareness that their folly was destroying the world’s greatest wild animals. The result was that the number of rhinos and elephants killed each year had exploded.

Karskie spit in the dirt.

“The cost of horn’s gotten so high, even private wildlife reserves have been caught poaching their own rhinos.”

Some greedy private-reserve owners pretended to discover the carcasses on their fenced-in grounds, then beat their breasts over how they’d been violated and held fundraisers for anti-poaching charities. They’d buy a replacement rhino from a breeder or another reserve for twenty thousand American dollars.

Some private owners had begun to dehorn their rhinos themselves, disfiguring the animals but protecting them. They registered the horns with the state, then locked them away for the day when selling horn became legal, a movement gaining steam in South Africa. A few speculators had cropped up, breeders raising rhinos not for display or preservation but to harvest the horn, which, if taken carefully, grew back. This was potentially a billion-dollar industry, which would increase the supply of horn and lower the price, pulling the rug out from under the poachers. But Karskie, who’d seen a few carcasses, agreed with the wildlife-preservation community that legalizing horn was a surrender to the poachers and an insult to the beast itself, reducing the rhino to the status of a chicken or a pig. LB saw both sides and said so, a mistake.

Karskie began to squirm, uncomfortable on the ground, his face registering disgust.

“Whatever it is, something’s got to change. You need to understand, the rhino’s just the marquee animal. If we lose them, the same syndicates will wipe out the elephant next.”

Karskie described an awful event a few years ago, in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. Poachers laced water holes with cyanide, poisoning four hundred elephants at one time for their tusks. The boy tossed more terrible numbers at LB, how Africa was losing four elephants every hour, three rhinos per day.

“Here’s the clincher. After the rhinos and the elephants are finished, the lion will be next, for lion-bone wine. Then the tigers for bone tea, sharks and great tortoises for soup, abalone for their shells. Did you know you can buy an ashtray made out of a gorilla’s hand?”

Karskie had gotten passionate. LB was about to put his hands over his ears to signal he’d heard enough. Just then, finally, Wally stuffed the sat phone into his vest and headed their way. Karskie ratcheted up his intensity, getting in his last licks before Wally arrived.

“There’s a shit ton of money in horn, and frankly, not much risk. The Kruger’s basically a shopping mall for poachers. We should have two thousand rangers on the ground, but we’ve got four hundred. Less than half are on patrol at any time. When we find a carcass, our response is to track them. That’s it, in the twenty-first century. That’s the extent of our technology. Yeah, we have a few shot towers to catch the sounds of gunfire, we fly a drone here and there. But essentially, we catch poachers because men like Neels bloody track them down. When we do manage to catch poachers inside the park, all we can do is prosecute the poor bastards or shoot them. Either way, their families get paid off by the syndicate. There’s no shortage of villagers who can fire a gun or swing a panga. In the end, there’s not a lot of disincentive to poaching.”

Neels had finished his agitated reverie and fallen in behind Wally. Promise, without being called, got to her feet. With dusty hands, she drifted away from her partner’s rock pile.

LB aimed his chin at the girl.

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“Jail, for a long time. Poaching. Accessory to murder.”

“And what’s his deal?”

“That man there? He’s gone
bossies
, I’ll give you that. Crazy. He’s got rhino fever. Seen too much, been in the bush too long. But he understands this is a war. Neels is the disincentive.”

Promise shuffled behind Neels, bowed and shamed. She was a plucky and clever girl, even pretty. If this was a war the way Karskie described it, no wonder Neels wanted to shoot her. She wore the same uniform as he did, a Kruger ranger, and had defiled it.

Still energized, Karskie hopped to his feet. The big boy had worked himself into a state and looked like he was raring to go. Wally walked past, curling a finger for LB to follow. LB took only one stride before Neels hooked a hand inside his elbow to drag him to a stop.

“Where you going?”

Wally answered while LB yanked his arm free.

“I’m going to brief my sergeant. If you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. Let me tell you a little something.”

Wally’s shining shades flattened his features when he turned to LB, who could only shrug. The two of them were helpless without Neels and had no power to compel him. Neels would gun Promise down before letting her out of his sight. Karskie was brainy but sure to be useless from this point forward.

Neels tapped his own breast.

“You see, lads, I’m going to Macandezulo whether you come or not. Me and the girl, even Karskie, we’ve got authority to cross the border in pursuit of poachers. I’m in pursuit of Juma. And Promise there? She’ll have a word with the moer who shot Wophule.”

Neels sauntered closer, pointing east to the Mozambican border, where he knew the way.

“I don’t give a fok about your missile. That’s your problem. So understand. I’m not going with you. You’re going with me. And that’s only if I say so.”

Neels took a last stride, stepping between LB and Wally. He lapped heavy arms across their shoulders as if in a huddle. He volleyed a happy glance between them.

“See, if you two do tag along, you know my mission, but I don’t know yours. Doesn’t seem fair, ja? Or smart. So tell me what I need to know right now. Then let’s light the fuses and get to it. Or good luck to you.”

Neels did not pull down his arms until Wally and LB pushed them off. The old ranger folded his arms across his chest. Something out in the bush hooted; it was easy for LB to hear it as a laugh.

“Your call, Wally.”

Neels waited only moments in Wally’s reflecting glare before turning on his heels, heading for Macandezulo as he’d warned. Wally spoke to his back.

“There’s a self-destruct charge on the missile.”

Neels pivoted with a curious expression.

“I thought that was just in the movies.”

“Not this time. It’s so they could blow the drone over the ocean.”

“Makes sense, since one of your missiles was on a South African drone. Why was that?”

“That I can’t tell you. But use your imagination.”

“I already have, lad. I’ve done a few covert missions in my time.”

“Then you can figure out why we can’t leave it with Juma.”

“No, you can’t.” Neels liked this. “What’s the range on the charge?”

“Fifteen miles line of sight. Ground to ground, I don’t know. Depends on the terrain.”

“Why not just walk a few more miles east? Macandezulo’s not that far past the border. Blow it up. Kill the bastard for me.”

Wally pursed his lips. He didn’t answer Neels quick enough, so LB jumped in.

“It’s not what we do. We’re rescue. We don’t endanger civilians, even at our own risk.”

Neels swept the back of his hand at LB, dismissive.

“Civilians? Juma’s no civilian.”

“The people around him might be.”

“Anybody with Juma is a fokken criminal. Period. Blow it.”