Glass Tiger (3 page)

‘Shit,’ said Ray in a low voice. His FBI i.d. was strung on a lanyard around his neck and his Sig Sauer was in his right hand, held low at his side. ‘Crows. They’ll alert him. C’mon!’

The crows barely had time to flap up from the log. One, huge and shiny as a raven, stayed to rip out bits of bark and throw them in all directions with savage sideways flings of its head, somehow always keeping one beady eye on the intruders. Then it was gone with a final fat morsel in its beak.

Walt sat down on the log, winded by his sprint to the clearing. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground.

‘I get it, Ray. Since the crows are here, he can’t be.’

‘Smart fella, Walt.’

Ray held an ungloved hand above the embers of the fire before letting himself sit down and light up. The harsh smell of burning tobacco drifted through the clearing.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Maybe thirty. That close. That’s the bad news.’ He feathered out smoke. ‘The good news is that he can’t be more than forty minutes ahead of us.’ He smeared out his just-lit Marlboro against the log. ‘Let’s move. Let’s show those Secret Service fucks how to take down a suspect – we’ll have this guy’s ass in custody before noon.’

‘Unless he resists,’ said Walter piously. He was an asshole, but he loved mortal shooting and was good at it.

‘Unless he resists,’ Ray agreed.

The crows were back at the beef jerky when Corwin crawled out of the log dragging his pack and sleeping bag behind him.

FBI. He even recognized their voices: they had smoked a cigarette above his hiding place back in the Delta in November. As expected, they had been told that he was armed and dangerous. Well, he once had been. He’d lost track of the men he’d killed over the years. These two were no threat.

He trotted unevenly away down his backtrail, leaving Bird Crow’s gang of ruffians to savage the last of the jerky. He’d call Janet from Cedarbrook, she’d leave the 4-Runner for him at Truckee as planned, he’d pick it up with no contact between them. She would be safe, he would have a clean vehicle to drive now that he was clear of the searchers. In two or three weeks their masters would surely find someone better to send after him – the shadowy tireless tracker of his nightmares?

By then he would be hidden away. In plain sight.

On an early April dawn two weeks later, an unmarked G400 Gulfstream jet circled Nairobi International Airport preparatory to landing. Terrill Hatfield stared almost gloomily down at the flat brown earth rushing up to meet them. He had his New Year’s Eve wish: he and his FBI Hostage/Rescue Team were on detached duty to the President’s Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future. But they had failed to catch Corwin at King’s Canyon, as they had failed to catch him in the Delta in November. And now this.

After he deplaned, a government car took Hatfield from a far corner of the field to the far side of Kenya passport control and customs check. He had read the file of the man he had been sent here to bring back. Impressive. Too impressive. He and his men could get the job done without the help of this outsider. But Hatfield had been told to bring him: bring him he would. He would wait for an enabling incident, grab his man, and fly him back to D.C. In custody. It would exceed his authority, yes, but the stakes were high and he had Kurt Jaeger behind him.

What if the man succeeded where Hatfield had failed? There was a way around that. Use him, then step in to seize the power and glory of success for himself alone. Step on the son of a bitch hard, right away. Keep stepping on him. Control him, use him, obstruct him if necessary, then find a way to discard him.

—

Brendan Thorne began bucking hard under Ellie, the 23-year-old blonde straddling him at Sikuzuri Safari Camp in Tsavo East. Eleanor’s groom, 59-year-old Squire Pierpont III, was paying eight hundred bucks a night, not the usual $600, because his new trophy wife, after glimpsing Thorne on their arrival, had insisted on an extra-spacious banda with two private bedrooms.

Hemingway’s randy white hunters with their double-wide sleeping bags were no more, so two or three times a year Thorne, lowly camp guard, got seduced by women like Ellie: bored wives dragged to darkest Africa by wealthy husbands. It was the only social life he got, and as much as he could handle.

Ellie started panting, open-mouthed. Her eyes rolled up. Thorne flipped her onto her back and pumped hard. She came again in synch with him. Vocally. He was glad she had put all that Halcyon in her husband’s final whiskey-soda last night; his job was the only thing that held Thorne together. Since New Year’s Eve, no worthy stalk had yet appeared to rouse him from the somnolence of his narrow days. But he kept hoping.

Thorne emerged into cool pre-dawn darkness to find the other camp guard, a Wanderobo-Masai named Morengaru, squatting beneath an African toothbrush tree. The shotgun that he used for everything from buck to buff rested buttdown on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.

‘Na kwenda wapi?’ Thorne asked. Morengaru stood, swung an arm to the east. Down river. ‘Kwa nini?’ Why?

Gathering dawnlight picked out the high cheekbones on the African’s deadpan ebony face. ‘Lori,’ he said.

Morengaru was going downriver because he had heard a lorry. It must have come from Somalia, three hundred miles to the north. In the 1970s and ’80s,
Somali ivory and horn poachers had been the reason Sikuzuri Camp needed armed guards. They had wiped out Tsavo’s rhinos and had reduced its six thousand elephants to a few hundred, then had started killing tourists until Richard Leakey’s Kenyan Wildlife Service rangers started shooting them on sight.

Now Thorne and Morengaru mostly protected the resort’s guests against Tsavo’s notoriously uncivil lions. Tsavo’s males were sparsely maned and much bigger than Africa’s other lions – four feet at the shoulder, five hundred pounds in weight, a feline ‘missing link’ between Africa’s modern lions and the hulking extinct unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene. Occasionally they ate careless people, even well-heeled
wazungu
on photo safari.

‘Na piga minge sana,’ said Morengaru.

He had heard the sound of many ‘blows’ – which Thorne knew meant in context the pounding of automatic rifles.

‘Namna mbali?’ How far away?

Morengaru held up five fingers: five kilometers. Since he could hear a car engine starting up twenty kilometers off, on a moonless night could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eyes, Morengaru’s five clicks absolutely meant five clicks.

A superb starling with a metallic-blue back and chestnut belly swooped down on green-tinged blue wings to the rim of the water pan left out for Yankee, the camp watchdog. He checked right, then left, then plunged his whole jet-crowned head underwater and shook it violently. Came up, sent spray in every direction, repeated, again, yet again, then flew off. As always, the two men watched this morning ritual with great respect.

A kilometer downriver a leopard bitched about his empty gut with a frustrated, rasping, two-note cry. Morengaru said with a sly look and in passable English,
‘Since we two landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’

‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Thorne. They both laughed.

Could the leopard kill himself a
shifta
? A gratifying thought, but unlikely. The shifta’s specialty was spraying their prey with
AK
47 assault rifles from a safe distance away.

So why was Thorne leaving the camp Uzi at home, starting on his first manhunt in seven years with only his Randall Survivor and his 9mm Beretta? Was it his pathetic bow to a time when he had been a fighting man instead of a glorified babysitter? Or because his killing days were gone forever?

Sikuzuri Safari Camp was strung out along a quarter-mile of the Galana River’s south bank. Bar and lounge, dining hall as big as a posh restaurant, good china, chairs and tables of native hardwoods, buffalo horns and animal skulls on the walls.

The two men trotted down one of the resort’s well-marked paths. Golden pipits hurled themselves from bush to bush like tiny gold coins. The
watumishi
boys were stirring: strong coffee wooed their nostrils, but they had no time for a mug of it. An agama lizard popped up from behind an exposed acacia root to eye them icily, then ducked down again, like an infantryman checking out enemy troops from his foxhole.

They went silently down river on game paths twisting through saltbrush and doum palm, wary of ambush. Saltbrush, thick and bushy like dense groves of cedar, could conceal the leopard they had heard, a pride of lions, even a herd of elephant. All could kill the unwary, and often did.

The long rains were gone. Northeast across the Galana, thickets of spiked wait-a-bit comiphora shrubs –
ngoja kidoga
locally – blanketed the plains with nasty curved thorns that could claw the skin off a man’s back as neatly as an attacking leopard. Seven Grant’s zebras foraging the dried grasses looked car-wash fresh. Their kick could break a lion’s jaw.

Beyond was the flat-topped Yatta Escarpment, the longest lava ridge in the world, black and forbidding in the early morning light. Tsavo was the size of Massachusetts, still untamed and essentially untouristed.

A six-foot russet-necked Goliath heron, Africa’s largest bird, fished the sedges along the shore beside a shady grove of tamarind trees loaded with rattly brown seedpods. The tree trunks were polished red by mud-covered elephants rubbing against them. Morengaru stopped abruptly.

‘One click more.’

Ten minutes further on, across the river and below a small ridge, three maneless male lions were feeding on the massive body of a bull buffalo. A fresh kill, an hour old, not ripe yet.

The old bull, alone on a ridge above one of the small dry stream beds called luggas, fearless because he weighed as much as a VW Beetle, hadn’t had a chance. The three lions, each the size of a small grizzly bear, had been lying in wait. Each lion would eat seventy-five pounds of the buff’s meat before midday, then would not feed again for several days.

Another two hundred yards brought the dull telltale glint of metal in the saltbrush, also on the far side of the river. A decrepit British lorry of incredible vintage, camouflaged with branches.

Morengaru jerked his head downstream, whispered, ‘Kiboko.’

The hippos’ telltale protruding eyes showed above the water. They killed more Africans each year in panic than
any other animal did on purpose. But they posed no real threat as long as the men didn’t try to cross near them.

Back upriver, the way they’d come, a fish eagle swooped low over a large eddy of russet water where half a dozen fifteen-foot logs drifted in slow, aimless circles.

Thorne chuckled and said in English, ‘Hippos and crocs.’

Crocodiles were Africa’s second deadliest animal. On purpose. A sudden lunge, a three thousand-pound snap of massive jaws, and a tribal woman washing clothes in the river, facing the shore as always, would be dragged backwards screaming from the bank. Then she would be stuck in the mud at the bottom of the river until ripe enough to be torn into bite-size pieces and eaten.

The two men could cross in only gut-deep water right where they were, but the crocs made such a crossing a race with death. Lose their footing, lose the race. Don’t try, and the shifta would be free to do whatever bloody work they were about.

Thorne trotted down the bank, went in, churning ahead, bent forward, straining against the weight of water, looking neither back nor to the sides. Morengaru would be behind him. The stolid hippos would be watching. The crocs would be coming; coming like half-ton cigarette boats, heads up, jaws gaping, casting spreading wakes behind them. The men splashed up the far bank with six feet to spare, the crocs lunging halfway out of the water before sliding back with frustrated jaw-clacks.

A brace of startled waterbucks bounded off across the savanna like outsized jackrabbits. Dense clouds of flies rose from the truck bed. Thorne approached with massive foreboding.

‘Cocksuckers!’ he exclaimed involuntarily.

Tossed carelessly into the back of the lorry was a pair of black rhino horns, matted hair use-polished into the
hardness of bone, the curved front one five feet long. Hacked off with pangas after the nearly extinct animal had been killed by the burst of automatic weapon fire Morengaru had heard. Bits of skin and flesh still clung to them, pink but darkening rapidly.

Just over three months ago, Thorne had laid his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s back. He had considered the ugly, endearing, grumpy, near-sighted beast a friend: now he was dead and left to rot, slaughtered for hacked-off horns that would be carved into status-symbol handles for the decorative daggers of petro-rich Yemeni Arab youngbloods. Left-over bits would be ground into aphrodisiac powder for Asians who didn’t trust Viagra.

Just a bonus for the shifta. In 1989, the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species had imposed a worldwide ban on the sale of elephant tusks. But now Zimbabwe and Botswana, overpopulated with elephant, were lobbying to lift the ban, again sparking demand for ivory in Japan and China.

So the shifta were after the last two of the Galana’s old bull elephants who carried 175 kilos of ivory that would sell for $6,000 a kilo. The tusks would be worth a million dollars to a black market buyer: the raiders had not come hunting on spec.

‘Not today, you fuckers,’ Thorne whispered to himself.

Nobody had been left to guard the lorry. Keys in the ignition. Thorne dropped them into his pocket. Morengaru moved slowly forward, bent at the waist. He put gentle fingertips into several shallow, barely-discernable depressions in the dust. Came erect displaying three splayed fingers.

‘Tatu.’

Three shifta. Catch the bastards, hand them over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, rough fuckers who would
work them over until they gave up their buyer. A very good day’s work indeed.

Thorne swung an arm, breathed, ‘Sisi endelea. Upesi.’

Let us go quickly. They trotted along the edge of the savanna for silent movement, detouring through the salt-brush only to avoid the scavengers squabbling over Bwana Kifaru.