The Devil's Horn (28 page)

“Go. Go right now.”

LB had spent a dark night in the Kruger. Promise’s eyes were darker.

She spoke past him.

“Juma.”

“What?”

“Let me stay.”

She tried to free her arm from LB. He resisted until Juma asked him to let her go.

Moving to her great-uncle, Promise flattened both hands against his wide belly. She pressed her cheek to his chest. She seemed to be listening through a wall.

“I’m in trouble with the rangers. They know what I did for you. That’s why I came with the American. So I could ask you to let me stay. Juma, I’ll go to jail. They might kill me.”

Gently, Juma enveloped her wrists.

“Nomawethu. You are my family.”

“Yes.”

“I will give you one more gift.”

He eased her hands away from him, pushed her back a step, then set her loose. Juma spread his arms wide. Like this, he was immense.

“Do what the sergeant says and go now. Or you have my word you will die where you stand.”

“Juma.”

His eyes did not break from hers. Leaving his arms out, Juma retreated, some ceremony of departure and damnation.

“Good Luck, the next word she says, shoot her.”

The toothless poacher didn’t stand from the lawn chair when he shifted the rifle off his knees. Lush Life seemed appalled, wanting to say something. But he only appraised his mountainous friend and found him unmovable. The old white man put an arm around Promise’s waist to nudge her away from Juma. He backed her beside Karskie, muttering, “Sorry, dear,” and left her.

Karskie put his back to Promise and LB. He faced the dirt road of Macandezulo. The boy’s shoulders rose and fell. One more time, Karskie’s hands flapped against his pockets.

He pirouetted, quickly if not nimbly, and caved into the lawn chair opposite Good Luck. Juma dropped his arms. LB lowered the radio he’d been holding out.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s not your fight, LB. I wish it was, trust me. But it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“The missile’s yours, but not the rest of it. You’ve seen one rhino. I’ve been here a month and already seen a hundred, all dead. Tell my father I said that. It’s good.”

The whores up the street had gathered behind a hovel. Some squatted inside their skirts, one worked a well pump, the rest splashed in the spilling water.

“Get up, Karskie.”

“It’s alright. I got this.”

“No, you don’t.”

“It’s sitting in a chair. My skill set.”

“Get up.”

“You save people, right? That’s what you do.”

“It is.”

“Then you should keep doing it. You know. Me next. Because I’m scared shitless.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“No, I don’t. Tell my father that, too. And Neels.”

LB couldn’t insist further, couldn’t argue without tipping his hand to Juma and Lush Life that whoever sat in this lawn chair had a strong chance of never leaving Macandezulo.

The first of the women began to filter back toward the blockhouse. They’d bathed in their clothes, their cotton gowns clung and turned translucent. The women became geese again, cackling, wet and dumb to their own danger.

“Will they pay, LB? If you tell them to?” Karskie asked.

LB nodded. Karskie shrugged, extending an empty palm to him. The gesture said,
Then I leave it to you
.

The big boy sat back against the flimsy chair. Good Luck glowered in his leopard pelt, returning the rifle across his lap.

Karskie folded his hands.

“Chess?”

Good Luck showed his tongue and gums.

Karskie pretended LB was not standing there. He watched the whores come.

This was not the first time LB’s fate had taken a hard turn. For twenty years, as a Ranger and a PJ, whenever he thought he’d bought the farm, he’d been wrong. Those times, he’d been left standing in the smoke or panting on the ground, but alive, wondering how the hell he’d been spared, and why? He never could figure out how, just the fog and fortunes of war. But the why, LB always knew. He was meant to live for the next time. And each of them, like this one, felt like the end until LB found it wasn’t.

He didn’t move until Promise tugged on him.

“We have to go.”

Juma snapped his fingers at his four armed guards. The men shook off the laziness that had settled over them. They formed a picket in front of Juma, Lush Life, and their hostage, Karskie. Above them, Juma inclined his head at LB.

“Midnight, Sergeant.”

Without a glance at Promise, the big man squeezed through the blockhouse doorway and vanished.

In the sun, Lush Life focused on his bare feet.

LB asked, “You’re a smart guy. How’d you get caught up in this?”

Lush Life made a smacking, regretful noise.

“It’s only been minutes since I’ve been caught up in anything. It all seemed quite simple before you.”

Lush Life flicked a finger at Promise.

“And her.”

Lush Life tipped his brow at Promise in parting. Turning on his bare feet, he spoke across his shoulder.

“Midnight, Sergeant.”

Lush Life did not join Juma in the blockhouse but strode up the street. He passed through the returning flock of women, hands in his wrinkled pockets. The man couldn’t have been more different from the women, all of them black, young, and sloppily sensual. But as they flowed around the old white man, LB noted a kind of bond between them, a kinship of despair, the taint of a cage. All their feet dragged, none of their heads were up, and even as some of the women traced their hands over Lush Life, the touches meant nothing to him or any of them.

Looking old, Lush Life stepped up on the tilting porch of a pink house, one of the few with four straight walls. From there, he watched the whores return to the blockhouse above the missile. He sat on the house’s rotten steps while LB and Promise walked out of the village.

Chapter 32

At the edge of Macandezulo, Promise put a hand to LB’s back. She meant it as empathy, knowing he was torn. LB misinterpreted the gesture, thinking she was asking him to act now. He shook his head.

“I can’t do it.”

He considered Promise for long moments. She expected him to ask if she could. But he did not. LB wasn’t a man to seek approval.

She would have pressed every button. And like LB, she would not have asked what anyone else thought.

Promise told him that Karskie was right, he wasn’t important. But none of them were, or they wouldn’t be out here. That got a rise from LB. When the hard muscles in his back quaked from a quiet laugh, she dropped her hand.

With the sun well past noon, they reentered the bush. Fever trees, fat jades, and spiky acacias made their path roundabout, but Promise soon guided LB to the rusty soil of the creek bed. Along the way they walked side by side but exchanged no looks or words. The buzzards circled again in the distant crystal sky.

LB broke the long silence.

“Did you mean it, when you told Juma you wanted to stay?”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re in trouble?”

“I haven’t much purpose left.”

“What if I’d blown the building?”

“I would have kept Good Luck near it.”

Their boots had fallen into the same cadence in the red dust. They walked back to Neels and whatever awaited there.

“We have things in common, LB.”

“That so?”

“You and I both considered dying in Macandezulo. I think we both have less purpose than we would wish for.”

“You don’t know me, lady.”

With their steps in rhythm over the dry ravine, Promise told him a quick story. Two months ago, she and Wophule reported a rhino that had a thorn in its eye. They guided a vet into Shingwedzi. When they found the sick rhino, it was in the company of two others, both bulls. Wophule darted the beast with the bad eye. It fell, and while it was down the vet pulled the thorn and disinfected the eye. The other two rhinos backed off fifty meters and stood, still as boulders.

“They did not move. They would not be frightened away. They could do nothing else but safeguard their comrade. I have seen you, LB. Your kind of beast. In the bush, many times.”

“So I’m a rhino.”

“If you wish. I can grant that.”

Again, Promise rested her hand along LB’s spine. She left it there over many strides, and he did nothing to make her remove it.

She had thought to die in Macandezulo. But not like LB, not to protect someone, but to find a way to avenge Wophule. What sort of man was this under her hand? What would he be like to know? A man who would lay his life down for a stranger, a mission, a missile. What kind of life could LB build if every day he was willing to spend it? Like a house you might leave at any time, how could you settle in, how could you make it a home for yourself or anyone else? How could you love?

Promise and LB had both been sent away from their deaths, she by Juma, LB by Karskie and Lush Life. Both walked on, joined by that, by the silent bush, and her hand bridging to his back.

She pitied him along with herself. She spoke without voice, uttering only the breath of the words so they would enter the world but LB would not hear. “Uxholo, umnunzan.” (I am sorry, sir.)

Chapter 33

Neels pulled off his bush hat. The sun ironed his tunic against his shoulders, but he did not sweat. He ran a hand over his scalp. His skin felt cool. He could stand like this for hours, had done it in his youth and refused to believe he could not now. Only one hour had passed. Macandezulo had not blown up. In the open, in the red ravine, he watched and listened to the east.

The American captain did not stand near Neels in the mean light of Mozambique but waited on his own. The captain sat some, paced a little, and spoke on his satellite phone, explaining himself, arguing a bit. He ignored Neels and seemed to ignore his sergeant who was off doing the job. Neels would not look anywhere but east until Macandezulo exploded.

He didn’t worry for the sergeant, not only because he didn’t like him but because the sergeant was a military man and they didn’t always return. Karskie shouldn’t have been asked to go, but the captain had said someone from SANParks added to their cover story. Without Karskie, LB would have been just a solitary
fokkol
soldier strolling into the village with no identification. He probably would have been shot before he opened his mouth. In truth, the little bastard’s chances of being shot would get worse
after
he opened his mouth. But Neels hoped to see Karskie again.

And Promise. The girl had turned her back on everything Neels valued. Why should she get away with it? She was his ranger, a traitor in his sector. Promise was a blunder, an embarrassment and a pain. She had to come back to pay.

In the distance, buzzards ringed high above something dead elsewhere. Neels wondered what it could be. The animals of the Kruger rarely crossed the border; they knew it to be fatal for them in Mozambique. Probably a human. Some poacher or lost migrant, somebody miserable the buzzards could barely pick. The veld was harder than a man. To die here was no surprise.

Neels kicked a pebble. It skittered a long way. Without him, without his boot’s toe, the stone might have lay in place for a thousand more years. It took him coming along to move it. Long ago his farmer father and teacher mother had quoted one Sunday’s church sermon at supper. The meek shall inherit the earth. Neels had asked: Inherit from whom? They didn’t know, but he did, and he told them. The ones who act, that’s who. His parents said he was cheeky. Ten years later the proof came. After Neels left for the Scouts, their family’s lands in Rhodesia were nationalized and given to the local people who had no idea how to work the soil that Neels’s grandfathers had settled. Not long after, both his parents died meekly, a factory worker and a teacher in Durban.

Why had Neels been punished for not standing aside like his parents, like the Bible said? What should he have done? Quit his job, let someone else do the tough work because he had a wife with no stomach for it?

He should have carried her into Shingwedzi, pushed her close to a rhino freshly dead by a poacher’s hand, gutted by the bush. See that? A murdered animal, a shot poacher, a Cuban corpse, a dead Angolan rebel, a rotting ape tied to a fence. Look what I have done. My acts.

Who was she to tell Neels who he was? What would have made her happy? The kind of man she needed was not inside him, that man would not do what he was about to. Aloud, Neels said good-bye, but did not believe she heard.

Macandezulo had not blown up. Juma was not dead. A hundred meters out, the sergeant and Promise pushed toward him along the ravine. They walked on their own warped reflections, shimmering heat ghosts. Where was Karskie?

The American captain, yakking on his satellite phone, hadn’t seen them yet. He waved an arm to whomever he was talking to, but he seemed incapable of saying the right things. Neels had two rifles across his back. He dropped one of them into his hands.

“Hang it up.”

The captain shifted only a piece of his focus to Neels. He kept talking.

“They’re back.”

Neels pointed up the ravine. The sergeant and the girl had trod out of their mirages, only dust clouded their strides.

The captain rang off and stowed his phone. He turned to greet Promise and the sergeant.

Neels spun the rifle around. He raised it high and clubbed the captain in the back of the head.

Chapter 34

LB broke into a run at Neels, with the girl on his heels. When LB was ten strides from barreling into him, the old ranger jammed a boot into the middle of Wally’s back. He dropped the muzzle of his rifle to the rear of Wally’s head, then commanded LB and Promise to stop. Both skidded to a halt.

Wally lay facedown in the ravine. Neels loomed over him, one foot between his shoulder blades. Wally groaned and clutched at the dirt. Neels held his rifle one-handed, standing it on end in the cleft beneath Wally’s skull. Neels’s finger curled over the trigger.

“I didn’t hear anything blow up, Sergeant.”

LB had nothing, no gun or blade, not a rock to throw. Neels wasn’t wearing his bush hat. He looked to be baking, red faced.

“Wally, you alright?”

Neels’s foot stopped Wally from turning his head to answer. He spoke facing away from LB, lips in the dust. His sunglasses had been knocked off.

“Not really.”

Promise inched forward. LB held her back. He held an open hand to Neels.

“What are you doing, man?”

Neels licked his lips. He looked thirsty. He held out his free arm to LB, seeking answers. Neels looked frustrated, like he’d been forced to do this.

“Where’s the boy?”

“They kept Karskie.”

“Did you see the missile?”

“It’s in a basement.”

“Is Juma close?”

“He’s in the same building.”

“Is Karskie why you didn’t blow it?”

“He is. And there’s women. Eight of them.”

“You mean whores.”

“I mean women.”

Promise stepped back from LB, circling away from him. Out of his reach, she approached Neels. He cocked his head at her.

“Far enough.”

Promise crossed her hands over her breast.

“This is all my fault. You’re mad at me. Don’t do this.”

Neels laughed, a bit hyper.

“I don’t give a fok about you, girl.”

With Neels’s attention on Promise, LB stole inches closer. He stopped when Neels’s eyes slashed like knives across him. LB held out both palms, placating.

“Okay. What’s this about?”

Neels shifted the rifle barrel from the back of Wally’s head to Wally’s shoulder. He raised all his weight onto one boot over Wally’s spine, and pulled the trigger.

The report was muffled by the meat of Wally’s shoulder. Wally howled and rippled like a carpet with wind under it. Neels’s boot pinned him to the red dirt.

With a fuming glare, Neels dared LB to move toward him again. Promise barred her mouth with one hand, her heart with the other.

The old ranger slid the barrel back where it had been, under Wally’s skull. Wally’s ruined left arm lay bent next to his head with trembling fingers.

“Turn around, Sergeant. Go back to the village. Make sure Juma’s inside that building. Then blow up your missile and go home. I should hurry, your captain’s bleeding.”

Neels stabbed a hand back toward Macandezulo.

“Do what I tell you. Turn around, or I kill your captain. Then I’ll tell you again.”

LB worked his jaw, desperate for something to say. Nothing came, not a word to find a way out of this. His jaw hung while his fists balled, useless as his tongue. Any move he made, any word he uttered, was going to cost lives.

Neels answered LB’s silence by tapping his finger on the trigger.

“I’ll shoot him, Sergeant. Then the girl. Then you, if I have to. I’ll claim you were all done in by poachers. I barely got away with my life. Trust me, I’ll be believed. The buzzards will do for you. The sun and wind will finish the rest. You’ll stay unidentified a bit longer.”

The hole in Wally’s shoulder bled into a rusty mud. Above him, Neels wobbled. Wally groaned when Neels balanced himself on the rifle like a cane. Neels thrust a pale finger at LB.

“You come to the Kruger to fix some cock-up your country made. You stay for a few hours, and you tell me, you tell
me
, who lives and dies.”

Neels ground his boot into Wally’s ribs. Wally gasped into his own blood.

“See your captain here? He’s doing what I’ve done for forty years. Bleeding into Africa. You want to save Karskie? You don’t know Karskie. The boy wants to be a ranger. Good for him. I’m going to let him.”

Neels swung his finger at Promise.

“He’ll be a hero like Wophule. Remember him, jou poes?”

Neels mopped his white brow with the back of his hand. He found it dry, noted this, and carried on.

“Juma’s women? Their lives are shit. You want to save eight. I say there’s eight hundred we save.”

Neels teetered again. He had heatstroke, LB was sure of it. He’d seen it in the Kush and the hot plains of Iraq. Dizzy, ashen, disoriented, no sweat, cool skin.

LB lifted his own palm against Neels’s accusations, wanting to tell him he needed to get out of the sun. Everything could be figured out if they all stayed calm.

This angered Neels even more, the idea that LB might have something to say. He stomped on Wally’s back, squeezing out an agonized curse.

LB did everything in his power to root his boots to the ravine and keep from bull-rushing the man. Neels ignored him.

“Poachers take twelve hundred rhinos a year. More. The beast will be gone before the decade’s over. You don’t have rhinos in America, why the fok should you care? Don’t tell me Juma lives. Don’t you fall out of a plane, spend one night in my park, then come tell me Juma lives today for Karskie and eight whores. No.”

Neels shook his extended hand, panning for LB’s radio.

“Give it to me. With the code. I’ll do it.”

LB traced fingers over the radio stuck in his vest. He’d been ready to die in Macandezulo. But that was with Juma, not instead of him.

In agony beneath Neels’s boot, Wally managed to turn his head. Dust clung to his lips and chin.

“Don’t do it.” Wally couldn’t lift his eyes, only his voice. “LB. Don’t.”

Neels dropped his appeal for the radio, placing both hands on the rifle.

“Sergeant.”

Neels’s features, already colorless from the heat, went blank. His hands firmed on the rifle and trigger. Standing over Wally, he seemed like a clock ticking seconds.

Again, Wally spoke into the red dirt.

“Don’t.”

LB plucked the radio from his pocket, to do something, anything to string out a few more moments. Neels reached for it, easing his weight off Wally. LB hefted the radio. What a small thing it was, small as the time left to him.

What was next? Tuck the radio back in his vest, or give it to Neels? Either brought terrible consequences. If LB kept the radio, Neels would pull the trigger. The old bastard was crazed and sun sick, but zeal convinced him he was right, and sacrifice told him he was justified. Wally wouldn’t survive him, no doubt.

If Neels shot Wally, LB would charge him. Too much rage, LB would do it. The mission would fail, with one murdered GA, two dead rangers, and an unexploded Hellfire. Juma and Lush Life would walk away scot-free with two hundred million dollars.

If LB gave Neels the radio and the code, the cost to take out Juma would be Karskie and eight blameless, sad women. How many rhinos would that save? How many lives would be saved by ridding the world of Juma’s weapons, poaching, drug- and human-trafficking operations?

Neels was right.

What would Karskie say? Would he make that trade? Neels didn’t speak for him. And the women, would they throw their lives on the fire to stop Juma? Would they die today to defend other unknown women on another day? Did Neels speak for them?

Neels was wrong.

Wally lay under the muzzle of Neels’s gun. Wally had made the decision for himself. He’d made the brave and right choice of a Guardian Angel.

What would Torres say? Did Wally speak for her?

Could LB?

Neels spit in the dirt. LB had taken too long holding the radio.

Time was up.

“I’m sorry, Captain. Your sergeant prefers Juma.”

LB tensed to speak, leap, something! What a fucking awful thing for Wally to hear, to be told that LB would let him die. A lie, a lie that would stand. He couldn’t get to Neels fast enough.

Promise—LB had forgotten her—threw out her arms.

“Wait. There’s someone else.”

Neels hesitated. LB hugged the radio to his chest, not putting it away, not offering it, just clutching it. Wally exhaled what was almost his last breath. Neels tipped his head toward the girl.

“Who, Promise? Who else is there?”

“An old man. In the village. A white man.”

“A white?”

Neels looked to LB, as if for some reason this might be his department.

“Who is he?”

Again, as in Macandezulo, LB couldn’t keep up with the careening of his fate and emotions. Seconds ago, he was prepared to kill or die trying, to either see Wally executed or sentence Karskie and Juma’s women to death. Neels asked questions coldly, fact-finding, as though all of them did not stand on the edge of many unmarked graves. LB was in no frame of mind to answer Neels while he sorted out what to do.

“Promise, shut up.”

Neels tutted, detached and mercurial. He turned to Promise for answers.

“Who is the white man?”

“A friend of Juma’s.”

“A friend. What’s his name?”

“He called himself Lush Life.”

“Really? What did he look like? How was he dressed?”

“His clothes were dirty. But they were from the city. Expensive.”

“Odd. Sergeant, isn’t that odd?”

Under Neels’s boot, Wally was fading, blanching. Judging by the puddle of blood, the bullet had gone all the way through his shoulder. It might have hit a vessel. Another ticking clock.

“Sergeant.”

“Yeah. Odd.”

“How did he behave? Who is he?”

“He’s Juma’s partner. It was fucking obvious.”

Neels’s face lit up as if the sun had flared on it. His mouth opened, eyes lifted from LB to the sky, fathoming something and thankful.

LB edged one boot closer. He leaned on his toes.

Neels had the instincts of the bush. His attention flashed back to LB.

“Sergeant.”

“What?”

“I might shoot you first.”

LB shifted his weight back to his heels.

Neels stepped down. He lowered the rifle to his waist and retreated. Out of range, he squatted on his haunches, weapon across his knees, ready.

“Do you have a first aid kit?”

“In my pack.”

“Take care of your captain.”

LB hustled to his pack. He tore into it for the small med kit from the plane. Promise rushed to help Wally roll onto his back. She set to unbuttoning his tunic. By the time LB had alcohol, gauze, and antibiotic ready, she’d stripped Wally’s shoulder bare. He sat upright, woozy, gritting his teeth.

His shoulder was a scarlet mess, but the wound cleaned up well. Both entry and exit holes were neat. Fired at close range and high velocity, the round was a through and through, in and out; it hadn’t bounced off a bone into a lung or anything vicious. LB moved his face close to Wally’s to check him for shock.

“Hey.”

Wally’s cheeks had gone pallid, but his eyes focused.

“Don’t worry.”

LB scooted behind him to patch the entry wound. A red ring, the imprint of Neels’s gun, showed just below Wally’s hairline. While LB stuffed gauze into the open wound, Wally stiffened with a deep, pained grunt.

LB spoke to the back of his head.

“Worry about what?”

“I know.”

Behind him, where Wally could not see, LB nodded. A lot welled up in him that he could not name or separate into categories or years, just a lot. LB swiped away a tear so he could do his work.

“Man, I’m sorry.”

“I said I know.”

Promise knelt to hold Wally up. LB skidded around to deal with the exit wound. Wally blinked with every touch, sucking in his cheeks, until LB wrapped his arm to his chest with an elastic bandage. When LB finished, Wally closed his eyelids to rest for moments. His blood loss had weakened him, but he was clearheaded. Ten yards away, Neels hunkered, waiting and observing like one of the buzzards.

“Captain.”

Wally opened his eyes. He didn’t answer right off but stared back, drawn and tired. Under Neels’s gun he’d made his decision, just as LB had in the village. Everything else about being alive seemed faraway and temporary.

“What?”

LB took a knee beside Wally. The girl remained standing, always ready to bolt.

Neels patted the rifle in his lap.

“I want you to understand. I need your radio and the code to the missile.”

“You’ve made that clear.”

“This white man, Lush Life, has to die. He has to. More than Juma.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a tier three. A financier. These are the right bastards. They drive all this, the poaching, organized crime. For money, Captain. Lives are nothing to them. Nothing. Just things to steal and sell. We never see them. They kill and spoil and do it all from inside corporations and bank accounts. But this one. Lush Life. I don’t care why or how, but he’s come out where we can see him. And he’s one kilometer away from me. You’re going to let me kill him. Or I will shoot all three of you. By God, I will.”

The sun had soared well past its peak. Neels’s shadow in the ravine crept at LB and Wally. Its outline was sharp in the bright, unbroken light. Neels wavered. He put a hand in the dirt to steady himself.

“Captain. Juma and this white man are blackmailing your country. They’ve ruined the girl there. Your own lives are at risk. You’ve got reasons to see them dead, too.”

Wally seemed to want to collapse. Like Neels, he dropped a hand to the dirt for balance.

“What did they do to you, Neels?”

The old ranger was staggered by either the question or the heat. He rocked forward onto his knees, the rifle tumbling out of his lap. He didn’t reach for it but ran a hand across his mouth, a tremble in his fingers. Neels’s lips parted as if to give some answer. His posture went slack. On his knees he looked to be a man in surrender.

Wally said nothing more. The bullet from Neels’s gun seemed to link them, he wobbled, too. But he did not lie back down.

Wally drew his legs under him, propped himself on his good arm, and struggled to rise. Promise rushed to support him. LB did nothing, amazed.