Chapter 24
Donovan
Zayn moved fifteen meters ahead of me, his tactical flashlight filtered down to a tight red beam that barely reached the ground in front of his boots. The rangers called them torches.
The rangers spread out behind Zayn in the staggered formation we’d drilled into them over weeks of training.
Andrew fell in beside me near the middle of the column.
The pace was slower than any of us wanted it to be, but Zayn was reading spoor in near-darkness and rushing him could cost us the trail.
He’d picked up the group’s tracks at the carcass site itself. The tracks were clear enough to follow. Wherever there was topsoil, he followed the indentations of boot prints. Where the ground cover thickened, Zayn read the brush instead. He followed the flattened grass and snapped branches.
The last of the afternoon light had gone fast. It always did this close to the equator.
Within the hour, we were moving through a darkness cut only by starlight, enough to see the man in front of you and not much else.
The only thing guiding us was the thin red sweep of Zayn’s filtered torch on the ground ahead.
Sarah had called when she’d gotten back to camp. She hadn’t run into any trouble, and camp was clear. A slight weight lifted off my chest at hearing her voice. Now my mind could fully focus on the mission.
The bush was alive around us. Things moved in the grass that I could hear and couldn’t see.
One of the rangers flinched hard when something large crashed through the brush to our left, the sound of it explosive in the silence.
I watched him lock up, watched his rifle come around toward the noise.
Then he caught himself. We all steadied ourselves and kept moving.
“You know who we remind me of right now?” Andrew said, low and dry at my shoulder.
“Who do we remind you of?”
“Captain John Parker’s militia on Lexington Green.
April 1775. A bunch of farmers who’d never fired a shot in anger, standing in the dark waiting for a column of British regulars who might or might not be coming down the road.
Half of them weren’t sure they wanted to be there.
The other half weren’t sure the British were real.
” He paused. “Do you want to know what the real plot twist was?”
“Sure.”
“The British were real.”
A couple of the rangers close enough to hear him laughed quietly. I felt myself grin in the dark. The humor definitely eased some of the tension we were all feeling.
We continued on for another half hour before Zayn killed his light and froze. The rest of the column halted immediately, and everyone took a knee. The rustle of our movement died out.
In the silence, I heard what Zayn already had. Voices. Ahead and to the right. Low and casual. The nighttime carried voices much farther than most people realized.
The brush we were still in gave way to open grassland.
White lights clustered maybe eighty meters out.
Several flashlights were bobbing and crossing as the men moved around a central point.
No attempt at concealment. Beyond them, a spotlight threw a hard circle of light on a shape standing in the grass.
A rhino. Alive. The light held steady on her flank.
They were between us and the animal. Setting up the shot.
I signaled the column forward to Zayn and me. Everyone flat at the edge of the brush. The poachers’ own lights were killing their natural night vision. They couldn’t see past their headlamps into the dark, and they were facing the rhino anyway.
I lay still and counted. Half a dozen men or so, focused on their work. They hadn’t heard us. Didn’t have a reason to listen.
I reached back and tapped Zayn’s shoulder, then Andrew’s. The three of us pulled together, faces inches apart.
“The rhino’s behind them,” I whispered. “Nobody shoots unless you are absolutely sure you have a clear shot. And if you aren’t sure, you don’t pull that trigger.”
In the dark, I caught the outline of both heads nodding. “Roger that,” they murmured.
“They’re in the open, and we’re not. We spread out along the tree line and stay in the brush.
Every man fixes his torch in the ground or props it on a branch in front of him, aimed toward the clearing, switched to white light.
On my signal, everyone turns on their light and immediately shifts a few feet to the side.
You are not behind your light when those men look this direction. ”
“Because if they shoot, they shoot at the lights,” Andrew said.
“And nobody’s there. Zayn, when I give the signal, you shout for them to lay down their weapons and put their hands in the air.”
“And if they don’t?” Zayn asked.
“If it comes to a firefight, it’s up to you guys to return fire. My pistol and Andrew’s won’t be effective at that range. But half a dozen men against a dozen lights coming out of nowhere—the odds say they fold.”
Zayn moved off to spread the rangers along the tree line. I watched him work down the line, a hand on each man’s shoulder, his mouth close to each ear, passing the plan. Each ranger fixed his torch in the dirt or propped it against a branch, angled toward the clearing.
Andrew and I took the center. Zayn returned and set up to my left.
I squeezed Zayn’s shoulder.
Zayn’s voice cut through the dark, commanding them to drop their weapons and get on the ground. Twelve torches blazed to life across the tree line, and every ranger rolled clear of his light.
For half a second, I thought it had worked.
In the next half second, that theory was proven wrong.
Repetitive muzzle flashes strobed across the clearing as the hunters sent a hail of bullets in our direction. I barked one word—“Down!”—and dropped flat. Rounds zipped through the air above us. Brush snapped and splintered as the tree line took the worst of it.
Every ranger was on the ground. Flat and frozen.
Rifles in their hands and not a single one of them firing back.
These rangers had never been shot at. All of the training and all of the drills had stopped at the edge of real danger.
The immediate and natural urge to self-preserve in the face of danger was not easily overcome.
And honestly, I was not expecting this intense of a response. None of us were.
The rate of incoming fire began to slow. It may have been wishful thinking, but the rounds also seemed to be landing farther from us than they had at the start.
I lifted my head. Some of the torches we’d set up were still on, throwing enough light across the clearing to see what was happening.
The poachers were pulling back, not running in a panic but moving in a controlled withdrawal across the open ground toward the far tree line.
Covering one another. These men had done this before.
Then they were gone. The clearing was empty. The only thing left was the spotlight, still aimed at the patch of grass where the rhino had been standing.
Everyone held position. Ten minutes of lying in the dirt with my weapon up and my ears straining for any sound that didn’t belong. The only thing that came back was the bush itself. Insects. The distant bark of a baboon.
Nothing human.
“Sound off,” I said quietly. “Andrew.”
“Here.”
“Zayn.”
“Here.”
“Baraka.”
“Here.”
One by one, down the line. Every name answered. Every man present. Nobody hit.
We were fucking lucky.
I got to my feet. The rangers stood up around me, some of them slowly, like their bodies didn’t trust the ground was safe to leave yet.
Baraka was the first one to speak. “Are we going to pursue them?”
His voice was just a little less certain than it had been in the past, but a whole lot angrier. Being shot at had changed the equation.
“They’re on foot,” Baraka said. “We know this ground better than they do.”
Three of the other rangers were already checking their weapons, their bodies angled in the direction the crew had fled. Zayn stood with his rifle across his chest, his eyes on me. Waiting.
“No.”
Baraka took a step forward. “They just shot at us. These are the men who’ve been killing rhino, and they just—”
“I hear you. I was lying in the same dirt you were.” I kept my voice level.
“These are much more dangerous men than some lads hunting for sport. They have firepower, and they are not afraid to use it on us. Now they have had time to retreat and potentially set up an ambush for anyone who follows. That’s how someone in this group goes home in a bag. ”
The anger in Baraka’s face didn’t go away.
“Listen to me. All of you.” I waited until I had every set of eyes.
“We know significantly more about these guys than when we started. We take all of that information, and we figure out who these people are. We get the support we need. And then we come back and do this right. Not scrambling in the dark hoping we find them before they find us.”
Nobody spoke. The anger was still there. But I could also tell they were coming down from the shock of it.
“You all did something tonight, no matter the outcome,” I said. “That rhino is alive. She’s out there right now because you were here. Because you showed up and you held the line. That animal would be dead on the ground with her horn cut off if you hadn’t been here.”
Baraka clenched his teeth in deep thought. He looked at the ground, then back at me. He didn’t like it. But he heard it.
What I didn’t say was the rest of it. That I’d told them they could shoot if they had a clear shot, and not one of them had even tried.
Not because they were being careful. Because they couldn’t have pulled a trigger if they’d wanted to.
That the gap between where they were tonight and where they needed to be was the difference between lying flat because you’re told to and lying flat because you can’t move.
I filed that away and kept my mouth shut, because pointing it out thirty minutes after it happened didn’t build a man up. It tore him down.
It cost me to make that call. Every instinct I had wanted to push into the dark after the poachers. Patience over pursuit. I kept telling myself that, and it kept not feeling true.
Andrew ended the argument. He stood up and walked toward the ground where the crew had been working. He didn’t say a word. He just headed into the clearing deserted by the poaching crew.
The rangers watched him go. Then Zayn followed. Then Baraka. Then the rest.
We spread out across the area where the spotlight had been, searching the trampled grass with our own lights.
Boot prints and churned soil everywhere, along with spent brass casings scattered across the ground.
I had a couple of the rangers collect as many as they could find.
A quick look at the headstamps would tell us how many different weapons platforms these guys had access to.
“Boss.”
Jomo was crouched in the grass ten meters from where the crew had been set up. He held something up. A small rectangle catching the light.
I crossed to him and took it from his hand.
It was a phone. It had a cracked case, and the screen was smeared with dirt, probably from where it was dropped and trampled in their retreat.
I turned it over in my fingers and pressed the power button.
The screen lit up. The battery was at eleven percent.
Contacts. Messages. Call logs. Locations. The kind of break that could crack an operation wide open if somebody with the right skills could get inside it.
I looked at Andrew. Andrew looked back at me. This could be the most significant lead since finding the shell casing and cigarettes.
I put the phone in my chest pocket and buttoned it shut.
“Let’s move. Back to the vehicles.”
The walk was quiet. Nobody talked. The adrenaline was draining out of them, and what replaced it was the heavy understanding that we had all been very lucky. The bush was loud around us, and every sound that hadn’t bothered them on the way in made them flinch now.
The vehicles were where we’d left them, parked nose-out on the track.
We loaded up without a word. One of the rangers climbed into the bed of the lead truck and sat against the tailgate with his hands between his knees, staring at his own fingers.
The one beside him kept clicking his safety.
On, check. On, check. The small mechanical sound repeating like a habit he didn’t know he’d picked up.
Zayn drove. He knew the route best. The headlights cut a narrow tunnel through the bush, and the engine was the only sound in the cab. Andrew sat beside me in the back seat with his window down, his arm on the frame, looking out at nothing.
We were outgunned. We were outmatched. Every man in those two trucks knew it, and nobody was pretending otherwise. If the crew had held their ground instead of running, if even one of those rounds had found a body instead of brush, people I had trained would have died out there tonight.
I had told them they were ready enough for a night move. I had made that call. And the only reason everyone was coming home was because the men on the other end had decided to flee.
The truck pulled into camp.
Zayn killed the engine. The second truck pulled in behind us, and the rangers climbed out in silence.
“Get some sleep,” I said. “All of you. We’ll debrief in the morning.”
They moved toward the bunkhouse in ones and twos with their heads down. The compound went still.
Andrew stood beside the truck for a moment. He looked at me, and whatever he saw on my face made him decide this wasn’t the time.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
He headed for his cabin.
I walked to Sarah’s cabin.
The light was on. A thin line of it shone under the door. She was awake. She was never going to sleep through the sound of trucks pulling in late carrying the man she shared a bed with.
I opened the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed. Her eyes went straight to my chest and then my face. Looking for damage.
“Everyone’s fine,” I said. “Nobody’s hurt.”
She stood. She crossed the room and put her arms around me, and I dropped my face against her neck.
I didn’t tell her what had happened. Maybe in the morning, when I could find the right words. For now, I just savored the embrace.