Chapter 26
Donovan
Sarah’s breathing had settled into the deep, even rhythm that meant she was out. My arm was across her waist, and I should have been asleep two hours ago. I couldn’t get there. The day kept cycling in my mind.
The extensive amount of evidence showing how frequently these guys had been doing this kind of thing.
The sheer number of previous locations that Faith had shown us was almost overwhelming.
To think of that many rhinos butchered helplessly made my blood boil.
I couldn’t even imagine what Sarah was feeling about it all.
Willem Nasser. South African poacher.
The enemy had a name now. Naming a problem was the first part in defeating it. And Nasser was certainly making himself a big problem. His crew had funding for decent arms; I was already witness to that intimately. And his crew was disciplined.
Fuck, they were fast to respond.
Almost as soon as we had put our lights on them, they executed an immediate react-to-enemy-contact maneuver. They established overwhelming fire superiority, and then they used that to cover a tactical withdrawal.
I shifted onto my back. The ceiling was a slab of black above me. Sarah murmured and tucked closer, her palm settling flat against my chest.
I could get used to this.
The sound of the engine hit my ears, and at first, I dismissed it as just the regular noise of the camp.
It had dropped to an idle somewhere in the camp. There weren’t supposed to be any vehicle operations scheduled at this hour.
Who the hell is driving around camp right now?
I sat up and started pulling my pants on. The engine revved hard. I shoved my feet into the boots by the door, unlaced, and opened it.
Fire.
Across the compound, the vet facility was burning.
Flames climbed the back wall and punched through the roof in rolling orange columns that threw shifting light across every surface in camp.
A vehicle’s taillights bounced through the dirt road leading out, already fifty meters past the last cabin and accelerating into the dark.
“Donovan—”
Sarah was behind me in the doorway. She gasped in shock.
I ran. I hit the side of the bunkhouse with my fist as I passed it. “Fire! Fire! There is a fire!”
Rangers spilled out behind me, some in boots and some barefoot, all of them running toward the glow. The blaze behind the building lit up the outline, and flames were already eating through the roof. The corrugated metal above the timbers buckled inward.
Andrew came from his cabin at a dead sprint, shirt half-buttoned, and pulled up beside me. We reached the facility entrance together, and the heat pushed us back a step.
Sarah got there after us. She didn’t slow down.
She ducked past my arm and went through the door. The fire hadn’t reached the front of the structure yet, but it was coming. The ceiling above her glowed a deep, pulsing orange.
Andrew and I went in after her. She had the drug safe by its handles and was dragging it across the floor toward the entrance.
I got my hands on a crate of surgical instruments and hauled it into the open air.
Andrew grabbed the sample refrigerator and muscled it through the door, the veins in his neck bulging out with the effort.
Sarah turned to go back in. I caught her arm, just barely.
“The cabinet,” she said. “The dart guns and the controlled substances are in the locked cabinet.”
She pulled out of my hold and was past me before I could argue.
She had the key from around her neck in the lock before I could follow.
She pulled the cabinet open, loaded her arms with everything she could carry, and came back out coughing hard, her eyes streaming from the smoke.
I took half the load from her and set it on the ground, clear of the building.
The rangers had organized themselves. Zayn was at the water tank, directing two men who carried every container they could find.
The rest split the remaining work without discussion, beating at the brush between the facility and the nearest cabin with blankets and shovels, while others dragged crates and supply boxes clear of the heat.
Nobody told them to do any of it.
The accelerant had taken the structure too fast. Water hit the walls and flashed to steam.
The roof sagged inward. One of the support beams cracked and dropped a section of metal sheeting into the interior with a crash that sent embers spiraling high into the black sky.
The heat rolled outward in a wave that forced everyone back three steps.
We kept at it. Kept pouring water and pulling anything salvageable free. Andrew and two of the rangers soaked blankets and laid them across the roofs of the nearest cabins, buying time against any ember that drifted.
But I knew it fifteen minutes in, and so did everyone else. We weren’t saving the building. We were just trying to keep the fire from eating the rest of the camp.
It took an hour to burn down to embers. The concrete block walls were still standing, blackened and heat-cracked. The roof was gone and the interior completely gutted.
I did a head count. Every ranger present, Andrew beside me. Sarah was standing ten feet from the ruined entrance.
Nobody was hurt.
By first light, the fire had been out for an hour, but the camp was still dealing with the aftermath.
Two rangers walked the perimeter of the wreckage, kicking at charred timber to make sure nothing underneath was still catching.
Baraka pulled a scorched equipment rack clear of the foundation, the metal still warm enough to need gloves.
Everything salvageable was spread across the dirt in front of the ruined building.
Instruments and drug cases on one side, supply crates along the far edge.
Not a soul had slept since three in the morning. Coffee sat on the mess tent table where somebody had made it and forgotten about it. It was now cold.
Sarah moved through the salvage spread with a clipboard, cataloging losses. Her face was streaked with ash, and her hair was pulled back in a knot.
I stood at the edge of the wreckage and looked at it in daylight. The whiteboard Sarah used for her daily schedules had buckled off the wall and lay facedown in the ash. The table where we had laid out all our evidence with Faith the day before was nothing more than a smoldering pile of ash.
In the dark, it had all been chaos, and the only thing we could do was react. By morning light, we could more readily understand that this was deliberate. Every camp vehicle was still parked under the lean-to. Whoever drove out last night wasn’t one of ours.
The vet facility was the most visible building from the access road. Maybe that was all it was, the first target the driver saw in the dark. But the facility was also the center of everything Sarah did on this reserve.
Who would do this?
“Donovan.”
Andrew stood near the water tank, one hand scratching his chin. He motioned me over.
I crossed to him and saw it before I got there.
Sprayed in white paint across the curved metal surface of the tank were four words.
BACK OFF OR BURN.
The paint was fresh. Still tacky at the edges of the letters where it had run in thin drips down the tank’s surface.
The rangers found it next. In the darkness and chaos of fighting the fire, they hadn’t noticed it earlier.
Zayn came around the side of the tank first, then Baraka behind him.
The others filtered in from whatever task they’d been on.
They stood in a loose half circle and read the four words, and every man went still.
The silence lasted a long minute before everyone started asking questions at once.
“Who did this?”
“Was it the poachers?”
The last one came from a ranger standing near Zayn’s shoulder. He looked at me and then at the burned-out shell of the vet facility, and the line he drew between the two was written on his face. “We stopped them from killing the rhino. This is what they did about it.”
Not one man argued with him. He was right.
Baraka stood with his fists braced against his hips. “So what are we doing about it?”
Sarah spoke from beside the salvage pile. “The building can be rebuilt. The animals on this reserve can’t.”
I looked at the faces around me. Covered in ash and soot, these exhausted men were unsatisfied with so many unanswered questions. These men had been shot at forty-eight hours ago. They’d spent the last four hours fighting a fire that someone had set in their home. They deserved the full picture.
“Gather up. All of you. Tight.”
They closed the circle. Sarah set down her clipboard on a crate and moved closer. Andrew stayed at my shoulder.
“The man directing this operation is named Willem Nasser. He is a South African national. He’s been running a crew through the Laikipia conservancies for months.
Lewa, Borana, Mpala, and now here. They’re killing rhinos for their horns and moving them into the international market through a chain of middlemen.
The phone Jomo found at the interdiction site confirmed all of it. ”
I kept it short. They didn’t need the detail of every text message and GPS coordinate. They needed to understand that this group of poachers was part of a larger picture.
“This isn’t just some locals with borrowed rifles.
This is a funded, organized operation run by men who know what they’re doing.
You saw that two nights ago. They had discipline.
They withdrew under control instead of scattering.
And last night, they drove into this camp while we were asleep, burned the biggest building to the ground, and left us a message. ”
I let that settle.
“Faith Njeri has everything we have, and so do KWS and the police. That part is in motion.”
“So what do we do?” one of the younger rangers asked.
“We go after him.” Baraka said it evenly. “This is our reserve. Our camp. He burned our building and put a message on our water tank like we’re supposed to be afraid of him. We find him and we end this.”
Several heads nodded. The ranger who’d connected the interdiction to the fire spoke up again. “Baraka is right. They attacked our home. How about we attack theirs?”
Zayn turned from the tank. He didn’t agree or disagree. He watched me, and in that restraint, I could read his own instincts warring with his judgment.
“I understand what you’re saying, the action you want to take,” I said. “Every part of it. This is your home, and somebody came into it and ransacked it.”
“Yes. We need to show them how it feels to have your home destroyed,” Otieno interjected.
Several heads nodded in response again.
“But here’s the problem. We don’t know where Nasser is.
We don’t know where his crew is staging from.
Finding and arresting a South African national running an international criminal operation is law enforcement’s job.
KWS and the police have everything they need to start.
The fire gets added to that report today. ”
Baraka’s expression didn’t soften, but his mouth stayed closed.
“What we can do,” I said, “is make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
I turned so I was facing all of them.
“The fire proved something none of us wants to hear. Patrols aren’t enough.
We had eyes on every waterhole in the northeast sector for a week, and Nasser’s people rolled straight through our perimeter at three in the morning without a single alarm raised.
The reserve needs to be defended. Night watches on every approach road and early warning positions, so that if someone comes in here again, we know about it before they reach us. ”
Zayn nodded once. “I can draw up the positions. I know the roads.”
“Good. Do it.”
“And if they come anyway?” Baraka said. “If all the watches and the positions don’t stop them, and they come with guns instead of gasoline?”
“Then you need to be ready.”
Baraka held my gaze. He wasn’t challenging me. He was asking me to say what he already suspected. Behind him, the rest of the group had gone still.
The silence that followed was a different kind. Heavier. It registered across the group, settling into the spaces between them.
“Two nights ago, when they opened fire on us, nobody in this group fired back.”
Not a single man looked away. I gave them that.
“That is not a criticism. I need you to hear that. What happened out there is normal. First time somebody shoots at you, your body locks up. Fight, flight, or freeze—and most people freeze. Every trained soldier in history has had that moment when the rounds come in and the brain stops talking to the hands. I’ve been there.
Andrew’s been there. It does not mean you failed. ”
“But if it happens again,” Baraka said quietly, “we can’t freeze again.”
“No. You can’t.”
Andrew spoke from beside me. He’d been quiet through all of this, letting me run the briefing, and when he stepped in, the group’s attention shifted to him.
“The training changes. Starting today. Everything we’ve done up to now—the drills, the field exercises—built a foundation.
It made you a team. You proved that last night with the fire.
Not one person had to be told what to do.
That foundation is real, and it is solid.
But it won’t prepare you for what happened two nights ago, and it won’t prepare you for what might come next. ”
“What replaces it?” Zayn asked.
“Contact drills,” Andrew said. “How to move when someone is shooting at you. Not just hitting the ground, but getting to cover while keeping your weapon oriented toward the threat. How to conduct fire and maneuver.”
“How to hold a position,” I said, “when every nerve in your body is telling you to run. How to keep functioning when the chaos and fear are so loud that nothing makes sense.”
Each man began processing what it meant to train for something that two days ago had been theoretical and was now the most real thing any of them had ever experienced.
I owed them one more thing.
“Anyone who wants to walk away can walk away. Right now. No judgment and no shame in it. You signed up to be rangers, not soldiers. What I’m asking you to do next goes beyond what anyone asked of you when you took this job.
If this isn’t what you want, you tell me, and you go home to your families with my respect. ”
Silence.
The compound held its breath. The burned-out shell of the vet facility stood behind us, heat still rising from the debris in thin wisps, the painted words on the water tank taunting every man standing there.
Nobody moved.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody walked.
I made eye contact with each and every one of them. All of them held their ground.
“All right. Get some food and some water. We start in an hour.”