Chapter 4
Donovan
The vehicle stopped and the dust kept going. It rolled past the windshield in a red-brown wave, drifted across the hood, and settled over everything within fifty feet.
Ol Pejeta Conservancy. End of the road.
I stepped out. Andrew came around from the other side, stretching his back and glancing around at the camp.
“Well,” he said. “It’s not the Ritz.”
It wasn’t. The main base sat at the edge of a wide clearing.
It was a handful of low buildings with corrugated roofs, a water tank on a metal stand that leaned about ten degrees off true, and a cluster of small cabins set back from the rest, grouped loosely together with maybe thirty feet between them.
Solar panels on two of the roofs. A generator housing with the door hanging open.
Vehicles parked along a dirt track between the buildings, none of them new.
One had a cracked windshield. One had no windshield at all.
“The brochure made it look bigger,” Andrew said, squinting at the cabins.
“There was no brochure.”
“That explains a lot.”
He stretched his arms over his head and rolled his neck.
“You know, the British ran a POW camp about sixty miles from here during World War II. Italian prisoners. Apparently the Italians started a vegetable garden, and the guards let them because the food was better than anything the Army was providing.”
“Is there a point?”
“The point is I’m starving, and I’m hoping someone here has taken up gardening.”
The land beyond the camp stretched flat and gold in every direction, broken by clusters of acacia trees.
Cole Braddock came out of the nearest building before we’d finished unloading. He looked good. Rested, even, which meant the past two weeks hadn’t been hard enough to wear him down yet.
“About time.” He gripped my hand, pulled me in, and clapped my back. Same with Andrew. “Was the flight okay?”
“Thirteen hours of Andrew talking,” I said. “Do you think it was okay?”
“I was enriching your mind,” Andrew said. “You should be thanking me.”
“He did that the entire way from Nairobi too,” I told Cole. “Something about the Mau Mau uprising and the history of the Laikipia Plateau.”
“It’s relevant,” Andrew said throwing up his open hands to feign innocence.
“It was four hours.”
Cole grinned. “Come on. Let me show you what we’ve got.”
He walked us through the camp. Most of the buildings were cinder block with metal roofs, they were the kind of construction that went up fast but at least stayed standing through weather that would flatten anything less.
There was a dining tent with a canvas roof that held mismatched tables and chairs, open on three sides.
A ranger bunkhouse set apart from the rest. Someone had pinned a hand-drawn map of the reserve to a post in the dining tent with outpost positions marked in red.
“Generator runs about sixteen hours a day,” Cole said, pointing to the housing we’d seen from the road. “Diesel. They’ve got enough fuel for about three weeks if nobody does anything stupid, which is optimistic.”
“Backup?” Andrew asked.
“Solar on a couple buildings. Enough to keep the radios charged and the lights on. Everything else goes dark.”
We reached the cabins. Cole nodded at them as we passed through the cluster. “You’re in these. Running water, actual beds. Just enough to be comfortable.”
Past the cabins, a concrete block building stood apart from the rest, larger than anything else in camp, the one structure that looked like it had been built to last.
“Vet facility,” Cole said. “Examination area, supply storage, recovery space for animals. There’s an American vet team here on fellowship. Three of them. They work with the animals on the reserve. You’ll see them around, but they do their thing and we do ours.”
“How long have they been here?” Andrew asked.
“About a year. They know the animals better than anyone.”
We passed a vehicle bay—really just a lean-to with a concrete slab—where a Land Cruiser sat with its hood up, tools on the ground next to it, nobody working on it.
He kept walking and we followed.
We ended up back at the dining tent. Cole pulled out a chair, sat down, and crossed his arms.
“All right. Let me tell you about the rangers.”
“How bad?” Andrew asked.
“Not great.” Cole leaned back in his chair.
“So, you know Ethan and Mel came through here on their honeymoon last year. They spent a few days on the reserve, and Ethan saw what was going on. The Kenyan government set up a ranger program about five years ago. Good idea, no follow-through. They recruited a bunch of local kids, gave them uniforms and weapons, pointed at the bush, and told them to protect it.”
“How many rangers are there?” I asked.
“Twelve. Most of them are teenagers. A few are barely twenty. And they don’t do much.
” He shrugged. “Can’t blame them, really.
Nobody trained them. Nobody gave them a mission.
Nobody checks in. So they sit around, they sleep, they let their gear fall apart.
They were handed a title and nothing else. ”
Teenagers. With weapons. And no one watching.
“And Ethan saw all this?” Andrew said.
“Ethan saw a problem he could do something about. So he sent us.”
I sat with that for a second. This wasn’t a contract. Ethan had stood where we were sitting, looked at the same picture, and decided it mattered enough to send his own people. Ethan’s judgement call meant something.
Cole kept going. “The program was supposed to cover a lot of ground. Deterring poaching, monitoring wildlife, basic first aid, and even helping establish some stability in communities out here that don’t have regular government presence or law enforcement.
In some areas, poaching’s been a real issue.
Here, not so much. It’s been quiet.” He shrugged.
“But the intent was good. These guys signed up because they wanted to do something that mattered. They just don’t know how to do it. ”
“So what can they do?” I asked.
“They know the animals. They can herd them between zones, manage grazing patterns, keep species separated when they need to be. The wildlife-management side, they’ve picked up on their own.
” He paused. “What they don’t have is any idea how to run patrols, maintain security, or protect those animals from people.
A poacher walks onto this reserve tomorrow and these guys wouldn’t know how to spot him, track him, or stop him. ”
That was the gap. They could manage wildlife. They couldn’t defend it. Two completely different skill sets, and they only had one.
But they had guns.
Andrew leaned forward. “So we’ve got a dozen teenagers who can move a herd of zebras across a valley but can’t clear a room or run a two-man patrol.”
“That’s a pretty accurate take.” Cole said.
“Could be worse.” Andrew looked at me. “At least they’re not starting from zero. They’ve got discipline in one direction. We just need to build it in the other.”
I looked at the map pinned to the post behind him.
The distances between the outpost positions were wide.
The whole thing looked like it had been sketched from memory.
Five outposts, twelve rangers, and a reserve that stretched farther than any of them could cover.
Andrew got up and stood next to me, studying it.
“That’s a lot of ground,” he said quietly.
It was.
“We’ve got a list of gear that can make these guys’ jobs significantly easier, but they need training in discipline, fieldcraft, radio protocol, weapons maintenance, basic patrolling.
” He shrugged. “You know, the fundamentals. And they need someone who can teach it without making them feel like they’re being punished for not knowing it already. ”
We turned from the map back to the table and Cole.
“What’s the community situation?” Andrew asked. “You said the program was supposed to help establish stability out here. Are we talking about villages nearby?”
“A few. Small communities scattered around the edges of the reserve. The rangers are supposed to be the bridge between the conservancy and the local population. In theory, they’re the guys who show up when there’s a problem. In practice, nobody shows up.”
“Hmm, it is certainly a laundry list of tasks.” I said.
“That’s why you’re here.” Cole looked at both of us. “I’ve been here two weeks, and I can tell you these are good guys. They’re not the problem. The problem is that nobody ever gave them the tools to do the job they were asked to do.”
Andrew nodded slowly. “So we build it from the ground up. Treat it like a training cycle. Six weeks, maybe eight. Start with individual skills, move to team tactics, then put them on actual patrol rotations with oversight.”
“That’s the plan,” Cole said. “More or less.”
“Let’s take a look at them,” I said.
Cole led us toward the far side of the camp where the ground sloped down toward a flat, open area. The rangers were there. Some of them anyway.
A few were sitting in the shade of a building, talking.
Two were leaning against a vehicle with their rifles propped next to them, muzzles in the dirt.
One was asleep on a bench with his hat over his face.
Another was cleaning something that might have been a radio or might have been a personal item.
None of them looked up when we approached.
They looked exactly like what Cole had described. Guys with nothing to do and no one around to tell them anything different.
Andrew was quiet for the first time since we’d landed. He stood beside me and watched them the same way I was watching them, with the kind of focus that meant he was already working the problem in his head.
“The big one on the left hasn’t touched his weapon in four days,” Cole said, low enough that only we could hear. “The two by the vehicle trade off sleeping when they are supposed to be on patrol. Neither one of them thinks I know.”
“They will find out soon enough.” Andrew said.
I’d seen units like this before. They weren’t bad people. Not lazy, exactly. Just abandoned and neglected by the larger system. You give someone a job with no tools, no training, and no leadership, then this is what you get. Every time.
Their uniforms were mixed. Some wore the full kit. Some had the pants but civilian shirts. One of them was wearing boots two sizes too big with something clearly stuffed into the toes to make them fit. Another one, clearly young, maybe sixteen, was limping along the edge of the group.
“Is that kid hurt?” I asked.
“Clubfoot,” Cole said. “He was born with it.”
This was the team, a term I was using ridiculously loosely. Twelve rangers, a handful of radios, and ninety thousand acres to cover.
I was already running through where to start.
Weapons first. You teach someone to respect and maintain his rifle before you teach him anything else.
Then radios, then basic patrol structure.
Small steps. Build the foundation and let the rest follow.
I’d done this before. Different country, different uniforms, but still the same problem.
Then I noticed the kid at the edge of the yard.
He was sitting on an overturned crate, with his rifle across his knees.
Straight-backed. His weapon was partially disassembled, and he was working through it with a rag and a level of focus that didn’t match anyone else in that yard.
His hands moved with purpose. When someone called out to him from the group, he looked up, answered, and went right back to what he was doing.
I watched him for a while. He hadn’t looked at us once. Not because he hadn’t noticed—he knew we were there. He just didn’t care about impressing anyone. He was doing the work because the work needed doing.
“That’s Zayn,” Cole said. He’d been watching me watch him. “Zayn Kipsang. Twenty years old. He’s the one Ethan noticed.”
I could see why.
I looked at the rest of them again. The one sleeping on the bench. The too-large boots. The one with the clubfoot. As Cole said, they needed someone to teach them the basics.
I could do this. This, I could carry. There was no danger to them here—except for maybe shooting out their own eye.
“All right,” Cole said. “Let’s get you two settled. Dinner’s in about an hour. There’s a few cooks onsite who provide meals for the camp in the mess tent. We need to discuss our training plans.”
We headed back toward the main buildings.
The light had shifted while we’d been walking, the sun dropping lower and turning everything amber.
The camp looked different in that glow. The dust that had seemed harsh when we arrived had settled, and without the direct sun, the temperature dropped to much cooler levels.
Cole was talking logistics. Sleeping arrangements.
The schedule he’d been running. Andrew was asking questions about the outposts, the rotation.
I was listening, but part of me was just taking in my surroundings.
The open land. The quiet. The fact that the biggest threat on this reserve right now was boredom and bad habits.
I rounded the corner of the dining tent, and something hit me in the chest.
It was a tray of food. The impact was sudden and wet, and whatever had been on that tray went down my shirt in a warm rush. Rice, some kind of stew, and something that might have been fruit was now a stain spreading across my chest and dripping onto my boots.
I looked down at myself.
Then I looked up.
Green eyes. Auburn hair pulled back in a braid that had mostly come undone. A face I hadn’t seen since a hotel hallway four thousand miles from here, right before she’d thrown up on me.
Sarah.
She was staring up at me with her mouth open and the empty tray still in her hands. Rice on her forearms. I watched the recognition hit her the same way it had hit me, and for a second, neither of us moved.
A piece of rice slid off my chest and landed on my boot.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“I’m starting to think you don’t own enough shirts,” Andrew said behind me.