Chapter 22
Donovan
We moved out at first light, twelve rangers and two operators strung along the track in a loose patrol column.
A month ago, I’d have had to drag them out of the bunkhouse.
A month ago, the column would have been ragged and their weapons carried as little more than inconveniences.
Today, Zayn had them formed up before Andrew and I crossed the compound.
Two columns of six, weapons slung correctly.
They stepped off in silence and moved as a cohesive team.
“Look at them,” Andrew said from beside me, low enough that only I could hear. “Almost makes me feel unnecessary.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
I watched the column move. Baraka was carrying the heavy pack today without having been assigned it.
He’d just picked it up. Two of the younger rangers had their heads on a swivel, scanning the tree line to their flanks the way we’d drilled them, and they were doing it without thinking about it.
Zayn was at the front, setting the pace.
It had been a week since the mauling. Four days since I’d stood beside Sarah while she put her hands on a sedated bull elephant and pushed through a fear that would have broken most people. The whole camp was learning to adapt to the new circumstances.
Sarah was better. Still hurting, but better.
I’d watched her work three cases in the past two days without stalling between them.
No second-guessing the dosage, no freezing with the syringe in her hand.
She was committing to each task and moving on to the next one, and that kind of forward momentum was representative of her willpower.
Word had come through that Alyson and Cole had both made it stateside.
Separate flights, separate roads. Alyson for the long reconstruction ahead of her.
Cole to learn how to walk on a leg that was mostly surgical steel.
He’d called from a military hospital in Virginia, sounding like himself, which meant he downplayed everything and then asked about the reserve.
“Cole says hi,” Andrew had reported after that call. “And by ‘hi,’ I mean he wants a full status report, a patrol schedule, and an equipment manifest.”
“Did you tell him his job right now is physical therapy?”
“I told him his job right now is watching daytime television and learning to use crutches. He told me to go to hell. It was a productive conversation.”
That was the register we kept it in. Cole was on his back in a hospital with his leg bolted together, and the only way any of us were getting through it was to keep it humorous and keep it moving.
The fellowship program had decided not to send replacements. Ten months left on the rotation, and they weren’t going to onboard anyone new for that. Sarah would finish it alone. The whole reserve’s animals on her.
From what I could see, that didn’t daunt her. Shorthanded or not, she was here because she wanted to be here. She loved it. The animals, the outdoors, and working alongside the rangers who had an equally strong passion for protecting the reserve. She wouldn’t be anywhere else.
Ten more months.
I filed it away for now and kept walking.
The sun climbed, and the patrol pushed deeper into the reserve. This was country we hadn’t covered regularly before, a sector northeast of the main outposts where the terrain opened into broad grassland broken by stands of acacia and the occasional rocky kopje.
“Patrol, halt. Zayn, take ten.” I raised a fist, and the column stopped.
Zayn turned back to me. “There is a waterhole ahead. Maybe four hundred meters. The rhinos come there.”
“Take two men and scout it. Andrew and I will hold here with the rest.”
He tapped Baraka and Otieno, and the three of them moved forward. Spacing themselves in a V formation, they covered the terrain the way we’d taught them. Baraka took the left flank, Otieno drifted right, and Zayn moved center, each one holding his rifle at the ready.
We waited. The rest of the rangers took a knee in the shade of an acacia cluster, using the time to hydrate and get some relief from the weight of the gear they were carrying.
Maybe fifteen minutes had gone by when Zayn called back over the radio.
“Boss. You need to come see this.”
Andrew and I looked at each other. I keyed the radio. “On our way. Hold position.”
We moved forward with four rangers behind us. The rest held where they were. The waterhole came into view through a break in the acacias, and past it, in the open, the shape that didn’t belong.
A rhino. On its side. Legs stiff, the bulk of the body unmistakable even at a distance.
Zayn was twenty meters from it, down on one knee with his weapon resting across his thigh. Baraka stood behind him, his face sour.
We closed the distance and the details arrived. Flies first. A dark shifting blanket of them over the exposed tissue, a swarm that produced a sound almost like radio static.
The carcass was whole. The hide unbroken except where scavengers had started working the soft tissue. No meat had been cut away. Nothing else had been touched. It appeared to be a fairly fresh death, but the oddest part was it was missing its horn.
I dropped to a knee beside Zayn.
“If you had to take down a rhino, where would you want to hit it?”
Zayn considered the carcass. “Behind the shoulder. The heart and lungs sit low and forward. A heavy round placed there could drop the animal fast.”
He moved to the far side and pointed. I came around and saw it. A single entry wound behind the left shoulder, exactly where Zayn had described.
The hide was split and curled back at the edges from the force of the impact, and the cavity that was created was pretty substantial. No exit wound that I could find.
“How old?” I asked.
“One day. Maybe two.” Zayn pointed at the earth around the carcass.
He stood and walked a slow circle around the site, reading the dirt, stopping twice to crouch over something before moving on.
I looked at Baraka, then back at Zayn. “All right. Let’s work the scene. Tell me everything you can read from what’s in front of us. Tracks, tools, anything that tells us who did this and how.”
Zayn went first. He pointed at the churned-up prints near the carcass.
“The tracks around the animal are a mess. Too much overlap from people moving around while they worked.” He walked out about ten meters and pointed down.
“But out here, on the approach, the prints separate. It looks like four men. Maybe five.”
“What’s giving you that number?”
He knelt beside two prints and traced the edges with his finger.
“Different treads. This one is a boot with a worn heel. This one is a sandal. And there are at least two more patterns, all heavy enough to be grown men.” He stood and traced a line with his hand toward the northeast. “They came from that direction, I think. And it looks like they left the same way. I would need to walk the trail to be sure.”
“Baraka?”
Baraka was kneeling near the animal’s head. “Somebody used a saw on this. The cuts are too clean for a panga or a machete. No hack marks, nothing wasted.”
Andrew came alongside me. He’d been working the perimeter in a wider arc, checking for anything the immediate scene didn’t show.
“Site’s clean,” he said. “No brass, and nothing else left behind that I can find. Whoever did this knew enough to police their mess.”
I looked at the wound again. That entry point bothered me.
“This wasn’t a small rifle,” I said. “Whatever dropped this animal, it had serious weight behind it. That’s a heavy round.”
Zayn looked up from the tracks.
“I wouldn’t expect a village to have something that could put this down in one shot,” I said. “That’s a hunting rifle. A real one.”
“You would be surprised.” Zayn straightened and rested his hands on his rifle sling.
“Old rifles come through these communities. They have for decades. Like .303s from the colonial era. Some military surplus. An AK here and there. They get loaned and borrowed and traded. Somebody’s uncle has one, and it passes through many hands. ”
“He’s right,” Baraka said. “My father’s neighbor had a rifle like this when I was young. Nobody knows where it came from.”
Andrew looked at me. I looked at the wound and then at the tracks leading northeast toward the inhabited boundary of the reserve.
“So, somebody local,” Andrew said, “gets hold of a serious rifle and figures out what a horn is worth?”
“That is what I think,” Zayn said. “The tracks go toward the settlements. The approach came from that direction. And I know who moves through this country.”
One of the younger rangers who’d come up with us spoke in Swahili to Zayn. Zayn listened, answered briefly, and turned back to me.
“He says there are men in the settlements who have been talking about money. Easy money. He has heard it secondhand.”
I stood and took a step back from the carcass. I wasn’t a vet, but I’d spent enough time with Sarah to understand just how devastating this abhorrent waste was. My jaw ached, and I realized I’d been clenching it since I’d touched the hide.
As if she needed more loss to be sad about.
We had a large-caliber bullet wound and no casing to identify it. We had tracks heading northeast toward the settlements. We had hearsay evidence of quick money jobs popping up but no idea if they were specifically related.
We had assumptions but were lacking proof.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s track it.”
We followed the tracks northeast. Zayn led, eyes down, moving at a pace that let the tracks talk to him.
The rest of us spread behind him in a loose formation, covering his flank while he tracked.
The prints held for the first two kilometers, clear enough in the soft soil.
The stride pattern was consistent on the return.
Whoever they were, they hadn’t appeared to have been in a hurry.
Then the terrain changed. The grassland gave way to harder, well-worn paths beaten by foot traffic and livestock, and the tracks thinned.
One set disappeared into a cattle trail.
Another merged with a broader path worn by a hundred daily comings and goings.
Within another half kilometer, we’d lost all of them.
Zayn stopped at the edge of a well-worn track that branched in three directions. He went to one knee and studied the dust for a long time before he stood.
“It’s gone,” he said. “Too many people walk here. I cannot separate them.”
I looked at the track, at the settlement boundary markers visible in the middle distance. Somewhere out there, someone had a really big gun and a horn that didn’t belong to them.
Nobody said a word for a while. Zayn stood with his thumbs hooked in his vest and his eyes on the horizon.
“This is why the program exists,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was back to looking at the track where the trail had died. “This is what we are here to stop.”
The other rangers stood around us. Baraka had his arms folded tight against his chest, his mouth a flat line. The others were still and watchful. No one was angry. I’d expected anger and there wasn’t any.
What I saw was recognition. The threat they’d grown up hearing about had reached their reserve, and they were standing on the evidence of it. Nothing about their faces said surprise. This was the thing they’d always known was coming.
“What can we actually do right now?” Andrew asked. He asked it of the group, not of me.
Zayn considered it. “Report it to KWS. Faith Njeri will need to know.”
“Tighten the patrols,” Baraka added. “More coverage on the waterholes. The northeast sector. If they came once, they know the way back.”
“What about eyes at night?” one of the younger rangers asked. “We can post on the likely routes. The water, the browse lines where the rhinos feed.”
I listened to them work through it. A month ago, I’d have had to hand them every step. Now, they were building a response on their own, and the response was sound and measured. Nobody was suggesting they saddle up and ride into the settlements looking for a fight.
“Do it,” I said. “Zayn, draw up the new rotation. Baraka, coordinate with the outposts. I want overlapping coverage on every waterhole in the northeast sector. Andrew and I will handle the KWS report and update Ethan.”
I stood at the edge of the reserve looking out across the hard-packed dirt where the trail had ended. Andrew stayed beside me.
“One kill,” he said. “One cold trail. One assumption.”
“That’s what we’ve got.”
“And no one to point to.”
I let that settle. He was right. We had a dead rhino, a heavy round, and a set of tracks that vanished into a community where a hundred people came and went every day. We had rangers who were trained and ready, and nothing to aim them at.
We’d sort the new patrol schedules and coverage rotations when we got back to camp. Every one of them was willing and able. And the best thing we could do for now was be patient.
My hands wanted something to do. I checked my rifle, checked the magazine, ran my thumb along the receiver. Habit. The kind of movement your body defaults to when there’s energy in you and nowhere for it to go. Andrew saw it and didn’t say anything, because he knew what it meant.
Somewhere behind the frustration, underneath it, there was a darker thing I couldn’t say out loud. After two stretches of problems with no enemy behind them, we finally had a person on the other end of this. Somebody who had made a choice. Somebody I could find.
I kept that to myself, because finding relief that a butchered rhino meant a clear-cut enemy still wouldn’t sit clean with most.
“The patient hunter,” I said.
Andrew nodded and finished the line. “Gets his prey.”