Chapter 23
Donovan
Three days of nothing, and the rangers were running the obstacle course like they’d invented it.
I stood at the tree line with my arms folded and watched them move.
The same course they’d built with their own hands at the start of the program, back when half of them couldn’t lash a rope brace without it slipping and the other half couldn’t figure out which end of the plank went down first. A month ago, this had been a circus.
A rifle reassembled with a part backward, and Baraka arguing with anyone who’d listen and even a few who wouldn’t.
Now they ran it as a unit, each man knowing where the next one was without looking. They hit the wall together and came off the other side in formation.
At the low-crawl lane, Jomo dropped to his belly and started pulling himself through.
The clubfoot dragged behind him the way it always did, costing him time he couldn’t afford.
Baraka was already past the net and on his feet.
He stopped, turned back, and dropped to a knee at the far end of the lane.
He didn’t reach in or haul Jomo through.
He just held the edge of the net up so the kid could clear it without catching his bad ankle on the pegs.
Jomo came out and got to his feet. They moved on to the next station without a word between them.
Baraka had waved him off at the night exercise a few weeks ago, dismissed him in front of the others.
Now he was clearing a path without making a production of it, and Jomo was taking the assist without it costing him anything.
I made a mental note of that progress.
Underneath the admiration was a frustration I couldn’t let go of.
The tightened patrols had produced nothing—extra eyes on every waterhole in the northeast sector, overlapping coverage, extended shifts, the whole roster pulled tight, and not a sign.
The trail from the first carcass had gone cold into the settlement paths.
The KWS report had gone up the chain and produced exactly zero actionable responses.
Every morning, I checked in with the outposts and every morning got the same answer.
Baraka jogged past after his run and pulled up beside a few of the others cooling down. He unclipped his canteen and took a long drink, then said what the rest of them had been thinking.
“Three days and no sign. It was one time. One local who got lucky and went to ground.”
A couple of the others nodded.
“You’re still chewing on the carcass.” Andrew appeared beside me with his own canteen and the expression he wore when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. “You know who you remind me of right now? McClellan.”
“Don’t.”
“George B. McClellan. Sat outside Richmond in 1862 with the largest army the union had ever assembled. Had twice the men Lee did. Convinced himself he was outnumbered and spent months drilling his troops instead of fighting. Lincoln finally wrote him a letter asking if he wasn’t planning to use the army, could he borrow it for a while. ”
“That’s not what’s happening here.”
“Isn’t it? We geared up for something that never came. The rangers are running drills because there’s nothing better we can aim them at.” He capped his canteen. “I’m just saying. Sometimes the enemy doesn’t show.”
The joke half landed, because he was right and I knew it.
A cold trail didn’t get warmer with time.
Reasonable men had concluded that a single dead rhino and a set of tracks headed toward the settlements added up to exactly what Zayn had suggested in the first place.
A local who got hold of a serious rifle and figured out what a horn was worth.
But I couldn’t put it down. Something about the first rhino site still sat wrong in my chest. The passage of time without incident wasn’t healing it either.
The rangers cycled through the island crossing while I tried to name what was bothering me. I couldn’t. Not in a way that would hold up in a briefing.
Sarah’s voice carried across the clearing before I saw her.
“Donovan.”
She was coming from the direction of the vet facility, her field kit over one shoulder and a radio in her hand. Her pace alone told me something was wrong before she opened her mouth.
“A patrol just called it in. Second rhino. Horn gone.”
The course went quiet. Baraka lowered his canteen. Andrew straightened beside me.
“Where?”
“Northeast, out past the kopjes where the bachelor herd ranges. Fifteen kilometers from the nearest outpost, at least.” She shifted the kit on her shoulder. “The patrol found it thirty minutes ago. They’re holding position.”
The word had come to her because a poached carcass was vet work first. Cause of death and the samples KWS would need.
She stood there with the kit over her shoulder, hands steady on the straps.
Ten days ago, those hands had been red to the elbows, holding pressure on her best friend’s face while the road tried to shake them apart.
She was much steadier now. She was doing her work confidently and competently, regardless of the emotions she might still be dealing with.
“Andrew. Let’s get all the guys out there.”
We loaded up in three vehicles and drove.
The ride was a solid forty-five minutes, pushing northeast past the outposts and into country the regular patrols only touched on their longest rotations.
The terrain opened into broad savanna broken by rocky ground and scrub acacia, emptier and wilder than the sectors we’d been covering.
Sarah rode in the lead vehicle with me. On the way, she passed along what the patrol had radioed—a single bull, horn removed, no sign of the shooters.
“Same MO?” Andrew asked from the back seat.
“Same wound placement from what they described. Behind the shoulder.”
“That doesn’t tell us if it’s the same crew.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
The last two kilometers were on foot. The vehicles couldn’t handle the rocky drainage we had to cross, so we parked and walked in with the gear on our backs. The patrol had marked the position, and we found it in a broad clearing ringed by low brush and whistling thorn.
The difference was immediately noticeable.
The first carcass had been a day or two old when we’d found it, bloated and swarming with flies.
This one was fresh—hours old, not days. The blood at the wound site was dark but still wet at the margins. The hide hadn’t started to split. The only scavenger activity was a pair of vultures on a branch fifty meters out, waiting.
The horn had been taken and nothing else touched. Same wound behind the left shoulder and same devastating cavity from a large-caliber round.
Sarah set her kit on the ground and pulled on gloves. She assessed the wound site and collected her samples, then looked up at me.
“Less than twelve hours. Probably closer to eight.”
The number changed everything. This wasn’t old news. This was this morning. Someone had been standing here with a rifle while we were eating breakfast.
“All right,” I said. “Work the scene. Everything. Let’s hope they got sloppy.”
The rangers spread out the way we’d taught them.
They’d done this at the first carcass, and the routine was already in their hands.
Two of them worked backward from the wound to determine the angle of the shot while the rest got in line and swept toward the likely shooting position, looking for brass or any sign of where the shooter had set up.
I walked the perimeter with Andrew. He went wide. I stayed close.
I almost walked past it. A dull brass gleam in the short grass, sixty meters from the carcass, half-hidden by a clump of red oat grass. I crouched and looked at it without touching it.
A spent casing.
There had been nothing like this at the first site. No brass, no trash, nothing dropped. Whoever these men were, they’d policed their scene clean the first time. This time, they’d come up one short.
I picked it up by the rim and turned it in my fingers. Read the headstamp off the base.
“It’s a .375 H&H Magnum.”
Andrew came over, Zayn behind him.
“Say that again,” Andrew said.
I held it up so they could read the headstamp. “Says .375 H&H. Classic African dangerous-game cartridge. This is a safari rifle. Professional grade. Purpose-built for dropping heavy animals.”
“That is not something you find in the settlements,” Zayn said. His voice had gone flat.
“No.” I turned the casing over once more and set it in my palm. “At the first site, we had a wound and a guess. A big rifle, but we couldn’t put a name to it. Now we can. Same weapon. Same crew.”
At the first carcass, Zayn had offered the local explanation.
Old .303s from the colonial era. Surplus AKs.
Somebody’s uncle’s rifle that got loaned out, borrowed, or traded through a dozen hands.
A .375 H&H didn’t fit that picture. This was imported sporting equipment, the kind of weapon a professional hunter carried into the bush.
A rifle like that didn’t drift through a village on loan.
It didn’t prove outsiders on its own, but the local explanation was cracking.
Baraka’s voice carried from the far side of the site. “Over here.”
He was standing near the base of an acacia, holding something between his thumb and forefinger. I crossed to him, and he held it out.
A cigarette pack. Crumpled, half empty. The branding was in Afrikaans.
“Where was it?”
“In the grass. Stepped on.” He turned it over. The writing on the side panel was unmistakable.
“South African cigarettes,” Andrew said quietly.
Baraka looked at Zayn. Zayn looked at the pack, then at the ground where the tracks led away. Two other rangers exchanged a glance.
Nobody local was smoking South African cigarettes in the deep bush of the Laikipia Plateau. The men who had been standing at this carcass this morning had come from somewhere else.
The conversation dropped into Swahili and stayed there. Not the loose back-and-forth of a normal patrol. Their faces turned toward one another and away from Andrew and me. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone needed no translation.
Then one of the rangers turned to me. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
“Why are South Africans killing rhino in Kenya?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. Nothing I could be certain of—for now, at least.
They finished combing the area for anything else the shooters might have left behind. Zayn said almost nothing for the rest of it. He did what needed doing with his eyes on the ground, but clearly, his mind was deep in thought.
Sarah packed her samples and stripped off her gloves. Her documentation was started, her work at the carcass complete. She caught my eye across the site, and I could see she’d arrived at the same place I had.
Because the operative fact was already sitting in my chest. Fresh kill meant the men who did this were still out here.
The trail wasn’t a week cold and running into a village where a hundred paths crossed.
It was hours old and still going, made by men who were somewhere in this reserve right now. And possibly still hunting.
“The trail’s hot,” I said. “If we wait, we lose it the way we lost the last one.”
Zayn looked up. Every ranger at the site turned toward me.
“We should follow it,” Zayn said. “I think I know where these tracks are heading. There is a vehicle pull-off on the western access track, maybe eight kilometers from here. If they have transport, that is where it would be. We can cut toward it on the high ground and be in position before dark.”
“How sure are you?”
“It is the only road that reaches this country without passing an outpost. I am certain of it. If they are not using a vehicle, then they could be many other places. But if they are, that is most certainly how they got here.”
The rangers stood around us. Each one clearly eager to pursue.
This was what they’d trained for. They knew it. I knew it.
I pushed back anyway, because everybody in this conversation needed to hear what I was about to say.
“Listen to me. All of you.” I waited until I had every set of eyes.
“Whoever killed that rhino is carrying a .375 H&H Magnum—an expensive, professional weapon—and the men behind it are not messing around. We don’t know how many of them are out there.
Could be a shooter and a spotter. Could be a full crew.
We start now in daylight, but that trail leads deeper into the reserve, and we will be in the dark before long.
Finding armed men you can’t count in terrain you can barely see is not the same exercise as running an obstacle course.
It is a different thing entirely, and I need every one of you to hear me say that. ”
Nobody flinched. Nobody looked away.
“I hear you,” Zayn said. “We all hear you. And we want to go.”
I held his eyes for a long moment. Then I looked at Andrew.
Andrew gave me a short nod.
“All right. We follow the sign now, while it’s still readable, toward the likely ground.
We put ourselves in position, and we see what’s there.
Nobody plays hero. Nobody breaks off. We move together, or we don’t move at all.
” I looked at Zayn. “You’re on point. Baraka, you’ve got rear security.
Triple-check your ammo, radio batteries, and water.
We want to be light enough to catch up but armed enough to fight. We step off now.”
They moved. Every man there started gearing up from what they had with them, checking weapons, checking magazines, slinging radios and spare batteries without a wasted motion. The drills, the obstacle course, the ruck marches—all of it led to this.
Sarah had the vehicle keys in her hand. Her samples were already secured for transport. Tracking armed men in the dark wasn’t her work, and neither of us needed to say so.
She stood by the truck with her bag on the seat behind her.
I crossed to her.
“Drive straight back,” I said. “Radio me when you’re in.”
She nodded.
I kissed her. Her hand found the front of my shirt, fingers closing on the fabric.
“Be careful,” she said.
She searched my face for something. I didn’t know if she found it.
“You too. Straight back.” She nodded and I stepped back.
She climbed into the truck. The engine turned over. She pulled out onto the track. The dust rose behind her, and I stood there watching until the vehicle disappeared behind the first stand of acacias.
Then I turned back to the men.
Zayn was at the front, his eyes already on the ground where the tracks led away from the carcass. Baraka was at the rear. The others filled the gaps between, weapons ready and determination in their eyes.
“Gentlemen, my patience for these hunters is running out about as fast as our daylight. Let’s go find them.”