All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  “Who is the fixer’s contact? The man in Douala. Who does he deal with at the shipment point?”

  Everybody who did business in any country in west Africa valued their personal contacts beyond anything that people from North American or western Europe could understand. It was as if all the technology being used by the poaching gangs and the smugglers was meaningless to them beyond a certain point. They all boasted personal contacts and valued face to face communication beyond anything else. It was tribal, in some ways backwards, but in other ways rather more secure.

  “That information is unknown to me, Bish—” Fabrice gasped and winced as a wave of pain washed over him.

  “You value personal contact over everything, Fabrice, so why should I believe that you have never met anyone beyond the fixer in Douala?”

  “Bishop,” the man gasped again, “this is how it works. I am not allowed any deeper into things.”

  Bishop stared intently at the man, but Fabrice returned his stare. Finally I hear an absolute truth.

  “I am leaving now, Fabrice,” Bishop said flatly over the man’s moaning. “You are not to make any calls. To anyone. No whispered words to a runner. Until tomorrow at sundown you are not to communicate to anyone, not even the doctor who fixes your wound. Do you understand?”

  Masiki nodded absently, grimacing and flinching as he thought Bishop was going to irritate the wound again.

  “Speak, Fabrice.”

  “I will not call anyone! I will not call! I will not say anything to anyone!”

  Bishop knelt down next to the man, smiled at Masiki, paused for a moment then knocked him unconscious with a short, straight right to the mastoid process behind his right ear. It was a dangerous strike, but Bishop was careful enough to deliver a knockout and a concussion rather than a lethal hit. Let the next bar customer call the doctor. Poor, damaged Fabrice could tell them he resisted the evil white man and got beaten and shot for his bravery. Bishop quickly rifled Masiki’s pockets and found two cell phones. He put both of them in his pack to give to DeCourcey.

  Bishop hit the front door of the bar hut at a dead run. He pulled the sat phone from its belt pouch on his left side as he sprinted to his Land Rover. Tcholliré was a moderate size town, considering its location in gently rolling countryside well away from the capitol. There were few buildings taller than a big man could reach, so satellite reception was good. He made the Land Rover in just under a minute, settled into the driver’s seat and punched the codes for DeCourcey. He then threw the sat phone on the passenger seat, started the Rover and stomped the gas pedal just as he clutched and shifted it into first gear. By the time he’d driven across the wide ditch separating the bar hut from the main road, the sat phones were hooking up. DeCourcey answered immediately.

  “Any luck?”

  “Yes,” Bishop answered over the roar of the engine, downshifting to clear a rise. Thanks to the rugged build of the sat phone, it contained an oversized speaker suitable for use in noisy environments. “Everything, include the entry point. Here are the longs and lats,” he said, tapping the keypad with one hand and steering with the other. “There’s more, including shipping destinations for another load leaving Douala. And I managed to get the name of the fixer at the port. But that’s where the information stops. Masiki simply does not known about anything or anyone beyond Douala. The organization is tight. We can deal with that later. I took his phones too,” Bishop said as he handed them over. “Since their comms went invisible, it’s possible that the phones themselves are part of the riddle. Maybe one of these is special.”

  “Good catch, Bishop,” DeCourcey replied as he took the phones, staring at them like curiosities. “I hope you’re right. The techs will sort them out as soon as I can get them into an evidence pouch and into their hands.”

  “I’ll put Linders on the fixer at the port immediately. She’s got a solid contact in the Judicial Police in Douala itself, and she made friends with the littoral governor. They’ll cooperate. The governor is looking for investment money to finance the port improvements that the president has been boasting about over the past five or six months. Linders will offer to put in a good word in Paris, which is where his honor the president has been trying to raise capital. She’ll get the name from the police after one of the president’s aides makes a call to them.”

  “You sound very sure of that,” Bishop replied.

  “I am not confident about cooperation from the president of Cameroon. I am not confident that the judicial police in Douala aren’t wholly corrupt. I am very confident in Linders.”

  “No argument there,” Bishop said. Glancing up and down between the sat phone’s key pad and the rough road, Bishop keyed the coordinates into the readout and sent them to DeCourcey.

  “I’m on my way to you now. If you leave right away and maintain about thirty kilometers an hour, I should catch up with you in about thirty minutes. Then we can pick it up a bit, depending on the condition of the road, all the way to the main turnoff into the park. If I read my map right, we’ll only be able to drive half a klick or so into the park itself before we have to shut down and walk the rest of the way.”

  “We’re cutting it close, Agent Bishop,” DeCourcey said between the jouncing and rattling of his own Rover. “Remember that you’re here—that we brought you in—because telecommunications surveillance became a dead end. They change phones, surveillance agencies re-sniff, and we pick them up again eventually. This time they went dark on us and stayed that way. We’re facing something new. We suddenly can’t track their phones and we can’t snoop their comms. The small amount of traffic we do manage to capture is encrypted so heavily that nobody has been able to come close to cracking it. We are having a difficult time even sniffing their connections. NSA, DTRA, Interpol and everybody we deal with are stumped. They’re obviously being supplied with comms gear by a silent partner with technical expertise they could never hope to develop on their own. Maybe Masiki’s phones will tell us something, but in the meantime, the poaching gangs know about surveillance and flyovers and the existence of advanced tech, but they’re not technical themselves. They’re not programmers or hardware designers. Quite the opposite.”

  “You think their manager—their silent partner—is watching them.” Bishop said it as a statement because DeCourcey was taking a long time to make a point during what should have been a sixty second call. Besides that, it was oven hot and getting hotter.

  Silence.

  “Richard,” Bishop said when it seemed as though DeCourcey wasn’t going to reply, “you have to state your request or your concern.”

  “Very well,” DeCourcey said, making a slight grunt as he hit a pothole at a bad angle and banged against the driver's door. “I believe that the silent partner is watching. Drones are a plentiful and cheap. I am starting to think that this tactic of yours was anticipated.”

  Bishop laughed softly, almost to himself.

  “The one thing these poachers know—the one thing all gangs know—is when someone is watching them. Believe it. Believe that a drone, a local watcher and electronic measures would be found quickly, then shot down, shot to death or shot to pieces. Believe that my infil will be the one thing they don’t expect.”

  “I hope you’re right, Bishop.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bishop replied off-hand, concentrating on the horrible road. “So now we rely on old-school down and dirty field work, and all the shit that sometimes goes with it. Very stressful. Lots of anxiety. Just what the doctor ordered, Richard. Then again, being knee deep in trouble why you joined this circus in the first place, right?”

  “Never planned on this heat though,” DeCourcey replied, trying to sound more like a team member than a fretful weak sister. “Never planned on you either, Bishop.”

  “Nobody ever does. See you soon,” Bishop replied, then rang off and tossed the sat phone back onto the passenger seat next to the portable radio set he’d be using when he reached the team. Hot and getting hotter.

  ***r />
  The road was miserable. Rocky, pitted, packed-down ochre dust and earth. The Land Rover seemed at war with the only route available. It was a road for cattle farmers and goat herders, not motor vehicles. Local villagers even kept their few horses away from the road because there was too great a chance that the animals could pick up a strain or sprain from the awful surface. But Bishop had no choice. His estimate of thirty kilometers per hour for DeCourcey’s team was optimistic. They’d all be lucky to average twenty, so it was going to be even tighter than they’d feared.

  Twenty-five kilometers up the road, nothing was going well for DeCourcey’s team. Fifteen minutes after ringing off with Bishop, he was stalled. His team was divided up into two Rovers and a military surplus, un-armored Humvee. There were three fully armed park rangers in the lead and a five-man squad of federal special forces detached from the Cameroon army’s Bataillon Blinde de Reconnaissance in the middle. DeCourcey and two IUCN observers brought up the rear. The military surplus Humvee in which the BBR squad was riding had a broken front axle. The weight of the squad and their gear was too much for the aging, heavily used truck. No repairs on-the-spot. No spare parts within a hundred kilometer radius. The vehicle was finished, at least until someone could come and tow it back to Tcholliré or Sorombéo or anywhere else in Bénoué or Mayo-Rey in a day or two. It wouldn’t last that long if it was left unguarded. The locals would strip it for parts overnight and there would be nothing left but the chassis by morning, perhaps even that would disappear. There was no room in the other Rovers for the BBR squad and all their gear—not even close. They had spare fuel, loads of water, they were fully armed and they were carrying an enormous amount of ammunition. But they weren’t going anywhere.

  It took Bishop a full ninety minutes to catch up to the broken down convoy. He was still an hour from the entry point they had to hit in order to make the poaching location on foot, early enough to set up an ambush for Mkutshulwa and his gang. One look at the group stalled on the road told Bishop they were no longer in the fight. He braked hard as his Rover pulled alongside the dead Humvee.

  “Captain Eloundou,” Bishop nodded at the BBR squad leader, “sorry to see you’ve got equipment problems.”

  Captain Issa Eloundou did not want to be on that road, and neither did his men. He disliked Bishop the American only slightly more than he disliked DeCourcey and his Europeans. He loved his country though, and reserved some of his passion for a heavy measure of hatred for the poachers, terrorists and terrorist sympathizers who polluted Cameroon. He also resented being singled out for duty like this that was more likely to get him killed than put a stop to poaching. Of all the people in the group standing in the midday heat on the road though, Captain Eloundou’s squad members wanted to be there least of all. They had no desire to get into a firefight with better-equipped poachers, and they especially did not want to get into a firefight with poachers who had financial connections and philosophical sympathies with Boko Haram and Da’esh. They and Eloundou both wanted a full company in place before getting into a firefight with Michel Mkutshulwa and his boys. Let them take their elephants and their rhinos. The men were well trained and they knew the animals were endangered, but they also knew they were outgunned. There was no taste for a pitched battle in the worst of the November heat.

  “Agent Bishop,” Eloundou intoned, “As you can see, we are out of the fight this time. No fault of ours, which is something I know you will reflect in your report. I am afraid to say that you are on your own.” One good look into the captain’s eyes told Bishop all he needed to know. Eloundou’s reputation was solid, but he was undermanned and underequipped, and the uncomfortable shifting and dust kicking of his squad spoke volumes about their mindset as well.

  “Richard,” Bishop called to DeCourcey standing some distance ahead surveying the road the landscape on either side, “Are you prepared to go ahead?”

  “Michael,” DeCourcey replied as he turned and walked back, “the BBR squad is our main and only backup. The rangers can’t be expected to fight Mkutshulwa’s boys without heavy firepower and a favorable method of engagement. There is no way we can make it to the coordinates together, and there’s no way these guys will fight now even if we could find a way to get them all there in time. I’ve radioed for assistance and so has Eloundou. In the meantime, I can call Linders and get her started on running down a location for this fixer in Douala. I’m going to get Linders to hint to the Douala police that Eloundou helped get the information. That will either help Eloundou and create better cooperation from him in the future, or it will severely damage his own network who’ll take him out of the picture and we won’t ever have to deal with him again. Either way, we win. It will still take some digging to find this fixer though.”

  Bishop shook his head. He’d been tracking intel for weeks, most of it fed to him by Interpol’s Marseille-based unit, and he would be damned if he passed up this opportunity to put a hole, a real big hole, in the activities of these poachers. He assembled a ridiculously dangerous ‘plan B’ in his head as they talked.

  “Fine,” he said flatly. “It is what it is.”

  “Why do you say that so often? What does it even mean?” DeCourcey snapped at him, irritated.

  “It’s a tautology,” Bishop replied, smiling, looking around and blinking sweat out of his eyes. “It’s a way of facing reality. It means I’m doing what’s needed to follow the money.”

  “All right,” DeCourcey sighed. Despite his experience in the field, the equatorial west African heat was starting to get to him too. “What do you propose?”

  ***

  They had tried to stop him when he explained his plan. Technically, they had jurisdiction over him, but no taste for argument. The park rangers were unhappy about even contemplating getting anywhere near poachers directly connected to terrorists. The BBR squad was ill-equipped to deal with anything that didn’t involve heavy equipment, heavy weapons and motorized transport, and they sure as hell weren’t about to hike kilometer after kilometer in the stifling heat and dust with all their gear. The BBR had the legal authority to stop Bishop, but Eloundou’s men were out of the fight and might have needed a strong incentive to push on even if their transport hadn’t broken down. They wanted as little as possible to do with Bishop and any other foreign troublemakers who showed up. Eloundou briefly entertained the idea of ordering his men to detain Bishop. They might have even obeyed their captain, but Eloundou didn’t want to field test that possibility. DeCourcey and the IUCN observers had no direct authority over Bishop; their respective agencies were cooperating with each other, neither agency subservient to the other. All they could agree on was to pick Bishop up two klicks into a particularly rough bush trail in the southwest part of the park near the terminus of the same road they were on now in less than two hours if Masiki’s information turned out to be accurate. No radio contact and no satphone contact until after Bishop caught up with the poachers; too much chance of being intercepted or overheard.

  Captain Eloundou took Bishop aside, to the side of the road and well away from DeCourcey and the others.

  “Illegalities will be met with severe penalties, Bishop,” the reedy army captain intoned in a low voice. “You are in Cameroon. We have laws. The people you are tracking, including Mkutshulwa in particular, are citizens of Cameroon. Evidence of illegal behavior on your part will not be viewed well, Bishop. Observe and report. An engagement without the authority and presence of BBR will not earn you a sympathetic response from my government or from me.”

  “You are a patriot, Captain,” Bishop replied mildly with a nod of his head. “But I assure you that I am here as an observer only, gathering intelligence. I will not hurt anyone unless they try to hurt me first. Of course it would be good to have an army or park ranger escort to ensure my good behavior and honesty, don’t you think?”

  Eloundou just stared back at him. Eloundou’s men were not patriots. Most of them were in the service for the paycheque, nothing more. He knew that. H
e also knew that Bishop was the right man in the right place for this particular job. But he had to maintain the proper form and attitude in front of his men. If he didn’t, they’d never follow his orders again.

  “Keep your smart talk to yourself, Bishop,” Eloundou said flatly, and loud enough for his men to hear. “You are not welcome in my country.” In response, Bishop just half-saluted the man, playing the forced role of arrogant foreigner, turned on his heel as if in direct defiance of Eloundou and walked quickly toward the Rover.

  “I will take great delight in reporting your untimely demise, Mr. Bishop,” Eloundou intoned after him.

  Bishop could not trade barbs with Eloundou. The equipment breakdown had ruined Eloundou’s chances of being part of a solution, and he now wanted nothing more at that moment than to delay Bishop, DeCourcey and the IUCD observers past the point at which any of them had any chance of catching Mkutshulwa in the act.

  “Did you hear me, Bishop!” Eloundou called again. “You should look at the man who holds your fate in his hands.”

  So Bishop turned around to face the captain. Eloundou’s back was toward his men. He was smiling slightly, and winked once quite obviously as he stared directly at Bishop. There was no mistaking the wink, and Bishop understood immediately. Eloundou might well be a dedicated soldier and a patriot after all. Bishop saluted him again, properly this time, to show his respect for a man caught between a rock and a hard place who was still trying to do his best. Eloundou might have his back after all, if only when the fight was over, and Bishop had just shown Eloundou’s men that he would apparently obey the captain.

  ***

  Bishop was taking chances with his Land Rover that he’d never normally take. If your vehicle breaks down in this heat, you’d better have water, a lot of patience, very good hiking boots and reliable weapons with enough ammunition to fend off bandits, wildlife and local gangs. He was driving much too fast for the road conditions and he was praying the vehicle wouldn’t fly apart from the beating it was taking. The prayers were not the kind you hear in church.