All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  “Do not fall apart on me for another two klicks, you bastard!” Bishop hissed between gritted teeth as he hit a washboard section of road, slewing it partly sideways and rattling so hard that Bishop felt it in his spine.

  A few minutes later, Bishop had pulled off the remains of the road. He dusted some of the wheel tracks using leafy switches cut from the thick bush. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but it would do for the brief time he’d be in the area. He only needed the wheel tracks to appear windblown, as though they’d been made the day before.

  He rooted around in the back of the Rover and came up with six things. First, he quickly assembled and then slung an M110 sniper rifle with a mounted Leupold scope, then packed his waist belt pouches with ten clips of .45 ammunition for his Glock 30 and four heavy, twenty-round clips of 7.62x51 for the M110. Second, he loaded the remaining space on his belt with two canteens of water. Third, he grabbed his shooting glasses. Fourth, he grabbed his favorite old Chris Reeve sebenza folding knife and stowed it in the leg pocket of his pants. Fifth, he uncased a GPS tracker, programmed the coordinates of his destination, set the device’s alarm and plugged the earphone into it. Nearly ready, he clipped a long, pouched ranging scope to his web belt, unzipped it part way and slid in a suppressor for the M110. He double-checked to make sure both the satphone and the two-way were turned off. Last was a tough little Nikon V-series camera with a mounted 30-110mm zoom lens stuffed into a fanny pack. Bishop checked the batteries in the Leupold scope, the ranging scope and the V3. Full charges, but he packed a couple of spares just in case. He was carrying almost fifty pounds. Then he laced his worn and battered Tilley campaign hat firmly on his head, turned toward the park and started a fast, steady pace to the coordinates he’d extracted from Fabrice.

  “Steady pace,” Bishop whispered aloud as he retightened a couple of slack straps. “Steady pace. What you can handle. Not more, not less.” It had been at least four hours since he’d had a salt pill, so he took one out of the little plastic case in his shirt pocket and popped it in his mouth as he jogged.

  “Suck it slowly, don’t swallow it or you’ll throw it up,” he whispered, his throat rasping.

  The heat in the lightly forested area was oppressive. It was 39C but felt nearly ten degrees hotter. As he quick-marched the narrow trail the cinch on the M110 slung on his back was loosening slightly, and the heavy rifle had started to slap his back every stride. That wouldn’t do. It could damage the scope. He stopped for the few seconds it took to adjust the cinch, re-lock it and resume his steady pace.

  “One point five kilometers now,” Bishop whispered again. “I can do that in my sleep. Keep steady. Keep the pace.” His breathing was starting to rasp. He knew he was overheating.

  The trail was tight, full of potholes, rocks and jutting branches. It wasn’t used often, and then mostly by a few locals hunting in the park illegally and by small-time poachers who walked in and out and needed the overhead forest canopy cover to hide from helicopter patrols and satellite observation.

  The poachers Bishop was tracking were not so shy. They weren’t afraid of helicopters because they traveled heavy, loaded with stolen or contraband M72 LAWs and RPGs. They drove medium and heavy vehicles and they did big business. They bribed park officials, bribed government officials, bribed border officials, financed and armed their operations through buyers who were feeding profits back to terrorist organizations, slaughtered endangered animals, and all of it without a second thought. These boys frequently killed for fun and to enhance their fearsome reputation and then slept like babies the same night.

  Bishop’s brutal march came to an end at a small rise approximately two kilometers into the park. There was a clearing shown on the embedded GPS map, with a stream splitting the large open area in half. It was an obvious watering hole, with the low banks of the stream pounded smooth by wildlife coming to drink. He spotted two rhinos, both big old males, separated by about one hundred fifty meters, and a small herd of elephants another one hundred meters along. The rhinos didn’t seem to be aware of each other. The elephant herd numbered eight animals including two calves that seemed less interested in drinking water than in chasing each other and getting in the way of the adults. The full grown elephants, including at least one female that seemed to be paying a bit more attention to the calves, tolerated the calves mildly. All the adults kept glancing toward the nearest rhino. Bishop took it all in as he set up just below the top of rise, behind a line of scrub that offered protection from the view of anyone in the clearing.

  The M110 sniper rifle is a 15.3 pound killing device. It is purpose built, semi-automatic, and with the Leupold Mk4 3.5-10x40mm sniper scope, was designed to do one thing and one thing only in the hands of a trained operator. It was designed to kill people with one shot from a long distance. In Bishop’s hands, and with his favorite M118LR rounds, the M110 was scary-accurate out to a little over eight hundred meters. As he surveyed the clearing from one side to the other and from his vantage point to the far side across the stream, he used his ranging scope to fix the longest distance at four hundred meters.

  “That’s what I want,” he muttered to himself, “a decent shot at tweaking these boys in their own backyard. This will be fun.” He settled into his natural hide, removed the suppressor from its padded carry pouch and mounted the long extension onto the end of the barrel. The suppressor would muffle and diffuse a lot of the shot noise and redirect it, making it extremely difficult for anyone more than fifty meters away to pinpoint his position by sound.

  If Bishop’s idea of fun was everybody else’s idea of fear, terror, stifling heat and bloody death, there was nobody around to comment at that moment. He extended the bipod, and used his knife to work a pair of shallow pits in the hard-packed dirt to get a level and solid position for the support. After he was satisfied, he took a full drink of water and popped another salt pill to help replenish his body. He was still recovering from the fast march through the heat along the miserable bush trail, but his heart rate was almost normal again and both his hands felt steady. There had been a few minutes when he’d felt distinctly light-headed, but that had passed and he was back in control.

  If Fabrice was not lying through his miserable teeth, Michel Mkutshulwa and his boys should either be setting up for their illegal hunt or getting ready to hit the clearing in their vehicles at any moment, Bishop thought. Bishop was also starting to wonder if he’d been spotted by Mkutshulwa’s point man. It was unlikely. Mkutshulwa was far too much of a regional tyrant who had worked hard to ensure that he was widely feared. But that also made him vulnerable mainly because the very few men in the world like Michael Bishop simply did not scare very easily. Or at all. Bishop viewed humans like Mkutshulwa as something you scrape off a boot before coming indoors. Such people wanted to be feared and known as violent and murderous. Their violence, posturing and bullying had no effect on Bishop. They wanted to be homicidal criminals, and that’s exactly how Bishop treated them.

  Another minute ticked by, then another. Bishop, lying in a prone shooting position, had an eighty-degree field of view through the branches of the scrub when he looked above the scope. He couldn’t see the entire width of the clearing, but the view was still more than wide enough for observation.

  Another minute ticked by. Some ants had snaked their way over to his bipod feet to check out this new object in their neighborhood. Bishop stared at them, momentarily fascinated by their seemingly intent inspection. A line of sweat beaded off his brow and ran down his left cheek, curved down his jawline and dripped into the dirt. Bishop’s breathing was slow, long and deep. He could hear the slow drip of sweat as it hit the dirt. His senses were keyed up even as his body was utterly still, his heart rate steady and normal.

  He began to hear a slowly building susurrus, a faint rumbling and buzzing, He strained to identify it and to determine the direction. After almost two full minutes had passed, the sounds began to resolve themselves. Vehicles!

  From out of the surroundin
g forest opposite Bishop, two Humvees roared into the upwind side of the clearing. One of the trucks tracked north of the target animals, the other south. It looked like Mkutshulwa was flanking above and below to trap his prey, but he seemed to have forgotten the east trail and partial clearing that most of the bigger animals used to get to this part of the stream and watering area in the first place. Then, out of the corner of his right eye, Bishop heard a keening wail and chant as beaters on foot came out of the forest on the east side. Bishop knew that Fabrice had steered him in this direction because he believed Bishop would inadvertently run into one of Mkutshulwa’s teams. But Bishop had deliberately chosen the toughest trail available, knowing full well that the gang would avoid it like the plague.

  “Lucky me,” Bishop said aloud. No more need to keep quiet with all the hollering, chanting and truck noise the herders and beaters were making.

  He rolled onto his back and scanned the skies around him. No helicopters. Even though everybody at all levels of senior policing and military knew what was happening, no helicopters. Mkutshulwa paid well and paid often. Good money in this. Very good indeed, Bishop thought.

  “No problem, then,” Bishop said aloud. “No one to see what comes next.” He rolled back into his prone shooting position and waited for an alignment he could use.

  It took the herders and beaters only a few minutes to scare the animals into three defensive groups. That was Bishop’s mark. It would only take a few more moments for the shooters to get into position for the best angles and start picking off the elephants with the best tusks, and all three rhinos. Four shooters were moving on foot, while the Humvee drivers were revving their engines and shouting nonsense through megaphones to keep the animals distracted. Bishop waited until each group of two shooters was settling into position, intent on their targets, then scanned quickly for any sign of Mkutshulwa himself. It took a few moments, but Bishop spotted him as he popped his head up through the opening in the roof of what looked like a brand new Land Rover.

  “Makes sense,” Bishop said to his rifle. “Everybody likes that new car smell.”

  He slowly tracked right, looking steadily through the scope to locate the farthest pair of shooters. They were still, settling down, and their two support people were talking encouragement to them and to each other.

  “Four men, four shots,” Bishop whispered. He settled into himself, breathed deeply and slowly, twice, marked his target, and shifted to place the crosshairs a degree or so high and to the left of the first shooter. There was no wind at all, and Bishop was in a higher position. His training and practice and experience told him ‘Now’ and he squeezed off the first round. The cold bore shot was effective, but not precisely on target. The M110 kicked back and raised some dust, but Bishop kept his position and kept his eye on the scope. The first shooter was down, his lower chest a complete mess. Bishop tracked left half a degree, lined up the second shooter who seemed frozen, staring at his partner. Barely five seconds had passed and there was still some dust in front of his scope, but he was sure of the shot. Squeeze, quiet report, and half a second later the second shooter was down. The two supporters were now looking wildly around. They were smart, these boys. They’d look for dust kicked up by a long rifle on a ground mount. So Bishop pulled a canteen, poured some water into his cupped hand and threw it to dampen the soil and scrub. He capped the canteen, hooked it back onto his belt, then got back into position.

  The other pair of shooters were hunched down and talking animatedly into their two-way radios. They did not look happy. Bishop tracked back left and reacquired Mkutshulwa. The man was shouting aloud at his men nearby and shouting into his two-way, gesticulating wildly in the wrong direction.

  “Not spotted yet,” Bishop breathed. He tracked right and down to find the final pair of shooters. They were moving and they were experienced, using scrub cover in the clearing to mask stops and starts as they moved at random intervals and speeds. Bishop was familiar with the tactic. He’d used it many times himself. What many people don’t understand, even the ones with his kind of experience, is that stop and start tactics only work for half a minute or so. Sometimes less. A good sniper knows his job and knows that a stop of only two seconds is more than enough time to aim, fire and drop a midrange target.

  At the very next stop, Bishop made his shot. It was a beauty even though he’d tensed up slightly. He picked off the nearest shooter directly through the left ear. The poacher was hunched down, in full profile. It was a classic shot and the damage was massive. An M118LR cartridge carries a jacketed 175 grain bullet that enters its target cleanly at the four hundred meter distance from which Bishop was shooting. The bullet then begins to tumble inside the target while still traveling at anywhere from 500 to 700 meters per second. It had exited the target’s head slightly askew and smashed out an eight centimeter hole as it left, taking brains, tissue and skull with it. The man was dead, utterly lifeless before he even started toppling to the ground. There was a bonus too. The other one of the pair, kneeling beside his partner, took what remained of the bullet in his right shoulder.

  “Through and through,” Bishop said aloud, as he tracked his scope up, slightly to finish off the wounded one. He was about to squeeze off the next shot but then relaxed. Better to leave him screaming to distract the rest of them and maybe even stampede some of the game.

  The suppressor on the M110 was too good. No so-called “silencer” could ever truly silence any high-powered weapon of any kind. The suppressor did a fine job of noise reduction though, and more important, diffused the sound in a way that made it difficult for anyone downrange to pinpoint the source. None of Mkutshulwa’s gang had spotted Bishop yet, nor had Mkutshulwa himself. It couldn’t last though. These boys were too experienced and Bishop was operating on their turf. In the next minute or so, they’d all get their respective shit together and start hunting him. Time for the money shot.

  Bishop settled down again. He scanned down and left. He was looking for the boss man. He doubted he had more than a minute. In fact, he could hear Mkutshulwa screaming orders in pidgin English and some in French to check the high ground. Mkutshulwa was scanning the tree lines around the clearing and figuring out where the sniper had to be to make the shots.

  “Give me a profile, Michel,” Bishop whispered as he relaxed his body and calmed his breathing, taking air in and releasing it slowly, controlled. “Give me a profile.” Mkutshulwa had ordered his driver to begin starting and stopping. The man was feeling it and he kept bobbling around as he stood up in the roof opening.

  Then the inevitable happened. The Land Rover got momentarily stuck in a deep pothole or burrow hole in the clearing. The right front tire became jammed, and the whole vehicle lurched forward. Mkutshulwa was slung forward suddenly as well and banged his forehead on the roof. He straightened himself, put his right hand to his forehead and froze for a moment as the pain of the impact washed over him. He’d probably hit his head hard enough to cause a concussion.

  In a few seconds, that wouldn’t matter. Bishop was lined up on the brute. A gentle squeeze and the shot was made. Five hundred meters; no more than that. The muzzle velocity of an M118LR bullet as it exits the barrel of an M110 sniper rifle is approximately 785 meters per second. The bullet slows through the air, but the time to target over five hundred meters is still only just over half a second. Michel Mkutshulwa’s head was smashed back and sideways by the vicious impact. The force of the shot bent him backwards, dead, on the roof of the Land Rover. The driver was back to stopping and starting, not realizing yet that his boss was dead.

  The water that Bishop had sprinkled to keep the dust down had evaporated quickly. The shot to kill Mkutshulwa had kicked up enough for one of the beaters to finally spot his position. They started yelling and pointing. Then they started shooting.

  “Oh yeah, time’s up!” Bishop said aloud as he drew the little Nikon with its long zoom lens. He made about twenty photos on full auto of the carnage, then picked off two flankers attempting t
o sweep around to his position. They were all firing at him, but the slaughter only a few minutes earlier had scared them. When the second flanker went down, Bishop immediately drew the Glock 30 and started making some noise. Two shots, roll left and crawl about three meters, make another two shots, roll and crawl right about ten meters, make another two shots. That’s what it took to drain the fight out of the leaderless gang. They stopped firing and used whatever cover they could find to work their way back to their transports.

  “Now I’ve really overstayed my welcome,” Bishop finally growled to himself as he packed up his gear after backing down the rise a couple of meters.

  He had been drinking more water and sucking on another salt pill. He was refreshed as much as he could be under the circumstances, and he was in far better shape than any of the late Michel Mkutshulwa’s gang. The plan was for DeCourcey to meet him partway up the trail with the park rangers in order to provide some cover for their escape if any of the poachers was persistent enough to chase Bishop that far on the toughest local trail.

  “Richard, you better be there,” Bishop said through gritted teeth as he made the trail head and started his steady jog.

  He shouldn’t have worried. The poachers were not interested in tracking him. They had a badly wounded man on their hands and they still had elephant ivory and rhino horn on their minds. One group of elephants had retreated from the clearing during all the shooting, and one of the rhinos had escaped as well. That left five elephants and one rhino that the beaters were again keeping boxed in. The buyer in Yaoundé would be happy enough.

  Chapter Two