“Oh, trust me, I won’t.”
King Cobra
I went out to get the bucket of fresh water and returned ready to dispense with my water allotments when I was stopped in my tracks by an extremely large king cobra that had reared up in the doorway to the pangolin cages with its hood spread, poised to strike Ling-Ru. With her back to the snake, Ling-Ru was looking at the pangolins, completely unaware of the situation.
I took a step back to avoid walking straight into it and conjured the calmest and yet most urgent voice I could muster. “Ling-Ru, don’t move,” I said forcefully.
Ling-Ru started to turn around. “What do you mean?”
“No! No! No! You have to trust me on this.” I held my breath for a second. “Whatever you do, do not turn around.”
“Okay,” Ling-Ru said with great uncertainty, trying her best to freeze in place while still attempting to look sideways to see what could possibly make me so concerned. “What is it?”
“It’s going to take me a minute, but you have to stay still.”
“A minute to do what?” Without thinking, Ling-Ru turned her head and her eyes filled with terror.
“I know what you’re thinking. You have to trust me, Ling-Ru. Find some way to channel calm. I’m going to get you out of this.”
Ling-Ru struggled to breathe and tried to close her eyes but couldn’t.
My mind was going a thousand miles a second. I knew what needed to be done. I had done it once before with a black mamba that almost bit Jon. I held up a long piece of steel pipe and looked down the center of it. At about two meters in length, it created as much distance as I was going to get away from this snake. I was going to have to do this at an angle, given that the opposite wall of the hallway was less than two meters.
I had to work fast. I retrieved the ball of string from my pocket, cut a length of it with the machete, and fed it through the pipe. I tied a large knot on the far end and then made a loop around the front end.
I looked at the pure muscle standing erect at half my height and aimed at Ling-Ru, with the rest of the snake coiled on the ground. It must have been about ten feet long.
Ling-Ru was slowly getting her breathing under control. “How’s it going, Catherine? I need information here.”
“We’re almost there, just one more minute,” I whispered.
I held the pipe out and angled it around the corner in front of me. I positioned the noose just above and behind the snake’s head so as not to create a sudden detectable movement that could cause it to turn or strike forward. I held the knot of the string out the other side of the pipe as tightly as I could as I lowered the noose over the cobra’s head. My hands were steadier than I had expected.
When the noose went over the cobra’s head, I pulled as hard as I could, emitting a spontaneous noise from my throat—as if I had just broken a board. Ling-Ru turned and screamed, jumping backward and knocking some of the pangolin cages over. “Catherine, are you out of your mind?”
I held the knot and pulled and twisted the string around my hand. I twisted and twisted as the extraordinarily strong serpent writhed on the other end of my rope. The tail end moved like a giant octopus’s tentacle, curling in all directions, seeming like eight tails instead of one. I couldn’t keep track of where the beast began and where it ended.
“Catherine, you can’t hold that thing tightly enough. What do I do?”
I was so tensed up I couldn’t speak, holding the string so tightly that it cut into my hand. “Help me,” I gasped, struggling to secure my grip on the string.
“Help you? What do you mean?”
“Come over here.” I was pulling with all my might. The neck was so strong and so thick, I couldn’t hang on. “Help me hold it.”
Ling-Ru backed herself up against the pangolin cages. “I hate snakes. You know that.”
“Seriously, you need to help me or I’m going to lose my grip. Get over here!”
“Christ.” Ling-Ru edged around the cages as I tried to steer the writhing cobra body away from her. She kept as much distance as possible from the snake as she approached me. “You are planning on killing it, aren’t you?”
“I’m hoping to get it into that burlap bag over there.”
She grabbed the pipe and helped me pull the string. “If we just keep pulling, we can kill it.”
“I don’t want to kill it.”
“It’s too big. We could never get it into that bag and not have it strike as we release it. You have to trust me now. I’ve seen it too many times. So many young men fancy themselves as snake wranglers and they end up getting bitten through a cloth bag. Can we please kill it?”
“It would be incredibly difficult to kill by choking it like this.”
“All right, you get a better grip and keep holding on. I’ll use the machete.”
I saw a large metal cooler that was opened in the corner of the room. It had a latching mechanism to close it. “Okay, how about this? We get it into the bag and then put it in this cooler.”
She pointed to the gashes on her arm. “I have enough wounds for the day. I don’t want to be poisoned as well.”
“Okay, you hold the end and I get it in the bag. Then you can let go and I’ll put it in the cooler. If anything goes wrong, then you can kill it.”
“You’re insane.” Ling-Ru picked up the machete.
I held out the noose. “This first, please.”
Ling-Ru grabbed the string and wrapped it around her good hand. “You know the asshole that probably planted that snake here isn’t planning to keep it alive when he returns.”
“Hold on.” I placed the rest of the snake in the bag. At this point, it had gone limp so I quickly closed the burlap bag and instructed Ling-Ru to let go of the noose.
Ling-Ru let go of the noose and grabbed the machete. “Okay, my snake-loving friend, at the slightest deviation from your plan, I’m going to hack that thing in two.”
I dropped the bag into the cooler and closed the lid, already preparing myself for what we might find next.
Ivory Stash
After dispensing two buckets of water to some extremely thirsty pangolins, seven of them looked like they would recover. Two others were possibilities, but they couldn’t even get up. The other seventy-one pangolins were dead and in various stages of decay. If the scales of one pangolin were worth a thousand dollars, there were probably eighty thousand dollars’ worth of pangolin scales in that room.
As I turned the hose back on to refill the bucket, I noticed a floorboard that was slightly loose in the stern of the boat. I handed the hose to Ling-Ru. “Here, can you finish this?”
Ling-Ru held the bucket under the hose and watched me kick at the loose floorboard with my foot. It was hanging on its nails as if it had been hastily replaced and not completely nailed back down. A few other boards were in the same state.
I looked around and saw a hammer near the stairway to the bridge. I loosened the nails on three boards and pulled them up. The stench of fish was overpowering.
I held my breath and looked down into what was probably a hold—a cold stowage most likely for fish, similar to the fishing trawlers that moored near the Star Ferry to sell their fresh catch of the day. Only this hold was far from cold.
The space was full of giant wooden crates, all with a large stamp on the top in black ink labeled FISH MEAL, and yet there was also a small stamp on the side written in Chinese characters.
“Ling-Ru, come here.”
Ling-Ru looked at the crate. “What is it?”
“What language is this?”
Ling-Ru looked closely at the characters and shook her head. “It looks like Thai.”
“Do you know what it says?”
Ling-Ru shook her head.
“How could a shipment meant for Thailand end up here in Hong Kong?”
“Maybe it came from Thailand.” Ling-Ru tried to make sense of the swirling text. “Or maybe it isn’t Thai. It could be Tai Lu. The Tai Lu language is also spoken in so
uthern Yunnan by the Dai. And in Vietnam by the ethnic minority, Lu, and also in Myanmar and Laos.”
“Can you hand me that pipe?”
Ling-Ru handed me the pipe and I took the end of it and dug around in the meal until I hit a hard object. I ran the pipe along the object, got the pipe underneath it, and popped it up to the surface of the reddish-colored meal. A long ivory-colored pointed object poked through the meal. It was a long, slender elephant tusk. “Oh my God.”
I poked around and felt where the meal ended and the stash of ivory began, halfway down the depth of the crate. I opened another and another, and they were both layered in this same way. I opened two more crates and found the same thing. I did a quick calculation—there were easily five or more tusks in each crate and at least several hundred crates. “There must be tons of ivory in these crates.”
I pulled out a tusk and brushed it off. It was only two feet long. I hated to see such small tusks. Judging from how slender the tusk was and how small, this was probably a very young female. This most certainly meant that a whole family group had been shot—many family groups. There weren’t many big tuskers left, and the only way to get enough ivory was to slaughter a whole group with varying-sized tusks. Female tusks were more slender and typically shorter than male tusks. Judging from the sizes I could detect through the fish meal with my pole, most of them were in this size range.
The tip of the tusk was chipped in several places, but the ivory didn’t look brittle, which might have indicated that it had come from the Etosha area of Namibia where mineral deficiencies in the soil cause tusks to be brittle and easier to break. Those tusks had deep cracks and blackened striations in them. This one didn’t.
I felt around the hollow edge of the bottom of the tusk, looking for a thin-enough area to break a small piece off for genetic testing. It was too hard to break by hand so I put it down, held the tip with my foot, and hit the thin edge of the other end with the hammer in order to break a piece off. The end of the tusk is attached to the base of the skull and contains the most DNA because that’s where the tusk grows out, which was convenient because it was easier to break off.
A hacksaw works pretty well at the tip, which is what I had used when I was a ranger in Kruger and we wanted to see how quickly ivory grew back on tuskers that we had put GPS collars on to track their movements. But there wasn’t as much DNA at the tip.
“What are you doing?”
I pulled two splintered pieces off the tusk and put them in my pocket. “I’m going to analyze the DNA. See what part of Africa it comes from.”
“How can you tell it’s not from an Asian elephant?”
“Asian-elephant ivory is denser and slightly yellower. The forest elephants in Central Africa have similar ivory, and because it is denser than the savannah elephant, it is more desirable. But at the rate that elephants are being poached in the Central African Republic, there aren’t going to be any left pretty soon.”
“It’s so sad.” Ling-Ru picked up a tusk and inspected it. “Who does the analysis for you?”
“We do it ourselves.”
“Where?”
“In our office.”
“You do genetic analysis in your office?” Ling-Ru said with a note of incredulity.
“We do now. Craig just got a sequencer. There are kits designed for the wildlife trade industry. One specifically for elephants.”
“But I thought you needed blood, or skin or hair, or poop at least. How can you extract DNA from teeth?”
“There’s a lab at the University of Washington that figured out how to do it. That’s the one useful thing I did while I was home last month. I went to visit the lab and learned the technique.”
“Amazing. But sounds expensive.”
“Not anymore. They’ve been working on it for about twenty years. The technology is getting better and better—easier to use, faster, and pretty inexpensive.”
“Like how inexpensive?”
“If there’s a kit already made up with target primers, it’s around fifty bucks a sample.”
“Really? That would come in handy for a lot of our confiscations.”
“Craig’s been coordinating with the secret police in Hong Kong. Apparently, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got funding for two labs, one for them and one for us.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“And the University of Washington lab has built up a huge database and created a genetic map of elephants across Africa in order to track ivory. I’ll be able to tell within two hundred miles where this ivory came from.”
Ling-Ru shook her head. “You know, it’s hard enough for us to police the trafficking of illegal Asian wildlife. Why can’t they crack down on smuggling in Africa so we don’t have to deal with chasing down ivory as well?”
“The effort has to come from both directions. If smugglers can’t get a shipment out of Africa, that’s a huge deterrent, especially if the punishment for getting caught is meaningful. But, if they can’t get a shipment to the final destination, it’s less worth the risk of trying to smuggle it out of Africa in the first place.”
“True. But you’re still going to have the poacher that wants to make a buck. And you’re still going to have someone who wants to buy from the poacher in Africa. The elephant is dead long before the ivory makes it over to Asia.”
“You’re looking at the problem at the wrong scale. Things have changed. Ivory is worth so much more now than it has been that it’s attracting the attention of crime syndicates. It’s now worth the risk for both the poacher and the smuggler. That increase in price was driven by an increased demand in Asia due to your booming economy, among other things. I don’t have to tell you that a market has to be in place to drive the value up. That market is not in Africa. It’s in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., and then all those that buy from Asian markets after it’s been carved. If we could make it harder to get ivory to the market, it would slow down the money changing hands and make the whole business less attractive.”
“The contents of this boat are a testament to what we have to contend with on a daily basis. African officials should do a better job of stopping ivory from leaving their ports to make it easier for us over here.”
“Point well taken.” I got up. “Come on, we’ve got more turtles in need of fresh water.”
We finished filling buckets with water and changed the water out for many hundreds of endangered freshwater turtles from Brazil, according to a note attached to one of the buckets. We also found ten tiger paws, four badly chewed bear paws, and a sealed basket full of snakes—at least that’s what the basket smelled like, and sounded like. Ling-Ru was opposed to checking in on them, so I left the container sealed.
I wrote a note of warning on the cobra cooler so no one would accidentally open it unprepared. Ling-Ru wrote out the Chinese characters as well just in case the person who happened to open the cooler couldn’t read English.
We then made our way back through the cabin and out to the stern. Following Ling-Ru, I picked up the machete before climbing up the ladder to the bridge.
I noticed a mask and snorkel sitting on the bridge and brought it along as well. I was determined to retrieve our firearm, knowing that there was a wounded tiger somewhere in the vicinity, and possibly also triad members keeping an eye on their investment.
Grizzly Acts
By the time we stepped off the boat, the plank was equal with the dock because of the rising tide. The hull ID numbers were now at eye level on the starboard side of the transom.
I pulled out my cellphone and took a picture of the numbers. I mouthed them: HIJ 007JB MI69X.
H-I-J, I believed meant the months that the boat was manufactured, in either March, April, or May, and then the 69 at the end would correspond to the date of certification—1969. I had remembered that much from the little bit I got off the Internet on boat-registration protocol before flying down the Ka Long River.
The water was now quite a bit deeper, making the search for Ling-Ru’s f
irearm all the more daunting. I held up the mask and looked down at the water. “Is it worth a try?”
“Do you have an iron lung?”
“I’m pretty good underwater.”
“I don’t think we’re alone out here.” Ling-Ru scanned the shoreline. “It might not be a bad idea. But the water is so brown and the tide so high, I don’t think you’ll ever find it.”
“If you think it will fire, I will give it a try. Don’t want a hungry tiger on our tail.”
“Or an angry triad member. But you wouldn’t catch me dead going into that water.”
“Well, I didn’t say I’d enjoy it.” I took my shirt, shorts, and sandals off and handed them to Ling-Ru, along with the machete and my cellphone. I put the mask on and stood on the gunwale at the back of the boat where the gun went overboard.
Ling-Ru handed me back the machete. “You might want to take this just in case.”
“Really?” I took the machete, held the mask to my face with my free hand, and jumped in the water with one leg dragging to slow my entry. The water felt like piss and smelled much worse.
I wasn’t looking forward to searching around in the murk at high tide. There was so much garbage on the beaches, who knew what I’d find on the sandy bottom near a known criminal’s dock. But I wanted that gun. I had to at least try to find it.
I took a few deep breaths at the surface and then one long deep breath and went down. The water was so brown I couldn’t see a thing, and I was glad to have the machete as a psychological crutch, if nothing else.
I made my way to the bottom as quickly as possible. Given the tide, I suspected that the gun had shifted toward the shore, but I felt I needed to start from the point where I saw it fall in.
When I reached the sandy bottom, there was a lot of garbage shifting back and forth in the surf: plastic bags, broken flip-flops, plastic bottles, glass bottles, plastic food containers. I placed the machete on the surface of the sand and moved it back and forth as I kicked toward the shallow water. As the blade dragged through the sand and garbage, I hoped to hear and feel the thud of a hard metal object.
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