The Night Ranger jw-7

by Alex Berenson

The smudges in the sky were as good as a GPS. They’d all heard the same announcement: Delicious carrion in aisle two. They might be headed for a cow or a sheep or even a camel. But Wells didn’t think so. After another twenty minutes in the Cruiser, Wells could see the birds slowing, organizing themselves into a ragged circle. They were almost directly to the south, maybe five kilometers. Three swung lower, disappearing behind a hill. Soon they popped up again. Wells imagined they’d tried to feed and been chased out by stronger predators, jackals or hyenas or even lions. The big Kenyan national park called Tsavo East lay about 150 kilometers southwest of here. No doubt lions sometimes ranged this far from its boundaries.

  The birds rose, riding on thermals, black spurs against the empty blue sky. Wilfred pointed to a faint pair of ruts marked by a cairn of a half-dozen stones. He started to turn into the track, but Wells put a hand on his forearm.

  “Go straight. Park over the next rise. Then we leave this and walk.”

  “It will take forever. And snakes. There are snakes.”

  “We go on foot, no one knows we’re coming.”

  “Better to have this.” Wilfred patted the dashboard like a horse’s flank.

  “We walk. You don’t like it, stay in the car.”

  —

  They trudged south through the ugly low scrub. The dirt was soft, almost spongy, swallowing their steps. The refugees walked through hundreds of miles of this to reach Dadaab. No wonder they were starving when they arrived. Wells carried the essentials in his pack: water, a first-aid kit, binoculars, a sat phone and GPS. He’d strapped on a climber’s headlamp, goofy-looking but essential for keeping his hands free if he found himself in a dark hut. The shotgun was slung across his chest, the Glock tucked into his waistband. He’d given Wilfred the Makarov.

  “You don’t shoot unless I shoot.”

  “Okay, yes.”

  The Land Cruiser’s clock had read 14:20 when they left. Wells figured they’d need close to an hour to reach the area directly beneath the vultures. That didn’t give them much time on target if they were going to return to the Cruiser before dark. They walked in silence, Wells a few feet ahead, scanning for smoke, huts, any sign of human habitation.

  A high-pitched cackle, an ugly gasping sound, half laugh, half choke, erupted somewhere in front of them. Wells stopped with one foot in the air like Wile E. Coyote. “Hyenas?”

  “That’s their song.”

  “Pretty.”

  “The devil rides them through hell.”

  “Save the folk tales for the anthropology professors.”

  Wilfred shook his head in perplexity.

  “Come on. Unless you want to be out here in the dark.”

  Twice more they heard the cackling, and once an answering call behind them. Neither man mentioned it. The vultures floated high overhead, using the thermals, barely flapping their wings.

  A half hour later, Wells came over a hill and saw the huts. Four in all. Three small and close to each other. The last larger, maybe fifty meters away from the third. They were mud-brick, hand-built, like a thousand other huts that Wells had seen that day. The big one had a tin roof, angled slightly so the rain would pour off. The other three had traditional branch roofs. No walls or barbed wire separated them from the land around. Hidden in plain sight. No vehicles either. They were gone, or hidden.

  Wells dropped to a knee, scanned the compound through his binoculars. In the middle of the compound, he saw a man, or more accurately what was left of him. His arms and legs were chewed to stumps, his belly torn open. Intestines glistened against black skin like stuffing pulled loose from a cheap toy. Two more bodies lay in front of the second hut, similarly dismembered.

  “See them?” Wilfred muttered.

  He wasn’t talking about the corpses.

  The hyenas lay in the shade of the huts, lazing, their bellies swollen. Beards of blood coated their muzzles. Wells counted ten. As he watched, one stood and waddled over to a corpse. The hyena poked and snuffled the body and then clamped its jaws around an arm. It put its paws on the dead man’s chest and lifted its head and grunted and strained, its body shaking, until the arm tore from the shoulder with a gunshot-loud snap. Over the years, Wells had seen human beings destroyed in almost every conceivable way. Even so, the violence done to these corpses tightened his throat.

  Wells stood, unslung the shotgun. No need for stealth. Whoever had killed these people had left the camp to the hyenas. “Time to restore our place at the top of the food chain.”

  “You want to go down there.”

  “When they learn how to shoot, I’ll worry.” Wells strode down the hill. After a few seconds, he heard Wilfred follow. When he reached the base of the hill, fifty yards from the nearest corpse, the animals stood and looked at him. They were motley creatures, with big cupped ears that made him think of fly-eating flowers. Their brown fur was marked with dark spots like an old man’s hands. Their tails angled downward, toward the earth. When dogs put their tails at that angle, they were showing submission. Wells figured hyenas behaved similiarly, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know much about them. He’d have to remember to read up before his next trip searching for volunteer aid workers.

  A breeze ruffled the hyenas’ fur and brought Wells the sour stench of the torn, bloated corpses. Over millennia, humans had invented rituals to hide the monstrousness of postmortem decay. But here was death in its truest form, destroying not just the spirit but the body itself.

  Wells lifted the shotgun high and shouted, “Go! Git! Go on, now!”

  The hyenas were less than impressed. One yawned, its pink tongue flopping out. Another scratched furiously at the dirt like a drag racer spinning his wheels before the flag dropped. The one closest to Wells went back to tugging on a corpse.

  “Get lost! Hubba-hubba!” Wells cocked the shotgun and strode closer. Most of the pack padded away. But four stood their ground. The hyena nearest Wells seemed to be the leader. It raised its tail, bared its teeth, growled low in its throat. Wells felt his adrenaline rise. The creature might not be pointing a pistol at him, but its intent was more than clear. It stared at him with unblinking black eyes. It was enormous, three feet tall. As big as a Great Dane but sturdier. It had to be almost two hundred pounds. It had a thick neck and teeth that looked like they could tear steel.

  Wells put the shotgun to his shoulder, angled the muzzle skyward. “GO!” The hyena merely licked its lips. “I thought you were cowards.” He squeezed the trigger. The Mossberg bucked against his shoulder and its blast rattled through his skull. He pumped the shotgun, fired again.

  Finally, the hyena stepped away from the corpse and turned aside. It looked over its shoulder at Wells and loped off, its tail between its legs. You don’t scare me. The other three holdouts followed, forming a single-file line as they disappeared into the scrub. They moved with an odd precision. The stink of the corpses would lure them back by nightfall, Wells thought. Another reason not to tarry.

  Wells topped up the Mossberg with two more shells, slung it over his chest, and turned to the bodies. They looked worse up close, rotting meat covered with quilts of flies. Wells wished for a kerchief to shield his mouth, or even better, some Vicks VapoRub to hide the stench. He squeezed his nose, forced himself to ignore the flies and the stink and look close at the corpses. Their faces had been chewed into unrecognizability, but in their flesh he saw neat punctures. GSWs, as trauma surgeons said. Gunshot wounds.

  He didn’t see any rifles or pistols, but brass casings glinted in the red dirt around the bodies. Wells picked up a handful. 7.62-millimeter jackets. AK rounds.

  Beside the third hut he saw two more bodies. A piece of torn rubber lay between them. It looked like it had been chewed and then spit out, as if even the hyenas wouldn’t bother with it. A mask. A Joker mask.

  Joka-joka-joka call back-back-back.

  —

  Wells had heard plenty of lies over the years, and told his share. But he couldn’t remember anyone who lied with as much c
onviction—as much flat-out style—as James Thompson. The man had been close to tears at the press conference in Nairobi. Wells wondered what explanation Thompson would offer for having the Joker’s number programmed into his phone. No doubt it would be a beaut. Wells grabbed the mask, threw it as high and far as he could. Let the vultures have it, if the hyenas wouldn’t.

  The first hut held supplies, mostly canned food and water. Cases of peanut butter and jam. Whoever had been here had wanted to be sure he wouldn’t need a fire to cook. At the back, two hot plates with electrical cords and a half-dozen plastic jerricans of gasoline. No generator. Wells wondered if the raiders had taken it.

  In the next hut, six cots, their mattresses thin, stained, and lumpy. The dank sour smell of a locker room that hadn’t been cleaned all season. T-shirts and jeans and sneakers and Tusker bottles strewn across the floor. Against the wall, an empty AK magazine, no rifle in sight. Wells imagined the chaos of a surprise night attack, men scrambling for weapons and running outside to die. He rousted the room for notebooks or phones, didn’t find any.

  The third hut had only two cots. Wells guessed the leaders had lived here. A wooden chest held shoes and clothes, including a bright yellow polo shirt, size XXL. Wells put it in his pack. Maybe Moss could identify it as belonging to Suggs. Between the cots, a cardboard box held two oversized bottles of off-brand scotch. Nothing else. The whole camp felt temporary to Wells, as though the men who’d lived here hadn’t planned on staying long—evidence for the theory that Thompson and Suggs planned to end the kidnapping quickly, once the media attention peaked.

  One hut left, the big one. Process of elimination said it was the place where Gwen and the others had been kept. Up close, Wells heard grunting and snuffling and scratching, horror-movie sounds. He reached for his pistol, flicked on his headlamp, stepped inside—

  The room was airless and dark and painfully hot. In the headlamp’s stark white light, Wells saw a hyena tugging at a corpse against the far wall. The animal turned to Wells and screeched and Wells stepped backward. He knew instantly he’d made a mistake. The hyena bared its teeth and raised its tail like a battle standard and charged, pouncing across the hut, angling toward Wells. Wells raised the Glock, a classic shooter’s two-handed stance, and pulled the trigger. The Glock had more kick than the Makarov, more than Wells expected. The pistol pulled sideways and the round caught the hyena in its hindquarters. The hyena screamed now, but kept moving. Wells pulled the trigger again—

  This second shot caught the beast farther up. Wells expected the hyena to go down. Still it came. Ten feet away now. It opened its jaw wide, its teeth white and vicious under the headlamp’s single eye. Wells knew he had time for only one last shot. He raised the Glock high and, as the hyena leapt, he pointed the pistol into the beast’s open maw and pulled the trigger—

  The hyena’s head exploded and its body convulsed sideways. It flopped against the hut’s dirt floor. When it stopped moving, Wells poked it gingerly with his foot. He knew he had killed it well and truly. Yet he half expected it to rise. The devil’s pet indeed. Those fierce slavering jaws. And the stink. A stomach filled with carrion, the meat twice dead now. Wells found himself murmuring the Shahada, the Muslim creed, La ilaha illa Allah . . . There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.

  “Holy shit,” Wilfred said behind him. “Score one for the great white hunter.”

  The stench of decaying tissue clotted Wells’s throat. He pressed his forearm against his nose and forced himself to walk deeper into the hut. And realized something about the body at the far end. It was white. The face was still largely intact. A man. His mouth open, and his eyes. Wells had never met him, but from photos he knew the frat-boy chin. Gwen’s sometime boyfriend. James’s nephew.

  Scott Thompson. Resting in nothing like peace. Wells would have to leave him here. Before he did, he leaned close, examined the body. Two shots in the chest, close range. They didn’t look like AK rounds to Wells, though he couldn’t be sure. He looked away, saw a glint in the wall. A metal ring. A chain hung from it.

  He clamped down on the acid rising in his throat and checked the rest of the hut. Three more empty rings in the walls. The other hostages, gone. Why had Scott been killed and left? Had he fought the kidnappers? Was his death a message to James Thompson? Wells wished he had a forensic team helping him. Instead he had a headlamp and Wilfred. Who called to him now, urgently.

  “John.”

  Wells stepped outside. The sun hit him, and before he could stop himself his stomach clenched viciously. Bile coursed through his throat and into his mouth, and he vomited a thin brown muck that the dirt swallowed instantly.

  He groped in his pack for a bottle of water. He gulped until his cheeks were full, swished, spat. And again. Rinse and repeat. Anything to hide the angry sour taste. He poured a second bottle over his face and hands, hoping the lukewarm liquid would wash away the stink. As he tilted up his head, he couldn’t help but see the vultures dirtying the sky. Death and its minions were everywhere in this camp.

  “Listen,” Wilfred said.

  In the distance, to the north: The hive-of-bees buzz of a dirt bike engine revving high. And a second, meshing with the first.

  “Coming this way,” Wilfred said. “If we had the Cruiser—”

  “We don’t.”

  “What then?”

  “We kill them.”

  “Mzungu. That some sickness. Don’t even know them, what they want—”

  “We kill them. Unless you’d rather they kill us.”

  10

  SOUTHWESTERN SOMALIA

  After the man in the black T-shirt made his three-word speech—You’re mine now—Gwen and Hailey and Owen were led into the Range Rover and blindfolded and driven through the silent African night. Gwen felt like she was in a plane that had suddenly spiraled into a dive. She was terrified, but also helpless, and that helplessness distanced her from the insanity that her reality had become. She felt almost as if she were starring in a movie of her life: Taken 2: Africa. Or would that be Taken 2 Africa? Anyway, she wished someone could tell her whether it would have a Lifetime-style happy ending or be more of a downer.

  It had been a downer for Scott, for sure. She didn’t want to believe he’d been in on the kidnapping. Maybe he’d had another reason to ask about Suggs. Maybe he was confused, or scared to have a gun pointed at him.

  But he hadn’t sounded scared to Gwen. He’d sounded pissed.

  Then he’d died.

  Gwen had never seen anyone die before. She’d hardly been to any funerals even. Her parents and grandparents were still alive. Two of her mom’s friends had died of cancer, which seemed nasty. You looked bad, then you looked better and everybody got excited and took you out to dinner. Then it came back and your hair fell out and you went into the hospital and turned yellow and died. That was two funerals. And one of her high school classmates had died in a drunk-driving accident. So Gwen wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of mortality. But she had always had a difficult time believing that death would ever come to her or her immediate family. Especially not since her sister pulled through that car accident. Death was something that happened to other people. People who weren’t as lucky or beautiful or American as she was.

  She wanted to believe Scott would be waiting at the next hut. But she couldn’t escape the reality of what she’d seen, the You shot me shock in Scott’s eyes before they glazed over like a shower door closing. No, Scott wouldn’t be apologizing. He had seen his plan, whatever it was, going bad, and he had lost his temper and spouted off. Just like he had a hundred times at frat parties and football games and wherever else he thought he was cool enough to get away with being a jerk. Which was everywhere. Only this time he hadn’t gotten a beer poured over his head. He hadn’t gotten into a slappy sloppy fight that stopped before anybody got hurt. He’d gotten himself killed. He’d learned the hard way that in Africa death wasn’t shy around the young. It didn’t just hang out at nursing homes. It slippe
d the bouncer a twenty and came to dance at the club.

  Yep, Scott was finally the tough guy he’d always pretended to be. Part of Gwen wanted to congratulate him. And ask, by the way, what have you gotten us into? But he wouldn’t be around to answer that question either.

  —

  They drove awhile. At least an hour. At one point, a prop plane passed overhead. The Range Rover abruptly stopped. They waited in silence for several minutes, then drove on. No explanation.

  When they stopped again, Gwen heard men nearby. Her door opened. She was shouldered out of the truck and guided along a rough path. She was still blindfolded and cuffed, and once she stumbled and nearly fell, but a firm hand held her. The path flattened. For a few seconds, Gwen caught the rank odor of raw sewage. Then the stink was gone. Not much later she felt a squeeze on her shoulder. She stopped walking and someone uncuffed her hands and lifted off her blindfold. She found herself with Hailey and Owen in the center of a bush settlement, fifteen or twenty mud-brick huts. No lights. If the place had a generator, it wasn’t running.

  Wizard and another man led them to a hut nearby, shined a flashlight inside. Three blankets lay on the ground, along with two pairs of sweat suits. No chains or handcuffs.

  “A guard will be outside,” Wizard said. “You need the toilet, you tell him. You go one at a time. You two”—he waved the flashlight at Gwen and Hailey—“wear those”—he pointed at the sweat suits—“when you’re outside. My men are Muslim, and some will be happier if you stay covered. As for food, whatever we eat you’ll eat.”

  “We’re not locked in?” Owen said.

  “This is Somalia. Believe me, you’re safer with me than anywhere else. We’ll protect you.”

  Like you protected Scott, Gwen wanted to say. But she couldn’t see any upside in making this man mad.

  “Sir?” Hailey said. “Mr. Wizard? Can we ask you one more question?”

  “If it’s not trouble.”

  “Are you from the Shabaab?”

  Wizard said something to the man with him and they both laughed. “You would like me to be Shabaab? You would feel better?”