“Why?”
Karskie flattened his hands on the desk, away from his keys, the equivalent of a man from a different generation setting down a pen. Karskie drummed both index fingers, unafraid of Neels.
“Because you are in the tenth month of the year. So far, you’ve lost close to a thousand white rhinos out of a population in the Kruger of nine thousand. You’re on the same pace as last year, which, if you understand, was a record. At this rate, your rhinos are, for all intents and purposes, already extinct. Your kill rate exceeds the birthrate.”
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?”
“The point is that I know. You’ve got no statistical stability to your data. That’s what I was brought in to do. What month, day, what phase of the moon? What weather, temperature, what time, what location, how many and what sort of weapons? I’ve been here a month, and so far what I’ve seen is a primitive response to a primitive problem. Poachers sneak in, butcher a rhino, then walk out. You follow their tracks. And if somehow you manage to bump into them in a park the size of Israel, you kill them, for the most part.”
“We do the fucking best we can.”
“And the result of that is your rhinos are being wiped out. It’s not enough. We’re trying to change that. We can spot tendencies. Be more efficient. We can bring some fucking twenty-first-century technology to bear.”
Karskie flicked one finger onto the keyboard to make some facts march.
“Let’s see, shall we? Alright.”
Karskie pecked one key repeatedly. The gesture agitated Neels, as if the boy were nicking at him.
“Over the last two years, Kruger’s lost an average of three rhinos per day. Out of ten to fifteen border crossings daily, your rangers find and follow just one set of tracks. Every day and night, somewhere in the park, where hundreds of thousands of tourists visit year-round, there are shots fired. So, let’s just figure, for shits and giggles, that, on any given day, you have twenty to thirty armed and illegally present men creeping over the Kruger. That’s six hundred poachers a month. Out of that number, just twenty are neutralized. Sixteen of those are shot dead outright. So, in effect, you’re stopping one poacher for every five rhinos killed. Please, tell me, how’s the tracking thing working out for you?”
Karskie sat back from his tattletale computer screen. He folded his arms and tilted his head at Neels.
Opu said, “Fuck you,” and walked out of the room.
The big boy waited until the old Zulu was gone before speaking again.
“You think I’m judging you. I’m not.”
Karskie said this with a lowered voice, to keep his words from carrying out the door Opu had left open behind him.
It seemed acceptable for Neels, the bush warrior, to talk this way, to be critical of their slipping hold on the last rhinos. But in this cool office, away from the bloodletting, with only pictures of half-devoured carcasses and dead black men on his desk, young and new Karskie could not.
The boy leaned forward to speak to Neels above his computer screens, as though cutting them out of the conversation. He almost whispered.
“Look. No one cares if you shoot every bastard you find out there.”
“I intend to.”
“Good. And along the way, keep me up to speed. We’re building intelligence nets in Mozambique. I’ve got informants in a few of the poaching gangs. Give me what you get in the field. I’ll give you back gold. I promise.”
Neels got to his feet, shouldering his rifle.
“Alright. Here’s your first.”
“Give it to me.”
“Juma.”
Neels waited past noon at the airport for the chopper pilot to give him a ride north to Shingwedzi. Opu had disappeared and would find his own way.
The first half of the flight back was silent and seething for Neels, grinding his teeth above the vast expanse of the Kruger. Every ranger was aware of the boy Karskie’s bleak numbers, but that didn’t keep the numbers from being jarring when balled up and thrown in one’s face. Karskie was not liked. Neels had given him Juma’s name to see what he could do with it.
The pilot, Ian, flew level and straight for thirty minutes. Neels closed his eyes. Before long his gone wife entered through the dark space there and walked on. His heart called out and ached. Neels opened his eyes just as the chopper banked.
Ian had spotted a big herd of bok filling the khaki plain. The pilot nudged the stick to drop down, get a closer, lower look, and to make them run.
A thousand horned antelope leaped away from the zooming helicopter, across the grassless ground, crowded and rippling like troubled water. Ian flew fifty feet over the boks’ sprinting, bobbing backs. Neels pressed his forehead to the plexiglass window to see the dashing animals and the rushing earth. When Ian pulled up into the blue afternoon sky, Neels clapped the pilot on the knee.
The rest of the flight north to Shingwedzi was made twice as long; Ian took the two of them on a safari. He circled elephants in a clutch of marula trees, buffalo in the brown river with alligators sunning near them, a hundred zebra and ostriches milling together on an emerald hillside. The day was sunny, and tourists stopped their cars on the road to let grazing giraffes cross.
Neels’s mood swung sharply like the chopper; he became joyful, bouncing and pointing in his seat, his own voice a buzz in the headphones. Ian indulged him, finding and flushing out more wildlife. Neels’s excitement grew with every sighting of a beast caught in the open or frightened out of hiding. Neels laughed hard, and harder, until a tear slipped down his cheek. Then he asked Ian to head for Shingwedzi.
Neels’s small ranger station was set in a copse of trees in the center of a wide, flat plain, broken only by scrub and one dusty road leading to the park byway. In the middle of that plain, only a kilometer from the ranger station, a lone, massive, black rhino stood on its shadow, which made it seem even grander. The animal surveyed the dry and unwelcoming land. Ian, flying up from behind, slowed to hover in midair. The rhino’s ears twitched; it stood rock still for moments that to Neels felt ancient and stunning. The rhino began to dance in place, hopping side to side, keeping its tail facing the chopper.
At once the rhino turned to face the chopper, its magnificent horns tipped up at the floating machine. The animal pawed the plain once, again, then bent its anvil head and long horn to the ground to scoop up dirt, casting a cloud in the air. Ian held the copter in place. The rhino pawed a third time, challenging, then charged. Ian let the beast rumble at them, muscle, horns, girth, and rage, not too close but enough for him and Neels to have the thrill of it. When Ian flicked the chopper away and the rhino rampaged beneath them, both men whooped into the microphones bent to their lips. Neels glanced back. The rhino had not pivoted to watch them go but slowed its gait and kept its broad rump to them, in disdain and majesty.
Neels shook Ian’s hand, then slammed the copter’s door. He ducked beneath the spinning blades while the chopper lifted off. A stinging dust whipped up, turning Neels away to the ranger station.
He reached the small blockhouse in time to see the pair of day rangers push off on their bicycles. A boy and a girl. She was called Promise, her partner Wophule. The boy was still a teen, the youngest of all the Kruger rangers. His name was a Xhosa joke: Wophule meant broken, for broken promise. Bad enough he pedaled Shingwedzi; he did so with a woman.
But he was no less a joke than the girl.
In two decades of training rangers, Neels had yet to see a female up to the job. They needed time off for babies, couldn’t carry a full five-day pack, couldn’t keep their pants on; one issue or another always needed to be dealt with for the women. Few lasted more than a year in the bush, stuck out in the stations, isolated with the men. None had ever been promoted to the extended patrols, the ECP teams. This young one pedaling away, Promise, had joined the Kruger rangers two years ago, at age twenty. Like the rest of the trainees, the girl came to Neels after completing twelve months of study in tracking, weapons, n
ature conservancy, and bush survival. She’d been given to Neels, and he’d had no say in that. Promise had proven a good tracker, knew the veld well enough, kept her mouth shut, made no problems. That didn’t mean something wasn’t going to go wrong; it just hadn’t yet. He assigned her to routine daytime patrols on a bicycle. A year later, he gave her the boy, Wophule, to ride with.
She and her little partner wheeled out of sight, rifles on their backs, in the direction of the black rhino. Neels had no faith she could protect that giant if the hard work came her way. She rode a bike, and that’s where she would stay. And the boy who rode with her, what kind of ranger rides with a woman?
Neels went inside. Two other rangers were there, lean, quiet Zulus, one with a towel around his waist, fresh out of the shower. The other, in uniform and black beret, rose from a kitchen chair to give Neels a gentle fist in the shoulder as he walked past. “We heard. Good shooting, baas.”
In his small office, Neels cut on the oscillating fan. His desk was clean save for a VHF radio and a daybook that said he was to pick up the Shingwedzi ECP team at six o’clock and drop off the next one, these two in the station. He set his cell phone next to the radio. Together, the two devices could reach almost anyone in the world.
Neels fingered the cell phone, still warm from his pocket. He lifted the radio’s microphone to his mouth, the plastic cool at his lips. He replaced the mic to its hook. The radio and phone were a rebuke. Who was there to talk to?
But he wanted to talk. Not about the night before or the man he’d killed; that was just one of hundreds he’d put a bullet into between the Border War and twenty years in the Kruger. He wasn’t concerned about consequences from the killings; no ranger was. In a winter meeting, in Pretoria, between the twenty-three Kruger section chiefs and the top federal prosecutor for South Africa, Neels and the rest had been informed privately, in terms not to be repeated, that on her watch, no SANParks ranger would ever be prosecuted for murdering a poacher.
Neels wanted to talk about anything else. The cell phone and the radio on the desk offered themselves. He had only to dial, and he could talk about a garden, a game, some news or memory, cars, food, any topic, anything but the bush and the corpses of animals and men. Neels envisioned himself speaking to someone; he didn’t need to recognize the face or voice in his imagination—just a person who knew nothing about him. What came out was a conversation about love and hatred and how to stand them both. He closed his office door on the two rangers readying for their five-day disappearance into the park beginning at sundown. He sat by himself with only the radio, the phone, and the calendar on his desk.
For an hour, the two Zulus made very little noise on the other side of Neels’s door. The rangers packed and armed themselves; they gathered food and shelter as Neels had taught them. Neels heard only the scrape of a chair, a closet closing, a murmur. It was not enough. Like Karskie had said, it was not enough. He wished to throw open his door, to see and hear more, not two dark men readying themselves to vanish. Neels looked in his lap at his hard and aging hands, and he wanted. A party, a Christmas, a braai, a family, perhaps joy. He envisioned a ham to carve on the desk in front of him. He considered what he might say to his friends for the occasion. The cell phone rang, and he was surprised to find himself on his feet. He wondered if he’d conjured the ring, too, until it rang again. The ham before him did not dissolve. The phone rang a third time, and Neels blinked himself back to the empty room in the station deep in the Kruger. The fan oscillated past him, beyond him, and he answered.
“Ja.”
“It’s Karskie.”
“What do you have?”
“The name you gave me. Juma. I found some things.”
“Ja?”
“He’s an old, black Rhodesian. Moved into Mozambique about ten years ago. Lives in Mapai, in a mansion. He’s untouchable there, local hero. Got his own syndicate. He’s drugs, some guns. Human trafficking. Rotten piece of work.”
“What about horn?”
“No word Juma’s ever traded horn.”
“Find word.”
“I’ll keep digging.”
Karskie hung up. The ranger station’s timbers and tin roof crackled from the rising heat. The Zulu trackers had gone to their bunks to rest before dusk. Chubby Professor Karskie considered what he was doing digging. Neels, thinking of war and the Kruger, laughed at how different their two notions of that word must be.
The silence around him, the heaviness of it all, abated. For these moments, Neels’s laughter was the loudest sound in the ranger station, perhaps in Shingwedzi.
Chapter 7
The battle raged over the grassy field beside the air base’s main runway. A hundred South African troops and a dozen war machines surged forward by air and land; their advance was loud and fiery. Nearby, close enough to feel the thumps of the explosions, today’s twenty thousand awed people, half with children on their shoulders, stood in a half-mile-long line, clapping, while an announcer narrated the fight over loudspeakers.
LB watched from a lawn chair on the east-west runway, binoculars up. He cheered each blast, shouted out the spectacle to the lounging team behind him and for Wally, who was not watching, either, but working. Over and again, LB called out, “You gotta see this!”
The infantry company on the ground moved in fine formation toward their pretend target, a hangar. At their rear a pair of choppers swooped in, hovering eighty feet off the ground to discharge two dozen more troops, Special Forces on fast ropes. The South Africans were good. They slid down the ropes smoothly, raised weapons, and moved in a neat firing line. Preset charges blew on their left and right, and none of the soldiers flinched. Behind them, more armored transports charged into place, more men leaped out. Another pair of choppers crept just above them, aerial protectors. Out of nowhere in all the noise and show, a big helicopter gunship howled past, low and lethal; the announcer called out, “Here come the big guns!” A detonation far ahead of the troops sent a gasp through the big crowd as if the gunship had fired. A lone tank rumbled forward, too, painted in desert camouflage, spinning its turret, looking for enemies. The tank’s commander rode in the open cupola, hamming it up with one arm out to point the way.
A South African Air Force Gripen, sharp-nosed like a dagger, flashed across the scene next. The jet tore a marvelous rent through the afternoon, so fast its own roar trailed it. Thousands of hands in the crowd, big and little, black and white, reached up to the streak. LB followed the Gripen in the binoculars, watched it snap into a barrel roll just above the earth, then climb straight up on a tail of blue flame.
Satisfied, LB folded the lawn chair and strolled over to his team. War, from the remove of safety, was an epic thing to witness. The endless boy in him thrilled at the thunder of guns, at the thrum of engines, at trained soldiers and dangerous machines moving in concert. LB couldn’t understand why anyone who did this stuff for a living, given the chance to see it without the adrenaline and risk, wouldn’t watch and enjoy it. That was why he’d called out all the highlights of the exhibition to the rest of the team, to shame them a bit and remind them that what they did in real life was fucking exciting.
He walked under the great wing of Kingsman 1, the first of two waiting US Air Force HC-130s. Quincy, Doc, and Jamie lay on the tarmac in the wing’s shadow. Dressed in ABUs (airman battle uniforms), they rested their heads on their parachutes, all eyes closed. The military taught this lesson early on: never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, and never just lie down when you can sleep. Wally didn’t recline with the team but stood apart, overseeing the loadmasters while they secured one of the two Guardian Angel Air-Deployable Recovery Vehicles, the PJs’ muscular, all-terrain, souped-up buggies. They would toss these GAARVs out of the planes at two thousand feet as the air show’s final performance.
LB approached. Wally had little to do mother-henning the loading of the GAARVs. The vehicles were tubular steel, armor plated, and gunned up, with fat tires and powerful engines
designed to climb, dash, and fight in and out of trouble. Because America’s military and allies operated in every environment on the planet, the GAARVs, like the GAs, had to be prepared to go anywhere to execute their mission of CSAR (combat search and rescue).
A forklift had set one of the vehicles at the foot of the cargo plane’s lowered gate; straps held the GAARV tight to a cardboard crush pallet that would absorb the impact of the parachute landing. The loading crew had hooked the pallet to a winch to hoist it up the gate’s rollers into the bay. Of all the world’s militaries, the United States’ pararescuemen were famed for jumping out of planes onto any kind of environment—ice, mountain, jungle, or sea—in any weather, with anything: zodiac inflatable rafts, wave runners, motorcycles, ATVs, all sorts of heavy equipment, weapons, Jaws of Life, cars.
LB watched Wally from behind. The man was doing the same thing LB had done from his lawn chair, making a statement. LB believed the team should have some fun, hoot and holler at things blowing up, support their South African hosts, not lie about and snooze. Likewise, Wally stood here in the sun with his fists on his hips while the loadmasters did their jobs, just to show the team that no detail was too small not to be checked and rechecked.
LB strolled past Wally to the GAARV, jumping up on the plane’s ramp while the buggy was hauled over the rollers. He poked at the cardboard fenders and cushions, tugged on the restraining straps, and pretended to take an interest. Wally nodded and did not catch that he was being lampooned. LB shot the loadmasters a thumbs-up, and they, too, got no sense of the joke. He clomped down the metal ramp to Wally, who did not turn his sunglass-covered gaze away from the GAARV fading into the cargo hold. LB put his own hands on his hips, a shorter, much thicker version of Wally.
“So.”
Out on the air base’s sunny, trampled field, the last fireball erupted as the mini war wound down. Over the loudspeakers, the announcer declared victory.
The Devil's Horn Page 9
