White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

It took her some time to come to grips with what had happened, to realize the taste was left over from whatever drug he’d stabbed into her. She was sore, but didn’t bother checking for a bruise. Instead, she focused on an undulating reddish brown line a foot in front of where her cheek lay on the powdery dirt.

  Safari ants. The column of workers was an inch wide, protected on the outside by an interwoven network of sentries a half-inch thick.

  Grace sat up slowly, overcome with aches and pains. She must have been thrown from the vehicle. She wiped mascara from under her eyes and searched for the Jeep. But she saw only endless savanna.

  Why was she waking up at all? If someone wanted to kill her, why not just do it? Why dump her instead?

  She took in the sameness of the savanna, which stretched before her, an endless plain of auburn grasses, stunted trees and coiling shrubs. In the distance, smooth gray hills rose slowly to join verdant mountains. The expanse left her feeling inconsequential and meaningless.

  Her few safari rides had instilled in her a respect for the scope of the African bush. Open, unfenced space to the horizon. Wild animals, elegant and bold. But that had been from the cushy backseat of a Land Cruiser, a thermos of tea within easy reach. She recognized immediately that there might not be any kind of structure for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Somewhere in the distant mountains stood Ol Donyo Lodge, where she was currently a registered guest. But where exactly? How many days on foot would it take to reach those hills?

  There had to be an explanation for her current situation. Was she a victim of an accident? Had the truck hit a ditch? An animal? Had she hit her head in the collision and wandered off into the bush? Her short-term memory was fleeting and confused.

  She would sort out the cause later. An aboriginal instinct was spreading from her belly through her chest and into her extremities.

  Two days earlier, while being guided in the Solio reserve in the north, she’d found herself uninterested in the big game, but fascinated by her guide and driver, a Maasai in full tribal costume. He’d been willing to indulge her.

  “On one’s own,” Olé, the guide, had told her, “a stranger to the bush won’t last a single night.”

  “But the Maasai,” she’d countered. “You have lasted thousands of years.”

  “It is true. We have lived here, hunted here, survived here, for thousands—tens of thousands—of years. We have learned from our forefathers. We can survive for weeks, months.”

  “Teach me.”

  “Excuse me, Miss Grace?”

  “Olé, we see a rhino and he runs away. Giraffe, busy with eating. We spend forty minutes driving dusty trails searching for a lion that I honestly, sincerely, do not want to disturb. I feel in the way here. I’m intruding. Please, tell me about your life, the lives of your tribesmen. Help me understand the humans in this place.”

  He’d started with the obvious: what to eat—roots, mostly. But not all! Particular berries for particular purposes; how to find water; methods to prevent bug bites and to treat those that bite anyway. Set snares. Take shelter. Avoid being stalked and hunted by jackals and cats. Some of the information was new; some similar to lessons given by her grandmother while tending their family farm in central China.

  Safari guests were constantly cautioned to never leave the vehicle without instruction to do so. When allowed, Grace had always been accompanied by a guide. Cape buffalo were the animals most feared. Not rhino or jackal or hyena. Not elephant. Cape buffalo were known to charge without provocation. The safari vehicles were reinforced and fitted with roll bars and all manner of defense, but out of the vehicle? That was another story. She was one woman, one small woman, alone in the bush and with no form of self-defense.

  Grace’s thoughts circled back, unable to let go of the need to understand what had gotten her here. It had been nearly four weeks since she’d arrived to investigate Winston’s bad vaccine. During that time she’d felt little if any personal threat. Her most recent visit had been to an NGO called Larger Than Life, not the type of people to dump you in the bush.

  Her only reasonable concern had been the discovery, days earlier, of someone attempting to breach her computer. Though a virtually impossible task, it had been enough to scare her, to put her on the move.

  She reviewed the past few weeks, looking for a misstep. She’d begun with interviews of the activist, the old reporter. She’d moved on to some early success behind her computer—she’d breached a shipping company’s servers. Various pieces of the investigation had begun to fit together. She’d covered her digital tracks well, had taken extra precautions—but had sent John a red flag when someone tried to hack her. She thought if there was to be trouble, it would be in Nairobi, not a tiny village on the Tanzanian border.

  An animal cried in the distance, mournful and discomforting. It sounded both lonely and hungry. Grace worked to calm herself. Listening to Olé’s lessons in survival was one thing; living them quite another. Surely the staff at the Ol Donyo Lodge would come looking for her when she failed to make dinner. The couple who managed the place would be worried by now. Help was on its way.

  Unless . . .

  Someone had obviously planned this for her. She flushed with heat. She did remember now—leaving the clinic with a new driver, one not from the lodge!

  So, had they crashed? Broken down? Or had she been left here to wait for her driver’s return, or dumped, left to die of exposure? Why couldn’t she remember? Had her abductor intentionally left a broken-down vehicle out there somewhere to complete the fiction of her getting lost and isolated? She glanced at her phone; no service.

  Grace squatted and pulled herself into a ball, arms clasped around her shins, shivering despite the heat. Her breathing was shallow, her limbs shaking, ears ringing. She pushed to calm herself. She’d gone into shock. She needed water; there was none. She closed her eyes, steadied her breathing. She reminded herself she’d been raised in the rice fields of central China. She’d faced her share of exposure to the elements. Snakes. Wild dogs. Equally wild neighbors. She’d been through boot camp with the People’s Liberation Army; had eaten grubs and worms. During her service in Army Intelligence, she’d been trained to survive and escape captivity. She’d scored higher than any woman before her. She was no U.S. Navy SEAL, but she was no Shanghai shopper, either.

  No time for hysterics. Think, plan, act.

  As the sun tracked, she would know east from west, north from south. Nighttime presented the greatest risks. Her bodily odors would betray her. Olé had been clear about that: her prey would smell her first.

  If not an accident, she’d been dumped with the intention of killing her. Whoever was responsible wanted it to look accidental. Attacked and eaten. Stung. Bitten. Exposure. She couldn’t believe that her return trip to the conservation group, Larger Than Life, had caused her situation. Someone had caught up to her there, or had gotten ahead of her and had been waiting. The thought sent a chill through her.

  Her real hope remained with John. How long until he acted on that text she’d sent? How effective would the crumbs she’d been leaving since the start of the trouble prove to be? Crumbs too complex for a stranger to decipher, and no piece of cake for Knox, but solid nonetheless.

  Another unexplainable chill swept through Grace. Another slow, controlled breath helped her overcome it. None of it mattered. She had only herself to save her. No daydreaming. No false hope. No reliance on the abstract. One hour at a time.

  Think. Plan. Act.

  7

  Guuleed’s lanky frame belied his ferocity. Not only did he possess physical strength, he had the mental fortitude it took to lead a roughshod band of wannabe bandits. He naturally spoke in a growl, the result of years of Turkish cigarettes, hollering orders and a general indifference to others.

  He flicked ash out of where there had once been a car door.

  The camp consisted of six tents, the la
rgest of which served as the mess. They were tucked side by side along the fever tree–lined banks of a stream of muddy water. It could be easily forded in the trucks. The idea was to present the image of a safari camp, since they did business as one. They ordered supplies, bought fuel and water under the company name. With over four hundred safari operators in Kenya, no one could track them all.

  Guuleed’s company not only served his poaching needs but served to launder money by inventing twenty to thirty paying guests each night and reporting much of the phantom income.

  “The ambush wasn’t coincidence,” he told Rambu, his first lieutenant. The two men occupied the front seat of a battered Land Cruiser riddled with bullet holes along its right side. The gas tank had been patched with fiberglass earlier in the day. The vehicle reeked of the fumes. As the sun pushed for the horizon, bugs of all kinds took flight. The threat of malaria flew with them.

  Rambu, a brute of a man with near purple skin and a face that had seen too much sun, did not speak. His droopy eyes gave him the look of a young Sylvester Stallone, which accounted for his mispronounced nickname. He knew better than to question Guuleed. His boss had been in a bilious mood of late.

  They stood out of the shade, in the direct sunlight, where the insects weren’t quite as plentiful. Rambu’s acne-scarred face, wide shoulders and massive thighs had helped him earn his position as Guuleed’s pit bull, when in fact he was more kind-hearted than his men knew.

  “Find me a traitor. Doesn’t matter who. You pick.” Guuleed intended to send a message to his men about loyalty and leaking information to Koigi and his rangers. His only real concern had little to do with poaching or his men, or even loyalty. His beautiful wife and their six children had been made bargaining chips. “Xin Ha is holding me responsible for the closing of the health clinic.”

  “Clear down in Oloitokitok? You? Responsible, how?”

  “It’s believed I overlooked a warning. Completely false. I believe it’s because we were sloppy killing Faaruq and the others. They died in the same manner. That will cost us. The clinic’s closing hurt Xin Ha mightily. He lost money; he lost an important piece of cover for the exports. You tell the men any of this, I’ll cut your tongue out.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “If I do not fix this, my family will be killed.”

  “Animals! The fucking Chinese!”

  “I need tusks, a shitload of tusks. And I need them now. No more traitors shortchanging me. Things are going to get bad. Handle it.”

  Guuleed climbed into the Land Cruiser and watched in the cracked mirror as Rambu called four others to his side and spoke in confidence. Together, these five men singled out a young man named Jakmar and dragged him backward, kicking and screaming. He was stabbed deeply in both thighs, his wrists and ankles bound, his tied hands looped over the tow ball of a Jeep. Rambu and another man dragged him out of camp behind the vehicle, his cries carrying for a full minute until fading to a faint whine that matched the buzz of the insects. He would be dumped, bleeding, a few kilometers away. Stripped to bone by morning. The bush was not a place to be alone at night.

  Guuleed looked on with indifference. One did what one had to do. He had liked Jakmar, felt badly that fate should deal the man such a hand.

  The others had turned their backs following the first glint of a knife. They pretended not to hear the man’s pleas, his proclamation of innocence. One of them, Guuleed thought, knew he should have been the one killed, unless Rambu had made a lucky guess. One of them would not sleep well tonight, or the next. Within two to three days the real traitor would reveal himself in this way, and then he, too, would meet a similar fate.

  Guuleed unclipped the cumbersome satellite phone as it rang. CALLER UNKNOWN was displayed on the screen. Not to Guuleed.

  “Big Five Safaris,” he said, speaking English with difficulty.

  He was told an American had been added last minute to Eastland Safari’s private list and was scheduled to arrive on an eleven P.M. flight from Berlin. The arrangement had come from England, just like the whore’s. The parallel was uncanny and could not be taken as coincidence. Such information was expensive and could always be trusted.

  Ending the call, awaiting Rambu’s return, Guuleed smoked a cigarette and cursed. If he’d buried Faaruq instead of trying to send a message, none of this would be happening. He had only himself to blame. He thought of home, fought the fear that he would soon receive a package containing his child’s hand or foot—or worse.

  He needed a good kill, at least ten kilos of ivory; half that of rhino horn would do, though rhino hunting was a much more difficult and risky operation. A good deal of bribery and perfect timing would be required to nail two on the same night.

  The tobacco heightened his impatience and tested his already sour mood. His men were locals, mostly poor and desperate to feed their families. A few were simply greedy. Collectively they were bad shots, slow learners and big dreamers. The worst. But Guuleed worked with them daily to improve their skills.

  His impatience turned into a kind of hot tar that ran through him as deep-seated anger. Give him a posse of well-trained Somalis and bagging a couple of elephants would be child’s play. That would get Xin Ha off his back. As it was, he had to deal with the blood-hungry Koigi, who had well-trained men . . . and a cause. Fucking causes could kill you.

  Rambu returned, looking feverish. “It’s done.”

  “I must take a meeting with Xin. The balls on that one! You will come with me to Nairobi and speak to our man in the one-four.”

  “The senior sergeant?” Rambu sounded doubtful. “Is that wise?”

  “There’s an American coming in. I told you it was getting bad. We need him gone. It can’t attract attention. The sergeant will help us. You’ll see to it.” Guuleed didn’t hold subordinates by the hand, but by the scruff of the neck. Rambu had to step up. “You, me and two you trust. Our best shots. Two vehicles. I will make the call and confirm we’re on our way.” He squeezed the satellite phone tightly in his hand. “Keep watch for the real traitor. He will expose himself before midday tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Take care of it the moment you know. Something the others won’t forget.”

  Guuleed praised Allah, and Rambu did so along with him. Guuleed could smell something on the wind. The dead man’s blood.

  8

  Knox took Nairobi’s dismal airport as a harbinger of what was to come. Immigration control looked like a row of tollbooths with hand-painted signs for RESIDENTS and NONRESIDENTS. Baggage claim was a low-ceilinged space with a poured concrete floor and two rusted, noisy luggage conveyors. A pair of plywood booths at the far end advertised LOST LUGGAGE and VISITOR INFORMATION. He saw lines at both.

  Knox hadn’t checked a bag. He walked past bone-weary tourists recovering from the nine-hour flight who stood now, waiting for bags. Knox hated waiting. Hated misplacing things, not for the fool it made him feel like but for the time wasted in trying to find them again. Put it back where it belongs and it’s there the next time. If he ever had kids, he intended to tell them that.

  He intended to spend time in the backyard with them, too. To read to them before bed and make sure they ate as a family every night. Music. Movies. A love and respect for all things living. A garden, maybe. A lawn for sure.

  I find in my heart both something missing and something fulfilling. Grace’s words, not his.

  He thought about her then, imagined where she was at this moment. Held in a room? The back of a van? He hoped she’d gone to ground. Situations changed abruptly in the field. A broken phone wouldn’t explain forty-eight hours of radio silence, but maybe she’d worked her way into an inner circle of Winston’s enemies and didn’t dare risk communication. Maybe she was traveling with people suspicious of her. Maybe her phone had been confiscated.

  Grace had good instincts and tremendous nerve. More nerve than bra
ins, which worried him, given how smart she was. He wanted, needed, her back.

  “Here’s the deal. My brother is the most important person in my life.” His words, not hers.

  “Mister!” A tug on Knox’s jacket. “Did you check a bag?” A boy who looked no older than twelve. Boot-black skin. Leviathan eyes. A face adorable enough to win tips, but deceptively ageless. Twelve, fourteen, going on twenty. He topped out halfway between Knox’s navel and collarbone.

  Knox kept walking, never breaking stride.

  The kid wore an oversized orange vest with reflective stripes on the side. Rubber flip-flops clapped the concrete. A piece of string bunched his shorts at the hips.

  “This way,” the boy said, tugging on Knox’s wrist.

  Knox flicked him off. “Don’t touch!”

  The boy held up his hands. It was all part of the act. I mean no harm—poor innocent me! I want only to pick your pocket and leave with your wallet. Knox knew the boy’s cousin in Tunisia, his second cousin in Amman. Take a number.

  “Other green line is here,” the boy said, indicating a guarded doorway to their left that had no line. Overlapping safari posters and hotel advertisements served as wallpaper, occupying all available wall space. Knox was familiar with third-world rules, could play by them most of the time. Now he regretted not speaking Swahili.

  The busy green exit—NOTHING TO DECLARE—lay straight ahead. Arriving passengers were being checked, their carry-ons searched, despite the green. Knox had nothing to fear from an inspection, but for him waiting in line was right up there with misplacing things. More time wasted.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” the boy told Knox, pointing to a uniformed man, off on his own, guarding another exit from the terminal.

  “Is that right?”

  “His second wife’s son and I go to Sunday school together.”

  “Sure you do. And you’re both in AP Chemistry.”