White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

  Knox lowered his arm and took one last look at the beast to make sure he hadn’t signaled prematurely.

  That’s when he saw it.

  A perfectly round black hole faced him from a bush. At first it looked like a berry that didn’t belong. But it was too perfect a circle. Machined. The muzzle of the Kalashnikov.

  He refocused, trying to separate the shrub from the rifle.

  “Grace,” he whispered, so dryly the word fell only feet in front of him. He cleared his throat and tried again. To the naked eye, the gun barrel appeared to be suspended, propped inside the shrub maybe. Knox looked around, fearing it was being used as a diversion.

  Nothing.

  “Grace. It’s me.”

  He kept his hands out in front of him. He would not provoke a shot. When he finally saw the unflinching eye, he gasped aloud. Right there, the whole time, at the end of the rifle looking back at him.

  He imagined he could make out a hairline. One ear, perhaps. No chin or shoulders. No body. Just the eye, floating inside the shadowy interior of a thorn shrub alongside the Kalashnikov.

  Slowly, the form of an arm and elbow emerged, materialized from within the puzzle of branches and leaves. A shoulder. A piece of a woman’s chest. She was sitting, the Kalashnikov resting on a knee.

  Again, he called her name. Again with difficulty. “Gr . . . ay” it sounded like.

  The muzzle twitched. For a second he thought she’d pulled the trigger. Then she pushed forward, rose out of the thorny shrub without any apparent sensation of it scratching her.

  She was kneeling, naked in hiking boots, her skin smeared brown with mud. Her limbs were scratched and bug-bitten. Her wrist was swollen horribly. The one eye he could see looked distrustful and savage. Wild. She held a metal spear under an armpit and across the gun stock, while still managing to hold the rifle.

  “It’s me: John,” he coughed out. “It’s me. I’m here. I’m going to stand now. Slowly. I’m here to help you. There is another man with me. You met him. Travis Brantingham. He is a friend, Grace. We are both your friends. You’re safe now.”

  He’d seen shock in hostage victims, been taught how to deal with it. But all the training went away. This was Grace; this was different.

  Knox had also been traumatized on the battlefield, had seen others much worse off than he. Doctors spoke of adjustment periods, of giving the brain time to forget. But some things are never forgotten, Knox thought.

  The weapon remained aimed at his chest.

  He screwed up his courage to speak the first words that came to him.

  “‘I find in my heart both something missing . . .’” he coughed, “‘and something fulfilling. Missing, when too much time separates us. Fulfilling when we are together. It is a small thing, perhaps. I cannot say. But its very existence interests me.’ Your words, Grace. Your words to me.”

  The gun dropped dangerously, pointing toward the ground. As she reached to cover her eyes, her shoulders shook.

  “No . . .” She backed away, crab-walking on all fours, her eyes bloodshot and jaundiced in a sunbaked face smeared with mud. She cried out for a second time. But this time the cry was his name. “Jooohhhnnn!”

  “Good God!” Brantingham said, surprising them both.

  Grace hoisted the spear over her shoulder.

  “No, Grace! No! He’s a friend. You know him.”

  “Travis Brantingham,” the man introduced himself. “You’re one hell of a shot, Ms. Chu.” To Knox: “Single shot through the transmitter. If it isn’t perfect, she either kills him or scares him off. Brilliant!”

  Gently, Brantingham set down his rifle. “Brilliant,” he repeated. “I’m telling you, John, you or I could try that shot a dozen times and only get it right once.” Now he addressed Grace. “How difficult it must have been, how hard to make that choice, take that risk.”

  Grace lowered the spear.

  Knox spoke. “Grace! ‘I miss you when we are apart . . . This is the John Knox I want to know better.’”

  Her shoulders shook. He moved toward her, slipping off his jacket as he approached. He held it out to her. Trembling all over, she set down the spear and slipped into the oversized windbreaker.

  “Thank you.” She leaned into Knox’s arms. He held her. Their fingers webbed together. “I knew you would come.”

  Knox felt his throat close off.

  She repeated it several times.

  Brantingham retrieved the spear and the rifle, pulled her improvised sack from within the bush. Neither man spoke. Though Grace staggered, she was surprisingly steady on her feet. Knox moved her out of the shrubs as Brantingham offered her water from his canteen. “Slowly at first.”

  She drank. He offered her a fresh orange from his pocket and she bit into it, skin and all. The juice dribbled down her chin, running over badly chapped lips swollen twice their normal size.

  “I have a first aid kit in the plane. I should have thought of it.”

  Knox removed his shirt and, bare-chested, tied it onto Grace’s body as a skirt. “There,” he said. “Better.”

  “I can carry her,” he added to Brantingham.

  “It’s too far, and would take too long, even with the two of us sharing the burden.”

  “Your men.”

  “Yes. I can call in our location. They’re already on their way. Wait here. I’ll return to the plane. I should be able to land out there,” he said, pointing to the desert. “Better . . . much better for her if we can fly her out. It would be hours overland.” He added, “Or I can wait, if you’d rather.”

  “How long?” Knox asked.

  A series of calls were made. Brantingham came off the last one and shook his head gravely at Knox. “We are advised to hurry,” he said. Knox translated the undertone. “My men are at least ninety minutes out. We can beat that easily. I will pick you up in the plane. I’m thinking we’re two to three kilometers away. Give me forty minutes at the outside. Move her to that stand of trees there. That will be my landmark.” He searched Grace’s sack. Came away with three magazines of ammunition. He left Knox with his lever-action Marlin 1895 with an extended barrel and scope. “Holds six,” he said, handing Knox a box of shells. “It’s fast, and accurate to two hundred meters. You might want to practice loading. It can take a few tries to get it right.”

  Grace groaned, half asleep in Knox’s arms. The men shared an ominous moment of eye contact.

  “Three trucks,” Brantingham said. “No safari markings. Poachers, more than likely. If not, something even worse.”

  “Keep low. Run fast,” Knox said.

  72

  The surprise presence of the plane threw Guuleed. He watched openmouthed as it lifted, taking off smoothly over the plains.

  He and his men had traveled a full day to reach this barren shit heap of marsh and gravel. Now Brantingham and his fucking plane had beaten him to it. Two of his men got off shots, but they were only throwing bullets into the sky. Guuleed motioned them to bring their rifles down.

  Brantingham was a crafty motherfucker. A white man, no less. And so the question remained: had Brantingham taken off because he was done here, or had he seen Guuleed coming and flown off in an attempt to lead him away from Snaggle Tooth?

  The location of the last signal from the elephant collar was now just three kilometers south, five if they rode the dirt track to better ground. “Off-road!” he ordered, pointing due south. The truck slowed and lumbered into a dry channel bed.

  “It will be slower.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Guuleed snapped.

  His mind was spinning. Brantingham would have landed as close to Snaggle Tooth as possible. If he’d flown away in an attempt to lead Guuleed away from the elephant, the ruse would fail. Snaggle Tooth’s single tusk, an aesthetic prize, was worth in weight alone a million U.S. dollars; twice or three times that given its un
iqueness. His broken tusk? A half million. Together, they represented a vast fortune.

  If Brantingham’s actions had to do with Rambu’s report of the American at the Ol Donyo Lodge, then his presence here might involve the missing girl as well—and, indirectly, the missing stash of government ivory. He’d assigned the humiliated Rambu the task of locating Guuleed’s two other men, who’d gone missing since entering the bush in search of the girl.

  If those two had harvested Snaggle Tooth’s tusks and run—another of the reasons for Guuleed’s rush to reach this godless place—he would take their tongues for dinner.

  73

  Knox heard the single report from a rifle echo across the desert like a distant crack of thunder. The dozing elephant spooked, running hard for several yards before pausing and looking around, his ears flapping.

  The gunshot caused Grace to twitch awake in a spasm of panic. Knox consoled her, held her close, his left arm around her. After a moment, he felt her relax. It might have been Brantingham trying to signal, though he doubted it.

  More likely, it was the poachers.

  The next sound began as an insect hum, but quickly revealed itself to be the buzz of a single-engine plane as it arced a turn, its wings steeply pitched, so far to the west that to Knox it looked more like a seagull. Brantingham was flying surprisingly low—A hell of a time to show off, Knox thought—no more than seventy-five feet above the gray wash of sand and swamp that comprised a wide, dry delta. The plane pointed in Knox’s direction, the wings leveling out.

  Fucking maniac, Knox thought; wrong time for acrobatics.

  The man’s bush pilot skills were evident and on display as the Cessna turned again, this time away from Knox’s position, out over the desert terrain at the same dangerously low altitude. Each time a wing dipped, the plane sank lower, slipping away from the force designed to keep it aloft.

  Knox thought he heard a backfire, or a sputtering engine. The danger in flying so low was that one brief moment of engine trouble could cause a crash—it denied the pilot any glide time. But it wasn’t the engine. It was more gunfire. A lot more gunfire, much of it from automatic weapons.

  A firefight. A skirmish . . . or a battle, and a mile or two away at most.

  In the near distance, the Cessna flew erratically, slowed and bounced across the desert floor in a rough landing.

  “Come on,” Knox said, cradling Grace in his arms and standing. He grabbed the sack she’d been carrying, along with the spear and guns, and trudged off toward the copse of trees.

  Brantingham had made the rendezvous. The plane, still a long way away, taxied toward the trees. It was going too fast—way too fast.

  An instant later, Knox thought he understood the poor flying: he spotted an army-green truck, coming at them from the direction in which they’d found the two dead bodies. Brantingham had flown low because he’d been trying to use the hills to screen the plane.

  Cursing under his breath, Knox set Grace in the shade, the plane still approaching, and took the rifle with him as he ran toward Snaggle Tooth. The elephant fled. Knox raised the gun and fired into the air twice, to drive home his point. The elephant charged deeper into the brush, running now. Running out of sight.

  He turned to see Brantingham behind him, awkwardly lifting Grace. Knox hadn’t realized how far he’d run—two hundred meters or more. He had no way to judge the identity of the approaching truck as friend or foe, but Brantingham’s apparent lack of composure told Knox to run. He grabbed the spear and the sack on the way to the idling plane, reaching Brantingham as the man was kicking a rock out from in front of the forward tire.

  “You’re shot.” The man’s blood stained his left side from his lower ribs to his belt.

  “Yes. Right through the door. Bad luck, that.”

  Knox looked away, saw the safari truck barreling toward them.

  “In!” Brantingham ordered.

  Knox ran around the tail of the plane and climbed into the passenger seat. Grace sat awkwardly on the back bench, her eyes open the smallest slit. “I can help,” she said. “John? A rifle!”

  The truck sped closer. Knox heard a gunshot.

  “Shit.”

  Knox struggled to work the Kalashnikov into his arms, a difficult task in the tiny space. The plane bounced and rocked as it gained speed. Knox propped the door open with his knee and aimed.

  “The engine block,” Brantingham advised.

  Knox raised the rifle. The plane’s jostling made sighting through the scope impossible. A man rose out of the SUV’s side window, exposed to his waist, an assault rifle snugged against his shoulder.

  Knox fired, the repeating rounds deafening, the cordite swirling bitterly.

  “Wait!” Brantingham called loudly over the roar of the wind through the door. “Wait for takeoff!”

  Seconds later, the plane lifted and steadied. Knox squeezed off three additional sprays of rounds. Then the rattle of the gun stopped, the magazine empty.

  From the backseat, Grace, wild-eyed and frantic, passed him the rifle. “One in the chamber,” she said.

  Knox took the gun, aimed and fired six consecutive shots at the SUV. It swerved. He didn’t have time to see what kind of damage he’d done.

  “Okay,” Brantingham said, his voice guttural but alarmingly steady and calm. “It’s all yours.” The plane dipped.

  “What the hell?” Knox grabbed the yoke. The plane settled back to the ground at a high speed. “You fly!”

  “Injured!” Brantingham said, trying to coach him. “Flaps! Speed!”

  Knox got his foot onto the right rudder pedal and braked, trying to avoid a group of rocks. The nose wheel hit hard, the plane lurched to the left and dragged a wing.

  “Yoke back!”

  Airspeed was lost. The front wheel was bent or its tire flat. The plane skidded forward. Knox cursed, pulled back the throttle but kept the plane moving. Shoving down the rudder pedals, he turned the nose slightly right and aimed the plane for the distant trees.

  Brantingham was unconscious, his side bloodied.

  74

  As Koigi’s crowded truck hurried along the twisting dry creek bed, one of his men shouted out above the roar of the motor that he thought he’d heard a gunshot.

  On Koigi’s order, the truck slowed. He saw a single-engine plane lift into the sky to the south. Travis Brantingham, he thought. Snaggle Tooth. All listened intently, hearing no weapons fire.

  Koigi’s phone buzzed. Kanika Alkinyi had come through for him with coordinates for Snaggle Tooth’s lost collar signal. He and his navigator conferred.

  “It’s close, boss. Four klicks.”

  Ground zero, Koigi thought. Guuleed. Snaggle Tooth. The wounded gazelle. His men. Blood would be spilled here today.

  They’d come to a stop at the mouth of a labyrinth of islands, a wide dry wash through which the seasonal flood had cut many deep, narrow channels. The banks were steep.

  “Boss!” One of his men pointed behind them to ground level, toward an SUV, listing on its side. The vehicle’s paint and condition implied it had only been there a short time. The Kenyan sun was unforgiving. Koigi questioned his map man. “Time?”

  “It’s tight, boss. They’re close. Ten, fifteen minutes. The road is six klicks.”

  Guuleed would have also seen Brantingham’s plane. Would the sight of it and the suggestion of Larger Than Life rangers scare the poachers off? Or make them more greedy?

  “Plot a route from their last-known position to the spot where that plane took off. You’ve got two minutes,” Koigi said tersely. He ordered three of his men from the truck, decisive and sure. “Cover us,” he told those remaining.

  Koigi took his sniper with him. The two hurried up the bank to the capsized vehicle. They spotted a second SUV not twenty meters away.

  “What the fuck?” his lieutenant said, weapon at the ready.
/>
  They split up, Koigi taking the crash. A decomposing body would be signaled by colonies of bluebottle flies. Koigi saw nothing of the sort on the windows as he cautiously approached. He tried the door, pulling it open, anticipating the unforgettable odor of death. He smelled only hot air.

  Someone had surgically attacked the interior upholstery and ceiling fabric, removed the mirrors, even the lightbulbs. He thought of all the sights he’d seen in the bush—the bestial savagery of species on species, the tearing of raw flesh from bone nearly a daily sight. Never anything like this. It wasn’t Kenyan. A woman’s touch, the cuts careful and precise.

  “Anything?” he called across to his man.

  “No, boss. Empty.”

  “Engine?”

  “Cold. And there’s a skim of dust, boss. She’s been here awhile.”

  Koigi found the mention of “she” unsettling. “The interior? Is it cut apart?” He focused, trying to account for the presence of the second vehicle and its driver. His internal clock warned him: they had to get moving.

  But if the crash had been an accident, where were the remains? If it was staged, why a second car? By her actions, the Chinese woman had ensured that whoever found the salvaged vehicle would know she’d survived. A massive risk to take if she thought they might return to confirm her death.

  “No, boss. The inside’s all good.”

  Together, they slid down the embankment and hurried back to the trucks.

  “Mark this spot,” Koigi told his map man. “Weapons ready!” he ordered. “We shoot to kill . . .” he said, starting the chant.

  “There’s blood to spill!” called his men.

  “We shoot to kill.”

  “There’s blood to spill!”

  “No matter the cost,” Koigi said, “no one gets those tusks.”

  75

  Koigi’s men double-checked their weapons. They were running south now, following a parallel dry bed separated from Guuleed’s GPS identifier by a long low hill covered in fever trees, acacia and bush grass.