White Bone

by Ridley Pearson

  “We are close to even with them,” his man said, “but their route is more direct. Our best option to cross is here.” He pointed to a thin dashed line nearing the end of the hill. One of many such off-road trails that spiderwebbed the area.

  Koigi didn’t like the thought of falling behind them for a second time. “They will head directly to the elephant.” There was no longer any doubt as to Guuleed’s intentions. It had nothing to do with the Chinese woman, he realized. He’d wasted precious time at the crash site.

  Koigi understood that his one enormous advantage was the element of surprise. Falling behind Guuleed was not an option. “That wash has got to be slower than these tracks.”

  “Agreed,” his navigator said.

  “So drive faster,” he advised the man behind the wheel.

  “This road is shit. And we’re heavy.”

  “Okay, slow down!” Koigi called to the driver. He pointed at two of his men. “You! Out! Wait for the others.”

  The chosen men looked bewildered. The second truck was following by a distance of twenty meters.

  “Out!” Koigi hollered. They’d slowed considerably. The three men jumped. Now only Koigi, his navigator, his sniper, Blackie, and the driver remained.

  “Is that better?” Koigi asked his driver.

  He slapped his navigator on the shoulder hard. “Good work. Check your weapon again. His, too. This is going to get cheeky.”

  76

  Easy!” Guuleed hollered as the truck he was riding hit a rock. The creek bed had widened, the span of it littered with stones. “Go easy, man!”

  The truck slowed. Fever trees clogged each bend, giving the driver tough choices.

  “The plane is landing,” a man called out from the backseat.

  Guuleed radioed his men in the trailing trucks to remain in the dry creek bed. They were to quickly search the area where the plane had taken off and rendezvous with him at the landed plane, some three or four kilometers away.

  Guuleed could hardly believe his luck. Brantingham—it had to be Brantingham! And Snaggle Tooth, the prize of all prizes!

  Though his rival had flown less than five minutes, he appeared to be landing again. Engine trouble? He shook his head. To be safe, his truck would pursue the plane, while the others made sure the takeoff was not intended as a ruse to draw Guuleed and his men away from the elephant.

  “Take us out of this godforsaken creek bed, now!” he told his driver, pointing up into the scrub.

  77

  Seeing the back of John’s head from the seat in front of her, recognizing Brantingham passed out in the pilot’s seat, lent a dreamlike quality to what Grace was feeling and experiencing. On some level, she understood she’d been rescued; on another, her blood pulsed like she’d drunk Tunisian coffee.

  Her muscles tweaked and flexed of their own accord. The space was too small and claustrophobic. She longed for the open air of the bush. The plane’s instruments and equipment struck her as manmade and unnatural, something she’d not felt before.

  They, and this plane, didn’t belong. Her thoughts battled with an instinct to flee the plane and run. How, she wondered, could she think such a thing? Where did such thoughts come from?

  “I am frightened,” she said, making sure John heard her.

  “You’re the strongest one in this plane, Grace. Believe it. We’re all right. We’re heading for those trees.” He reached back and took her hand in his. “You amaze me.”

  The plane shook so badly over the rough ground that Grace feared it would come apart.

  “It is not the plane,” she said. “Never mind.”

  “What?” He glanced back. That was all she needed—his eyes. Concerned, caring eyes. “We’re going to be okay.”

  “I want to help,” she said. “I can help.”

  He squeezed her hand. “There’s a surprise,” he said sarcastically.

  “I cannot laugh, John. I have forgotten how to laugh.”

  “I don’t believe that. We can find it again.”

  We, was all she heard. “Okay.”

  “That’s my girl.” Knox laughed to himself loudly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “What? How did it sound?”

  “Sexist.”

  “Bullshit.” Grace seldom cursed. Knox fought back a smile. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. “John. It sounded good to me.”

  78

  Koigi ordered his driver and navigator to search the immediate area of the plane’s tire tracks and then to take up a defensive position, guarding the truck. He and Blackie hiked quickly up a hill overlooking a natural choke point in the creek bed. A pair of fever trees crowded the route, narrowing it to no wider than two truck widths.

  He radioed the second truck. His men took up position on the opposite slope. They owned the choke point. Guuleed and his men would be trapped, the only way out behind them, and Blackie’s lethal skills could prevent that option.

  Stalking their way up the hill, Koigi and Blackie ducked lower as tendrils of rising dust swirled, threatening to reveal their position. To be safer, they dropped, lay prone, Koigi adopting the role of Blackie’s spotter.

  Quietly, Koigi again radioed his men, alerting them to Guuleed’s approach. “Kila la kheri!” “Good luck” in Swahili.

  The slow speed of the two trucks was to Koigi’s advantage. If he hadn’t wanted his opponent forced into the ambush, he would have had Blackie start picking off men. As it was, he and Blackie would serve as cover. He placed the binoculars down and readied his own rifle in case it was needed. His sore shoulder wasn’t helping. Still, his heart pounded in his chest. Adrenaline. Always the same. He looked over at Blackie, whose eye was pressed to the scope as two trucks rolled into view.

  “I’ve got them.”

  79

  Koigi, weapon at the ready, watched through the binoculars as the driver’s head exploded. Blackie had taken him out from two hundred meters. Through the spray of blood and quaking bodies, Koigi searched for Guuleed.

  His rangers made quick work of the ambush. Guuleed’s men returned a lame attempt but, sandwiched as they were, and unable to maneuver the trucks, they took multiple rounds each.

  Two fell from the trucks. The rest died sitting down. Ten, maybe twelve men. Forty seconds at the most. Four men with raised hands.

  Koigi felt no remorse, only a huge sigh of relief. These men, who had killed numerous elephants, rhinos and his own rangers, who had eluded him on three separate occasions and put a bullet in his shoulder—Kenya was rid of them now. Their departure offered a better chance of survival for his beloved animals.

  The only missing piece of the celebration was to identify Guuleed’s body among them.

  “Boss!” Blackie had his rifle’s sight trained away from the ambush.

  Koigi swung the binoculars south. A third truck had emerged from behind the opposing hill. It was speeding across the flat in the direction of the plane that had landed.

  “Bastard,” Koigi muttered. “Too far for a shot?” A moving shot, he thought.

  Blackie with a rifle was akin to a painter with a brush. Koigi watched the truck’s three passengers through the binoculars. He could feel Blackie find the vehicle and lead it. His rifle barked. One of the three small figures in the distant truck slumped, a fine pink mist rising like a halo above him. An impossible shot.

  He and Blackie scrambled down the hill, running toward their truck.

  80

  Guuleed heard the sudden burst of gunfire. KGA? Larger Than Life? His men had driven into a shitstorm. He wanted to think it was his men doing the shooting, but when a lighter volley followed a few long seconds later, he knew as any leader knows that the second burst belonged to his team—and by the light volley, he knew they’d already suffered serious casualties.

  It erupted then like a fireworks finale, the exchange of
gunfire so furious it sounded like rocks rolling down a hill. To try to give backup now would be suicide. His driver and navigator looked at him expectantly, anticipating that order.

  “The plane,” Guuleed said. “Now. As fast as this shit heap will go!”

  The look on the other two faces, as they reacted to his decision not to support his other men, shook him to the core. But he kept his own face still. The sacrifice of the others would not be in vain.

  At that same moment, the man between him and his driver lost his head to a bullet. It was like a melon exploding, blood everywhere. Guuleed ducked down low.

  “Faster!”

  81

  Knox maneuvered the damaged plane to the far side of a stand of fever trees, wanting cover. The safari truck was closing in on them, fast.

  From their left appeared a thin line of rising dust. “Those are my men,” Brantingham said, his head swiveling with difficulty. Knox blinked; he hadn’t realized the man was conscious. “Five kilometers. Too far. Too late for us.”

  Ignoring him, Knox scrambled from the plane, rifle in hand. The Larger Than Life rangers needed at least five minutes to close the distance. The safari truck threw shots at him, peeling chunks of bark and wood from the fever trees. Knox dropped to one knee, steadied the long rifle against a tree trunk and squeezed off three more rounds. He reloaded quickly, stealing glances at the opposition bearing down on him.

  The truck’s engine died and the vehicle glided into an area of sparse trees, the driver cutting sharply to put the truck perpendicular to Knox’s position.

  The two men—that’s all he saw—hunkered down inside the vehicle. They aimed and fired in his direction. Knox checked to his left: the plume of dust had barely grown higher, putting the rangers still well to the southeast.

  Knox did not return fire, but waited. Soon, the firing stopped. In the distance, a second truck approached at high speed.

  Thirty yards of scrub and rock separated the two copses. The man in the front seat lifted his head to have a look. The truck rocked forward on its springs; Knox sighted the head of the man he was about to shoot—and then he gasped audibly.

  There, in his line of sight, came the massive gray elephant, its black ears flapped out wide, its massive head leading its lumbering charge. Once again the mass of the thing stunned him. The deep crags in the skin, the scars and stains and age. The wild eyes. As bewildering as anything he’d seen.

  He had to hold the attention of the two in the truck. If they looked back, they would see the elephant and drop the beast immediately.

  Knox had heard stories of elephants’ keen memory; how some could return to a pile of bones three years after a poaching and shed tears over the remains; how they learned smells to avoid and could recognize the human form in silhouette.

  Snaggle Tooth had not shied at the weapon fire as he should have. He had waited nearby and now, with a prolonged cease-fire, had taken it upon himself to avenge, threaten or protect. Perhaps it was a misguided suicide mission. A kamikaze elephant. Perhaps he had smelled Brantingham and knew him as a friend. Knox saw only a bold, heroic charge, the elephant’s one glorious curving tusk nearly scraping the ground.

  Knox darted between trees to hold the attention of the two in the truck. No shots.

  The elephant reached the truck. The men startled and turned; the passenger struggled to raise his rifle. But before he could aim, the elephant slipped his tusk beneath the vehicle, lifted and heaved. A gun fired. The vehicle rolled up onto its side, as if made of cardboard. Both occupants were thrown out, sprawled onto the earth ahead of the truck, which tumbled upside down and on top of them.

  A voice cried out. The elephant heaved again, lifting and rolling the truck angrily, ears out, eyes enormously wide. Knox saw one of the men reappear, flattened to the ground, nearly cut in two by a roll bar that had crushed his body beneath his ribs. To Knox’s astonishment, the second man, noticeably wounded, slipped between the elephant’s rear legs and scrambled away. Knox sighted down the barrel. Slipped his finger to the trigger. Squeezed.

  The man lost a piece of his leg in a rose-colored spray. Knox pulled away from the rifle scope, his finger still on the trigger. He hadn’t fired the weapon.

  The elephant roared and fled the gunfire. His moving aside revealed the second vehicle. There, alongside of it, was the unmistakable profile of Koigi.

  For Knox, it was as if this second vehicle and Koigi had closed the distance magically, moving in seconds.

  Koigi, not Knox, had shot apart the man’s leg. He called out to the wounded man in Swahili. The man struggled to his feet and stood defiantly twenty yards away.

  82

  Koigi advised Guuleed to stand down, that to reach for his sidearm would get him killed. Guuleed was bleeding from his head and his legs.

  And now that Koigi had the opportunity to study him, he realized that this man, this murderer he’d sought for nearly two years, wouldn’t be reaching for his gun. Formerly infamous for the missing finger he’d lost in pirating a tanker at sea, Guuleed now had only a fleshy stump where his right hand should have been. The rolling vehicle had crushed it.

  “Have you ever seen such a thing as that?” Koigi asked.

  “Never so close,” replied Guuleed. “Cheeky bastard, that one.”

  “He saw you coming.”

  “Yes. You may be right there.”

  “It pains my heart that we have a witness in the trees,” Koigi said. “Without him, I would kill you here, cousin, without a second thought.”

  “And I would thank you for it.” Guuleed fell to his knees, unable to stand any longer. He cried out as his wounded leg hit the earth. “My blood is in the soil, as it should be,” he said, his head hung down. “I wonder, cousin, if I can manage to turn my back, would you allow me to reach across for my weapon?”

  “No, cousin, I would not,” Koigi said, moving closer now. Suicide was too good for this bastard. “I’ll take the other leg and your balls first. Your decision.”

  A knife hung on the man’s belt as well, but again, his hand was of no use to him. Koigi adopted the slow walk of a pallbearer. He’d imagined this moment a hundred times. Never like this. He’d wanted the challenge.

  Justice did not exist in Kenya. He said as much to Guuleed.

  “There is justice here, cousin. In the soil. The sunlight.” Guuleed squinted, looking up. “You’ll never win, you know? They will be hunted until they’re gone. The rhino, also. Easy money, that’s all they are.”

  He was intentionally provoking Koigi and both men knew it.

  From ten feet away, Koigi put a bullet into the man’s groin and two more into his abdomen. Guuleed collapsed to the side. Koigi rid him of his weapons and, with the man bleeding out, looked down into his eyes long and hard, his cold gaze expressing his sudden indifference. Then he walked toward the woods and the plane that was cocked down onto one wing.

  He left Guuleed alive—but just barely. The lions and jackals were certain to follow in the hours to come.

  Even that fate was too good for him.

  83

  Knox never left her side. He sat her on a chair in the shower at Larger Than Life’s headquarters and sponged her clean, never a moment of embarrassment between them. They’d been through Amsterdam together. So many secrets lay behind them now.

  Grace showered for forty-five minutes. Washed her hair three times. He tended to her cuts and bites, abrasions and rashes. She kept down the fresh fruit. Didn’t want anything more than that, just water and sports drinks.

  Brantingham’s gunshot wound required a flight to Nairobi. Knox and Grace joined him, leaving behind the only four of Guuleed’s men to have survived. They would be turned over to the Kenyan Game Agency.

  En route, the medics administered a variety of shots and put Grace on an IV drip. She slept. In Nairobi’s Karen Hospital, she went through two days of tests and examinati
ons and was treated for dehydration, malnutrition, a sprained ankle, an infected snakebite, numerous contusions and lacerations. Knox heard a Swahili word repeated by the nurses and was finally able to get a translation: “miracle.”

  In private moments while she lay sleeping, breathing softly, he would take her hand. It was during one such tender moment that he realized he’d allowed her in.

  No one, he thought, would understand the significance of this inclusion. But for a man who’d blocked out the world—save only his brother—behind multiple layers of sarcasm and bravado, pseudo-independence and aloofness, it was a watershed moment for Knox. He felt connected to Grace, and more important, he wanted and welcomed that connection.

  He had not a single strand of temptation to sever the emotional ties that had formed. Indeed, he thought, he would work tirelessly to maintain and strengthen them if given the chance.

  Several times over the next two days, she came awake to see him leaning over the side of the bed. “Hello, there,” she said on the first of these occasions.

  “They’re calling you a miracle. No surprise there.”

  No smile.

  She nodded and slipped back into sleep. And so it went, each conversation a little longer, a little more in depth. She wanted to know the fate of the elephant with the broken tusk, was horribly worried she’d wounded him. She had, in fact, inflicted a surface wound that neither Brantingham nor Knox had seen. The LTL rangers were monitoring Snaggle Tooth and planned to tranquilize him, dress the wound and reattach a working transmitter.

  Grace started talking business practically before eating her first meal, but for once Knox wouldn’t play along. He pushed away such talk for a future time.