Shoot the Bastards

by Michael Stanley

  Hennie took off the safety on his rifle and indicated that all of them should do the same. The clicks sounded deafening, even though they tried hard to deaden the sound. He put his finger to his lips—as if they needed telling—then motioned them forward. Crys waited for a few moments to let him get ahead, then followed.

  The group moved even more slowly now, often stopping to make sure that the fuzzy images in their goggles were animals, not humans. After twenty minutes, Hennie stopped and pointed to the right. There, through the trees, Crys saw the white silhouette of a rhino. It couldn’t be anything else—the shape was unmistakable.

  Hennie motioned them together again. And once again spoke in an almost inaudible whisper. Everyone leaned close and, even then, almost had to lip-read. “Kai and me are going around the other side. Bongani and Crys, you stay right here. Ariko is off to the south. Each of you find a big tree and stand right next to it. That’ll shield you from view from one side. You’ll see the poachers if they come, because they’ll have to get close to the rhino to shoot it.” He looked at me. “You understand, Crys? No mistakes.”

  She nodded and took several deep breaths, trying to slow her racing heart. Even with her exploits in northern Minnesota, she’d never put herself in such a dangerous situation before. And she’d never felt so scared.

  * * *

  The next hour crept by, and Crys was having a hard time keeping still. What made it worse was that she didn’t know what was going on. She couldn’t see Bongani, who was hiding behind a tree about twenty yards away. And she didn’t know what any of the others were doing. They were all out of sight.

  The whole time, she was terrified that a poacher was creeping up on her, and that she could be killed at any moment. She was sure anyone nearby would hear her heart because it was pounding so loudly.

  Suddenly a white figure moved out from behind the tree Bongani had chosen. Crys held her breath and took aim with her rifle, praying it was him and not someone else. The figure came toward her. Was it Bongani or a poacher? She couldn’t tell.

  “Crys,” the figure whispered.

  Crys let out her breath. It was Bongani. He leaned over and whispered, “Hennie has seen two people moving toward the rhino. He wants us to move around behind them to cut off their retreat.”

  She nodded and gritted her teeth.

  Bongani moved off to the left at a faster pace than they’d used before. Crys struggled to follow his footsteps while keeping an eye out for low branches and glancing back in case someone was coming up from behind.

  They’d walked for another fifteen minutes or so, when Bongani stopped and motioned Crys to come up level with him.

  “Hennie says the poachers are within range. They’re going to shoot them.”

  “Without warning?” Crys whispered. “Is that legal?” She knew that some of the stuff she’d done in Minnesota wasn’t legal either. But none of it involved killing anyone.

  Then two shots rang out, the boom of a big-caliber rifle and the crack from a smaller weapon. Crys thought that the bigger was probably Hennie’s Remington 80 elephant gun. Then came a fusillade of shots, then another two from the big-caliber.

  Then silence.

  Bongani put a finger on his earpiece for a moment and listened. Then he whispered, “Hennie thinks there were four in total. Two are down; the others are headed this way. You go behind that mopane bush over there.” He pointed over to the left. “I’ll find another one. Remember, if you see anyone coming this way, shoot. Don’t wait for them to shoot first.”

  “What if it’s Hennie?” Crys whispered nervously.

  “It won’t be. They’ve something else to do…”

  Before she could ask him what, he’d disappeared. She crawled behind the thick mopane bush and lay down, her heart beating wildly. She wondered what Hennie’s group could be doing. Maybe the rhino had been shot and needed attention.

  After about ten minutes, a shot rang out. Crys nearly jumped out of her skin. It seemed to have come from right next to her. She looked around but saw nothing. Then another shot, equally close. Then silence.

  And more silence.

  The blood was pounding in her ears. She didn’t know if Bongani had done the shooting or had been shot. She turned her head slowly to look behind her. Nothing. Nobody. She breathed deeply, and soundlessly repeated her mantra to get her heart under control. Eventually it slowed down a bit.

  Suddenly, a white image appeared from behind a tree to the right. Crys swung her rifle toward it and sighted.

  “Crys. Don’t shoot. It’s me, Bongani.”

  It had to be Bongani. A poacher wouldn’t know her name. But she kept the rifle aimed at the oncoming figure, just in case. Finally, she lowered it.

  “Let’s check that the two I shot are dead,” he said. “Then we must go to where Hennie is.”

  Crys stood up and walked out from behind the bush. She was shaking. Ahead, she saw two white figures lying motionless.

  “Keep your rifle ready,” Bongani said. “If the left one moves, shoot him. I’ll watch the one on the right.”

  They moved slowly toward the two bodies, dodging from one tree to the next. There was no movement. Eventually, they were behind trees only a few yards away. Crys stopped, unable to believe what she’d got herself into.

  “Watch the left one carefully, Crys,” murmured Bogani.

  She aimed at the man, not completely sure what she would do if he did move. Then Bongani ran from behind the tree and kicked a rifle away from the other man’s grasp. Then he kicked the man in the stomach. There was no reaction. He repeated the same thing with the man Crys was covering. Same result. Both were either dead or so severely wounded that they couldn’t react.

  Crys held her breath as Bongani felt each man’s pulse.

  “Dead,” he said, looking in her direction. He picked up the rifles and took all the bullets he could find. “Let’s go.”

  “Are you just going to leave them here?” Crys choked, shocked.

  Bongani nodded. “When the hyenas have finished, nobody will even know they were here.” He walked on.

  For a moment, Crys couldn’t move.

  He turned to see where she was. “It’s better this way. Believe me.”

  * * *

  Following his GPS, Bongani led them slowly through the bush. Crys suddenly recalled her thought at dinner the previous night that people didn’t disappear in the twenty-first century. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe what was left of Michael was lying in the bush somewhere being polished off by hyenas. She felt sick.

  As they approached the others, they heard a scream, followed by shouting, then another scream. Crys froze.

  Ahead, Bongani had lifted his hand. “I think we should wait here.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “You don’t want to see.”

  Crys’s reporter’s instincts kicked in. “Oh, yes I do.”

  Bongani shrugged. He took off his night goggles and indicated she should too. They walked forward and soon reached Hennie and the others, standing in a circle.

  Nearby, a body was lying on the ground. A poacher, surely. Crys assumed he was dead, because no one was paying attention to him. All their eyes were turned to another figure, spread out a couple of yards away.

  The man’s hands were bound together and tied to a tree. His legs were splayed apart, each foot secured to a bush. He was naked. Hennie had a flashlight pointed at him, and Crys could see a gaping wound in the man’s thigh. It looked as though a shot had nearly taken the leg off. She put her hand to her mouth.

  Then she saw a flash of a blade. Hennie had a large knife in his hand and was shouting at the man in a language she didn’t understand. The man shook his head desperately. But Hennie leaned over him and ran the knife between the man’s nipples. Blood welled out of the wound.

  Bongani made a choking sou
nd and turned away.

  Hennie shouted some more. The man shook his head again. Once more Hennie leaned over him. This time he grabbed the man’s ear.

  And then, with a sweep of his hand, he cut it off.

  Crys couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Part of her wanted to run forward. To stop the barbarity. But her feet seemed welded to the ground, and she was unable to turn her eyes away.

  Hennie dangled the severed ear in front of the man’s face and shouted again. Again, a shake of the head.

  This time Hennie took a step back and kicked the man in the side. The man screamed. Hennie grinned. Crys could see his teeth. He said something to the man again. But once more the man shook his head.

  I’ve got to stop this, she thought. But deep in her stomach she knew that she couldn’t.

  “Okay, you blerry kaffir,” Hennie shouted. “Let’s see how tough you really are.”

  And with that he grabbed the man’s penis and sliced off the top, as easily as if he were cutting a piece of ripe fruit. The sound that came out of the man’s mouth was unlike anything Crys had ever heard: agonized fear.

  At last she found her voice. “Hennie. Please!” she shouted.

  He ignored her. He asked the man another question, but he shook his head again. And this time Hennie hacked off the rest of the penis and the scrotum. Like a butcher at his chopping block.

  “Bastard!” he shouted and kicked the man in the head. Then he turned away.

  “Let’s go. It’s a long way back,” he said, as casually as if he was on an evening stroll.

  A wave of nausea rose from Crys’s belly through her chest. She stumbled a few yards into the scrub and threw up.

  Breathing heavily, her mouth burning with stomach acid, she choked back a sob. And then threw up again.

  Chapter 8

  Hennie and his men sat around the fire, with cups of coffee. Some had a sandwich in hand; others dunked a rusk into their coffee to soften the hard-baked confection. Crys hadn’t appeared yet.

  “Do you think she’ll keep her mouth shut?” Sampson asked.

  “Most National Geographic reporters are real pros,” Hennie replied. “I think she’ll keep to what she agreed.”

  The men stared into the flames.

  “I thought she did pretty well,” Hennie continued, “considering she’s only been in Africa a few days. Most people, men or women, wouldn’t have had the balls to do what she did.”

  “She did what we asked. She’s tougher than she looks,” Bongani said.

  “She must have been shocked out of her skull when you cut off his balls,” Ariko said. “Probably never dreamed of anything like that.”

  Hennie shrugged. “Hard to know what people dream about.”

  “Wish she would wake up,” Sampson growled. “I want to get out of here.”

  “We’ll give her until ten-thirty. If she’s not up, I’ll wake her,” Ariko said.

  “No, let me do it,” Sampson said, lifting his rifle. “This should be loud enough to get her up.”

  The men around the fire laughed, imagining what the woman’s reaction would be to an elephant gun being fired right outside her tent.

  * * *

  Crys opened her eyes and looked at her watch. It was just after ten. She’d only had about five hours’ sleep, and they weren’t good. Some of the time, images of the man tied to the ground had flashed into her mind, and she’d heard his screams. Other times, she saw hyenas, licking their lips, saliva dripping from their powerful jaws, creeping toward the man. He was struggling, knowing he was going to be eaten.

  And sometimes it wasn’t the poacher she saw.

  Sometimes it was Michael.

  She closed her eyes and pulled the pillow over her head, hoping the images would go away. They didn’t.

  Eventually she dragged herself out of her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. She saw that the others were sitting around a fire, a blackened kettle balanced on a twisted grate above it.

  “Coffee?” Hennie offered.

  Crys nodded. “Thanks.”

  He spooned some instant coffee powder into a tin mug and poured water over it.

  “No milk,” he said.

  “No problem,” she mumbled.

  “Sugar?”

  “Two, please.”

  After adding the sugar and giving the liquid a stir, he handed Crys the mug. She sat down on a dead tree they’d pulled close to the fire. Like the others, she gazed at the flames.

  “Crys, I need to remind you of what you agreed to yesterday. You can report what you saw, but no names, places, or dates of what happened. Understand?”

  She nodded. She had to stick to her word.

  “Good. Now, how’re you doing?”

  Crys didn’t answer right away. She didn’t really know how she was feeling. Or what she was feeling. Her mind and emotions were in turmoil. Eventually she murmured, “I’m okay.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “What would you have done?” Hennie asked.

  Crys looked around the group. Everyone was staring down into the fire.

  She took a breath. “Couldn’t you tell them to put their hands up instead of just shooting them?”

  “We tried that at the beginning. One of my friends was killed when they opened up with an AK-47. If they see us, they don’t hesitate. They shoot to kill. So now we do the same. We shoot the bastards!”

  “What about the other man—the one on the ground? Did you have to…?” Crys’s voice cracked. She swallowed, trying to stay calm. “Did you have to torture him and leave him to be eaten alive?”

  “He was going to die anyway. He was hit badly and was going to bleed to death. And it was too far to carry him.”

  “You could’ve tried to stop the blood. You could’ve got the Land Rover. He might have survived. And…and…” She couldn’t stop herself. “You looked as though you were enjoying it!”

  “He knew what he was getting into when he signed up as a poacher.”

  There was a long silence.

  “What were you asking him?” Crys said at last.

  “I wanted to know where he came from.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “If we know where he comes from, we can go to his village and encourage the villagers not to cooperate with the men next up the chain.”

  “You mean kill them like you killed him!” she snapped, her anger rising. “Is that why he didn’t say anything? He didn’t want his village destroyed. That’s what the Americans did in Vietnam—killed innocent villagers to find out where the Vietcong were.”

  Bongani stood up and walked away.

  “And which side were you on, Crys?” Hennie’s lips formed a tight, thin line. “The brutal Americans or the brutal Vietcong?”

  Crys gripped her mug and drained it.

  Eventually she said, “I wasn’t born then. My father was in the South Vietnamese army.”

  “He was lucky to get out,” Hennie said.

  “He didn’t. At least not then.” She stared into her empty cup. She didn’t want to talk about her family.

  “What happened?” Hennie asked, taking a softer tone.

  Crys normally avoided answering questions about her family, but with the events of the previous night sharp in her mind, her usual barriers were down. She turned and looked Hennie in the eyes. “The Vietcong put him in prison for thirteen years. My mother got pregnant with me after one of her annual visits, and I was born just before he was released. We were lucky that she wasn’t harassed…or worse. She and my brother and I were able to get to the States in 1989. My father was only allowed to join us a couple of years later.”

  Nobody said a thing. She didn’t know what was going through the heads of the men around the fire, but she was thinking of her father. She hadn’t spoken to him in more than te
n years—since he’d thrown her out of the house for not being a “good Vietnamese girl” and obeying his every wish, for being too American, even though she was raised there. The familiar ache spread from her chest to her throat.

  Then Hennie broke into her thoughts. “The problem with you Americans is that you want rhino poaching to stop, but aren’t willing to accept what has to be done to accomplish that.” He threw a branch onto the fire. “What you really need to do, if you want to stop rhinos being killed, is to put an embargo on all Vietnamese trade. That’s where most of the horns go. And you know what for?” He glared at her. “For medicines that don’t heal anything and for sniffing at yuppie parties. And it doesn’t even give them a high.” He threw the dregs of his coffee onto the fire.

  “I get it why poachers are willing to take the risk,” he continued. “They can earn a lifetime of income from a couple of horns.” He pointed to the others sitting around the fire. “But we’re working at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t get anything extra when we catch or kill a poacher, even though our lives are in danger. We do it so rhinos don’t disappear from the planet.”

  He picked up a stone and threw it at the fire. It hit a log and sparks flew up, crackling. “We can only try to stop the poachers—the U.S. has the influence to stop the trade. But what does it do? Nothing. Because too many people are making too much money. Or perhaps it’s feeling guilty about what it did in Vietnam…”

  Crys knew there was some truth in what he said, but couldn’t take any more of it—of him; of what she’d seen. Of his justifications. All she could see was the grin on his face as he tortured the naked, mutilated man.

  She stood up and headed back to her tent.

  “We’ll give her a few more minutes to get her shit together,” Hennie said. “Then we’re off.”

  Crys turned and glared at him.

  * * *

  Crys stayed in her tent until Bongani called out that they were leaving.

  “Do I have time to interview the others?” she asked, realizing that she probably had lost the opportunity.

  He shook his head. “No, we don’t. Anyway, they don’t want to talk to you. They think it’s bad luck having a woman around.”