In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

Krieger put the glasses on the seat. “Then don’t miss.”

Zoeller smiled quietly. In more than three decades hunting the Kimber, Krieger had never seen Zoeller other than the way he looked right now: faded safari vest over a massive bare chest, brief shorts, boots, and a necklace bearing a single lion’s tooth. He had been a bush bodybuilder all of his life, lifting tires, fuel drums, cargo chains, even curling the children of his clients, a young Terry Krieger included. “Old Pete” still had silky yellow-white hair that reached to his broad shoulders and a mustache that extended well off his square chin.

From his outfit and what appeared to be recently acquired dentures, one might mistake Zoeller for a has-been circus act. But Krieger knew better. Not so many years ago, Krieger had invited a famous Hollywood actor to Zimbabwe to hunt elephant. The guy’s movies had done a great deal for the defense industry, and Krieger had gotten to know him. Zoeller found them an elephant, but the actor with the veins running down his famous biceps had ignored Zoeller’s whispered advice to wait. He’d fired too soon and too high, and the enraged bull elephant, already in musth, had charged.

Zoeller stepped in front of the actor and was able to get off a shot from his double, but the elephant was in a hormonal fury, too fast for a second shot, and Zoeller had taken the animal’s charge fully in the chest. The impact launched him skyward, his body sailing like a blond rag doll up and over a huge termite mound. Fortunately, the elephant drove its tusk deep into the concrete-like termite mound, where it wedged, offering Krieger time to make an easy kill shot.

That night, Zoeller had appeared dressed for dinner as if nothing had happened. He had sustained six broken ribs, a fractured skull, and a crushed spleen. But that would not be discovered until a week later. The only sign that anything out of the ordinary had occurred was that Zoeller asked Krieger if he and the boys wouldn’t mind a quiet dinner together, apart from the famous actor and the other guests. While the action hero toasted his conquest of a raging bull elephant, Zoeller had eaten his braised kudu and watercress salad, finished his Tusker, and had a bite of honeyed pie. Afterwards, as the hunter retired to his tent, Krieger overheard him talking to himself, quietly repeating the same line over and over. “I always wondered would I stand,” he said. “I always wondered.”

Krieger never watched the action hero’s films again.

•   •   •

Hunting was not for everyone, and that applied not only to Hollywood actors. Krieger had seen an Iraq veteran with two dozen confirmed combat kills get the shakes so bad he couldn’t pull the trigger on a zebra. But for Krieger, hunting was a kind of walking meditation. His first wife used to make fun of him for his after-deal hunting trips. She would leave the house while he packed his gear, jealous that he needed a blood sport to satisfy him, angry that hunting filled a void she couldn’t.

How to explain it? Every significant business deal seemed to move a pendulum inside him, his most sophisticated deals ratcheting that pendulum so far in one direction that instead of feeling satisfied, he felt supremely out of balance. Hunting was his very soul demanding something primal, a blood conquest to match his intellectual victory.

He’d shared his pendulum theory with China’s president during their hunting trip together on the Kimber. Ho’s broad, lineless face had broken into a knowing smile. “Wu ji bi fan.” He’d nodded, stepping over a fallen log. “When things reach an extreme, they must move in their opposite direction.” Ho patted Krieger’s shoulder. “Yin and yang, Terry. We need a calm to have the storm.”

The Seventh Fleet was in Krieger’s pocket now—the entire Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy. He hadn’t closed the deal yet, but his tactical success over Admiral Tighe had ratcheted the pendulum inside of him to a point that demanded release.

Blaze held up a vial of tranquilizer. She was filming the hunt for her college applications. “I need to adjust this,” she said into her iPhone. “Because he’s way above average male weight.”

He couldn’t believe she was headed to college. To him Blaze was still the little seven-year-old girl who had taught Krieger’s brother what a liberal was. It had been Christmas at the Montana ranch. James, a dermatologist from San Francisco, was tucking Blaze into bed when Blaze said, “Uncle James, Daddy says I shouldn’t talk politics with you because you’re a liberal.”

James had been amused. “What’s a liberal, Blaze?”

“Daddy says if I get an A on a test and a lazy girl gets an F, a liberal will take away my A and give it to the lazy girl so she gets a C and I do, too.”

That was Blaze. She had politics in her future. Or maybe even Perseus Group—if she could step up today.

“We’ll need to bait him, Tots,” Zoeller said, looking up at the lion. “He’s breeding age and nothing’s going to get him off those females.”

“Who’s Tots?” Blaze asked.

Krieger smiled. “It’s my bush name. Ras Botha gave it to me when I was a boy. Tots because I was the baby Krieger when your great grandfather hunted here. If you do well, maybe Pete will give you a bush name.”

Blaze gave a short laugh. “I think I can live without one, Tots.”

•   •   •

While Zoeller set up a blind, Krieger sat in the passenger seat of the open Land Rover, closed his eyes, and breathed in the warm air. Behind him, Blaze was looking at her phone. Their trackers, a father and son named Njovu and Isaac, went off to find a zebra to use as bait.

Krieger could feel Ras Botha’s presence on the Kimber. Even when they were boys, Botha had been something out of