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

calculating how much of the poacher’s load was likely water, and where the area’s water sources lay, Bernard had driven ahead of his quarry, set up camp, and was having tea when the poacher arrived. “I’ll be having those,” Bernard had said, taking a sack of bloody tusks from the surprised man. “Good tracking follows a trail,” Klay wrote of the incident. “Great tracking leads it.”

“Voi’s not here, Greg,” Klay repeated.

Looking at Bernard, the software engineer scoffed, “I’m not talking dowsing sticks.”

The blinking-green elephant on the engineer’s phone suddenly jumped. Klay pushed the phone hard into the engineer’s chest. “What’s that?”

The engineer looked down. “Oh,” he said.

“Oh, what?”

“Must be the satellite.” Greg tapped at his phone. “There may be a lag. It happens sometimes.” He turned and pointed west to a single mountain that rose above the plain. “It says he’s up there.”

The KWS ranger shook his head and dropped his cigarette.

•   •   •

I don’t like it,” Bernard said after they had parked and surveyed a portion of the mountain’s base. “No spoor.”

Klay, too, had seen no tracks—neither human nor elephant—and it was getting late. “Okay,” he said. “But if my intel’s right, and Greg is right, and we don’t follow?”

“Then we’ve said goodbye to a national treasure.”

Bernard spoke to the KWS ranger and returned to Klay. “There’s a plateau just before the top. Our cattle end up there sometimes. That’s where he’ll be. Follow the trail. We’ll clear the area and meet you at the plateau.”

“What about those two?” Klay asked.

“The MP stays in the car.”

When Bernard didn’t continue, Klay shook his head. “No.”

“Babysit him, would you?”

Klay looked at Greg again and sighed. “Beer’s on you.”

“Fair enough.”

Bernard gave a few hand signals, and then he and his rangers vanished up the steep slope, dancing over rocks and among trees, like ghosts.

The climb was steeper than Klay had expected. After an hour he was using vines and roots to pull himself upwards. After two hours, he was struggling to silence his breathing. It came out of him in deep, cave-emptying gasps. His thighs burned. At each step he ordered his foot to clear the next rock, then watched as his boot kicked the rock loose and sent it tumbling down the mountain. Behind him, Greg climbed easily.

Klay wiped a damp forearm over his muddy face. Sweat burned his eyes. It was a poacher’s moon, nearly as full and bright as daylight. Tracking is easiest at dawn and dusk, when angled sunlight casts a shadow in each footprint, enabling even an average tracker like Klay to read the ground. In the moon’s bright light animals and men stood out, but the earth for Klay was illegible.

Finally, he reached the edge of the plateau where the elephant was supposed to be. He wiped his eyes with a dry corner of his shirttail and raised his binoculars. The clearing was empty. Klay grabbed the engineer’s phone from him. According to the TIPP app, the biggest elephant in Africa was standing right in front of them.

Bernard appeared at Klay’s side. He put a finger to his lips. “No elephant,” he mouthed, gesturing to indicate a trunk. He scissored his fingers to indicate a man walking, and pointed. Klay understood: someone was on the plateau with them.

Klay heard the crack of a rifle shot. Bernard’s eyelids fluttered. The Samburu ranger seemed surprised, as if someone familiar had called out his name. Klay dove forward, tackling Bernard to the ground. He didn’t hear the second shot. Klay’s senses inverted. Sound turned to light. Light became touch. He tasted the bullet’s impact, he would later recall. And then he was falling.

HOMECOMING

Dulles, Virginia, and Washington, DC

Klay awoke as the plane dipped toward Dulles International Airport and the green fields of northern Virginia came into view. It was late morning. He adjusted his arm uncomfortably. The bullet had passed through his right shoulder below the clavicle. He’d suffered bruised ribs and a brain-numbing concussion in the long fall. The doctors in Nairobi said he would be fine.

Bernard was dead.

The politician was dead, too, and the elephant had been nowhere near their location.

“Are you finished, sir?” a flight attendant asked, and he realized she’d already asked him once.

He looked down at the tiny Chivas bottles littering his tray. “I’m finished,” he replied.

An anti-poaching operation gone bad, Kenya’s Daily Nation had speculated. Land dispute, ran a competing theory.

Klay knew differently. He had the Botha file. Ras Leopold Botha, age forty-nine. He was born in Musina, South Africa. Father a local police officer, mother a housewife. Botha himself had been a cop once, supplementing his policeman’s salary running stolen cars across the border, shipping them on to Mozambique. Working the syndicate with his brother, Dirk. The two men buying up property, opening a professional hunting company, Botha Brothers Safaris. Ras was the dominant brother, the imaginative one.

They had met once before. Klay was investigating elephant poaching in South Africa, and Ras Botha was a necessary stop for any journalist making that trip. Most reported Botha’s name without speaking to him. Botha was not an easy man to track down, and he didn’t talk to the press. Klay got lucky. Botha had been on trial in Pretoria, charged with murdering one of his Russian dancers. Klay attended the trial. On the last day, Botha had testified on his own behalf. The Afrikaner’s defense was simple. “You don’t vermoorden ass like that,” he told the judge. “You fuck it.”

Afterwards, Klay sat in a visitors’ room, looking at the man through scratched Plexiglas. Someone had ripped the phone off the wall on Klay’s side of the window, so they yelled at each other through holes drilled in the Plexiglas.

“I run the ivory trade in Africa,” Botha shouted. He was short and stocky, with a square head, protruding ears, and black crew cut hair. Two prisoners flanked him, a cell phone in each of their hands, all of them Botha’s. The Octopus, they called him.

Klay laughed at the bold confession.