The Devil's Horn (5 page)

With Marius gone for a minute, LB swirled a finger around the table to invoke the team’s attention.

“Did Wally tell you?”

Quincy flattened his big mitts on the metal table, rattling the dozen empty bottles.

“Yeah. And I think it’s sweet.”

LB rocked in his seat. The plastic under him threatened to buckle.

“You’re kidding.”

Quincy made a ridiculous face.

“Fuck yes, I’m kidding.”

When Marius returned with beers dangling between his thick fingers, the team stopped sniggering. The pilot asked what the hilarity had been. LB tried to wave it off as nothing, but Jamie told him about Wally on one knee, proposing over the radio in the back of a cargo plane to a major all the way back in Djibouti.

Marius laughed hard, perhaps to be included.

“Jirre.”
This was the Afrikaans way of saying “wow.”

For uncomfortable moments, the laughing Marius remained unaware that no one had joined him. Jamie, who’d told the story, licked his lips and hung his head, a sorry pose. Doc and Quincy drummed their fingers on the metal table. LB worked on his beer, waiting this out. The clueless Marius didn’t quit fast enough. LB set down his beer and raised a palm.

“Okay, pal. Let it go.”

Marius sniffed away the last of his laughter.

“What?”

“I said just let it go. Wally’s getting married. So good for him.”

“
Ja
, good for him. But you laughed.”

Jamie tried to placate him, leaning across the table.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. My fault.”

When Marius glared at Jamie, Doc tugged the young PJ upright in his chair, keeping him out of it.

Marius spread his arms to survey the Americans at the table. He could have taken on any of them except Quincy, and he would have been a handful for the big PJ. Though the bar rippled with an international flavor today, Marius had an ample number of South African Army and Air Force members nearby, and as a rule they ran large.

For no reason LB could articulate, because in his way of thinking he’d done nothing to bring this on himself, Marius addressed him.

“I buy you drinks.”

“Thank you.”

“I let you pretend to rescue me. In front of fucking ten thousand people.”

“Like I said . . . Thank you.”

“So suddenly I’m an arsehole?”

Why do it? LB had never developed complex answers to simple questions. This was his strength, what he valued most about himself and believed others admired in him: he gave dogged and linear, reliable, repeatable responses to challenges. This was what LB tried to teach young pararescuemen as an instructor at Pararescue Indoctrination, what he tried to give to the wounded in combat when they’d lost almost all their own strength. Never quit. Focus, narrow it down, right here and now. Later will take care of itself. Why jump out of a copter into a raging sea or out of a plane into a boiling desert, into an icy crevasse, into a firefight, into this? Why? Because that was the job.

“Not suddenly.”

Marius shot up, the rim of the table in his hands. Bottles cascaded past LB, spilling on the bricks, one of the full ones doused him. With a heave, the big pilot tipped the table into LB’s lap; LB fended it off, and the table rolled away to rest upside down. Doc, Jamie, Quincy, and the beer-soaked LB sat in an empty ring where it had been. Marius, standing alone, moved his arms and fists like a flexing gorilla. The rest of the patio’s patrons swallowed their tongues; the music in the background was the only sound left, with Marius commanding everyone’s attention, awkward and wrong.

“Get up.”

Whether through surprise or lack of desire, Doc, Jamie, and Quincy stayed rooted to their seats. LB stayed in his plastic chair for a different reason. He’d been told to stand.

Marius grunted.

“You’ve got a
snotklap
coming, mate.”

The pilot took one stride across crunching glass. His next step was interrupted.

Wally slipped into the circle without making a sound, even without treading on the glass. Taller than Marius, rangy and erect, cropped, tucked, and certain, Wally hoisted both hands to ward off the advancing goonish pilot.

“I don’t know what he said or did, but I’m sure you deserve an apology.”

Marius pouted, mulling this shift. LB hadn’t kept count of the pilot’s beers, only his own, and maybe Marius had been further along than he’d known. The big Afrikaner’s features dulled the way a drunk’s would, sudden and unreasoned.

“Alright.”

Without turning his sunglasses away from Marius, Wally reached behind him to snap his fingers.

“First Sergeant.”

LB had no urge to fight, but also none to capitulate. He hovered between the two choices, impressed with himself in this moment that he had the presence of mind to wonder what sort of story this would make for later. But the only people to tell it to who might care or understand were the men around him right now.

“Sorry, pal. Didn’t mean anything by it.”

This defused Marius, but not enough for Wally to walk away. From behind his shades, Wally saw something that kept him rooted between LB and the big pilot. Doc and Jamie set to putting the table on its legs. A waitress with a broom and dustpan wended through the stunned and gawping military men and women from around the globe. Still, Wally faced Marius.

The pilot aimed an arm thick as a post past Wally, at LB.

“Hy’s vol kak.”
This bit of Afrikaans was easy to interpret: “He’s full of shit.”

Wally nodded. “I agree.”

The pilot wavered on his feet and between languages. He growled in a jowly, accented English.

“Just be glad he’s one of yours.”

“Most days, I’m not.” Wally leaned in an inch, just enough. “But understand, friend. He
is
one of mine.”

Marius backed a step, not in retreat but to better look Wally up and down, a sort of public dressing-down.

“You’re the
moffie
who took the knee on the radio, eh?”

Wally cocked his head.

“I don’t know that one.”

A British airman at a nearby table provided the translation.

“Pansy.”

Wally rubbed the back of his neck with long fingers.

“He told you?”

LB answered before Jamie.

“I thought it was a laugh.”

“Was it?”

“Yep.”

At this, LB stood. Doc, Quincy, and Jamie, all taller than LB, rose, too. They stacked in a line, ready as ever to jump behind him.

LB closed the distance to Marius, stepping beside Wally to dig a finger into the Afrikaans pilot’s burly chest.

“But understand, friend. He’s our moffie.”

Marius’s lips parted, but he had no quick words, stymied just long enough for LB to walk on. Doc tugged Wally by the sleeve to get him moving, too, past the waitress working the broom. The bar, like a tree full of birds when a cat has gone away, began to chirp again.

Chapter 3

When the chopper touched down, a hundred buzzards burst skyward in a dark spiral, a swirling, squealing pillar. On broad, black wings they rode the hard stench into the air, leaving feathers and white droppings over the carcass. The buzzards fluttered into a high, lazy circle to wait for the living to go away.

Neels stepped out of the chopper first, rifle in hand should there be big cats about. He tucked his sunglasses into a pocket, then held up a palm to keep Opu and the photographer in the helicopter until he’d cleared the area.

He did not approach the dead rhino but walked a wide circle around it, to leave the crime scene untouched for Opu. Nothing leaped out of the brush, though tracks were everywhere—of lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, jackals, wild dogs, and men. Neels signaled that it was safe.

Opu approached with his metal detector and knives, the police photographer with his camera and notepad. The pilot finished his shutdown, then emerged in his white bush hat and blue flight suit. The midday heat flooded down, unbroken by wind or shade. Insects kept a constant chatter in the brush, and flies clotted on the carcass.

With no breeze to push the smell of rot away, Neels could find no place to stand out of it. He backed away to lessen it. Opu noticed his grimace and shook his old, black head at Neels, who, even after so many years and carcasses, could stand the sight of fresh death better than its stink.

The rhino lay in a round patch of bare dirt. All the grass had been scrabbled away by the host of animals that had come to eat the carcass, evidence of the great commotion in the bush whenever something big died. The beast’s belly had been clawed open, likely by lions. The guts would have been devoured first, then the meat around the ribs, leaving the bones picked clean to bleach in the light. The smaller scavengers would have kept their distance while the big cats and hyenas gorged. Once the body had been stripped of its softer meats and organs, the buzzards swarmed in. They were patient and numerous enough to peck through the tough hide on the back and shoulders. Finally, the sun, rain, and flies would dissolve the flesh and skin into the bush, and the wind and elephants would scatter the skeleton.

Opu stepped onto the orb of raw earth, moving into the choking odor without a flinch. The man was a former poacher. Now an investigator for the Kruger, he rode this chopper to three, four, five murdered rhinos every day of the week.

Neels stood back with the photographer. The cameraman was Zulu, a talkative people, but this one had not spoken in the chopper and did not speak now, only stared. The pilot came alongside Neels. In the heat and reek, all three winced while Opu worked close to the corpse. The young South African National Parks pilot, an Englishman in his first week on the job, pinched his nose. Neels glared at him, and the pilot dropped his hand. Pinching the nose was disrespectful; the dead beast’s condition should be witnessed, breathed, recorded, and despised.

Opu waved the head of the metal detector over the rhino’s body, guiding it across the white picket of ribs into the emptied torso. Next he scanned the dirt around the body, seeking a casing or a bullet that might have been eaten by a scavenger and spit out or regurgitated. The detector beeped steadily, finding nothing.

The old ex-poacher tugged down the bill of his baseball cap against the sun. He swept the metal detector across the rhino’s gray skull. The beeps lengthened into a tinny wail.

Opu set the detector aside and knelt for his kit. He popped open the plastic case he’d brought, removing latex gloves and a long knife. The rhino lay awkwardly on his chest, on his own thick legs without composure. Opu flattened a gloved hand to the top of the beast’s great skull to mutter the Xhosa prayer that was his custom, his apology for his past.

The old man waved the photographer forward. Neels walked with him; the young pilot held his ground on the perimeter.

The smell grew grimmer with every step. Neels leaned into the stench to honor the beast and accept his failure to protect it, for it had been killed in his sector, Shingwedzi. Dead men stank but never this badly; they drew buzzards but not in the hundreds. They did not drip with other animals’ shit. Forty years ago in the Border War, mates and Angolans alike died in the hot bush, but back then Neels could lift a kerchief over his nose and mouth to pass them without regret. He’d killed many an Angolan and Cuban himself. But those bodies had been soldiers and enemies, they’d died as they saw fit, in uniform and battle, for a cause good or bad. The rhinos of the Kruger were dying to the brink of extinction for no cause but greed.

Neels had never cared how a dead poacher smelled.

He stood behind Opu, with the photographer beside him. Stench pulsed from the carcass like flames. The animal’s face had been butchered by an ax, hacked deep into the sinuses to carve out the horns by the roots. Jackals and buzzards had mauled much of the meat away from the snout to reveal how the ax had gashed the bone many times.

Opu fingered a bullet hole behind the rhino’s right eye socket.

“Entry here.”

On the other side, he pointed at a second, larger hole.

“Exit here.” The bullet had flattened on entry, then blown away a large piece of the rhino’s head on the way out.

“This.”

He indicated a deep hack behind the rhino’s neck, the cut in the shape of a V as if to fell a tree.

“And this.”

Opu touched a finger to a fourth wound, a puncture drilled through the top of the skull. Someone had stood where Neels stood and fired that round.

Neels growled.

“I will
moer
the sons of bitches who did this.”

Opu and the police photographer paid no mind, but Neels was glad to hear himself say this. He’d come along on the morning chopper ride to make himself freshly angry. His job was a hard one. Anger eased it.

From his knees, Opu aimed the tip of the knife at him and the policeman.

“Lift the head.”

Both men dug hands under the chin. The rhino’s skin was coarse, but its bottom lip felt soft, like that of a horse. Short whiskers brushed against Neels’s palms. With the photographer he shifted the weighty head to the side so Opu could dig into a small tunnel in the dirt. With his long knife the old man pried out a spent round. He held it up for Neels, then nodded to the photographer. The Zulu cop got busy with his camera, shooting close-ups of the carcass, the holes in the head, the one in the ground, and the wreckage of the rhino’s face.

Opu squeezed the bullet between his finger and thumb.

“Three hundred grains. Maybe more.”

Neels agreed.

“H & H .375 magnum.”

Opu sealed the round in a clear bag from his kit. He carved a small square of skin and flesh off the rhino’s neck and tucked that in another bag. The beast’s DNA would be recorded and cataloged. Later, if the horns were ever found, they could be typed back to this carcass. The same applied to the bullet; the ballistics would be checked against other poachers’ bullets to help spot a trend, a gang, a farmer’s stolen rifle, any clue.

Neels reached down to help Opu to his feet. The old man dusted off his knees, then doffed his cap to draw an arm across his brow.

“This one ran.”

“Ja.”

Opu tapped a finger below his temple.

“They missed the first shot. Caught up with it. Cut the spine. Then.”

He tapped a fingertip to the top of his own head to mimic the final shot. Opu puffed out his cheeks.

“One day dead.”

He gathered up his kit, knife, and metal detector and strode out of the circle of scoured dirt. The flies overlooked the photographer snapping the body. Opu sprayed green paint on a tree branch, to signal park rangers that this carcass had been spotted and recorded.

Neels walked past the pilot. They’d not met before today. When the ECP called in the coordinates yesterday, this became the first poaching in Neels’s sector in three weeks. At two hundred and twenty-five square miles, sixty thousand square hectares, Shingwedzi was one of the smaller of the twenty-two sectors of the Kruger. Higher concentrations of rhinos roamed to the west in Woodlands and Shangoni and south in the Marula region of the park. Usually, the poachers only snuck across Neels’s territory on their way to or from the border. Shingwedzi was more passageway than killing ground; it saw more spoor and scurrying poachers than killed rhinos. Because of this, Neels made certain the boys under his command were the best trackers and shots in the Kruger.

The pilot sucked his teeth.
“Bliksems.”
Though he was English, he used the Afrikaans word for bastards. “Can you ever catch them?”

Neels stopped beside the pilot. He glanced back, trying to see the dead rhino through this young man’s blue eyes after working one week in the Kruger. Neels couldn’t do it, couldn’t see the tragedy of only this carcass, couldn’t smell just this one.

He noted the word, “ever.” If he had that long?

“Ja.”

While Opu and the photographer recorded the carcass, while the pilot folded his arms and shook his head in the unshielded heat, Neels pieced together the story of the poaching.

The rhino had run, just as Opu said. A full day of wind and sun had eroded much of the spoor, but there remained enough blood and tracks to guide Neels along the rhino’s path a hundred meters south. The animal’s prints showed elongated strides as he rumbled over the veld; dots of blood marked his dying. A pair of sandals, a small-footed and lightweight poacher, ran alongside. The rhino crashed through scrub and thorns trying to escape, always in a straight line. Why?

The bullet holes in the skull behind the eyes. The rhino was likely blinded. Panicked. It could only run straight.

The poacher had dashed up and flailed at the fleeing rhino’s spine with a panga or an ax. Once the cord was severed, the beast dropped like a sack.

At the spot where the poacher’s sandals joined the rhino’s tracks, Neels hung his bush hat on a branch of a scraggly mopane. This saved his place. He returned to the chopper where the others waited.

He grabbed his backpack, rifle, and extra water. The cop buckled himself in, silent as his photographs. Opu reached for his own pack and made to climb out.

“I’ll come.”

The pilot nodded at Neels.

“Going off to catch them?”

“Going to follow them.”

“I see you meant what you said.”

“Ja.”

“Look. That was the last carcass for the day. I’m headed back to Skukuza.” This was the southern sector that housed the central offices for Kruger’s rangers and the airport. “I’ll wait till sundown for you to radio in.”

Opu dropped to the ground. The pilot brought the chopper to life, flipping switches and toggles. He tugged on his helmet as the copter’s blades turned.

Neels tossed the young pilot a thumbs-up. He bid no farewell to the stone-faced Zulu cop. With Opu beside him, Neels bent at the waist to hurry out of the chopper’s building wind.

Lifting off, the copter whipped up specters of dust and blew away the rotten smell. With Opu, Neels returned to his hat, hanging on the spindly tree, and faced east to the border. The buzzards, in flapping flights of five and ten, descended again on the dead rhino.

For the first hour, Opu did not speak and Neels only muttered. The poachers had done little to hide their spoor leading away from the carcass. They’d trod single file on game paths, and when they left the bare dirt for grass or rocks, the trail took up again in a line straight for the border. This paltry effort to evade insulted him as the sun climbed and the heat peaked in the buzzing bush.

Neels caught glimpses of three poachers in the earth. One was tall, marked by a longer stride in his sandal prints. The other two were slight, with smaller feet. What were they doing hunting in Shingwedzi? His sector rarely suffered more than a few poachings per year, and these were mostly happenstance and bad luck. In this set of tracks Neels sensed something purposeful, an incautious gait, an unwavering direction. These poachers knew where they were going. The notion nettled Neels more.

The white rhino they’d killed had been great, a solitary giant. Twenty years ago, when Neels was not a baas and had spent more time patrolling Shingwedzi, he’d watched the bull rhinos sharpen their horns against termite mounds and marula trees, witnessed battles between challengers for mates. The ground trembled when these beasts ran near; who would not tremble to feel this? Who had judged Shingwedzi and Neels vulnerable, to sneak here in the night? The image of the Goliath’s skeleton laid bare and its blood lapped up drew Neels onward, faster over the tracks, while the sun beat on his shoulders and neck and the rifle across his back. He did not stop because the poachers had not. He could see their feet; walking with them, he vowed he would see their faces.