White Bone (29 page)

A
pprehensive, Knox trailed a few feet behind Brantingham as they followed the disturbed sand and earth left in the wake of the five elephants. The trail looked as if it had been made by a tractor, dragging a heavy implement. Alongside, the occasional small bootprint appeared.

“You see this?” Brantingham said. “Small strides. Walking slowly. She’s following the ellies at their pace. Smart girl. She knows they will head to water. Knows the safari guides will be looking for such sightings.”

“Smart girl,” Knox echoed. In contrast to Grace’s steady tracks, he was having trouble walking, overcome by the discovery of the campsite.

Fifteen minutes later Brantingham picked up his pace. Knox saw why. A scrap of fabric, hanging from a bush. They reached the marker and saw what turned out to be a backpack and a pile of clothes. The items Brantingham had theorized about.

“Well, sir,” Brantingham said. “I’d never have expected this. She stripped the man down to his shorts. You see?”

“Not really.”

“The shirt. A pair of trousers beneath the pack. I’ll wager another set of clothing’s inside. Shall we take a look?”

“Sure.” Knox forced the word out. He could barely speak, was struggling to understand what any of it meant. Grace wouldn’t abandon warmth, or the storage offered by the pack. His gut wrenched as reality sank in. “What’s it mean? Why leave it?”

“That is the question.” Brantingham had taken photographs at the campfire. Now he studied the back of his camera. Took several shots of the clothing and backpack before approaching the bag.

Knox stayed with him as Brantingham carefully emptied the backpack, revealing a second set of filthy clothes and little else. “Well, there you have it.”

“Have what, exactly?” Knox asked.

“Smart, as we’ve said. Bush smart. She understood the ellies could smell her. Brilliant! They’d kept her at a distance, you see. A distance she wanted to close.”

They walked another thirty minutes. Knox felt the desolation of the landscape, the exposure and isolation. The plane was miles behind them now. Brantingham was in his element. Knox barely existed to him.

“Christ to hell!” Brantingham cursed. The words cut sharply into Knox’s thoughts. Beside him, Brantingham went down on one knee. He took a photograph, then used the arm of his sunglasses to hook and capture a brass shell from the sand. “Five-four-five by thirty-nine millimeter. Kalashnikov seventy-four. Single shot . . .” He dropped the shell into a leg pocket of his cargo pants and began taking additional photographs. “Kneeling shot. Close range. For fuck’s sake, she shot him!”

“Your men told her about the collar,” Knox suggested. “She saw a way out. She took it.”

“They scattered here. See?” Knox nodded. The elephant tracks fanned out in several directions. “I expect we’ll pick up blood within a few meters. Damn it all to hell. We separate. I’ll take these three. You follow each of those. The blood may look like water, like a piss spot. You’ll have to handle it.” He rubbed his fingers together. “The sun dries it quickly.”

“Understood.” Knox started with the one farthest to his left. “How far?”

“Start with fifty meters. Hard to imagine she missed, but if she did, we’ll need to stay with this.”

Brantingham walked off, head down.

Knox walked the first track for fifty yards. He was well into following the second when Brantingham called out. Knox joined him.

“You see?”

“No.”

“Just there.” Brantingham pointed.

Even being guided, it took Knox a moment to spot the boot heel mark.

“This is the ellie she’s following. The one she shot.”

“Blood?”

“Not yet.”

“Shouldn’t we see blood?” Knox asked.

“Depends on the shot. They’re big animals. Blood can dry on skin before hitting the ground.”

“Let me ask you this,” Knox said. “Why a single shot? If she’s desperate enough to shoot it, why not take advantage of an automatic?”

“Ellies can run over twenty kilometers per hour, John. There may not have been time for a second shot. Maybe another ellie
blocked her. The gun could have jammed. Kalashnikovs can be temperamental. We won’t know until we find him.”

Her,
Knox thought.

On they walked, following both the elephant’s long strides and the boot impressions that followed.

“They can’t sustain a run for more than half a kilometer,” Brantingham volunteered.

Either the sun or the discouragement or both took the talk out of them. Knox applied more sunscreen, pulled up his shirt collar. A line of ants, interrupted by the elephant tracks, drew a broken calligraphy in the sand.

It was another twenty minutes before Brantingham spoke, and then it was in a whisper so faint Knox wasn’t sure if he was imagining it. Extremely slowly, Brantingham lay down prone. Knox followed, again not seeing whatever it was Brantingham saw. The man hauled the binoculars to his eyes, propped himself up on his elbows.

“Alive,” he said. “Standing. Four hundred meters. Collar’s on.”

“Snag—”

“Yes!”

“Four hundred meters is within the range of a Kalashnikov.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She’s been captive for days,” Knox said. “Possibly out here in the bush. A lot can go wrong with a person’s mind. We go in quietly, and we go in carefully. For her sake, and ours.”

The landscape was crusty with rock. Grasses and bushes were bunched tightly before them. Brantingham spoke in a whisper.

“Whether he’s been hit or not, he won’t let us get within a hundred meters. You can call out for her, but I’d appreciate a closer look at him first.”

“To see if he’s wounded.”

“Yes.” Brantingham belly-crawled to Knox, handed him a Glock
17 with a spare magazine. “We’ve come a long way, John. Give me the extra ten minutes I need.”

“I don’t need this,” Knox said.

“It’s for Snaggle Tooth. Fire into the air if he charges. He likes to charge, that one. Stand your ground.
Do . . . not . . . run.
His legs aren’t nimble, but his head and trunk will surprise you. You can jump . . . dive out of the way. But only at the last second. You understand?”

Knox nodded.

“Head a hundred meters straightaway in that direction,” Brantingham said, pointing into the thicker bush, “then ahead another hundred until you’re even with him. If she’s here, she’s hunkered down.”

“She could easily shoot at us, mistaking us for the enemy,” Knox warned. “We do not return fire.”

“Keep an eye out. You inspect him from this side. I’ll look from the other. Raise one arm if no sign of a wound. Two, if he’s been hit.”

Nodding, Knox crawled into the shrub, rising up on all fours where the vegetation stood higher. It was slow and difficult going. He quickly lost track of Brantingham and the elephant he had yet to see.

K
nox crossed the bootprints, his nerves jangling, his senses heightened. He scanned the area for Brantingham, having immediately lost his own interest in anything to do with the elephant. Nothing. The guy was a ghost.

Mindful of Grace’s fragile state of mind, and of the Kalashnikov, he stayed low on hands and knees, though everything in him was desperate to stand and call her name. The ground became rock hard. He lost the bootprints.

He heard the elephant before he saw it. The animal was using its trunk to slap dust and dirt over itself in a noisy display thirty yards to Knox’s right. He still couldn’t see Brantingham, but Knox pressed ahead anyway, dropping into a belly-crawl. He raised the binoculars and scanned carefully, frame by frame. No visible wounds.

He raised his right arm.

When he saw Brantingham, it was because the man wanted him to—three feet up an acacia tree less than twenty feet from the
elephant. Brantingham carefully and slowly hoisted a single arm. No wounds on the elephant. Knox had been granted permission to call out.

Knox lowered his arm and took one last look at the beast to make sure he hadn’t signaled prematurely.

That’s when he saw it.

A perfectly round black hole faced him from a bush. At first it looked like a berry that didn’t belong. But it was too perfect a circle. Machined. The muzzle of the Kalashnikov.

He refocused, trying to separate the shrub from the rifle.

“Grace,” he whispered, so dryly the word fell only feet in front of him. He cleared his throat and tried again. To the naked eye, the gun barrel appeared to be suspended, propped inside the shrub maybe. Knox looked around, fearing it was being used as a diversion.

Nothing.

“Grace. It’s me.”

He kept his hands out in front of him. He would not provoke a shot. When he finally saw the unflinching eye, he gasped aloud. Right there, the whole time, at the end of the rifle looking back at him.

He imagined he could make out a hairline. One ear, perhaps. No chin or shoulders. No body. Just the eye, floating inside the shadowy interior of a thorn shrub alongside the Kalashnikov.

Slowly, the form of an arm and elbow emerged, materialized from within the puzzle of branches and leaves. A shoulder. A piece of a woman’s chest. She was sitting, the Kalashnikov resting on a knee.

Again, he called her name. Again with difficulty. “Gr . . . ay” it sounded like.

The muzzle twitched. For a second he thought she’d pulled the trigger. Then she pushed forward, rose out of the thorny shrub without any apparent sensation of it scratching her.

She was kneeling, naked in hiking boots, her skin smeared brown with mud. Her limbs were scratched and bug-bitten. Her wrist was swollen horribly. The one eye he could see looked distrustful and savage. Wild. She held a metal spear under an armpit and across the gun stock, while still managing to hold the rifle.

“It’s me: John,” he coughed out. “It’s me. I’m here. I’m going to stand now. Slowly. I’m here to help you. There is another man with me. You met him. Travis Brantingham. He is a friend, Grace. We are both your friends. You’re safe now.”

He’d seen shock in hostage victims, been taught how to deal with it. But all the training went away. This was Grace; this was different.

Knox had also been traumatized on the battlefield, had seen others much worse off than he. Doctors spoke of adjustment periods, of giving the brain time to forget.
But some things are never forgotten,
Knox thought.

The weapon remained aimed at his chest.

He screwed up his courage to speak the first words that came to him.

“‘I find in my heart both something missing . . .’”
he coughed,
“
‘and something fulfilling. Missing, when too much time separates us. Fulfilling when we are together. It is a small thing, perhaps. I cannot say. But its very existence interests me.’
Your words, Grace. Your words to me.”

The gun dropped dangerously, pointing toward the ground. As she reached to cover her eyes, her shoulders shook.

“No . . .” She backed away, crab-walking on all fours, her eyes bloodshot and jaundiced in a sunbaked face smeared with mud. She cried out for a second time. But this time the cry was his name.
“Jooohhhnnn!”

“Good God!” Brantingham said, surprising them both.

Grace hoisted the spear over her shoulder.

“No, Grace! No! He’s a friend. You know him.”

“Travis Brantingham,” the man introduced himself. “You’re one hell of a shot, Ms. Chu.” To Knox: “Single shot through the transmitter. If it isn’t perfect, she either kills him or scares him off. Brilliant!”

Gently, Brantingham set down his rifle. “Brilliant,” he repeated. “I’m telling you, John, you or I could try that shot a dozen times and only get it right once.” Now he addressed Grace. “How difficult it must have been, how hard to make that choice, take that risk.”

Grace lowered the spear.

Knox spoke. “Grace! ‘
I miss you when we are apart . . . This is the John Knox I want to know better.’
”

Her shoulders shook. He moved toward her, slipping off his jacket as he approached. He held it out to her. Trembling all over, she set down the spear and slipped into the oversized windbreaker.

“Thank you.” She leaned into Knox’s arms. He held her. Their fingers webbed together. “I knew you would come.”

Knox felt his throat close off.

She repeated it several times.

Brantingham retrieved the spear and the rifle, pulled her improvised sack from within the bush. Neither man spoke. Though Grace staggered, she was surprisingly steady on her feet. Knox moved her out of the shrubs as Brantingham offered her water from his canteen. “Slowly at first.”

She drank. He offered her a fresh orange from his pocket and she bit into it, skin and all. The juice dribbled down her chin, running over badly chapped lips swollen twice their normal size.

“I have a first aid kit in the plane. I should have thought of it.”

Knox removed his shirt and, bare-chested, tied it onto Grace’s body as a skirt. “There,” he said. “Better.”

“I can carry her,” he added to Brantingham.

“It’s too far, and would take too long, even with the two of us sharing the burden.”

“Your men.”

“Yes. I can call in our location. They’re already on their way. Wait here. I’ll return to the plane. I should be able to land out there,” he said, pointing to the desert. “Better . . . much better for her if we can fly her out. It would be hours overland.” He added, “Or I can wait, if you’d rather.”

“How long?” Knox asked.

A series of calls were made. Brantingham came off the last one and shook his head gravely at Knox. “We are advised to hurry,” he said. Knox translated the undertone. “My men are at least ninety minutes out. We can beat that easily. I will pick you up in the plane. I’m thinking we’re two to three kilometers away. Give me forty minutes at the outside. Move her to that stand of trees there. That will be my landmark.” He searched Grace’s sack. Came away with three magazines of ammunition. He left Knox with his lever-action Marlin 1895 with an extended barrel and scope. “Holds six,” he said, handing Knox a box of shells. “It’s fast, and accurate to two hundred meters. You might want to practice loading. It can take a few tries to get it right.”

Grace groaned, half asleep in Knox’s arms. The men shared an ominous moment of eye contact.

“Three trucks,” Brantingham said. “No safari markings. Poachers, more than likely. If not, something even worse.”

“Keep low. Run fast,” Knox said.