White Bone (31 page)

E
asy!” Guuleed hollered as the truck he was riding hit a rock. The creek bed had widened, the span of it littered with stones. “Go easy, man!”

The truck slowed. Fever trees clogged each bend, giving the driver tough choices.

“The plane is landing,” a man called out from the backseat.

Guuleed radioed his men in the trailing trucks to remain in the dry creek bed. They were to quickly search the area where the plane had taken off and rendezvous with him at the landed plane, some three or four kilometers away.

Guuleed could hardly believe his luck. Brantingham—it had to be Brantingham! And Snaggle Tooth, the prize of all prizes!

Though his rival had flown less than five minutes, he appeared to be landing again. Engine trouble? He shook his head. To be safe,
his truck would pursue the plane, while the others made sure the takeoff was not intended as a ruse to draw Guuleed and his men away from the elephant.

“Take us out of this godforsaken creek bed, now!” he told his driver, pointing up into the scrub.

S
eeing the back of John’s head from the seat in front of her, recognizing Brantingham passed out in the pilot’s seat, lent a dreamlike quality to what Grace was feeling and experiencing. On some level, she understood she’d been rescued; on another, her blood pulsed like she’d drunk Tunisian coffee.

Her muscles tweaked and flexed of their own accord. The space was too small and claustrophobic. She longed for the open air of the bush. The plane’s instruments and equipment struck her as manmade and unnatural, something she’d not felt before.

They, and this plane, didn’t belong. Her thoughts battled with an instinct to flee the plane and run. How, she wondered, could she think such a thing? Where did such thoughts come from?

“I am frightened,” she said, making sure John heard her.

“You’re the strongest one in this plane, Grace. Believe it. We’re all right. We’re heading for those trees.” He reached back and took her hand in his. “You amaze me.”

The plane shook so badly over the rough ground that Grace feared it would come apart.

“It is not the plane,” she said. “Never mind.”

“What?” He glanced back. That was all she needed—his eyes. Concerned, caring eyes. “We’re going to be okay.”

“I want to help,” she said. “I can help.”

He squeezed her hand. “There’s a surprise,” he said sarcastically.

“I cannot laugh, John. I have forgotten how to laugh.”

“I don’t believe that. We can find it again.”

We,
was all she heard. “Okay.”

“That’s my girl.” Knox laughed to himself loudly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“What? How did it sound?”

“Sexist.”

“Bullshit.” Grace seldom cursed. Knox fought back a smile. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. “John. It sounded good to me.”

K
oigi ordered his driver and navigator to search the immediate area of the plane’s tire tracks and then to take up a defensive position, guarding the truck. He and Blackie hiked quickly up a hill overlooking a natural choke point in the creek bed. A pair of fever trees crowded the route, narrowing it to no wider than two truck widths.

He radioed the second truck. His men took up position on the opposite slope. They owned the choke point. Guuleed and his men would be trapped, the only way out behind them, and Blackie’s lethal skills could prevent that option.

Stalking their way up the hill, Koigi and Blackie ducked lower as tendrils of rising dust swirled, threatening to reveal their position. To be safer, they dropped, lay prone, Koigi adopting the role of Blackie’s spotter.

Quietly, Koigi again radioed his men, alerting them to Guuleed’s approach.
“Kila la kheri!”
“Good luck” in Swahili.

The slow speed of the two trucks was to Koigi’s advantage. If he hadn’t wanted his opponent forced into the ambush, he would have had Blackie start picking off men. As it was, he and Blackie would serve as cover. He placed the binoculars down and readied his own rifle in case it was needed. His sore shoulder wasn’t helping. Still, his heart pounded in his chest. Adrenaline. Always the same. He looked over at Blackie, whose eye was pressed to the scope as two trucks rolled into view.

“I’ve got them.”

K
oigi, weapon at the ready, watched through the binoculars as the driver’s head exploded. Blackie had taken him out from two hundred meters. Through the spray of blood and quaking bodies, Koigi searched for Guuleed.

His rangers made quick work of the ambush. Guuleed’s men returned a lame attempt but, sandwiched as they were, and unable to maneuver the trucks, they took multiple rounds each.

Two fell from the trucks. The rest died sitting down. Ten, maybe twelve men. Forty seconds at the most. Four men with raised hands.

Koigi felt no remorse, only a huge sigh of relief. These men, who had killed numerous elephants, rhinos and his own rangers, who had eluded him on three separate occasions and put a bullet in his shoulder—Kenya was rid of them now. Their departure offered a better chance of survival for his beloved animals.

The only missing piece of the celebration was to identify Guuleed’s body among them.

“Boss!” Blackie had his rifle’s sight trained away from the ambush.

Koigi swung the binoculars south. A third truck had emerged from behind the opposing hill. It was speeding across the flat in the direction of the plane that had landed.

“Bastard,” Koigi muttered. “Too far for a shot?”
A moving shot
, he thought.

Blackie with a rifle was akin to a painter with a brush. Koigi watched the truck’s three passengers through the binoculars. He could feel Blackie find the vehicle and lead it. His rifle barked. One of the three small figures in the distant truck slumped, a fine pink mist rising like a halo above him. An impossible shot.

He and Blackie scrambled down the hill, running toward their truck.

G
uuleed heard the sudden burst of gunfire. KGA? Larger Than Life? His men had driven into a shitstorm. He wanted to think it was his men doing the shooting, but when a lighter volley followed a few long seconds later, he knew as any leader knows that the second burst belonged to his team—and by the light volley, he knew they’d already suffered serious casualties.

It erupted then like a fireworks finale, the exchange of gunfire so furious it sounded like rocks rolling down a hill. To try to give backup now would be suicide. His driver and navigator looked at him expectantly, anticipating that order.

“The plane,” Guuleed said. “Now. As fast as this shit heap will go!”

The look on the other two faces, as they reacted to his decision
not to support his other men, shook him to the core. But he kept his own face still. The sacrifice of the others would not be in vain.

At that same moment, the man between him and his driver lost his head to a bullet. It was like a melon exploding, blood everywhere. Guuleed ducked down low.

“Faster!”

K
nox maneuvered the damaged plane to the far side of a stand of fever trees, wanting cover. The safari truck was closing in on them, fast.

From their left appeared a thin line of rising dust. “Those are my men,” Brantingham said, his head swiveling with difficulty. Knox blinked; he hadn’t realized the man was conscious. “Five kilometers. Too far. Too late for us.”

Ignoring him, Knox scrambled from the plane, rifle in hand. The Larger Than Life rangers needed at least five minutes to close the distance. The safari truck threw shots at him, peeling chunks of bark and wood from the fever trees. Knox dropped to one knee, steadied the long rifle against a tree trunk and squeezed off three more rounds. He reloaded quickly, stealing glances at the opposition bearing down on him.

The truck’s engine died and the vehicle glided into an area of
sparse trees, the driver cutting sharply to put the truck perpendicular to Knox’s position.

The two men—that’s all he saw—hunkered down inside the vehicle. They aimed and fired in his direction. Knox checked to his left: the plume of dust had barely grown higher, putting the rangers still well to the southeast.

Knox did not return fire, but waited. Soon, the firing stopped. In the distance, a second truck approached at high speed.

Thirty yards of scrub and rock separated the two copses. The man in the front seat lifted his head to have a look. The truck rocked forward on its springs; Knox sighted the head of the man he was about to shoot—and then he gasped audibly.

There, in his line of sight, came the massive gray elephant, its black ears flapped out wide, its massive head leading its lumbering charge. Once again the mass of the thing stunned him. The deep crags in the skin, the scars and stains and age. The wild eyes. As bewildering as anything he’d seen.

He had to hold the attention of the two in the truck. If they looked back, they would see the elephant and drop the beast immediately.

Knox had heard stories of elephants’ keen memory; how some could return to a pile of bones three years after a poaching and shed tears over the remains; how they learned smells to avoid and could recognize the human form in silhouette.

Snaggle Tooth had not shied at the weapon fire as he should have. He had waited nearby and now, with a prolonged cease-fire, had taken it upon himself to avenge, threaten or protect. Perhaps it was a misguided suicide mission. A kamikaze elephant. Perhaps he had smelled Brantingham and knew him as a friend. Knox saw only a bold, heroic charge, the elephant’s one glorious curving tusk nearly scraping the ground.

Knox darted between trees to hold the attention of the two in the truck. No shots.

The elephant reached the truck. The men startled and turned; the passenger struggled to raise his rifle. But before he could aim, the elephant slipped his tusk beneath the vehicle, lifted and heaved. A gun fired. The vehicle rolled up onto its side, as if made of cardboard. Both occupants were thrown out, sprawled onto the earth ahead of the truck, which tumbled upside down and on top of them.

A voice cried out. The elephant heaved again, lifting and rolling the truck angrily, ears out, eyes enormously wide. Knox saw one of the men reappear, flattened to the ground, nearly cut in two by a roll bar that had crushed his body beneath his ribs. To Knox’s astonishment, the second man, noticeably wounded, slipped between the elephant’s rear legs and scrambled away. Knox sighted down the barrel. Slipped his finger to the trigger. Squeezed.

The man lost a piece of his leg in a rose-colored spray. Knox pulled away from the rifle scope, his finger still on the trigger. He hadn’t fired the weapon.

The elephant roared and fled the gunfire. His moving aside revealed the second vehicle. There, alongside of it, was the unmistakable profile of Koigi.

For Knox, it was as if this second vehicle and Koigi had closed the distance magically, moving in seconds.

Koigi, not Knox, had shot apart the man’s leg. He called out to the wounded man in Swahili. The man struggled to his feet and stood defiantly twenty yards away.