Ivory (43 page)

‘Almost?'

‘
Ja
. I've also been tasked to get some vision and stills of the ivory being dumped at Skukuza, when he drops off the cargo net. National parks have asked for it, and it is their operation, after all.'

Steyn looked thoughtful, then nodded.

‘If it's all right with you, I'd like to stay on board with my guys and then get out at Skukuza. We've got a parks guy with us – an honorary ranger – who has a car at reception. He can drive us back out here to Satara to pick up our four-by-four.' Alex pointed a thumb back over his shoulder at Kobus, who was standing at the entrance to the tent. Kobus smiled and nodded.

Steyn scratched his chin. ‘Hmmm. Hadn't heard about another passenger. Shouldn't be a problem, though. There are two armed airmen on board, riding shotgun. Might be a bit tight for space, but there should be enough room for one more.'

‘That's great.
Baie dankie
.'

‘What next?' Novak asked when they walked back outside.

‘Earn your keep. Take lots of pictures. Be pushy, and don't take any shit. Kobus, go wait with the others.' The pilot nodded and walked off towards the car park.

‘Who are you?'

Alex turned around and was confronted by a giant of a man. Alex
was six foot two inches and no weed, but he felt dwarfed by the man in front of him, who had three inches on him at least, and had the build of a Cape Buffalo.

‘Army public relations,' Alex said. ‘We're here to film and photograph the culling operation.'

The man mountain grunted. ‘You want to see how it's done?'

‘Sure,' Alex said.

The man introduced himself as Frank Cole. He was an ex-Rhodesian national parks ranger, which Alex guessed must have put him in his early fifties at least, as that country hadn't existed by that name since 1980. Frank had a physique a twenty year old would have aspired to. His bare arms and long legs were mahogany brown and his bushy grey beard was stained yellow around the mouth from nicotine.

He lit a cigarette and said, ‘Come.'

Alex called to Novak and Kufa and increased his stride to catch up with the older man. ‘What's your role in all this? You're not wearing a uniform of any kind.'

‘I gave up uniforms a long time ago. And this shit. But they called me back. I used to run the culls up in Wankie and the Zambezi Valley. I came to South Africa when the blacks took over my country. When the same thing happened here and they stopped the culls in Kruger I took the package. I never thought I'd be back here killing elephants again.'

‘What do you do these days?'

‘I'm a PH.'

Alex should have guessed he was a professional hunter.

‘Tanzania and Zambia, mostly,' Frank continued. ‘Usually rich Americans and Germans, though some Russians as well. Mafia types. They tip well. Here's my crew.'

The other twelve men that Frank introduced Alex and his men to were of a similar age – none looked younger than forty. Like him, they had the dark wrinkled skin of men who lived a life outdoors in the African sun.

‘Cole?' Colonel De Villiers emerged from his tent holding a piece of paper.

‘Sir!' Frank snapped to attention and gave an overly theatrical salute. His men snickered.

De Villiers ignored the mockery. ‘Parks helicopter has found a herd for you. It's not far, so you can drive rather than fly. Five kilometres from here, on the S100 road. You follow the tar road from here and –'

‘I know where it is, Colonel. I know where they'll be drinking this time of the day.'

‘Yes, well here's a GPS coordinate just in case.'

Frank issued his orders with the understated authority of one who has commanded men in the field before. He called an African in national parks khaki over and spoke to the man in fluent Shangaan.

Minutes later Alex, Novak and Kufa were climbing into the back of a South African Army Unimog truck and bouncing along a dirt road that followed the course of an electricity power line.

‘We take the back roads,' Frank said, standing in the back of the truck, holding onto a tubular metal cross-bow that would normally support a canvas canopy. ‘That way no protesters can stop us, and no civilians have to see the big bad men with guns.'

Kufa filmed the hunters and the convoy of vehicles that swung in behind them. As well as the Unimog there were tractors towing flat-bed trailers, a truck towing a refrigerated storage trailer, and two
bakkies
with national parks field rangers in green bush uniforms standing in the backs.

‘I'd heard elephants were darted with a paralysing drug rather than shot outright,' Alex said. ‘But I don't see any dart guns.'

Frank nodded. ‘Before the culling ended last time, in 1995, we were using succinylcholine. It brought the elephants down but didn't kill them. We'd still have to go around and give each one a brain shot, but they were conscious throughout the whole thing. Using the drug removed the risk of an elephant being wounded by a bullet and suffering while it was tracked down, but better, I always said, for man and beast alike to end it quickly. If you're a good shot and you know what you're doing, the whole thing is over quick time.'

Alex pitied the rangers riding in the open vehicles behind them, as
they were soon lost in a growing cloud of red dust churned up by the Unimog and the other vehicles in front of them. But there was no time to waste. Frank spoke on a hand-held radio to the pilot of the national parks helicopter, who said the elephants had drunk from the N'wanetsi River and were now feeding in lightly vegetated country.

‘OK, keep them in sight but don't spook them,' Frank said into the radio. Frank turned back to Alex. ‘When it starts, you and your guys stay close to me. No one runs, whatever happens.'

All three of them nodded.

Novak snapped a photo of Frank looking out over the savannah. ‘I thought you'd be carrying something bigger than that,' he said, pointing at the 7.62 mm FN rifle the hunter carried.

‘One of these served me just fine for ten years during the bush war in Rhodesia, and in all the elephant culls I took part in. Wayne over there has a .375, and Jan's got a .458, but they're only in case we come across a big bull. The bulls shouldn't be near the breeding herds this time of year, but you never know when you might run into one. A 7.62 mm round's fine for a cow or a young one, and with a semiautomatic rifle you can put two or more shots in.' He snapped his fingers twice to emphasise the benefits of the military-style weapon over a bolt-action hunting rifle.

The truck slowed and Frank leaned over the side of the Unimog and spoke to the army driver through the window, switching effortlessly to Xhosa. The truck stopped and they climbed down.

Frank called them all together. ‘Right. We set up firm base here.' The radio hissed to life and he pulled it from a pouch on his belt.

‘
Herd is moving towards you now, Frank, over
.'

‘Roger. Let them come.'

He gave his orders quickly, telling his shooters to fan out on either side of him. The men took up positions in the shade of knob thorn trees and behind red-earth termite mounds. He pointed to where the herd would come from and Alex could tell they were down wind, so the elephants would not smell them until they were almost on top of them. By then it would be too late.

‘Are you filming this for real?' Alex whispered to Kufa.

‘Yes. I thought it would be worth something.'

Alex nodded. Frank held up a hand for silence, then pointed. Alex saw nothing for a few seconds, then the telltale flap of a sail-like ear caught his eye. The matriarch of the herd was a huge cow who stood as tall as a house. She moved slowly, her head looking from side to side every few steps. She paused and lifted her trunk, sniffing the air, but whatever it was seemed to be a false alarm, so she continued. Her newest calf trotted close behind her. Less than a year old, it was still thirsting for the milk in the swollen breasts between the cow's front legs, which were as thick as leadwood trees.

Behind the queen came her entourage of daughters and granddaughters. Alex could recognise just three males in the group of a dozen animals. They were juveniles and, like humans of the same age and sex, they were troublemakers. One chased another away from the forest of shuffling grey legs. Alex saw Kufa tense as one of the males let out a trumpet blast. He ran after his brother, but both stopped when they heard a low rumbling noise. It had come from the matriarch and it sounded like the empty grumblings of a huge hungry stomach. Whatever she said, it was enough to calm the unruly youngsters for the moment.

Alex heard the clatter of helicopter blades and looked up to see the green and gold livery of the national parks aircraft glinting in the sun.

‘Back off,' Frank whispered. ‘He's going to panic them.'

The matriarch lifted her head to the sky. She was old enough to remember the days when the rattle from the skies was a prelude to a deadly symphony of crackling death. She'd smelled the blood and offal on the ground and touched the bones of distant relatives once the meat, skins and tusks had been carted away.

‘She knows something's wrong,' Frank said.

The elephant started to turn. She raised her trunk and blew a high-pitched note that halted her family.

Alex smelled the musty stale odour of elephant on the faint breeze. He looked at Frank, who was silently shaking his head now, as if he felt
the elephant's confusion and mounting panic. He clearly didn't want to get involved in a chase, but what else could he do if the animals decided to change direction?

Frank strode from the shade of the tree that had also hidden him from view of the animals. As he walked he raised the steel-plated wooden butt of the FN into his shoulder and took aim.

The matriarch shook her head furiously, sending out a cloud of dust like a brown halo. She took two paces forward, raised her trunk high between her tusks and spread her ears out wide. It was a classic mock-charge stance, Alex knew. She was giving the man coming towards her one chance to back off and move out of her way.

‘On me,' Frank called to his men.

Alex, Kufa and Novak moved up behind him.

Frank was moving right, outflanking the elephant. When he had a clear view of her side he fired, twice into the spot where her left front leg met her huge body. She screamed and started to move forward, but the slugs had tumbled their way through her massive heart and the blood gushed from her with each of the four steps she managed.

When she crashed to the ground, first on her knees, she raised a cloud of dust and Alex could feel the vibration in the hot dry earth.

The rest of the herd panicked but did not run away. Their first instincts were concern for their leader, then protection of her and their young ones. The family closed up, all trying to reach the stricken body of the matriarch. The dying elephant's baby was sniffing its mother with its trunk and nudging her lifeless body with its head. He waved his trunk uselessly about in frustration. The young males circled the herd, screaming belligerently and looking for something or someone to vent their rage on. The other females closed in around their mother, backing towards her to meet the unseen threat.

Frank's men, all seasoned veterans of this kind of killing, had already been moving as their leader stepped out. They fanned out into a semicircle and began firing.

The stench of cordite and blood filled the air now and Alex's ears rang to the bang-bang, bang-bang of two well-aimed shots being fired
in quick succession – the double tap – and the crack and thump of projectiles splitting the air and driving into flesh.

The animals screamed, though the men were silent. They closed the distance, rifles always up, though the volume of fire that had crackled like dry burning brush at first had subsided to a desultory pop every now and then.

From a circular
laager
of tonnes of protective flesh and bone, an infant escaped. It was younger even than the matriarch's calf. Not even waist high to a man, it was little bigger than a pig, and probably not more than a few days old. It blundered out of the crush of falling and fallen bodies, and the cloud of dust that hung like poison gas over the bodies, straight towards Alex and his men.

‘Can't they save it?' Novak asked, although he knew the answer.

Frank Cole lifted his rifle wearily and looked through the sights as the tiny elephant walked closer and closer to him. Alex had no idea why it was drawn towards the hunter; perhaps it was the man's sheer height and bulk.

No one spoke and those of the rest of the herd that had not died in the first few seconds had now been put out of their misery.

There was silence and all eyes turned to Frank.

Alex saw a drop of sweat fall from the hunter's brow and run heavily down the wooden butt of the old rifle. Alex thought he detected a tremor in the brown hands that were spotted with age and scarred from a life full of thorns.

Frank fired twice.

The baby elephant dropped at his feet.

J
ane looked out over the harbour from the room in the Radisson Waterfront, Cape Town, and wished she could fly.

Why couldn't she be like normal people, who hopped cheap charter flights to Spain or Italy for a weekend or to Australia or the Far East for their annual holidays? Why, whenever she even contemplated the notion of confronting her fear, did she know for certain that she would be counting the minutes and seconds to her inevitable death as the airliner plummeted towards the ground or sea?

She was booked on another ship home and the irony was she had almost lost her life on the high seas when she'd been on George's freighter.

The time and cost of the impending voyage weighed heavily on her mind, too. Now she was out of a job, the price of a last-minute berth on the cruise ship to Portsmouth would hurt even more than usual and would very nearly deplete her savings account. She was pretty sure she would be able to get another job fairly soon, even without references, though she might run out of cash before she could start and that would mean giving up the flat and moving back in with her parents. The thought depressed her. It would be weeks before she could start earning again. At least, she sighed, she could busy herself on the
internet on board for the next two weeks, emailing off her CV and job applications.