The Devil's Horn (10 page)

In his small office, Neels cut on the oscillating fan. His desk was clean save for a VHF radio and a daybook that said he was to pick up the Shingwedzi ECP team at six o’clock and drop off the next one, these two in the station. He set his cell phone next to the radio. Together, the two devices could reach almost anyone in the world.

Neels fingered the cell phone, still warm from his pocket. He lifted the radio’s microphone to his mouth, the plastic cool at his lips. He replaced the mic to its hook. The radio and phone were a rebuke. Who was there to talk to?

But he wanted to talk. Not about the night before or the man he’d killed; that was just one of hundreds he’d put a bullet into between the Border War and twenty years in the Kruger. He wasn’t concerned about consequences from the killings; no ranger was. In a winter meeting, in Pretoria, between the twenty-three Kruger section chiefs and the top federal prosecutor for South Africa, Neels and the rest had been informed privately, in terms not to be repeated, that on her watch, no SANParks ranger would ever be prosecuted for murdering a poacher.

Neels wanted to talk about anything else. The cell phone and the radio on the desk offered themselves. He had only to dial, and he could talk about a garden, a game, some news or memory, cars, food, any topic, anything but the bush and the corpses of animals and men. Neels envisioned himself speaking to someone; he didn’t need to recognize the face or voice in his imagination—just a person who knew nothing about him. What came out was a conversation about love and hatred and how to stand them both. He closed his office door on the two rangers readying for their five-day disappearance into the park beginning at sundown. He sat by himself with only the radio, the phone, and the calendar on his desk.

For an hour, the two Zulus made very little noise on the other side of Neels’s door. The rangers packed and armed themselves; they gathered food and shelter as Neels had taught them. Neels heard only the scrape of a chair, a closet closing, a murmur. It was not enough. Like Karskie had said, it was not enough. He wished to throw open his door, to see and hear more, not two dark men readying themselves to vanish. Neels looked in his lap at his hard and aging hands, and he wanted. A party, a Christmas, a braai, a
family, perhaps joy. He envisioned a ham to carve on the desk in front of him. He considered what he might say to his friends for the occasion. The cell phone rang, and he was surprised to find himself on his feet. He wondered if he’d conjured the ring, too, until it rang again. The ham before him did not dissolve. The phone rang a third time, and Neels blinked himself back to the empty room in the station deep in the Kruger. The fan oscillated past him, beyond him, and he answered.

“Ja.”

“It’s Karskie.”

“What do you have?”

“The name you gave me. Juma. I found some things.”

“Ja?”

“He’s an old, black Rhodesian. Moved into Mozambique about ten years ago. Lives in Mapai, in a mansion. He’s untouchable there, local hero. Got his own syndicate. He’s drugs, some guns. Human trafficking. Rotten piece of work.”

“What about horn?”

“No word Juma’s ever traded horn.”

“Find word.”

“I’ll keep digging.”

Karskie hung up. The ranger station’s timbers and tin roof crackled from the rising heat. The Zulu trackers had gone to their bunks to rest before dusk. Chubby Professor Karskie considered what he was doing digging. Neels, thinking of war and the Kruger, laughed at how different their two notions of that word must be.

The silence around him, the heaviness of it all, abated. For these moments, Neels’s laughter was the loudest sound in the ranger station, perhaps in Shingwedzi.

Chapter 7

The battle raged over the grassy field beside the air base’s main runway. A hundred South African troops and a dozen war machines surged forward by air and land; their advance was loud and fiery. Nearby, close enough to feel the thumps of the explosions, today’s twenty thousand awed people, half with children on their shoulders, stood in a half-mile-long line, clapping, while an announcer narrated the fight over loudspeakers.

LB watched from a lawn chair on the east-west runway, binoculars up. He cheered each blast, shouted out the spectacle to the lounging team behind him and for Wally, who was not watching, either, but working. Over and again, LB called out, “You gotta see this!”

The infantry company on the ground moved in fine formation toward their pretend target, a hangar. At their rear a pair of choppers swooped in, hovering eighty feet off the ground to discharge two dozen more troops, Special Forces on fast ropes. The South Africans were good. They slid down the ropes smoothly, raised weapons, and moved in a neat firing line. Preset charges blew on their left and right, and none of the soldiers flinched. Behind them, more armored transports charged into place, more men leaped out. Another pair of choppers crept just above them, aerial protectors. Out of nowhere in all the noise and show, a big helicopter gunship howled past, low and lethal; the announcer called out, “Here come the big guns!” A detonation far ahead of the troops sent a gasp through the big crowd as if the gunship had fired. A lone tank rumbled forward, too, painted in desert camouflage, spinning its turret, looking for enemies. The tank’s commander rode in the open cupola, hamming it up with one arm out to point the way.

A South African Air Force Gripen, sharp-nosed like a dagger, flashed across the scene next. The jet tore a marvelous rent through the afternoon, so fast its own roar trailed it. Thousands of hands in the crowd, big and little, black and white, reached up to the streak. LB followed the Gripen in the binoculars, watched it snap into a barrel roll just above the earth, then climb straight up on a tail of blue flame.

Satisfied, LB folded the lawn chair and strolled over to his team. War, from the remove of safety, was an epic thing to witness. The endless boy in him thrilled at the thunder of guns, at the thrum of engines, at trained soldiers and dangerous machines moving in concert. LB couldn’t understand why anyone who did this stuff for a living, given the chance to see it without the adrenaline and risk, wouldn’t watch and enjoy it. That was why he’d called out all the highlights of the exhibition to the rest of the team, to shame them a bit and remind them that what they did in real life was fucking exciting.

He walked under the great wing of
Kingsman 1
, the first of two waiting US Air Force HC-130s. Quincy, Doc, and Jamie lay on the tarmac in the wing’s shadow. Dressed in ABUs (airman battle uniforms), they rested their heads on their parachutes, all eyes closed. The military taught this lesson early on: never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, and never just lie down when you can sleep. Wally didn’t recline with the team but stood apart, overseeing the loadmasters while they secured one of the two Guardian Angel Air-Deployable Recovery Vehicles, the PJs’ muscular, all-terrain, souped-up buggies. They would toss these GAARVs out of the planes at two thousand feet as the air show’s final performance.

LB approached. Wally had little to do mother-henning the loading of the GAARVs. The vehicles were tubular steel, armor plated, and gunned up, with fat tires and powerful engines designed to climb, dash, and fight in and out of trouble. Because America’s military and allies operated in every environment on the planet, the GAARVs, like the GAs, had to be prepared to go anywhere to execute their mission of CSAR (combat search and rescue).

A forklift had set one of the vehicles at the foot of the cargo plane’s lowered gate; straps held the GAARV tight to a cardboard crush pallet that would absorb the impact of the parachute landing. The loading crew had hooked the pallet to a winch to hoist it up the gate’s rollers into the bay. Of all the world’s militaries, the United States’ pararescuemen were famed for jumping out of planes onto any kind of environment—ice, mountain, jungle, or sea—in any weather, with anything: zodiac inflatable rafts, wave runners, motorcycles, ATVs, all sorts of heavy equipment, weapons, Jaws of Life, cars.

LB watched Wally from behind. The man was doing the same thing LB had done from his lawn chair, making a statement. LB believed the team should have some fun, hoot and holler at things blowing up, support their South African hosts, not lie about and snooze. Likewise, Wally stood here in the sun with his fists on his hips while the loadmasters did their jobs, just to show the team that no detail was too small not to be checked and rechecked.

LB strolled past Wally to the GAARV, jumping up on the plane’s ramp while the buggy was hauled over the rollers. He poked at the cardboard fenders and cushions, tugged on the restraining straps, and pretended to take an interest. Wally nodded and did not catch that he was being lampooned. LB shot the loadmasters a thumbs-up, and they, too, got no sense of the joke. He clomped down the metal ramp to Wally, who did not turn his sunglass-covered gaze away from the GAARV fading into the cargo hold. LB put his own hands on his hips, a shorter, much thicker version of Wally.

“So.”

Out on the air base’s sunny, trampled field, the last fireball erupted as the mini war wound down. Over the loudspeakers, the announcer declared victory.

Wally hooked a thumb across his shoulder at the second HC-130,
Kingsman 2
, thirty yards away. Its GAARV had already been loaded and stowed. Wally, LB, and Doc would ride on that plane, Jamie and Quincy here on
Kingsman 1
.

“All loaded. We spin up in five.”

LB rubbed his hands together. “I’ll get the boys moving.”

He tucked two fingers into his mouth to loose an earsplitting whistle. Under the wing, Doc sat up in the shade. LB twirled a finger beside his head. Doc rose to his boots and began to rouse the team.

Wally peered down on LB from behind his opaque lenses.

“What do you need, LB?”

“Are you pissed at me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You haven’t said two words to me since yesterday.”

“Busy.”

“Or pissed. I figure you’re pissed.”

Wally exhaled through his nose, stuttering, a private chuckle.

“No more than usual.”

“Good. Sorry about yesterday. That guy was a dick.”

“He didn’t start out that way.”

“Fair enough.”

The team clambered upright. Lugging their jump containers, Quincy and Jamie lumbered over the tarmac to climb the lowered ramp of
Kingsman 1
. Doc shouldered both his chute and LB’s. Today’s jump would be without weapons or med rucks; the PJs would simply follow the twin GAARVs down to the ground, cut them loose from their chutes and straps, rev them up, then tear up more of the air base’s infield, all to cheers.

Kingsman 1
’s engines whined, caught, and coughed greasy puffs. The propellers turned, the prop noise mounted. LB had to shout.

“You and Torres set a date yet?”

Wally shrugged. He hefted his own container over his shoulder.

“We’re waiting.”

“For what?”

“Got some decisions to make.”

“Like what?”

Wally raised his free arm and slapped it down against his hip.

“First you give me a hard time. Now you’re pushing me.”

LB raised his volume higher, increasing it more than enough to be heard over the rising engines.

“I’m just saying. If you’re gonna do it, do it.”

“And what do you know?”

LB lifted his hands with his voice.

“Whoa. What does that mean?”

“It means you got no idea about marriage and a family. As in none. Okay? LB?”

“I?” LB rammed a finger into his own burly chest. “I have no idea about family?”

Then what was all this? What was every scar he bore; every nightmare; every story, laugh, and worry; every person and thing he loved? Who were these men around him?

Before LB could answer, Doc joined them. Wally and LB both froze with hands up, pausing their gesticulating and punctuating.

Doc looked from one to the other, then dropped LB’s chute on the runway.

“No. Not doing it.”

That was all Doc said. In the swelling pitch of the spinning propellers, he climbed the ramp into
Kingsman 1
, to jump instead with Quincy and Jamie.

LB and Wally sat opposite each other in the thrumming cargo bay of
Kingsman 2
. Over in his mesh seat, Wally leaned his helmet back against the fuselage, reflective sunglasses down. LB couldn’t tell if Wally’s eyes were shut or if the man was staring at him. It didn’t matter which; stared at or ignored, both bothered LB. He wanted to chat, he always got keyed up before a jump. They could find other things to talk about than Torres and marriage. They could act like friends. Sitting here, bumping along with stoic, quiet Wally made LB uneasy.

They had the big cargo bay to themselves; the loadmaster had disappeared into the cockpit. Deep in the rear of the hold, the GAARV hunkered in yellow tie-downs and cardboard cuffs, looking ready to leap out of its restraints. LB was itchy to go, too.

They were coming up on fifteen years, him and Wally. LB’s first sight of Wally Bloom had been Wally as a bony boy at the Air Force Academy. The third-year cadet had been assigned to jumpmaster for LB’s eight-man Ranger team for a high-altitude, high-opening training jump, a HAHO. Wally was the leader of the Academy’s competitive parachute team. To be on the team, cadet jumpers had to cover a three-inch dot with their boots ten times in a row from different altitudes. To run the team, a cadet had to do it twenty times. Wally was that good. All that summer at the Academy, whether young Wally Bloom stepped out at twenty-five thousand feet or eight hundred, LB leaped into thin air behind him without hesitation. The kid was so thorough and locked down that LB requested him for some dark ops in South America later that autumn. Because all air force cadets were on active duty, Wally Bloom spent much of his fourth year studying by flashlight in the back of a cargo plane or dangling in the air over one jungle or another with LB and his team drifting down at his backside.

After graduating the Academy, Wally followed LB into the Rangers, just as LB was giving up his captain’s commission to become a PJ. LB had seen enough of combat from the search-and-destroy side. He’d done his share, a bit more, and wanted—needed—the pararescue mission to save lives instead of take them. By the time Wally Bloom followed him again, LB was a master sergeant and a pararescue jumper. Wally stayed a captain and became a combat-rescue officer, LB’s CRO.

That flip in roles had not been healthy for their relationship.

Ten years later, here Captain Wally Bloom sat in the back of another cargo plane, either staring at LB or asleep.

Didn’t matter which.

Wally folded his arms over his chest and crossed his long legs at the ankles. So he was awake behind those opaque shades. LB mirrored him, crossing his own arms and feet.

The two sat like this, a Mexican standoff of silence and mimicry. The loadmaster came down the steps from the cockpit. With the punch of a button, he lowered the HC-130’s gate; air and white light gushed in around the widening edges. LB and Wally did not move for another minute, until LB surrendered, because it was his job. He tapped his own ear and shouted across to his captain over the propeller noise.

“Hey! Radio check.”

Wally stirred but slowly. The two hailed each other over the team freq, answering five by five. Doc, Quincy, and Jamie checked in from
Kingsman 1
. Wally tested his ground-to-air radio with the pilots of both planes, while the loadmaster started to blade away the webbing around the GAARV on its cardboard crush pallet. Only one nylon restraint was left to hold back the big package.

The ramp dropped all the way, yawning into the bright afternoon. Rolling green plains, black ribbon roads, and patchwork hills carved into hamlets and farmland slid by three thousand feet below. The jumpmaster waited with his knife behind the GAARV, ready to shove the pallet over the casters in the deck. Above the open portal, the red ready light came on; this marked the final minutes before the jump.

LB covered the short distance to Wally, who got to his feet. The man was eight inches taller than LB, lean and lithe, more things the two of them did not have in common. LB circled Wally, checking his straps and chute container, then came to a standstill so Wally could tug and prod at him. When they were done, both pounded fists on the other’s shoulders to say,
You’re good
.

The GAARV would go out first. One good shove and a slice from the loadmaster and the rollers would do the rest. Wally and LB would dive out behind it. The massive crowd below was going to be amazed at the American pararescuemen leaping and landing with a pair of truck-sized GAARVs. On the ground, the team would free the badass, cutting-edge rescue buggies from their pallets in under a minute, fire them up, and roar off to the make-believe rescue.