The Devil's Horn (11 page)

LB shrugged his equipment into place. Waiting for the green light, Wally ignored him. LB shrugged at this, too. In these moments before the jump, anticipating the drop and popping chute, the thrill and action and cheers, all for being a PJ, Wally’s snit was petty. LB would deal with it later.

LB fixed his eyes on the red bulb, waiting for it to extinguish and the green to flick on. He stood to the right of the loadmaster and the big GAARV, Wally to the left. The roar of the plane’s twin engines, the whoosh of rushing wind, the blue and green world all flooded in the opened ramp. LB tapped his toe, impatient. He loved the first moments of the drop, the sudden stark silence, the focus and freedom of having his whole life on his back and in a handle in his fist.

The crimson light blinked out.

The green one glowed.

The loadmaster snipped the lone yellow strap. Lowering his shoulder, he heaved two short strides, rolling the GAARV to the lip of the ramp and out. Instantly, the package was snatched away by the wind. Two round, white cargo chutes blossomed.

A hundred yards behind and off to one side,
Kingsman 1
spat its own GAARV out into the African sky. Doc, Quincy, and Jamie followed. They jumped as one, plunging with arms and legs wide.

LB took a step.

Wally’s balled fist, the symbol for stop, appeared right in front of LB’s goggled eyes.

The GAARV fell fast behind the speeding cargo plane, plummeting from sight. The open gate, rushing air, falling package, all of it drew LB to the leap and the job. But Wally’s fist did not move from in front of his face.

LB whirled, expecting to yell something he should not. Even the loadmaster, in his emptied bay, turned to stare.

Wally lowered his hand to press it over his earpiece, to better hear one of his radios. He gave the loadmaster an officer’s scowl and pointed at the ramp.
Raise it.

The loadmaster did as he was told. Even before the button was punched to lift the ramp, before LB could fling up his arms at Wally or insist on an explanation, big
Kingsman 2
banked sharply away from the air show and the crowd below. The cargo bay tilted, but Wally was rangy enough to grab a piece of the superstructure and hold his ground. He kept one hand to his ear. The tilting deck spilled LB back into his seat, without an answer.

Chapter 8

Wophule pedaled ahead of Promise, gaining distance on her up the two-lane road. The boy was happy today and showed it. Before setting out, he’d told Promise about a girl he’d met over the weekend, a waitress at the Shingwedzi tourist station. Wophule had watched her chase a begging monkey away from the restaurant’s deck. He liked the way she did it, scolding like an
unina
, a mama. The girl wore an apron and a dark dress, like all the waitresses, in a uniform like him. The monkey hung around in the low trees, charming the tourists, still begging. The girl relented and tossed it a tidbit. Wophule thought that was kind and told her so. She answered him gently. Her name tag read “Treasure.” They talked not long, as she was working, but he learned she was Xhosa, too, and a few years older than him, in her twenties.

Promise did not pedal harder to catch up to him. She let him be playful and go. Besides, the midday temperature was scorching. The tarmac road sucked up the heat and breathed it out beneath Promise’s spinning tires. Wophule would slow in a little while. A tourist car whisked past, over the speed limit, but on a bicycle there was nothing she could do.

Around a bend she caught up with Wophule, who had stopped alongside the tourist car. A small pack of elephants—a bull, three females, and a pair of calves—grazed in marula trees beside the road. Wophule straddled the crossbar of his bike, explaining to the white tourists how elephants could get drunk on marula fruit if it became overripe and fermented. Promise had never seen this and did not believe it, but said nothing to correct Wophule, who was enjoying himself. Before the car pulled away, he asked the driver to observe the speed limit in the park.

They pedaled deeper into Shingwedzi and the sun. Wophule told her more of the girl. He’d not asked to see her outside her job, but he planned to soon. He wondered if Promise might go with him to the restaurant when Treasure was on duty, to advise him. This was the first girl Wophule had ever mentioned. Promise agreed to go. She’d been with a few men, all from the township. She had gotten away from there, but they had not, so Promise waited. The right man would come, though she’d not yet seen his tracks.

“How do you know she likes you?”

Wophule scrunched his brow, as if the answer was obvious. “She kept her eyes down while we talked.”

The older rangers could tell the roar of a hunting lion from a warning, a frightened elephant’s trumpet from an angry one. They knew where a leopard might sleep, when a warthog might charge, how to creep up on a herd of antelope without spooking them. The boy Wophule had a quiet sweetness about him. He could read animals as well as the old hands, and the children of the bush seemed to take to him as if they could smell his sweetness, like lavender or honeysuckle. It pleased Wophule to believe he could read Treasure, too. Promise poked him.

“She was looking at her watch.”

Wophule answered the jibe by riding away again. This time Promise pedaled after him, and the wind they made cooled them both.

They cycled side by side down a long straightaway, with no cars coming or going, until the road entered a pan of scrub and ocherous earth. Promise pulled off the highway, Wophule followed. Together they stashed their bikes inside an acacia bush and locked them. Promise checked her radio, cell phone, extra ammunition, rations, and flashlight. When Wophule had done the same, she slid her panga inside her belt. They headed into the bush on foot, where they would stay until sundown.

Insects chittered in the tall brush as Promise led the way into Shingwedzi, moving eastward along a game trail. On every side, spindly trees had been knocked over by elephants grazing, playing, fighting. Roots and branches withered in the sun, their green baked to gray, making them look like tumbleweeds scattered over the plain. Before long, sweat trickled down Promise’s bare legs into her green kneesocks. She scanned the orange dust of the trail for prints, pausing to challenge Wophule to identify the animals, the bushbuck, cape mongoose, kudu, and hyena.

They left the paved road behind and walked six, seven kilometers. As day rangers they patrolled their sector to mingle with the beasts, report on births, spot sickness before it could spread, track the movements of herds, and watch for the spoor of poachers. This last duty seemed unfair. Promise and Wophule, like all the Kruger rangers, hadn’t signed on to be soldiers but to care for the wildland and preserve its creatures. They’d arrived trained in conservation; Neels trained them further, teaching them to track and shoot. Neels taught them that only a few years ago, the ranger’s job was 80 percent conservation, 20 percent anti-poaching. Now, because of the waves of criminals flooding over the border, the work had become 100 percent and 100 percent.

Behind her, Wophule took to whistling, merry and very young. Sweating down her back beneath the rifle, gradually Promise began to begrudge the boy his ignorance and happiness. On foot, the Kruger could be a dangerous place, and they needed their senses alert. Their purpose was to enter and disturb the vast park as little as possible. The Kruger, the duties of a ranger, love, these were not things to skip over with a whistle. All had teeth.

Promise spoke across her shoulder.

“She won’t love you, you know.”

Wophule stopped whistling.

“She doesn’t know me yet. She might.”

“Even if she does, you’ll just be poor together.”

“Why are you being so mean?”

Promise walked on. Wophule quit whistling. The dust and thirst of the day, which normally did not bother her, caked in her throat.

What would Wophule do if she told him of the blood on her hands, the carcass she’d made, her disloyalty to her duty? She was leading him far from the remains of the great rhino; she didn’t want to see the beast with its organs eaten, blood drunk, in a patch of dirt worn bare by the eaters. What would Wophule say if she told him her reasons for killing it? If she said the Kruger was losing over a thousand rhinos a year; a few more would make no difference. A few more, that was all. In return, she could get enough money from Juma to lift her grandparents out of the slop of the township, up the green hill to a home with a breeze and a blue view. There, her gogo would not need to raise her bed high off the ground, because the black ghost would not follow. Khulu could stop working and let his hardness soften. Only a few more rhinos for Promise, and those would have died anyway, because the poachers could not be stopped.

Step after step, Promise planted her heels, meaning to whirl on foolish Wophule, scream at him what she had done and learn how’d he’d answer. He would yell back and turn her over to angry Neels. Or he would be meek, keep her secret, and beg her to stop poaching.

Either way, she would not stop. Stopping made no difference. She’d already taken one rhino. Two, three more would make no difference, would be no worse.

Promise halted on the path. She didn’t know why, perhaps to say these things to Wophule and see.

She turned to face him. Wophule stopped, too. When Promise said nothing, he raised his hands from his sides, seeming a little frustrated with her mood, to prompt her.

“What?”

To confess that she was a poacher was not something she could do. That burden could not be set down or lightened, only carried further. Promise fixed the only wrong she could right now.

“I’m sorry. She will love you. I’m sure she will.”

Promise walked on before Wophule could reply. She didn’t care for his thanks or forgiveness, these things were too small to help her.

They took a northern route, away from the water holes, into the drier plains of Shingwedzi. Promise let Wophule take the lead while she recorded notes on the number and locations of animals in their path. They came across small herds of kudu, skittish giraffes, scuttling bushpigs, ambling elephants, and a rotting eland carcass that showed the presence of lions. Their training had taught them to tread lightly, disturb nothing, alarm nothing, for on foot Promise and Wophule moved through the bush as equals with the beasts.

They crossed in and out of the brush, walking for a kilometer or two on game trails out in the open, then ducking for passages through branches and scrub. Wophule was not wary of the animals so much as he wanted to surprise a poacher. This, he believed, was how he would be promoted off his bicycle.

With two hours left until nightfall, Wophule turned them west, a return to the road and their bicycles. They shared little conversation, and their patrol today had not been a pleasant one. Promise took the blame for this, Wophule had started out in a sunny frame of mind, and she had rained on it. She’d not been ready for the constant gnawing of guilt.

She concentrated instead on imagining the crisp green of the township hill, the freshness of the houses, new wood and concrete; she saw her gogo up there, free and pleased. Promise walked close behind Wophule, ignoring the flat, brown land. When the boy stopped on the game trail to gaze into the brush, she almost bumped into him.

Wophule pointed.

“What’s that?”

A corridor had been bashed through a hedge of thornbushes and spindly marula. At first it seemed nothing more than the path of galloping or clashing elephants that had knocked aside everything in front of them, a common sight. Upended roots, loose leaves and twigs lay scattered. But a long gash had been cut in the earth, running straight through the hedge. Debris that was not of the bush lay strewn in it. Chunks of gray metal, a wheel.

Promise took the lead, the boy at her back. Two more black rubber wheels lay still attached to struts that had been snapped off something. Promise pushed through the shreds of the hedge.

The groove hewn in the dirt ran another fifty meters past the line of scrub. At the end of the rut, in a small clearing, lay the thing that had fallen out of the sky.

Wophule burst away from Promise, dashing ahead. She ran as swiftly as him.

Both halted at what seemed a safe distance. Broken wings, a propeller, an intact fuselage, wheels, all said this was an airplane. It had fallen into the Kruger like a shot arrow, with twin tail fins jutting in the air, the crumpled nose cone rammed into a mound of scooped dirt. The thing recalled the way the aardvark had fallen with its snout crammed in the hole it had dug. The plane’s right wing pressed into the ground to hold the whole thing up like an arm; the left one clung only by struts and cables.

The plane made no hisses or mechanical gasps. No human voice, no moan, came from it. Promise couldn’t tell how long ago it had crashed, but in the surrounding bush, every animal held its breath; no guano stained the wings, no paw prints in the surrounding dirt showed the approach of a curious creature. Her guess was it had crashed within the last few hours.

Wophule took a step forward. He shrugged away Promise’s reaching hand.

“This is no plane. It’s a drone.”

Promise crept behind the boy. On instinct she took her machete in hand.

Smaller than an airplane, with a wingspan of ten meters, the thing had no windows, was solid gray without insignia. The impact had bent the propeller like wilted petals. A metal ball clung to its sleek belly, and from it a round glass eye gazed darkly at them.

Under the right wing, the one dug into the ground, a long, rectangular box hung from a sleek metal arm, gray like the rest of the machine. Beneath the ruined left wing, a matching box lay dented in the dirt. Both containers were divided into four sections, like packing cartons. What were they?

Bold Wophule inched forward to inspect closer. While he moved in, Promise circled more. She tingled at the wreckage of secrets that lay before her. Big secrets, too, for who had drones like this but nations? Whose was it? What had made it crash? Why was it flying over the Kruger? Promise tightened her circle, drawn by curiosity. This was something she and Wophule were not supposed to see. It was exciting and rare, and in Shingwedzi.

She continued her circuit while Wophule ran a hand over the fuselage. Promise scanned the horizon, wondering who else might have seen it come down. Had the sector EC patrol been near enough? Judging by the furrow in the ground, the drone had flown in from the east, across the Mozambican border. Like all the Kruger’s sectors, Shingwedzi was immense. Perhaps only she and Wophule and some hiding animals knew the thing had plummeted here.

Promise put away the panga; her fears eased as she grew more inquisitive. She crept past the nose of the drone, knelt to get a good look inside the box, then jumped to her feet.

“Wophule! Get away!”

The boy froze beside the fuselage.

“I said get back. Now!”

Wophule stumbled while getting clear of the drone. Promise backed away, too, until the boy jogged beside her.

The two stood at a distance that might not have been enough if the missile inside the box, a rocket launcher, were to go off.