The Devil's Horn (14 page)

Juma stood beside Promise, dwarfing her, hands on hips. He continued to survey the scene, calculating. Good Luck lapped the leather bands around the contraption, then slipped the rod through them. When he was finished, he lifted Promise’s rifle off the ground and slung it across his back. He pushed Wophule to a sitting position—a horrible thing to see the slack boy yanked upright, empty like a puppet. Good Luck slipped the boy’s rifle off him.

Juma turned fully to Promise. He pulled her into his chest and hard gut; she let her arms dangle. Through the heavy layers of the man, she heard no heart.

He whispered, “Give us time to get across the border. Then call your rangers. Tell them you stumbled on the drone. Tell them while you were inspecting the crash, poachers came out of the bush. You exchanged fire, your partner was killed. You surrendered, there were too many. The poachers took your guns and what they wanted from the drone, then left. Do not describe me. But if you like, tell them of Good Luck. I give him to you.”

Promise spoke into Juma’s chest.

“I’ll kill him.”

“Leave that for another time, Nomawethu. I need him to help me carry this.”

Promise stepped back against Juma’s embrace. He let her loose, trailing his hands across her arms as she stepped away.

“Tell your gogo we do good business, you and me. I will expect it to continue.
Yebo
?”

Juma gestured at dead Wophule.

“You should know. I came personally to be sure you would be safe.”

With that warning, Juma took her rifle from Good Luck. Aiming it high, he fired one round, paused, then fired two more. The cracks raced away across the open savanna, chasing birds out of a dried bushwillow tree. Juma strapped her rifle across his broad back.

He lifted the electronic eye from the dust to take it with him. Then he and Good Luck hefted the staff onto their shoulders, Juma at the rear. Good Luck hardly managed his end. The two men, great and thin, put the low sun to their backs and walked east into the veld, the American missile slung like a trophy between them.

When they had gone out of sight, Promise drank from the water bottle in her pack. Chewing the last of her biltong, she squatted close to Wophule, with nothing to defend him. She considered picking up a stick or a rock, but she would win no fight with a beast who came to the smell of a man’s death.

So Promise waited beside Wophule, watching the slowly pinking sky, the green and gray bush, the rusty earth, for anything, anyone coming.

Chapter 12

At just under thirteen thousand feet, the leap into thin air was frigid. LB’s face stung from the razor wind rushing past, below freezing. Wally, the best skydiver in the Guardian Angels, plummeted beside him, and even he, without the proper gear for this high-altitude jump, grimaced against the cold.

Free fall hurtled them into warmth quickly; LB stopped shivering. Miles below, the Kruger sprawled as far as he could see. It was a desolate place, lusterless but for patches of green; pale paths in the reddish earth spread everywhere like capillaries. Dried streambeds and low hills gave the land some texture, but for the most part it looked as drab and scoured as any battlefield. From his descending height, LB scanned for animals and believed he did see something big gallop across the plain.

At three thousand feet, Wally maneuvered away from LB. Facing each other, both reached to their backs to grip the pillow handles on their containers. Two seconds later, at two thousand feet, Wally yanked his cord, LB followed, and both threw out their pilot chutes.

Gray silk and cord unraveled furiously behind them. With a suddenness that LB never grew used to, his chute bloomed, pinning him in midair, snatching away his speed and breath. In that instant he felt every bit of him collapse like an accordion, skin, muscles, eyes, and organs, then jerk back to the right size when the chute slowed his fall. The silence was immediate; three miles overhead, unheard, the cargo plane banked away. LB reached left and right beside his head for the dangling toggles and pulled to circle in behind Wally.

The team freq sizzled in LB’s earpiece, Wally sounding off.

“One up.”

LB responded, “Two up.”

A breeze cooled the dusk over the vast Kruger. Sundown was an ideal time for a clandestine daylight jump. The earth was darker than the sky, and the different shades made for tough viewing from the ground. Wally circled downwind above a long slash in the red dirt; there at the end of it, after smashing a hole through a hedge, lay the South African drone. Clearly the missile hadn’t exploded on impact, or the Denel would be a scorched crater and nothing else.

Wally turned into the wind to slow his descent, dumping the last of his altitude. LB whooshed behind him. He searched the landing zone for flat ground, ready to touch down running. The drone stood on its nose like a lawn dart, resting on one wing with the other snapped away and clinging by cables. The wheels had been clipped off and lay in the trough. Other than that, the damage looked minimal. Without active avionics, lost, short-circuited, and sightless, the thing simply flew into the ground. Wally aimed for a spot thirty meters from the Denel. LB wondered if this was enough distance from a live Hellfire.

Wally yanked on his toggles, flaring the chute to bleed off the last of his airspeed. He set his boots down perfectly, as if standing out of a chair. LB pulled on the toggles to do the same. But with just fifteen feet of air left, his eye snagged on a dark patch near the drone. From higher up he’d figured this for a low shrub or debris from the crash. With the last of his fading altitude, he made out a human figure.

LB hauled both toggles down to his waist to flare the chute. The instant his boots touched down, he quickly released the chest strap and bellyband, leaving him attached to the container and chute only by the crotch straps. He flipped the ejectors and freed himself.

Before the chute could collapse at his back, LB skidded to a knee, the Beretta in two hands and trained at the drone.

“Wally, down!”

The man on the ground didn’t stir.

In a flash, Wally stopped reeling in his silk and dove to his belly. Over the barrel of the pistol, LB searched for movement in the bush and failing light.

“What is it?” Wally’s head swiveled.

“Dead guy next to the drone. Move.”

LB pivoted a fast circle, covering every direction with the pistol, feeling vulnerable in the open. Wally sprinted for the hedgerow. Once he was out of sight, LB bent low and ran to join him. He dashed through the opening in the brush made by the drone’s crash landing. Beside Wally, he tucked himself in close to the leaves and branches.

A thorn snicked LB’s battle dress tunic, then his neck.

He groused. “Is there anything,
anything
, about this op I’m not going to hate?”

They waited, bating their breaths to listen to the living land around them. The wildness of the place hushed itself; LB half expected to hear monkeys and elephants, roars like a zoo. But the Kruger did nothing to welcome or frighten them. And it probably wasn’t the Kruger that had killed the man lying next to the drone.

For long, tense minutes, LB and Wally crouched side by side. LB kept watch on everything down the short length of the nine millimeter’s barrel: the drone, the corpse, the savanna, and the spiny bushes where he hid.

Night fell slowly. With the falling light, the animals of the bush began their calls, grunts, and shrieks. The land was flat, made up of expansive wastes and low vegetation with little to slow the sounds. LB couldn’t gauge the distance of any of it; a howl could be unnervingly close or a mile away. To make matters worse, a body lay close by. LB had no idea how long it would take for something with sizeable teeth and claws to get a whiff and head this way. He handed the Beretta off to Wally, his hands tired of squeezing it.

Wally kept vigil with the gun while LB clipped the NVGs to both their helmets.

Wally whispered, “You think it’s clear?”

“Dunno. Clear of what?”

Wally shifted his boots under him to rise with the Beretta.

“Okay. Stay here.”

LB clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Whoa. Where’re you going?”

“Torres wants a report. Time’s up.”

LB pulled down hard enough to buckle Wally’s effort to stand.

“We go together. You check the drone. I’ll do the corpse.”

Wally dipped his head at that. LB climbed to his knees, muttering.

“Torres’ll kill me if I come back without you.”

Wally jabbed him with an elbow, then slid the light-amplifying goggles down over his eyes. Behind the pistol, he eased away from the bush.

LB’s first steps into the open, unarmed, were disconcerting.

“If something comes to eat me, shoot it.”

“I’ll just shoot you and keep it busy.”

LB brought down his own NVGs. The lenses used the poor light from the emerging stars and the last shreds of sunlight to turn the world emerald and black. Every waving leaf, the twinkling sky, if anything moved in his field of vision, the sharp relief in the goggles would let LB see it.

He and Wally moved cautiously from behind cover. If whoever killed the man was waiting for them, the killer was ready, hidden, and had the first shot. If there were animals about, LB had no clue what to do about that.

Wally split off to the wreckage. LB approached the corpse.

The man lay on his back. A single bullet in the chest had knocked him backward. LB whirled to look in all directions through the NVGs a last time, then lifted them.

The body was that of a young black man, a Kruger ranger in an olive drab uniform, shorts, boots, and high green socks. Blood ringed his mouth. The chest shot was clean, center cut between the lungs, likely through the pulmonary artery. LB didn’t bother checking for a pulse.

One round, no other marks. The kid had no weapon near him. Maybe an execution up close. Maybe a long shot from a high-powered rifle. The ranger’s eyes were shut; his stained mouth hung open. LB had nothing to drape over him. He disliked leaving a body uncovered. It lacked finality. This mission, like so many over the years, was not ending with a death but just starting.

The young ranger had found the downed drone. It looked like someone had killed him for that. Why?

LB joined Wally beside the wreck. Wally didn’t lift his NVGs to talk.

“What have you got?”

LB related his facts, guesses, and questions about the ranger.

“What’s up with the drone?”

Like LB, Wally swept the wan landscape one last time with the NVGs before lifting them.

“Obviously we’re not the first ones here.”

“Nope.”

“I mean it’s worse.”

“Than a dead guy?”

“The missile’s gone.”

The news sent LB staggering, not backward but toward the drone. He stooped under the wing jammed into the dirt to see for himself. One launcher lay on the ground, badly dinged and empty. The pylon on the intact wing ended without a launcher, just a rail and four half-inch bolts in the dirt.

A jagged hole in the drone’s belly showed where the Denel’s electronic eye had been plucked out.

Without his sunglasses, the concern on Wally’s features was plain. His sockets crinkled at the edges, flexing in thought. The ebbing light drained the blue of his eyes to slate gray. Wally looked worried, something rare for his sunny, can-do disposition. That was why he wore the shades, to mask these gloomier moments.

LB shook his head at the night. The darkened Kruger seemed steeped in all kinds of natural dangers. The two of them had jumped into the vast turf of thousands of wild and uncaged animals. Suddenly, the beasts of the Kruger finally let the pair hear them. A wail drifted in from far away, then a screech, a trumpeting bark, and then one roar, a deep thunder from a big throat that couldn’t be reduced to a point on the compass but seemed to come from half the black world. Could the animals smell Wally and LB’s presence? Had the scent of the ranger’s corpse started to make the rounds; was that roar the dinner bell?

“Wally?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the new plan? We got no missile, no way to blow this thing. And no idea where it went.”

Wally squatted down to his haunches, elbows on his knees, to think as team leader and map out the next step.

“Well?”

“Not a clue. You?”

“What’s less than not a clue?”

“You.”

LB squatted next to him.

“Good. I’m glad you packed your grudge. ’Cause, you know, I left mine on the plane. Don’t want to be out here in the fucking wilderness without a grudge. Now you want to be a pro and figure out what we do next? Or you want to chew me out again?”

Wally scooped some dirt from between his boots. He jiggled it in his fist, then tossed it away like dice.

“You and I been together a long time. Almost twenty years.”

“And?”

“The first time I ever saw you at the Academy, you were everything I wanted to be. Smart, tough, a leader.”

“You were a better jumper.”

“Still am. But I patterned my career after you. Rangers, then the Guardian Angels. You were my hero.”

“Still am.”

“No. You need to get this. You’re not anymore. Torres is. She’s everything I want to be now. Loving, kind, strong. We’re still a team, you and me, and the guys. We’re still brothers. But not like it used to be. You’re not my only team. I’ve come to understand something. It’s hard to say, but I’m sad for you. We’re all you’ve got.”

LB sat with this, respecting Wally’s need to express it, the way a good teammate ought to. Then he rose to walk away and not hear any more. Before he did, he patted Wally’s shoulder. Wally hadn’t said a word LB didn’t know. Long ago he’d accepted it as the price of twenty-two years in the military—much of that spent with lives in his hands, men he’d led, killed, or rescued—and he wanted to ask Wally where to find the ability, the will, the dedication, the time to do something else? How do you bring a woman close and do your best by her, when your best has already been spent on those lives?

Wally gazed up at him with his often-hidden eyes. Wally seemed firm and sorry about what he’d said. But Wally never gave less than his best. Lucky Torres.

Wally got to his feet. Taller, leaner, younger, happier Officer Wally.

“I’m going to get on the sat phone, call it in. See what they want us to do.”

LB let the page turn back to the job. There’d be time later, when they weren’t surrounded by a mission, to talk more. Or not.

“Get a fix on where Smokey is. He needs to get here fast and bring a lot of shit. Explosives. I want a weapon.”

LB patted his stomach.

“And make sure he’s got that picnic basket. I’m starving.”

The missing missile changed everything. LB and Wally had no way to destroy the evidence of the drone, no way to track the stolen Hellfire. Smokey or somebody had to bring them the tools and intel to do the job. Or Wally and LB had to leave. And they had no way to do that, either.

Wally dug the sat phone out of his jump ruck.

“What are you going to do?”

LB turned toward the corpse. “Figure out some way to cover up the body. Rocks or something.”

Wally kept the Beretta. He faced the darkness away from LB, as if the sat call to Torres was somehow private. This was LB’s fault—he’d made Wally think that way.

LB knelt beside the dead ranger. He pushed the boy’s mouth closed to keep it from filling with grit or stones. The ranger hadn’t stiffened, he’d only been dead an hour or two.

The voices of the Kruger’s animals made the darkness lush. LB lowered his NVGs to better see the ground and search for stones. He’d build a small tomb of stacked stones around the body, then fill it in with dirt. Without a shovel that was the best he could do until the body was reclaimed. He couldn’t use a chute, their orders were to stay out of sight; a big piece of silk would be a dead giveaway.

LB found the first rock, the size of his foot. He lifted with his legs and turned back to the dead ranger.

Fifty feet away, emerald against the ebony air, motionless as a tree but unmistakable, stood a person, a long blade hanging from the figure’s waist.

“Leave him alone.” The voice belonged to a girl.

LB dropped the rock. He lifted the NVGs.

“Hey. Hi. Who are you?”

“Leave him alone.”

She was small, like the dead boy, but in the dark that was all LB could tell. He took a step toward her. She retreated to keep her distance.

“Okay, okay. Wally.”

Waiting for the signal to come up, Wally’s face glowed from the buttons on the sat phone, making his head look eerie and suspended. He turned at LB’s call. Spotting the girl, he lowered the phone then advanced a few steps. She recoiled. Wally held up a hand.