The Devil's Horn (17 page)

This drone could be the richest strike of his life. For that, would he send someone else?

He turned a palm up to his face. He had not lost all his calluses.

Allyn brought the phone to his lips.

“Juma.”

“Yes.”

“I’m coming.”

Chapter 15

LB squatted beside the ranger girl, fingers knit, and let her have a good cry. He didn’t pat her shoulder or mutter platitudes. The girl wept with anger, strength threaded through her grief, with fists balled.

Wally approached before she was done. He began to speak; LB waved the back of his hand.
Let it wait a few seconds. Let her finish
.

Promise snuffled into her wrist, swallowed hard, and brought her intense, black eyes up. She cleared her throat.

“Sorry.”

LB stood. He reached down a mitt to pull her up.

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

She gritted her bright teeth in the starlight. Wally waited no more. He curled a finger for LB to follow, away from Promise. She took the cue and walked off into the dark to give them privacy.

“I talked with Torres.”

“Okay.”

“I gave her the sit rep. Told her we got nothing out here but a pistol. No explosives, no supplies, no transport. No Smokey.”

“What did she say?”

“They’re working out a plan.”

“Maybe they should’ve done that before we jumped.”

“She’ll get back to us.”

“What about Smokey?”

“They’re sending him. He’s on the way with explosives, weapons, and food. We stay put.”

“That means CIA had to fess up.”

“That’s my guess. I reckon the South Africans figured it was better to play ball and help us keep this quiet than make a stink.”

LB could only guess at the millions, billions of dollars that were going to be secretly appropriated, squirreled away into some US defense bill, to pay off the South Africans for keeping this snafu quiet. Far more games were played under the table between nations than on top of it.

“So Charley Mike.”

“Charley Mike.”

“And you didn’t talk her out of it?”

“You mean
Major
Torres?”

LB opened his mouth, but Wally cut him short.

“Don’t say it. No. I did not talk the major out of her orders.”

Wally spread his hands, the gesture asking,
What do you want me to do
?

LB mirrored Wally’s extended, frustrated arms.

“And how exactly are we supposed to do that? We got no idea who took the damn missile or where it went.”

“Torres says we hold in place until Smokey gets here.”

“Why? Who’s this guy?”

“At this point, you know what I know, LB.”

“Okay. Fine. We’re stuck out here. But you understand, I thought I’d been to the middle of nowhere before. I was wrong. That wasn’t it. This is.”

LB turned his back on Wally to survey their surroundings with a new disdain. He imagined fangs in every shadow, behind every shrub, sailing overhead, growling and snorting to each other.

He spoke into a deep night, which only appeared empty but was surely full and would just as certainly be long.

“I’m hungry.”

The girl ranger moved. If it was possible to be darker than the bush, she was. She’d been standing close and unseen. She made no sound but her voice.

“What does that mean? ‘Charley Mike’?”

LB turned to Wally.

“What do you think? Bring her in?”

Wally chewed his lip.

“She’s the only asset we got right now.”

“I agree.” LB addressed the girl, though it felt like speaking to a specter. “It means ‘continue mission.’ ”

“What is your mission?”

“Right now, we wait.”

“For what?”

“Someone’s coming.”

“Who?”

“We’ll find out.”

“What about the rocket? The men who took it?”

“Again, we’ve got to wait.”

“Will you go after them?”

“We’ll see. That’s enough for now, okay?”

LB turned on Wally for a moment’s acknowledgment. Wally shrugged, the best he could offer.

Promise floated closer, halting beside Wophule’s mound. She lowered her gaze, and the two white gleams of her eyes snuffed out.

When she spoke to LB, she seemed to have consulted her dead partner.

“I can feed you.”

LB took a step toward her, eager.

“You can? Hey, thank you.”

“It depends on your desire to eat.”

He thumped his stomach.

“I got desire.”

Wally piped up. “And water?”

“Yes.”

Wally nodded, resolved to obey their orders, obviously with no more than a sketch in mind of how to follow them.

“You’re a ranger. You know the area pretty well.”

“Better than pretty well.”

Wally walked to the drone. Opening his pack, he tossed the empty canteen to LB. Then he bent for his helmet and the night goggles.

“You take LB first. I’ll wait here.”

“And do what, Captain?”

Wally started to answer, but Promise cut him off.

“Guard the drone from more poachers? With your pistol, from desperate men? Or will you protect Wophule from animals?”

“That was my intention.”

“We will all go. There’s nothing you can do if the bush wants your drone or my partner.” The girl ranger pointed to the brightening east. “You won’t need your goggles. The moon is rising. It will be light enough soon.”

LB didn’t like the notion of leaving his NVGs behind.

“What if we run into something big?”

Promise shook her dark head, while LB tucked the night goggles into his pack.

“No matter how well you see the animals, they are far more aware of you.”

She indicated the pistol tucked in Wally’s belt.

“And that will stop nothing but me. Come.”

Promise led them far from the crash. For the first minutes of striding into the night, LB worried they might lose their way. But she made turns on and off paths that she seemed to know like highways, and it grew plain she was taking them somewhere. He followed, with Wally and the pistol in the rear.

Promise spoke over her shoulder, describing what she saw and heard, what LB was missing. She kept her voice hushed and seemed to savor playing guide. Either that or she was keeping LB distracted. Was he that plainly unnerved?

Many times they disturbed birds in the dark. Promise turned to murmur:

“That is a nightjar. Listen to his song. ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’ ”

She murmured later: “Hear him? A water thick-knee. He has a pleading, mournful chirp. Listen.”

The breeze wafted through a line of shrubs, making an unsettling rattle. The girl explained these were bushwillows, what in Afrikaans were called
raasblaars
, or noisy leaves, for the sound the leaves made when the wind shook them. She paused over dung heaps in the trails, big piles and black pellets. Quietly she explained how to tell giraffe dung from antelope, similar in appearance, both like brown pebbles, but the giraffe’s leavings came from higher and so were more scattered over the ground. She whispered the ways to tell a jackal’s howl from a wild dog’s yelp, a lion’s roar from a leopard’s bark. A stench of decay crossed their path; Promise described a springbok killed by cheetahs just two days ago a hundred meters north from where they trod.

“They still around? The cheetahs?”

Promise grinned, enjoying herself.

They left the game path, striding over a flat reach bordered on one side by elephant grass taller than LB’s head. Without glancing back, the girl pushed into the grass and disappeared. This was the second time she’d vanished, and she seemed able to do it anytime she wanted. LB sucked a deep, reluctant breath and parted the moon-gray wall of reeds. Wordlessly, Wally stepped in after him.

LB could not see the girl ahead or hear her for the grasses brushing against him. He only followed where she’d passed, in her wake of crushed and bent stalks. He assumed Wally was doing the same on his six.

LB trudged onward, invisible, unarmed, and uncomfortable. Just as he was about to say something, to call out, the blinding grasses thinned and ended. He emerged into a flat plain stretching beneath the pearly light. Twenty yards out, Promise made straight for the black cutout of a great, spreading tree. Near the fat trunk, stars and the low-slung moon reflected in frets off a pond.

Promise waited in the shaded sward beneath the tree. LB and Wally caught up. When they stepped into the deeper darkness, she was gone again. LB flapped his arms.

“How the fuck does she do that?”

Wally only laughed.

Promise reappeared, literally stepping out of the tree’s trunk, a great hollow LB had not seen. He poked her in the arm.

“Stop that.”

The girl ranger feigned ignorance, still reveling in treating LB and Wally, the Americans who’d dropped from the sky, like helpless orphans in the bush.

“This is a baobab tree. They are often hollow. I had to make sure nothing was inside.”

“Like what?”

“There’s no need to scare you further.”

Promise put a finger into LB’s burly chest in a challenging way, returning the poke he’d given her.

“So you are hungry?”

“Yeah?” His reply was a question.

“We will see.”

With that, Promise walked from under the tree. At the pond’s edge, she pulled her ranger’s tunic over her head to dip it into the water like a rag. She came back to the baobab naked from the waist up, unselfconscious, muscled, and small breasted. She plopped the sodden jersey on the grass and turned to LB.

“Give me a boost.”

LB hesitated, unsure where this was going, until she prodded him into linking his hands. The girl raised her boot into his mitts, and LB heaved her up to the lowest branch. The knobs of her spine, the dimples in her back, showed as she shinnied easily up into the tree. Sitting on the branch, Promise pointed.

“Go stand in the water.”

LB sensed that the girl was measuring him. Maybe she’d met no Americans before, maybe she was showing off, or maybe she was just bossy. He held his ground beneath her hanging boots and bare breasts. She jabbed her naked arm again at the pond.

“Do you want to get stung?”

Wally moved first. LB lingered, just long enough to shake a finger at her. She turned from him, pleased, and ascended the old tree. LB hustled the twenty yards to the rim of the water where Wally was already up to his knees. At first LB did not wade in; he imagined shadows withdrawing around the shore of the pond.

Slowly, Wally backed in until he was up to his waist.

“You know, these are called killer bees.”

“Jesus. Even the fucking bees in this place.”

LB almost slipped in the mud, then splashed into the pond. Warm water sloshed over his boots, above his knees, until he settled beside Wally. LB scanned the shore and the pond’s surface, he didn’t know for what.

“Piece of work, this girl.”

Wally nodded. “She’d make a good PJ.”

High in the dense, dark baobab, a branch shook. Leaves hissed as though a wind scissored through them. A papery thud hit the ground. LB bent at the knees to lower himself into the water, letting it rise past his belt. Wally had already ducked up to his neck.

A hum swirled at the base of the tree, surprisingly loud, then swelled to an angry buzz. LB dropped his knees into the muck, chin to the water, and had time to curse before the mad swarm, sounding like a sawmill in the air, tore across the water at him and Wally. LB dove under, eyes open. Wally thrashed, a bee had nailed him on the back before he could get down all the way. LB swam for deeper water, and with every stroke worried what he might meet.

He held his breath as long as he could before coming up. Wally surfaced, too. He sucked his teeth and muttered, sore, but LB listened for the bees, ready to gasp and go down again. The night stayed quiet, the bees were gone, but he turned a circle to check on all sides.

On shore, under the baobab, Promise stood, not waving her arms to ward anything off, but calmly peering out to where LB’s and Wally’s heads bobbed like hippos. She waved for them to come back.

Dripping, they returned to the tree. Promise stood over her wet ranger shirt, which had been thrown across a lump on the ground, the hive.

She wrapped it, the size of a rugby ball, in her shirt, then smacked the hive against the ground.

Inside the tunic, the hive crunched. She left the shirt in place, dampening and confusing any bees left in residence, as well as hiding it from angry returnees. Promise reached in for broken bits. She handed the first to Wally, another to LB, and kept one for herself. Each waxy shard drizzled honey.

Promise, still all skin from the waist up, bit into the honey-comb first, eyes on LB. He sucked away as much honey as he could, catching the dribbles in his free palm, then nibbled off a corner of the honeycomb. The texture was stiff, with a bland flavor, but he chewed and swallowed. Wally did the same, while Promise finished her chunk of the hive with relish. LB wadded the rest into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth. The comb collapsed slowly between his teeth, but made it to his stomach.

The girl handed them more bits of the hive; they lapped the rest of the honey away, but LB ate no more of the wax. He was hungry but not enough to eat a candle.

While Wally and LB finished, Promise surveyed the dark bush, tuning her senses to it. Finding everything in order, she nodded to herself the way an animal might. Pulling her damp jersey over her shoulders, the ranger put away her nakedness.