Burning Angels

49

As carefully as they could, they approached the trembling, traumatised form of the baby elephant. It was lying on its side now, seemingly too exhausted to even stand. The ground betrayed the signs of its recent struggles: the rope tethering it to the tree had cut deep into its leg, as it had fought to get free.

Narov knelt over the poor thing. She lowered her head, whispering soft words of reassurance into its ear. Its small – human-sized – eyes rolled in fear, but eventually her voice seemed to calm it. She stayed close to the animal for what seemed like an age.

Finally she turned. There were tears in her eyes. ‘We’re going after them. Those who did this.’

Jaeger shook his head. ‘Come on… The two of us armed with pistols. That’s not brave: it’s foolish.’

Narov got to her feet. She fixed Jaeger with a tortured look. ‘Then I’ll go alone.’

‘But what about…’ Jaeger gestured at the baby elephant. ‘It needs protection. Safeguarding.’

Narov jabbed a finger in the direction of the guards. ‘What about them? They are better armed than we are.’ She glanced west, in the direction the poachers had taken. ‘Unless someone goes after them, this will continue until the last animal is killed.’ Her expression was one of cold and determined fury. ‘We need to hit them hard, mercilessly, and with the same kind of savagery as they used here.’

‘Irina, I hear you. But let’s at least work out how best to do this. Konig’s twenty minutes out. They had spare AKs stashed in the HIP. At the very least let’s get ourselves properly armed. Plus the chopper’s stuffed full of supplies: water, food. Without that, we’re finished before we’ve even begun.’

Narov stared. She didn’t speak, but he could tell that she was wavering.

Jaeger checked his watch. ‘It’s 1300 hours. We can be on our way by 1330. The poachers will have a two-hour start on us. If we move fast, we can do this; we can catch them.’

She had to accept that his was the voice of reason.

Jaeger decided to go check out the corpses. He didn’t know quite what he expected to find, but he went anyway. He tried to act dispassionately: to inspect the kill scene like a soldier. But still he found his emotions running away with him.

This had been no accurate, professional hit. Jaeger figured the elephants had been charging to protect their young, and the poachers must have panicked. They’d peppered the once-mighty beasts indiscriminately, using assault rifles and machine guns to take them down.

One thing was for sure: the animals would have had no quick and painless death. They’d have sensed danger; possibly even known they were being lured to their doom. But they came anyway, to safeguard their family, charging to the defence of their offspring.

With Luke missing three long years, Jaeger couldn’t help but relate. He wrestled with unexpected emotions and blinked back the tears.

Jaeger turned to leave, but something made him stop. He figured he’d seen movement. He checked again, dreading what he might find. Sure enough – unbelievably – one of the mighty animals was still breathing.

The realisation was like a punch to the guts. The poachers had gunned the bull elephant down, hacked off its tusks and left it in a pool of its own blood. Riddled with bullets, it was dying a slow and agonising death under the burning African sun.

Jaeger felt rage burning through him. The once-mighty animal was well beyond any hope of saving.

Though he was sickened, he knew what he had to do.

He turned aside and made his way to one of the guards, from whom he borrowed an AK47. Then, with hands shaking with anger and emotion, he levelled the weapon at the magnificent animal’s head. For just an instant he thought the bull opened his eyes.

With tears blurring his vision, Jaeger fired, and the stricken animal breathed its last.

In a daze, Jaeger went back to rejoin Narov. She was still comforting the baby elephant, though he could tell by her pained look that she knew what he had been forced to do. For both of them this was personal now.

He crouched beside her. ‘You’re right. We do have to go after them. Just as soon as we’ve grabbed some supplies off the HIP, let’s get moving.’

Minutes later, the noise of rotor blades cut through the hot air. Konig was ahead of schedule. He brought the HIP down into the clearing, the rotors throwing up a choking cloud of dust and debris. The bulbous wheels hit the dirt, and Konig began to power down the turbines. Jaeger was about to rush forward to help unload when his heart skipped a beat.

He’d spotted a flash of movement way off in the bush; the tell-tale glint of sunlight on metal. He saw a figure rise from the undergrowth, hefting a rocket-launcher on his shoulder. He was a good three hundred yards away, so there was sod-all that Jaeger could do with a pistol.

‘RPG! RPG!’ he screamed.

An instant later he caught the unmistakable sound of the armour-piercing projectile firing. Normally RPGs were notoriously inaccurate, unless fired at close quarters. This one tore out of the bush, hammering towards the HIP like a bowling pin on its side, trailing a fiery dragon’s breath in its wake.

For an instant Jaeger figured it would miss, but at the last moment it ploughed into the rear of the helo, just forward of the tail rotor. There was the blinding flash of an explosion, which ripped the entire tail section off the aircraft, the impact throwing the HIP through ninety degrees.

Jaeger barely hesitated. He was on his feet and racing forward, as he yelled orders at Narov and the game guards to form a defensive cordon, putting steel between them and their attackers. Already he could hear fierce bursts of gunfire, and he didn’t doubt the poachers were closing for the kill.

Even as flames sparked from the HIP’s shattered rear Jaeger vaulted into the torn and buckled hold. Thick, acrid smoke billowed all around him as he searched for survivors. Konig had flown in with four extra guards, and Jaeger could tell instantly that three of them were peppered with shrapnel, and very dead.

He grabbed the fourth, who was injured but still alive, hoisted his bloody form and hauled him out of the stricken aircraft, dumping him in the bush, before turning back for Konig and his co-pilot.

Fire leapt through the chopper now, the hungry flames taking hold. Jaeger needed to move fast, or Konig and Urio would be burned alive. But if he tried to brave those flames unprotected, he’d never make it.

He threw off his pack, reached inside and pulled out a large spray can, with COLDFIRE stamped across the matt-black exterior. Turning the nozzle on himself, he sprayed himself from head to toe before dashing for the HIP, can gripped in hand. Coldfire was a miracle agent. He’d seen soldiers spray their hands with it, then play a blowtorch across their bare skin and feel nothing.

Taking a massive gulp of air, he dived through the smoke towards the heart of the flames. Incredibly, he felt no sensation of burning; no heat at all. He lifted the can and let rip, the foam cutting through the toxic vapours and dousing the flames within seconds.

Fighting his way forward into the cockpit, he unbuckled the unconscious form of Konig and hauled him from the HIP. Konig looked as if he’d taken a blow to the head, but otherwise he seemed relatively unharmed. Jaeger was soaked with sweat by now, and choking from the smoke, yet he turned a further time and ripped open the other door to the HIP’s cockpit.

With a final burst of energy, he grabbed the co-pilot and began to drag him towards safety.