Burning Angels

50

Jaeger and Narov had been moving at speed for a good three hours now. Sticking to the cover of a wadi – a dry watercourse – they’d managed to overtake the poaching gang, and without any sign that they had been spotted.

They pressed ahead to a thick grove of acacia trees, from which they could get eyes on the poachers as they passed. They needed to assess numbers, weaponry, strengths and weaknesses, in order to determine the best way to hit them.

Back at the helicopter, the poachers had been driven off by the weight of defensive fire, and the injured had been stabilised. They’d called for a medevac chopper, which Katavi Lodge was getting sorted. They planned to lift the baby elephant out at the same time as picking up the wounded.

But Jaeger and Narov had left long before any of that could happen, hard on the trail of the poachers.

From the cover of the acacia grove they watched the gang approach. There were ten gunmen. The RPG operator who’d hit the HIP, plus his loader, would be bringing up the rear, making twelve in all. To Jaeger’s practised eye, they looked tooled up to the nines. Long bandoliers of ammo were hanging off their torsos, and magazines were stuffed into bulging pockets, plus rakes of grenades for the launchers.

Twelve poachers, with a veritable war in a box. It wasn’t the sort of odds he relished.

As they watched the gang pass, they saw the ivory – four massive bloodied tusks – being passed between them. Each man took his turn, staggering along with a tusk slung over his shoulder, before passing it on to another.

Jaeger didn’t doubt the energy expended in doing so. He and Narov had moved light, but still they were drenched in sweat. His thin cotton shirt was glued to his back. They had grabbed some bottled water out of the HIP, but even so they were already running short. And these guys – the poachers – were carrying many times more weight.

Jaeger guessed that each tusk was a good forty kilos, so as heavy as a small adult. He figured they’d be breaking march and setting camp any time soon. They’d have to. Dusk was only a short time away, and they would need to drink, eat and rest.

And that meant the plan forming in his mind might just be doable.

He settled back into the cover of the wadi, signalling Narov to do likewise. ‘Seen enough?’ he whispered.

‘Enough to want to kill them all,’ she hissed.

‘My sentiments exactly. Trouble is, if we take them on in open battle, it’ll be suicide.’

‘Got a better idea?’ she rasped.

‘Maybe.’ Jaeger delved into his backpack and pulled out his compact Thuraya satphone. ‘From what Konig told us, elephant ivory is solid, like a massive tooth. But like all teeth, at the root end there’s a hollow cone: the pulp cavity. And that’s filled with soft tissue, cells and veins.’

‘I’m listening,’ Narov growled. Jaeger could tell she still wanted to go in and hit them right here and now.

‘Sooner or later the gang will have to call a halt. They camp up for the night, and we go in. But we don’t hit them. Not yet.’ He held up the Thuraya. ‘We stuff this deep into the pulp cavity. We get Falkenhagen to track the signal. That leads us to their base. In the meantime, we order up some proper hardware. Then we go in and hit them at a time and place of our choosing.’

‘How do we get close enough?’ Narov demanded. ‘To plant the satphone?’

‘I don’t know. But we do what we do best. We observe; we study. We find a way.’

Narov’s eyes glinted. ‘And what if someone calls the phone?’

‘We set it to vibrate mode. Silent.’

‘And if it vibrates its way loose and falls out?’

Jaeger sighed. ‘Now you’re just being difficult.’

‘Being difficult keeps me alive.’ Narov rummaged in her pack and pulled out a tiny device no bigger than a pound coin. ‘How about this? GPS tracker device. Solar-powered Retrievor. Accurate up to one and a half metres. I figured we might need one to keep tabs on Kammler’s people.’

Jaeger held out a hand for it. Stuffing this deep into the tusk’s pulp cavity was certainly feasible, if only they could get close enough.

Narov held off from passing it over. ‘One condition: I get to place it.’

Jaeger eyed her for a second. She was slight, nimble and smart, that much he knew, and he didn’t doubt that she might move more quietly than he could.

He smiled. ‘Let’s do this.’

They pressed on for another three gruelling hours. Finally the gang called a halt. The giant, blood-red African sun was sinking swiftly towards the horizon. Jaeger and Narov crept closer, belly-crawling along a narrow ravine that ended at a patch of dark and stinking mud, marking the fringes of a waterhole.

The poachers were camped on the far side, which made perfect sense. After the long day’s march, they’d have need of water. The waterhole, though, looked to be a festering mud pit. The heat had dissipated slightly, but it remained stultifying, and every crawling, buzzing, stinging thing seemed to be drawn here. Flies as big as mice, rats as big as cats and vicious stinging mosquitoes – the place was swarming.

But nothing bothered Jaeger as much as the dehydration. They’d drained the last of their water a good hour back, and he had little or no fluid left in his body to sweat out. He could feel the onset of a splitting headache. Even lying utterly still, keeping watch on the poachers, the thirst was unbearable.

They both needed to rehydrate, and soon.

Darkness descended across the landscape. A light wind got up, whipping away the last of the sweat from Jaeger’s skin. He lay in the dirt, still as a rock and staring into the wall of the night, Narov beside him.

Above them a faint shimmer of starlight flickered through the acacia canopy, with just the faintest hint of the moon breaking through. To left and right a firefly skittered in the darkness, its fluorescent blue-green glow floating magically above the water.

The absence of light was to be welcomed. On a mission such as this, the darkness was their greatest friend.

And the more he watched, the more Jaeger realised that the water – repulsive though it might be – offered the ideal route in.