The Night Ranger

9

DADAAB

Wells didn’t like what he was about to do. It felt sneaky and cheap and—for lack of a more politically correct word—unmanly. With a few days and help from the bright boys at the National Security Agency, he might have found a high-tech way to locate James Thompson’s missing phone. But Wells couldn’t wait. He was stuck with Plan B.

He hoped Thompson liked coffee.

—

The night before, Thompson had been predictably unhappy when Wells explained that he was certain the hostages were in the Ifo 2 camp and that he planned to raid it as soon as possible.

“You haven’t even explained why you think they’re there.”

“That goes to sources and methods, Mr. Thompson.” A rare bit of agency jargon that Wells liked. Especially in this case.

“You’ve been in Dadaab twelve hours. What sources could you possibly have?”

A logical objection, one Wells ignored. “I have a very specific location.”

“That’s my nephew, my volunteers. Your sources and methods are wrong. If they even exist. I’m telling you they’re not in Ifo 2. The police would find them.”

“You said yourself Kenyan cops aren’t exactly brilliant.”

“So you’re planning to what? Drag them out. Without the police backing you up. You think the Somalis are going to stand by and watch while you shoot up the place?”

“I’m not going to shoot up the place. Mr. Thompson, I’m happy to talk this over with you face-to-face. Show you the intel, sat photos, forensic work, et cetera. You’re not convinced, I’ll reconsider. But it has to be tomorrow morning. My men and I are going in at noon.”

“Your men? Where’d they come from?”

“Sources and methods.”

“Please stop saying that. It’s meaningless. Anyway, what kind of commando attacks in broad daylight?”

Another point for Thompson. “Why they’ll never expect it.”

“What if I told you that I’ve just received a credible ransom demand and I’m sure the hostages are nowhere near that camp?”

“I’d say the timing’s awfully convenient. And I’ve got to trust my own intel.”

“Give me Moss.”

Wells handed over the phone. “I told him he was being rash . . . I’m not the one who said he could come, Jim. You did . . . I can tell you he’s not listening to me . . .” She gave the phone back to Wells.

“I want to talk you out of this foolishness, I have to come to Dadaab tomorrow morning,” Thompson said.

“Correct.”

“I’ll take the first plane I can. And I’ll expect you to be on it with me when I go back to Nairobi. And then you’re going home. I don’t care who you are.”

“Moss and I will pick you up.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything before then.”

“Agreed. Over and out.”

—

The next morning, Wells had just finished his dawn prayers when his phone rang. “You still serious about this?” Thompson said without preamble.

“Yes.”

“I’ll be in the air in five minutes. Should be in Dadaab around seven a.m.”

“We’ll be there. With a thermos of hot coffee, plenty of milk and sugar.”

“First smart thing you’ve said since we met.”

Dadaab’s airport was a fenced strip of pockmarked runway, with a one-room concrete building for a terminal. A wind sock at the far end served in place of a control tower. North of the runway, an old Dash-8 listed over its front wheels, paint peeling. Wells doubted it could taxi, much less get airborne. A GSU officer smoked in front of the terminal, his AK tossed over his shoulder.

“No flights today.”

“We have a charter. A friend coming in a few minutes,” Moss said.

“He has permits?”

“Of course.”

“No permits, he can’t stay.”

Wells wondered again why the GSU seemed so much more interested in keeping people out of Dadaab than finding the volunteers. But this officer wasn’t the man to ask. Instead Wells followed Moss around the building as a plane rumbled in the distance. “Right on time,” Moss said.

A boy of six or so ran from a cluster of huts south of the fence. He ducked through a hole in the wire and ran to them, his arms outstretched like wings.

“De plane, boss, de plane,” he yelled when he got close.

“Our very own Tattoo,” Wells said.

“I don’t know who taught him that, but he does it whenever a plane comes in,” Moss said. “Hey, Freddy,” she yelled.

“Hey, hot mama.” The boy wore a blue T-shirt imprinted with the words San Diego Yacht Club. He ran to Wells and said, “My name is Prince Charles, what is your name? My name is Prince Charles, de plane, boss, de plane—” The speech was delivered so fast it was almost a rap. He gave Wells a desperate grin that reminded Wells of the puppies at the North Conway animal shelter, the ones that still believed in human kindness. “Fifty shillings, boss.”

“No fifty shillings, Freddy.”

“Ten shillings, boss.”

“Go on. Back to San Diego.” Wells was surprised to see Moss dig into her pocket, hand the boy a coin. She said something in Swahili. The boy ran off with his arms spread. Moss nodded at the huts. “Have to give him something or whoever’s watching over there will take a stick to him when he gets back.”

“What about when five kids show up? Or five hundred?”

“I know. Solve one problem, create dependency and a bigger one. You have a better solution?”

“My first instinct would be to beat the stuffing out of whoever’s hurting that boy.”

“Then you leave, and he gets paid back tenfold.”

Wells had no good answer. They watched as the plane came in low and slow, a stubby-winged four-seat Cessna 172, the Toyota Corolla of aviation. Simple, cheap, reliable.

“So how’s this going to work, John? You tell Jimmy you want his phone and the truth? And he confesses everything because you’ve asked the question just so.”

“That would be the elegant alternative.”

“I sense you’re not the elegant type. You want to tell me, then?”

“Better if you don’t know.”

The Cessna touched down, bumped over the potholed runway, taxied to a halt fifty feet away. The passenger door swung open. Thompson stepped down, his laptop bag strung over his shoulder. He closed the door, walked toward them. His face was tight and angry. “Let’s go,” he said. “Get this over with.”

—

Wells sat in the back of the Land Cruiser and poured himself a mug of coffee.

“I get one?” Thompson said. “Been up since four.” Wells poured another mug and handed it forward. Thompson took a long swallow. “Hits the spot. Best thing about this country, the coffee.” He drank again. “You use something artificial as a sweetener, John?”

“Just sugar.”

“Because it has kind of a funny aftertaste.”

“I’m not getting that.”

“Strange. Guess I’m tired.” Thompson licked his lips, drank for the third time. “I feel, I don’t feel—” He looked over his shoulder at Wells. “You.”

Thompson’s mouth hung open. His eyes drooped closed. His head hung down and his body slumped forward, deadweight against his seat belt. The mug tipped from his nerveless hands and coffee rushed onto his khakis.

Moss pulled over. “What in the name of all that’s holy just happened?”

“Your Irish comes out when you’re stressed.”

“This was your plan? Tell me you didn’t poison him.”

“He’ll be fine. Sleep twelve hours, maybe a little more, wake up with a headache.” Unless he drank too much. Then he might die.

“What is it?”

“Rohypnol.” Wells had packed the pills in his bag of tricks from New Hampshire. He’d ground up twelve, mixed them into the thermos. Coffee and milk masked their bitter taste. “It’s a sedative, like Valium. Puts you to sleep. Just faster.”

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, John. You carry that stuff around? Isn’t that the date-rape drug?”

“I don’t plan to rape him. Though you’re welcome to.”

“I thought you were going to talk to him.”

“I am, eventually.” Wells lowered the window, dumped out the thermos. “Let’s go.”

“I hope to God you’re right about this.” Moss slipped the Land Cruiser back into gear and they drove in silence for a while. “What are you going to tell him when he wakes up?”

“By then we should know more.”

“But if you don’t.”

“That he passed out suddenly, that we have no idea why. What’s he going to do, ask for a tox screen at the MSF hospital?”

“He’ll know you’re lying.”

“He won’t be able to prove it, and he can’t touch me anyway. If Shabaab really does have these kids deep in Somalia, there’s not much I can do. I’ll switch passports and disappear. And if something else is going on, if he’s involved somehow, I’ll be the least of his problems.”

“I can’t see you as the least of anyone’s problems.”

—

Wells and Wilfred carried Thompson inside Gwen’s trailer. He was bigger than Wells had realized, two hundred pounds of deadweight. They laid him on his back on Gwen’s bed.

“What happened?” Wilfred said.

“Tell you later.”

“You hit him with mzungu magic.” Wilfred mimed beating drums. “A curse from the ancestral spirits.”

“A curse from Roche.” Wells put two fingers to Thompson’s carotid, picked up a slow, steady pulse, fifty beats a minute. He rummaged through Thompson’s windbreaker, found his passport and international phone. In his pants, a wallet and a local phone. Wells recognized the number taped to the back. This was the legitimate phone.

Wells couldn’t believe Thompson had left the third phone in Nairobi. He’d want it close by. In the laptop bag, he found a computer and a half-dozen Cadbury wrappers. So far the only secret he’d discovered was Thompson’s sweet tooth.

He patted Thompson’s legs down. The man didn’t stir. Wells had the unsettling feeling that he was robbing a corpse. He found nothing. He double-checked the windbreaker—

And finally found a tiny Samsung handset zippered into an inside compartment just above the waistband. No number taped to the back. Wells booted it up, but it demanded a four-digit password. Wells tried 1-1-1-1. No good. Hopefully, Moss would have some ideas. Wells pocketed the phone, turned Thompson on his side so that if he threw up he wouldn’t choke on his vomit.

“Watch him,” Wells told Wilfred. “Call me if he wakes up.”

“And if he stops breathing?”

“Call me then, too.”

Back in Moss’s office, Wells booted up Thompson’s laptop. It was password-protected and the obvious choices failed. The NSA could break it, but Wells couldn’t. He switched on the phone. It demanded a combination, four digits. Wells tried 1-2-3-4, then 4-3-2-1. No good.

“What’s his social?”

“His what?”

“The last four digits of his Social Security number.”

“How would I know?”

“It’s got to be on a record somewhere,” Wells said. She reached for her laptop, but he put a hand on her shoulder. “Forget it. Let’s try his birthday first. Egomaniacs love to use their birthdays for passwords.”

“That’s March 19, I think.” Moss flipped through an old-fashioned planner. “Yes.”

Wells keyed in 0-3-1-9 and the phone unlocked. He scrolled through the menus until he found the phone’s number. It was almost the same as the number Thompson gave Wells, but two digits were transposed. If Wells asked, Thompson could say he’d made a legitimate mistake.

The call registry showed that Thompson had used the phone sparingly, making just a handful of calls to three numbers in the last week, all with Kenyan prefixes. Most calls ran less than two minutes. In the hours after Wells demanded that Thompson come back to Dadaab, Thompson made several late-night calls, none of which were answered.

“Recognize these? Suggs, anyone?”

“No.”

“Let’s call them.”

Moss reached for her phone.

“Use Skype so they can’t trace the call,” Wells said.

Moss pulled up Skype on her laptop. Her first call went to a voice mail without a greeting. So did the second. The third rang three times before it went to voice mail. A man offered a greeting in Swahili and then said in English, “Joka-joka-joka call back-back-back.”

“Is Joka-joka-joka Kenyan slang?”

“Not that I know of. What he says in the Swahili part of the greeting is standard, leave a message and I’ll call back.”

“Is that Suggs?”

“Not sure. Let me hear it again.” She redialed. This time the call went straight to voice mail. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure it’s not Suggs.” She redialed one more time. This time a man answered. He said something, laughed, hung up.

“What’d he say?” Wells said.

“I don’t know. He was speaking Somali. Not Swahili.”

“But the voice mail message was Swahili?”

“Yes.”

“So either the greeting is intentionally misleading or the phone has been taken by someone who speaks Somali.”

“Correct.”

Wells tried to come up with a happy explanation for that particular fact pattern. He couldn’t. He called Shafer. “I got Thompson’s third phone.”

“Want to tell me how?”

“I roofied him and took it.”

“You what-ted him?”

“You heard me. I gave him a cup of coffee with some special sweetener.”

“This is why I love you, John. You’re insane. You’re telling me you drugged James Thompson so you could steal his phone.”

“We both know I’ve done worse.”

“He’s going to want your head when he wakes up.”

“That’s why I’d like you to run the number, Ellis. And three more. All Kenyan country codes, but they’re either in Kenya or Somalia.”

“It’s almost midnight here, John. But I’ll try. Give them to me.”

Wells did. “Names would be nice, but what I really need is an approximate location for the receiving handsets. Anything new on your end?”

“The level of interest here is extreme.”

“Because of the press conference.”

“Because they’re oh so pretty. Because of the wall-to-wall coverage on every network. This thing’s picking up speed. We could wind up invading Somalia.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Not really. The Kenyans want it. They think we can solve their problem with Shabaab once and for all. Then they’ll say Somalia’s been pacified, close the camps, send the refugees home. They’re talking to the White House.”

Now Wells understood why the Kenyan police weren’t trying to find the volunteers. “But Duto—”

“Would rather you find them yourself. Even better, tell me where they are so he can send in a SOG team, play the hero. A nice liftoff for his campaign. He’s watching. You want help from us or Fort Meade, I can’t hide it from him.”

“Including these phone numbers I just passed along.”

“If it turns out some Somali gang has your friends, you might be glad for the help.”

“Doubtful.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.” Shafer hung up.

—

“The United States government can track those phones?” Moss said. “Even if they were inside Kenya the whole time?”

“In a country like this, one where we more or less don’t care about the diplomatic consequences if we get caught, we have tracking software on every mobile network. Manufacturers install it or we sneak it in later. Don’t ask me how it works, because I don’t know. But it does work. I can tell you firsthand. Hopefully, they’ll have something for us before Sleeping Beauty wakes up.”

“But if Jimmy and Suggs faked this kidnapping, why did Jimmy make such a fuss that first day when the reporter from Houston said she was going to write? Wouldn’t he have wanted the media to know?”

“I think he did. He knew she was going to write something even if he told her not to. He figures he holds a press conference, raises a few million bucks, and then in a couple weeks gives everyone the good news. The hostages escaped. Or WorldCares paid the ransom. Or, best of all, the kidnappers heard his appeal to their humanity and let these poor aid workers go. The publicity will be huge. He’ll sell a million copies of his book. The hostages will probably all get paid too, books and movies and who knows what else. Best part is that once the volunteers get home, it’s not like the Kenyan police will keep looking for the kidnappers. Everyone will be happy to drop it. Like you said yesterday, there’s not even an insurance company to care.”

“But he didn’t understand how big this would get, and how soon,” Moss said.

“I think that’s right. He figured he could control it, but now it’s running away from him. Maybe that’s why a Somali answered that phone call we just made. Maybe Suggs decided he wants more money, so he’s moving the hostages someplace where Thompson can’t get them so easily. Like Somalia.”

Moss looked unconvinced. “Suggs is Kenyan, and Kenyans prefer this side of the border. So are you going to hit Jimmy with this theory that has absolutely no factual support?”

“Not just yet. For now I’m leaving your boss to you. I decided after you told me to forget the camps that I should see the kidnapping site for myself. Meantime, NSA will run the numbers. With any luck between us we’ll come up with enough to put some heat on James by the time he wakes up.”

“And if you don’t?”

“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. Meantime, I do have one more favor.”

“You never quit, do you?”

“I don’t think Martin’s car can handle these roads. Can I borrow a Land Cruiser, preferably one without WorldCares’s name on the side? No offense.”

“None taken. I might have another present for you, too—” Moss led Wells to a closet beside Thompson’s office. Inside, a padlocked case held a Glock .40-caliber pistol and a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun with a matte blue barrel, a mean-looking weapon. Boxes of ammunition were heaped on the floor.

“Aid workers aren’t supposed to need guns. But Jimmy wanted them.”

“Sure you don’t mind giving them up?”

“I never liked them.”

Wells didn’t like shotguns much either. They were overkill up close, useless at a distance. They were heavy, clumsy, and hard to hide. But for sheer intimidation, they couldn’t be matched. A Mossberg could stop a riot. Wells pulled it from the case, checked to be sure it wasn’t loaded, then put his nose to the barrel. It smelled of oil, not powder. It had been fired only a few times. The Glock was similarly new. Anne would be pleased. Wells tucked the pistol into his waistband and reached for the ammunition boxes.

—

Thirty minutes later, the WorldCares gates swung open. Wilfred was driving, Wells beside him. Wells had insisted Martin stay and watch Thompson. An excuse. Martin had a wife and three kids. Wells didn’t want to subject him to the risks they were about to take.

The camp stretched for miles, with only an occasional acacia tree to break the monotony. Women wearing long black abbayas clustered around a pumping station, pails in hand. A group of kids waved. But after the Land Cruiser passed, one grabbed a clump of dirt and flung it at the SUV. It hit the rear window, leaving a red-brown smear.

A GSU checkpoint marked the intersection of the camp track and the road that connected Dadaab with Ijara District. “To Dadaab?” an officer said.

“No. South.” Following the path of Suggs and the volunteers.

“I don’t advise anyone to go that way. The situation is unstable.”

“Then we’ll fit in fine.”

—

Even with the Cruiser’s four-wheel drive and big tires, Wilfred rarely got out of second gear. The land seemed set on rewind, endless miles of scrub and red dirt. Twice they passed flocks of sheep and goats watched over by armed herders. About an hour out of Dadaab, Wilfred made his way around a caravan of five camels, the tall humped beasts loaded with sacks of grain and charcoal.

After ninety bone-jarring minutes, the Cruiser reached Bakafi. Wells’s map showed it as the only village of any size on the road. Though size was relative. A handful of stores sold food and charcoal. A green-domed mosque marked the middle of town, followed by a police outpost and a school whose red paint had faded to a weak pink in the sun. Barefoot kids shouted as they passed.

Near the south end of town, a sign in English and Arabic marked a plain white building as “King Fahad Muslim Infirmary. Gift from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Even in this flyspeck town, the Saudis spread charity and Islamist teachings. A hundred meters farther down, a tall concrete building stood alone. Four men stood outside, smoking. The place was painted a striking canary yellow. A torn plastic banner hanging from the roof proclaimed: “Broadway Hoteli/Best in the District/Live Premier League Football/Tusker TOO!”

“A hotel? Here?”

Wilfred pulled over. “‘Hoteli’ is our word for a restaurant. Serves fried potatoes, mutton, all those things. A whole meal one hundred fifty, two hundred shillings. Usually it’s okay, but when they use the grease too long—” He rubbed his stomach.

“And this one serves beer? In a Muslim town?”

“Bakafi must not be all Muslim. Kenyan and Somali, Christian and Muslim. So the alcohol is okay.”

The place was the Kenyan equivalent of a Montana roadhouse, Wells thought, a way to keep drinking and trouble outside the middle of town, but close enough for the police to step in if a fight got out of control. Past the hoteli Wells saw a man on a motorbike. He fit the Somali stereotype, small head, coffee-colored skin. He held a cell phone at arm’s length, like he was taking a picture with it. A picture of the Toyota, maybe. The motorcycle between his legs was a dirt bike, stubby tires and thick shocks. As they moved closer, the guy tucked away the phone, kicked the bike into gear, rode south.

Wells wondered if he should have Wilfred follow. But if they got close, the guy could go off road, find a patch of soft ground that would trap the SUV. Plus Wells couldn’t imagine that the volunteers were being kept in a town where the Kenyan cops had a presence. No. If they were still in Kenya, they’d be at Dadaab, or in a cluster of huts that wasn’t on a map. Probably close to the Somali border. If the police had cared, they could have made the same calculation, hit every settlement within fifty miles of the border. But either they truly believed Shabaab was behind the kidnapping, or they had received instructions from Nairobi not to look.

“Let’s find where they were taken,” Wells said.

Wilfred lowered his window, shouted to the men across the street. One walked over and had what seemed like an endless conversation with Wilfred before finally wandering back to his buddies.

“It’s around twenty kilometers south,” Wilfred said. “The road takes a turn. A few kilometers before the intersection.”

“That’s all he said.”

“These men, it takes them an hour to answer a question. Country people. Not like Nairobi.”

Wells understood. He’d grown up in the seventies in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, a little town called Hamilton, south of Missoula. Back then the houses on the edge of town still had shared phones—party lines, they were called. The ranchers could make a conversation about the weather last an hour. Why not? The cattle weren’t going anywhere.

—

South of Bakafi the land turned hilly, a blanket on an unmade bed. The road faded until it was little more than potholes in the scrub, and Wells’s legs ached as the Cruiser thumped along. They drove about forty minutes before the road came over a hill and swung hard left. Wilfred stopped and pointed at a mess of cigarettes and water bottles in the road ahead.

The kidnappers had chosen wisely. Wells figured they’d blocked the road with one or two of their own SUVs. A driver coming over the hill would have only seconds of warning. If he tried to swerve past the roadblock, he would risk getting stuck in the hill’s soft dirt or flipping over. But once he stopped, he’d be trapped. Gunmen would have positioned themselves behind the WorldCares SUV, pinning it down.

Wilfred eased past the kidnapping site, stopping a hundred feet away. Wells tucked the Glock into his waistband and walked back under the hammering noontime sun. On all sides, the land was surpassingly quiet. No railroad tracks or cell towers. To the west and southwest, he saw scattered huts, but nothing that qualified as a village, much less a town. East, toward Somalia, the land appeared entirely empty. Southeast, maybe five miles away, Wells saw a few black smudges coasting through the sky. Smoke, maybe. He checked through his binoculars. He couldn’t be sure, but they looked like birds. Big ones. A bunch of them, widely spaced, but all moving southeast.

Rich tourists came to Africa under the illusion they would see the untouched world. But mostly they stuck to national parks or private game reserves as closely managed as zoos. They should have come here instead. Wells squatted down, pored over the road, the land around it. But the police had destroyed whatever evidence the kidnappers might have left. The soft red dirt held at least a half-dozen different tire tracks, dozens of footprints. Maybe the guys from CSI could tell the tracks left by the kidnappers from those left by the cops. Wells couldn’t. Pretending otherwise would only waste time.

Still, this trip strengthened his certainty that Suggs was involved. First, the kidnappers must have known the route the volunteers were taking. Why else wait here, on a road used by only a few vehicles a day? On the flip side, Wells couldn’t imagine why the volunteers would have chosen this route unless Suggs had suggested it. The road barely appeared on the map, and it was terribly slow. They’d covered a little more than 150 kilometers—not even 100 miles—in three hours. Going to Garissa and then south on the gravel road to the coast would surely have been faster, even with roadblocks.

“What do you think?” Wilfred said.

“I think Kenyan cops smoke a lot. Any of these brands unusual? Somali?”

“No, all Kenyan.”

Then Wells realized what he hadn’t seen. No spent rounds, no brass casings. No evidence of a firefight. He double-checked to be sure. Yes. Another sign that the kidnapping had gone off without a hitch. He took one last look around, walked back toward the Cruiser.

“That’s it?” Wilfred said. “We came all this way for that?”

“Sometimes you have to see a place with your own eyes.”

“Now we go back to Bakafi, see if anyone talks?”

“No. South.” Wells felt strongly that the kidnappers had gone away from Dadaab. If they had planned to hide in the camps, they would have taken the volunteers much closer to Dadaab.

“And you think these people around here want to talk to you?”

“Never know unless you ask.”

“I can tell you they aren’t much interested in talking to outsiders. Maybe you tell them you’re an Arab and you want to buy the girls for slaves. Like a vulture coming in after the kill.”

Like a vulture . . .

Wells raised his binoculars and looked at the black smudges on the horizon. They were still heading southeast. They’d shrunk to specks now. But even as he watched, another entered his field of view. This one was closer, close enough for him to see its wings, big and black and jagged, like they’d been sewn on the cheap and could unravel easy as tugging a string. The bird rode a thermal, rising hundreds of feet in seconds, then flicked its wings and circled southeast, same as the others.

“That way.” Wells pointed toward the vulture.

—

The track south ended a half hour later at a T-junction with another, equally unimpressive road. Twenty or so huts lay a kilometer west. Wilfred turned left, east. Toward Somalia, which was no more than thirty barren kilometers away. Wells racked the slide on the Glock, making sure it was loaded. The pistol felt strange in his hand, heavier and bigger than the Makarov he had carried for so many years. But Anne was right. He should have retired the Mak long ago. Now he had an excuse, a new pistol that fate, in the form of a plug-ugly Irishwoman, had pressed on him.

The smudges in the sky were as good as a GPS. They’d all heard the same announcement: Delicious carrion in aisle two. They might be headed for a cow or a sheep or even a camel. But Wells didn’t think so. After another twenty minutes in the Cruiser, Wells could see the birds slowing, organizing themselves into a ragged circle. They were almost directly to the south, maybe five kilometers. Three swung lower, disappearing behind a hill. Soon they popped up again. Wells imagined they’d tried to feed and been chased out by stronger predators, jackals or hyenas or even lions. The big Kenyan national park called Tsavo East lay about 150 kilometers southwest of here. No doubt lions sometimes ranged this far from its boundaries.

The birds rose, riding on thermals, black spurs against the empty blue sky. Wilfred pointed to a faint pair of ruts marked by a cairn of a half-dozen stones. He started to turn into the track, but Wells put a hand on his forearm.

“Go straight. Park over the next rise. Then we leave this and walk.”

“It will take forever. And snakes. There are snakes.”

“We go on foot, no one knows we’re coming.”

“Better to have this.” Wilfred patted the dashboard like a horse’s flank.

“We walk. You don’t like it, stay in the car.”

—

They trudged south through the ugly low scrub. The dirt was soft, almost spongy, swallowing their steps. The refugees walked through hundreds of miles of this to reach Dadaab. No wonder they were starving when they arrived. Wells carried the essentials in his pack: water, a first-aid kit, binoculars, a sat phone and GPS. He’d strapped on a climber’s headlamp, goofy-looking but essential for keeping his hands free if he found himself in a dark hut. The shotgun was slung across his chest, the Glock tucked into his waistband. He’d given Wilfred the Makarov.

“You don’t shoot unless I shoot.”

“Okay, yes.”

The Land Cruiser’s clock had read 14:20 when they left. Wells figured they’d need close to an hour to reach the area directly beneath the vultures. That didn’t give them much time on target if they were going to return to the Cruiser before dark. They walked in silence, Wells a few feet ahead, scanning for smoke, huts, any sign of human habitation.

A high-pitched cackle, an ugly gasping sound, half laugh, half choke, erupted somewhere in front of them. Wells stopped with one foot in the air like Wile E. Coyote. “Hyenas?”

“That’s their song.”

“Pretty.”

“The devil rides them through hell.”

“Save the folk tales for the anthropology professors.”

Wilfred shook his head in perplexity.

“Come on. Unless you want to be out here in the dark.”

Twice more they heard the cackling, and once an answering call behind them. Neither man mentioned it. The vultures floated high overhead, using the thermals, barely flapping their wings.

A half hour later, Wells came over a hill and saw the huts. Four in all. Three small and close to each other. The last larger, maybe fifty meters away from the third. They were mud-brick, hand-built, like a thousand other huts that Wells had seen that day. The big one had a tin roof, angled slightly so the rain would pour off. The other three had traditional branch roofs. No walls or barbed wire separated them from the land around. Hidden in plain sight. No vehicles either. They were gone, or hidden.

Wells dropped to a knee, scanned the compound through his binoculars. In the middle of the compound, he saw a man, or more accurately what was left of him. His arms and legs were chewed to stumps, his belly torn open. Intestines glistened against black skin like stuffing pulled loose from a cheap toy. Two more bodies lay in front of the second hut, similarly dismembered.

“See them?” Wilfred muttered.

He wasn’t talking about the corpses.

The hyenas lay in the shade of the huts, lazing, their bellies swollen. Beards of blood coated their muzzles. Wells counted ten. As he watched, one stood and waddled over to a corpse. The hyena poked and snuffled the body and then clamped its jaws around an arm. It put its paws on the dead man’s chest and lifted its head and grunted and strained, its body shaking, until the arm tore from the shoulder with a gunshot-loud snap. Over the years, Wells had seen human beings destroyed in almost every conceivable way. Even so, the violence done to these corpses tightened his throat.

Wells stood, unslung the shotgun. No need for stealth. Whoever had killed these people had left the camp to the hyenas. “Time to restore our place at the top of the food chain.”

“You want to go down there.”

“When they learn how to shoot, I’ll worry.” Wells strode down the hill. After a few seconds, he heard Wilfred follow. When he reached the base of the hill, fifty yards from the nearest corpse, the animals stood and looked at him. They were motley creatures, with big cupped ears that made him think of fly-eating flowers. Their brown fur was marked with dark spots like an old man’s hands. Their tails angled downward, toward the earth. When dogs put their tails at that angle, they were showing submission. Wells figured hyenas behaved similiarly, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know much about them. He’d have to remember to read up before his next trip searching for volunteer aid workers.

A breeze ruffled the hyenas’ fur and brought Wells the sour stench of the torn, bloated corpses. Over millennia, humans had invented rituals to hide the monstrousness of postmortem decay. But here was death in its truest form, destroying not just the spirit but the body itself.

Wells lifted the shotgun high and shouted, “Go! Git! Go on, now!”

The hyenas were less than impressed. One yawned, its pink tongue flopping out. Another scratched furiously at the dirt like a drag racer spinning his wheels before the flag dropped. The one closest to Wells went back to tugging on a corpse.

“Get lost! Hubba-hubba!” Wells cocked the shotgun and strode closer. Most of the pack padded away. But four stood their ground. The hyena nearest Wells seemed to be the leader. It raised its tail, bared its teeth, growled low in its throat. Wells felt his adrenaline rise. The creature might not be pointing a pistol at him, but its intent was more than clear. It stared at him with unblinking black eyes. It was enormous, three feet tall. As big as a Great Dane but sturdier. It had to be almost two hundred pounds. It had a thick neck and teeth that looked like they could tear steel.

Wells put the shotgun to his shoulder, angled the muzzle skyward. “GO!” The hyena merely licked its lips. “I thought you were cowards.” He squeezed the trigger. The Mossberg bucked against his shoulder and its blast rattled through his skull. He pumped the shotgun, fired again.

Finally, the hyena stepped away from the corpse and turned aside. It looked over its shoulder at Wells and loped off, its tail between its legs. You don’t scare me. The other three holdouts followed, forming a single-file line as they disappeared into the scrub. They moved with an odd precision. The stink of the corpses would lure them back by nightfall, Wells thought. Another reason not to tarry.

Wells topped up the Mossberg with two more shells, slung it over his chest, and turned to the bodies. They looked worse up close, rotting meat covered with quilts of flies. Wells wished for a kerchief to shield his mouth, or even better, some Vicks VapoRub to hide the stench. He squeezed his nose, forced himself to ignore the flies and the stink and look close at the corpses. Their faces had been chewed into unrecognizability, but in their flesh he saw neat punctures. GSWs, as trauma surgeons said. Gunshot wounds.

He didn’t see any rifles or pistols, but brass casings glinted in the red dirt around the bodies. Wells picked up a handful. 7.62-millimeter jackets. AK rounds.

Beside the third hut he saw two more bodies. A piece of torn rubber lay between them. It looked like it had been chewed and then spit out, as if even the hyenas wouldn’t bother with it. A mask. A Joker mask.

Joka-joka-joka call back-back-back.

—

Wells had heard plenty of lies over the years, and told his share. But he couldn’t remember anyone who lied with as much conviction—as much flat-out style—as James Thompson. The man had been close to tears at the press conference in Nairobi. Wells wondered what explanation Thompson would offer for having the Joker’s number programmed into his phone. No doubt it would be a beaut. Wells grabbed the mask, threw it as high and far as he could. Let the vultures have it, if the hyenas wouldn’t.

The first hut held supplies, mostly canned food and water. Cases of peanut butter and jam. Whoever had been here had wanted to be sure he wouldn’t need a fire to cook. At the back, two hot plates with electrical cords and a half-dozen plastic jerricans of gasoline. No generator. Wells wondered if the raiders had taken it.

In the next hut, six cots, their mattresses thin, stained, and lumpy. The dank sour smell of a locker room that hadn’t been cleaned all season. T-shirts and jeans and sneakers and Tusker bottles strewn across the floor. Against the wall, an empty AK magazine, no rifle in sight. Wells imagined the chaos of a surprise night attack, men scrambling for weapons and running outside to die. He rousted the room for notebooks or phones, didn’t find any.

The third hut had only two cots. Wells guessed the leaders had lived here. A wooden chest held shoes and clothes, including a bright yellow polo shirt, size XXL. Wells put it in his pack. Maybe Moss could identify it as belonging to Suggs. Between the cots, a cardboard box held two oversized bottles of off-brand scotch. Nothing else. The whole camp felt temporary to Wells, as though the men who’d lived here hadn’t planned on staying long—evidence for the theory that Thompson and Suggs planned to end the kidnapping quickly, once the media attention peaked.

One hut left, the big one. Process of elimination said it was the place where Gwen and the others had been kept. Up close, Wells heard grunting and snuffling and scratching, horror-movie sounds. He reached for his pistol, flicked on his headlamp, stepped inside—

The room was airless and dark and painfully hot. In the headlamp’s stark white light, Wells saw a hyena tugging at a corpse against the far wall. The animal turned to Wells and screeched and Wells stepped backward. He knew instantly he’d made a mistake. The hyena bared its teeth and raised its tail like a battle standard and charged, pouncing across the hut, angling toward Wells. Wells raised the Glock, a classic shooter’s two-handed stance, and pulled the trigger. The Glock had more kick than the Makarov, more than Wells expected. The pistol pulled sideways and the round caught the hyena in its hindquarters. The hyena screamed now, but kept moving. Wells pulled the trigger again—

This second shot caught the beast farther up. Wells expected the hyena to go down. Still it came. Ten feet away now. It opened its jaw wide, its teeth white and vicious under the headlamp’s single eye. Wells knew he had time for only one last shot. He raised the Glock high and, as the hyena leapt, he pointed the pistol into the beast’s open maw and pulled the trigger—

The hyena’s head exploded and its body convulsed sideways. It flopped against the hut’s dirt floor. When it stopped moving, Wells poked it gingerly with his foot. He knew he had killed it well and truly. Yet he half expected it to rise. The devil’s pet indeed. Those fierce slavering jaws. And the stink. A stomach filled with carrion, the meat twice dead now. Wells found himself murmuring the Shahada, the Muslim creed, La ilaha illa Allah . . . There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.

“Holy shit,” Wilfred said behind him. “Score one for the great white hunter.”

The stench of decaying tissue clotted Wells’s throat. He pressed his forearm against his nose and forced himself to walk deeper into the hut. And realized something about the body at the far end. It was white. The face was still largely intact. A man. His mouth open, and his eyes. Wells had never met him, but from photos he knew the frat-boy chin. Gwen’s sometime boyfriend. James’s nephew.

Scott Thompson. Resting in nothing like peace. Wells would have to leave him here. Before he did, he leaned close, examined the body. Two shots in the chest, close range. They didn’t look like AK rounds to Wells, though he couldn’t be sure. He looked away, saw a glint in the wall. A metal ring. A chain hung from it.

He clamped down on the acid rising in his throat and checked the rest of the hut. Three more empty rings in the walls. The other hostages, gone. Why had Scott been killed and left? Had he fought the kidnappers? Was his death a message to James Thompson? Wells wished he had a forensic team helping him. Instead he had a headlamp and Wilfred. Who called to him now, urgently.

“John.”

Wells stepped outside. The sun hit him, and before he could stop himself his stomach clenched viciously. Bile coursed through his throat and into his mouth, and he vomited a thin brown muck that the dirt swallowed instantly.

He groped in his pack for a bottle of water. He gulped until his cheeks were full, swished, spat. And again. Rinse and repeat. Anything to hide the angry sour taste. He poured a second bottle over his face and hands, hoping the lukewarm liquid would wash away the stink. As he tilted up his head, he couldn’t help but see the vultures dirtying the sky. Death and its minions were everywhere in this camp.

“Listen,” Wilfred said.

In the distance, to the north: The hive-of-bees buzz of a dirt bike engine revving high. And a second, meshing with the first.

“Coming this way,” Wilfred said. “If we had the Cruiser—”

“We don’t.”

“What then?”

“We kill them.”

“Mzungu. That some sickness. Don’t even know them, what they want—”

“We kill them. Unless you’d rather they kill us.”