REVIEWS:

“Not for the faint of heart. Africa is not for sissies. I grew up in Africa and recognized the authentic nature of the writing. It was a first class thriller and I enjoyed it thoroughly. ”
Paul R.

“...Fantastic, right up there with the best thrillers I’ve ever read. The story keeps buzzing. The plot, the facts (equipment, region, etc), and (perhaps most impressively) the characters are all engaging and consistent.... Dangerous Game is a powerful, thoughtful and polished thriller. It's rare to find a book that combines excitement, believable characters and hardcore hardware the way Dangerous Game does.”
Charles Morgan

“This book is nonstop excitement. Gives you the the feeling of actually being there. While most books and movies tend to be politically correct on the subject of modern Africa Dangerous Game does not go that route but instead takes the reader on a safari that National Geographic would not dare go. On this this journey you will see the corruption, aids, drug smuggling, violence, and other things that would have Kipling spinning in his grave. I first heard of this book on sniper [...] and after reading the reviews and excerpts I was intrigued enough to buy the book and can't put it down Don Hollway is an excellent writer and look forward to reading more of his books.”
Jim Pickens

“ Gripping Read. Dangerous Game is one FANTASTIC read. It’s gritty, it’s real, it’s brutal ... it’s Africa.”
David Hull

“Dangerous Game is gripping! Mr. Hollway has done a fantastic job of bringing forth a story that needed to be told! His grasp on African Politics is excellent!”
Bill Craig

MORE REVIEWS >>

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SAMPLE CHAPTERS:

1. Mogadishu 1993

2. Northeast Kenya

3. Life and death

4. Wajir

5. Unarmed in a knife fight

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Foreword

Obviously Dangerous Game is a work of fiction. The fact that as of this writing (1996) the current strong man in Mogadishu, Hussein Mohammed Aidid, is an AWOL Marine raised in the States since he was a teenager, is more of a comment on U.S. foreign policy than my storytelling ability. Aidid’s father, Mohammed Farah Aidid, was the warlord brought to power during, and largely responsible for overthrowing, the regime of President Mohammed Siad Biarre. After eluding attempts by Delta Force and the US Army Rangers to capture/kidnap him during Operation “Restore Hope,” the elder Aidid was killed in factional fighting in July 1996.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service web site there is no such position as Deputy Director of Enforcement, though there is a Deputy Director Security. I believe in and support the work the KWS is doing. However, it is interesting to note that the internationally known and highly respected Dr. Richard Leakey, son of the famous anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, was encouraged to resign his post as KWS Director amid government charges of corruption. This not long after he orchestrated the media event of burning several million dollars worth of ivory tusks captured from poachers.

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Glossary

Swa: Swahili       Som: Somali       Af: Afrikaans

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Mogadishu, 1993

Africa. Big game hunting. Army style.

Master Sergeant Mike McKay’s earplug crackled: “Spock, Scotty. I got Klingons.”

“Scotty, Spock. Copy.” Raising his camouflage-creamed face from behind a tumbled pile of bricks, Mike put an eye to the target scope of his .308-caliber M24 sniper rifle to scan the plaza below, mil-dotted cross hairs searching out a target in a simmering, twisted maze of orange sand alleys. All that was left of downtown Mog.

Weed-chewing black men in oversized shirts and raggedy sarongs, loafing on bullet-pocked street corners: small game. Silent women in multihued robes, herding flocks of potbellied children and goats through stubs of cactus and piles of rotting garbage and empty cartridge casings: small game. A frizzy, emaciated black kid standing in the bed of a bouncing, swerving, junker pickup truck, hanging onto the ass end of a free-swinging heavy machine gun. Trophy?

In any other war, the truck would have been target practice. In this one, it was light armor. A technical. As it fishtailed to a stop in mid-plaza, scattering the locals to cover, Mike tracked, zoomed, and focused, adjusting his aim point for a possible center-body shot on the kid. “Scotty, Spock. Phaser lock.”

“Kirk here,” muttered the mission C.O., lying beside Mike. Second Lieutenant Karim Said didn’t turn from his spotting scope.“Target denied.”

“Kirk, say again your last,” was the comeback—Staff Sergeant Miguel Sanchez sounding just the slightest bit teed off. After all their years together, Mike knew exactly how he felt. All damn night, picking their way, shadow by shadow, from the safety of the waterfront, across the Green Line between the UN forces and Somali militia. Through the “Black Sea,” the gunman-haunted no-man’s land washed up by the ebb and flow of civil war. Up into the tottering ruin of some dead or departed European’s abandoned, shell-smashed house. And for what?

“Not our man, Scotty,” Mike told him, studying the black kid’s face in the scope. All Skinnies looked the same to him. Scrawny. Leather faces, stretched tight over snaggle-toothed skulls. Half-high and hungry. Just like 2Lt. Said. “Some Sammy is all.”

Skinnies. Sammy. The same way the Viet Cong had been Charlie. Intel believed this shattered, colonial era apartment complex to be some sort of Somali militia headquarters. But the midday heat—or the threat of the Delta Force commandos who’d vowed to capture them—had driven the warlords, like ants under a magnifying glass, underground. Until now.

Mike swung his scope again, to find “Mig” Sanchez with his camo-hatted head poking up out of the rubble of his own sniper hide, four hundred yards away in the basement window of a half-collapsed house on the far side of the plaza. “And keep your head down, for Christ’s sake,” Mike told him. “You’re hanging out like a dog’s balls.”

“Spock, Scotty. Copy dog’s balls.” Muffled laugh as Sanchez pulled his head in. Mike and Miguel, the goddamn Mick & Spic Comedy Show, currently on the African leg of its world tour: Beirut, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and generally anywhere an American president felt like fucking with a foreign nation.

Mike took his finger off the M24’s hair trigger and daubed at an old, semicircular scope-eye scar cutting his right eyebrow. In hot weather it funneled sweat off his forehead into his shooting eye. “You know, Lieutenant,” he told Said, “you’ve got my buddy’s ass sticking pretty far out there, if it comes to some shooting.”

“Chill, Sergeant.” Displaying a grasp of command comparable to that of Custer on the runup to Little Bighorn or Lee in the advance to Gettysburg, Said had divided his forces in enemy territory without knowing his foes’ disposition. “We ain’t here to shoot nobody.”

“Funny, that’s what they told us the day we hit the beach,” Mike muttered. “What makes you so sure your warlord will put in an appearance?”

“This my old hood, afore my Mama brung me to the States.” Said wasn’t Delta Force like Mike and Mig. Hell, he was barely even American. A native Somali, only just out of his teens. Enough time Stateside to pass the citizenship test, pick up some Ebonics, and join the Army, where so far it looked like he was moving up through the ranks quicker than he would have in the Crips or Bloods. He’d been handed command of Mike’s sniper team at the last minute, as some sort of translator/guide, amid a lot of unanswered objections and a strong whiff of Army Intel and maybe even CIA. Especially after Mig found out through the grapevine that the kid had been a buck-fucking private just the week before. “Our man be along sooner or later,” he told Mike.

“Maybe,” Mike said. “But I’m a sniper, not a goddamn kidnapper.”

Now Said turned his head to give Mike a look. He wore the same turban and sarong as a Skinny, a disguise so perfect that Mike himself was suddenly unsure which side the Somali was on. “Who say anything about kidnapping?”

Before Mike could answer there was a commotion down in the plaza. He got his eye back to his scope in time to find three more fender-flapping technicals—the first must have been scouting for them—swerve into the plaza. A regular goddamn Somali Rat Patrol, missing body panels and windshields but packing machine guns, full crews of AK-toting bandits, and even an old US-issue 106mm recoilless rifle, left over from the days when Somalia and Ethiopia traded superpower patrons like bubblegum cards.

The convoy stopped in a cloud of dust. The Skinnies leaped down and spread out, sweeping the plaza and the surrounding rubble, as if anyone would dare challenge them. But one man remained standing in the back of one of the trucks. Mike had memorized this Skinny’s face from photos. Skeletal. Darty yellow tweaker’s eyes, orange-stained teeth. Death on meth.

“Shit,” Mike said, “that’s our man in the back of the truck!” Hassan Aziz, whom the UN generals called a murdering warlord and whose mooryaan—bandits, militia—had paralyzed Mogadishu and the efforts of the international community to relieve it. The closest thing Somalia had to a national leader, Aziz unfortunately had a problem with foreign troops on his soil. Major policy error on his part. “Get on the horn and tell the cavalry to mount up!”

Said still had his eye to his scope. “Wait. Maybe he just passing through....”

Mike shot him a look. “What the fuck are you talking about? He’s not going anywhere. From here I can keep a whole platoon pinned down. He makes a move, I’ll drop him where he stands.”

That got Said’s attention. “Sergeant, we ordered to find Aziz, not kill him.”

“Hell, I ain’t gonna kill him.” Mike put his eye back to the lens, centering Aziz, adjusting his scope knobs for windage and elevation. “I’m just gonna slow him down a little.”

Aziz made a good target, standing in the truck, waving his arms and shouting orders. A woman was standing next to him now, no doubt the First Lady. Something different about her. Mocha-colored, almond-eyed, wearing a very un-Somali leopard hide over her robes. Maybe half Aziz’s age, but seeming in her serenity somehow much older. Age-old, timeless, like she’d seen this sort of thing when this was the land of Punt and the soldiers took orders from Pharaoh. What the hell was going on down there?

“Scotty, Spock. Klingons,” Mike radioed. If he had to take a shot he didn’t want the Spic to open up and give himself away. “Scotty, Spock. Come back, Scotty.”

But Mig made no reply. And what the fuck was Aziz doing?

“Christ and Allah,” Said breathed.

Mike took his eye from the scope just long enough to see the expression of horror on Said’s face harden to resignation. He looked back down to the plaza to see what the high-power, narrow-view scope had not shown him: Aziz’s men running at the warlord’s orders, gathering up a limp, heavy bundle of oily brown rags which they’d been dragging in the street behind the last pickup truck.

“Oh God, no.” In the scope view, the bundle was chocolate chip desert camouflage, now shredded and bloody around the remains of a white man. “That’s one of ours. Scotty, Spock! Goddamn it, Scotty, do you read?”

Aziz was calling the cowering civilians out of the surrounding rubble. Meanwhile his militiamen propped the staggering American up against one of the trucks. The skin had been ground off his chest and stomach, but in the scope his bloody face was still recognizable.

“Fuck, it’s Mig. They’ve got Mig!” The hell with security. The hell with rank. Mike barked at Said, “Get on that fucking radio!”

Said fumbled with the burst transmitter. “Kirk to Starfleet, Kirk to Starfleet. Come in, Starfleet!”

“Just hang on, buddy, just hang on. I’ve got you.” Mike tightened down behind his scope. The instant one of those fucking rag heads raised a rifle he’d be dead meat. Dead goddamn meat.

“This is Starfleet,” rasped the radio. “Go, Kirk.”

“Starfleet, we got Klingons.” Said held down the transmit button. “Repeat, we got Klingons. Captain Koloth in command. Over.”

“Roger that, Kirk. Enterprise on its way. Prime Directive is in force.”

“Prime Directive my ass,” muttered Mike, switching his sight picture from Aziz to Mig and back again. “My fucking phaser’s set on kill.”

“Stand fast, Sergeant,” Said ordered. “Starfleet, Kirk. The Klingons got Scotty, over.”

Big pause on the other end. “Roger that, Kirk. Hold one.”

“I’m holding,” muttered Mike, fine tuning his elevation knob. “I’m holding my cross hairs on that bastard’s chest.”

“Stand fast, Sergeant!” Said warned again. “They got no reason killing your partner. Likely they hold him for ransom. Kidnapping big business in Mog.”

Maybe. Down in the plaza Aziz, oblivious to the gun sight centered on him, looked to be telling the assembling populace what a mighty leader he was, as evidenced by the foolish American currently on display. It had evidently not occurred to the Somalis that a U.S. soldier would not be found alone on the wrong side of the Green Line. Mig must’ve refused to talk. Hell, he was barely able to stand. His head lolled as his captors propped him up, tying his hands behind him.

“What the fuck is Enterprise doing?” Mike pounded his fist on the bricks. “How long does it take Delta Force to saddle up?”

In answer the radio called, “Starfleet to Kirk.”

“Kirk here. Go ahead, Starfleet.”

“Kirk, you are ordered to obey the Prime Directive. Wait for Enterprise.”

Mike said, “I’ll be goddamned!”

Said ignored him. “Put it in Warp Nine, Starfleet. Kirk out.”

Aziz had jumped down out of the truck. He lifted Mig’s drooping head by the hair so the crowd could see the American’s white, bloodied face. At his command, one of the mooryaan ran to fetch an old tire and a jerry can of fuel from the back of one of the trucks. In Somalia, gasoline was precious as water, and seeing the Skinnies prepare to use some made Mike sick. “Shit,” he said, “they’re gonna do him!”

“You hold your position, Sergeant,” Said warned. “Enterprise on its way.”

The Somalis hung the tire around Mig’s neck, sloshed gasoline into its hollow and doused him with it, but if Mig smelled the gas or felt it soaking into his wounds he didn’t show it. Passed out, thought Mike. Thank Christ. Because Mike knew what was coming. It was an old form of entertainment among Africans. They called it “the necklace.”

“Bullshit!” he said, thumbing off the M24’s safety. “They aren’t gonna get here in time. We gotta do something now!”

Aziz had paused to brag to the crowd one last time. His mistake. At that range, with the .308, Mike could choose not only whom to shoot but where to shoot him. He put the cross hair on Aziz’s solar plexus. No wind in the airless plaza to disturb the bullet’s flight, but Mike’s hard breathing and hammering heart made the crosshairs circle the target. Calm down, get control! He’d made many a longer, tougher shot than this. But never one so important.

Concentrating on his breathing, he laid the tip of his right index finger on the M24’s adjustable, two-stage trigger and began tightening it toward its three-pound release.

He heard the clack of the charging handle on Said’s M4 carbine—only Said would be in this position without a round already chambered—and its safety click off. Then something hard and cold nosed up behind Mike’s ear, and Said told him, “Sergeant, you will not take that shot.”

“If you think,” Mike said without moving, “I’m gonna lay here and let them torch my buddy, Private, you got another fucking thing coming.”

“You got ya orders. Take ya finger off that trigger.”

Said hadn’t pushed Mike’s eye from behind the scope. The Skinnies had rifle-prodded Mig clear of the truck so it wouldn’t catch fire when he did. Aziz had taken out a cheap Bic lighter and was trying to get a spark.

“All right,” said Mike, the M4’s muzzle against his ear. Said would have moved close alongside him, staying low to keep below the lip of parapet. “Taking my hand off.”

He moved his trigger hand well clear of the M24. Then he swung it all the way out, backhanding Said across the face. Cursing, Said fired. Mike’s quarter-roll had shouldered up the carbine and the burst went over him into the far wall. Half deafened, he grabbed Said by the shirt and continued his roll, pulling the kid over, across, and under him. With Said pinned on his back, Mike head-butted him in the face. “Motherfucker!”

Said’s nose exploded blood and the back of his head banged off the stone floor. His eyelids flickered and he went limp. Mike scrambled off him, back behind the M24, searching with the scope for his target.

The sound of the shots had sent the Somalis scurrying for cover, all except Aziz, who stood looking toward Mike’s position. Before Mike could get off a round, the warlord touched the sputtering Bic to the gas-soaked tire around Mig’s neck. The gas whoofed up with an orange flash and a rising black mushroom cloud, like a fuel-air explosive or a napalm canister dropped in an Iraqi trench.

“You fucker!” Mike cried.

Aziz ducked away from the fireball. Mike let him go. With horror he saw Mig come alive, wreathed in flame, trailing a plume of fire and black rubber smoke, staggering as he tried to buck the seething tire off. Blazing gasoline sloshed onto his legs and flared up. Inside the flames his chest and shoulders and face were blistering and peeling, burning away. Almost six hundred yards away, Mike could hear him scream.

“Mig! Mig!” he sobbed, but Mig couldn’t hear him. Mike tried to get the crosshairs on him, but Mig wouldn’t hold still. He caromed blindly among the trucks, a horrific apparition not yet dead but already in hell, terrified Somalis flushing right and left out of the rubble. When it seemed the horror would go on forever, Mig went down on one knee, his charred face upraised as if for God’s mercy.

“Hold still one second for me, Mig,” Mike wept, and shot him through the chest.

In the moment it took Mike to ride the recoil and get his eye back to the scope, Mig went down on his side, the blazing tire holding his charred body in a terrible embrace, rocking him gently to sleep.

Suddenly the plaza rang with the crackle of Somali gunfire. Bullets snapped through Mike’s window, chopping at the plaster above his head and sprinkling him with dust. He worked the .308’s bolt like a machine, all fear, all anger, all horror and grief gone out of him as he searched his scope. Where was Aziz? The warlord and his African bitch were nowhere to be found. In the distance, over the ringing in his ear, Mike could hear the beating of the Delta Force Black Hawk, homing on their position. The militiamen heard it, too, and leaped aboard the technicals, leaving Mig behind, aflame, forgotten.

End of mission. Mike pulled in the M24 and gathered up his gear.

Said was rolling around on his back, holding his smashed nose and whining. Keeping his head down, Mike crawled over to him, drew his .45 automatic and put it in the Somali’s ear. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now, you towel-headed, sand-eating, camel-fucking son of a bitch.”

Said looked up at him with wide, yellowed eyes. “Said my mother’s name. My father Hassan Aziz.”

“Fuck.” Mike stared at him. Everything fell into place. “Fuck!”

Another blast of bullets, heavy fifty-cals this time, shock waves cracking like rifle shots as they tore right through the building and kept on going out the other side. From the trucks down in the plaza came the slow stutter of heavy machine guns. The Skinnies weren’t going to take on Delta Force; one helicopter gunship would make mincemeat of those trucks. But by the sound of the truck engines—oncoming—they intended to take just enough time out from their escape to clean out the sniper hide.

Time for Mike’s getaway. But first he put the pistol in Said’s—Aziz’s—mouth. “You ain’t gonna make the family reunion, Sam.”

But even as his finger tightened on the trigger, a thunderbolt struck the building: a flash blinding in broad daylight, a noise like a rip in the planet. Sheer concussion blew Mike against the far wall. He woke up half-buried in pulverized brick and crumbled mortar, looking up through drifting white dust at bright blue sky.

The 106 recoilless had blown the top off the building.

But it had hit the wrong floor.

Coughing up powdered plaster, Mike rolled over to see Aziz scrabbling out the doorway and down the rickety stairs. Painfully he pulled himself from the debris, fearing broken bones but finding only bruises. He grabbed his pistol, but the rifles were buried somewhere under the rubble. No time to dig them out; the bazooka gunner would be reloading even now. A wonder the whole damn building hadn’t already caved in. Mike tumbled down the stairway in time to see Aziz, already out of pistol range, fleeing for safety among his fellow fucking Somalis. Mike let him go. Ducking out the other way, he dodged along the rubble-clogged street toward the prearranged rendezvous with the Delta Force commandos. He’d just crossed the road when another rocket round blew the first floor right out from under the building, which collapsed in on top of itself with an earth-shaking roar. A roiling, expanding cloud of sand and dust covered Mike as he scuttled toward the Green Line. He could hardly see where he was going. Mig! Mig! What the hell were we ever doing in Africa? Was this what it was all about? Was this what they wanted? Some sick fucking game?

Then Mike was going to start playing too. Until he finally finished it.

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Part one:
The hunter

Deep in the guts of most men is buried the involuntary response to the hunter’s horn, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of his fathers, who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. How meek the man is of no importance; somewhere in the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter’s heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood.

Robert Ruark
Horn of the Hunter

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Northeast Kenya

“Don’t sweat it, Bwana,” Matthew Mboya told Mike as they paused in a thicket of dead grass and wait-a-bit thorn, under the shade of a dried-up acacia tree. “I’ve read this wounded-cat scene a dozen times. Hemingway, Ruark, Capstick. Always turns out okay for our hero in the end.”

“So have I.” Mike wiped his khaki boonie hat off his head, dabbing at the old scope-eye scar. It was midmorning in the Furtherest Shag, Kenya’s arid Northeast Province, and already scorching hot. In the years since he’d mustered out of the military, he’d kept his regulation buzz cut, but now he had a beard of the same length, like some sort of grizzled GI Joe doll, gone salt-and-pepper gray. “Always the number two who gets it.”

“See, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Matthew laughed. He was the number two, the only other number, here on Kifaro Shamba, Mike’s struggling ranch. Overseer, tracker, guide, companion, general watcher of backs. “Of course, in the stories the cat’s always wounded. Usually gut shot, as I recall, in order for our hero to have an opportunity to prove his manhood by trailing him into the thick stuff. Unlike our own little chui here, whom I’d guess to be in the prime of health. In addition to being a proven man eater.”

Not only healthy, but well and recently fed. The blood trail they’d followed from the little Rendille manyatta half a mile down the dry lugga was not the leopard’s, but that of a little goatherd girl whom it had attacked and killed just that morning. The villagers had heard the girl’s frantic screams, though not a sound from the leopard. But by the time the women had retrieved their men folk, away tending their cattle and camels, the cat had already dragged the girl away into the brush. The men had circled the thicket and found no tracks leading out. They had raised enough of a ruckus to bring Mike and Matthew, who’d been camped nearby. Now they all stood back, jabbering in Swahili, waiting for Mike to do their dirty work. Though rustic, semi-nomadic, the Rendille claimed descent from Somali warriors of old. Mike despised them.

“He’s still in there all right,” Matthew said, peering into the thick grass and thorn. “Probably watching us as we speak.”

The pugmarks in the dry dust of the lugga were large enough to make Mike think they might have been left by a small lioness, but the villagers said it was just a chui manjano mkubwa. Big yellow leopard.

“Odd, though, isn’t it, for a healthy leopard to turn man eater?” Mike had been living in Kenya for several years now, long enough to learn the habits of the local wildlife. Matthew, however, was not only college educated but also native Kenyan, and the greatest authority on African wildlife Mike knew.

“Only thing predictable about leopard, Bwana,” he told Mike, “is that they’re completely unpredictable.” Matthew was of the Luo, an ancient tribe originally from the headwaters of the Nile. There was something of the Egyptian in his fine-boned face, mocha-colored skin, and the way he knelt there on the trail, trying to figure the best way to kill a cat his ancestors had worshipped.

“They’re blood enemies of the baboon and monkey,” he said, getting to his feet and hitching up his rifle. “Got millions of years of evolution conditioning them to kill primates. Doesn’t take much for them to step up the anthropoid ladder. I’ve seen leopards turn man killer just for the hell of it, leaving ’em where they fell. Maybe this one’s just hungry and can’t catch anything else. Call me an optimist. I’m going to assume he’s doing it for fun.”

“So am I,” Mike had to admit. The truth was that, here on the verge of bearding the proverbial tiger in its lair, he was deliriously, pulse-poundingly happy. This was a new experience for him. He hardly ever just wounded what he shot. “I always wanted to go hunting in Africa. My old man’s a guide in Alaska. I grew up stalking caribou, moose, the odd grizzly. Always thought when I got the money together I’d come out to Africa and do the great white hunter thing. Rhodesia, Tanganyika. Kenya maybe.”

Matthew shot him a look.

“Rhodesia is Zimbabwe now, and Tanganyika Tanzania. And we are emphatically not hunting leopard,” he said. “That would be highly illegal. Let no one be under any misconceptions, least of all the KWS, lest they throw the lot of us in prison for poaching and some land-grabbing bureaucrat confiscates Kifaro Shamba. This is pest control, pure and simple. For all we know that poor little bibi is still alive. If that chui gets his while we’re in the midst of saving the girl, well, that’d be just too bloody bad.”

“Ndio, Bwana,” said Mike meekly. “I called the KWS with the truck radio. Sure you don’t want to let them handle this?”

“I’m not waiting round for them while the cat gets away,” Matthew scowled. Before coming to work for Mike, he’d spent several years as a game ranger in the Kenya Wildlife Service. Respect was due the KWS for its power, he’d often told Mike, not its ability. “If this isn’t over by the time they get here, you and I won’t be in a position to care.”

A skinny, toga-wrapped old mzee stepped from the clump of villagers to belabor Mike in pidgin Swahili. Mike’s grip on the lingo wasn’t up to it. He looked to Matthew, who spoke the grammatical Swahili of the Kenya coast.

“Wants to join the hunt. Wants to lead it, in fact,” Matthew told him, looking the gray haired, gangly Rendille over with a critical eye. “Says he’s the little girl’s father. Says it’s his right to kill the cat.”

“With what?” Mike said. Besides their rifles, Matthew wore a big old British-era .455 Webley revolver, and Mike a .45 automatic. The Rendille was packing nothing more menacing than a spindly spear and a notch-bladed panga, the typical, all-purpose Kenyan machete. Matthew shrugged. “Among the Maasai you’re not a man until you’ve taken a charging lion onto your shield. These cattle herders don’t get much chance to prove their manhood, getting bullied as they do by the shifta.”

“If this old fart really is the girl’s father and not her grandfather, he’s already proved it to me.” Frowning at the old man, Mike asked Matthew, “What do you think?”

Matthew avoided their eyes. “I think if it was my daughter lying in there, likely dead but maybe still alive while that cat chewed on her, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I left some white bwana to do my killing for me.”

The old mzee stood facing Mike, the distance between them measurable not only in feet, but in ages. With a sword and spear in hand, this knock-kneed old camel driver could almost pass for a moran, a warrior. In bygone days, when the Rendille and their neighbors, the Samburu and Boran and Somalis, battled each other over this hardscrabble desert for water and women and cattle and fun, killing a problematic leopard had been merely an afternoon’s amusement. Now, of course, the shifta—Somali marauders and bandits, crossing the border to terrorize Kenya as well—came armed with the latest in assault weaponry, against which spear and sword were little better than tooth and claw. Moran vs. mooryaan. “Okay,” said Mike, “but let’s at least give him a gun.”

“He’s not getting mine,” said Matthew, hugging the German-made G3 assault rifle Mike had bought him. When it came to bush work, Matthew liked his fire rapid. “He’s more likely to blast one of us, if not himself. And anyway I’ve got a sure feeling I’m going to have to shoot the cat off somebody.”

Mike didn’t much want to part with his custom, scoped .308 bolt action either. But when he offered it the Rendille refused to take it, preferring to stick with his edged weapons.

Maybe there was a little of the moran in him after all.

Mike and Matthew unsnapped their holster flaps and unhitched their gun slings, tossing them aside to keep them from snagging on the thorn bushes. Matthew pulled on his leather bomber jacket, which he usually wore to protect himself from the freezing desert night. But even in this heat he zipped it up all the way, flipping up the lapels over his throat.

“If the cat doesn’t get you you’ll die of heatstroke,” Mike told him.

“I’ll take my chances,” Matthew replied tersely, and in that moment Mike saw that he was afraid. Mike was afraid too, but happily afraid, reveling in his fear. But Matthew, perhaps because he’d chased leopards into underbrush before, looked like he simply didn’t want to do it again. Mathematical statistics, Mike supposed. Sooner or later, luck was bound to be on the chui’s side.

“Now look, Bwana,” the Luo told him. “You’re used to taking your time—the slow-stalking, long-range stuff. But at the end this is going to happen all at once. Up close and bloody quick, understand? Lions growl or roar as they charge, but leopards don’t make a ruddy peep. If he manages to knock you down, just keep your gun across your throat until the old man and I settle on a plan. And if he’s on top of me, well, all I ask is that you please don’t shoot us both at the same time.”

Mike said mildly, “I’ve had basic, Bwana.”

“Must do things differently in the States. At least, they didn’t teach leopard shooting when I was in the Army.” Matthew pointed the G3 ahead. “Kwenda. Let’s get this over with.”

The Rendille scooped up a couple of pebbles in his sword hand. Paralleling the trail of bent, blood-scabby grass over which the leopard had dragged his daughter, he began to move forward into the thicket, slowly, feeling quietly ahead with each foot before putting his weight down, making no sound. After allowing him a little lead, Mike and Matthew followed, moving out to either side. The high grass closed up behind and around them and the whole world contracted into those few square yards of parched, brushy Africa.

The instant they moved out from under the spotty shade of the acacia, the sun turned up like a microwave oven. Mike guessed that if he’d been wearing a leopard-fur coat in this heat he’d be in a mood to kill somebody too. He could see nothing except occasional glimpses of Matthew and the Rendille as they moved through the grass. He tried to reach out for the leopard with his ears, listening for the first hint of a growl, the contented purr of a big cat over his kill, or even the crack of bone, tearing of meat, or lapping of blood. It was so quiet he could hear the pounding of his own blood in his ears. The heavy brush filtered noise better than a soundproofed room. Only the buzzing of locusts around their feet, the popping of thorns tugging at their clothing as if to tell them, don’t go in there, and from somewhere back in the trees a go-away bird calling to them, warning them: Go ’way! Go ’way!

Then Mike smelled it, wafting out of the thicket like the fetid stench off a day-old road kill: blood, coppery heavy and sweet, and the shit stink of an opened gut. His stomach did a flop. The leopard might not be in here, but the girl was.

Abruptly the Rendille froze. Keeping him covered with the G3, Matthew waved to Mike, who high-stepped his way over to where the old man stood with his bare legs astride what looked to be a snake, its oily gray length trailing away ahead through the grass. Northeast Kenya is cobra country, mamba country, and Mike almost shouted a warning. But the mzee had already seen it. The look on his face was not of terror, but of horror. Only then did Mike realize the purple-gray coil was not a snake, but a length of intestine, which must have unwound from the girl as the leopard dragged her away.

Spreading out again, they followed the grisly trail. A human lower intestine can stretch for thirty feet or more, but the girl was pre-teenaged and not so far away, as they discovered when they came across her, still attached at the other end.

She lay on her back, but face down, covered in black flies, the tatters of her kanga bunched up around her flat chest. Her stomach cavity was open, her half-eaten liver out to one side, thigh muscles stripped from the bone. Mike covered Matthew as he knelt down to check her throat for a pulse, but she was obviously, mercifully dead, with two holes in the back of her close-shaven head, where the leopard had pierced her skull with its lower canines in order to drag her. When Matthew turned her face up—disturbing the swarm of buzzing flies—they saw both eye sockets had been hooked by the uppers, her eyeballs popped like little grapes. The old mzee saw all this, all of it, but didn’t give her another glance. He kept watch out ahead.

Matthew straightened up, whispering to Mike. “Bite to the head. Killed her quick, thank Christ, before he did all this.”

Mike swallowed hard. “You think he’s gone?”

The Luo shrugged. “We’re about to find out.”

Beyond the girl the blood trail literally dried up. Only bent grass, already rising, marked the big cat’s passing. As the mzee followed it up, Mike swung out wide to one side again, staying just close enough to keep him in sight. The grass here was thick as a broom and higher than a man, but Mike saw it when the Rendille, some dozen yards from the girl, froze again.

Holding his spear at the ready, the mzee stared into the bush at something Mike couldn’t see and probably Matthew couldn’t either.

Switching the sword to his spear hand, he wrist-flipped one of his pebbles a few feet ahead of him, and immediately grabbed the sword again, ready for an answering charge.

The pebble plopped in the grass. No reply. Out in the lugga a guinea fowl clattered harshly.

Cautiously, the moran switched the sword over again, took out another pebble, and lobbed it like a dart in a Nairobi pub. A little closer this time. Christ, thought Mike, had the last toss been too far?

This time the pebble landed on something, with a tump like a fingertip on a Samburu drumhead. Or the full belly of a killer cat. But, save for the trilling of crickets in the high grass, there was no other sound.

Mike brought his rifle to his shoulder, tucking the butt into the pocket under his collarbone and spot welding his cheek to the stock, sighting into the brush where the pebble had gone. It was gonna happen right now, the leopard was right in there. Why didn’t Matthew shoot?

Mike knew the answer: Matthew was no sound hunter. He held in contempt those who would fire blindly at a noise without knowing for certain what lay behind it. Maybe it wasn’t the leopard in there. Maybe it was another animal. Maybe even another human victim.

After a very long moment, the mzee switched his sword to his spear hand again, cocking his throwing arm back with a third pebble.

As swift, as soundless, and as irresistible as an inner voice inciting murder, the leopard exploded from the brush in front of him, so big and fast and close that at full extension its hind feet were barely off the ground when its front paws, shit-dirty talons extruded, reached the old mzee to gather him in to the wide gaping, yellow gleaming, poison wet maw.

The Rendille, one hand full and one hand empty, could bring neither sword nor spear to bear before the big cat piled into him in full primate-killing mode. Fastening its fangs to his skull, it rode him down onto his back between Matthew and Mike, its front paws pinning him down even as the rears coiled up to begin, in true leopard style, to kick the guts out of him.

Mike saw it all in a kind of adrenalized slow motion, like his recurring nightmare of Mogadishu in which he could do nothing but watch Mig burn. He saw Matthew swing his assault rifle toward the cat, almost right between them, and for an instant feared the close-range, rapid-fire blast even more than the tearing claws of the cat. “No!”

At his command Matthew turned the G3 away. And the leopard turned on Mike, fixing him in a yellow-eyed stare, a scrap of the old man’s cheek hanging off its bloody jaw. And what Mike saw in those eyes was not hate, and not even hunger. Just the mindless, savage bloodthirst which had shaped this world for millions of years, linking predator and prey long before a shambling Rift Valley australopithecine ever stumbled in front of a hungry sabertooth: the primordial, East African killing rage, down from which all murders and wars derive. Looking into the face of it, Mike felt his guts clench and his knees lock, frozen under those green-gold eyes.

Then the cat launched itself off the Rendille’s bloody torso, into the air at Mike.

Life and death

Thirty feet in one leap. Mike, dropping to one knee and following the cat’s trajectory with the muzzle of his .308, got off one shot. The leopard squalled—the only sound it made in the entire attack—and went down in the grass behind him, somersaulting, rolling to a stop even as Mike twisted to cover it, working his rifle bolt, ready to shoot again. But the chui was dead, piled up like a carelessly tossed fur coat. Probably less than five seconds had elapsed since its initial spring.

“Bloody hell,” Matthew said.

Mike, somewhat giddy from the nearness of death, had to search for a moment to find him in the grass. Matthew was bent over the mzee, who lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His left eye was bloodshot, immobile, and staring off to one side over a bloody gash where the leopard, biting his head, had broken his cheekbone and ripped off the side of his face, showing two rows of rotten teeth.

“Bloody goddamn hell!” Matthew said again.

“Bloody goddamn hell is right,” said Mike, dropping his rifle and kneeling beside the Rendille. He didn’t touch the eye, guessing already that was the least of the old man’s worries. “Mzee, can you hear me?”

The Rendille mumbled something unintelligible, waving one arm like a drunken cobra. At least his neck wasn’t broken. Mike turned his chin one way and the other. It looked like the lower half of the old man’s head had gotten the worst of it, but if he’d taken any teeth through the skull, Mike knew, he’d be a good bet for brain damage. “Ask him his name,” he told Matthew, who rattled off some Swahili. The Rendille rolled his good eye over at him, its pupil contracted to a pinpoint. He mumbled incoherently. Matthew said, “He says his name is….”

“For Christ’s sake, I don’t give a damn what his name is!” The important thing was that the victim could still put together a sentence, still make his brain work. “Is he still making sense?”

Matthew thumbed back the mzee’s eyelid. “Seems like he’s still in there.”

“Good.” The old man’s cotton shuka had shredded in front where the leopard’s back feet had worked it over, ribbons of cloth stuck in his wounds. Gingerly, Mike peeled it away, seeing bright blood already welling up through the slashes, afraid he’d find coils of guts rolling out from inside. “Does he know what day it is?”

Matthew almost laughed. “Bwana, even on his best morning, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what day it is.”

Mike did laugh. “Yeah, okay, it’s Monday. One helluva way to start the work week, eh, mzee?” He pulled aside the old man’s shuka. A slice of his belly fat rolled out onto the ground like a lump of ketchupy tapioca, yellowish white streaked with greasy red. Mike ignored it, more concerned with the loop of ropy, pinkish gray intestine protruding from one of the ragged tears in his belly. Mike had seen enough intestines today to last him a lifetime. “Fuck,” he said. “Get the first aid kit from the truck! Suria!”

“Ndio!” Matthew was already up and running for Mike’s Land Cruiser. Mike delicately spread each tear in the Rendille’s belly. The blood was streaked with bile and lumpy with chunks of food; the digestive tract was holed. Mike knew leopards would dive delightedly into carrion that would turn a vulture’s stomach, and that if the slightest bit of that refuse had gotten into the wounds the old man could die of peritonitis instead of trauma, assuming he survived several hours of bouncing cross-country in the back of Mike’s Toyota so some waHindi daktari could inflict a few stitches on him.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Mike unsnapped his web-belt medical kit, careful not to spill his precious collection of tampons in the dirt. Rare as gold in this part of the world, they were ideal for plugging bullet wounds, but of less use against cat scratches. He laid the tampons lengthwise in the less serious gashes, squeezing iodine paste on them. He very carefully did not touch the exposed intestine, let alone attempt to put it back inside the old man. “Matthew! Where the fuck is that first aid kit?”

The Luo finally re-emerged from the grass with the first aid kit, standing back out of the way as Mike unwrapped a field dressing and laid it, white side down, over the old man’s gaping wounds. “Bwana,” he told Mike, “I don’t think this poor bugger’s gonna make it.”

“Like hell.” Mike wrapped the pressure bandage under the old man’s back.

“Better he should die, than live with such ghastly wounds.”

“Says you.” Mike tied the ends of the bandage together at the mzee’s side. Matthew was a good friend, but life in the Northeast Province had hardened him to others’ misery.

“He’s an old man, Mike,” said Matthew. “His time would’ve soon come anyway. Let his wives take him away into the bush. Better he dies with his family than alone in some city hospital.”

“Yeah, but not if it’s my fault.” Mike had the sinking feeling that he’d done something stupid. Had he really let an old man tackle a leopard for him? “He’s got to make it. The KWS will come down on me like a damn buffalo bull. It’ll be the end of everything I’ve worked for.”

The mzee had drifted into unconsciousness. Matthew peeled off his jacket and held it over the old man as a sunshade. “Why does the KWS need to find out about it?”

“You oughta know.” Mike touched up the hole in the mzee’s cheek and his other sundry rips and tears with the antiseptic paste. “You used to be one of them.”

“Yes, and I quit.” Matthew put a hand on Mike’s. “This isn’t Main Street, America. This is Africa, Mike. The Northeast of Kenya. This sort of thing happens all the time here. You’re only prolonging the agony. Let nature take its course.”

“Got it all figured out, do you?” Mike sat back, thumbing his bush hat up on his head. It made a sad sort of sense. When his turn came, he hoped he went out the way this old man had. He motioned toward the villagers. “Yeah, okay. Tell the women to come get him.”

“Too bloody late,” Matthew told him. He stood, looking to the south, from which came the throb of a distant helicopter. “Here comes the KWS now.”

“Story of my life,” Mike said. “Helicopters arriving at the wrong time.”

In his Army days Mike had had no problem with blacks in uniform. But something about black Africans in uniform brought to his mind Idi Amin or Emperor Bokassa, even if they weren’t in the military. Stephen Karanja of the Kenya Wildlife Service was a raw-boned, overweight Kikuyu whose khaki uniform and jaunty sand-colored beret with its green and red rhinoceros badge only made him look like a wannabe dictator. Mike had often marveled at how Karanja managed to keep those sharp creases in his pants and that shine on his boots, chasing poachers through the scrub and all. “Jambo, Mr. Karanja,” he said. “What brings you to Kifaro Shamba?”

“Oh, I enjoy getting out from behind my desk and into the field every now and then.” Karanja’s smooth smile displayed the full range of teeth, the same yellowish shade as his eyes. Citified, Matthew Mboya might have said, instead of a good bush wog like the Rendille, whose lower incisors were knocked out in childhood to allow use of a straw in case of lockjaw.

“I wouldn’t have expected the Deputy Director for Enforcement to take an interest in simple game control,” Mike said as the KWS rangers hefted the limp mzee onto a stretcher. They looked more interested in trying to impress the bare-breasted, giggling Rendille girls, whose late girlfriend lay forgotten in the high grass. The troopers’ military-surplus uniforms were threadbare and tattered, their ex-WWII rifles worn out before Mike was born and likely empty of ammunition, not that they cared. They didn’t attempt to hide their disdain for packing a half-dead old man out of the bush, either. But they damn well knew who Mike was, by reputation if not by name, and when he barked at them to watch their step and be more careful with their burden, they didn’t pause to make fun of his fractured Swahili.

“All wildlife problems in the Northeast Province come under my jurisdiction,” Karanja told him. Despite his military demeanor, the DDE was not Army, though his dozen years of experience in Kenya’s paramilitary General Service Unit stood him in good stead in his current line of work. Nor law enforcement, though his word was law over a fiefdom half the size of France. He was a sort of super park ranger, empowered to hunt down and kill anyone he deemed to be poaching Kenya’s endangered wildlife. The fact that he was rumored to be profiting from, if not running, the black-market trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn only added to his reputation. He told Mike, “The KWS takes a dim view of civilians taking such matters into their own hands.”

Especially white civilians, who not so long before in this country had once hunted black men like Stephen Karanja with the same enthusiasm, skill and success they brought to shooting elephant on safari.

“It was a man eating cat, for Christ’s sake,” Mike told him. “Would you have preferred that we feed it villagers until you saw fit to make an appearance?”

“It appears you decided to feed it at least one villager.” Stepping around the remains of the little girl, the DDE followed Mike and Matthew back to the thicket for a closer look at the leopard.

It was a desert tom, with pale cream coloring and small, widely spaced rosettes. Those terrifying green-gold eyes were still open, but filmy and opaque in death, like cheap plastic marbles. Mike’s .308 had taken it square in the breast, and at that range the bullet had gone almost all the way though, exiting near the hip. The cat had died instantly, without a lot of crusted blood to obscure the damage, but on closer inspection it looked to have been dying for some time. Matthew knelt down to part the fur on its foreleg, exposing the root of all the trouble: a strand of steel monofilament, like a piano wire or guitar string, looped so tightly around the limb that it had sliced halfway through to the bone. Mike had seen such injuries before, on animals ranging from diminutive dik-dik antelope to full-grown elephant. Snare. The wire’s end still trailed from the cat’s leg. It must have torn loose from the trap, but the snare had gone right on eating into its flesh, leaving the cat too crippled to take anything else but a human.

Poachers. Chalk up at least three more deaths to the Somali shifta. The little bibi. This poor chui, dead at Mike’s hand. And, like as not, the old mzee as well. Mike’s jaw tightened.

Matthew unwound the wire from the leopard’s leg and coiled it up for purposes of his own. Drawing a bilau, a Somali bush knife, he rolled the carcass belly-up for skinning.

“I’ll thank you not to tamper with that,” Karanja told him. “My men will handle disposal of the animal. We wouldn’t want it to end up in the black market.”

Not unless Karanja got his cut of the action. Mike and Matthew stepped back and let the rangers set in to dismembering the leopard. For men supposedly preventing the slaughter of wildlife, they were very good at it themselves. The mutilated hide came off in one piece, with the head, paws and tail still attached. They even scraped off and collected the fat—prized by the locals for medicinal purposes—and took the crescent-shaped floating collarbones, testicles and whiskers as magic talismans.

“Just like American Indians with buffalo, eh?” Mike said. “Nothing goes to waste.”

“Not for lack of trying,” said Karanja, frowning as he held up the speckled hide and peered through the gaping, close-range exit hole blown out of it. “You certainly made a mess of it. I thought you were such an expert shot.”

“I suppose we could’ve been neater, had we been able to shoot it from the helicopter while circling overhead.” Matthew reached for the skin. “If it’s not worth worrying about….”

Karanja snatched it away. “You’d be surprised at the repairs a good taxidermist can make.”

Matthew smiled, but not with his eyes. “I’m sure you’d know better than I.”

Karanja gave him the slit-eyed stare a puff adder gives a desert rat, just before the strike. “Don’t go thinking you’ve made a good career move, my little Luo. When this mzungu is no longer around to protect you, you and I will settle our affairs.”

Matthew had told Mike all about his ex-boss. For all his starched military bearing, Karanja came from a long line of man-eaters, cannibalism being a central theme of Mau Mau ritual. During the Emergency the bulk of the Mickey Mice had come from the Kikuyu tribe. It was said that Karanja himself had been born in a British concentration camp. Certainly he had no lost love for white men. “Be advised,” he told Mike, “I will conduct a full investigation of this matter. I intend to see you thrown into prison and this miserable little shamba of yours returned to African control, once and for all.”

“You mean your control, don’t you?” Mike told him. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Your own private little hunting ground back?”

Karanja showed his teeth. “You have no business here, white man. The old colonial days are long gone. I don’t know who it was you bribed to purchase this worthless piece of desert, but you made a mistake when you did not bribe me as well. Now it is too late. I feel certain you no longer have money enough to extricate yourself from this trouble.”

“Keep your hopes up, Karanja,” Mike told him. He saw no reason to admit that he was nearly down to his last can of gunpowder and his last tank of gas, because he’d have burned both before surrendering them to the DDE. “There may still be a slice of the action for you. It so happens I have a new source of financing. An American conservationist group. Their representative is flying into Wajir tomorrow to meet me.”

“Is that so,” Karanja mused, with all the innocence of a fox in a chicken coop. Like most Africans the DDE was a pragmatist at heart: Why have Mike thrown in jail now when he could do it after depleting Mike’s new source of bakshish? “We will see. Meanwhile, were I you, I would pray this old man doesn’t die, for the responsibility would be yours.”

“You’d see to that, wouldn’t you.” The rangers had wrapped what they wanted of the leopard meat in the hide and dragged it toward the chopper, a buglike little Hughes Defender loaned out from the British military. Mike checked to make sure the unconscious mzee was securely strapped down on his stretcher, fixed to the landing strut. “He’d just better not die of a drop from your helicopter.”

“Ah, a threat!” Lip curling, Karanja clapped on his earphones and climbed aboard. “Believe me, McKay, you would find me tougher to kill than a mere Somali shifta.”

The Defender lifted off in a swirling cloud of dust. Coughing, Mike and Matthew watched it accelerate away to the south. As they headed back to the Land Cruiser, the disappointed Rendille girls followed the tribeswomen back into the grass to fetch their friend’s body, from where the cry of her mother arose in a high-pitched, mournful wail.

The Luo handed Mike his .308. “Beware of Karanja, Mike,” he said. “He is a very powerful and dangerous man. A killer.”

Mike shrugged the rifle over his shoulder. “So am I.”

Wajir

The airstrip at the little desert town of Wajir had a checkered history. In 1984 rivalry between local clans over water rights—there were wells north of town—had become more bitter than usual, and provincial authorities had required them to lay down their arms. This far from Nairobi, many had disobeyed. They had been rounded up and, in a gross reenactment of the Mau Mau Emergency, penned on the airfield, where they had died in droves of exposure and dehydration. The incident had done little for the rule of law in Wajir.

So upon his arrival the following morning Mike was a little surprised to find, in the shade of the dilapidated shack which served as the airfield tower, what passed for the law these days: no less than the local Superintendent of Police, a simpering little waKamba with eyes yellowed by malaria and reddened by bhangi fumes. He was chatting up a white Westerner, a Ray-Banned, safari-suited, embassy type.

Mike turned away a second too late. Spotting him, the superintendent called out. “Mike? Ah, Mister Mike! So good to see you!”

“Hello, Superintendent Matuku,” said Mike, tugging his loose shirttail down to make sure it covered the .45 automatic holstered at the small of his back. “How goes the shifta business?”

“Oh, no shifta near Wajir. No, no!” How Joshua Matuku knew this he didn’t say. He and his men only ventured outside their barb-wired, machinegun-equipped enclosure to claim credit whenever Mike dragged some dead bandit into town. In Mike’s book the police, like jackals compared to hyenas, were a step below the shifta on the food chain. The poachers looked on them not as the law but as the competition, and furthermore had them outnumbered and outgunned. “Very safe in Wajir. Isn’t that right, sir?”

“Let’s bloody well hope so,” said the dark-haired, dark-glassed Westerner, with an American accent but British syntax. Given enough time in Africa, all whites started talking like Alan Quatermain. “Well, this is interesting. Mr. McKay, I believe?”

“Right. And you’d be…?”

“This is Mr. Parker Blake,” Matuku said importantly. “He is with the embassy.”

“‘With the embassy?’” If anything the terrorist bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and Mombasa had only increased the number of spies and US government operatives in East Africa. And if Mike had learned anything in his army days it was never to trust anyone with a last name for a first name. “What’s that supposed to mean? State Department? CIA? FBI? Peace Corps?”

“It means I’m with the embassy.” Blake adjusted his Ray-Bans with a faint smile. “Still running that ranch of yours, what’s its name…?”

“Kifaro Shamba.” Mike wondered what it cost the American taxpayer, shipping enough spray to Africa to maintain Blake’s helmet hair.

“Kifaro Shamba, right. Heard you had a spot of leopard trouble yesterday.”

How the hell, Mike wondered, did he know that? Since buying Kifaro Shamba, Mike had taken pains to stay below Uncle Sam’s radar. “You seem to know a hell of a lot about me, Mr. Parker Blake.”

“We’re the United States Government, Mike. We like to keep an eye on our own.”

So does the Mafia, Mike thought. But he just said, “I’m not one of yours any more.”

“Sure.” Blake studied him from behind the aviator shades. “But whose are you?”

Matuku, looking back and forth, hadn’t followed a word of it. It was getting to the point that Mike didn’t either. He took the last sweat-dampened, dog-eared letter from the potential sponsors from his shirt pocket. “Look,” he told Blake, “I’m just here to meet a representative from some conservationist group that might help finance my shamba. The, um, Society for Prevention of the Extermination of the African Rhinoceros.’’

“Ah yes, SPEAR.” Blake nodded. “Clever acronym, I must say.”

Mike tucked the letter away. “Is there some reason SPEAR should concern you?”

“It should, if their representative is Harrison Soames.”

Christ, thought Mike, another last name for a first name. “Never heard of him.”

“How will you recognize him, then?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, not many tourists come to Wajir.” Now that robberies, terrorist attacks, and AIDS were on the rise, sun-starved Europeans on midwinter sex safaris stuck to the coastal resorts. Nigerian and Pakistani drug couriers, midway along the East-to-West heroin circuit, merely stopovered in Nairobi on their way to the Americas. And despite its more-Arab-than-African flavor, kaffiyehed, cell-phoned Saudis had no reason to come to Wajir. The town was too far off the beaten path, well beyond the point where tourists turned back and even locals thought twice before going on. Mike said, “Shouldn’t be hard to spot a VIP.”

“No, it won’t be hard to spot him,” said Blake. “But haven’t you stopped to ask yourself what a VIP wants with your Kifaro Shamba in the first place?”

“I figure that’s his concern. I’m just here to make his visit just as smooth and pleasant as possible.”

Blake sighed. “That makes two of us.”

Matuku touched his arm and pointed. An aircraft was approaching from the south. As it drew closer and dropped down toward the field Mike, expecting an old Air Kenya DC3, saw with surprise that it had four engines, two underwing extended-range fuel tanks, and a tall fin.

“C-130?” he said. “Christ, this guy must be important, if Nairobi is flying him up.”

Blake looked at him sideways. “Nairobi can’t afford C-130s. It belongs to SPEAR. Which is to say, Soames himself.”

“You’re kidding.” In his day Mike had met a few men who had their own stretch limousines, but never one who had his own stretch Hercules. And he’d ridden in enough Herky Birds to guess that soundproofing sufficient to deaden the roar of those four 5,000-horse turboprops to a comfortable level would nearly equal the cost of the plane itself. But as the C-130 had proven again and again in hot spots round the world, it could put down where no other plane of such capacity could.

As the pilot buzzed the runway, checking for pig holes and sleeping lions, Mike saw civilian serials and the SPEAR logo on the plane’s fuselage. Its color scheme consisted of unusually bland tones—gray-beige and beige-gray. Low visibility, almost like camouflage. And the pilot flew like he was setting down in a war zone. He banked sharply, dropped wheels and flaps, touched down on the end of the strip, reversed thrust and pulled up amid a cloud of dust. The prop blades were still spinning as the rear cargo ramp started down.

“Superintendent,” Blake suggested, “I think you should make sure your men don’t become unduly excited.”

Military presence always put a crimp in police operations. Matuku barked orders in Swahili. His men trotted out onto the strip and the superintendent herded them into a loose—Jesus Christ, Mike thought—honor guard?

Just who the hell was Harrison Soames?

A squad’s worth of burly men deplaned down the C-130’s loading ramp and dispersed around the aircraft. Their dress code followed the corporate color scheme: olive drab and khaki, desert tan and stone gray. They were not obviously armed, but Mike’s practiced eye noted they all wore clothing loose enough to conceal weaponry. They took up positions that would perhaps coincidentally have provided excellent fields of fire in the event of a shootout. The police, standing at attention, weren’t so slack as to miss all this. They muttered among themselves as the newcomers cleared the landing zone. Every minute this was looking less like a tourist visit and more like an attempted coup.

Blake asked, “Shall we, Mr. McKay?”

Mike followed him out of the shade of the operations shack onto the glaring-hot runway. He was curious what these SPEAR guys—he found it difficult not to think of them as troops—were doing working for a conservationist outfit. As they began unloading at the rear of the plane, Blake went ahead, asking for Soames. But Mike reasoned anybody rich enough to fly in his own C-130 wasn’t going to be riding in the back like cargo. He saw the cabin door open on the side of the plane’s nose, and waited in the shadow of the Herc’s wing.

Khaki shirt blowing sloppily open over an undershirt of the same color, a big blond man stepped down, followed by an entourage, all of them squinting and blinking in the light. As they filtered through Matuku’s honor guard Mike called, “Mr. Soames? Mike McKay. Pleased to meet you.”

The big man, crew-cut blond and blue-eyed, regarded him with all the bulk and belligerence of a Cape buffalo bull. He extended a left hand the size of a lion’s paw, not to shake but to put in the center of Mike’s chest, holding him at arm’s length. “Stop.”

Shtop. German? Dutch? Out-of-practice Mike, just now pegging him as a bodyguard, was trying to decide if breaking his wrist would get things off to a bad start when someone else behind the big guy said, “Dieter! Kalm.”

“Yeah, Dieter, calm.” Mike took the big hand off his chest.

Dieter had a nose flat as a wildebeest’s, one ear nicked like an old tom leopard’s, and glittery blue Aryan eyes. He gave Mike a grin, the grin of a hyena whose pack has just driven a lion from its kill. His boss, the new sponsor, stepped out from behind him.

“Call me Harrison.” Soames didn’t look like he should be called Harry. Younger than Mike had expected. Sixty? But then, it was hard to tell. Tanned and unlined, he was a little too perfect. Full head of wavy hair with just enough gray to make it seem un-retouched, a smile full of teeth white enough and straight enough and expensive enough to keep Kifaro Shamba running for a year, and a tasteful assortment of gold jewelry accenting designer safari khakis. He could have come straight from yachting in the Caribbean, a polo match in the Hamptons, or a business meeting in New York. Or, with this bunch, a paramilitary op in the Third World. Kind of weird around the eyes.

“On behalf of Kifaro Shamba,” said Mike—this meet-and-greet white-hunter routine definitely wasn’t his bag—“I’d like to welcome SPEAR to Kenya.”

“Thank you. How are things on Kifaro Shamba?”

“Actually, we had a leopard-mauling, yesterday. One local killed, another badly hurt.”

“Oh, no!” Soames displayed approximately the same level of concern as had Parker Blake. “I hope he’ll be all right?”

“Remains to be seen. Won’t affect your tour, at any rate.”

“Good,” said Soames. Whether good, the poor victim would survive, or good, the tour wouldn’t be disrupted, he didn’t say. “Let me introduce my secretary, Miss Dobrosky.”

Mike nearly had to look up at Miss Dobrosky. In her sensible, neutral-tone suit and not so sensible high heels, she stood a good six feet tall—half a head over Soames, though not quite up to the bodyguard, Dieter. Straw-colored hair, no dark roots, wrapped up in a tight, professional ’do. Chic glasses, big but not thick. Metal alloy attaché case. She looked like a Penthouse Pet trying to get out from inside a librarian. With a little better makeup, maybe a Playboy Bunny. “Mr. McKay,” she said, extending her hand.

“Call me Mike,” he said. Her hand was cool and soft in his. He would’ve liked to hold it a while longer, but at that moment the embassy man, Blake, finally found them.

“Ah, here you are, Mr. Soames,” he said. “Parker Blake. I’m with the embassy.”

“Of course you are,” Soames told him. “My secretary, Miss Dobrosky.”

“Pleased.” Miss Dobrosky took her hand from Mike, giving it to Blake.

“Not as pleased as I, Miss Dobrosky.” Blake bowed to kiss her fingers. “Your presence makes Kenya that much more beautiful.”

Give me a fucking break, thought Mike, she isn’t gonna fall for that shit. This guy Blake’s just tired of playing Russian roulette with HIV-infested Nairobi hookers.

“Why thank you, Mr. Blake,” she said. “How nice of you to say so.” She took her hand back. Mike kept an eye out to see whether she wiped it off.

Soames asked, “And how is the ambassador, Mr. Blake?”

“Very well, sir. He sends his regards, and told me to see to it your stay in Kenya is a pleasant one.”

While Mike was still wondering if he’d heard that right, Soames said, “Hmm. I think you can start seeing to it right now.” Some sort of commotion, back at the rear of the plane. “There seems to be a problem with our luggage.”

The problem with the luggage was that at least some of it had come packed in a fully-equipped High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle, a goddamn Hum-Vee, which the C-130 was bit by bit birthing onto the gravel strip.

Military equipment made Kenya police nervous. They wanted either to run from it or to confiscate it. Matuku, acting as customs inspector, had not yet decided which avenue he preferred. Or, more likely, he was waiting for bakshish sufficient to make him overlook this infraction. For now he complained to Soames’s men, who ignored him as they continued unloading the cargo. Soames turned Miss Dobrosky and Blake loose on him. “Handle it, please,” he said. “Mike, I hope you don’t mind waiting while we straighten this out?”

“Not at all.” Mike tagged along with them toward the rear of the plane, interested to see how Soames dealt with African red tape, which made the most byzantine Western bureaucracies look efficient as a rubber stamp.

Blake was trying by threat and cajolery to sway Matuku, who appeared to have lost his subservient attitude. Mike watched with some amusement as Miss Dobrosky entered the fray, taking several permits and licenses from her briefcase and waving them in the superintendent’s face. Matuku’s men fidgeted, unslinging and reslinging their decrepit rifles. Dieter had some little Latino sidekick—Diego, they called him; he didn’t much remind Mike of Mig—and the two of them stood by, waiting for things to sort out. The rest of the SPEAR crew had stopped unloading the Herc and were loitering around, managing to look tough without actually acting tough.

“Just what do these guys do for you?” Mike asked Soames. They were of varied races but all looked genetically related to Dieter: unable to lower their arms for all the muscle. “And why are they packing hidden weapons?”

Soames gave him a smile. “I’m guessing your shirt is not hanging out due to sloppiness in your personal dress code.”

All right, the guy was no dummy. Mike tugged his shirttail down over the pistol again.

“I like to think of my men as the sharp end of the SPEAR,” Soames told him. “Corporate troubleshooters, if you will. They’ve been working hard and deserve a vacation, so I brought them along.”

“Just what kind of trouble does SPEAR need shot?” Mike took a peek inside the Herc’s stretched fuselage. They had two more Hummers in there, waiting to come out. Not the civilian versions either. Military issue. The fact that no weapons were in evidence could only mean that the police hadn’t found them yet.

Soames didn’t answer the question. “I’m told the Northeast has a problem with poachers and bandits.”

“Not on Kifaro Shamba. I see to that.” Mike didn’t elaborate.

“Well, surely you aren’t going to ask me to rely on these policemen for security?”

Matuku, sensing he could wheedle himself a bribe, had decided to raise the stakes another notch. Over the loud objections of Blake and the secretary, he turned his men loose on the cargo. Like a bunch of hyenas attacking a carcass, they set upon the stacked crates, cutting tie-downs and pulling off nylon tarps. When Miss Dobrosky attempted to stop them, they shoved her aside, knocking her over one of the containers. She went down hard on the runway, long legs flailing, one high-heeled pump dangling by a toe.

“Hey, goddamn it!” Mike started in. “There’s no cause for that—”

But Dieter was way ahead of him. The big blond man stepped in and dealt the offending policeman a straight-arm to the chest that sent him flying backwards. “Fokof, kaffir.”

The other policemen fumbled their rifles up. Soames’s men stopped slouching and dropped into combat stances, reaching under their shirts or behind their backs. Both Soames and Matuku were shouting at their men like dog handlers losing control. Mike felt it turning into one of those situations in which a stupid, too-quick move or even a loud noise would set off a shootout.

The only motion was in the corner of his eye. Using the incident to screen his approach, some kikoi-skirted local—tall and rangy, a hook-nosed, snake-eyed Skinny, sure as shit—had emerged from the cover of the low-slung Herc’s landing gear. Right behind Harrison Soames, with a rusty, curved, foot-long bilau already drawn. Busy calming everyone else, Soames—completely oblivious to the attack—blocked any shot Mike had at the assassin. And Mike, whirling toward them, already knew he would be about a second too late to keep his moneyman, his ranch and whatever life he’d made since Mog from dying on the edge of a Somali knife.

Unarmed in a knife fight

Mike yelled at Soames, “Watch it—!”

Evidently not used to being yelled at, Soames hesitated, just long enough for the Somali killer to grab him by the shoulder, spin him around…and hurl him aside, out of the way.

He had come not for Soames, but for Mike.

As Mike backpedaled, skidding in the runway dust, the Skinny swung the machete, quick as a striking mamba. But in the instant it took him to hack instead of thrust, Mike got that crucial half-step back. The tip of the bilau went thwip! through his shirt front and, though he felt his stomach muscles cramp against the sting of a cut, the slash was just short. But he stumbled over a travel case and went down backwards on top of it. “Shit!”

He nearly broke his arm, falling on it as he clawed behind him for his pistol. On his back in a slippery tangle of luggage and tie-downs, with his gun hand pinned under him and the other trying to keep his assailant at bay, he saw the shifta—for that was almost certainly what the Somali was—standing over him, about to rip him the other way.

Levering down with his gun hand, Mike kicked the African right up in his bony crotch.

The scrawny Sam did a complete forward somersault over Mike, who rolled to his feet. They came up facing each other, the shifta with his knife and Mike with—

Not a damn thing. His .45 had slipped out of its holster while he was on his back, and now lay somewhere under the pile of crates. Feet snagged in a web of bungee cords and tangled tarp, Mike stood cornered against the side of the plane.

Nobody moved. The police and the bodyguards all appeared to be wondering whose side they were supposed to be on, Mike’s or the shifta’s. Matuku showed no inclination to get in the way of a knife and hadn’t even reached for his revolver. Soames had gone sprawling over a stack of light-alloy suitcases and rolled out on the Herc’s loading ramp, where Dieter was pulling him to safety. Only Diego started to go for the shifta, and Dieter put out a hand to stop him.

Seeing that they weren’t going to interfere, and that Mike couldn’t avoid another cut, the Skinny took on the yellow, saw-toothed grin of a leopard standing over a downed gazelle. There’s not much a cornered, unarmed man can do in a knife fight except maybe lose some fingers before he dies.

“Kidole ya Mungu!” he sneered at Mike. Then he came in low, with the bilau sweeping up for the kill.

Mike was trying to scrabble up one of the overnight bags in a lame attempt to brain the Skinny when a gunshot cracked from behind him. With a little spritz of ocular fluid, shifta’s left eye popped. He stood up abruptly, very straight, with a surprised look on his face, and a thin trickle of blood started down out of the empty eye socket. Letting the knife slip from his hand to clatter on the runway, he collapsed on top of it while the shot was still echoing back off the walls of Wajir. He fell face-down, and Mike saw that the back of his skull had been blown out.

He turned to see the secretary, Miss Dobrosky, whom he and the Skinny and apparently everyone else had counted down and out, rising from behind one of the knocked-open aluminum travel cases. Her glasses were slightly askew and her hair was a bit undone and the look on her face was very definitely not that of a secretary, as she tilted up the rifle she’d taken from the case and used to hip-shoot the shifta assassin. A Snaiperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, a Soviet-made Dragunov SVD sniper rifle, complete with standard-issue, four-power PSO-1 telescope.

“Nice shot, Miss Dobrosky,” Mike told her. “Looks like I owe you one.”

Smoothing down her skirt and straightening her glasses, she propped the rifle on her hip, giving him a little half-smile. “Call me Lana.”

Only then did the police remember to raise their guns at Mike, Soames and his men. Matuku shouted for all of them to get their hands up.

“Unfortunately,” Mike said, raising his hands, “the Kenya police take a dim view of arms dealers and gun runners.”

“Actually,” said Miss Dobrosky—Lana—setting down the Dragunov and raising her hands, “that one’s mine.”

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About the author:

Author/historian/illustrator Don Hollway has been published in Aviation History, Excellence, History Magazine, Military Heritage, Military History, Civil War Quarterly, Muzzleloader, Porsche Panorama, Renaissance Magazine, Scientific American, Vietnam, Wild West, and World War II magazines. His work is also available in paperback, hardcover and across the internet, a number of his pages scoring extremely high in global search rankings.
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