Blue Warrior

Hawkins pointed up ahead. “Over there.” He led Pearce twenty feet farther in and pointed to a female form splayed under a camouflaged rain poncho borrowed from one of the park rangers. Pearce pulled back the poncho. She was stripped naked except for the pink sock still on her left foot. She must’ve fought, too. Her fair skin was tattooed with welts, scratches, bite marks. Her broken jaw was purpled and swollen. The perineum was a red ruin, the blood turning to a sticky black in the heat.

“Extensive bruising around her neck. No bullet wounds. I’m no CSI, but I’d say they’d strangled her to death,” Hawkins said. “If she was lucky.”

Pearce knelt down beside her. Closed the lifeless green eyes still staring into the faces that had killed her.

“She was a smart girl. Johnny was sweet on her.”

Dignam approached cautiously with a couple of neatly folded body bags.

“You need to see anything else?” Hawkins asked Pearce.

Pearce shook his head.

Hawkins nodded at Dignam, who signaled a couple of park rangers for help.

“What’s that god-awful smell?” Pearce asked. But he knew.

“You haven’t seen the worst of it,” Hawkins said. “At least in terms of pure savagery.”

Hawkins led the way past the outer ring of trees and into a tree-canopied clearing. The air roared with thousands of buzzing flies.

Pearce stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh my God.”

A dozen adult rhinos lay on the ground, all dead. Two calves, too. All of them had had their horns hacked off, leaving gaping wounds of exposed bone and broken flesh. Each lay in a puddle of its own blood.

“Poachers aren’t exactly surgeons, are they?” Hawkins pointed at the massive spill of intestines in the grass around one of the big females. “Some of these weren’t even dead when they butchered them.”

Pearce spat in the grass. “All of this because some old Asian dirt bags can’t get a hard-on.”

“Your friends must have stumbled upon the slaughter in progress. The butchers didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind.”

A park ranger screamed. Pearce and Hawkins whipped around as a rhino crashed out of the tree line, eyes crazed, bellowing. Blood soaked its snout, a gaping hole where the horn used to be. It loped toward the ranger, three thousand pounds of deadweight lunging on three wobbly legs, the fourth leg shot to hell.

A yellow tag pinned to its ear.

The ranger tossed his battered rifle and bolted away, shouting for help in his tribal tongue as the other rangers open fire. Dozens of steel-jacketed 7.62mm slugs slapped into the thick gray hide. Hawkins hit the dirt at the first shot, but Pearce stood firm, mesmerized. The animal’s front legs gave out first and its heavy, ruined head hit the dirt with a grunt, followed by the rest of the shredded torso. The rhino corpse kneeled there for a second before it crashed over on its side. The rangers finally stopped firing. The gunfire echoed into the distance, then finally faded away. The air still buzzed with flies.

Hawkins stood and dusted himself off.

“Congratulations,” Hawkins said. “You just witnessed the killing of the last rhino in Limpopo Park. Hell, in the whole damn country.”

Pearce turned around and watched Dignam and the other park rangers gently lift the body bags.

“I should’ve been here,” Pearce said. He glanced at Hawkins.

Hawkins’s pitying eyes agreed.

Pearce snatched off his hat and crushed it in his hand as he trudged behind the corpse of his friend back to the helicopter, its turbine slowly spinning up.

7

Zhao private residence

Bamako, Mali

3 May

To Zhao’s dismay, much of the new construction in the capital city was in the current pseudo-modernist style now in vogue throughout the Middle East. Zhao found the sharply angled cement and reflective glass structures to be distinctly childish and unsophisticated, if not pathetic. But this was the trend all over the developing world, including the new Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation building rising up on the bank of the Niger River.

Zhao witnessed the rise of such monstrosities in the pleasure capitals of Dubai and Doha. He’d even stood on the heli-deck of the soaring Burj Khalifa, soon to be the not-tallest building in the world thanks to the towering ambition of his own proud nation. Pounded by ninety-kilometer-per-hour winds and clutching his safety helmet, Zhao had struggled even more with the blustering of the emir’s nephew, who proclaimed with wild gesticulations the Burj as proof of a new Arab renaissance. Zhao bit his tongue to keep from laughing in the young fool’s face. Didn’t he realize the soaring Burj was designed by Americans and constructed by Koreans using cheap imported Indian labor? The only thing “Arab” about the building was its location. Even the money that paid for it was Western, technically, from oil discovered, exploited, refined, and shipped by the Western powers themselves.