The realisation was like a punch to the guts. The poachers had gunned the bull elephant down, hacked off its tusks and left it in a pool of its own blood. Riddled with bullets, it was dying a slow and agonising death under the burning African sun.
Jaeger felt rage burning through him. The once-mighty animal was well beyond any hope of saving.
Though he was sickened, he knew what he had to do.
He turned aside and made his way to one of the guards, from whom he borrowed an AK47. Then, with hands shaking with anger and emotion, he levelled the weapon at the magnificent animal’s head. For just an instant he thought the bull opened his eyes.
With tears blurring his vision, Jaeger fired, and the stricken animal breathed its last.
In a daze, Jaeger went back to rejoin Narov. She was still comforting the baby elephant, though he could tell by her pained look that she knew what he had been forced to do. For both of them this was personal now.
He crouched beside her. ‘You’re right. We do have to go after them. Just as soon as we’ve grabbed some supplies off the HIP, let’s get moving.’
Minutes later, the noise of rotor blades cut through the hot air. Konig was ahead of schedule. He brought the HIP down into the clearing, the rotors throwing up a choking cloud of dust and debris. The bulbous wheels hit the dirt, and Konig began to power down the turbines. Jaeger was about to rush forward to help unload when his heart skipped a beat.
He’d spotted a flash of movement way off in the bush; the tell-tale glint of sunlight on metal. He saw a figure rise from the undergrowth, hefting a rocket-launcher on his shoulder. He was a good three hundred yards away, so there was sod-all that Jaeger could do with a pistol.
‘RPG! RPG!’ he screamed.
An instant later he caught the unmistakable sound of the armour-piercing projectile firing. Normally RPGs were notoriously inaccurate, unless fired at close quarters. This one tore out of the bush, hammering towards the HIP like a bowling pin on its side, trailing a fiery dragon’s breath in its wake.
For an instant Jaeger figured it would miss, but at the last moment it ploughed into the rear of the helo, just forward of the tail rotor. There was the blinding flash of an explosion, which ripped the entire tail section off the aircraft, the impact throwing the HIP through ninety degrees.
Jaeger barely hesitated. He was on his feet and racing forward, as he yelled orders at Narov and the game guards to form a defensive cordon, putting steel between them and their attackers. Already he could hear fierce bursts of gunfire, and he didn’t doubt the poachers were closing for the kill.
Even as flames sparked from the HIP’s shattered rear Jaeger vaulted into the torn and buckled hold. Thick, acrid smoke billowed all around him as he searched for survivors. Konig had flown in with four extra guards, and Jaeger could tell instantly that three of them were peppered with shrapnel, and very dead.
He grabbed the fourth, who was injured but still alive, hoisted his bloody form and hauled him out of the stricken aircraft, dumping him in the bush, before turning back for Konig and his co-pilot.
Fire leapt through the chopper now, the hungry flames taking hold. Jaeger needed to move fast, or Konig and Urio would be burned alive. But if he tried to brave those flames unprotected, he’d never make it.
He threw off his pack, reached inside and pulled out a large spray can, with COLDFIRE stamped across the matt-black exterior. Turning the nozzle on himself, he sprayed himself from head to toe before dashing for the HIP, can gripped in hand. Coldfire was a miracle agent. He’d seen soldiers spray their hands with it, then play a blowtorch across their bare skin and feel nothing.
Taking a massive gulp of air, he dived through the smoke towards the heart of the flames. Incredibly, he felt no sensation of burning; no heat at all. He lifted the can and let rip, the foam cutting through the toxic vapours and dousing the flames within seconds.
Fighting his way forward into the cockpit, he unbuckled the unconscious form of Konig and hauled him from the HIP. Konig looked as if he’d taken a blow to the head, but otherwise he seemed relatively unharmed. Jaeger was soaked with sweat by now, and choking from the smoke, yet he turned a further time and ripped open the other door to the HIP’s cockpit.
With a final burst of energy, he grabbed the co-pilot and began to drag him towards safety.
50
Jaeger and Narov had been moving at speed for a good three hours now. Sticking to the cover of a wadi – a dry watercourse – they’d managed to overtake the poaching gang, and without any sign that they had been spotted.
They pressed ahead to a thick grove of acacia trees, from which they could get eyes on the poachers as they passed. They needed to assess numbers, weaponry, strengths and weaknesses, in order to determine the best way to hit them.
Back at the helicopter, the poachers had been driven off by the weight of defensive fire, and the injured had been stabilised. They’d called for a medevac chopper, which Katavi Lodge was getting sorted. They planned to lift the baby elephant out at the same time as picking up the wounded.
But Jaeger and Narov had left long before any of that could happen, hard on the trail of the poachers.
From the cover of the acacia grove they watched the gang approach. There were ten gunmen. The RPG operator who’d hit the HIP, plus his loader, would be bringing up the rear, making twelve in all. To Jaeger’s practised eye, they looked tooled up to the nines. Long bandoliers of ammo were hanging off their torsos, and magazines were stuffed into bulging pockets, plus rakes of grenades for the launchers.
Twelve poachers, with a veritable war in a box. It wasn’t the sort of odds he relished.
As they watched the gang pass, they saw the ivory – four massive bloodied tusks – being passed between them. Each man took his turn, staggering along with a tusk slung over his shoulder, before passing it on to another.
Jaeger didn’t doubt the energy expended in doing so. He and Narov had moved light, but still they were drenched in sweat. His thin cotton shirt was glued to his back. They had grabbed some bottled water out of the HIP, but even so they were already running short. And these guys – the poachers – were carrying many times more weight.
Jaeger guessed that each tusk was a good forty kilos, so as heavy as a small adult. He figured they’d be breaking march and setting camp any time soon. They’d have to. Dusk was only a short time away, and they would need to drink, eat and rest.
And that meant the plan forming in his mind might just be doable.
He settled back into the cover of the wadi, signalling Narov to do likewise. ‘Seen enough?’ he whispered.
‘Enough to want to kill them all,’ she hissed.
‘My sentiments exactly. Trouble is, if we take them on in open battle, it’ll be suicide.’
‘Got a better idea?’ she rasped.
‘Maybe.’ Jaeger delved into his backpack and pulled out his compact Thuraya satphone. ‘From what Konig told us, elephant ivory is solid, like a massive tooth. But like all teeth, at the root end there’s a hollow cone: the pulp cavity. And that’s filled with soft tissue, cells and veins.’
‘I’m listening,’ Narov growled. Jaeger could tell she still wanted to go in and hit them right here and now.
‘Sooner or later the gang will have to call a halt. They camp up for the night, and we go in. But we don’t hit them. Not yet.’ He held up the Thuraya. ‘We stuff this deep into the pulp cavity. We get Falkenhagen to track the signal. That leads us to their base. In the meantime, we order up some proper hardware. Then we go in and hit them at a time and place of our choosing.’
‘How do we get close enough?’ Narov demanded. ‘To plant the satphone?’