Cash? Nobody was knighted for writing a check to the Red Cross! He needed something better.
What he needed was a group of refugees who weren’t being serviced already by the world’s food-services charities. Even the best of them were afraid to go into war zones. Trouble was, Wylings was afraid to go into a war zone, too.
So what he really needed was a war zone that only looked like one. Everybody else would-be scared to go in; he would know it was truly safe and could bravely and personally lead in his cargo of food for the pathetic, dying natives.
That’s when he hired Jeremy Southeby.
Jeremy Southeby was a kindred spirit in many ways—a throwback to the days of the British Empire.
He lived a life that shouldn’t have been livable any longer, adventuring and hunting and traveling through Africa and Asia. He lived for the thrill of cheating death and evading foreign law.
His favorite undertaking was ivory hunting, starting with the tracking of the biggest elephants in Africa. He would pursue them on foot, just as they did in the old days, bringing them down with nothing more than a high-powered rifle.
“You chase ’em down, mile after mile, hopin’ not to be tracked yourself by the preservationist,” Southeby related. “They’re using helicopters these days. They know how to spot a dying beast from the air. You have to hope they’re not around to get to the prize first.”
The truly successful hunt came when the elephant finally dropped from exhaustion. Southeby would catch up to them, preferably while they were still alive, and cut out the great heart of the beast. “When you sink your teeth into that great mass of muscle, that’s when you’re a real man. That’s when you’re a hunter!”
He would personally cut the tusks from the pachyderm and pack them out of the interior, assisted only by a small knot of trusted Africans who had hunted with him for years.
But Southeby’s hunt for thrills didn’t stop there. This ended just the first part of the thrilling epic.
Southeby would smuggle the ivory, one way or another, onto his private sailboat, an old family yacht. The once luxurious appointments were now shabby, but Southeby had installed diesel engines, as well as radar, sonar and other electronics to allow him to sail it almost anywhere in the world—and infiltrate marine monitoring from Morocco to Mongolia. On board was another bunch of compatriots, just as hard-bitten and loyal as his African guides.
They would take the cargo of ivory and sail it across the Indian Ocean, usually through the Pacific to Japan, where they would again need to sneak the cargo past the increasingly vigilant Japanese anti-smuggling enforcement.
“They’re getting tougher. All over, they’re getting tougher. Harder to get around them all the time,” Southeby would say. “It’s a shame when I get boarded and I have to dump a cargo.” Dumping the cargo meant activating a trapdoor in the bottom of the hull. The illegal cargo was always stored in a watertight bulkhead, so the doors could be opened remotely, removing the incriminating evidence. “But that doesn’t happen too often,” Southeby claimed.
Sometimes it would be rhino tusks, or whatever other ephemera was in high demand in Japanese aphrodisiacs these days. Sometimes, Southeby hinted broadly, it would be living, human cargo that he would transport, often from Southeast Asia, taking them to exclusive island resorts at undisclosed locations in the South Pacific.
“Now that’s a cargo you really hate to jettison.”
Southeby grinned, telling the tale to Wylings at the club and drinking gin. “The other cargoes you might have a chance of coming back for to salvage, when the coast is clear. But of course, if you dump the pretty girlies, there’d be no point in comin’ back for ’em.”
It made Wylings shiver to think of it—and he believed every word. He’d known Southeby for thirty years and had yet to catch the man in a contradiction. His weren’t fairy tales but true exploits. Amazingly, it was all done for the sake of the adventure. Southeby was a millionaire who didn’t need his smuggling income. In fact, every cent of the blood money was hidden away, Southeby conceded, for rainy-day use.
Southeby was just the kind of man to engineer Wylings’s feat of heroism.
“Sure, mate, I can pull it off for you,” Southeby said. “Sounds new and exciting.”
Wylings offered to pay Southeby handsomely for his expertise. “Whatever, Wylie. I’ll take a few pounds.” Southeby was clearly, again, not motivated by greed.
Southeby found the right locale. The ideal collection of African villages ravaged by drought and completely dependent on food aid—and completely isolated from the outside world.
Southeby and his African mates hired a few extra helping hands. They were Unthu tribe, from a hundred miles to the northeast, and the type of renegades who would not notify any loved ones of their upcoming trip. They’d never be missed. They were ostensibly to serve as trackers, to help Southeby find a local sort of small, rare ape.
The trackers’ guns were taken while they slept, then used to massacre them in the light of day. That was step one.
Step two, arrive on the scene shortly after the humanitarian airdrop came. Take the Fernis at gunpoint, with the food packs, to the site of the Unthu killings. Shoot the Fernis with the Unthu weapons and bury the food packs.
Step three, sit back with a bottle of lager and let the situation ripen.
Step four. English Gentleman James Wylings, traveling into a dangerous and isolated corner of Africa to photograph an endangered subspecies of small ape, stumbles upon a forgotten and starving collection of Fernis tribal villages. Without regard for the grave financial losses, he uses his satellite phone to reroute one of his own cargo ships, which happens to be transporting foodstuffs, as well as eleven thousand MP3 players made in Malaysia. Wylings’s own private jet is used to airlift the supplies from the African coast to the isolated Fernis villages. Wylings’s own equipment beams images of the starving children and villages with corpses lying where they had fallen.
The media picks up on the selfless act—somehow it becomes known that Wylings suffered personal monetary losses of hundreds of thousands of pounds by diverting his cargo ship and missing a delivery date of MP3 players to Cape Town. When UN investigators arrived, Wylings himself led them to a place twenty miles from the village, where the rotting bodies explained how the monthly food shipment had gone missing.
“Wylings International, Ltd. is sending a team of doctors to service these people for the indefinite future,” announced a tired-looking, but quite dignified, James Wylings in a press conference from the Fernis region. “I’ve also ordered one of our survey teams off the job in Australia so they can commence efforts at once to locate new subterranean water sources for the Fernis. We hope to have wells dug within the next week, and our engineers will design and build an irrigation infrastructure for these people. After these people have regained their vigor, Wylings personnel will remain here to insure these people are provided what they need to create new lives for themselves. Schools. Medical supplies. Most importantly—” and here Wylings paused to give a stern accusing look at the audience behind the camera “—will be a communications system. These people were starving for weeks and had no way to let their cries be heard by the outside world. This is an unforgivable oversight.”
The oversight was clearly made by the humanitarian aid organization that had taken on the responsibility of feeding the starving Fernis. The organization tried to defend itself. “Every village in the Fernis region had shortwave radio, which we provided. It was a horrible happenstance that these radios became nonfunctional during these time of crisis.”