Assassin (7 page)

B
IN
W
AZIR, IN THE YEARS BEFORE HE ACQUIRED GREAT
wealth and notoriety, had fallen deeply in love with one of the world’s wealthiest women. Her father, who was known throughout the Middle East simply as the Emir, had vast reserves of oil as well as minerals, uranium, and gold inside the forbidding mountain ranges of his small country. Despite his enormous wealth, the deeply religious Emir lived the life of an ascetic, shunning all accoutrements of luxury. But, when it came to his only daughter’s happiness, his generosity knew no bounds.

Snay bin Wazir was just twenty years old and the son of a modestly successful jeweler. He lived where he’d been born, in the village of Ozmir, a lush oasis nestled at the foot of the mountains on the southern coast of the Emirate. He had met the beautiful Yasmin the night before her sixteenth birthday.

Her father had allowed Yasmin, in the company of four heavily veiled maidservants, to visit his father’s small shop in the souk. Only the best stones were sold by Machmud and these he proudly showed to Yasmin.

Snay, hiding in the shadows of the storeroom to which he’d been banished by his father, could only stare in wonderment at this veiled creature. He could not see her face; but her carriage, her manner, her voice, even her long delicate fingers transported him. He was determined to gaze upon that face. Hear the music that surely was her voice. His fevered heart had conceived a plan to deliver to her in person an enormous emerald cut diamond. And, so, on that very night he slipped over the Emir’s garden wall and dropped down into the thicket amidst the palms and sycamores.

She was standing alone by a fountain, singing softly to herself. She heard him approach and whirled around, preparing to call her guards. Her perfectly beautiful face clouded with anger. But the smile on the ruggedly handsome boy’s face and the moonlight sparkling on the enormous diamond he held out silenced her. His dark eyes, heavily lidded, were entrancing. He had a peculiar strength of will. Sensitive and proud, the boy was possessed by violent hidden drives that shone in his black eyes, cruelty masquerading as passion. Innocent of all wickedness, Yasmin was mesmerized. By the time their lips met moments later, they were in love.

“I am a poor boy, now, and not worthy of your esteemed love,” Snay bin Wazir told her that night. “I leave at dawn on a long journey to seek my fortune, dearest Yasmin. But one night, I swear I will slip over that puny wall once more and claim you as my own.”

He made his first real fortune in Africa, in the vast blood-soaked elephant graveyards of Mozambique.

There were many poachers inhabiting the Swahili Coast when the young Snay bin Wazir arrived. It was the early eighties, before the ban on ivory trade instituted in 1989 by CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Snay bin Wazir, restless, brilliant, imaginative, and despite some bizarre eccentricities, supremely practical, had heard that there were still fortunes to be made in the ivory trade. The tusk, but also the magic horn of the rhino.

Rhino horn had, for centuries, been much valued in Arab countries for two reasons. Ground into fine powder and stirred into the juice of the coconut, it made a most suitable aphrodisiac. Historically, it was also much prized as a material for the hilt of daggers. A dead rhino went for ten dollars on the open market in Mozambique. Snay bin Wazir could sell the ground-up horn in Yemen, for instance, for $7,000 U.S. per kilo.

It had always been thus. Demand for the much coveted ivory was so great in ancient Arab civilizations, that by 500 B.C., the vast elephant herds in Syria had been completely eradicated. What animals the ivory merchants didn’t kill, the Romans imported by the thousands for the merry slaughter of the Circus Maximus. When the supply in the Mediterranean was exhausted, the Arab Islamic dynasties established trade relations with people south of the Sahara and, later, along the coasts of Central and West Africa.

If there were many poachers in Mozambique when young Snay bin Wazir arrived, there were many fewer when he departed. Bin Wazir could tolerate many things, and sometimes did, but what he hated most was competition. Poachers began turning up dead shortly after his arrival. Strange fates befell them. One hanged himself by his genitals in a deserted stable and starved to death. One hurled himself into his cooking fire, another leapt into a vat of boiling pitch, and yet another impaled himself on a poison-tipped ivory tusk in the bush. Four died when their tusk truck exploded. It was all very mysterious.

There were rumors, naturally, that this spate of bizarre suicides coincided with the arrival of bin Wazir in southwest Africa, but who left among them had the balls to point a finger at him?

After he’d sufficiently discouraged the professional poachers, he went after any villagers still foolish enough to encroach upon his rapidly burgeoning monopoly. His solution was quite cheap and simple. He had instituted incentives, encouraging his agents to go from village to village and cut off the hands, and sometimes the arms, of all the males.

“Shortsleeves or longsleeves?” his men would ask, brandishing their machetes, taunting the poachers they’d run down and captured out in the
bundu.
The answer was always the same, because ‘longsleeves’ meant you lost your hand but got to hold on to your arm.

This method of dealing with competitors, bin Wazir assured his own growing army of poachers, would ensure fulfilling their quotas, not to mention their own life expectancies.

It was a time following a revolution in Mozambique, when the country finally won its independence from Portugal after a bloody ten-year struggle. But the warring factions had inadvertently conspired to present bin Wazir with two great spoils of war: two revolutionary poaching ideas that, combined, would change his fortunes forever.

The helicopter. And the land mine.

Traditionally, African and Asian poachers brought down elephants with high-powered rifles. You’d shoot an animal, walk up to it, and hack its face off with a machete. You’d locate a herd, get within a reasonable range, and open up. You had to kill them all. No animal was allowed to escape. Even though they were useless, calves and pregnant females were slaughtered. Because of their remarkable memories, any elephant that escaped a massacre and joined another herd would infect the new herd with panic.

The problem with elephant poaching, bin Wazir had soon discovered, was that you had to kill them one at a time.

“Listen, Tippu Tip, carefully,” he’d said to his chief that night long ago in Maputo. “You’re going to love this idea.”

The huge African across the table from him had skin so black it was blue, and possessed large ivory-colored teeth, which, when he smiled, looked like a row of piano keys stained red by the juice of betel nuts. The man was a fierce warrior from the village of Lichinga in the northern province of Nyassa. Besides ruling all bin Wazir’s field agents with an iron hand and a steel machete, Tippu had a great head for figures.

The African chieftain was smiling, but not at bin Wazir. They were at a small table near the stage at the Club Xai-Xai, watching the fat strippers grind and sweat in the dense smoky light. One particularly unlovely dancer had been laboring above them for some time now. The grim town of Maputo, squatting on the bluffs overlooking the Indian Ocean, was awash with such women. Most were former sweatshop girls who’d been sitting at their benches doing piecework when they’d finally come to a great realization.

They were sitting on gold mines.

Tippu, staring at the gyrating woman, was gnawing at a hunk of hippo meat he’d purchased earlier in the Zambesi market. Snay tried unsuccessfully to catch his eye.

“Are you listening or watching, Tippu?”

“Ar watching, Bwana.”

“Listen.”

The great black head swiveled momentarily in Snay’s direction.

“Ar listen,” he said.

“Of late, I’ve been thinking about something. An idea which runs through my mind with the noblest perfection. I am not a complicated man, Tippu. I am a hungry man. A thirsty man. I thirst for blood and I hunger for gold. Always. The way a pilgrim long lost in the desert might long for water. As of now, this moment, I feel like a pilgrim who has caught a glimpse of a vast oasis, lying just there, beyond that next dune.”

Tippu Tip tore himself away from the grunting, gyrating creature above him and turned his blood-red eyes on his employer. Tippu thought the wild-eyed Arab boy was mildly insane, at least deranged, although Tippu had never met a
muzungu,
a white man, who was more ferocious in getting what he wanted. If you had to work for a white man, Bwana bin Wazir was as good as it got. The Sultan, as he was now sometimes called by Tippu, made all of the African’s former Portuguese masters, many of whom he himself had killed, look like morons.

“Ar listen, Bwana Sultan,” Tippu said loudly, and many heads swiveled in their direction. Tippu Tip’s voice had the rumble of distant thunder from a borderless land. He took a deep draught of
chibuku,
the local potion which passed for beer. He said, “What treasure lie in this vast oasis, Sultan?”

“Blood, Tippu. Blood and gold.”

“Yes, Bwana. Both good.”

“I want to buy helicopters. Two, maybe three to start.”

“Helicopters?”

“Helicopters,” the Sultan replied, his eyes glittering. “I’m saying to you, Tippu, you are going to be crazy for this idea. Feel free to call me a genius once I have explained it.”

“Can you tell it?”

“No. It’s a secret. Very hush-hush. I shall demonstrate all, Tippu Tip, but only when everything is in place.” Snay licked his fingers noisily, one by one. He was eating fried grasshoppers from a paper sack.

“
Baksheesh, baksheesh!
How much,” Tippu wanted to know, “the Sultan pay for these choppers?”

“Sultan will pay however much
baksheesh
necessary.”

“Good. Ar know a man up on the coast. Beira. Frenchman. Ar can talk with him.”

“See to it.”

Tippu Tip nodded his great head and returned his red gaze to the giant naked woman looming above him, pendulous breasts slick with sweat, slapping and swaying together, the drooping lobes of her ears stretched perilously thin by the heavy brass hoops of her earrings.

“Ar lak this one, sah. Not so big.”

“Not so big? Her teats alone must weigh twenty stone each.” Bin Wazir recalled that Tippu had been married once, to an equally mammoth female, but that one had died long ago of Blackwater Fever.

“Ar lak her, Bwana. She lak like me. See? She lak jig-jig me.”

“Ha! She’s yours, Tippu! She’ll be waiting in your tent when you return from Beira tomorrow evening. With a signed purchase order for three helicopters. You can jig-jig all night.”

Tippu smiled briefly, and then his expression settled once more into stony silence. His face, bin Wazir thought, looked at times exactly like the African masks for sale in the dusty jumble of curio shops in the
souks
of Maputo.

That night was the eve of a new era for bin Wazir and Tippu Tip, the ivory traders. Tippu drove his truck up the muddy, rutted coast road to Beira. There, he met a man known as
le Capitain
and he purchased three used French helicopters for one hundred thousand each. The Alouette III transport choppers he bought were some of the first to be sold in Third World countries. Bin Wazir had
le Capitain
import three chopper pilots recently retired from the French
Armée d’Air
and was soon training them in skills he himself was making up as he went along.

One morning, in the baking heat, he summoned Tippu Tip to his tent and said it was time for the explanation of his “oasis” theory. Tippu found Snay sitting at a folding campaign table going over his maps. The visionary was wearing a big ivory-handled Smith & Wesson pistol on each hip and had his rhino hide whip stuck inside his belt. As he spoke, Tippu heard the roar of the three Alouettes descending and landing just outside bin Wazir’s tent.

Twenty minutes later they were screaming over the treetops looking for elephants. Bin Wazir sat up front next to the pilot, jumping up and down in his copilot seat like a child. Tippu sat on a jumpseat just behind him in the cargo bay. The pilot and his two passengers were all wearing headphones in order to communicate over the roar. Tippu had never seen the boss so excited.

The three helicopters raced in formation across the vast savanna; they were flying low over pink clouds that were actually vast numbers of flamingos, rising up from the shallows of the soda lakes bordered by the golden mountains. Clouds of dust rose, too, but it was only herds of horned animals: kudu, eland, and impala, no elephant so far.

“There!” bin Wazir shouted. “Allah be praised, there must be three hundred in that herd! François! Get the other two pilots on the radio and give them our coordinates. We are about to make history, my friends. Just you wait!”

He turned in his seat and smiled at Tippu Tip over his shoulder.

“Tippu!”

“Sah!”

“You remembered the camera?”

Tippu patted his large canvas shoulder bag and nodded.

“Video camera, yes sah, two blank tapes, Bwana,” he said.