White Bone (28 page)

F
aster,” Koigi instructed the man driving.

“We’ll break an axle, boss, the way this road is.”

The word “road” was itself an exaggeration, thought Koigi. The route didn’t qualify as a dirt track, given the huge gaps between any signs of other vehicles having driven it. It was ruts, rocks and weeds tall enough to catch beneath the truck chassis. “So be it.”

“Our dust will be seen for miles.”

His man next to him, the one with the map unfolded on his lap, was reading his personal e-mail to gain Guuleed’s latest coordinates. The navigator placed his stubby finger well down the road from Kajiado, then placed a second, its fingernail broken and black, onto a spot nearly equidistant from the upcoming intersection of three dirt tracks.

The confluence would put them on the same southern track. It was paramount to Koigi that he arrive first and unseen. He swore in Swahili, then called on the radio for the two trailing trucks to
slow down and pull off no closer than a kilometer out from the intersection. It would reduce their dust and provide cover in case Guuleed surprised him and turned north.

In one of the brief spurts of cell coverage, three of his six men and Koigi himself received texts concerning the lost transmission from Snaggle Tooth. If the information had reached his men, then it had reached Guuleed.

“That’s what he’s after,” Koigi said as his men’s faces lowered to their cell phone screens. “It must be his men that killed Snaggle Tooth.” He felt the loss as a palpable pain in his chest, a shortness of breath, reacting physically as he had in the most recent firefight. A dead elephant was a dead relative; he knew so many by name all across the country. He kept a memorized list of those lost: Satao, Magna, Keyhole, Goliath. Each an animal he’d seen either close up or through binoculars; he felt a kindred spirit. “We capture those tusks and we burn them. We post another video.”

“This is Larger Than Life territory, boss. Is the Somali so stupid?”

“He’s never stupid, but always greedy.”

“Faster,” said another of the men.

The driver tested the accelerator and increased the truck’s speed by a full third. The men were thrown about in their seats. They braced, rising and falling in unison.

“You sure, boss?” the driver asked. The vehicle was taking a beating.

“Yes. And we go off-road before the intersection. Through the bush. Leave no fresh tracks on the road.” The roads could go untraveled for days or weeks. To drive through the intersection would signal the presence of a vehicle.

“Fuck the Somali!” said the same man. Another laughed and joined him. “
Fuck the Somali!”
his men began chanting.

Koigi leaned back, smiling. After a moment, he joined in the chorus.

B
rantingham carried a long rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol in a belt holster, with an army canteen, a sat phone and a radio clipped to the opposite side. He handed Knox sunscreen and a canteen; told him to be liberal with the first, and conservative with the other.

“Did you see them?”

“I saw one. The truck?” As they’d landed, Knox had seen a 4x4 out his window. No sign of a person.

“Two. Stay with me.” The man was an extraordinarily fast walker. Knox, with his longer strides, could barely keep up.

They reached the two vehicles. Finding both abandoned and one scavenged, they hurried on, hiking for forty minutes in silence toward the Porini Camp.

Throughout their journey, Brantingham never consulted a map or a compass.

When they arrived, they found two preyed-upon carcasses, their
brutalized condition not visible from the plane. One wore nothing but plaid boxer shorts.

What remained of the two dead men around a black smudge of a campfire caused Knox to swear mightily, a long string of expletives. The bodies—both African men—were swollen from the sun, their veins bulging grotesquely. They’d been scavenged, with a good deal of flesh left on the bone. It was a sight and a smell that Knox knew would linger for a long time.
No way to die,
he thought.

“Jackals and hyenas,” Brantingham said, studying the tracks around the bodies. He stuck a stick in the only pot and stirred.

“Their veins,” Knox said.

“They poisoned themselves, I reckon. Happens more often than it should. Usually it’s the kids. A bit surprising in men this age. They should have known better.” He spoke in a professional but strangely unsympathetic way, and continued to walk the area, head down. “Odd to see nothing more than a single machete. I’d like to know where they dragged his clothes off to. A rucksack, too, I should think. Usually, it’s no more than a few meters away.”

He stopped and kneeled. Backed away from the fire circle, head down. His mood had intensified. Moving faster now, he circled in the opposite direction from Knox.

“What?” Knox asked, moving toward him.

“Circle around, man. KGA will need to investigate.” Concern had filled his voice. “Look: do me a favor. Search the area. Find the clothes, a rifle. Something.” He pointed into the bush beyond the two corpses.

“Something was dragged here,” Knox said.

Brantingham stuck a stick in the sand where he’d been standing and joined Knox. The man kneeled and touched a few spots, the sand crumbling easily.

“What do you think?” Knox said.

Brantingham had tuned Knox out. The man was clearly in his element. He shuffled away from the camp in a squat, following the disturbed ground. Then he stopped and turned, still on his haunches, looking back at the camp, where a few daring vultures had returned to feed. Knox looked away.

Brantingham stood and slapped his palms together. “Stay where you are, please, John,” he chided. “I don’t want to disturb it.”

Knox felt a bubble in his throat. “Tell me they didn’t have a hostage,” Knox said. “Tell me we’re not going to find a third body.”

“Mother of Christ,” Brantingham groaned. He stopped back toward the upright stick. “See my prints?”

“Yes.”

“Follow them. Walk in them if possible.”

Moving fast, but precisely, Knox reached a series of circles Brantingham had drawn. Each one contained a bootprint. It took Knox a moment to spot the obvious. “Small.”

“Yes.”

“Too small for either of them. Small, as in a woman’s boots.”

“There are plenty of small men.”

“These guys were wearing sandals,” Knox said. “Their prints are all over the place.”

“See this . . .” Brantingham used the same stick to point to an impression in the sand. “Here and back there as well. That’s a woman’s bare breast.”

“We don’t know that. You can’t possibly know that!”

“She’s topless and wearing boots.”

“That’s not true.” Knox felt his gut clench. He squatted, trying to catch his breath and quiet the dizziness.

“She wasn’t dragged. She crawled out of camp. Crawled backward.”

“Alive,” Knox gasped.

“If she ate whatever they did, probably not for long.”

Knox felt his throat constrict. Brantingham circled the campfire. Knox remained squatting, unable to move.

“She killed them,” Knox proposed, wondering on the effect it would have on her. He knew well the depression and torment that came from such an act, even if delivered in self-defense.

“Found them, more likely. Understood not to share the soup if she’s lucky. Took their clothes. A rucksack . . . This will require a few minutes,” Brantingham said. “I need your eyes.”

Knox rose and followed along robotically as Brantingham walked a long, ever-expanding spiral out from the camp, following the line of small bootprints.

“She’s walking fairly well,” Brantingham said encouragingly. “Sore left leg, but no staggering. No stopping. No blood. It’s all good, John.”

The boot tracks joined elephant tracks fifteen meters later.

“You’re good at this,” Knox said, feeling stupid for saying so.

Brantingham took the compliment indifferently. He wasn’t talking at the moment.

They walked for several more minutes, this time following the wide swath of elephant tracks. At last, Brantingham raised his binoculars, trained them in the direction of the plane. “We’re what, three or four klicks from our lost collar signal? I think we should trek it. Is that good with you? You can wait by the plane, if not. The point being, I may not find as good a place to land.”

“I’m good,” Knox said.

“She’s alone, John. No other prints. No evidence of anyone else. It would appear she got lucky. They likely denied their hostage food, and they both died for it. The only curious thing—contradictory evidence, you could say—was the melted mobile.”

“I saw that, too.”

“I don’t understand it, I admit.”

“She’s on foot. They’re dead. There were no ropes or ties suggesting she’d cut herself free.”

“I noticed that as well. She’s only a matter of hours ahead. The state of the bodies tells us as much.” Brantingham slipped the radio off his belt and called into his agency’s dispatch. The KGA would be put on notice. Brantingham’s Larger Than Life rangers were mobilized. “They’re two hours out,” the man said. “I suggest we don’t wait.”

“That’s not an option.”

I
t wasn’t the axle, but the wheel and rim that Koigi’s vehicle lost as the driver set off to shortcut the intersection of the three dirt tracks.

The earth caved in beneath the left tire; a blowout. Koigi radioed one of his trucks forward, leaving the last of the three in a position to ambush if Guuleed ran north unexpectedly.

It took fifteen minutes to change the wheel, fifteen minutes to discover it wasn’t just the bent rim, that the truck wasn’t going to drive. By the time their truck arrived, delayed by the passing of Guuleed’s convoy several hundred meters to the west, Koigi’s plan had gone from the shit heap to the crapper. He stomped impatiently, awaiting the truck, and piled his men in quickly once it arrived.

Guuleed was ahead of him.

“So we play catch-up now! Same as always! Who cares?” He wanted his men staying positive. “Call back and bring them along.”

To try to catch Guuleed from behind would risk being caught in an ambush. He needed a plan. He leaned over to his navigator. “We need a shortcut across the bush.” The track matching Guuleed’s coordinates eventually died in the middle of a vast nothingness.

“Yes, boss.”

Complicating matters further, Koigi had a love of the mountainous north, had never warmed to the grasslands of the south. He’d established camps all over Kenya in the past fifteen years, had a love of Maasai but not the arid land they often inhabited. From his first childhood trip, a church service trip for Kibera children, the mountains had owned him—the changeable weather, the cool, and forests so thick they blotted out the sun.

“May I suggest . . . ?” his navigator inquired.

“Speak!”

“If the Somali is heading to Snaggle Tooth, and if Larger Than Life won’t supply us with the coordinates, perhaps your lady friend, the policewoman, could help?”

The man’s mention of Inspector Kanika Alkinyi hushed the car. She was the great unspoken. No one talked of Koigi’s interests outside of the cause. The wind whipped, making them numb.

“She could find out for us, eh? That might tip the scales, boss. I map us a route along here.” He traced his wide finger along a line of dashes. “There are only two ways to go. Both terminate in the bush. But look here.” His finger found and followed a dry creek bed—all such creeks were seasonal, active only during the monsoon—to a vast fan of dry swamp some distance south. “This splits the two tracks right down the middle, boss. We take the creek bed, and they never see us coming. If your friend can get us the coordinates, then we also know where they’re heading.”

Koigi thought back to the message involving the wounded gazelle.
He weighed this against Guuleed’s brazen entrance into Larger Than Life territory, a place where the odds were stacked against him and his men.

Perhaps,
he thought,
Guuleed is after Snaggle Tooth; perhaps, Grace Chu, the wounded gazelle.

He lit up the satellite phone and dialed, his men looking on.