Force Protection
Gordon Kent
For intelligence analysts who sort truth from lies.
Table of Contents
The old bull elephant stamped.
The matriarch let the stripped acacia branch drop at her feet and turned her head a little. The bull stamped again, snorted. She took a step toward him and then looked down at her calf, unsure. He stamped again.
All through their band, heads came up.
The old bull’s ears shot forward, full display, and he stamped, louder, and trumpeted. There was a noise now, a noise they all knew, and the alien metal smell. Too close, the old bull was saying. She turned away, her calf at her side, and began to move along the nearly dry watercourse, away from the noise. She was the matriarch, and the others followed her lead. She moved quickly, easily, fitting her bulk between trees or just knocking older wood down. She wanted to get into deeper cover first, while the bull did his job.
Braaat. A noise like a tree being torn out of the ground right beside her. She whirled and her calf was gone. She started to go back. She could smell her own fear and that of her sisters all around her. Her calf was kneeling at the base of a tree, slumping down slowly, and she knew he was done. She keened a little, and Braaat sounded again. Something punched her in the head and stung her ear and she bellowed her pain. One of her sisters stumbled, fell, didn’t rise. The ripping noises were all around her, everywhere, and she watched another, younger bull go down heavily, his feet thrashing and tearing at the dry earth even as he gave his death cry. All their shrieks tore the air, audible for miles, the message clear to other elephants. Panic and death.
Angry and afraid, she whirled her bulk back and forth, looking for her assailants, looking for the predator killing her family. She hated with a wild hate, and called, standing over her dead calf, until the braaat finished her, too.
He was a big, confident white man with a sneering smile. His black soldiers feared him. He walked through the carnage, his ‘boys’ already cutting the ivory and in two cases taking the hides. Younger men were cutting the tails for bracelets. He shook his head at the two dead calves.
‘That’s a waste of ammunition,’ he said to a young black man, his own South African accent plain. ‘No reason to shoot ‘em. Nothing on ‘em worth taking back.’ He made ‘back’ sound like ‘beck.’ The boy nodded, his eyes still wide from shooting the elephants. The South African thought that killing elephants was an excellent way to train his men. He walked back to the big truck that they had come in to lay their ambush hours before, took a long drink of water to wash the red dust from his throat, and reached for the cell phone on the seat.
Sixty miles down the coast of Kenya, in the small city of Malindi, a man also reached for his cell phone. He was dark with sun but not African – Mediterranean, rather, perhaps Maltese or even Spanish. His English was accented but clear, slightly Americanized. He was a small man, not quite middle-aged, muscular. He was sitting in the well of a thirty-foot power boat in the Malindi marina, sipping Byrrh and looking at a handsome black woman in a thong.
‘Uh,’ he said into the phone.
‘This is Cousin Eddie.’
He knew the voice and the South African accent. A prick, but a necessary prick, was his view. ‘Uh,’ he said again. The topless woman was lying on the deck of the next boat over. Her nipples pointed skyward like little antiaircraft guns, he thought. He’d had experience of antiaircraft guns.
‘We got eleven nice pianos.’ ‘Pianos’ were elephants (because piano keys used to be made from elephant ivory).
‘Send them down. Everything okay? The kids, they’re okay?’ The ‘kids’ were fifty adult mercenaries, mostly Rwandan Hutus.
‘Kids are fine. They’re playing every day.’
‘Ready