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Copyright © 2021 by Whitewater Falls LLC
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Ebook ISBN 9780593187937
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: David Litman
Cover images: (city skyline) Wenjie Dong / Getty Images; (Capitol Building) Dominic Labbe / Moment / Getty Images; (giraffes) Verónica Paradinas Duro / Moment / Getty Images; (trees) DanM / Moment / Getty Images; (bird) Thomas Winz / The Image Bank / Getty Images
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For my wife, Jennifer
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Fallen Guardian
Homecoming
Assignment
On the Hunt
A Surprise Encounter
The Public Has an Interest
The Crevice
Change, Move, or Die
One Beautiful Battlefield
Candy for a Whale Shark
On Ice
The Confession Club
Two-Man Team
Reunion
Blooding a Krieger
The Purge
Fluke
You Were the Gun
The Unraveling
What Have You Done?
There’s Always a Who
The New Orange
Unarmed in the Company of Killers
A Different Set of Teeth
Marching Orders
Mischief Reef
The Undertaker’s Son
Here Lies Tom Klay
A Death in Camelot
We Bury Them One at a Time
Home
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
—John Stuart Mill
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
FALLEN GUARDIAN
Samburu County, Kenya
Captain Bernard Lolosoli looked down at the American journalist. “You were right.”
Tom Klay, sitting with his back against the tire of a Land Rover, looked up from his notebook. Klay wore a faded safari shirt, brown field pants, and hiking boots. A droplet of sweat rolled off his chin and struck the page at the exact spot where he’d just finished a line, destroying the word and his thought along with it. “It happens,” he replied.
“Are you ready?” Bernard asked.
Klay closed his notebook and dropped it into his shirt pocket. “All packed.”
“Good.” The ranger extended his hand. Klay took it and got to his feet. “Three men entered our east gate two days ago. We located their vehicle this morning. Their plates are stolen, and there is no exit record. Their passports were fakes.”
“Passports,” Klay said. “Not locals then.”
“Ugandans. On holiday, they said.”
Klay caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A small male dog emerged from behind the Green Guardians’ field station, carrying a feathered chicken wing in its mouth. The dog was scarred head to tail, with that compact build common to developing-world canines. “You get many of those?” he asked.
Bernard followed Klay’s gaze. “Dogs? Or chickens?”
“Ugandans.”
“We do. It was rail workers. Now it’s tourists.” Bernard smiled. “Thanks to your article, everyone wants to see our famous elephant.”
Klay watched the dog. Every few steps it glanced over its shoulder toward the guardhouse, checking to see if anything was following it. The dog set the chicken wing down in the dirt. It looked back again, expectant. There wasn’t much to see. The concrete field station and next to it the Guardians’ makeshift field armory, a steel shipping container under a thatched roof. Between the two structures, the dirt was stained black with motor oil.
The little dog yipped, and Klay heard agitated scrabbling on hard ground as a large dog emerged at speed from behind the building and rocketed toward the mutt. The bigger dog was a Belgian Malinois, a shepherd breed with relentless drive, making it a favorite among law enforcement. As the Malinois bore down, the smaller dog snatched up its chicken wing and sprinted across the clearing. It hopped onto an overturned bucket and into the crotch of a large acacia tree.
The Malinois didn’t need the bucket. It leapt straight into the tree and chased the smaller dog up a thick branch into the tree’s umbrella. The little dog barked as it climbed. Suddenly a third dog—a female as small and scarred as the first, but heavy from nursing—emerged from behind the field station, carrying a whole chicken, minus a wing. The female crossed the open space, dragging the dead bird between her forelegs, and disappeared into the bush. A moment later her mate leapt from the acacia tree onto the field station roof. The Malinois tried to follow, but it was too heavy and crashed to the ground instead. The big dog was about to climb the tree again when Bernard whistled. The dog froze. “Pfui!” Bernard said, and pointed. “Platz.” The Malinois slunk obediently to the outpost’s front door and lay down.
Klay looked up at the dog on the roof. The skinny male lay with its back legs spread on either side of the roof peak, looking down at Klay, chewing its wing.
“What do you think?” Klay asked. “You think it’s lost tourists—or something else?”
Bernard sighed. “We paid one hundred thousand dollars for that animal,” he said, looking at the shepherd. “Our donors insisted we have military dogs. I flew to Berlin to buy him. I had to learn German to speak to him. He has a better education than most of my family, and he still falls for that old dog-and-chicken routine.” Bernard nodded at two vehicles speeding in their direction. “It doesn’t bloody matter what I think, Tom.”
Klay squinted. Two black SUVs were racing toward them from the south, kicking up clouds of dust. “I’m going to say it again. If Botha is running this operation, you do not want a political ride-along anywhere near it.”
“I
