“So, why’s he coming?”
“Someone might have told him you want his photograph for your famous magazine.”
Klay groaned. “I should have brought a camera then.”
“That would have been nice.”
Two of Bernard’s rangers waited nearby. The Green Guardians were a privately funded counter-poaching force made up of Samburu warriors. Bernard’s men looked the part. In addition to their desert fatigues and tan boots, they wore their hair in long, ocher-dyed braids pulled back severely from their scalps, adorned with feathers and narrow, brightly beaded headbands. Beneath their uniforms, the men’s lean ribs were tattooed with chains of coffee-bean-sized scars representing bravery. Like their Maasai relatives, the Samburu were nomadic pastoralists. When not on duty, Bernard’s men—Goodson Ltumbesi and Moses Lelesar—tended their animals, lived on milk and blood drained from the necks of their cattle, and warred over livestock with neighboring tribes. With their hair tied back, their dark eyes, and their cheekbones as sharp as cracked shale, they resembled a pair of young eagles swiveling for prey, with well-oiled and well-used HK G3 battle rifles for talons.
Bernard was a contrast. The Samburu warrior had gone to boarding school in England. He wore his hair short, sported a closely trimmed goatee, and carried a baby’s arm of fat around his middle. When Klay had first met him, years ago, Bernard was working as a fixer, taking journalists to difficult locations throughout East Africa. He emerged shirtless from his hut wearing an orange-and-black-checked shuka over one shoulder, multicolored bead necklaces that wrapped his neck from chin to chest, tire-rubber sandals, and a gold belt adorned with tiny dime-shaped metal circles dangling on gold chains. A thin chain stretched from one ear, under his lower lip, and over the other ear. He jingled when he walked, like a child’s toy.
“You always dress up like this?” Klay had asked.
“Like what?” Bernard had replied.
Bernard took Klay up in a rented Cessna 172 to look for elephants. It was the first time Klay saw Kenya’s largest living elephant, a local tourist attraction named Voi. The super-tusker was standing among a group of five males on the west side of a low hill. All six were big elephants, but Voi was mammoth, with tusks so long they rubbed the ground. Bernard pointed him out, then banked the plane to take a second look. “Watch!” As the plane came around, the five male elephants looked up, then quickly encircled Voi. Brandishing their tusks, they shook their heads violently, while Voi turned his back to the plane and lowered his head.
Klay was astonished. “Like they know,” he said. Bernard tapped the earcup of his headset to indicate he couldn’t hear. Klay bent the mic closer to his lips and shouted again. “Like they know,” he repeated, “it’s because of his tusks . . .”
“Of course they know!” Bernard had replied. “We say, ‘An elephant is born carrying two gravestones: One for himself. One for his species.’” Klay had included the line in his article. “The Last Great Tusker,” he’d called it.
Klay’s cover story had come at a cost. The big elephant was now world famous. Voi’s enormous tusks, revered by Kenyans, were now priceless to Asian ivory collectors. To protect him from poachers, Kenya’s president had declared the animal a national treasure, and had deputized the Green Guardians to protect him.
Only a few criminals had the connections and the wherewithal to kill the well-protected Voi and smuggle his tusks to China whole. Klay’s information was that Ras Botha, a man known all too well to Klay, was about to try.
Klay watched the politician’s vehicles approach. “Long haul from Nairobi.”
“We flew him in,” Bernard said. “Same as you. He’s trouble for us, Tom. Ras Botha may be our immediate threat, but if we’re not careful, Simon Lekorere will become our long-term problem. The Chinese completed the Uganda rail line since you were last here. They have built another line from Addis to their military base in Djibouti.”
“The Ultimate Silk Road Project,” Klay said. “I know.”
“Do you know they want to connect them?”
Klay whistled. He imagined a gigantic Roman numeral I burned into the side of East Africa. The Kenya-to-Uganda rail line would be the numeral’s base; Addis, Ethiopia, to the port of Djibouti would be its cap. China had built the southern line for economic reasons. The northern line was strategic: Djibouti was a gatekeeper to the Suez Canal.
Klay looked up at the small dog still crunching its chicken wing. “Oil,” he said.
Bernard nodded in the direction of the politician’s incoming vehicle. “He extorts payment from us to keep his voters from poaching our elephants. That’s nothing new. Our donors pay him off. But he will get more money than we can afford by selling our land to the Chinese. Connect those two rail lines and everything we have here will vanish.”
Klay looked out over Kenya’s idyllic landscape. Bernard was right. Whatever China’s ultimate plan, if a third rail line was built through here, everything he was seeing would be lost. “No protests?”
Bernard laughed. “The Chinese hired Perseus Group.”
Klay cocked his head toward the other American in their group, a lanky blond software engineer wearing a pale blue Perseus Group polo shirt. The engineer leaned against the Guardians’ outpost, rapidly typing something into his iPhone. “I thought you hired Perseus Group?”
Before Bernard could respond, the two SUVs braked to a hard stop, covering Klay and Bernard in their dust. Klay ran his tongue over his teeth and spat. Two bulky Kenyans wearing sunglasses and business suits emerged from the lead vehicle. They hurried across the clearing, inspected the Guardians’ Land Rover, gave a nod, and a third bodyguard opened the main car’s back door. Inside sat Simon Lekorere talking on a mobile phone. The heavyset politician wore a dark brown cowboy hat, gold-framed Gucci sunglasses, and an orange kitenge shirt.
“Jesus,” Klay muttered.
“He’s Samburu,” Bernard said.
The politician sipped a bottle of beer.
“Deep down,” Bernard added.
Bernard whistled, and his rangers swung themselves into
