“Let’s go,” Klay yelled to him.
The engineer glanced momentarily in Klay’s direction, then returned to his phone. He spent a few more moments typing before finally crossing the clearing to join them.
“I sent my report to Tysons Corner,” he said to Bernard.
“That’s your prerogative, Greg,” Bernard replied.
“Our contract is very clear with respect to all anti-poaching operations.”
“So you said. We’ll be leaving in a moment. You’ll have the second row to yourself.”
The engineer climbed into the truck.
“Welcome to Kenya, Mr. Sovereign,” Simon Lekorere boomed, extending his hand. The politician’s hand was small in Klay’s, but surprisingly calloused. The portly man laughed, as if he knew what Klay was thinking.
“Come,” he said, climbing into the Rover’s passenger seat. “Let us see if we can save some of our elephants today.”
A bodyguard placed a small cooler between Lekorere’s feet. Bernard walked Klay to the back of the vehicle.
“What’s your play to hold him?” Klay asked quietly.
“Pride,” Bernard said.
“Pride?”
“Samburu understand the importance of land. We have to remind him that he is Samburu first and a greedy politician second. He’s wily. He’s been playing the Chinese for us, getting us a new school and a clinic.” Bernard reached into the back of the vehicle and withdrew a rifle. “Take this.”
“No, thanks,” Klay said.
“You said it yourself,” Bernard said. “If this is a Botha operation, we should be ready.” He nodded toward the politician. “Let’s give him the idea we’ve got something worth protecting, shall we?”
Klay accepted the rifle, a battle-scarred, bolt-action Mauser, no doubt confiscated from a poacher. He shouldered it. Checked the action. “Make a better club,” he said, working the ragged bolt.
“Good.” Bernard smiled. “We are out of those.” He handed Klay a five-round stripper clip. Klay pressed the cartridges into the magazine, pushed the bolt forward, and let the clip fall to the ground.
Bernard bent down and picked it up. “We recycle these.”
“Sorry,” Klay said.
Bernard tapped him on the shoulder with the piece of metal and nodded toward the politician. “We need him. So try not to shoot him.”
“That only happened once,” Klay said. “And it was an accident.”
Bernard was still chuckling as he started the vehicle.
• • •
Bernard drove fast, the Land Rover shuddering over a dry and broken landscape. In the truck were the three rangers, the politician, the software engineer, a monitor from the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Klay. Their route traced the Ewaso Nyiro River. The river’s seasonal ebb and flow had lately been accelerated by the earth’s rapidly changing climate, floods in dry season, droughts in wet. It was late November, time for the short rains, but none had come. They crisscrossed the river’s desiccated bed, plunging down and then up its steep banks, dodging fallen trees, spinning in deep sand, crashing through thornbush.
Standing behind Klay, Bernard’s rangers scanned the landscape for threats, barely touching the truck’s roll bar despite the vehicle’s bucking. Klay did not ride as easily. At each jolt his thick knees punched the back of the politician’s canvas seat.
Klay didn’t fit well into the truck’s second row. He didn’t fit well into most places. He was a large, broad-shouldered man. With his amber eyes and graying brown hair, he was still handsome enough, but etched now, salt overtaking pepper. The same applied to his personality. More than one grade school teacher had described young Tom Klay as troubled. Now, in middle age, he was a hardened brooder. He ground his molars. He spoke sparingly, in a voice so low it often sounded as if he were talking to himself. He carried himself in a way that suggested any number of past careers, not one of them journalist. If you were a boxer, you might recognize the forward roll in his shoulders and the slight tuck of his chin. If you had law enforcement experience, you might notice his tendency to stand with one hip forward, the other canted away. He was best appreciated in geologic terms, a cairn of irregular boulders stacked above a very active fault line.
“Tuskah!” the politician shouted over his shoulder, too fat to turn. He held a bottle of beer above his head. “You like it, right?” he called to Klay. “Tuskah?”
Klay ignored Lekorere and looked out over the savannah, two fingers balancing the Mauser’s barrel against his thigh. A male lion dozed beneath a tree in the late-afternoon sun.
He wasn’t here for the animals, or for the conversation.
“Doesn’t it get to you?” readers asked him from time to time. “The killing . . . all those poor animals?”
The question surprised him the first time. “It’s not easy,” he replied, “but I grew up in a funeral home, so I guess I was born for this job.”
Years later he was still giving the same awkward response, only the truth behind his answer had changed. The truth was the killing had used to bother him a great deal, and he wished it still did. The transformation had happened surprisingly quickly, he realized looking back. One trip he had returned home and discovered that he hadn’t noticed any baboons, though they had surely surrounded his camp. On another, he found himself irritated by a tower of giraffes blocking the road. Eventually, even the elephants became invisible.
Nature had become his murder book. From A to Z—from the spiral-horned addax to Grevy’s zebra—he exposed crimes against endangered species in the pages of The Sovereign, and then, like a television detective with a season to fill, moved dutifully on to the next victim. One didn’t linger over the dead, in fiction or in life. One moved on.
Klay was a criminal investigator. He was selective in the stories he took on. Winnable cases only. He was no Don Quixote. He didn’t investigate crashing insect populations or stranded polar bears. He didn’t report on the global warming crisis for the same reason he didn’t investigate Russian money laundering, Mexican drug trafficking, or Wall Street’s financial crimes. Those stories weren’t winnable. He identified traffickers, designed investigations, reported his
