“Helicopters?”
“Helicopters,” the Sultan replied, his eyes glittering. “I’m saying to you, Tippu, you are going to be crazy for this idea. Feel free to call me a genius once I have explained it.”
“Can you tell it?”
“No. It’s a secret. Very hush-hush. I shall demonstrate all, Tippu Tip, but only when everything is in place.” Snay licked his fingers noisily, one by one. He was eating fried grasshoppers from a paper sack.
“Baksheesh, baksheesh! How much,” Tippu wanted to know, “the Sultan pay for these choppers?”
“Sultan will pay however much baksheesh necessary.”
“Good. Ar know a man up on the coast. Beira. Frenchman. Ar can talk with him.”
“See to it.”
Tippu Tip nodded his great head and returned his red gaze to the giant naked woman looming above him, pendulous breasts slick with sweat, slapping and swaying together, the drooping lobes of her ears stretched perilously thin by the heavy brass hoops of her earrings.
“Ar lak this one, sah. Not so big.”
“Not so big? Her teats alone must weigh twenty stone each.” Bin Wazir recalled that Tippu had been married once, to an equally mammoth female, but that one had died long ago of Blackwater Fever.
“Ar lak her, Bwana. She lak like me. See? She lak jig-jig me.”
“Ha! She’s yours, Tippu! She’ll be waiting in your tent when you return from Beira tomorrow evening. With a signed purchase order for three helicopters. You can jig-jig all night.”
Tippu smiled briefly, and then his expression settled once more into stony silence. His face, bin Wazir thought, looked at times exactly like the African masks for sale in the dusty jumble of curio shops in the souks of Maputo.
That night was the eve of a new era for bin Wazir and Tippu Tip, the ivory traders. Tippu drove his truck up the muddy, rutted coast road to Beira. There, he met a man known as le Capitain and he purchased three used French helicopters for one hundred thousand each. The Alouette III transport choppers he bought were some of the first to be sold in Third World countries. Bin Wazir had le Capitain import three chopper pilots recently retired from the French Armee d’Air and was soon training them in skills he himself was making up as he went along.
One morning, in the baking heat, he summoned Tippu Tip to his tent and said it was time for the explanation of his “oasis” theory. Tippu found Snay sitting at a folding campaign table going over his maps. The visionary was wearing a big ivory-handled Smith & Wesson pistol on each hip and had his rhino hide whip stuck inside his belt. As he spoke, Tippu heard the roar of the three Alouettes descending and landing just outside bin Wazir’s tent.
Twenty minutes later they were screaming over the treetops looking for elephants. Bin Wazir sat up front next to the pilot, jumping up and down in his copilot seat like a child. Tippu sat on a jumpseat just behind him in the cargo bay. The pilot and his two passengers were all wearing headphones in order to communicate over the roar. Tippu had never seen the boss so excited.
The three helicopters raced in formation across the vast savanna; they were flying low over pink clouds that were actually vast numbers of flamingos, rising up from the shallows of the soda lakes bordered by the golden mountains. Clouds of dust rose, too, but it was only herds of horned animals: kudu, eland, and impala, no elephant so far.
“There!” bin Wazir shouted. “Allah be praised, there must be three hundred in that herd! Francois! Get the other two pilots on the radio and give them our coordinates. We are about to make history, my friends. Just you wait!”
He turned in his seat and smiled at Tippu Tip over his shoulder.
“Tippu!”
“Sah!”
“You remembered the camera?”
Tippu patted his large canvas shoulder bag and nodded.
“Video camera, yes sah, two blank tapes, Bwana,” he said.
“Most excellent,” said bin Wazir, unfastening his harness and squeezing past the pilot towards the rear of the chopper. “Get ready to start shooting, Tippu,” he said. Picking up a Russian submachine gun, he began cackling at his own terrible joke.
He slid open the starboard side door, hooked himself into the canvas harness, and sat down in the opening with the machine gun across his lap. The two other choppers appeared; they flew in a wide formation, three abreast, hard on the heels of the now stampeding herd of elephants.
Snay opened fire, shooting over the heads of the elephants. Two of his most trusted poachers, sitting in the open bays of the other two helicopters, starting firing as well. To Snay’s delight, the combination of the roaring choppers and the rounds flying over their heads, enabled Snay to direct the herd in any direction he wished.
“Eh bien, Francois, let’s take them due south!”
The two other pilots heard him and now all three choppers banked hard right, staying just behind the thundering herd. A huge smile broke across Snay’s features. The herd had turned south.
“Did I not tell you this was genius, Tippu Tip? Look at them! I could take them to Paris if I wished! Right up the Champs-Elysees!”
“Where you take them, Sultan?”
“You shall see, Tippu! Be patient and you shall see!” Snay was cackling like a mafisi, a wild hyena.
The first explosion occurred four minutes later. A female elephant, the matriarch of the herd, had been in the lead and had been first to enter the minefield. Three of her legs were instantly blown off. She went down in a heap. Explosions were coming rapidly now, as three hundred panicked elephants entered the huge minefield. It was a feast of blood, fountains of the stuff, red jets everywhere you looked. It was just the way Snay had imagined it, and his heart sang with the joy of the truly fulfilled.
“Francois!” he cried. “Right here! Hover over that big bull…I’m going down!” Snay stuck his foot in a wire harness and grabbed the handhold mounted in the open bay.
“But the mines, zey—”
“Do it!”
The chopper leveled off and hovered perhaps twenty feet above the dying elephant. Snay pressed a button that would allow him to descend rapidly. He had his razor-sharp machete in his hand now, and when he got low enough to the bull’s head, he slashed the face off. First the right side, then the left. The elephant, like those around him, was still alive. He bellowed in pain as Snay ripped the tusks from his bloody head. There was a small calf lying legless next to the bull, and bin Wazir, in a mad fit of kindness, used one of his .357 magnum six-shooters to put the useless baby animal out of its misery.
Tippu, looking through the lens of his video camera at the scene beneath him, stared in open-mouthed amazement. There were exploding elephants in all directions, as far as you could see. A fine red mist had risen up from the plain. And then there was the Sultan, swinging wildly about at the end of his tether. Tippu couldn’t hear him, with the roar of the rotors and the turbocharged engines. But he could see enough of the blood-soaked bin Wazir to know that he was laughing hysterically as he chopped and slashed.
This white man, he is part hyena, Tippu decided in that moment. Half man, half wild dog. A snarling creature who would devour the whole world if he could, eating everything, crushing bones and stones with his teeth, not spitting out a thing.
Snay bin Wazir seemed to have a penchant for collecting nick-names and soubriquets to go with the name he was making for himself in the world. In Africa, he was called the Sultan. Later, in London, he would style himself Pasha. But the name Tippu Tip would give him that day, the day of the first great elephant massacre, would remain with Snay bin Wazir for the balance of his life.
Tippu Tip called him the Mafisi.
The world would come to know him as the Dog.
Chapter Eight
Dark Harbor, Maine
