Chapter Four
15 May 2018
Parc National de Zakouma
Barh Signaka, Guera, Chad
The rain was coming down in buckets.
Félix Habré sat in the passenger seat of the jeep, the rain dripping off his brimmed hat and the yellow plastic poncho that covered him from shoulders to knees. The jeep’s tires were bouncing as the driver navigated the muddy ridges of the 1200-square mile Zakouma National Park. Félix had always appreciated that the government had gone to the trouble of forming this park back in 1963. Nestled right in the Sahel region of eastern Chad, located handily on the midpoint between the Sahara and the rainforest, the park was a refuge for Africa’s dwindling elephant population.
Which made life much easier for Félix. Having them all in one place made it much easier to poach them.
He glanced back at the truck that was pacing the jeep. A third member of his team was driving it, the fourth next to him. Behind them in the truck were the AK-47s, the canvas covering protecting them from the elements.
As they went around a bend, Félix saw a man standing directly in their path. Whoever the man was, he’d chosen his spot well, as the pathway—the ribbon of mud could not truly be dignified with the word “road”—was lined with trees on one side and a muddy pool of water on the other, so there was no way around him.
The man wore a large hat that obscured his face, but as they approached, Félix could see that he was elderly, based on the white wisps of wet hair poking out from under the hat. He could see the man’s mouth, though, and it was completely bereft of teeth.
Adoum, the driver, pulled the jeep to a halt even as the old man held up a hand. “Go back!” he cried out in a voice that sounded very peculiar, though Félix figured that to be mostly due to the lack of teeth.
Behind them, the truck also came to a squelching halt on the muddy path.
Félix stood up in the passenger seat of the jeep and shouted to the man over the windshield. “Move aside, old man!”
“Go back! If you harm the elephants, the creature will strike!”
Rolling his eyes, Félix said, “You’re insane, old man! Move!”
“What creature?” Adoum asked, suddenly sounding apprehensive.
Whirling on the driver, Félix said, “Nothing.” He then chuckled. “A tale told by old fools of a creature of vengeance who harms those who harm the beasts. It’s idiocy.”
“It’s true!” the old man cried out. “Listen to me!”
“I am not interested in what you have to say.”
The wind shifted a bit, and the brim of the old man’s hat was blown back. Félix could now see his entire face.
What was left of it.
His eyes were crazed and haunted. His skin was parched and wrinkled.
That, however, barely registered on Félix, for what drew his attention was between his mad eyes and his toothless mouth.
The old man’s nose was gone. The barely healed flesh around where it had been was scarred and irritated, surrounding a revolting hole in the middle of the old man’s face, leaving the septum and the back of the soft palate exposed.
Félix had always thought of himself as having a strong stomach. He’d seen plenty of exposed innards of both humans and animals in his time, but usually they were already dead or dying. This was a living, talking person, yet he was peering right into his very skull. It took an effort to hold down his breakfast.
For his part, the old man continued to rant. “I was once like you! I once hunted the elephants, but the creature made me pay! He killed my people, but let me live to warn others! Heed my warning, and go back!”
From behind him, Hassan, the driver of the truck, cried out, “Should I shoot him?”
Félix swallowed down his nausea, Hassan’s bluntness like a welcome bucket of ice water in his face. “No, a dead body would force the park rangers to investigate—or force us to pay prohibitively larger bribes. Just—just move him out of the way.”
Nodding, Hassan shifted the truck into park, hopped out, and manhandled the old man until he was off the road.
The entire time, the old man was screaming, “Go back! Go back! You won’t survive!”
Next to him, Adoum looked as frightened as Félix was starting to feel.
Seeing it in his subordinate helped remove it from himself. Angrily, and as much self-directed as it was at Adoum, Félix cried, “Snap out of it! We have a job to do!”
“What if he’s telling the truth? Did you see his nose?”
“He’s insane,” Félix said quickly, not wanting to think about it, even as Hassan got back into the truck. “Let’s move!”
It was always best to go after the elephants early in the rainy season. This soon, the rain hadn’t had a chance to accumulate—by the end of June, beginning of July, the region would be better named Zakouma National Lake, there was so much flooding—but the actual downpours were intense enough that most folks stayed away. Especially those tiresome conservationists.
For many years, Félix worked as a guide to the park, usually for insipid tourists or those very same conservationists. The former were irritating, but at least tipped well. The latter were self-righteous and pig-headed, and tipped very poorly. They spoke of the elephant population being endangered, as if the creatures couldn’t still reproduce or something. It was madness. They still had calves, which the poachers generally avoided killing, since their tusks weren’t developed yet. And they all died eventually in any case. What difference did it make if it was from one of his weapons or from old age?
The heavy rains meant he was likely to be left alone—by everyone except for noseless lunatics, in any event. Not that conservationists wandered around armed or anything, but killing or even injuring one came with difficulties and attention that Félix preferred to avoid. He’d already spent time in Korotoro Prison, an experience he was very much not eager to repeat.
At least he didn’t have to worry about the park rangers. He’d adequately bribed all of them to keep their distance and give him and his team free rein of Zakouma. The bribes were considerable, but as nothing compared to what the Chinese were offering for the ivory of the elephants’ tusks. Even though it meant bribing pretty much everyone who worked for the park, as well as about a dozen government officials, it was still such a small percentage of what they got from the Chinese that it wasn’t much more than a rounding error in terms of profits.
So everybody won. The Chinese got the ivory they craved, Félix and his team got embarrassingly large amounts of money, and a bunch of civil servants got something to actually put into a savings account for once in their miserable lives.
Well, truly not everybody. The conservationists didn’t win, but they had plenty of elephants in zoos that were doing fine.
Then there were the crazy people like that old man and his mad stories. Keeping the park rangers away had probably had the unintended consequence of allowing that mad old imbecile to roam free. Félix had, in fact, heard stories about some kind of creature of vengeance before, though never from someone who claimed to have encountered it.
But the old man had likely lost his nose in some accident. He was probably indigent and couldn’t afford proper care of it. And no doubt his teeth had fallen out in the natural course of life.
That had to be it.
Checking his GPS, he saw that they were getting closer. Putting a hand on Adoum’s soaked shoulder prompted the latter to decelerate, with the truck doing likewise and pulling alongside the jeep as both vehicles stopped.
“We go the rest of the way on foot.” Félix then grinned. “Don’t wish to spook the herd, now do we?”
The two in the truck chuckled. Adoum said nothing. Hassan went to the back of the truck and started distributing the AK-47s. Each member of the team checked the weapon to make sure it was loaded properly. They also made sure they had spare ammunition.
Félix always felt that he made the right choice in terms of profession, mostly due to how easy it was. He didn’t know how poachers who were in it to salvage meat did it. When all you were after were two three-meter ivory protrusions, the fate of the rest of the body was comparatively negligible. If you wanted to bag, say, a pheasant illegally, you had to use buckshot or some other method that left enough of the body intact to serve as a meal or three. Automatic weapons were out of the question.
Not so with elephants. You could keep your distance and pretty much guarantee a kill. Especially with four people doing the shooting.
They moved quickly through the park, their boots squelching in the mud, the rain sluicing off their hats, their arms kept free via slits in the sides of the yellow ponchos. Adoum lagged behind a bit. Apparently the toothless, noseless old man was still distracting him. If he kept it up, Félix was going to dock his pay.
Félix couldn’t hear much over the rain, but he felt a mild vibration in the ground that indicated that the elephants were nearby. He raised a fist in the air and stopped moving forward, though Hassan had already stopped.
Moving more slowly now, the quartet eased their way toward the herd, who were under a copse of trees in an attempt to stay, if not dry—that wasn’t really possible this time of year—not totally soaked.
“Remember,” Félix whispered as he raised his AK-47, “aim high. There’s no value in the calves, at least not till they’re grown.”
Once they got close enough, he yelled, “Fire!”
The first break in the rain occurred in the evening. Though he had rented an SUV, Yuvraj Varaich still wasn’t entirely comfortable driving into Zakouma while it was actually raining.
He went next door and knocked. “Chanan, you awake?”
His intern opened the door. Yuvraj flinched a bit, as he always seemed to around Chanan Carlisle. It was ridiculous. Over the past three decades working with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Yuvraj had spent time with some of the nastiest predators the Earth had to offer. He’d been proximate to buffalo stampedes, angry bears, and panthers in heat, and never once cowered. Yet every time he was in Chanan’s presence, he wanted to throw up his arms and beg for mercy.
Chanan stared at him with his penetrating eyes and shaved head, and said, “I am awake, yes.”
“Good. The rain’s stopped, and I want to see if I can find out what happened to those GPS transmitters on the elephants. I mean, it could just be that they’re not as waterproofed as the manufacturers said.”
“That is not what you believe.” Chanan did not pose it as a question.
Yuvraj shook his head. “No.” Earlier that day, several of the subcutaneous GPS transmitters they’d put in the elephants in Zakouma had lost their signal. One or two would not be noteworthy—the things failed on a regular basis for the most mundane of reasons—but they lost half a dozen. Worse, in the time since then, none of the others had moved.
Long, bitter experience taught Yuvraj to fear the worst.
“You know,” he said, as Chanan got his gear together, “I got into this business right around when they passed the international ban on the ivory trade in 1989. It slowed the poachers down for, what, five minutes?” He sighed. “Hey, maybe we’ll be lucky, and it really will be the rain.”
They were not lucky. A long, difficult drive through the darkened park later, and they arrived at the location from where the GPS trackers indicated the elephants had not moved.
That was, it turned out, for good reason. The headlights of the SUV clearly showed that the elephants had been butchered. Bullet holes riddled what was left of their bodies.
Of course, the tusks had all been removed, dried blood caked around the skin from which the tusks had been violently ripped, meaning it had happened immediately after the elephants had been killed—or, in some cases, no doubt, before they had succumbed to the bullet wounds, but were too injured to defend themselves against the poachers’ actions.
“I hear something,” Chanan said.
Yuvraj cupped a hand to his ear, and then he heard it too.
Before Yuvraj could even say anything, though, Chanan had sprung into action, running into the sea of elephant corpses.
Following more gingerly, he came across Chanan standing over an elephant calf who had survived. The sound had been the calf keening.
Two drops of rain fell onto Yuvraj’s face.
He looked up, and four more drops hit his face. “The skies are about to open. C’mon, let’s get the calf back to the SUV before the biblical flood starts. We’ll come back in the morning.”
As they moved to gently pick up the animal, Chanan said, “The rain will wash away the evidence.”
Yuvraj snorted. “Right, because gathering evidence will really matter when park authorities already let this happen in broad daylight.” He glanced up at the clouds accumulating in the night sky. “Well, not broad, but you know what I mean. I’m sure they were all paid quite handsomely to not give a damn.”
“How do you know it was daylight?” Chanan asked as they placed the calf in the back of the SUV.
The infant barely fit, and Yuvraj had to put down the back seats to give the calf enough room. “Because it was midafternoon when the GPS units died.” He pointed at the calf. “And because that little guy’s alive. They could see their targets. Had to make sure they didn’t hit the tusks, and they tried to spare any calves.”
“Why would poachers care about sparing a baby?” Chanan asked as he wrapped the calf in one of the blankets they had in the back of the SUV.
Yuvraj opened the driver’s side door as the rain started to intensify. “A dead calf’s of no use to them. A live calf will grow up to be another source of ivory. Let’s go.”
“I’ll sit in the back with him,” Chanan said.
Nodding, Yuvraj got in and put the SUV into gear.
Félix held his smartphone to his ear, speaking in Mandarin. “Yes, they will arrive within the month.… No, I cannot send them sooner. Besides, they are already gone.… The ship that I have secured has a guarantee that it will not be searched by any port authorities. Or if it is, those authorities have been paid for.… Well, yes, there’s always a chance, but this vessel carries the most minimal risk of such.… It is called the Flower of Senegal and it should arrive in Shanghai no later than the thirteenth of June.… Yes.… Thank you, goodbye.”
He shook his head and walked across the warehouse floor to Adoum. They had transferred all the tusks to this place in Al Junaynah, right over the border in Sudan. He’d spent the last week cleaning and packing them, and also finalizing the arrangements to ship them to his clients, one of whom he had just had his twelfth reassuring phone call with. For whatever reason, Rao wanted the ivory as fast as possible. If Rao had had his way, Félix would have shipped them via Federal Express. But his shipment was already on the Flower of Senegal, where it wasn’t likely to be x-rayed by anyone, a state of affairs he would be unable to avoid with commercial shipping carriers.
“How soon until this last batch is all packaged?”
“Excuse me?” Adoum stared at him.
Félix blinked, realized he’d asked the question in Mandarin. In French, he asked the question again.
“Another hour, perhaps ninety minutes,” Adoum said.
“Good.”
A voice came from behind Félix. “Excuse me.”
Whirling around, Félix saw a man wearing a bulky coat and gloves, and a face mask that was in the shape of an elephant.
Unable to help himself, Félix started to laugh.
But that laugh died in his throat when he saw that the masked man was also carrying an AK-47.
Félix pointed at the door through which the masked man had come. “You’re trespassing! Get out!”
The masked man’s voice was muffled by the elephant mask. “You have committed crimes for which you must pay.”
“I’ve served my time, thank you. Are you familiar with Korotoro?” Félix shuddered at the memory of the lice, the rotten food, the brackish water, the filth, the overcrowding. The place gave snake pits a bad name.
“I’m not interested in arresting you. That has already failed, and I do not have the authority to do so in any case.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Félix saw Idriss moving slowly and quietly through the boxes in the warehouse, a Beretta in hand.
Stalling, Félix asked, “Why are you here, then?”
“To make you pay for what you did to forty-three adult elephants in Zakouma last week, as well as one calf.”
Adoum said, “We spared the calf.”
Félix winced. That was as good as an admission of guilt. Not that that seemed to matter here.
“Elephants have family units very much like humans. The calf saw you murder her parents, and it traumatized her. She would not take any food or water, and she died in my arms. All so you could have your ivory.”
“Look—” Félix started, even as Idriss drew in closer, now standing next to one of the boxes.
But before he could continue, the masked man turned toward Idriss and shot the AK-47 on full automatic. It splintered the box and cut Idriss to ribbons.
Félix winced, more concerned with the loss of the goods inside the box than the loss of Idriss. There were always more mercenaries to be hired. Much of central Africa was impoverished, and many nations of the African continent could not afford to pay their military a living wage, which made it easy to recruit them for this kind of more lucrative work.
“As I was saying—” Félix began again, but then the masked man turned to face him with the weapon pointed right at Félix’s face.
“I am not interested in what you have to say.”
Félix heart skipped a beat as he heard the exact words he’d said to the crazy old man—perhaps not as crazy as he thought—when he warned him about the creature of vengeance.
All at once, Félix realized he should have listened to the old man. Or at least not dismissed him quite so readily.
In thirty-two years of life in one of the most violent regions on Earth, Félix Habré had somehow contrived never to be wounded by a bullet. He’d been stabbed a few times, on the streets of N’Djamena growing up, and again in Korotoro, but never once had he been shot.
He had not expected it to be so hot. The feel of the bullets as they ripped apart flesh and muscle and bone was almost scorching. That on top of the impact, which he had expected, like being hit repeatedly with a hammer.
A red-hot hammer, in fact.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor. His vision was hazy as he stared up at the ceiling. Félix felt no pain—nor much of anything else. Thoughts proved difficult to form, and he couldn’t make any of his limbs move. In fact, he couldn’t swear to whether or not his limbs still existed.
He supposed he was going into shock.
Dimly, he registered the arrival of the fourth member of his team, Hassan, who started screaming in his native Senegalese. More fire from the AK-47, more screams—all, to Félix’s disappointment, from Hassan—more wood being splintered along with flesh.
An elephant mask appeared to block out the view of the ceiling. “That was the first step. Two of your men are dead. You will follow them. But your other employee still lives, and he will remain alive. I have heard that you were warned of me by one of the heralds whom I have left behind. He is obviously no longer effective, so your companion here will take his place as my new herald.”
Placing the AK-47 down on the floor, the masked man then reached into the ridiculously bulky coat—why would anyone wear such a thing in this heat?—and pulled out what appeared to be two hooks on long metal handles.
The masked man ushered Adoum over to the two of them. Félix could see the terror in Adoum’s eyes, the beads of sweat cascading down his face. The fear the young man had had when they’d encountered the noseless, toothless herald in Zakouma was back tenfold now.
“Sit at the top of his head and hold the forehead still,” the masked man said.
With what little energy he had remaining, Félix hoped and prayed that Adoum would fight past his fear and attack this madman.
Instead, the fool did as he was told. Adoum had been a soldier once, and had served Félix well as a mercenary, yet he was completely cowed by this murderer who had killed two of his fellows and was about to do the same to Félix himself.
Félix couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could feel the life draining from him as Adoum cupped Félix’s jaw with his right hand and held Félix’s forehead with his left.
The masked man pulled a small switchblade from his coat pocket next. “I will show you,” he said to Adoum, “the fate of those who would rip elephants’ tusks from their bodies. You will warn those who come after you of what you are about to see.”
“W-what am I—?” Adoum cut himself off and Félix heard him swallow hard.
“I will show you. First, we must cut open his face.”
A moment ago, Félix felt nothing.
Then the masked man applied the scalpel to the laugh line on the left side of his face and started to cut.
Suddenly, Félix felt everything. The scalpel’s slicing through flesh drew him out of shock, as the pain coursed through his body, forcing him to not only feel the blade cutting the flesh of his face, but also bring the gunshot wounds’ agony back into sharp relief.
Félix screamed.
Adoum held his head in place, but the rest of his body squirmed and convulsed with agony.
“Hold his head still,” the masked man said as he gripped the dual-hook device. The rounded bottom part slid easily into Félix’s mouth, thanks to his throat-ripping screams. He felt the two straight hooks slide into his nostrils, an action that might have made him shudder with disgust were he not already writhing in brutal agony.
Then he heard the sound.
The dying Félix would probably never be able to articulate what the bone-crunching sound was like, exactly. It only added to the pain that simply would not stop.
But now, blessedly, he felt himself sliding into oblivion once again, this final assault on his face shutting his mind and body down.
He no longer saw the elephant mask or the ceiling of the warehouse, and the voice he heard seemed so distant: “I have disarticulated his nose and palate from the remainder of his skull. This is the closest one can come to duplicating what you have done to the elephants you’ve tormented.”
The last words Félix heard were Adoum’s: “He doesn’t look like a person anymore.”
His last thoughts were of the old man warning him to go back in a plaintive howl, and wishing to hell he’d listened.