Joe Gores: Glass Tiger

He had begun by scattering the jerky on the log. Had worked his way closer until he could sit on the end of the log while they ate. He knew he didn’t look like another crow to them, but he always furnished them with beef jerky. Crow Three.

Bird Crow began digging at the choice bits of jerky buried deep in the bark. His cohort hopped up to gobble the easy ones. No jostling, no shoving. A clan. A family.

Seven minutes later, the sentinel left in the top of the ponderosa sounded the alarm. The searchers had arrived.

‘Shit,’ said Ray in a low voice. His FBI i.d. was strung on a lanyard around his neck and his Sig Sauer was in his right hand, held low at his side. ‘Crows. They’ll alert him. C’mon!’

The crows barely had time to flap up from the log. One, huge and shiny as a raven, stayed to rip out bits of bark and throw them in all directions with savage sideways flings of its head, somehow always keeping one beady eye on the intruders. Then it was gone with a final fat morsel in its beak.

Walt sat down on the log, winded by his sprint to the clearing. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground.

‘I get it, Ray. Since the crows are here, he can’t be.’

‘Smart fella, Walt.’

Ray held an ungloved hand above the embers of the fire before letting himself sit down and light up. The harsh smell of burning tobacco drifted through the clearing.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Maybe thirty. That close. That’s the bad news.’ He feathered out smoke. ‘The good news is that he can’t be more than forty minutes ahead of us.’ He smeared out his just-lit Marlboro against the log. ‘Let’s move. Let’s show those Secret Service fucks how to take down a suspect — we’ll have this guy’s ass in custody before noon.’

‘Unless he resists,’ said Walter piously. He was an asshole, but he loved mortal shooting and was good at it.

‘Unless he resists,’ Ray agreed.

The crows were back at the beef jerky when Corwin crawled out of the log dragging his pack and sleeping bag behind him.

FBI. He even recognized their voices: they had smoked a cigarette above his hiding place back in the Delta in November. As expected, they had been told that he was armed and dangerous. Well, he once had been. He’d lost track of the men he’d killed over the years. These two were no threat.

He trotted unevenly away down his backtrail, leaving Bird Crow’s gang of ruffians to savage the last of the jerky. He’d call Janet from Cedarbrook, she’d leave the 4-Runner for him at Truckee as planned, he’d pick it up with no contact between them. She would be safe, he would have a clean vehicle to drive now that he was clear of the searchers. In two or three weeks their masters would surely find someone better to send after him — the shadowy tireless tracker of his nightmares?

By then he would be hidden away. In plain sight.

On an early April dawn two weeks later, an unmarked G400 Gulfstream jet circled Nairobi International Airport preparatory to landing. Terrill Hatfield stared almost gloomily down at the flat brown earth rushing up to meet them. He had his New Year’s Eve wish: he and his FBI Hostage/Rescue Team were on detached duty to the President’s Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future. But they had failed to catch Corwin at King’s Canyon, as they had failed to catch him in the Delta in November. And now this.

After he deplaned, a government car took Hatfield from a far corner of the field to the far side of Kenya passport control and customs check. He had read the file of the man he had been sent here to bring back. Impressive. Too impressive. He and his men could get the job done without the help of this outsider. But Hatfield had been told to bring him: bring him he would. He would wait for an enabling incident, grab his man, and fly him back to D.C. In custody. It would exceed his authority, yes, but the stakes were high and he had Kurt Jaeger behind him.

What if the man succeeded where Hatfield had failed? There was a way around that. Use him, then step in to seize the power and glory of success for himself alone. Step on the son of a bitch hard, right away. Keep stepping on him. Control him, use him, obstruct him if necessary, then find a way to discard him.

Brendan Thorne began bucking hard under Ellie, the 23-year-old blonde straddling him at Sikuzuri Safari Camp in Tsavo East. Eleanor’s groom, 59-year-old Squire Pierpont III, was paying eight hundred bucks a night, not the usual $600, because his new trophy wife, after glimpsing Thorne on their arrival, had insisted on an extra-spacious banda with two private bedrooms.

Hemingway’s randy white hunters with their double-wide sleeping bags were no more, so two or three times a year Thorne, lowly camp guard, got seduced by women like Ellie: bored wives dragged to darkest Africa by wealthy husbands. It was the only social life he got, and as much as he could handle.

Ellie started panting, open-mouthed. Her eyes rolled up. Thorne flipped her onto her back and pumped hard. She came again in synch with him. Vocally. He was glad she had put all that Halcyon in her husband’s final whiskey-soda last night; his job was the only thing that held Thorne together. Since New Year’s Eve, no worthy stalk had yet appeared to rouse him from the somnolence of his narrow days. But he kept hoping.

Thorne emerged into cool pre-dawn darkness to find the other camp guard, a Wanderobo-Masai named Morengaru, squatting beneath an African toothbrush tree. The shotgun that he used for everything from buck to buff rested buttdown on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.

‘Na kwenda wapi?’ Thorne asked. Morengaru stood, swung an arm to the east. Down river. ‘Kwa nini?’ Why?

Gathering dawnlight picked out the high cheekbones on the African’s deadpan ebony face. ‘Lori,’ he said.

Morengaru was going downriver because he had heard a lorry. It must have come from Somalia, three hundred miles to the north. In the 1970s and ’80s, Somali ivory and horn poachers had been the reason Sikuzuri Camp needed armed guards. They had wiped out Tsavo’s rhinos and had reduced its six thousand elephants to a few hundred, then had started killing tourists until Richard Leakey’s Kenyan Wildlife Service rangers started shooting them on sight.

Now Thorne and Morengaru mostly protected the resort’s guests against Tsavo’s notoriously uncivil lions. Tsavo’s males were sparsely maned and much bigger than Africa’s other lions — four feet at the shoulder, five hundred pounds in weight, a feline ‘missing link’ between Africa’s modern lions and the hulking extinct unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene. Occasionally they ate careless people, even well-heeled wazungu on photo safari.

‘Na piga minge sana,’ said Morengaru.

He had heard the sound of many ‘blows’ — which Thorne knew meant in context the pounding of automatic rifles.

‘Namna mbali?’ How far away?

Morengaru held up five fingers: five kilometers. Since he could hear a car engine starting up twenty kilometers off, on a moonless night could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eyes, Morengaru’s five clicks absolutely meant five clicks.

A superb starling with a metallic-blue back and chestnut belly swooped down on green-tinged blue wings to the rim of the water pan left out for Yankee, the camp watchdog. He checked right, then left, then plunged his whole jet-crowned head underwater and shook it violently. Came up, sent spray in every direction, repeated, again, yet again, then flew off. As always, the two men watched this morning ritual with great respect.

A kilometer downriver a leopard bitched about his empty gut with a frustrated, rasping, two-note cry. Morengaru said with a sly look and in passable English, ‘Since we two landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’