Bear Grylls - Burning Angels

The elephants possessed little of their poise or magical grace any more. Compared to the magisterial animals that he and Narov had encountered deep within Burning Angels cave, these had been rendered into unmoving bundles of lifeless meat.

‘As you can see, they captured and tethered a baby elephant,’ Konig announced, his voice tight with emotion. ‘They used that to lure the parents in. Both the bull and the mother have been shot and butchered. Tusks gone.

‘I know many of the animals here by name,’ he continued. ‘The big bull looks like Kubwa-Kubwa; that’s Swahili for “Big-Big”. Most elephants don’t live past seventy years of age. Kubwa-Kubwa was eighty-one years old. He was the elder of the herd, and one of the oldest in the reserve.

‘The baby is alive, but it’ll be badly traumatised. If we can get to it and calm it down, it may live. If we’re lucky, the other matriarchs should take it under their wing.’

Konig sounded remarkably calm. But as Jaeger well knew, dealing with such pressure and trauma day after day, took its toll.

‘Okay, now for your surprise,’ Konig announced grimly. ‘You said you wanted to see this… I’m taking you down. A few minutes on the ground to witness the horror close up. The guards will escort you.’

Almost instantly Jaeger felt the HIP start to lose what little altitude it had. As it flared out, the rear end dropping towards a narrow clearing, the loadie hung out of the doorway, checking that the rotor blades and tail were clear of the acacia trees.

There was a jolt as the wheels made contact with the hot African earth, and the loadie gave the thumbs up.

‘We’re good!’ he yelled. ‘De-bus!’

Jaeger and Narov leapt from the doorway. Bent double and heads bowed they scuttled off to one side until they were clear of the rotors, which were whipping up a storm of dirt and blasted vegetation. They went down on one knee, pistol in hand, just in case there were any poachers remaining in the area. The two game guards rushed over to join them. One gave a thumbs up to the cockpit, Konig flashed it back, and an instant later the HIP rose vertically and was gone.

The seconds ticked by.

The juddering beat of the rotors faded.

Shortly the aircraft was no longer audible at all.

Hurriedly the game guards explained that Konig was returning to Katavi to fetch a harness. If they could get the baby elephant darted and put to sleep, they could sling it beneath the HIP and fly it back to the reserve. There, they’d hand-rear the animal for as long as it took to get it over the trauma, at which stage it could be reunited with its herd.

Jaeger could see the sense in this, but he didn’t exactly relish their present situation: surrounded by the carcasses of recently butchered elephants, and armed with only a pair of pistols between them. The game guards seemed calm, but he doubted how skilled they’d be if it all went south.

He rose to his feet and glanced at Narov.

As they made their way toward the scene of unspeakable carnage, he could see the rage burning in her eyes.

As carefully as they could, they approached the trembling, traumatised form of the baby elephant. It was lying on its side now, seemingly too exhausted to even stand. The ground betrayed the signs of its recent struggles: the rope tethering it to the tree had cut deep into its leg, as it had fought to get free.

Narov knelt over the poor thing. She lowered her head, whispering soft words of reassurance into its ear. Its small – human-sized – eyes rolled in fear, but eventually her voice seemed to calm it. She stayed close to the animal for what seemed like an age.

Finally she turned. There were tears in her eyes. ‘We’re going after them. Those who did this.’

Jaeger shook his head. ‘Come on… The two of us armed with pistols. That’s not brave: it’s foolish.’

Narov got to her feet. She fixed Jaeger with a tortured look. ‘Then I’ll go alone.’

‘But what about…’ Jaeger gestured at the baby elephant. ‘It needs protection. Safeguarding.’

Narov jabbed a finger in the direction of the guards. ‘What about them? They are better armed than we are.’ She glanced west, in the direction the poachers had taken. ‘Unless someone goes after them, this will continue until the last animal is killed.’ Her expression was one of cold and determined fury. ‘We need to hit them hard, mercilessly, and with the same kind of savagery as they used here.’

‘Irina, I hear you. But let’s at least work out how best to do this. Konig’s twenty minutes out. They had spare AKs stashed in the HIP. At the very least let’s get ourselves properly armed. Plus the chopper’s stuffed full of supplies: water, food. Without that, we’re finished before we’ve even begun.’

Narov stared. She didn’t speak, but he could tell that she was wavering.

Jaeger checked his watch. ‘It’s 1300 hours. We can be on our way by 1330. The poachers will have a two-hour start on us. If we move fast, we can do this; we can catch them.’

She had to accept that his was the voice of reason.

Jaeger decided to go check out the corpses. He didn’t know quite what he expected to find, but he went anyway. He tried to act dispassionately: to inspect the kill scene like a soldier. But still he found his emotions running away with him.

This had been no accurate, professional hit. Jaeger figured the elephants had been charging to protect their young, and the poachers must have panicked. They’d peppered the once-mighty beasts indiscriminately, using assault rifles and machine guns to take them down.

One thing was for sure: the animals would have had no quick and painless death. They’d have sensed danger; possibly even known they were being lured to their doom. But they came anyway, to safeguard their family, charging to the defence of their offspring.

With Luke missing three long years, Jaeger couldn’t help but relate. He wrestled with unexpected emotions and blinked back the tears.

Jaeger turned to leave, but something made him stop. He figured he’d seen movement. He checked again, dreading what he might find. Sure enough – unbelievably – one of the mighty animals was still breathing.

The realisation was like a punch to the guts. The poachers had gunned the bull elephant down, hacked off its tusks and left it in a pool of its own blood. Riddled with bullets, it was dying a slow and agonising death under the burning African sun.

Jaeger felt rage burning through him. The once-mighty animal was well beyond any hope of saving.

Though he was sickened, he knew what he had to do.

He turned aside and made his way to one of the guards, from whom he borrowed an AK47. Then, with hands shaking with anger and emotion, he levelled the weapon at the magnificent animal’s head. For just an instant he thought the bull opened his eyes .

With tears blurring his vision, Jaeger fired, and the stricken animal breathed its last.

In a daze, Jaeger went back to rejoin Narov. She was still comforting the baby elephant, though he could tell by her pained look that she knew what he had been forced to do. For both of them this was personal now.

He crouched beside her. ‘You’re right. We do have to go after them. Just as soon as we’ve grabbed some supplies off the HIP, let’s get moving.’

Minutes later, the noise of rotor blades cut through the hot air. Konig was ahead of schedule. He brought the HIP down into the clearing, the rotors throwing up a choking cloud of dust and debris. The bulbous wheels hit the dirt, and Konig began to power down the turbines. Jaeger was about to rush forward to help unload when his heart skipped a beat.

He’d spotted a flash of movement way off in the bush; the tell-tale glint of sunlight on metal. He saw a figure rise from the undergrowth, hefting a rocket-launcher on his shoulder. He was a good three hundred yards away, so there was sod-all that Jaeger could do with a pistol.