Mike Maden - Blue Warrior

So much blood.

Hawkins worried that if he left the scene, the rangers might have bolted, too. Whoever had done this could still be around, and it was only an hour until sunset. But the rangers’ dignity, such as it was in their disheveled uniforms and battered assault rifles, wouldn’t allow them to leave if the American had the balls to stand fast. Especially an African-American like him.

Pearce marched up to Hawkins.

“Troy. I’m so sorry.” Hawkins shouted above the helicopter turbine still winding down. He extended his hand.

Pearce stared at Hawkins’s hand for a moment, trying to clear away his rage, then reluctantly took it. Hawkins wasn’t to blame, that was for damn certain. Pearce leaned in close so he didn’t have to shout. “Thanks for holding down the fort, Jack.” Hawkins nodded. Pearce and Hawkins briefly met years before in D.C. When Pearce and Johnny had checked into the embassy a few days before, Hawkins was there to brief them over rum and Cokes.

“Dignam gave you all of the particulars. There’s not much more to add, but I wanted you to be able to get a look-see before this place got picked clean by the locals.” Hawkins defined “locals” by nodding at the park rangers nervously fingering their rifles.

“Show me what you’ve found,” Pearce said.

Dignam jogged back to the chopper while Hawkins walked Pearce to the back of the Land Rover. The windows were busted out from the intense heat that had melted away all of the plastics, tires, and paint. “Bodies?” Pearce asked.

“Not here.”

Pearce forced open the back door of the utility wagon, the spare tire melted off of the rim. The hinges creaked with stiff resistance as if rusted shut. Clearly, everything inside was destroyed.

“Gear’s missing,” Pearce said.

“Burned up?”

“No. The bays are empty.” Pearce pulled out his smartphone, pulled up a locator app. No GPS signal from the Silent Falcon. “Shit.”

“You lose any classified stuff?”

“Not exactly. But it’s not the kind of equipment you want to hand over to your worst enemies, either.”

Pearce glanced back over at the park rangers. “What do you think?” Park rangers all over Africa had a mixed reputation, especially the armed ones.

“No. Bishop and I were here first, before those boys showed up. He’s an ex-pat and a drinking buddy. He was flying the park when he saw the bodies and the busted-up Rover. Figured they might be Americans or Europeans, called it in to me, then flew me out here. I recognized Johnny from our meet and greet the other day. Thought I’d better find you.”

“Where is he?”

Hawkins knew Troy’s record. A real tough customer. Figured Pearce could handle seeing his friend.

Doubted he’d seen worse, though.

“Follow me.”

They trudged over to the stand of acacia trees. The park rangers spread out a little further to give Pearce and Hawkins privacy. With the helicopter rotor finally shut down, the air filled up again with the sickly stench of death.

Johnny was just inside the tree line, lying in the dirt in a crumpled heap, like a bag of bloody laundry that had fallen off the back of a speeding truck.

“Jesus.”

Pearce kneeled down. Johnny’s jaw had been sheered away by some kind of jagged blade. The rest of Johnny looked worse. He’d been hacked viciously by dozens of blows. Machetes, judging by the width of the cuts. A chunk of scalp was missing. So was the left cheek, now covered in clotted, black blood. They even cut off his nose all the way down to the bone, leaving a gaping hole. The cut was too neat, though. That was done with a sharper, smaller blade. A message? Heavy black flies buzzed around Johnny’s face, darting in and out of the gaping sinus cavity. Pearce batted them away.

“Fucking savages,” Hawkins said. He wasn’t thinking about race, obviously. But if the ambassador had heard him say that, she would’ve written him up on the spot.

The underside of Johnny’s broken forearms were shredded with blade cuts, too. “He tried to put up a fight,” Pearce said. “That must have freaked them out. Most people drop at the first hit.”

“So they frenzied.”

“Maybe.” Pearce knelt closer. Saw something. Unbuttoned Johnny’s shirt. “Look at that wound in his chest.”

“What about it?”

“Knife wound.”

“I don’t understand.”

“One knife wound, the rest machete strikes.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” Pearce stood. “Where’s the girl?”

“Not far. She have a name?”

“Gallez. Sandra. World Wildlife Alliance. A Belgian national.”

“I’ll have Dignam call that in to the their embassy. That’s the same Alliance project you told me about, right? It’s why you guys were here?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing else? I mean, off the books?”

“No. Straight up.”

“I’ve heard… rumors.” Hawkins was sympathetic, but he had a job to do, too.

Pearce glared at him. “I’m giving you the straight dope.”

“Why no security? This is Indian country out here.”

“Johnny was the security. He was a good gunfighter.”

So are you, Hawkins wanted to say but didn’t. “And you went fishing?”

“Johnny wanted to make his play on the girl. Didn’t need a third wheel to cramp his style. You know how it is.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just surprised anyone got the drop on him. This is all close in. No bullet casings? Nine mil?” Pearce was thinking about Johnny’s Glock.

“Not around here.”

“The girl?”

Hawkins pointed up ahead. “Over there.” He led Pearce twenty feet farther in and pointed to a female form splayed under a camouflaged rain poncho borrowed from one of the park rangers. Pearce pulled back the poncho. She was stripped naked except for the pink sock still on her left foot. She must’ve fought, too. Her fair skin was tattooed with welts, scratches, bite marks. Her broken jaw was purpled and swollen. The perineum was a red ruin, the blood turning to a sticky black in the heat.

“Extensive bruising around her neck. No bullet wounds. I’m no CSI, but I’d say they’d strangled her to death,” Hawkins said. “If she was lucky.”

Pearce knelt down beside her. Closed the lifeless green eyes still staring into the faces that had killed her.

“She was a smart girl. Johnny was sweet on her.”

Dignam approached cautiously with a couple of neatly folded body bags.

“You need to see anything else?” Hawkins asked Pearce.

Pearce shook his head.

Hawkins nodded at Dignam, who signaled a couple of park rangers for help.

“What’s that god-awful smell?” Pearce asked. But he knew.

“You haven’t seen the worst of it,” Hawkins said. “At least in terms of pure savagery.”

Hawkins led the way past the outer ring of trees and into a tree-canopied clearing. The air roared with thousands of buzzing flies.

Pearce stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh my God.”

A dozen adult rhinos lay on the ground, all dead. Two calves, too. All of them had had their horns hacked off, leaving gaping wounds of exposed bone and broken flesh. Each lay in a puddle of its own blood.

“Poachers aren’t exactly surgeons, are they?” Hawkins pointed at the massive spill of intestines in the grass around one of the big females. “Some of these weren’t even dead when they butchered them.”

Pearce spat in the grass. “All of this because some old Asian dirt bags can’t get a hard-on.”

“Your friends must have stumbled upon the slaughter in progress. The butchers didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind.”

A park ranger screamed. Pearce and Hawkins whipped around as a rhino crashed out of the tree line, eyes crazed, bellowing. Blood soaked its snout, a gaping hole where the horn used to be. It loped toward the ranger, three thousand pounds of deadweight lunging on three wobbly legs, the fourth leg shot to hell.