Assassin ah-2 Read online

  Rhino horn had, for centuries, been much valued in Arab countries for two reasons. Ground into fine powder and stirred into the juice of the coconut, it made a most suitable aphrodisiac. Historically, it was also much prized as a material for the hilt of daggers. A dead rhino went for ten dollars on the open market in Mozambique. Snay bin Wazir could sell the ground-up horn in Yemen, for instance, for $7,000 U.S. per kilo.

  It had always been thus. Demand for the much coveted ivory was so great in ancient Arab civilizations, that by 500 B.C., the vast elephant herds in Syria had been completely eradicated. What animals the ivory merchants didn’t kill, the Romans imported by the thousands for the merry slaughter of the Circus Maximus. When the supply in the Mediterranean was exhausted, the Arab Islamic dynasties established trade relations with people south of the Sahara and, later, along the coasts of Central and West Africa.

  If there were many poachers in Mozambique when young Snay bin Wazir arrived, there were many fewer when he departed. Bin Wazir could tolerate many things, and sometimes did, but what he hated most was competition. Poachers began turning up dead shortly after his arrival. Strange fates befell them. One hanged himself by his genitals in a deserted stable and starved to death. One hurled himself into his cooking fire, another leapt into a vat of boiling pitch, and yet another impaled himself on a poison-tipped ivory tusk in the bush. Four died when their tusk truck exploded. It was all very mysterious.

  There were rumors, naturally, that this spate of bizarre suicides coincided with the arrival of bin Wazir in southwest Africa, but who left among them had the balls to point a finger at him?

  After he’d sufficiently discouraged the professional poachers, he went after any villagers still foolish enough to encroach upon his rapidly burgeoning monopoly. His solution was quite cheap and simple. He had instituted incentives, encouraging his agents to go from village to village and cut off the hands, and sometimes the arms, of all the males.

  “Shortsleeves or longsleeves?” his men would ask, brandishing their machetes, taunting the poachers they’d run down and captured out in the bundu. The answer was always the same, because ‘longsleeves’ meant you lost your hand but got to hold on to your arm.

  This method of dealing with competitors, bin Wazir assured his own growing army of poachers, would ensure fulfilling their quotas, not to mention their own life expectancies.

  It was a time following a revolution in Mozambique, when the country finally won its independence from Portugal after a bloody ten-year struggle. But the warring factions had inadvertently conspired to present bin Wazir with two great spoils of war: two revolutionary poaching ideas that, combined, would change his fortunes forever.

  The helicopter. And the land mine.

  Traditionally, African and Asian poachers brought down elephants with high-powered rifles. You’d shoot an animal, walk up to it, and hack its face off with a machete. You’d locate a herd, get within a reasonable range, and open up. You had to kill them all. No animal was allowed to escape. Even though they were useless, calves and pregnant females were slaughtered. Because of their remarkable memories, any elephant that escaped a massacre and joined another herd would infect the new herd with panic.

  The problem with elephant poaching, bin Wazir had soon discovered, was that you had to kill them one at a time.

  “Listen, Tippu Tip, carefully,” he’d said to his chief that night long ago in Maputo. “You’re going to love this idea.”

  The huge African across the table from him had skin so black it was blue, and possessed large ivory-colored teeth, which, when he smiled, looked like a row of piano keys stained red by the juice of betel nuts. The man was a fierce warrior from the village of Lichinga in the northern province of Nyassa. Besides ruling all bin Wazir’s field agents with an iron hand and a steel machete, Tippu had a great head for figures.

  The African chieftain was smiling, but not at bin Wazir. They were at a small table near the stage at the Club Xai-Xai, watching the fat strippers grind and sweat in the dense smoky light. One particularly unlovely dancer had been laboring above them for some time now. The grim town of Maputo, squatting on the bluffs overlooking the Indian Ocean, was awash with such women. Most were former sweatshop girls who’d been sitting at their benches doing piecework when they’d finally come to a great realization.

  They were sitting on gold mines.

  Tippu, staring at the gyrating woman, was gnawing at a hunk of hippo meat he’d purchased earlier in the Zambesi market. Snay tried unsuccessfully to catch his eye.

  “Are you listening or watching, Tippu?”

  “Ar watching, Bwana.”

  “Listen.”

  The great black head swiveled momentarily in Snay’s direction.

  “Ar listen,” he said.

  “Of late, I’ve been thinking about something. An idea which runs through my mind with the noblest perfection. I am not a complicated man, Tippu. I am a hungry man. A thirsty man. I thirst for blood and I hunger for gold. Always. The way a pilgrim long lost in the desert might long for water. As of now, this moment, I feel like a pilgrim who has caught a glimpse of a vast oasis, lying just there, beyond that next dune.”

  Tippu Tip tore himself away from the grunting, gyrating creature above him and turned his blood-red eyes on his employer. Tippu thought the wild-eyed Arab boy was mildly insane, at least deranged, although Tippu had never met a muzungu, a white man, who was more ferocious in getting what he wanted. If you had to work for a white man, Bwana bin Wazir was as good as it got. The Sultan, as he was now sometimes called by Tippu, made all of the African’s former Portuguese masters, many of whom he himself had killed, look like morons.

  “Ar listen, Bwana Sultan,” Tippu said loudly, and many heads swiveled in their direction. Tippu Tip’s voice had the rumble of distant thunder from a borderless land. He took a deep draught of chibuku, the local potion which passed for beer. He said, “What treasure lie in this vast oasis, Sultan?”

  “Blood, Tippu. Blood and gold.”

  “Yes, Bwana. Both good.”

  “I want to buy helicopters. Two, maybe three to start.”

  “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 Armée 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! François! 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, François, 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-Elysées!”

  “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.

  “François!” 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

  DEIRDRE SLADE GLANCED OUT HER UPSTAIRS BEDROOM window at the sound of an approaching motor. It was too foggy to see anything, even with the floodlights on the rocks and one out at the end of the dock. But she knew by the distinctive putt-putt of the motor that it was Amos McCullough’s ancient lobster boat. Nice of him to bring his granddaughter over on a pea-souper night like this. He may not have all his marbles, Deirdre thought, but by God, Amos McCullough still had his good old-fashioned Yankee manners.

  She looked at her small diamond evening watch and rushed back into her dressing room, her cheeks expelling a little puff of air. Almost seven. She was going to be late if she didn’t get off island by seven-thirty or so. Invitation had said eight sharp and it was a good twenty minutes in the Whaler over to the Dark Harbor Yacht Club docks. Night like this, with the fog really socked in, it could easily take her half an hour.

  The Old Guard still took invitations seriously up in this part of Maine. Show up a little late, or a little stewed, or, worse yet, not at all, and you are definitely going to be Topic A at the Beach Club next morning. Deirdre had, over the years, been guilty of all three transgressions.

  Thank God Amos had made sure his granddaughter Millie, the babysitter, was on time. Charlie and Laura, five and six, had had their macaroni and cheese dinner and were already bathed and in their Harry Potter jammies. She and her two children had been having a ball here on Pine Island, the three sole inhabitants of the big old house up on the rocks her parents had bought in the fifties. It was the house she’d grown up in and she adored every musty nook and cranny.

  Deirdre added a little gloss to her lipstick and stepped back to look at herself in the full-length mirror. Black Chanel dress. White pearls. Black satin Manolo Blahnik heels. Pretty good for an aging babe, she thought, fooling around with her shoulder-length blonde hair. Certainly good enough for the Maine Historical Society dinner at the Dark Harbor Yacht Club.

  She took a quick sip of the glass of grocery store Chardonnay sitting on the mirrored top of her dressing table.

  God, she hated these things. Especially when she had to go with
out her husband. Still, it was fun to bring the kids back to Maine for a couple of weeks. It was spring break at their school in Madrid. Evan was of course supposed to be here. But, at the last minute, his job had gotten in the way. He had promised to join them if he could duck out of some urgent Mideast talks in Bahrain a few days early. She wasn’t holding her breath. These were tough times for diplomats, and Evan took his job very seriously. He’d plainly been on edge on the phone tonight. Something was bothering him.

  Something was going on in sunny Madrid.

  He wouldn’t, or more than likely, couldn’t talk about it. What had he said to her when they’d said good-bye in the lounge at the Madrid Barajas airport? Keep your eyes open, darling. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better. She waited for more, but she could see in his eyes it wasn’t coming. Over the years, she’d learned not to ask. They had a good marriage. If there was something that needed saying, and it was something that could be said, it got said.

  She’d replaced the receiver and sat on her bedside, staring out into the swirling fog beyond the bedroom windows. Keep him safe, she whispered, on the off chance that there really was somebody up there listening. You keep him safe.

  “Hiya, Amos,” Deirdre said descending the stairway. All she could see at first were his yellow rubber boots and the legs of the foul-weather gear, but she’d know that stance anywhere. The wide-apart stance of an old man who’d spent years on the slippery wet deck of a wildly pitching lobster boat.

  “And, hello, Millicent,” Deirdre started to say. “It’s awfully nice of you to—”

  It wasn’t Millicent.