Page 23 of Duty Preserved

“True.” Andrew was smiling now, the way he did when he’d decided something was going to be fun. “So let us show you who we are. Make it a bet.”

“What kind of bet?” Baraka said.

“You think you’re already good at guarding this place,” Andrew said. “So let’s find out. Before the sun’s down tonight, the three of us get into the middle of this camp and leave our mark on it, and not one of you sees us do it. You’ll know we’re out there. You’ll be watching for us the whole time.” He spread his hands. “A poacher won’t give you that much warning. If we can still walk in on you, that’s your answer. It means there are things we can teach you.”

Someone laughed. Baraka came close to it himself. “You,” he said. “The three of you. Against all of us.”

“Against all twelve. You choose where you stand. You choose your watch. Your ground, your rules.” Andrew shrugged. “You know this place, and we just got here. Should be easy for you.”

“And when we win?” Baraka said.

“If you win, we leave.” Andrew shrugged. “We pack up and go, and you run this place your way.” He smiled. “But if we win, you’re ours. You train the way we say, as hard as we say, and we won’t hear a word about it. Deal?”

Baraka looked at the others. Whatever he read there made up his mind for him.

“Deal,” he said.

We went out with the afternoon still ahead of us. This kind of thing took daylight and time—hours to move a hundred yards, using the low sun and the long shadows and the patience most people didn’t have.

We walked out past the last building and into the tall grass, in plain sight of every ranger who cared to watch us go. Once the land had folded the camp out of view behind us, we stopped and got to work. We worked charcoal and mud across our faces, grass and cloth into our kit, breaking up the outline and every hard edge a person’s eye knows to look for, until there was nothing left of us that read as men.

Moving through open country like that was mostly a matter of knowing when not to move. You went so slowly that a man looking right at you would swear you were part of the ground, a few inches at a time, freezing the instant anyone turned your way.

You kept an eye on the animals, because they read you long before people did. A stand of impala grazing easy out in the open meant nothing had spooked them, which meant the three of us working in through the grass still weren’t reading as a threat.

We came in through the tall grass on the west side, low and agonizingly slow. Somewhere in the first hour Cole broke off to loop wide and set up our distraction, and Andrew and I kept on for the middle.

Getting flat forty yards out, chin in the dirt, had cost me close to five hours. I’d low-crawled several hundred yards of brush to get there, a few inches at a time, since the afternoon was still high. From there, I watched them defend their camp.

They did it the way I’d have bet against my own paycheck they would. They’d stopped taking it seriously somewhere in the last few hours, too sure of themselves to believe anyone could cross their own ground without their knowing it. They bunched at the gap between the vehicle bay and the leaning water tank, three of them together with their rifles slung, joking, watching the track where a vehicle might come and nothing else. Two more wandered over to join the talk. They glanced at the horizon now and then, more for show than for real, and not one of them thought to check the ground twenty yards off their flank, where I lay, gaining a few feet each time they turned their heads.

It took the better part of an hour to cross ground a lethargic man could have walked in ninety seconds.

By the time the light started to fail, Andrew and I were flat in the tall grass at the edge of camp, close enough to the heart of it to hear them talk. All we had to do now was wait for Cole’s distraction, whatever he’d decided that would be.

We didn’t have to wait long.

Baraka came ambling out toward the edge of camp on his own, working at his belt, in no hurry, certain as anything that this ground was his. Andrew’s voice was the barest breath against my ear.

“How about we make an example of him?”

So we let him come. He stopped a few feet from where Andrew and I lay, close enough that I could have counted the laces on his boots, and never once thought to look down. He just stood there in the last of the light and took a leak into the grass, the loudest man in camp gone quiet and careless all at once.

That was when Cole made his entrance.

He’d gone with the bull-in-a-china-shop approach. A great crashing racket tore out of the brush on the far side of camp, branches breaking, the sound of somebody lumbering through cover in a hurry. To twelve kids who’d spent the whole afternoon braced for the Americans to come, there was only one thing it could be, and it was on the far side of camp entirely.

Baraka’s head came up. He didn’t run at it the way the others did, being otherwise occupied, but he had plenty to say, waving an arm back over his shoulder and shouting the whole pack off to run down the Americans who’d finally, obligingly, blundered in on the wrong side of camp.

They went.

“Wait.” The voice was young and thin, and it came from back by the water tank, from the boy who hadn’t joined the rush. “Shouldn’t some of us stay here?”

“I’ll be right here.” Baraka never turned around, still glancing back over his shoulder toward the noise and the men he’d sent after it. “Go get them, Jomo.”

So he was looking exactly the wrong way, and still holding himself, when Andrew and I came up out of the grass and took him down before he could make a sound.

Andrew had an arm around his neck and a hand clamped over his mouth before Baraka understood he’d been taken, and I threw myself over the both of them to keep us all hidden in the grass. He thrashed once and worked out that the thrashing bought him nothing.