Page 84 of Duty Preserved

One of the younger rangers who’d come up with us spoke in Swahili to Zayn. Zayn listened, answered briefly, and turned back to me.

“He says there are men in the settlements who have been talking about money. Easy money. He has heard it secondhand.”

I stood and took a step back from the carcass. I wasn’t a vet, but I’d spent enough time with Sarah to understand just how devastating this abhorrent waste was. My jaw ached, and I realized I’d been clenching it since I’d touched the hide.

As if she needed more loss to be sad about.

We had a large-caliber bullet wound and no casing to identify it. We had tracks heading northeast toward the settlements. We had hearsay evidence of quick money jobs popping up but no idea if they were specifically related.

We had assumptions but were lacking proof.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s track it.”

We followed the tracks northeast. Zayn led, eyes down, moving at a pace that let the tracks talk to him. The rest of us spread behind him in a loose formation, covering his flank while he tracked. The prints held for the first two kilometers, clear enough in the soft soil. The stride pattern was consistent on the return. Whoever they were, they hadn’t appeared to have been in a hurry.

Then the terrain changed. The grassland gave way to harder, well-worn paths beaten by foot traffic and livestock, and the tracks thinned. One set disappeared into a cattle trail. Another merged with a broader path worn by a hundred daily comings and goings. Within another half kilometer, we’d lost all of them.

Zayn stopped at the edge of a well-worn track that branched in three directions. He went to one knee and studied the dust for a long time before he stood.

“It’s gone,” he said. “Too many people walk here. I cannot separate them.”

I looked at the track, at the settlement boundary markers visible in the middle distance. Somewhere out there, someone had a really big gun and a horn that didn’t belong to them.

Nobody said a word for a while. Zayn stood with his thumbs hooked in his vest and his eyes on the horizon.

“This is why the program exists,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was back to looking at the track where the trail had died. “This is what we are here to stop.”

The other rangers stood around us. Baraka had his arms folded tight against his chest, his mouth a flat line. The others were still and watchful. No one was angry. I’d expected anger and there wasn’t any.

What I saw was recognition. The threat they’d grown up hearing about had reached their reserve, and they were standing on the evidence of it. Nothing about their faces said surprise. This was the thing they’d always known was coming.

“What can we actually do right now?” Andrew asked. He asked it of the group, not of me.

Zayn considered it. “Report it to KWS. Faith Njeri will need to know.”

“Tighten the patrols,” Baraka added. “More coverage on the waterholes. The northeast sector. If they came once, they know the way back.”

“What about eyes at night?” one of the younger rangers asked. “We can post on the likely routes. The water, the browse lines where the rhinos feed.”

I listened to them work through it. A month ago, I’d have had to hand them every step. Now, they were building a response on their own, and the response was sound and measured. Nobody was suggesting they saddle up and ride into the settlements looking for a fight.

“Do it,” I said. “Zayn, draw up the new rotation. Baraka, coordinate with the outposts. I want overlapping coverage on every waterhole in the northeast sector. Andrew and I will handle the KWS report and update Ethan.”

I stood at the edge of the reserve looking out across the hard-packed dirt where the trail had ended. Andrew stayed beside me.

“One kill,” he said. “One cold trail. One assumption.”

“That’s what we’ve got.”

“And no one to point to.”

I let that settle. He was right. We had a dead rhino, a heavy round, and a set of tracks that vanished into a community where a hundred people came and went every day. We had rangers who were trained and ready, and nothing to aim them at.

We’d sort the new patrol schedules and coverage rotations when we got back to camp. Every one of them was willing and able. And the best thing we could do for now was be patient.

My hands wanted something to do. I checked my rifle, checked the magazine, ran my thumb along the receiver. Habit. The kind of movement your body defaults to when there’s energy in you and nowhere for it to go. Andrew saw it and didn’t say anything, because he knew what it meant.

Somewhere behind the frustration, underneath it, there was a darker thing I couldn’t say out loud. After two stretches of problems with no enemy behind them, we finally had a person on the other end of this. Somebody who had made a choice. Somebody I could find.