Glass Tiger Read Online Free Page B

rapidly.
    Just over three months ago, Thorne had laid his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s back. He had considered the ugly, endearing, grumpy, near-sighted beast a friend: now he was dead and left to rot, slaughtered for hacked-off horns that would be carved into status-symbol handles for the decorative daggers of petro-rich Yemeni Arab youngbloods. Left-over bits would be ground into aphrodisiac powder for Asians who didn’t trust Viagra.
    Just a bonus for the shifta. In 1989, the Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species had imposed a worldwide ban on the sale of elephant tusks. But now Zimbabwe and Botswana, overpopulated with elephant, were lobbying to lift the ban, again sparking demand for ivory in Japan and China.
    So the shifta were after the last two of the Galana’s old bull elephants who carried 175 kilos of ivory that would sell for $6,000 a kilo. The tusks would be worth a million dollars to a black market buyer: the raiders had not come hunting on spec.
    ‘Not today, you fuckers,’ Thorne whispered to himself.
    Nobody had been left to guard the lorry. Keys in the ignition. Thorne dropped them into his pocket. Morengaru moved slowly forward, bent at the waist. He put gentle fingertips into several shallow, barely-discernable depressions in the dust. Came erect displaying three splayed fingers.
    ‘Tatu.’
    Three shifta. Catch the bastards, hand them over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, rough fuckers who wouldwork them over until they gave up their buyer. A very good day’s work indeed.
    Thorne swung an arm, breathed, ‘Sisi endelea. Upesi.’
    Let us go quickly. They trotted along the edge of the savanna for silent movement, detouring through the salt-brush only to avoid the scavengers squabbling over Bwana Kifaru.
    It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Snapping jackals, snarling spotted hyenas, spindly-legged marabout storks with bald heads already red from being thrust into the rhino’s guts. Leaping, yelling, fighting. Overhead circled a pair of tawny, muscular bataleur eagles, disdainful of the scene below.
    A kilometer on, they passed a score of elephant skulls as big as boulders, left by the poachers of fifteen years ago. Every gaping eyesocket held a nest of spur-winged plovers.
    Half a click, and they came upon still slightly-steaming cannonball-size piles of fresh elephant dung. Getting close. A Hemprich’s hornbill foraging the strawy brown mounds for seeds and grasses flapped away, indignantly clacking his dusky red downturned beak. Later his own droppings would spread the seeds over the savanna to complete the cycle of death and rebirth.
    Silent as ghosts, the two men moved downriver and upwind. Stopped. Ten yards ahead, facing away from them, were the shifta, three scruffy men in kepis and cast-off military uniforms with sandals made of truck tires.
    Thirty yards further on in a small clearing were the two old bull elephants. The larger was thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighed seven tons. Thorne had named him Tantor after Tarzan’s elephant friend. Tantor had just curled his sinuous trunk around a bunch of browse like a cook’s hand around a pound of uncooked spaghetti, was shoving it into his curiously delicatemouth and chewing, rumbling with pleasure. His massive forehead was braced against a doum palm to temporarily ease the weight of ten-foot tusks that almost touched the ground.
    The younger bull, Dumbo, with only slightly smaller ivory, was shielded by Tantor’s bulk. The shifta were waiting until they could kill both animals with one sustained magazine-emptying burst of rifle fire. If only wounded, they would disappear into the saltbrush in seconds, taking their ivory with them.
    A drab little bulbul, unconcerned with the drama below, sang its beguiling song in the foliage overhead. Thorne slid to his right, knowing Morengaru would go left. No twig crackled underfoot, no branch rustled.
    The man in front of Thorne raised his AK 47 to shoot Tantor in the spine.