The matrix of white lines vanished, and the poachers swarmed the carcasses like insects, then finally retreated once the harvest was complete.

“Can you find out where they went?” Becker asked.

Davis turned his attention to Becker, already a step ahead of the professional hunter. “We’re going to need another pot of coffee.”

The two men worked through the night as Davis pored through classified spy-satellite feeds, tracking the movement of the ivory from the kill site across sub-Saharan Africa. Zooming in on the photos, Davis could see images of the Boko Haram poachers returning to an encampment where the ivory was aggregated with other contraband and loaded into a pickup truck. The truck then delivered the shipment to an airfield, where Davis managed to cross-reference the plane’s transponder and track it as it flew east to a dirt landing strip in Tanzania. A US satellite that had been pushed over eastern Africa to aid with the hunt for the Lord’s Resistance Army showed a box truck waiting for the plane when it landed, as two thermal signatures stood by to receive the cargo. Tracking the truck as it made its way east beyond the vigilant eye of American spy satellites was the most challenging aspect of Davis’s hunt, but thanks to the hundreds of small commercial satellites that now photographed the entire landmass of Earth every day, he could leapfrog open-source images without ever losing sight of the Boko Haram contraband.

Less than twenty-four hours after the kill, the box truck drove down Mandela Road in Dar es Salaam and turned off at the entrance for the container port. It approached a checkpoint with an armed guard. The driver passed a thick envelope out his window, which the guard took before waving the truck through.

The truck then wended its way through the Dar es Salaam container port, stopping at the Wan Hai 212, a large, rusting container ship. The ship was already being loaded with a shipment of illegal timber and other African exports bound for Asia.

A week later, Davis was back in the conference room at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, presenting his findings to the group. The room was mostly empty as he made his case to Ron Nelson and Director Wilkes, who had requested the progress report. Time-lapse satellite imagery tracked the shipment of ivory.

“The cargo is then loaded onto container ships bound for Macau,” Davis informed them. “This is hard evidence that Boko Haram is financing its operations with illegal blood ivory. What’s more, after they transferred the ivory, we were able to track the militia members back to a compound in Northern Nigeria, which I believe is where their command element is based.”

Nelson cut him off. “Boko Haram?”

Davis volleyed back with smug confidence. “The Islamic African terror group currently holding two Nigerian politicians and twenty schoolgirls hostage.”

“We know who Boko Haram is,” Wilkes interjected somberly, still processing Davis’s findings.