I then traveled to Hong Kong and Macau, where I met with officers from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau and the Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau to learn how the cartels traffic animals and how they use casinos to launder the money from those transactions.

The final leg of the trip took me to South Africa and Mozambique, where I spent a week living out of a pickup truck with Damien Mander, founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, after whom my son is named. Damien introduced me to rangers in Kruger Park and took me to a court trial for a corrupt ranger who was colluding with poachers. We joined rangers as they intercepted a group of three teenage poachers with a massive suppressed rifle and an ax, who were searching for a rhino. We then headed to private hunting reserves catering to Russian and American billionaires, and finally, deep into the poaching towns of Mozambique, where kingpins operate with impunity.

Though I admittedly knew little about the world of animal trafficking when I began this project, I ended up having what amounted to a front-row seat for the Sixth Extinction. My goal with this novel is to expose as many people as possible to this issue. To that end, all my income from this book will be donated to nonprofit organizations dedicated to protecting wildlife.

Will Staples
Los Angeles, 2021

CHAPTER 1
COBUS

kruger national park, south africa

Cobus Venter knelt before the six-foot-long mound of freshly turned dirt. In his hand was a flower. The thirty-five-year-old South African planted the stem, gingerly forming a small pile of soil to support it. The sun had burned his tattooed arms the color of the earth and left his face as cracked as the mud around a drying water hole. Though Cobus hadn’t touched a barbell in years, he still carried the musculature of a silverback under his olive-drab uniform.

The priest had just finished saying some words, but Cobus heard only the bleak narrative running circles in his mind, digging a deeper and deeper rut with each revolution. He had thought he left the war, but war had followed him. He didn’t regret the things he had done—he could justify his every action—but he had nonetheless been infected by a darkness. He wondered whether he was the host who had brought the disease here and infected the land and people around him. Soon, they would all be dead, man and beast alike.

Other rangers stepped forward to lay their flowers on the grave, hoping this small act of beauty might somehow offset the ugliness of their friend’s murder.

Kruger was a wilderness of souls where one could easily get lost. It was a place of absolute truth and a place of absolute lies. A place of godliness and godlessness.

Every year nearly two million tourists came to Kruger to experience the “Africa” they had watched in nature documentaries and explored in the glossy pages of National Geographic magazines. If Walt Disney had created Africa-Land, it would be Kruger. Its golden plains were dotted with mushroom-shaped acacia trees and boulder piles where magnificent predators lazed between meals and where elephants and rhinos lumbered about in plain view with their offspring in tow. Many visitors to Kruger left with a false sense that the Edenic landscape was Africa’s rule, not the exception. But beyond the electrified gates wreathed with concertina wire was a different Africa—an undefended land where man’s insatiable appetites had stripped away everything that could be eaten or burned, reducing the land to red dust. And this ever-growing void was metastasizing throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America.