Cobus remembered what his boss, a British former SAS officer, had told him in Iraq about dealing with people in an emotional state: calm is contagious. Cobus did his best to keep his words measured. “He reached for a gun. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Simon’s father looked up from his hands, eyes wet and red. “Who shot him? Was it you?”

Calm is contagious. “Her name was Basani,” Cobus replied in a measured tone.

“She was killed in the firefight,” Lawrence added.

The news of the female ranger’s death silenced the induna.

Cobus continued. “As long as your sons keep bringing guns over the border to hunt rhino, we will keep killing them until all your sons are dead.”

The men were taken aback by Cobus’s blunt ultimatum. He softened, addressing the father of the deceased.

“This poaching war is a tragedy for both sides. I am truly sorry for your loss.”

“What do you want, mlungu?” Simon’s father bitterly spat through his tears.

“Please, just tell me who supplies the guns. No more of your boys have to die. Let us end this war.”

Cobus knew it was a long shot asking them to rat out one of their own, especially after he and his team had just slaughtered three of their tribe on the other side of the border. He hoped their love of family superseded their tribal loyalty.

The induna turned to each other, searching their souls. Forced to choose a side.

Cobus drove straight from the meeting with the elders to ranger headquarters at Kruger. The induna had weighed their tribal loyalties against the lives of their children and had opted for protecting the next generation over the criminals in their midst. For as long as Cobus had been at Kruger, he had gone to war with men from Mozambique whose guns could be traced back to thefts in South Africa (where lax firearm laws meant that the country of fifty million people had a staggering six million guns). Cobus suspected that someone was stealing the guns, then supplying them to the desperate and willing who would try their luck in the Big Smoke. But the source of the guns had never been uncovered. Now Cobus had a name.

“The poachers are supplied their guns by a syndicate leader named Nimpini. The Hawks have a warrant out for his arrest for a farmhouse murder three years ago.”

The Hawks were an elite police unit in South Africa who were known for taking scalps. Nimpini had been a thorn in their side ever since he raped and murdered the farmer’s wife before stealing the guns from their home and ghosting back across the Mozambique border. The farmer’s missing hunting rifle, which he had used for hunting bushpigs on his property, was subsequently used to kill five rhinos and a ranger.

The man Cobus was so urgently pleading his case to was Willem van Wyck, the managing ranger at Kruger, who oversaw Cobus’s region. He sat heavily behind his desk, absorbing Cobus’s findings. Willem had a thin mustache and close-cropped silver hair. The walls in his office at park headquarters were papered with maps of the park, dotted with colored pushpins denoting the sites where poachers had slaughtered the animals under his care.