As Nimpini dug the hole, Cobus crossed to one of the trees at the edge of the small clearing and carved a hash mark in it with his knife. Between the km marker and the tree, he would be able to find this place again if he needed to.

An hour later, Nimpini was drenched in sweat, standing waist-deep in the grave he had dug for himself. Cobus noted that Nimpini had taken particular care with the excavation, clearing away any rocks or roots that might make eternity in this final resting place any less comfortable.

“That’s enough,” Cobus informed him.

Earlier in the evening, while Nimpini was unconscious, Cobus had traversed the road over the Massinger Dam in his pickup. The sun was low in the sky, casting a blood-orange glow on the black water. Cobus considered pulling over and tossing the large bag with Nimpini’s guns into the lake. It was a bulky cache of nearly a dozen weapons, with a combined weight of over fifty kilos. The contents had probably been responsible for the deaths of over a hundred rhinos and a handful of rangers at Kruger and the surrounding properties. No good could come of having weapons like these in the world.

Cobus also knew, however, that his actions could potentially kick off a war between the syndicate and the rangers, and in that event, he and his colleagues would need these types of untraceable high-powered weapons to do bad things to bad people. If there was one thing his military training had taught him, it was to always have a contingency plan.

Cobus kept Nimpini’s suppressed rifle aimed at his prisoner and instructed him to remove the bag of weapons from the truck. Nimpini struggled to drag the sack from the truck to the hole, where he had to get on all fours to shove the formless dead weight over the lip of the grave. It landed with a thud.

Nimpini turned and raised his hands at Cobus, his eyes filled with terror as he stared at the rifle he had sent on so many raids into Kruger.

Cobus swept the rifle to the shovel resting on the ground, where Nimpini had dropped it.

“Get to it. They’re not going to bury themselves.”

The one piece of evidence Cobus kept from his encounter with Nimpini was the kingpin’s mobile phone. Cobus had seen shocking reports by a fly-by-night Swiss environmentalist who had proved through DNA analysis that horn from Kruger’s rhinos often appeared in Asian markets within five days of the kill. This indicated that there was a streamlined, highly efficient distribution channel that flowed north.

Cobus hoped the call log on Nimpini’s phone would reveal his Asian buyer, but all he had found were dozens of numbers in both South Africa and Mozambique, with no associated names. Cobus knew that if anyone could help him interpret the data he had seized, it was Jan Snyman.