Cover

Dedication

For my wife, Jennifer

Epigraph

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.

—John Stuart Mill

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

FALLEN GUARDIAN

Samburu County, Kenya

Captain Bernard Lolosoli looked down at the American journalist. “You were right.”

Tom Klay, sitting with his back against the tire of a Land Rover, looked up from his notebook. Klay wore a faded safari shirt, brown field pants, and hiking boots. A droplet of sweat rolled off his chin and struck the page at the exact spot where he’d just finished a line, destroying the word and his thought along with it. “It happens,” he replied.

“Are you ready?” Bernard asked.

Klay closed his notebook and dropped it into his shirt pocket. “All packed.”

“Good.” The ranger extended his hand. Klay took it and got to his feet. “Three men entered our east gate two days ago. We located their vehicle this morning. Their plates are stolen, and there is no exit record. Their passports were fakes.”

“Passports,” Klay said. “Not locals then.”

“Ugandans. On holiday, they said.”

Klay caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A small male dog emerged from behind the Green Guardians’ field station, carrying a feathered chicken wing in its mouth. The dog was scarred head to tail, with that compact build common to developing-world canines. “You get many of those?” he asked.

Bernard followed Klay’s gaze. “Dogs? Or chickens?”

“Ugandans.”

“We do. It was rail workers. Now it’s tourists.” Bernard smiled. “Thanks to your article, everyone wants to see our famous elephant.”

Klay watched the dog. Every few steps it glanced over its shoulder toward the guardhouse, checking to see if anything was following it. The dog set the chicken wing down in the dirt. It looked back again, expectant. There wasn’t much to see. The concrete field station and next to it the Guardians’ makeshift field armory, a steel shipping container under a thatched roof. Between the two structures, the dirt was stained black with motor oil.

The little dog yipped, and Klay heard agitated scrabbling on hard ground as a large dog emerged at speed from behind the building and rocketed toward the mutt. The bigger dog was a Belgian Malinois, a shepherd breed with relentless drive, making it a favorite among law enforcement. As the Malinois bore down, the smaller dog snatched up its chicken wing and sprinted across the clearing. It hopped onto an overturned bucket and into the crotch of a large acacia tree.