That night, Zoeller had appeared dressed for dinner as if nothing had happened. He had sustained six broken ribs, a fractured skull, and a crushed spleen. But that would not be discovered until a week later. The only sign that anything out of the ordinary had occurred was that Zoeller asked Krieger if he and the boys wouldn’t mind a quiet dinner together, apart from the famous actor and the other guests. While the action hero toasted his conquest of a raging bull elephant, Zoeller had eaten his braised kudu and watercress salad, finished his Tusker, and had a bite of honeyed pie. Afterwards, as the hunter retired to his tent, Krieger overheard him talking to himself, quietly repeating the same line over and over. “I always wondered would I stand,” he said. “I always wondered.”

Krieger never watched the action hero’s films again.

•   •   •

Hunting was not for everyone, and that applied not only to Hollywood actors. Krieger had seen an Iraq veteran with two dozen confirmed combat kills get the shakes so bad he couldn’t pull the trigger on a zebra. But for Krieger, hunting was a kind of walking meditation. His first wife used to make fun of him for his after-deal hunting trips. She would leave the house while he packed his gear, jealous that he needed a blood sport to satisfy him, angry that hunting filled a void she couldn’t.

How to explain it? Every significant business deal seemed to move a pendulum inside him, his most sophisticated deals ratcheting that pendulum so far in one direction that instead of feeling satisfied, he felt supremely out of balance. Hunting was his very soul demanding something primal, a blood conquest to match his intellectual victory.

He’d shared his pendulum theory with China’s president during their hunting trip together on the Kimber. Ho’s broad, lineless face had broken into a knowing smile. “Wu ji bi fan.” He’d nodded, stepping over a fallen log. “When things reach an extreme, they must move in their opposite direction.” Ho patted Krieger’s shoulder. “Yin and yang, Terry. We need a calm to have the storm.”

The Seventh Fleet was in Krieger’s pocket now—the entire Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy. He hadn’t closed the deal yet, but his tactical success over Admiral Tighe had ratcheted the pendulum inside of him to a point that demanded release.

Blaze held up a vial of tranquilizer. She was filming the hunt for her college applications. “I need to adjust this,” she said into her iPhone. “Because he’s way above average male weight.”