Klay wiped a damp forearm over his muddy face. Sweat burned his eyes. It was a poacher’s moon, nearly as full and bright as daylight. Tracking is easiest at dawn and dusk, when angled sunlight casts a shadow in each footprint, enabling even an average tracker like Klay to read the ground. In the moon’s bright light animals and men stood out, but the earth for Klay was illegible.

Finally, he reached the edge of the plateau where the elephant was supposed to be. He wiped his eyes with a dry corner of his shirttail and raised his binoculars. The clearing was empty. Klay grabbed the engineer’s phone from him. According to the TIPP app, the biggest elephant in Africa was standing right in front of them.

Bernard appeared at Klay’s side. He put a finger to his lips. “No elephant,” he mouthed, gesturing to indicate a trunk. He scissored his fingers to indicate a man walking, and pointed. Klay understood: someone was on the plateau with them.

Klay heard the crack of a rifle shot. Bernard’s eyelids fluttered. The Samburu ranger seemed surprised, as if someone familiar had called out his name. Klay dove forward, tackling Bernard to the ground. He didn’t hear the second shot. Klay’s senses inverted. Sound turned to light. Light became touch. He tasted the bullet’s impact, he would later recall. And then he was falling.

HOMECOMING

Dulles, Virginia, and Washington, DC

Klay awoke as the plane dipped toward Dulles International Airport and the green fields of northern Virginia came into view. It was late morning. He adjusted his arm uncomfortably. The bullet had passed through his right shoulder below the clavicle. He’d suffered bruised ribs and a brain-numbing concussion in the long fall. The doctors in Nairobi said he would be fine.

Bernard was dead.

The politician was dead, too, and the elephant had been nowhere near their location.

“Are you finished, sir?” a flight attendant asked, and he realized she’d already asked him once.

He looked down at the tiny Chivas bottles littering his tray. “I’m finished,” he replied.

An anti-poaching operation gone bad, Kenya’s Daily Nation had speculated. Land dispute, ran a competing theory.

Klay knew differently. He had the Botha file. Ras Leopold Botha, age forty-nine. He was born in Musina, South Africa. Father a local police officer, mother a housewife. Botha himself had been a cop once, supplementing his policeman’s salary running stolen cars across the border, shipping them on to Mozambique. Working the syndicate with his brother, Dirk. The two men buying up property, opening a professional hunting company, Botha Brothers Safaris. Ras was the dominant brother, the imaginative one.