Page 90 of Duty Preserved

“Here.”

One by one, down the line. Every name answered. Every man present. Nobody hit.

We were fucking lucky.

I got to my feet. The rangers stood up around me, some of them slowly, like their bodies didn’t trust the ground was safe to leave yet.

Baraka was the first one to speak. “Are we going to pursue them?”

His voice was just a little less certain than it had been in the past, but a whole lot angrier. Being shot at had changed the equation.

“They’re on foot,” Baraka said. “We know this ground better than they do.”

Three of the other rangers were already checking their weapons, their bodies angled in the direction the crew had fled. Zayn stood with his rifle across his chest, his eyes on me. Waiting.

“No.”

Baraka took a step forward. “They just shot at us. These are the men who’ve been killing rhino, and they just⁠—”

“I hear you. I was lying in the same dirt you were.” I kept my voice level. “These are much more dangerous men than some lads hunting for sport. They have firepower, and they are not afraid to use it on us. Now they have had time to retreat and potentially set up an ambush for anyone who follows. That’s how someone in this group goes home in a bag.”

The anger in Baraka’s face didn’t go away.

“Listen to me. All of you.” I waited until I had every set of eyes. “We know significantly more about these guys than when we started. We take all of that information, and we figure out who these people are. We get the support we need. And then we come back and do this right. Not scrambling in the dark hoping we find them before they find us.”

Nobody spoke. The anger was still there. But I could also tell they were coming down from the shock of it.

“You all did something tonight, no matter the outcome,” I said. “That rhino is alive. She’s out there right now because you were here. Because you showed up and you held the line. That animal would be dead on the ground with her horn cut off if you hadn’t been here.”

Baraka clenched his teeth in deep thought. He looked at the ground, then back at me. He didn’t like it. But he heard it.

What I didn’t say was the rest of it. That I’d told them they could shoot if they had a clear shot, and not one of them had even tried. Not because they were being careful. Because they couldn’t have pulled a trigger if they’d wanted to. That the gap between where they were tonight and where they needed to be was the difference between lying flat because you’re told to and lying flat because you can’t move. I filed that away and kept my mouth shut, because pointing it out thirty minutes after it happened didn’t build a man up. It tore him down.

It cost me to make that call. Every instinct I had wanted to push into the dark after the poachers. Patience over pursuit. I kept telling myself that, and it kept not feeling true.

Andrew ended the argument. He stood up and walked toward the ground where the crew had been working. He didn’t say a word. He just headed into the clearing deserted by the poaching crew.

The rangers watched him go. Then Zayn followed. Then Baraka. Then the rest.

We spread out across the area where the spotlight had been, searching the trampled grass with our own lights. Boot prints and churned soil everywhere, along with spent brass casings scattered across the ground. I had a couple of the rangers collect as many as they could find. A quick look at the headstamps would tell us how many different weapons platforms these guys had access to.

“Boss.”

Jomo was crouched in the grass ten meters from where the crew had been set up. He held something up. A small rectangle catching the light.

I crossed to him and took it from his hand. It was a phone. It had a cracked case, and the screen was smeared with dirt, probably from where it was dropped and trampled in their retreat. I turned it over in my fingers and pressed the power button. The screen lit up. The battery was at eleven percent.

Contacts. Messages. Call logs. Locations. The kind of break that could crack an operation wide open if somebody with the right skills could get inside it.

I looked at Andrew. Andrew looked back at me. This could be the most significant lead since finding the shell casing and cigarettes.

I put the phone in my chest pocket and buttoned it shut.

“Let’s move. Back to the vehicles.”

The walk was quiet. Nobody talked. The adrenaline was draining out of them, and what replaced it was the heavy understanding that we had all been very lucky. The bush was loud around us, and every sound that hadn’t bothered them on the way in made them flinch now.

The vehicles were where we’d left them, parked nose-out on the track. We loaded up without a word. One of the rangers climbed into the bed of the lead truck and sat against the tailgate with his hands between his knees, staring at his own fingers. The one beside him kept clicking his safety. On, check. On, check. The small mechanical sound repeating like a habit he didn’t know he’d picked up.