Prologue  

Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Beginning of the long rains

Riding shotgun in the small Cessna, Ben Matthews shot a quick glance over at Ewan McAvoy as the single-engine plane pitched violently, slamming Ben against the passenger door.

Feeling suddenly claustrophobic in the tight quarters of the plane’s small cabin Ben could feel a cold sweat beading down his back as he braced himself for the next body slam, while Ewan white-knuckled the steering column and fought to coax the small plane away from the maelstrom of approaching storm clouds.

Suddenly a loud crack jolted both men.

Ben was convinced they’d hit something, a bird perhaps.

Or they’d been hit.

Ever since coming to Africa, Ben sensed he was finding himself in increasingly dangerous situations.

Or being placed in them purposely, the earlier warnings from Kate regarding what Kallie had dug up about Jackson Sironka’s ties to a poaching cartel now ringing in his ears.

Ben had taken heed of the warnings but rather than turn and run, giving up on this opportunity to experience Africa, he’d decided to ride it out, but keep his head on a swivel and watch for anything suspicious or untoward that might give him reason to worry about his personal safety.

“Be careful,” Kate had warned.

“I will,” he’d replied.

During his career as a Canadian national park warden, Ben had flown hundreds of hours in small aircraft and helicoptors, in every sort of weather, but suddenly all his hard-won confidence earned from conducting wildlife surveys, enforcement patrols and forest fire fighting in Canada seemed to vanish in the skies of Africa as a sense of vulnerability he had never felt on previous flights seemed to overtake him.

Today’s airborne anti-poaching patrol in the Wogakuria Hills in the northern Serengeti was just the latest example, considering there was strong evidence a poaching ring notorious for having shot down an aircraft last year was known to be operating in the area.

Some suggested it was a splinter group of the Lord’s Resistance Army which primarily operated in the neighbouring countries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, but that seemed unlikely. Among other things, the LRA was notorious for attacking villages, killing all the adults and stealing the children to recruit into their own forces: Africa’s infamous child soldiers.

And just in the last few weeks, the rebel army had been accused of shooting down two United Nations planes, with the loss of all on board.           

Considering these recent events, even if the truth of what happened was questionable, the LRA was rumoured to be funding its operations through the illegal sale of rhinoceros horn and elephant tusks, and whether true or not, as far as Ben was concerned, being shot down was being shot down.

Maybe he was overthinking it but even if it was by another group, Ben wondered why Gabriel Juma, Jackson Sironka’s righthand man, had insisted on an aerial patrol. At least a ground-based effort would have put them on equal footing with the suspected poachers. Instead, they took to the air despite the forecasted bad weather, all of which only added to Ben’s concerns about Sironka’s real intentions.

After all, Sironka had been the man who facilitated Ben and Kate’s exchange to Africa at a time when there was mounting pressure back in Jasper National Park by German mining magnate Helmut Stenger to build a backcountry lodge in one of the park’s premier wilderness areas.

And recent suggestions that Ben stay on longer in Tanzania to gain more valuable experience and impart his own knowledge to more of the local rangers, left Ben wondering if it was as Sironka suggested, or if it was merely a tactic to keep him away from Jasper even longer.

The intel he’d received from Kate and Kallie left him convinced it was more the latter as Stenger’s plans for Jasper seemed to becoming closer to reality despite the park having a new Superintendent who Kate said was making it tough on the German’s political allies in Ottawa to push the lodge through.

Having Ben out of the way and Kate preoccupied with Stenger’s proposed coalmine on Jasper’s boundary would serve Stenger well.

And then there was Ben’s de facto Tanzanian supervisor, Dhakiya Zuberi, the female lead ranger assigned to oversee Ben’s time in the country, purportedly to expose him to as much of an African ranger’s work world as possible in the time he was there.

While she seemed to have overachieved in that department, keeping Ben busy pretty much seven days a week, he found Dhakiya hard to read and still wondered if she had taken on the assignment willingly. Even after several months as part of her team, he was still uncertain where her allegiances lay.

All of this left Ben wondering if she was just another pawn in the process to keep an eye on him so his attention didn’t turn back to the happenings in Jasper, or if she was the most suitable person to show Ben the ropes, so to speak.

Assigning him to Dhakiya’s all-female anti-poaching unit could have been a way to demonstrate the forward thinking happening within the country’s National Parks Authority or it could have simply been a matter of putting him with the lowest person on the totem pole in the male-dominated organization.

Ben wasn’t convinced one way or the other but felt caught in the middle of a quasi-power struggle within the Parks Authority. Even though Dhakiya had softened somewhat in the time he’d been in Tanzania, there was still a lot unspoken between them. He and Dhakiya had never seemed at ease with each other, leaving Ben wondering if it was a question of race, gender, or position?

Or was it simply because Ben sensed she was part of Sironka’s plan to keep him in the dark about pretty much everything?      

Whatever the reason,Ben was wondering more and more about motives and losing confidence in his Tanzanian overseers.

Thankfully, considering his current predicament, he had full confidence in Ewan McAvoy, a wiry, sandy blond-haired South-African ex-pat who’d flown for that country’s Air Force. Once finished his military service with the SAAF, Ewan had turned his attention back to his second love, protecting Africa’s wildlife, offering his skills to the Tanzanians.

Coy about the reasons he’d chosen one of Africa’s poorest countries, Ben was pretty convinced it had more to do with Ewan’s love interests than anything else, having initially taken up with a South African wildlife veterinarian who’d been working for one of Tanzania’s NGO’s.

When she moved on, Ewan started seeing Mansa Selemani, a ranger in Dhakiya’s unit. He seemed to be happily settled down with Mansa, living in a modest house on the outskirts of Arusha, spending as much time together as their varied and hectic schedules allowed, with Mansa gone for multi-day patrols while Ewan was always on call to fly at a moment’s notice.

During his service with the SAAF Ewan had flown almost every type of fixed-wing military aircraft, but once finished with the Air Force came back to the smaller Cessna that first inspired his interest in flying. Ewan had expressed to Ben that he felt as one with the smaller planes, their wings merely an extension of his own body that he was able to manipulate and maneuver at will, overriding the forces of gravity and the vagaries of African weather.

But even Ewan had his limits, as any pilot would under these turbulent circumstances.

Wide-eyed, Ewan now wrestled with the controls, trying to strong-arm the aircraft back toward the heavens while gravity fought to counteract his effort. Nothing he tried seemed to be working then suddenly, without warning, the plane lost power and stalled.

“Damn,” Ewan shouted as he tried desperately to restart the engine, dropping the nose of the plane to regain some momentum, then flipping switches, adjusting knobs, and checking gauges, all to no avail.

“Christ, we’re going in,” Ben yelled as the Cessna started to nose-dive.

“Hold on,” Ewan grimaced as he pulled back on the steering column with all his strength. “We’re going to hit hard.”

 Ben braced himself with a death grip on his seat cushion.

The next thing he knew, they were hurtling toward the ground as Ewan tried to guide the Cessna away from the trees, barely missing a large acacia before finally slamming into the wooded hillside, careening to a stop at the base of a large kopje, luckily avoiding hitting the massive boulders.

When the ear-jarring screech of ripping metal finally stopped, an eerie silence ensued, briefly punctuated by the hissing of steam and gases.  

Seriously injured and barely conscious, Ben eased his head upright and looked over at Ewan, slumped across the steering column.

“Ewan,” he whispered. “You okay?”

Struggling, he reached across and grasped the pilot’s shoulder, trying to shake out a response.

“Ewan.”

Suddenly a loud explosion shattered the plane’s fuselage, the force of the blast spitting both men onto the ground as the entire aircraft was engulfed in flame.

Then the sky opened up.