Months earlier. End of the long dry season

Leaning her stocky frame against the military-green Park’s Authority Land Rover, Dhakiya Zuberi searched the Ngorongoro crater basin, peering through binoculars as the shimmering heat waves rising from the crater floor distorted her view.

            An ancient caldera thought to have formed 2.5 million years ago when the cone of a large active volcano collapsed inward after a major eruption, Ngorongoro was home to all of Africa’s Big Five: elephant, lion, buffalo, leopard, and, since its relatively recent reintroduction, rhinoceros.

            But with two rhinos poached in the last week Dhakiya knew that without a major effort to stop the poaching it would only be a matter of a few years before the last black rhinos in Tanzania were gone.

            And the short rains had yet to start. When they did and the tourist season slowed down, Dhakiya knew there would be even fewer eyes to report any unusual activities, more cover to hide in and less of a deterrent for poachers.     

            I should be leading my team on regular night patrols to catch the bastards responsible for this, not wasting my time showing this Canadian ranger around.

            Babysitting.

            Crew leader of the first all-female anti-poaching unit in Tanzania, Dhakiya was suspicious of Gabriel Juma’s reasons for assigning Ben Matthews to her unit. But she could do little to persuade Juma to assign the Canadian to one of the other ranger units. She was stuck with him, supposedly to satisfy important commitments made by government officials to show him around.

            God, there are a dozen safari companies that could do that.

            We are the eyes and ears needed to protect these rhinos, but we are pulled away from the job we need to be doing.

            Finally focusing the binoculars on a dark blur in the distance, Dhakiya sighed with relief.

            “Ah, there you are my girl,” she whispered to herself as a female rhinoceros appeared out of the bushes. “Now where is your baby?”

            As she spoke a smaller version of the mother rhino trotted into view, moving playfully alongside the massive female, bringing a smile to Dhakiya’s usually unyielding face.

            The reintroduction of endangered black rhinos from South Africa to Ngorongoro and Mkomazi National Park a few years earlier had been a huge challenge but with the support of various NGOs, the Tanzanian government had pulled it off. Very slowly, the population grew to just over a hundred animals, but a recent spate of poaching had the potential to derail all the positive energy the rhino’s return had provided the country, bolstering tourism, a key source of funding for one of Africa’s poorest nations.

            Although Dhakiya’s anti-poaching unit was employed by the Parks Authority, she had been given the green light to help Ngorongoro Conservation Area rangers do whatever it took to stop the poaching, but that freedom didn’t come without risks. Two of her rangers had already been killed in the process, two out of more than one hundred rangers killed across Africa in just the past year.

First, however, they needed to identify the foreign-based wildlife traffickers who funded the illegal killing. Likely Asian, and even more likely Chinese, Dhakiya had been fully briefed by Gabriel Juma and Jackson Sironka regarding the intel that had been collected on Wu Yin. The Zanzibar-based, Chinese-born businesswoman was allegedly responsible for the illegal export of most of the elephant tusks and rhinoceros horn leaving East Africa, feeding an almost insatiable demand for everything from medicinal remedies to intricate carvings that fetched enormous sums of money for Wu and her co-conspirators.

            Taking down The Ivory Queen, as she was known in Interpol’s intelligence circles, and sentencing her to a lengthy prison term, would send a strong message to international traffickers that Tanzania was not the place to poach.

            If only Dhakiya could trust the intel Gabriel Juma and Jackson Sironka had passed on to her, she and her unit might be able to put a dent into Wu’s operations.

            But could she trust them?

            She was under no illusions.

            She’d heard the rumours that Jackson Sironka had been fingered for diverting enforcement resources away from the areas where Wu’s operatives had successfully poached several rhinos.

            But she wasn’t sure if the rumours were true.

            Always suspicious of other’s motives, Dhakiya was initially convinced they were part of a smear campaign intended to drive Sironka back to Kenya where he was born, not unlike the bullying tactics she’d experienced firsthand until she married into a Tanzanian family. Tribal animosities still weighed heavily on the continent and in many of the political dealings among and between countries.

            Possibly because Dhakiya herself was from Kenya, Sironka had been a big supporter of her push to create a team of rangers unique to Tanzania, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, until she saw evidence purportedly substantiating the rumours.

            True or not, the allegations gave Dhakiya no comfort. Along with everything else she had to deal with, now she also had to weigh whether the information she was relying on to do her job was accurate, or total bullshit, not only wasting her team’s valuable time and energy, but also potentially putting them unnecessarily in harm’s way.

            Dhakiya had enough hurdles to contend with being a female in a traditionally male-dominated field, having to work twice as hard as her male counterparts for the same or even lesser rewards.

            And to top it all off, there was the matter of Matthews.

            Against her strong objection, the Canadian park warden or ranger, or whatever he was, had been suddenly parachuted onto her team and she was suspicious of the reason.

            Gabriel Juma had told her the news but she questioned if the direction had come from Sironka himself?

            Was it intended to throw her off and take her away from her main objective, a diversion? Or was he embedded with her team to provide feedback to Juma or Sironka. Whose side was he on?

            Wherever the truth lay, Matthews was a headache she didn’t need right now. Yes, he did seem genuinely interested in her anti-poaching unit and its work, but she had no way to determine how sincere he was or if that was part of a ruse. Somehow she had to find out, to put him to the test.

            ‘I want to be part of the boots on the ground’, he’d said when they were introduced. ‘Treat me no different than you would the other members of your team.’

            Easier said than done, Dhakiya thought. After all, her unit, to a person, was female. Having a ‘muzunga’, a white man, in the mix just complicated things.

            Tossing the binoculars into the Land Rover she turned to her crew, signaling for them to get in.

            “You too,” she added, motioning for Ben to ride shotgun while still mulling over how to make the most of her situation as he slid his six-foot frame in beside her. Having a man in her crew, especially a white man, would no doubt make many aspects of their work even more difficult, including getting past the local’s ingrained suspicions of dealing with park rangers in general. Even if he was experienced when it came to law enforcement, Dhakiya questioned whether what he would have dealt with in Canada would have any relevance here in Africa, protests she had made to Gabriel Juma that went nowhere.

            Finally conceding she would get no satisfaction in arguing the point Dhakiya decided if it was an African experience the Canadian wanted, she would do what she could to give it to him.