Page 86 of Duty Preserved

The word had come to her because a poached carcass was vet work first. Cause of death and the samples KWS would need.

She stood there with the kit over her shoulder, hands steady on the straps. Ten days ago, those hands had been red to the elbows, holding pressure on her best friend’s face while the road tried to shake them apart. She was much steadier now. She was doing her work confidently and competently, regardless of the emotions she might still be dealing with.

“Andrew. Let’s get all the guys out there.”

We loaded up in three vehicles and drove. The ride was a solid forty-five minutes, pushing northeast past the outposts and into country the regular patrols only touched on their longest rotations. The terrain opened into broad savanna broken by rocky ground and scrub acacia, emptier and wilder than the sectors we’d been covering.

Sarah rode in the lead vehicle with me. On the way, she passed along what the patrol had radioed—a single bull, horn removed, no sign of the shooters.

“Same MO?” Andrew asked from the back seat.

“Same wound placement from what they described. Behind the shoulder.”

“That doesn’t tell us if it’s the same crew.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

The last two kilometers were on foot. The vehicles couldn’t handle the rocky drainage we had to cross, so we parked and walked in with the gear on our backs. The patrol had marked the position, and we found it in a broad clearing ringed by low brush and whistling thorn.

The difference was immediately noticeable.

The first carcass had been a day or two old when we’d found it, bloated and swarming with flies.

This one was fresh—hours old, not days. The blood at the wound site was dark but still wet at the margins. The hide hadn’t started to split. The only scavenger activity was a pair of vultures on a branch fifty meters out, waiting.

The horn had been taken and nothing else touched. Same wound behind the left shoulder and same devastating cavity from a large-caliber round.

Sarah set her kit on the ground and pulled on gloves. She assessed the wound site and collected her samples, then looked up at me.

“Less than twelve hours. Probably closer to eight.”

The number changed everything. This wasn’t old news. This was this morning. Someone had been standing here with a rifle while we were eating breakfast.

“All right,” I said. “Work the scene. Everything. Let’s hope they got sloppy.”

The rangers spread out the way we’d taught them. They’d done this at the first carcass, and the routine was already in their hands. Two of them worked backward from the wound to determine the angle of the shot while the rest got in line and swept toward the likely shooting position, looking for brass or any sign of where the shooter had set up.

I walked the perimeter with Andrew. He went wide. I stayed close.

I almost walked past it. A dull brass gleam in the short grass, sixty meters from the carcass, half-hidden by a clump of red oat grass. I crouched and looked at it without touching it.

A spent casing.

There had been nothing like this at the first site. No brass, no trash, nothing dropped. Whoever these men were, they’d policed their scene clean the first time. This time, they’d come up one short.

I picked it up by the rim and turned it in my fingers. Read the headstamp off the base.

“It’s a .375 H&H Magnum.”

Andrew came over, Zayn behind him.

“Say that again,” Andrew said.

I held it up so they could read the headstamp. “Says .375 H&H. Classic African dangerous-game cartridge. This is a safari rifle. Professional grade. Purpose-built for dropping heavy animals.”

“That is not something you find in the settlements,” Zayn said. His voice had gone flat.

“No.” I turned the casing over once more and set it in my palm. “At the first site, we had a wound and a guess. A big rifle, but we couldn’t put a name to it. Now we can. Same weapon. Same crew.”