“What?!” Caldreaux’s eyes bulged wide as he quickly looked around the darkened room. “You invited a stranger to our dinner?”
“Have you lost your mind?” Fogarty demanded as he and Kingman started up out of their chairs.
“Gentlemen, please stay seated,” Hateley said in a soothing voice. “And no, I have not lost my mind on this momentous evening, because the man I’m about to introduce is not a stranger to anyone in this room; or to the covert nature of our amusements.”
Hateley waited until all three of his guests had regained their chairs and at least some degree of their composure before thumbing the remote one last time.
In the far corner of the underground room, a single overhead light came on, revealing the figure of a man they all knew all too well.
“Gentlemen,” Marcus Wallis said, “thank you very much for inviting me to your annual dinner. The meal — which I had the honor of sharing with the chef, and as you’ve already noted — was superb. However, I came here tonight for more important reasons than food. First, to apologize for the unfortunate incident in Thailand; and, secondly, to offer a solution to what I see as a simple moral dilemma.”
Wallis paused for a moment, his cold eyes surveying the darkened room and the three men at the table, two of whom aappeared frozen in place.
“Every hunter has his limitations; shots they cannot or will not take. You four men seem to have discovered yours, and understandably so. But I would suggest to you that your revulsion to the idea of shooting an immature animal — especially one newly risen from extinction — and putting that creature’s head on your wall, is a perfectly rational response. I’m certain it’s not the act of shooting or killing that repels any of you; but, rather, the lack of a challenge.
“In essence,” Wallis concluded, “you would never be able to look up at these mounts with any sense of pride or accomplishment; therefore, they would never be a true trophy in any of your eyes.”
Wallis paused again to survey the frozen expressions of his audience, and smiled.
“Unless,” he said, as he reached down to the floor and picked up a pair of objects,” you chose to do something, as a group, that hasn’t been done for twenty thousand years.”
He held up a flint-tipped wooden spear in one hand, and a hide-wrapped flint knife in the other.
“Hunt down your mammoths and kill them the old-fashioned way.”
CHAPTER 30
At the Khlong Preserve shooting site
The night rain in Khlong Saeng Wildlife Preserve had turned into a light mist, causing the resident Hornbills, Bamboo Rats, tree frogs and insects to shift slightly out of their protective niches; because interesting things were happening in their wetlands neighborhood.
All of these diverse creatures were aware, in their own ways, of the single human figure stretched out on the top a crudely-reconstructed bamboo hunting platform standing six feet and a half feet above the lush undergrowth, and the other human’s standing beside the platform; but none of them seemed to view this latest intrusion as threatening. Very possibly because Chief Narusan — who was quietly contemplating the logical actions of a midnight poacher from the top of the platform he’d carefully reconstructed from the chopped bamboo lengths collected from the hidden grave site — was clearly at home in this lush Thai rainforest.
That and possibly the fact that the Chief, who had hunted and fished for his dinner all of his adult life, had no intention of killing anything other than a fellow human on this particular night; and only then if it became absolutely necessary.
Tonight, the Chief was fully engaged and focused on the complexities of his latest professional interest: the reconstruction of events at a crime scene. The confrontation and killing would come later; after all of the clues and evidence items had fallen into place.
And, in fact, it had been Narusan, the amateur naturalist, who thought he recognized the four larger-diameter sections of bamboo he’d found at the grave site — the ones that turned out to be platform legs when he finally managed to reassemble the pieces — as being an almost extinct south Asian variety replanted at the Khlong Saeng Wildlife Preserve, with some ceremony, a few years earlier.
Captain Achara Kulawnit had then used her law enforcement authority to awaken and demand the immediate services of the Preserve’s senior horticulturalist, who — when he arrived at the Preserve headquarters, groggy and disheveled — took one horrified look at the sharpened and pounded seven-foot bamboo sections, and then immediately drove the investigative team to the specific area in the Preserve where the ceremonial planting had taken place.
Ten minutes after the enraged horticulturalist pointed his flashlight beam at the shattered-stump areas when the components of the platform had clearly been taken, Achara Kulawnit — searching through a nearby section of recently trampled tall grass with a long snake stick — found the four barely-discernable holes where the platform legs had been pounded into the ground.
But it was Narusan, on his hands and knees while in the process of putting the thick bamboo legs into their original hole positions, who discovered the single expended brass casing nestled under a clump of trampled grass.
The casing — now rattling around on the end of a small twig — was being examined carefully by Achara while Narusan lay on the platform and stared across the wetland clearing at the distant stretch of trees, ferns, bamboo, and massive limestone formations that lay in line with the angular direction of the platform.
They were waiting for the arrival of a laser-beam equipped transit so that Narusan, an amateur surveyor in addition to his other skills, could make a better estimate of the flight vector of a. 243 Remington Magnum bullet fired by a wealthy poacher resting comfortably on the protective platform; undoubtedly never imagining that his illicit actions might be re-enacted at some later time by a now very enthusiastic and persistent Thai Royal Navy crime scene investigator.
At the Draganov Center
“You’re going to let them kill all four of the little ones?” Aleksei Tsarovich stared at Sergei Draganov in disbelief. “No, you can’t be serious.”
They were off by themselves, in the Center’s small conference room; talking in hoarse whispers because they didn’t dare let word of Marcus Emerson’s latest order get out to everyone else at the Center.
“What choice do we have?” Draganov demanded, the anguish evident on his flushed face. “You know what these people are like. They killed my brother and his entire smuggling organization like they were pests… they as much as admitted it! Do you think they would hesitate for an instant to kill us too?”
“That’s just it, I really don’t think they would kill us,” Tsarovich argued. “Think about it; they need us — you especially. How else can they obtain more exotic creatures for their barbaric hunts?”
“They might not kill us,” Draganov said uneasily, “but they would certainly kill the others here; probably one by one, until we agree to their terms. Could you stand by and watch while they were all executed, over a few creatures that we know we can easily replicate?”
The logic was as clear to the two scientists as it was disheartening.
“No, I couldn’t,” Aleksei agreed with a deep sigh. “We have to do as they say; but how will we be able to explain it to the others — and especially to Borya?”
“Borya can’t know, at least not right away,” Sergei Draganov said emphatically. “He would never bow to such heresy, and they would certainly execute him as an example to the others — and to us.”
“But how do we keep it from him? You know our staff; once they find out what we’re going to do, they’ll get word to him somehow.”
“Not necessarily,” Aleksei said. “Not if we disable the wireless communication system and delay for a while repairing our phone line. And even if he should become suspicious, the snow must be at least ten feet deep up at MAX by now — and it is still falling — so digging his way out to where we release the little ones from MIN would be an impossible task, even for Borya.”