Safari: A Technothriller Read online

  SAFARI

  A Novel

  by

  Alexander Plansky

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Alexander Plansky. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please refer all pertinent questions to the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9992399-0-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017911498

  Published by Meq Media, Inc. Visit www.meqmedia.com for more information.

  Cover design by Alexander Plansky. Images licensed from Adobe Stock and 123RF.com

  Author photo by Carolyne Plansky

  First Edition: August 2017

  SAFARI

  For Mom, Dad, and Carolyne

  “The silence of an African jungle on a dark night needs to be experienced to be realized; it is most impressive, especially when one is absolutely alone and isolated from one’s fellow creatures, as I was then.”

  John Henry Patterson

  The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I: PREDATORS

  MUSEUM

  SIMBA KISHINDO

  TOUR

  SAFARI

  FEAST

  FIELD WORK

  REMAINS

  LIBRARY

  HEAT

  RECOVERY

  CAVE

  PART II: PREY

  DEPARTURE

  CAUSE FOR CONCERN

  GARAGE

  CAMERA

  TROPHIES

  COURSE OF ACTION

  TRESPASSING

  MONSTERS

  GETAWAY

  RIVER

  SPECIMEN

  ITERATIONS

  PART III: WILD

  TRANSFORMATIONS

  ETHICS

  ANSWERS

  TRUTH

  OPTIONS

  BREAKOUT

  LODGE

  ESCAPE

  HUNTED

  TAKEOFF

  RETURN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  The morning sun glinted down on the hood of the Jeep as it climbed higher into the sky above the Serengeti. Sitting in the passenger seat, Solomon Akeda squinted and retrieved a pair of sunglasses dangling from his shirt collar. The grassland sprawled out in all directions as far as the eye could see, occasionally dotted by a small cluster of acacia trees. It was a breathtaking sight, but one that he was accustomed to.

  “How far?” he asked the driver.

  “Five minutes, tops,” the park ranger said, wiping sweat from his brow. He looked nervous.

  Akeda bit his lip and glanced back out at the plains, hoping to see some of the animals. This whole thing had him on edge. The warden had requested him specifically, but Akeda had no clue why they needed a zoologist. The park staff dealt with animal problems all the time; he was simply there to study them.

  Born in Johannesburg, Solomon Akeda had always been fascinated with African wildlife. This obsession carried him through undergrad at the University of Cape Town, widely considered to be the best on the continent, and later into field research for the same institution. His focus was now ethology, which examined the correlation between zoological behaviors and conditions in nature. He was up here in Tanzania to study social transmission in hyenas and hadn’t been planning on heading out into the park until the afternoon. That changed when a vehicle with the Serengeti National Park logo on the side pulled into his team’s camp just before seven in the morning.

  Akeda had been asleep in his tent when his assistant Bekker woke him and told him there was a ranger here to see him. At first he thought that idiot Kruger back at Cape Town had mucked up the permits again, but instead he saw the man who now sat beside him, looking frightened and asking him to please come with him.

  “What’s going on?” Akeda had asked.

  “We need you to look at something. It’s urgent.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  The ranger had shaken his head. “I can’t explain. It is best to see it.”

  Then they were off. That had been over twenty minutes ago. The ranger had been tight-lipped ever since and didn’t even play any music; there was just the sound of the wind whipping past the open windows and wheels rolling over the uneven terrain. Akeda almost dozed off – he had been planning on getting another hour or so of sleep – but then the Jeep hit a bump and he jolted back into consciousness.

  Up ahead he could see three other park vehicles stopped thirty feet from a lone acacia. Akeda could see several other rangers milling around a short distance beyond. Though they were spread out, they all appeared to be looking at something on the ground. The Jeep came to a halt and Akeda climbed out. A heavyset man was supervising the rangers, standing with his back turned to them. At the sound of car doors closing, the man turned around and started towards them.

  “You must be Solomon Akeda,” the man said, looking relieved. He extended his hand. “Matthew Diawara, Chief Warden.”

  Akeda shook it. “What’s the issue?”

  Diawara began leading him past the other Jeeps. “See for yourself.”

  A few feet later, he froze. A chill shot down his spine as he took it all in. “Jesus Christ,” was all he could manage.

  Before him, spread out within a fifty-foot radius, were the carcasses of at least twenty zebras. Each of them was covered with horrific gashes. Huge, bloody chunks had been ripped from their necks but the damage done to the rest of the bodies was inconsistent. Some had been disemboweled with their entrails strewn about, but others had only been partially eaten. Akeda saw some with minimal wounds aside from the throat gashes, as if whatever had done this had killed them all quickly and only consumed what it needed before moving on.

  He stepped forward and crouched to examine one of the more heavily mutilated carcasses. The zebra’s head remained barely attached, tethered to the rest of its body by a few ragged strands of flesh and a bent spinal cord. The animal’s viscera lay in a gory tangle spread out several feet from its open abdomen. Blood had seeped into the soil and stained the nearby blades of grass.

  The violence of the scene wasn’t what bothered him; Akeda had been well aware of the “red tooth and claw” nature of the biological world ever since he started watching National Geographic documentaries as a kid. No, it was that in all his years of studying animals he had never seen anything like what lay before him, let alone heard of it.

  “Do you know what could have done this?” Diawara asked from behind him.

  Without turning around, Akeda shook his head. His eyes scanned the carnage laid out before him, moving from carcass to carcass, turning the possibilities over in his mind. Then he spotted something on the ground a few feet away and got up for a closer inspection.

  Emerging from the zone of the kill was a pair of four-toed bloody imprints on the turf. Leaning down, he could see they were roughly five inches across. Normally, he would’ve immediately said they belonged to a lion. But given the circumstances, he wasn’t sure. Lions certainly didn’t behave this way, not any lions that he had ever heard of.

  The trail of prints continued forward, becoming less bloody with each step the creature had taken. Akeda suddenly saw several more tracks nearby, leading away from the other carcasses. He walked over to inspect them, the sun beating down on the back
of his neck as the day grew warmer. He wished he’d brought a hat. At first it was confusing to follow them because they crossed each other multiple times, but Akeda counted at least five separate tracks made by the same type of animal.

  A pack.

  His gaze followed the trails as they became a formation and slipped off into the expansive savanna beyond. Slowly he turned around to see the others staring at him, waiting to hear his thoughts on the matter.

  Akeda opened his mouth, then stopped, realizing he was speechless.

  PART I

  PREDATORS

  MUSEUM

  The first lioness was clambering onto the buffalo’s back, her open jaws descending towards the creature’s hide for the first bite. The second was turning to dodge the falling animal, which had a vaguely terrified expression cemented on its face as it began to topple. It was a snapshot of a life and death struggle, frozen in time.

  Of course, Sydney knew that just like every other exhibit in this room, it had been purposely staged. These three animals had probably never even come into contact in real life, yet here they were: immortalized together as an example of nature’s breathtaking savagery. They had been just like that every time she visited this place since she was a little kid.

  The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History was situated halfway on the Mall between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. Growing up in Potomac, Maryland, coming here with her family had been one of her favorite childhood weekend excursions. They had called it “Stones and Bones” for the geology exhibition and the fossil collection, but the Hall of Mammals had always held a special place in her heart.

  Even at age twenty-one, Sydney Marlowe still felt the same childish tingle of excitement walking into the open area of the African Mammals portion of the exhibit. Beneath a high glass ceiling, taxidermied animals were displayed in small slivers of their former lives. An impala stood on a rocky outcropping, a giraffe stretched its neck to reach the dangling leaves of a tree branch, zebras drank from a riverbank, and a magnificent lion roared on a podium while the information board beneath it read “Africa” and provided information on the climate of the grasslands. The far wall was painted to look like the savanna woodlands but all the other sides of the exhibit were white save for some stylistic milky-white glass panes along the walls. Lighting was rigged above and below certain displays to highlight them for dramatic effect when it became dark.

  What impressed Sydney the most was that each individual exhibit was quite minimalist in style, yet still managed to convey a larger world beyond what it depicted. She preferred it to the zoo because the staging allowed for a more theatrical feel than watching sun-baked lions lounge in the shade on a hot July day. Also, the museum was air conditioned.

  A tall, black man who was the same age as her brushed past, taking it all in.

  “So…what do you think?” she asked.

  “Impressive,” he said with a British accent, turning to look at the two lionesses killing the buffalo off to the left. “Can’t believe in three years I’ve never come here.” Born in London, Andy Baker had spent most of his life there until he came to Georgetown.

  “You need to get out more,” she teased.

  He glanced back at her and smirked. “You’re one to talk. I’m the one always dragging your sorry behind everywhere.”

  She laughed and scratched her arm awkwardly, knowing he was right. Andy had come to the States without knowing a soul and yet, by the end of the first semester he had become one of the most popular people in their year. He seemingly attracted only positive attention, and making friends came naturally to him. Sydney, however, felt she was a few steps behind in that regard. Sometimes she wondered if Andy only hung out with people like her as friendship charity cases, but his care always seemed genuine. Besides, they had had innumerable heart-to-heart discussions over the past few years. She shook off the thought as he walked up the ramp towards the center of the room and started to follow him.

  Andy stopped in front of the artificial riverbank display, looking closely at the figure of a giraffe splaying its legs to bring its long neck down to drink. A hippo stood beside it, looking off in a different direction with its enormous jaws agape. A few shrubs were placed around the animals but the ground was marble like a countertop rather than the color of dirt. Even though she knew she’d never get so close to such fauna in real life, she’d always had a fantasy of visiting Africa and going on a safari along the Serengeti plains to see something that wasn’t just a recreation.

  And in two days, her dream would come true.

  She stepped closer. “I can’t wait.”

  “Me neither,” he said, looking at the zebras now. “You finished packing?”

  She chuckled. “Haven’t started. My mom’s gonna kill me.”

  “I suppose we’re lucky. Not many biotech firms that I’ve heard of have their own game reserve.”

  “But it belongs to Sans, right?” she said.

  “It was his family’s originally, but he’s repurposed it for the company.” Andy turned away from the display to look at her. “He seems a bit off, if you ask me.”

  “For multi-millionaires, I believe the term is eccentric.”

  “Enigmatic would better suit him. From what my dad tells me, he hasn’t left the reserve in about three years. Some say he’s gone off his trolley.”

  Sydney shrugged. “Maybe he just doesn’t like to deal with people that much. So what?” I can hardly blame him, she thought.

  “Being a recluse doesn’t really mix with running a corporation. From what I hear, his introversion is starting to get on the board’s nerves.”

  “Not all introverts are recluses.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Sydney.”

  “You haven’t even met this guy yet. Without him, the company wouldn’t be a leader in its field. He obviously knows what he’s doing.”

  “I’m not doubting the company, I’m doubting him. I mean, grad schools are going to shit bricks when they see ‘SansCorp Field Researcher, Tanzania’ on our resumes,” Andy said. “But don’t you think there’s something slightly odd about someone who has been away from civilization for all that time by choice? Especially when they show no signs of going back anytime soon?”

  “I guess…” Sydney figured if she had a private game reserve and could run a billion-dollar company without ever leaving its confines, she’d probably stay there as long as she could.

  SansCorp was a major bioengineering firm, up there with Gilead, Amgen, Celgene, and Regeneron. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, it specialized in everything from growing artificial organs to gene therapy techniques and cloning technologies. The CEO, William Sans, was born in Geneva to a British mother and a Swiss father, who founded the company in 1986. Sans was raised in Switzerland before attending Harvard and Stanford. Beyond that, everyone only knew one thing about him: he loved hunting. The only photo she had ever seen of him smiling had him crouched beside an enormous lion with a hunting rifle in his hand, wearing khaki shorts and safari attire. All the other pictures online were of him looking stern in various suits. He didn’t seem like one to give off a warm vibe.

  For the first time ever, four interns had been selected to become field researchers at the reserve this summer. Over the next two weeks they would serve as assistants at the company’s facilities there, where Sans oversaw the implementation of their latest technologies. He himself had selected the four based on applications open only to this year’s interns.

  This Tanzania gig was a golden opportunity. She’d wanted to be a doctor her whole life, but getting into medical school these days was so competitive it practically required applicants to have discovered a cure for cancer. If you were anything less than perfect, they ignored you, and this position was her ace in the hole. Plenty of prospective graduate students had internships, but few had anything this high-level. Her supervisor would be none other than the CEO of a company that ranked fifth in possession of its industry’s market share. />
  At that point, the fact that she was getting an all-inclusive trip to Africa seemed like icing on the cake, as it had been such a longtime desire of hers.

  The truth was, she was unimaginably excited.

  She turned around and looked at the display directly across from her. A leopard was perched up in a tree, the carcass of an impala draped over a branch. The predator appeared perfectly relaxed as it stared off into the distance, knowing its meal was secure from the prowling hyena on the ground below. Though the tree was located in the middle of the hall, Sydney could still picture it being surrounded by a grand savanna, the leopard gazing at the sunset as the horizon turned orange on the brink of dark. Its only concern was survival. Its only guiding logic was primal instinct. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

  She sighed, feeling almost envious of such a lifestyle.

  SIMBA KISHINDO

  The Cessna 208 Grand Caravan banked right in a wide arc and when it leveled again, Sydney groggily peered out the window on her left to see the vastness of the plains. The prairie grass all blurred together to look like a sea of faded green, trees were reduced to tiny specks, and the occasional river wound through the landscape like a snake. It seemed to go on forever.

  She’d seen many pictures of the Serengeti before, but none taken from the air. And besides, this was better than staring at something on Google Images. She was actually here. It had taken them nearly twenty hours to get to Kenya. There were no direct flights from Washington, D.C. so they had flown from Dulles to Zurich and Zurich to Nairobi with a three-hour layover in-between. Sydney had tried to get some rest during the first leg but she’d always had a terrible time sleeping on planes. She’d managed to snooze on the second flight out of sheer exhaustion, but even then jet lag had cut into her initial excitement of landing in Africa. It had taken a moment for it to sink in that she was halfway around the world from home, in a land she’d only seen in picture books and Disney films.