I rooted around in my backpack for the camera and set it on the bar.
"Look. This happened this afternoon."
Her face betrayed shock as she watched the footage.
"Oh, my God! That can't be right. I was so busy running for my life, I hadn't noticed. The lions were all male? How can that be? That has never happened before."
She shook her head at the screen and looked up at me with dinner-plate eyes.
"You need to show this, Jackson," she said. "People must see this."
"They will, Chloe." We began to hear the low thrum of a plane engine in the distance. "And please. Call me Oz."
Chapter 30
SIX HOURS LATER, wearing my good shoes and scratching one of those maraschino-cherry ant stings below my ear, I went clattering down the back stairs of Riley's-Maun's largest, and as far as I knew only, hotel.
Dropping my packed bags beside the scuffed brass rail of the outdoor hotel bar, I looked around for Chloe, whom I was supposed to meet for a quick drink before my midnight flight out of Botswana.
I did a double take when I spotted her talking on her cell phone, her luggage bunched beneath her feet at the bar stool. We had both been so bitten, bloody, and dirty we'd looked like mud idols when we came out of the bush a few hours before, but now, in a pale yellow dress with her hair still damp from the shower, Chloe was stunning.
I was struck by how happy I was to see her. Besides her obvious assets, I couldn't get over the toughness, the dogged will to live that this tiny slip of a woman had shown in surviving the trials she'd been through over the last few days. Meeting her had been one of the only good things to come out of this whole situation. That and the footage I had caught.
It was late, and there was almost no one in the bar: a group of tourists keeping quietly to themselves in one corner, a couple of gruff-looking drunk men at one table, and a piano player at a baby grand striking notes that tinkled over the steady sploosh of a fountain in the middle of the enclosure. The marble bowl of the fountain was lit from below, and the water flashed veins of blue-green light.
I turned away from Chloe when a tall, gaunt, red-haired man walked into the bar. It was Robinson Van der Hulst, Abraham's business partner and the pilot who'd found Chloe and me and flown us out of the bush.
"What's the word, Robinson?" I said as we shook hands. "Are the authorities collecting the lions for autopsies?"
Robinson shook his head regretfully and looked over his shoulder.
"The government game rangers are so busy they won't even help me retrieve the bodies. There's a lot going on, Mr. Oz, none of it good. For one thing, yours wasn't the only attack today."
Robinson glanced over his shoulder again.
"The whole delta is in chaos, man," he said. "Two other camps were attacked by lions and another two have been out of radio contact for twelve hours."
I blinked at him. The animal crisis that I'd been trying to convince people was coming for years seemed to have arrived full-blown in a single day.
"I even heard that the largest camp in the delta, Camp Eden, was attacked by jackals, of all things."
"Jackals?"
The implausibilities kept compounding, one on top of another. Jackals are basically coyotes. They occupy the same niche in the ecosystem. Once in a blue moon you'll hear about a jackal making off with a baby or something like that, but it's so rare that if it happens, it makes the news. Jackals don't attack adult humans. They just don't. Jackal attacks on humans are so rare that there isn't even any data on them. Feral dogs, wolves, dingoes, and so on might attack people now and then, but even those attacks usually occur because the animals are rabid.
That thought clicked on another lightbulb over my head.
"Listen-do you think there's any chance these attacks might have something to do with a virus? Like a massive outbreak of rabies? Robinson, you have to ask the authorities again. Hell, you have to tell them. The bodies of the lions, the jackals, all these animals need to be collected and studied. We need to do autopsies, tests for rabies-yesterday."
"You don't understand, Mr. Oz," Robinson said, shaking his head at me. "The authorities here aren't scientists. They're politicians. Which in Africa means they're thugs. Believe me, they're not in a listening mood right now. There must be close to a hundred people missing, and they're panicking. It's so bad, I hear they're going to issue an evacuation order for the entire delta. I've heard rumors the military is on its way."
At that moment, we saw a pickup truck roar up beside the hotel and come to a squealing, jerky halt. The smoky diesel engine of the parked truck hammered and chugged. A middle-aged African in a crisply ironed white shirt got out of the passenger door and marched into the bar. His head was roughly the size and shape of a basketball. Two young soldiers carrying AK-47s hopped out of the truck bed and filed in behind him. There was an immediate and palpable tension in the bar. The two drunk men at the nearby table quit talking.</ol>
"That's Assistant Superintendent Mokgwathi," Robinson whispered to me. "Maun's top cop. What now?"
The piano player stopped playing, and the vacuum of silence was louder than the music. The fountain splashed, glass clinked behind the bar.
"I must speak to a Mr. Oz," Mokgwathi said to the room in a deep and musically sweet African accent. "A Mr. Jackson Oz."
My legs twitched, and I was about to step forward when Robinson squeezed my shoulder and kept a vise grip on it. Chloe's eyes flashed at me from the bar and quickly looked away. Robinson didn't let go until the policemen, getting nothing from the room but vacant looks, pivoted on their jackboots and left the bar.
"What's up?" I said. "Why would they be looking for me?"
"Do you have your plane ticket?" he said.
I nodded.
"Good," Robinson said, grabbing my bags and jerking his head in the direction of the street. "My truck's around the corner. It's time to get you to the airport and onto your plane."
"I don't understand," I said.
"Someone in the hotel must have seen your camera and alerted the police," he said. "Tourism is big business here, man. One of the only businesses. If word gets out that animals have gone bonkers and are killing tourists, that's bad news for Botswana's GDP, isn't it? This is very dangerous for you."
"What is dangerous?" Chloe said. She'd watched the episode with the cops over the rim of her drink and now stood beside us with her bags.
"I'll tell you on the way to the airport," I said, shouldering her carry-on as I led her toward the street.
Chapter 31
AT THE AIRPORT, all the seats were taken in the Air Botswana waiting area. The terminal was filled to capacity, crowded with tourists coming in from evacuated safari camps.
The air buzzed with fear and nervous excitement. The tourists looked scared and confused, though I was glad to see that many of them were texting or talking on their cell phones. With the threat of a government cover-up looming, I hoped word of this craziness was already leaking to the press.
It took no small amount of persistence, as well as a folded hundred-dollar bill, and then another, to snag Chloe a seat on the midnight flight to Johannesburg with me. From there, we'd be going our separate ways. I was headed back to the US, I hoped for a press conference at which I would show the lion footage. Chloe needed to return to Paris.
I was glad I'd decided to leave the camcorder with Robinson when the airport scanners pulled me out of the security line for a more thorough search. I held my breath as the inspectors tossed my bags and wanded me. They missed the DVR tape I'd hidden in my pants, taped against the inside of my thigh. No TSA-style pat-downs out here, thank God.
As I was standing by the window at the gate, looking out onto the runway, my stomach dropped like an anchor when what looked like a military cargo plane blasted in. It was thick and snub-nosed, painted brown. Was the Botswanan military really crazy enough to try to quarantine this thing? I didn't want to find out.
Things were changing right in front of my eyes, I realized. Whatever this phenomenon was, it was spreading, getting stronger, catching hold. The jittery feeling of a rising crisis was in the air, like the feeling before a hurricane.
But I was convinced HAC wasn't a local problem. It was a global one. Governments and military forces have enough trouble dealing with large-scale problems one at a time. How were they going to be able to assist everyone everywhere, all at once? This problem would call for an unheard-of amount of global cooperation. And I didn't see it happening yet.
"So you really think this thing is real, Oz?" Chloe said. Her eyes were focused out the window. Outside on the rough tarmac, soldiers spilled from the plane, Trojan Horse – style. "All around the world, animals suddenly attacking humans for no reason? And not other animals? I mean-how can that be? Why? Why now? It sounds-er-completely crazy."
"I don't know how or why, Chloe," I said. "All I know is that bird populations don't just double in the course of several years, and lions don't just suddenly, radically, inexplicably change their hunting behaviors. Something very weird is going on."
The temporary cell phone I'd bought in Maun that day rang as we were standing in line to board the plane. It was a voice mail from Gail Quinn, a former professor of mine at Columbia. It was good news. She'd shaken some trees and managed to arrange a meeting about HAC with Nate Gardner, the senior senator from New York.