have begun to recruitânegatively and positively, you could say. We need to shut him down before he firms up his foothold.â
âYes, sir. Where should I start?â
âWith Ranger Sanderson. Work with her. She, it seems, has a better grasp of the park and the area than anyone andâ¦there is one more thing you should know.â
âSir?â
âWe sent Bahiti Ditlalelo up there undercover. We didnât hear from him for nearly two weeks. Then Ranger Sanderson found his wallet in the park near some bones. Modise, they know weâre on to them so, be very careful.â
Chapter Six
Kgabo Modise had attained the position he now held as much by his work ethic as his intelligence. He was bright, no doubt about that; in a developing country, sometimes that is enough. But Modise also worked hard at his job. His brief, very brief, time with law enforcement agencies in the United States had convinced him that the profession heâd chosen required diligence and patience. The States, heâd discovered, took for granted that people understood the parameters of productivity, and to be unproductive required a conscious decision and effort to be so. New, raw countries, like his, freed from paternalistic overlords, had to learn the how of it. Modise had. And now he realized that he would need to apply those lessons to the case at hand. Law breakers did not reveal themselves; they were to be ferreted out and pursued.
After he left the directorâs office, carefully avoiding Joseph Ikanya, he returned to his cubicle and rummaged through the stack of documents piled on one of the desk corners. Never throwing anything away had become an important part of his routine. Heâd made that mistake once and it had nearly cost him his life. On the other hand, it had resulted in a famously cluttered work area. He extracted a moderately recent file and began to read. He wanted to be sure he had not forgotten anything.
Olegushka Zhoravitch Lenka: currently a resident of Cape Town, South Africa.
Lenka has moved between various locales, Sharjah, Antwerp, and Rio de Janeiro. Like his contemporaries, including the presently incarcerated and disgraced Victor Bout , he is a native of the old and the new Russia, the U.S.S.R. as it had been, and the state that now operates in its place. Born in Novograd, educated in St. Petersburg, he emerged as a senior Bratva figure in the late nineties. His group now operates through multiple fronts including Nexus Aviation which is currently one of the larger commercial air carriers linking Africa, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia. And it has a significant air service infrastructure at O.R. Tambo airport in Johannesburg. Lenkaâs network linked these services operating out of East Africa, specifically to Uganda and Rwanda, where they apparently are involved in a variety of enterprises in and out of the Democratic Republic of Congo: Specifically guns, spares, drugs, as well as legitimate and quasi-legitimate cargoes such as coltan and, occasionally, conflict diamonds.
His organization employs locals as âboots on the groundâ in its markets. In Southern Africa this means the presence of ex-liberation-era combatants both white and black.
Boers, Modise translated. Boers and the riff-raff which flowed across the border from Zimbabwe, all the unhappy people who couldnât get their mind around the fact that Southern Africa was done with killing. He noted the red pencil note heâd added earlier: âHow do you fight a gang that has its own air force?â
Next he opened the envelope that had been left for him: Bahiti Ditlaleloâs transmissions from the Chobe District before he disappeared.
Lenka is a serious sociopath.
No news there.
He has no sense of basic morality. He will order a killing often simply to make a point and the victim might be chosen at random. He has his eyes on the casino on the Chobe, but that is not all. He believes he can be the