The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

true. You know that enough is enough and we all must act now. But what do we do? How do we stop the richest five people on the planet getting richer? How do we get them to contribute taxes, charitable donations and random acts of human kindness? Easy! We have the power. We can make a change.

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9

 

Nine months earlier

South Africa

 

“I tell you, he’s hit the six-thousand mark.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, ‘Dulla has seen it with his own eyes, ‘bro!”

“Drunken caffer can’t see straight, much less out to six-thousand metres.”

The boy looked at the old hand. “Ah, don’t use that word, eh?”

“What, drunken?” he grinned.

“You know what I mean.”

“Sorry to upset your sensibilities,” the older man said, his accent was thick Afrikaans, guttural and punchy. “I remember when caffer meant a male bull. Tough and strong, regal even…”

“You know you didn’t mean it like that,” the boy said. He wasn’t really a boy. At the age of nineteen he was not only a man in his own right, but a crack shot and a keen tracker. He had taken parties out to hunt lion and buffalo. He was promised elephant this year, but it had not yet materialised. “Anyway, Pistorius was with him, or at least he took him out there. He asked for a range out past five-thousand.”

“And what the hell is five-thousand metres going to do for him? That’s five-kilometres!” He swung the open-topped Land Rover around a pothole which could have swallowed it whole, but he kept the speed the same, the rutted track violently shaking the metal and rendering the padded seats useless. “And you say he’s hit six-thousand? Who needs a shot that long?”

The boy shrugged. “He took a Springbok down at seven-hundred metres.”

“Bullshit!”

“No,” the boy said. “I was there.”

“Prone?”

“No.”

“Bench rest, or a tree?”

“No. Standing, shouldered.”

“What with?”

“With a varmint rifle.”

“A what?”

“Small bullet, large back-charge and case. So that the bullet travels at shit-hot speeds and the shock takes the animal down as much as the metal. A .22-250, I think. Short barrel.”

“Are you pulling my chain, ‘bro?”

“No.”

“But why? A .375 magnum is the legal rifle calibre for water buffalo and lion. Even elephant. But that’s the minimum legal calibre,” the man said incredulously. “Why piss about with plinking ammo. Most gamies are bringing in .416’s or larger these days.”

“I guess it’s not plinking ammo in the rest of the world,” said the boy. “Other countries don’t have the space. They want the bullet to either stay in their quarry or drop out the other side. They can’t shoot a deer using a .500 with a town or a school a half a mile further on down range. They have smaller game too. Deer and foxes, rabbits, I guess. Cougars…”

“Cougars! What the hell has a tart who likes young cock got to do with anything?” he grinned.

“It’s a type of mountain lion,” the boy sighed, not humouring him. “In America. They have coyotes too, that’s like a cross between a fox and a wolf, and they have larger timber wolves, of course. They need a hot round. They don’t need a big round like a .308 though. Fast moving .22’s are the most popular. Like .223 or .220. Pistorius said the man’s testing his skill.”

“That’s just because the bloody yanks like their military crap. They go out with an AR-15 with all sorts of shit stuck to it on Picatinny rails – laser sights, torches, night-vision. Hell, a twelve-gauge strapped underneath. In other countries, real hunters would head out with a bolt-action .308. End of story,” he paused, shaking his head. “I don’t know what this guy is doing, but there is no way in hell he made a seven-hundred metre shot on a springbok with a .22 based bullet. No matter what the back-charge was.”

“I saw it ‘bro.”

“And I said, bullshit!” He swerved as a warthog shot out from the bushes and ran across the track. The truck threw up a cloud of dust, drifted a little and then got back on line. He did not lift the throttle, and nor did he brake. “Where is he now?”

“Peter’s Ridge,” he paused. “And I’m telling you - I saw it. Seven-hundred metres at least and the guy was standing.”

The older man nodded. “Okay, ‘bro. Let’s go and look at this six-thousand metre genie… see what other tricks come out of the bottle.”

The drive was a little over forty-minutes away. It was deep in the South African bush, in the Gauteng province. Close enough to the city and airport, the townships for labour and help when needed, but just an hour’s drive and the bush enveloped you, surrounded you with the big five game animals. These were the animals initially chosen by western settlers and adventurers as the most dangerous to hunt. Lion, leopard, rhinoceros (both black and white species), elephant and Cape buffalo. Nowadays, tourists’ sightseeing lists differed from the original big five, with people wanting to see giraffes, zebras and gazelles as well. But hunters were old school. Hunters wanted to kill the animals they had read about as a child, or had seen in movies. They wanted the big five. And with enough money, they could tick off their list and take a photo of their slaughtered quarry, with their rifle over their shoulder and chest inflated.

The poverty in the surrounding villages meant a government permit for the killing of a small number of elephants had been granted, but only if the beast was in poor health or harmful to the rest of the herd, and only if the carcass was butchered and distributed among the people soon enough. The ivory had to be destroyed, but there was always a little to get past the paperwork and this was