Kagiso looked through the sights of his hunting rifle. There were two of the rhinos ahead and through his scope he could one had the much larger horn. That would be his chosen target, if he was lucky he might get the chance to shoot the second one but that would depend on what direction the beast hurried. He took a final breath and squeezed the trigger. He saw a red puff through the scope and was confident he'd hit his mark. He switched his rifle to the left, found the second rhino running away having presented its profile willingly to Kagiso. He quickly pulled the trigger again and saw a second puff of red mist this time though the beast didn't instantly fall and so he took a second. Even before he had packed the rifle away his colleagues had already begun stage two of the process. The truck driven by Gatsha had Msizi already firing up the chainsaw. Moments later Msizi had hacked off the first rhino's horn and was already half way through the second by the time Kagiso walked over. Leaving the rhino carcass for the scavengers the trio headed off as quickly as their pick up would let them over the bumpy Kermahan terrain.
As they approached the town of Pongola on the west coast of Kermah a warehouse was expecting them. The gate opened and they were waved inside. "You're early boys" a man in a suit said cheerfully. "I like people who are beyond punctual. What do you have for me."
Gatsha pulled a tarpulin that covered the flat bed of their pick up to unveil a virtual butchers slab of animals and parts. "All fresh, all from the last 48 hours." He lifted up an elephant tusk proudly. "We've eight tusks, some elephant skin, two rhino horns, rhino skin, several Gazelle heads and we trapped around twenty snakes." Already various warehouse workers were pulling the contents off the back, weighing or counting them and then placing them in special boxes marked up as machine parts. As the last of the snakes was dumped into a box and sealed up with tape and then cling film a man wearing a polo shirt and dark shorts handed the suited man a note.
"Well Gatsha your little haul is netting you $1000. He reached into his left inside pocket and brought out a bundle of bank notes and began counting them out into the palm of a very pleased looking Gatsha's hand. The suited man was Lindokuhle Nolwazi, on the surface a businessman who specialised in exporting machine parts, his "clean" business brought old technology from nations like Abertone or Paracambi, broke them down into parts ranging from copper wiring to engine parts and then shipped them off around the world to anywhere wanting them. It was a perfect front for his other, more profitable business in selling rare animals as pets or the much more lucrative market of animal parts for medicine in Lijiang. This latest batch was now ready to be shipped off and while he had paid Gatsha a good wage for a Kermahan he himself would likely net some $100,000 for their haul, one of the rhino horns alone would sell in Lijiang for around $130,000 per kilogram and by just the weight of his hand he judged the smallest was around 3kg. All that was left to do now was to container up the shipment, make sure the bribes had been paid and wait for the ship to Lijiang to depart.
