THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT: Colt Ryder is Back in Action! (4 page)

‘Illegals?’ I asked, and Ortiz gave another of his casual shrugs.

‘It seems that way,’ he said noncommittally, ‘although nothing official ever gets said about it. He has plenty of security there too, employs a lot of ex-military personnel.’

‘You think it’s not well managed?’

‘Let’s just say that our director turned down the requests of Badrock’s representative the other week – we will never supply animals to that park, at least under its current ownership.’

‘Can you give me some more details?’ I asked, my interest aroused.

‘Details?’ he said as he toyed with his glass of water. ‘Hell, okay, why not?’ He looked back up at me, his eyes meeting mine. ‘That crazy general has gone and put the predators and prey animals in the same compounds, “let nature take its course”, he says – you know, lions and crocodiles alongside buffalo and gazelle.’

I shrugged. ‘You don’t approve of that?’

‘
Nobody
approves of it!’ he said in amazement. ‘I’ll tell you what he wants, he wants the park to be part of some sick blood sport, get people to pay to watch the animals kill one another.’

‘But isn’t that what happens in nature?’ I asked innocently. ‘What shouldn’t a park, or a nature reserve, replicate that?’

‘Let me give you two good reasons,’ Ortiz said immediately, holding up his index finger. ‘One, the animals going there are supposed to be looked after, as part of the park’s commitment to the environment it’s supposed to be protecting these animals. Are you going to donate a zebra to Badrock Park if you know that it might get dragged underwater and ripped to pieces by a Nile crocodile a day later?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ He held up a second finger. ‘Two, Badrock is making a spectacle of nature, bringing out the worst in people and therefore bringing everything we do, everything we’ve struggled for and campaigned for over the years, into disrepute. It’s like the damned Roman circus up there.’

‘But it’s legal?’

‘He’s greased the right palms alright,’ Ortiz said dismissively, ‘he’s got all the right licenses, yeah. Amazing what you can do if you have enough money. But we’re appealing to the state government about it, and we’ll go higher if we have to, believe me.’

‘Okay,’ I said, standing up and bringing our little meeting to a close. ‘You’ve been very helpful. My interest has been well and truly piqued.’

‘You’ll keep the police and the press out of this then?’ Ortiz asked as we shook hands.

‘I will,’ I assured him.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And I hope you manage to find that young man. If he’s up at Badrock Park, who knows what might have happened to him.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I hope I find him too.’

Then I turned on my heel and left the office, knowing where I would have to head next.

Badrock Park.

Chapter Three

The lion roared, only feet away from me, and I could count the huge teeth in its wide open mouth as the sound passed right through me, chilling me to the bone.

It was the closest I’d ever been to such a magnificent animal – according to the tour guide, a fully-grown adult male which weighed in the region of five hundred pounds – and I wasn’t sure that the open-top jeep we were in was the most sensible platform for viewing him. On balance, I’d have preferred something with armored glass.

There were six of us in the jeep – the driver and guide up front, and myself and three other tourists in the back. I was sandwiched in between a young couple and an older, lone traveler like myself. We’d all paid a little extra for the smaller jeep, to get closer to the action than the larger tour buses allowed.

‘Don’t worry,’ the tour guide said in a thick South African accent as the driver edged the jeep slowly along, flattening the grasses as we traveled across the vast landscape at somewhere under five miles per hour. ‘Samson here’s pretty lazy, he’s not going to do anything, this is just his way of letting us know he’s there, that’s all.’

Well, Samson was doing a pretty good job of it, I had to admit.

And, as the lion padded gently alongside us, his muscles rippling and his mane swinging, I also had to admit that I was rather enjoying myself here at Badrock Park.

I’d arrived that morning, having hitched a lift along Interstate 40 with a long-distance trucker on his way to LA. I’d got out at Laguna, then waited for the transport which bused people the fifteen miles further north to the safari park itself.

I’d picked Kane up from Kayden, and he’d come with me as far as the front gate but – like the Rio Grande Zoo – they wouldn’t allow him in the park itself due to ‘animal welfare’. I didn’t know whose welfare we were being concerned about – Kane’s or the park animals’ – but agreed to leave him at the kennels provided. He didn’t seem bothered – he probably welcomed a proper bed after a lifetime of walking and sleeping out under the stars.

I’d decided to do the tourist bit first, get an idea of the layout of the park, see what I could ascertain about the security here.

I could see straight away that Ortiz had been right about Badrock hiring ex-military personnel; there were a hell of a lot of former soldiers here, you could tell straight away from the way they held themselves, the way they moved. But perhaps in a place where predators and prey mingled freely – and with fee-paying humans also in the mix – having a good security team was a pretty sensible precaution.

Ortiz had also been right about the rest of the hired help, at least around the main entrance, animal houses and recreation facilities near the front gate. I didn’t know whether they were illegals or not, but there were plenty of Mexicans here.

But on the whole – despite Ortiz’s misgivings – the park was impressive and the general seemed to have invested a huge amount of money in the place. It bore out what I’d read in an internet café back in Albuquerque the night before, when I’d done a little research on Badrock and his safari park.

Badrock had retired five years ago, after thirty-three years of service to his country. Born in 1960, he’d joined as a boy soldier aged seventeen; a move that had surprised both his parents and their wealthy and influential friends. His father was a rich oil baron, and it was assumed that Roman would grow up to take over the family business. Even after he signed up, people thought he would just serve out a short-term contract and then go back to the oilfields.

But then came active service in the Sinai, El Salvador and Lebanon, until – just before his short-term commission was due to finish – he led a platoon of paratroopers into Grenada as a Captain in the 82
nd
Airborne Division. And it was there – after extricating three of his wounded soldiers from a gun battle with two bullets in one of his own legs, killing or wounding thirteen enemy combatants as he went – that Roman Badrock’s legend started to be formed, cemented by the awarding of the Medal of Honor at a congressional ceremony a few months later.

It also gave Badrock a taste for action that he knew would never be satisfied in the civilian world; and so a short-term commission became long term, and the powers-that-be had marked the man out for great things, a fast-track career to high office.

At some stage during that fast-track, lengthy and impressive career, both of Badrock’s parents died and – with no siblings to split the inheritance with – he became a wealthy man. And over the years, according to the
Wall Street Journal
piece I’d read online, he’d used that money to become even
more
wealthy, investing profits from the oil company into a burgeoning property and business portfolio that – back in 1999 – had put his net worth at over four hundred million dollars.

There was scant information about his family life, but it appeared that he’d been married late, although it hadn’t lasted; his wife had been killed in a car crash while well over the legal limit, a tragic end to their short relationship. Their marriage had left him with a daughter however, so at least some good had come of it.

Badrock’s retirement – even after thirty-three years – had come as something of a surprise to many, as he’d been on the road to making full General, with a place on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military was in his blood, a part of him that ran deeper than any other, and in several articles he claimed he had the desire to serve until he was no longer allowed to. But despite searching everything I could, there was no solid information anywhere as to what had eventually changed the man’s mind.

It was an interesting anomaly and I contacted an old friend of mine in Army records to see if she could provide me with any more detailed ‘insider’ information on the good general. She agreed to try but – given the man’s importance and super-high security clearances – it would take some time to get it to me. With no way of her contacting me direct, I said I’d check in with her in a couple of days to see what she’d managed to find out.

Whatever the reason though, Roman Badrock
had
retired and – in between conducting various business deals and arranging high-value security contracts – he had purchased a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico, fifty thousand acres of land that incorporated sandstone bluffs, huge mesas, rock formations, open valleys and huge swathes of expansive grassland.

It was here – at the re-named ‘Badrock Park’ – that he immediately set about moving the cattle operations to surrounding ranches and converting the seventy square miles of land into a gigantic nature reserve.

An article in
Time
gave some indication as to the reasons behind his move –

‘I’ve been around, you know? I’ve seen the best the world has to offer, and I’ve seen the worst. But what stood out for me, many times during my career, was the effect we humans were having on the landscape, on the natural world. Have you ever seen what Agent Orange does to a jungle? What artillery and mortar fire does to forest or grassland? Conflict all over the world comes at a cost, and not all of it is human cost; the damage to nature is extraordinary. And whereas we can make those decisions ourselves, wild animals cannot. And that’s why I’m creating Badrock Park, to provide a refuge for some of these animals who are struggling to survive in warzones and conflict areas around the world, give them a safe haven if you will. For it would be a true tragedy if we were to lose some of these species as a result of our own barbarism and bloodlust.’

I guess I’d been impressed by those words, if a little surprised – it wasn’t every day that a man whose money came from oil spoke out in favor of the environment.

But, as I joined the small group on the jeep as it headed out into the park, the sun already warm over our heads, the proof of Badrock’s intentions was plain to see. The park was, as advertised, an almost perfect replica of the African savannah, the grasslands interspersed with occasional trees, giving way to higher ground beyond; and just like on the African plains, herds of elephants coexisted alongside wildebeest, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, gazelle and hippopotamus. They were all here, ready and waiting to be seen by the hordes of eager tourists; and yet even though the parking lot was full and I’d passed by hundreds of families at the entrance, out here we could barely see another human because the ranch was so vast.

Somewhere in front of us was a large tour bus filled with eager onlookers – I knew this because I’d seen it leave about ten minutes before our jeep – but it was nowhere to be seen now, and I easily imagine myself almost alone in the Serengeti. And at a fraction of the cost of a trip to Africa, I could see why Badrock Park was so popular.

It was true what Ortiz had said back in Albuquerque – Badrock’s idea of mixing predators and prey was controversial to say the least. Some people – including the directors of most zoos in the United States – were up in arms over the affair. On the other hand though, there were many that approved of Badrock’s maverick stance, claiming that a natural approach was the best to follow and citing the success of Africa’s own game reserves as proof of how it could work. Badrock Park was a much smaller operation perhaps, but a lot of people believed that the principle should hold true there as much as it did at Kruger or Okavango.

There wasn’t much of the circus about it either, if truth be told. From Ortiz’s description, I had envisaged crowds baying for blood as buffalo were herded toward the water’s edge, to be attacked en masse by crocodiles. But instead it was just as Badrock himself claimed – nature taking its course. He had just invited people onto the property to watch it happen, but he wasn’t manufacturing any of it.

Safety concerns from local residents about the predators escaping were groundless – as well as fifteen feet high double perimeter fencing running the entire forty-mile perimeter of the ranch, the rivers flowing through the property were also netted to prevent the crocodiles leaving, while allowing fish and smaller marine animals to move through.

The male lion was far behind us now, and I felt the bumpy ride of the jeep easing up as we came to a stop.

‘There,’ the guide said in his strong accent, pointing across the grasslands to a stand of trees in the distance.

The other three passengers and I moved to the side of the jeep and raised our binoculars to get a closer look at the troop of giraffes eating leaves from the tree branches, incredibly long necks at full stretch to reach the tastiest and most nutritious specimens.

‘Wow,’ the girl next to me said to her boyfriend, ‘they’re amazing.’

‘I know honey,’ the guy replied, mesmerized by the scene. ‘I know.’

‘Those four that you can see are fully grown adults,’ the guide said, ‘about twenty-one feet – hold on.’ The guide interrupted himself as his own field glasses swept left. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’ve got zebra as well, a whole herd of them coming up.’

We all dutifully looked left, and were rewarded with the wonderful sight of about two dozen zebra moving gracefully across the grass.

‘And if you look closely,’ the guide continued, ‘about a kilometer further off and slightly to the right, you’ll see a small parade of elephant too, I see six of them.’

I adjusted the focus on my binoculars and had a look. ‘Seven,’ I said after a quick count.

There was a brief pause, then the guide nodded. ‘Yeah, seven mate, you’re right. Good eyes.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I knew my years of close target observation in the Rangers would come in handy one day.

It was then that my peripheral vision caught movement, and I swung the binoculars toward it. ‘What was that?’ I said as I saw the grass move again.

‘Where?’ the girl next to me asked. ‘Where?’

But the guide had already seen it, and nodded his head in seeming satisfaction. ‘Where the prey goes, the predators follow,’ he chuckled to himself.

‘Leopard?’ the single guy asked, but the tour guide shook his head.

‘Dogs,’ I said, picking them up now, my eyesight just as keen as it had been on operations more than a decade before.

‘Yeah,’ the guide agreed. ‘African wild dogs. They hunt in packs, bloody efficient too.’

The guide had barely finished speaking when six dogs broke from the cover of the high grass and raced for the zebra herd, scattering it in wild panic. They immediately locked onto the slowest animal, left confused and seemingly dazed by the escape of the herd; when it ran, the six dogs were right behind it.

Despite its confusion, the zebra was still fast and looked as if it might outrun the dogs, but still they kept on in dogged pursuit. The zebra tried to jink to the right, but two more dogs were there waiting for it, and it veered immediately to the left instead; but as it raced that way, another two dogs emerged, forcing the animals back onto the straight, right toward a small stand of trees.

‘They’re funneling it,’ I said, and the tour guide nodded.

‘Yeah,’ he confirmed, ‘that’s how they do it. Clever little buggers.’

The zebra, despite the endurance of the dogs chasing it, was opening up its lead as it reached the trees; but then as soon as it got there, four dogs – which had been hiding in wait – leapt out from cover and pounced onto the racing zebra, jaws pinching around its back legs and belly, hanging on as the animal reared and bucked and kicked out wildly. But it was no good, as the rest of the pack arrived and leapt onto the zebra, bringing it down to the ground where two of them latched onto its throat.