Savannah Drone
A mystery in East Africa (20 min read)
William could smell the charred flesh on his legs. Upwind from the smoke and with his face planted towards the ground, he hadn’t noticed the wildfire until it had almost completely surrounded him.
First came the sounds. The crackle of dry Serengeti grasses exploding into flames. The panic of birds leaping from the earth and squawking their way into the sky.
Then came the smell. He had smelled wildfires from afar just about every year around this time. An abrupt change in the wind, though, transformed a subtle smell into an overwhelming one. Smoke clouded his vision and assaulted his lungs all at once. He stumbled and coughed uncontrollably, completely disoriented.
Then came the heat. For a moment, it got cooler as the smoke blotted out the beating African sun. Suddenly though, there were two suns, three, four, five. Orange and menacing, the flames began baking William alive and chewing up his desperately leaping ankles.
He bolted.
A random dash through the blinding smoke brought him over a short wall of flames and into the region of scorched grassland. He kept running and running, his terror overriding every other thought and feeling.
Then he tripped. A dark rock had concealed itself in the field of ash.
William tumbled on the ground to a stop, extinguishing the last embers clinging to his calves along the way.
He could barely get up.
The burnt savannah was unrecognizable. He dragged his feet, step by agonizing step, in the direction of what he thought was a nearby stream.
He was wrong. All that lay ahead of him was ash.
William heard the cackling of hyenas in the distance. With a flick of the wind in their direction, they too could smell the charred flesh on his legs. They smelled easy prey that they would tear limb from limb.
But the hyenas didn’t get to him first.
Zipping down from the heavens, a sparrow-sized drone perched on William’s back like an oxpecker. It opened a hatch and poked a small needle into his spine.
William the antelope died on the spot.
The geofence got leakier every year, Anna shook her head. In theory, the consumer drone manufacturers blocked their products from flying over the Serengeti. But amateur filmmakers, live-streamers, and pranksters alike consistently found ingenious ways to circumvent the geofence.
The problem had gotten so pervasive that Anna, the Serengeti park’s first “sky ranger,” had begun physically swiping drones out of the air. The threat of confiscation deterred at least some subset of the intruders. On a random day each month, Anna rented an anti-drone system, a “fishing net” of sorts that captured unlucky drones, fried their electronics, and returned them to the Park Ranger Headquarters.
Anna looked over the usual haul of DJIs, GoDros, and Parrots, some of which were outfitted with pricey custom cameras. Then an unusual drone caught her eye. Only the size of a sparrow, it was painted light blue on the bottom and sides, greenish-tan on top – clearly colors meant to evade being spotted from below or from above. On the blue side of its central module, Anna spotted a small white insignia for the Tanzanian Defense Forces.
Her stomach dropped. She hadn’t even considered that military drones might fly over the Serengeti when she began renting the anti-drone system earlier that year. Let alone checked with the military for permission to use such a system.
She could throw the troublesome drone into a lake and pretend like this never happened. Or she could report the drone’s capture and destruction to the military and face who-knows-what consequences.
Anna stared intently at the little contraption causing her so much trouble. Something didn’t add up.
Were military drones really susceptible to out-of-the-box anti-drone systems?
Anna looked it up, and the rental company’s website suggested no.
So this probably wasn’t a military drone. But whoever flew it clearly wanted it to go unseen and to intimidate anyone who inspected it closely.
Anna’s stomach dropped deeper. Forget amateur filmmakers, live-streamers, and pranksters. This was a poaching drone.
She had heard of the high-tech gangs in Mozambique, who tagged and tranquilized elephants, rhinos, and the occasional pangolin. She’d never heard of them operating in Tanzania, let alone in a park as prestigious as the Serengeti.
Her hand reached out to call her supervisor. Then paused.
If an international poaching gang were operating in the Park, would the Chief Ranger really not know about it? How could he not know? And if he knew she knew, what would happen to her?
Anna’s fingers withdrew from the phone and tapped repeatedly against her desk. She needed some more information and some more time.
She walked over to her workstation’s toolbox and picked out the sharpest flat-head screwdriver she could find. She flipped the poaching drone onto its backside and wedged open its bottom hatch. Peering inside, she saw exactly what she’d expected to find:
An arm-mounted needle. Connected to a flexible gray tube. Connected to a thin cylindrical canister with a skull-and-crossbones printed on its side.
Poachers had infiltrated the Serengeti – and likely compromised the Park Rangers, possibly even the Chief Ranger. She could hardly believe it.
Anna paced back and forth in her workshop as the day shift at Headquarters emptied out. She couldn’t look one of her colleagues in the eye, knowing what they might know. So she paced and waited for them to leave.
Had the poachers even succeeded? Maybe they were just testing their air capabilities in the Serengeti. And setting up any sort of ground operation was yet to come. If there was any way to tell, it ought to be on the drone’s needle.
She put on a pair of black nitrile gloves and carefully unscrewed the needle from its connecting tube, knowing that a single prick through those gloves might tranquilize her – or worse.
She placed the needle tip-down in a small test tube of water, then waggled it around to dislodge whatever might have been stuck to its surface. Then she stowed the needle away, snapped close the test tube, and headed over to the Serengeti genomics room just down the hall.
Kwaku had gone home for the evening, but his computer was left on, as was the toaster-sized sequencer it wired up to.
Sample volume: 1 milliliter.
Sample buffer: water.
Analysis mode: species, sex.
Scarcely ten minutes later, the sequencing was done. There was indeed wild animal DNA on the poaching drone’s needle, and it belonged to a male steenbok antelope.
An antelope?
Who the hell poaches an antelope?
Steenboks had six-inch-long dagger-like horns, but they weren’t made of ivory and weren’t worth anything on the black market. In fact, Anna had literally never heard of steenbok horns, pelts, or hooves being sold by anyone, anywhere.
Maybe it was their meat? She hadn’t heard of that either, but she supposed if someone were hungry enough, the tiny little antelope could feed a family for a few days.
No, that also made no sense. Steenboks were plentiful just about everywhere in Tanzania, and if you needed to kill one, the Park would be the stupidest place to do so.
This couldn’t be about the antelope itself.
This was the poachers just proving the concept: that they could fly a drone into the Serengeti and kill an animal and get away with it. Presumably their ground logistics were not yet established.
Anna considered her options:
If the Chief and the other Rangers were clean, there was no way that poachers could drive into the Park and carve up an elephant, drone or no drone. They would get caught for sure.
If the Chief or other rangers were dirty, they could collaborate with the poachers to set up such an operation. And if they knew Anna was onto them, they could threaten her career or safety or both. Anna shuddered. Those poaching gangs were notoriously brutal.
In either case, it might be prudent for Anna to do nothing. But she hated that conclusion.
And her friend Abira would hate it even more.
Anna called Abira from her main monitor. After one and a half rings, Abira picked up on her mobile. She was clearly walking and clearly sweating.
“Anna, what’s the matter? Wildfire season got you down?”
The Gorangosa Preserve didn’t have its own “fire ranger,” so Abira was expected to pitch in.
“Good to see you, Abira,” Anna smiled when she noticed a streak of soot on Abira’s forehead. “Yeah, I’m in a bit of a conundrum.”
“No-way-me-too! What’s up?”
“Well, I think I’ve found a poaching drone flying over the Serengeti.”
Abira scrunched her forehead and lips. Those bastards were bleeding Mozambique dry.
“Have you told the Chief?”
“No,” Anna said after glancing to her left.
Abira stopped walking and nodded her head.
“You think he might be dirty. The well-dressed ones usually are.”
“No, no, he’s been around for so long. Why would he go crooked now? When he’s more respected than ever? It’s just that you’ve told me all these horror stories about those gangs. I guess I’m just scared.”
“Let’s see the drone.”
Anna held up the drone in front of her monitor and rotated it a few times.
“Daaaaang. You Tanzanians are so bougie that even your poaching drones are classy.”
“Oh? It sounded more-or-less like what you’d described. It even had a needle right here under its hatch.”
“Yeah, but that’s some next level build. The gangs here use the cheapest GoDros you can buy. They strap explosives to the top to quickly destroy any evidence. And that cute little skull-and-crossbones? Like those shitheads care who they kill…”
“Oh, there was one more thing,” Anna remembered. “I sequenced the DNA on the needle, and it looks like it had pricked an antelope. A steenbok.”
Abira snorted.
“Yeah, that’s not a poaching drone. Whoever built that has deep pockets and some sense of decency. What’s that white symbol on the side?”
“Tanzanian military. I assumed it was a false flag since my anti-drone shouldn’t be able to take down their shit.”
“Maybe their shit isn’t as good as you think,” Abira laughed.
“Well do you think I should report it to them?”
“Look, where I’m from, the army stays out of my way, and I stay waaaaay out of theirs. I don’t know why your troops are poking antelopes, and I don’t think you want to – oh shit.”
Abira’s phone shook violently as she stomped out some embers on the ground.
“Hey Anna, I gotta get back to this. Okay-love-you-bye!”
Abira left Anna’s monitor, but her words lingered.
Why would the Tanzanian military be poking antelopes? Anna admit that she might regret finding out, but she couldn’t help herself at this point.
Whatever the answer, she figured, the biggest clue left must be the contents of the skull-and-crossbones canister.
It was getting late, but Anna had off the next day anyways. Plus, it would be awkward to explain to a coworker why she needed to use the Serengeti analytical chemistry lab. Anna cupped the military drone in her left hand and walked as inconspicuously as she could to the far side of Headquarters.
This was stupidly dangerous, she reflected, opening the door to the lab. She slipped on a bright blue flame-resistant lab coat, a fresh pair of gloves, and some protective goggles. She slid up the sash of the chemistry fume hood and placed the drone inside.
She twisted off the cap of the skull-and-crossbones canister and pulled it away from the rest of the drone. Following it were two clear pouches, each filled with a clear liquid.
Anna unsealed the individual pouches. She dispensed just a few drops from each into respective glass test tubes. Then she fed the test tubes one at a time into the mass spectrometer at the far end of the fume hood.
Results arrived in just a couple minutes:
Pouch #1: a fentanyl-like neurotoxin. That made sense.
Pouch #2: the deworming drug praziquantel. That didn’t.
Anna safely discarded the pouches and tossed the partially-disassembled drone into her backpack. That second chemical was a ridiculous curveball, but she was too tired to attempt to make any sense of it.
She’d sleep on it.
Anna’s husband liked to sleep in on Saturdays, so she sat alone at the breakfast table, puzzling over yesterday’s revelations as if they were all a dream. She got up to double-check her backpack. The mystery drone was still in there.
Was it really reasonable to think that the military had taken an interest in deworming antelopes? Or assassinating them, for that matter? And if it weren’t in fact the military, who else would it be?
Anna downed what remained in her mug of tea, then poked her head back into her bedroom.
“Hey Vince, I’m going to go check up on Bongani. And then maybe head out for the day.”
Vince grunted in acknowledgement.
Turning right outside her unit door, Anna walked down the hallway to Bongani’s apartment at the very end. On his door was an old embroidery that read, “Christine & Bongani.”
It tugged Anna’s heart. The two had been married for forty years, but Christine passed away a few months ago, many years too soon.
Anna knocked.
About a minute later, Bongani opened the door with a smile. He was always up and energetic early.
“Anna-dear, good morning. I read in the newspaper that it’s a rather gentle wildfire season. Can I help you to some tea?”
Anna stepped inside and embraced Bongani.
“I had my tea this morning, but thank you. Have you seen any rare birds out there?”
“The usual, the usual,” Bongani said as he patted her back. “Come, let’s take a seat in the parlor.”
Anna placed her backpack by her feet and settled on a worn-out couch. There was no sense delaying.
“Bongani, I found something disturbing at the Park yesterday. You may be able to help me understand. It might involve the military though, so you might be better off not knowing all the details.”
Bongani chuckled. He’d served as a medic before becoming a veterinarian. Having long ago been through hell with them, what could the military threaten him with now?
“You’ve dewormed animals with praziquantel, yes?”
“Yes, yes. Dogs, cats, I think even a hamster one time.”
“What about wild animals? Like an antelope.”
“No, no. I’m afraid I was never talented enough to work for the zoo.”
“Oh, I mean actual wild antelope, like the ones in the Park.”
Bongani looked puzzled.
“Someone is deworming antelope in the Park? … and you think it’s the military?” Bongani howled. “Those nincompoops couldn’t find the Serengeti on a map! They couldn’t tell an antelope from a cantaloupe!”
Anna smiled sheepishly.
“Anna-dear, let me tell you. Back in my day, and the former-medics I train say the same: the Tanzanian military only cares about shooting stuff. If it doesn’t have a gun, they don’t care about it, they don’t think about it, they don’t even know about it.”
Anna nodded, unsure whether to take what he was saying at face value.
“Okay, let’s forget about the military for now,” she pivoted. “When you deworm a mid-sized dog, how much praziquantel do you have to inject?”
“Inject? They’re tablets, Anna-dear, tablets. You slip a tablet into the dog food, and they wolf it down none-the-wiser. One tablet is more than enough.”
“So you’ve never injected praziquantel?”
“No, no. Never even heard of that.”
Anna felt stumped. The military seemed ruled-out, and the drone was apparently delivering praziquantel in a highly unconventional way.
“You know, Anna-dear, deworming used to be a big, big deal in our country.” Bongani rolled up one sleeve. “When I was a boy, my mom-mom took me to get a slow-release praziquantel implant. Kept me schisto-free for years and years. I think the organization is still around downtown. Deworm Us All, it was.”
Anna stroked her chin. It was worth a shot.
She stood up, but Bongani remained seated. He was in the perfect spot to see some birds out the window.
“It was great to see you, Bongani.”
“You too, Anna-dear. Stop by anytime.”
Anna caught a bus headed downtown. The Deworm Us All office was in a plain, dated, low-rise neighborhood – the kind that ambitious real estate developers salivated over. A sun-bleached poster in the office window read, “Did you know that 10% of Tanzanian children are still vulnerable to schistosomiasis?”
Yeah, Anna doubted the timeliness of that statistic.
She opened the door to the jangling of some chimes. The front desk was unattended, as were the front-most row of cubicles behind it. The water cooler by the door dripped periodically. On the office’s left wall was a freshly-painted list of the organization’s donors.
The usual suspects, with their outdated logos: Sightsavers, the East African Community, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. Then, at the top of the list where the wall met the ceiling, Anna spotted a nerdy-looking portrait of Claude Mwenda. It felt out-of-place to see a tech mogul supporting such an old-fashioned charity.
Oh, what was the name of his company? Biscuit, East Africa’s largest fleet drone manufacturer.
“Hello, can I help you?” a voiced called from the back.
But with a jangling of the chimes, Anna was out the door.
Anna looked down at her beat-up sneakers and realized she didn’t actually own any nicer shoes at the moment. She rarely thought about such things, even as a child. She grew up obsessed with the outdoors, and her urban middle-class family couldn’t afford much more.
Suffice to say: this wasn’t billionaire attire.
She dialed the Mwenda family office anyways.
“Hello, Mwenda family office.”
“Hi, this is Anna Juma, sky ranger at the Serengeti National Park. Would it be possible to arrange a meeting with Mr. Mwenda sometime?”
“Hi Anna, this is Marge. Lovely to hear from you. Claude is always happy to support the Serengeti however he can.”
“Oh, sorry, this isn’t a fundraising call. I was hoping to speak with Mr. Mwenda about a, uh, scientific matter.”
“Even better,” Marge said as a keyboard clacked on her end. “Claude flies to Zurich this evening but would be happy to see you in the late afternoon.”
“Afternoon? Today?”
“Exactly, any time before 6pm. I’ll text you the address.”
Marge disconnected before Anna could think of a follow-up question. Her text of the address arrived.
Anna wondered whether this was a good idea. Was she really going to enter the lair of a powerful businessman and suggest he committed a crime involving a deadly neurotoxin? If her hunch was wrong, no problem; Mwenda could even be a great asset for cracking the case. But what if her hunch was right?
Anna thought back to the skull-and-crossbones printed on the drone’s canister and Abira’s comment that whoever built it had “some sense of decency.” She remembered the fearless streak of soot across Abira’s forehead.
Then she texted Vince where she was going and why. And she hailed a ride.
The Mwenda estate eschewed landscaping, to say the very least. The entire grounds were unkempt savannah, save the dirt road and the dignified mansion in the middle.
The mansion was beige with enormous windows that reflected the grassland and sky. Anna watched her own reflection in a window as she approached the front door.
The moment she raised her fist to knock, a speaker alerted her, “It’s open. You can come on in.”
Anna opened the door and gasped.
The “mansion” was actually just a shell around a shaded stone courtyard. There were flowering trees, patio furniture, and in the center, well, a shack. The humblest, humblest rectangle of wood, mud, and corrugated aluminum.
“Over here, Anna.”
Claude waved to Anna with both hands, one of them holding a half-finished book.
He was sitting barefoot in a lawn chair by a “mansion” window. He wore a traditional cotton robe, not so different from the ones Bongani would wear on festival days.
“Hi, Mr. Mwenda, sir. Thank you – on such short notice – for taking the time to talk with me.”
“Please, please, call me Claude,” he smiled and gestured for Anna to take the adjacent chair. “How can I help you today?”
“Well, the Serengeti Rangers captured an unusual drone over the Park yesterday, and we think it might be yours.”
Anna held out the mystery drone for him to examine. He squinted intensely at it.
“Ah shoot, that sure is my drone,” Claude grinned guiltily. “My mistake, they’re really not supposed to be flying in the Park, are they?”
“Well no, they’re not. And we’re pretty concerned about what you’ve been doing with that drone. Not just taking pictures.”
“You’re all pretty concerned?”
Anna paused. She wished now more than ever that she had thrown that drone into a lake the moment she saw it. But she could feel Abira’s boot stomping out the embers of her self-preservation and self-doubt.
“I am.”
“How so?” Claude gently shot back.
“That drone was carrying a deworming drug and a neurotoxin. Its needle was covered with antelope DNA. You’ve been tampering with animals on the Serengeti in a completely inappropriate way. Maybe even killing them!”
Claude nodded, unable to conceal how impressed he was.
“Well would you like to know why?” Claude motioned towards his shack in the center of the courtyard.
Anna was scared. She hesitated but concluded she was past the point of no return.
They walked together to the shack, and Claude opened the door.
No surprises in there. The shack was a shack on the outside and a shack on the inside, too. On the far wall, there was a bed draped in a finely-woven net.
Claude pointed to it.
“Every night, I sleep under an insecticide-treated bed net. Yes, even in Zurich this coming week, I’ll bring one along. They remind me who I am, how I got here, and what I owe to the world.
“Every night as children, my parents slept under bed nets very much like that one. Without it, one of both of them could have easily died of malaria. No marriage. No me. No Biscuit Technologies Incorporated.
“And where did the bed nets come from?”
Anna wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer, but she honestly didn’t know.
“Not from Tanzania. Not from Tanzania. The bed nets were sent by people from the opposite side of the world, people nothing like us at all, people who could have been perfectly content to let us suffer ‘in our natural state’.
“That is why I sent out the drones, Anna. Every day in your Park and around the world, conscious beings nothing like us at all are suffering. Animals are suffering and suffering and suffering, meaninglessly, senselessly, and fatally. Especially during fire season.”
There was a long silence.
“Claude, I get it,” Anna reached out to touch his shoulder, “but there are more than just individual animals at stake here. There are entire ecosystems to consider.”
“I appreciate that, I appreciate that. The neurotoxin I chose degrades rapidly, well before any scavengers arrive at the carcass.”
“That’s good,” Anna conceded, “but I meant that so many of the processes that keep the ecosystem running involve individual animals experiencing pain. Like hunting, like fighting over territory, even birthing.”
“I appreciate that, too. But there are plenty of cases where that argument falls apart.
“Consider a fawn maimed by a wildfire, in agony yet incapable of comprehending its own agony. It drags its feet through the ashes in a quantifiably futile attempt to survive. What ecological difference does it make if that fawn dies now or a few hours from now?”
Anna bit the inside of her cheek to think.
“Is it playing God?” Claude asked rhetorically. “I can see it on your lips, Anna, that you were about to ask. If there were a God, though, is this not exactly the kind of pointless agony that God would prevent?”
Anna didn’t quite know what to say. She had never thought of her career in this way, as the defender of a system of primordial evil.
“Why are you telling me this? I am a Park Ranger, a preservationist, your natural adversary in this mission…”
“Anna, I have been in business for many years. I recognize talent when I see it. And courage. And willpower. I may not live to see it, but I have no doubt you’ll ascend to Chief Ranger and beyond. And when you do, you will decide whether to be an adversary or ally to this movement.”
“This movement?”
“Yes, there are more who think like me, many more. The entire living world will soon shift under our feet. Things cannot remain as they have been.”
There was another long silence.
“Claude, thank you for telling me all this…”
“Thank you for listening, Anna.”
“But, if I could make a request: Please stop trying to deworm animals in the Serengeti. The worms are animals, too. They suck, but they’re just trying to eke out a living.”
Claude wordlessly acquiesced.
“And the euthanasia?” he asked.
Anna’s mind flashed to the story of the doomed fawn.
She shrugged and walked out of the mansion’s front door.