Buttkickers of the Serengeti

By Daniel Bowers

It’s 1995, and the Central Intelligence Agency has a plan for the former French colony of Kilbara. This troubled and impoverished country huddles in a thin strip of jungle between an endless desert and a salty tropical sea. A covert Creative Operations team is dispatched, but before their mission briefing is complete, their transport aircraft crashes, killing their commander. The team is left stranded without equipment, supplies, or communications amidst the barren inland sand dunes of an enigmatic land.

The four remaining highly-trained agents know they have a mission to complete, but are ignorant about their objective. They also find that years of unquestioning obedience has left them scarcely able to think independently. Yet their inability to plan does not interfere with their confidence and instinct to act. This satirical espionage thriller tells the story of a former college star athlete, an Ayn Rand-loving Slav, a pyromaniac electronics technician, and a philosophical Japanese assassin who together embark on a wild adventure to complete their assigned task...whatever that might be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Bowers
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005319892

Daniel Bowers

Daniel works in IT, where he is sustained by caffeine, rage, and occasional writing.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Two Landings

That wasn’t a very good landing. A thin scratch of blood on his left cheek glistened in the bright sunlight. While his body was otherwise unscathed, ragged strips hung from his cargo pants and sleeveless shirt, corroborating his opinion on the craft's touch-down. I’ve trained paratroopers to jump without chutes, and even the first-timers land better than that. Usually, Stone added silently to himself.

And just look at this airport, he said slowly, squinting through the glare at what lay beyond the smoking wreckage. He pounded a heavy black leather boot into the earth, leaving a deep impression. The dirt on this runway isn’t even packed down correctly.

That's because it’s not dirt, suggested Pavel. Pavel reached down and scooped a handful of the material. The light brown granules of sand flowed between his fingers, piling into a tiny perfect cone at his feet. And I don’t think this was an airport. Although, technically, it is now. He lifted a palm-down hand above his eyes to shield them from the glare, and looked at the dunes that rolled into the distance around the squad. But I agree, it wasn’t a very good landing. He coughed once, clearing some of the smoke that remained trapped in his lungs.

Stone nodded. The Colonel had trained him to unflinchingly accept the ideas of the other squad members, even – especially – if they conflicted with his own. He lurched over a large piece of twisted metal that once served as the cockpit door on their C-180 transport. Maybe it was because the pilot was dead, he suggested. Milford Stone was a massive specimen of the species homo sapiens. Even when it was intact, his loose-fitting desert camouflage uniform was neither loose enough nor camouflagey enough to hide his sculpted muscles. Stone hoisted a jagged aluminum sheet above his six-foot-six body, and heaved it crashing fifteen yards away.

Hey! cried Pavel, scurrying away from the tossed jetsam. The metal thudded into the ground a few feet from Pavel Petrovich Mendalayev, spraying a mist of sand into his eyes. At five foot nine inches tall, Pavel was both much smaller than Stone and exactly the height of an average male. Most people described Pavel as nondescript, although the majority of people who met him had trouble recalling him at all. His darkish light hair was partially straight, somewhat curly, and cropped long. Unlike Stone, he did not wear a military-style uniform.

Guys, called a slightly higher-pitched voice from behind a small dune. I don’t think Killian is asleep over here. Pavel and Stone staggered their way through the deep drifts of sand and piles of smoldering refuse. Pyro Milgram had pawed though a pile of plastic containers and broken wooden crates, and was now squatting down in front of the down-turned face of their mission commander.

He looks asleep, suggested Stone, stopping about five feet away. He put his large, clenched fists on his hips, and stared at the back of Killian’s head. The colonel was wearing an Army uniform – or perhaps it was Navy, Stone couldn’t remember. The uniform looked as if had been freshly cleaned and pressed five minutes ago. Of course, the intervening five minutes included a mid-air explosion, a five-thousand-foot spiraling fall, thousands of shards of burning shrapnel, and the wrinkle-inducing impact of being crushed under a 65,000 horsepower Pratt & Whitney jet engine. Pyro, kneeling close, picked up a small section of metal pipe and prodded the exposed upper torso of the inert officer. Killian's death was real, or at least more convincing than the Colonel's prior attempts at being dead. Holding two fingers under the prone man’s neck, Pyro tested Colonel Killian's pulse. There was none.

Pyro was shorter than the other two men, but not the shortest of the five-member team. The fourth and shortest was female, very slight in build, with straight black hair that she kept in a tight ponytail. She didn’t seem to be around the crash area, but her sudden absence from the five-member squad wasn’t unusual, so the others hadn’t bothered to look for her.

They sifted through the few bits of gear that had survived the crash and subsequent fire. Most of the crates from the cargo hold were smashed open, and all of the fragile electronic gear was beyond repair. Some of the soft goods – food rations, specialty clothing, forged documents – survived, so they each filled backpacks with what they could carry. Setting those aside, they spent two hours collecting wreckage from the plane and burying it underneath the shifting sands of the desert. They then gathered on a small hill that was the high point of the local terrain, and looked around. The brown dunes stretched far away into the distance, touching the blue line of the horizon at the edge of their vision. There was no sign of civilization in any direction.

Well, said Stone, We have a mission to complete. Being a man down doesn’t stop the clock. Not in a real sport, anyway. We’d best get to it. A few beads of sweat from his thick arms dropped onto the parched ground. He held a hand above his forehead and stared to the west for a few moments. He lowered his hand and looked at Pyro. Ah…Do any of you know what our mission is? he asked.

Pryo was starting absently to the north. No. They both looked at Pavel.

No, me either, Pavel shook his head. They looked at each other in silence. Noriko might, Pavel finally suggested, but none of them expected her to speak, if she was even still nearby.

Stone concentrated, hard. A bead of sweat appeared on his forehead in a way that made him uncomfortable, but he kept thinking. Whatever we're here to do, he announced finally, must be really important.

###

In 1645, exactly three hundred and fifty years to the day before the team's accidental desert landing, European colonization of the land now called Kilbara began in earnest. A three-masted French trading vessel, blown off course by the coordinated efforts of an incompetent navigator and a vicious summer storm, wrecked on the rocky shoals outside of Sambika Bay. The French captain, with twelve men from her crew, rowed ashore in their sturdy wooden longboat. They brought with them the usual trading goods to swap for food and supplies from whatever friendly natives they hoped would appear. The remaining crew remained on the stricken schooner to attempt repairs.

A healthy number of the quite friendly natives gathered on the clean, sandy beach when the longboat arrived. They had seen the large sailing ship weaving dangerously in the waves off shore. They shouted, waved, and finally set up large bonfires attempting to warn the sailors that really ought to watch out for the big rocks. Despite their best efforts, the ship nevertheless headed straight into the shoals, floundered, and smashed large gashes into her hull. Although the people along this coast had never seen a ship so large – their own boats were eight-foot rafts of poles and thatch – they realized that only idiots would come near this particular shore in the first place, much less ignore hours of shouted warnings. And idiots, the elders taught, were the best people with whom to trade.

When the small rowboat reached the shore, the captain leaped out, strode proudly onto the beach, and crammed a tall pole into the sand. At the end was a tiny piece of red and blue cloth that flapped aimlessly in the sea breeze. He yelled loudly in French, kneeled, stood up, walked around the flag, and kneeled again. His men hauled the small boat a few feet onto the beach, then they joined their captain’s odd dance. A few began singing. More pointing, more kneeling. Finally, a couple of the men pushed the little boat back into the water, returned to the main ship, and returned to shore with a few more wooden crates.

About fifty Kilbarans had now gathered on the beach. The word was spreading through the nearby villages that strange and likely stupid men had crashed on.

Graniko's beach. The locals brought food, medicine, clothing, lawn chairs, beach toys, and anything else they thought would make for an interesting evening.

Finally, the French captain raised his arms in what the local residents assumed was a signal that his dance-ceremony was complete. The two groups slowly approached one another.

Kilbarans had very advanced linguistic skills. Over many generations, their culture had developed a unique mechanism for controlling the rebellious phase of teenagers. Every few years, the youth were expected to develop their own new secret language, rejecting that of their elders. They could then safely criticize their parents and elders without exposing them to punishment. This scheme, while successful, quickly led to the need to master dozens of languages, simply to communicate with other age groups. Because each age band attempted to create a language difficult for their parents to learn, the languages were extremely complex. Their ability to learn and understand new languages was tremendous. French, by comparison, was a simplistic language, designed with words and a grammar that made no attempt at obfuscation. The villagers mastered French in two hours. Years later, most Kilbaran communities adopted French as their common tongue, which they found convenient as a cross-generational lingua Franca. They carefully maintained their own accent, however, and developed a unique dialect – Broken French – to use when talking with actual Frenchmen.

By nightfall, they could carry on fluent conversations with the French. Finally, they asked the Captain their pressing question. What are you doing here?

I am here to claim this Country for God and the Crown, he replied indignantly. Both God and Crown were not familiar words, but the bemused locals assumed the grandiose phrase had something to do with the tattered swatch of blue and red flapping in the salty breeze. The Captain pointed to the trees behind them. And we claim this Coast, and all of the Lands along them, as Territory of our Sovereign, he added, with sufficient enunciation so that all listeners could hear his use of capital letters on the nouns.

The Kilbaran residents huddled for several long minutes to debate an appropriate response.

You can't. Someone lives here already, they finally replied.

The Captain arched his eyebrows and retreated a step, shaken by this unexpected response. In his many years of Territory-claiming, beach dwellers had always fled from his massive ships of war; or, if those did not frighten them away, his sweeping speeches did. Here was a new situation.

Ah yes. Well. Do you…have a King? he stammered. He forced his eyebrows back to their normal linear position, hoping that would add gravity to his question.

Oh yes, replied one of the residents, who turned around quickly and raised a pointed finger. Right there… he began, but as he looked into the face of each of his companions, he faltered. He could not remember who their current King was. The Kilbaran rulership was not a hereditary office, but rather one held only for a few months at a time. The Sovereign – sometimes a King, sometimes a Queen, but often something not quite either – was selected though a competitive tournament of a game similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors, except without the Paper or Scissors. Unfortunately, the ritual gaming also involved heavy drinking, so often the Kilbarans woke up the next morning without clear memories of who their King was. Anyway, yes, we have a King. The group nodded quickly in agreement, each vaguely hoping the others remembered who that was.

Ah. I see, answered the Captain slowly. He tried more thinking, then tried consulting with his crew. After an animated conversation with one of his soldiers, the Captain stomped quickly back to the assembled locals. Do you have a flag? he asked. The villagers scrunched their noses, not recognizing the word. Like this one, here, he added, pointing to the mounted textile, which now drooped sadly after absorbing water from the humidity.

They glanced at each other. None could think of a similar device to this strange bit of cloth tied to a stick. Wait! a young woman finally cried, 'Old Man Graniko hangs his shorts on a pole near his hut, just like that, she said proudly. The others remembered, then nodded in agreement. So, we DO have a flag!" she said proudly.

Ahhhh, said the Captain, again at a loss. One of his sailors, a young man with a cropped haircut and strong calves, whispered something into his ear. The captain’s eyes glowed. But do you have a national football team?

This stumped the residents. The Captain explained the game – involving kicking the intestines of dead animals around, if their newly-acquired knowledge of French could be trusted. The locals had to acknowledge that they did not have a national football squad.

Aha! exclaimed the Captain. Without a national team, I’m sorry, you don’t have a country here. So I’m claiming this territory for the King and/or Queen of France. He lifted the flag pole out of the ground, then slammed it back to emphasize his point. The wet sand shifted, and the flag pole fell slowly onto the ground. After a few attempts to get the flag pole to stand straight, the Captain finally resorted to just holding the pole in his hands, occasionally shaking it slightly to give it a regal, fluttering appearance.

The locals didn’t really mind. They assumed the strange seafarers was just talking about the land around the beach, which belonged to Old Man Graniko. Graniko truly enjoyed visitors, and constantly invited them to stay on his beach. He had some of the best parties there, so the group of locals gathered by the French troops nodded amongst themselves, confident that Graniko wouldn’t mind. The Captain even explained later that the people’s now-lost sovereignty made all of them eligible to send players up to the French national football team. A few thought this was a good idea, and eventually left with the French crew after they helped repaired the ship. The territory around the bay became the French colony of Kilbara.

Chapter 2: Sixth Sense

Something is wrong, Stone announced. As night fell onto the sandy floor of the arid savannah, the daytime breezes slowed and the croaks and trills of nighttime animals began to fill the cooling air. His deep, baritone voice carried though the open range. Pavel and Pyro turned to face him. Noriko Doraku, some three miles away, also detected the booming voice; she sat on the ground, eyes closed, to listen to the far-off conversation.

I don’t see anything, said Pavel.

No, I don’t see anything out there, but I feel like something is wrong, Stone explained. My sixth sense is tingling. The others nodded, hoping Stone would be able to focus on the feeling.

The entire team would occasionally find themselves directed by a mysterious sixth sense, which is one reason they collectively assumed they had been chosen for this special covert-operations unit. Colonel Killian had a much more developed and accurate sixth sense, they all had to admit; although Killian himself often discouraged the others from trusting the feelings. Ignore it if you can, he told them many times. (Trained for many years to follow orders and react at an instinctive level, the group no longer appreciated that their own intellects occasionally provided useful advice. When it did, they attributed it to a mysterious sixth sense.)

Stone finally nodded silently, satisfied that he understood the message his extra-sensory input was providing. We should go that way, he pointed to the west. His sixth sense, tapping into the memory of what Stone saw on the ground just before the plane crashed, reported that a city lay in that direction. Our mission is over there.

The last time Stone traveled, his mission was to assassinate someone. The time before that, he was also tasked to assassinate someone. In fact, his passport – at least his theoretical passport, since Stone didn't actually have one – was filled with theoretical entry-visas and exit-stamps from countries around the world where he had gone to kill people. Usually they were very important people. This meant that his victims were usually surrounded by lots of other people, and lived in big houses in large cities. Stone – often with the help of the other team members – would sneak in, dispatch the person Killian described, then get out. The burly former football player grew accustomed to this routine.

Killian had said before they left their secret base in the United States that this would be the team’s most important mission yet. Since the plane’s one-point landing appeared to postpone the colonel’s mission briefing indefinitely, Stone decided that the briefing was just a formality of their job. Their mission was clear – at least, Stone’s part of the mission. Since his normal job was to seek out and kill a very important person, and since this mission was their most important to date, Stone decided that his target was probably the most important person he could find. And since the C-130 had only a limited range, and was nearing the end of its fuel when it crashed, Stone further reasoned that his job was to find the most important person within walking distance of the plane crash, and kill them. The mission is definitely that way, he reiterated, pointing in the direction of the city.

Pavel and Pyro didn’t agree with Stone. I don’t remember seeing a city that way, Pyro argued. He lifted a small hand-held multiband radio to his eyes, and played with one of the dials. There’s no radio traffic coming from that direction. He instead motioned with the radio to the north. There are signals coming from that direction, and at least one of them looks like encrypted traffic on a low-frequency military band. I think we need to head that way.

Pyro’s missions varied. Perhaps varied was too imprecise a word, Pyro reminded himself. Oscillate was closer to the truth, because his covert assignments entirely fell into two categories: installing things and breaking things. Usually, he only did one of those things per mission. Sometimes he would double up; installing one thing, and breaking another. Once, his mission was to break something he had previously installed.

Breaking things was not as easy as it sounded, he often reminded Killian. Sometimes the Colonel was anxious that a particular job would be finished within a strict schedule, so the team leader would push everyone to rush though their allotted tasks. Could you use that magnetic-field generator you used in Jakarta on this one? Killian asked once. That will destroy the receivers quicker than cracking into the control box.

And let anyone with a multimeter be able to find out what happened? Pyro had retorted. I’ll have to get into the control circuits if we don’t want to leave any evidence of tampering, he explained, and that will take at least 10 minutes inside of the wiring panel. Killian had relented, but Pyro didn’t feel like the old officer truly understood the complexity of breaking things.

Installing things was quicker. Designing and building them took a long time, and often, it took weeks to build the tools that he would use when installing something; but the installation itself was usually very quick.

Killian had not asked Pyro to build or bring any new eavesdropping devices or other equipment, so Pyro knew that his mission here would not be to install something, it would be a destruction mission. Detecting the radio signal on the military frequency confirmed it. Somewhere to the north was a transmission station, its antennas pulsing electromagnetic energy that was a clear and present danger to truth, justice, apple pie, and quarter-pounders-with-cheese. Pyro’s job was to remove that threat.

Pavel suggested they go east. Stone objected that the sandy desert plains extended to the horizon in that direction, and there were no signs of any human activity there. There were also no trails leading in that direction, nor smoke from far-away campfires. Even Pavel admitted that he had seen nothing but unending nondescript scrub land when the plane flew over that region.

That, Pavel explained, was the reason he believed their mission lie to the east. To Pavel, the monotonous terrain and lack of reference points was evidence that something was being hidden. A large camp, he reasoned. Training grounds for thousands of elite rebel troops, bent on Maoist-Leninist-Naderist overthrow of capitalism.

Pavel’s last mission was an Infiltrate-and-Disrupt. Killian dispatched him to repurpose an emerging paramilitary Marxist-Leninist organization that was accused of encroaching on the democratic institutions of a small island-nation in Southeast Asia. The organization turned out to be a branch chapter of Toastmasters. A quick consultation with Washington revealed that the Toastmasters did appear on CreSol’s list of potential troublemakers, so Pavel went to work. Moochers, all of them, Pavel had said at the time. Seven weeks later, he left the island, after successfully converting the organization into a highly prosperous chapter of Amway.

Lately, though, Pavel had been getting bored. He did not doubt his CIA CreSol superiors who told him about the hundreds of thousands of Leninist rebels that still roamed the world. Their recent missions failed to locate very many of them, though. None of them, in fact. Yet Killian had said that this mission was going to be their biggest yet. To Pavel, that could only mean they’d located a mother lode of Communist rebels.

###

Three miles away, Noriko felt the same confusion and uncertainty her teammates were experiencing. She sat in lotus position under a gnarled monkey-grabber tree in the dusty, dry wilderness. Meditation, she felt, would reveal what the Tao intended for her.

She had found that the Way usually revealed itself through Colonel Killian. Her previous master, an ancient man gifted with the calm wisdom of a Zen master and the reflexes of a Japanese ninja, never seemed to get much guidance from the Tao. Despite marathon meditation sessions, her old master would revive only briefly to reveal universal truths about the inner harmony of trees. Fascinating stuff, Mei believed, but usually not actionable. Killian, on the other hand, would meditate for mere moments and learn that universal balance was at risk unless she went halfway around the world to steal some documents locked in some Chinese diplomat’s office safe.

Now, her primary source of information about the Way was lost, with Killian dead in the plane crash. Meditating under the hard, cracked tree, she emptied her mind so that the Way would reveal itself to her, as it so often did before to Killian. She found no answers, though, and was growing concerned.

###

The three men sat facing each other as the sunlight faded from the sky. An hour had passed in argument, but they remained in stubborn disagreement about their mission.

We must stay together, Pyro cautioned as they argued. If we separate, it will be easier for them to catch at least one of us, and that will blow our cover. He waved to the north, where he was still detecting faint military radio signals. It’s probably the military that runs things around here, I’m sure we need to knock out their communications first.

They agreed that sticking together was the right thing to do. In a region without industrial or transportation infrastructure, Pavel advised, the political aristocracy is the lynchpin. During his training, Pavel had carefully studied the rise of militant socialists in less developed countries. It is the training camps that we need to knock out; without them, the Communists won’t have any backbone.

Why is it always Commoners? whined Stone.

Comm-you-nists, Pavel said slowly. They’re the—

Wait, Pavel, said Pyro. Something you said… Pyro struggled with the confusion in his brain, as an idea tried to wiggle its way out of his orbitofrontal cortex. Shouldn’t we first knock out the communications, so that when we shut down the first training camp, they won’t be able to warn the others?

There was a long silent pause. Pyro looked at Stone, who looked blankly back. Usually, whenever one of them asked a question that involved thought, they’d wait for Killian to respond. Stone was the first to remember that Killian wasn’t in a talking mood anymore.

Uh, he offered. I’m not sure…

Here, replied Pyro. He kneeled to the ground, and brushed clear twigs and grass from a swath of dusty earth. With his fingers, he drew what looked like a small satellite dish in the middle, and then a square on either side. He drew a line from each square to the satellite dish. Let say we go shut down one of Pavel’s training camps to the East first, he started, pointing to the square to the left of the satellite dish. He rubbed the square out with the palm of his hand,