But Wylings knew, even as a relatively young man, that he would need well-established knighthood to come across as a legitimate commander of the Knights of the Proclamation. So he got himself knighted.
It had to be accomplished through an act of bravery and selflessness. It had to be an act that sold well. It had to be, of all things, an admirable act that earned him enrollment in the honorary orders.
It took him a long while to figure out what would be the right thing to do, and then he came up with the idea of saving a bunch of starving refugees. Wylings owned shipping companies. He could just ship in some food to some starving refugees, right, and save them from miserable death.
But that wasn’t as easy as it sounded. It turned out there were already various organizations busying themselves with just such an endeavor. They didn’t even want Wylings’s gifts of food, because they already had their own food-shipping systems in place. “What we could really use is cash donations,” they told him.
Cash? Nobody was knighted for writing a check to the Red Cross! He needed something better.
What he needed was a group of refugees who weren’t being serviced already by the world’s food-services charities. Even the best of them were afraid to go into war zones. Trouble was, Wylings was afraid to go into a war zone, too.
So what he really needed was a war zone that only looked like one. Everybody else would-be scared to go in; he would know it was truly safe and could bravely and personally lead in his cargo of food for the pathetic, dying natives.
That’s when he hired Jeremy Southeby.
Jeremy Southeby was a kindred spirit in many ways—a throwback to the days of the British Empire.
He lived a life that shouldn’t have been livable any longer, adventuring and hunting and traveling through Africa and Asia. He lived for the thrill of cheating death and evading foreign law.
His favorite undertaking was ivory hunting, starting with the tracking of the biggest elephants in Africa. He would pursue them on foot, just as they did in the old days, bringing them down with nothing more than a high-powered rifle.
“You chase ’em down, mile after mile, hopin’ not to be tracked yourself by the preservationist,” Southeby related. “They’re using helicopters these days. They know how to spot a dying beast from the air. You have to hope they’re not around to get to the prize first.”
The truly successful hunt came when the elephant finally dropped from exhaustion. Southeby would catch up to them, preferably while they were still alive, and cut out the great heart of the beast. “When you sink your teeth into that great mass of muscle, that’s when you’re a real man. That’s when you’re a hunter!”
He would personally cut the tusks from the pachyderm and pack them out of the interior, assisted only by a small knot of trusted Africans who had hunted with him for years.
But Southeby’s hunt for thrills didn’t stop there. This ended just the first part of the thrilling epic.
Southeby would smuggle the ivory, one way or another, onto his private sailboat, an old family yacht. The once luxurious appointments were now shabby, but Southeby had installed diesel engines, as well as radar, sonar and other electronics to allow him to sail it almost anywhere in the world—and infiltrate marine monitoring from Morocco to Mongolia. On board was another bunch of compatriots, just as hard-bitten and loyal as his African guides.
They would take the cargo of ivory and sail it across the Indian Ocean, usually through the Pacific to Japan, where they would again need to sneak the cargo past the increasingly vigilant Japanese anti-smuggling enforcement.
“They’re getting tougher. All over, they’re getting tougher. Harder to get around them all the time,” Southeby would say. “It’s a shame when I get boarded and I have to dump a cargo.” Dumping the cargo meant activating a trapdoor in the bottom of the hull. The illegal cargo was always stored in a watertight bulkhead, so the doors could be opened remotely, removing the incriminating evidence. “But that doesn’t happen too often,” Southeby claimed.
Sometimes it would be rhino tusks, or whatever other ephemera was in high demand in Japanese aphrodisiacs these days. Sometimes, Southeby hinted broadly, it would be living, human cargo that he would transport, often from Southeast Asia, taking them to exclusive island resorts at undisclosed locations in the South Pacific.
“Now that’s a cargo you really hate to jettison.”
Southeby grinned, telling the tale to Wylings at the club and drinking gin. “The other cargoes you might have a chance of coming back for to salvage, when the coast is clear. But of course, if you dump the pretty girlies, there’d be no point in comin’ back for ’em.”
