It made Wylings shiver to think of it—and he believed every word. He’d known Southeby for thirty years and had yet to catch the man in a contradiction. His weren’t fairy tales but true exploits. Amazingly, it was all done for the sake of the adventure. Southeby was a millionaire who didn’t need his smuggling income. In fact, every cent of the blood money was hidden away, Southeby conceded, for rainy-day use.
Southeby was just the kind of man to engineer Wylings’s feat of heroism.
“Sure, mate, I can pull it off for you,” Southeby said. “Sounds new and exciting.”
Wylings offered to pay Southeby handsomely for his expertise. “Whatever, Wylie. I’ll take a few pounds.” Southeby was clearly, again, not motivated by greed.
Southeby found the right locale. The ideal collection of African villages ravaged by drought and completely dependent on food aid—and completely isolated from the outside world.
Southeby and his African mates hired a few extra helping hands. They were Unthu tribe, from a hundred miles to the northeast, and the type of renegades who would not notify any loved ones of their upcoming trip. They’d never be missed. They were ostensibly to serve as trackers, to help Southeby find a local sort of small, rare ape.
The trackers’ guns were taken while they slept, then used to massacre them in the light of day. That was step one.
Step two, arrive on the scene shortly after the humanitarian airdrop came. Take the Fernis at gunpoint, with the food packs, to the site of the Unthu killings. Shoot the Fernis with the Unthu weapons and bury the food packs.
Step three, sit back with a bottle of lager and let the situation ripen.
Step four. English Gentleman James Wylings, traveling into a dangerous and isolated corner of Africa to photograph an endangered subspecies of small ape, stumbles upon a forgotten and starving collection of Fernis tribal villages. Without regard for the grave financial losses, he uses his satellite phone to reroute one of his own cargo ships, which happens to be transporting foodstuffs, as well as eleven thousand MP3 players made in Malaysia. Wylings’s own private jet is used to airlift the supplies from the African coast to the isolated Fernis villages. Wylings’s own equipment beams images of the starving children and villages with corpses lying where they had fallen.
The media picks up on the selfless act—somehow it becomes known that Wylings suffered personal monetary losses of hundreds of thousands of pounds by diverting his cargo ship and missing a delivery date of MP3 players to Cape Town. When UN investigators arrived, Wylings himself led them to a place twenty miles from the village, where the rotting bodies explained how the monthly food shipment had gone missing.
“Wylings International, Ltd. is sending a team of doctors to service these people for the indefinite future,” announced a tired-looking, but quite dignified, James Wylings in a press conference from the Fernis region. “I’ve also ordered one of our survey teams off the job in Australia so they can commence efforts at once to locate new subterranean water sources for the Fernis. We hope to have wells dug within the next week, and our engineers will design and build an irrigation infrastructure for these people. After these people have regained their vigor, Wylings personnel will remain here to insure these people are provided what they need to create new lives for themselves. Schools. Medical supplies. Most importantly—” and here Wylings paused to give a stern accusing look at the audience behind the camera “—will be a communications system. These people were starving for weeks and had no way to let their cries be heard by the outside world. This is an unforgivable oversight.”
The oversight was clearly made by the humanitarian aid organization that had taken on the responsibility of feeding the starving Fernis. The organization tried to defend itself. “Every village in the Fernis region had shortwave radio, which we provided. It was a horrible happenstance that these radios became nonfunctional during these time of crisis.”
Actually, sneaking in and sabotaging the radios in every village had been step 2-B. Southeby had done the work himself, all in a single night, creeping into the villages, finding the weather-protected radio huts and creatively disabling each in a unique way. “I felt like a ninja!” he exclaimed to Wylings later.
“Glad you enjoyed yourself.”
“It wasn’t just that, either. It was the thrill of the making things happen. You know what I mean, Wylie? I killed a bunch of these savages any other place at any other time and nobody notices. I kill the right bunch at the right time, and bam! Global interest! I have to tell you, mate, this has been great fun. I owe you a debt of gratitude. No more puny ivory runs for me. I’m going into the business of African geopolitics.”
