Star of Africa

Chapter 45

‘There,’ Khosa said, and swung up an arm to point towards the sunset.

It was a moment before Ben spotted the distant speck in the sky, but by then there was already no doubt in his mind what he was going to see up there. The aircraft was still a few miles away, gently dropping altitude as it droned closer. The speck grew larger as they watched, then larger still. Coming right towards them. Even at this distance Ben could tell it was a sizeable plane, a big flying tank of a thing, broad in its wingspan and much larger than Kaprisky’s sleek private jet. An aircraft of that size coming in to land in the middle of nowhere, in a desert of rubble and scattered brush miles from any kind of airport, should have been an unreal, improbable sight.

But Ben was realising what he’d missed before.

Now he understood what the disused compound really was. It was much more than just an old abandoned military base for embattled government or rebel forces to hole up in during a civil war nobody talked about any more. It was the lack of any kind of smooth, level, metalled runway that had fooled him into never twigging until now that the place was an airfield. The broad avenue between the facing rows of buildings wasn’t any kind of drill or parade ground. It had been hammered out and levelled into a rough landing strip. Nothing like the one that he, Jeff and Tuesday had landed on at Obbia, which looked like Heathrow by comparison. Nothing you could remotely call an airport, not even in African terminology.

And Ben hadn’t reckoned either on the kind of plane you could land on a rough, rutted strip of compacted earth in the middle of the arid, rock-strewn arsehole of nowhere.

He hadn’t reckoned on a Dakota. Two mistakes in one. He was angry with himself for not thinking of it before.

It was the sound that gave it away, even before he recognised it by sight. Nothing like the ear-ripping high-decibel screech and whistle of an incoming jet. The thrumming, clattering rumble of the approaching plane sounded like a thousand pneumatic drills all pounding away at once. It sounded exactly like what it was, the roar of twin nine-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engines driving a pair of massive three-bladed propellers towards them out of the falling dusk. It sounded like something out of World War Two.

Because it was something out of World War Two, literally.

The Douglas DC-3 Dakota, or ‘Old Methuselah’ as it was often called by the pilots who both loved and hated it, was like no other plane ever built. The first one had rolled off the production line at the Douglas factory in Santa Monica in 1935 and the last one just ten years later at the close of the war. But in that short production period it had become legendary as the most versatile and durable airliner ever made, and quickly found useful service all over the planet. It was the only airliner still flying that could take off and land on runways of dirt and grass, making it the hot ticket for developing countries everywhere. The landing distance it required was much shorter than modern airliners, and could take off in little more than half that. It was also one of the toughest warbirds ever made. It could go anywhere, in any weather. It could fly on one engine if needed. Ben had heard of one US Air Force Dakota during WWII that had been riddled with over three thousand shells from Japanese fighters and not only reached base safely but been put back in service just hours later, patched up with canvas and glue. Despite its supposed maximum passenger load of just thirty-five, a hundred Vietnamese orphans had been crammed on board one Dakota that had scraped out of Saigon under heavy fire during the city’s evacuation in 1975.

Ben had only ever seen two of them in his life, one in the air over Sierra Leone many years ago, and another smashed into a mountainside high up in the Hindu Kush, not far from the Khyber Pass near the Afghanistan — Pakistan border, pillaged and looted for anything the local militias could strip out of it and reduced to little more than a skeleton. But he knew that hundreds of these living dinosaurs were still in daily use in Third World countries everywhere even after seventy-odd years of hard service, and that you could still pick up a battered but sturdy example for a couple of hundred thousand US dollars.

Jean-Pierre Khosa had apparently done just that.

Do not underestimate me, soldier. Ben was suddenly beginning to wonder if that was another mistake to add to his account. And he was wondering what other surprises the man had in store. It was a deeply uncomfortable thought.

The Dakota came down low and slow, a huge lumbering monster with the falling sun casting red glints along its fuselage, scarred and battered and dull olive green like the three helicopters in the compound, but dwarfing them completely in size. Over sixty feet long and almost a hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip. Its undercarriage was lowered, those two wheels so huge that they couldn’t be fully retracted below its wings, attached to massive hydraulic struts that canted forwards like the legs of an eagle swooping down on its prey.

The Dakota’s clattering roar filled Ben’s ears, and the hurricane from its propellers and slipstream filled the air with a storm of dust and loose particles of dirt whipped up from the sun-baked ground as it cleared the perimeter fence by a matter of feet and came down to earth in the broad open space between the buildings.

The huge wheels hit the dirt with a jarring crash and an explosion of dust. The aircraft juddered and bounced, the wings slewed at a crazy diagonal angle, and for a second Ben thought the pilot had come in too hard and fast, and that the starboard wingtip was going to plough a massive furrow into the ground and flip the whole plane over and round in a circle and tumble it over end to end, wreaking a giant trail of exploding carnage right through the middle of the compound.

But whoever was at the controls was a cool and experienced hand who must have done this a thousand times before. The Dakota dropped back from its erratic bounce into an even landing, its tail settling, its rear wheel touching down with hardly a bump. The aeroplane roared down the beaten-earth runway with its wings just a few yards clear of the buildings either side, making Ben and Khosa’s soldiers step back out of the great slap of wind and cover their eyes and noses against the choking dust. Khosa himself didn’t flinch as the giant wing passed right over his head. The Dakota roared on, past the parked helicopters and the fuel truck that Khosa’s men had, Ben now realised, tucked in close to the buildings to make way for its landing. The pilot backed off the throttle and the deafening roar of its engines rapidly subsided as the Dakota slowed.

Khosa watched with a beaming smile and his hands on his hips while the plane rolled by for another fifty yards, reached the open ground beyond the buildings and then began to taxi back round on itself in a wide circle, steering by its pivoting rear wheel, barely visible for the clouds of dust swirling around it like smoke. The Dakota rolled to a halt, stones crunching and popping under its gigantic front tyres. The engines shut down with a splutter, first one and then the other. The three-bladed props with their yellow-painted tips and silver nose-cones clattered to a standstill. The drifting dust began to settle back down to earth.

Khosa turned to face Ben, his demon’s face split by that beaming white smile of triumph. He pointed at the Dakota.

‘You want to know how we will return to my kingdom, soldier?’ Khosa said, laughing. ‘That is how.’

Ben looked at him. ‘I warned you. I hope you listened to me.’

‘Say goodbye to the world you have known, soldier. You are mine now. We leave at first light.’