The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 14

It didn’t matter to Ben that those about to die weren’t his friends. He’d seen so much blood spilled already at the hands of Khosa’s army that he could stand to see no more — not on his watch, at any rate. And not spilled by children. He strode up to Xulu, pressed a hand to the captain’s pointing arm and firmly lowered it.

Xulu stared at him in astonishment. A stunned silence fell over the assembled troops. The only sound was the gibbering of one of the prisoners, who had fallen to his knees by the wire fence. The other three were silent, seemingly accepting of their fate. At least shooting was quicker than being hacked to bits by blunt machetes.

‘There aren’t going to be any executions in this army,’ Ben said to Xulu, quietly, so that the soldiers wouldn’t hear. ‘Not while I’m the General’s military advisor. You made your point. Fun’s over. So tell those boys to stand down, nice and easy, and let these poor bastards live.’

Xulu’s face was a trembling mask of rage. His eyes boggled at Ben and he could barely talk for indignation. ‘You speak to me this way in front of my own men?’

‘Is there some other way to speak to a sadistic moron who enjoys watching unarmed men being executed in cold blood?’ Ben said. ‘Would you understand that better, Xulu? If so, just let me know and I’ll be sure to speak that way instead.’

‘I will report this to General Khosa,’ Xulu hissed.

‘Of course you will. That’s the first thing any maggoty little snitch would do. But in the meantime, Khosa’s not here to protect you. It’s just you and me. So either give that order to stand down, or I’ll do it myself. Then I’ll explain to Khosa that this isn’t how things are done in a proper army.’

The prisoner was still blubbering in terror. The firing squad were still uncertainly aiming their weapons, but with their eyes off the condemned men and turned questioningly towards their captain. Their captain, however, was too busy staring speechlessly at the taller blond-haired white man to give them any direction.

‘Can’t make a decision?’ Ben said. ‘You’re an unworthy officer, Xulu. You’re not fit to captain a fishing boat, let alone a military unit. I’m taking over command here.’ He addressed the firing squad and yelled, ‘Lower your weapons!’ Then repeated it in Swahili, to make the command doubly clear. The youngsters hesitated, but did what they were told.

‘I knew,’ Xulu said, looking at Ben with narrowed eyes and nodding to himself with quiet triumph, as though he’d been vindicated. ‘I was sure of it, and now I know I was right. You are a coward, soldier. You are not a warrior at all. What kind of warrior is afraid of blood?’

Ben looked at him calmly for a second or two. Then he punched him in the mouth, fast and straight.

It wasn’t a hard blow. Not enough to take his head off his shoulders, or even to knock him out. But it was enough to mash Xulu’s lips against his gold teeth and spray blood all over his chin and the front of his uniform. Xulu went down on his backside and sat there in the dirt, touching a hand to his burst lips and gaping in horror at the red on his fingers. One of his gold teeth had come loose and was lying on the ground next to him.

Jeff and Tuesday were staring at Ben. So much for playing it cool and pretending to be cooperating, Jeff must have been thinking.

‘I have no problem whatsoever with blood,’ Ben told Xulu. ‘If it belongs to the right person. You wanted to see some, there you have it. Now get up on your feet and try to act like a man for a change.’

Xulu struggled upright with a hand clamped to his bleeding mouth. He fired a look of hatred at Ben and beat his inglorious retreat to the armoured personnel carrier, gesticulating at the soldiers and leaving a trail of blood spots on the ground as he went. He disappeared inside the hatch and the vehicle took off with a roar.

‘There goes our ride,’ Jeff said.

Tuesday watched the APC go off into the distance, back towards the city. ‘You’ve made a friend there, Ben,’ he commented. ‘He can’t get back to the city soon enough, and the second he does he’s going straight to Khosa. Just like he said he would.’

‘I’m not worried about it,’ Ben said, and he meant it. Khosa wasn’t going to harm Jude over a minor infraction. For as long as he believed his captives were of use to him, his hostage was too precious a commodity to sacrifice for the likes of Xulu.

Ben’s judgement was right, in that respect. But he soon discovered that he’d been wrong not to worry.

A squad of Khosa’s personal guard was waiting for them back at the hotel. Stepping down from the truck with Jeff and Tuesday, Ben found himself under arrest. Resistance would have been foolish. With six Chinese submachine guns at his back, he was marched inside the building and taken down a series of corridors to a ground-floor office he hadn’t seen before. A male secretary in khakis was one-finger-typing on an antique PC at a corner desk.

Seated behind a larger desk in the middle of the room, hands laid flat in front of him and drumming his fingers on the tabletop, was Khosa. At Khosa’s right stood Xulu, with a lower lip crusted in black blood and so swollen that he could hardly manage a twisted leer of satisfaction.

Ben had faced disciplinary proceedings before now. He walked into the room wearing the same brass face he’d worn when grilled by SAS superiors after the Basra affair, among other acts of insubordination that had dotted, and occasionally threatened to mar, his military career. He stopped a foot from the table. There was a chair, but he wasn’t invited to sit and remained standing. He looked coolly at Khosa, ignoring Xulu and the rest of the soldiers.

The General got right to the point. ‘Captain Xulu has filed a formal complaint against you, soldier. He claims that you disobeyed a direct command, and struck him. Is this true?’

‘It’s only half true,’ Ben said. ‘I disobeyed no command. I acted to prevent him from carrying out an order that I considered immoral and unsoldierly. Then I knocked his bloody teeth out. Which I’ll do again, as often as necessary, as part of my task to turn this rabble of yours into a proper army. I won’t be a party to acts of unwarranted cruelty against unarmed and defenceless prisoners.’

Khosa drummed his fingers some more, pursed his lips, glanced up at Xulu, then let out a heavy sigh. ‘I am displeased, soldier. Displeased, and disappointed. You are still new here. I can understand that our methods are unfamiliar to you, but such displays of disobedience are bad for the morale of my men, and cannot be tolerated. Perhaps the punishment I have in mind for you will teach you to show more respect towards your superiors.’

‘I don’t consider Captain Xulu my superior,’ Ben said. ‘I consider him a worthless piece of shit who will get what’s coming to him too.’

‘Then what is needed here, soldier, is a lesson in humility. I hope for your sake that you learn from it. Take him away.’

The soldiers took Ben’s arms and wheeled him out of the room and back up the corridor. He could have taken the whole bunch of them down with his bare hands and then used their own weapons on them to make sure they didn’t get up again. Instead he bit his tongue and let himself be marched along. He still refused to believe that Khosa would hurt Jude for this. The hurt would be on him alone. They would probably beat him. Fists, sticks, or a whip, he didn’t care. He would take their hurt without a word, and when the time was right he would revisit it on them a hundredfold.

They took him outside through a side exit, into a bare brick alleyway where an open-backed Toyota technical was waiting. One of the soldiers produced a black cloth hood, grinning. He rammed it down over Ben’s head, and then they bundled him roughly into the back of the pickup truck. He felt the suspension rock as they clambered aboard with him. Then felt the hard kiss of gun muzzles pressing against his chest and head. The engine roared, and the vehicle took off.

If they planned to beat him half to death, they apparently intended to do it somewhere private. Somewhere they didn’t want him to see the way to. Twice the vehicle slowed to a crawl, each time Ben heard voices and the clatter of gates. They were taking him outside the perimeter, but he couldn’t understand why.

He counted the minutes: at least twenty of them passed by before the vehicle crunched to a halt for the third time, rough hands dragged him out of the back and dumped him on the ground. The soldiers laughed as they kicked and shoved him across what felt like ten or fifteen yards of stony earth. Then one of them whipped the hood from his head, and he caught a glimpse of a large, gaping hole in the ground in front of him before a powerful shove from behind drove him down into it. He fell, slithering, twisting, fingers raking through loose soil for a grip. The hole seemed to swallow him up as he fell deeper and deeper, desperately digging his knees and elbows into its sides to try to slow himself down. For a few instants he thought he was going to keep falling forever; then he hit the solid bottom with a thump that drove the air from his lungs. He blinked dirt out of his eyes, gasping, and looked up at the circle of sky at the mouth of the hole. He’d fallen maybe twenty feet. A couple of faces peered down at him, and he heard laughter.

He got to his knees and groped around him in the semi-darkness. The hole was bottle-shaped, widening out at the bottom with enough room for him to have lain down stretched out if he’d wanted to. The shape of its walls made it impossible to climb out. Try too hard, and you’d only pull down enough earth to bury yourself alive. That was when Ben realised they planned to keep him in here for a while. It wasn’t just a hole in the ground. It was a primitive dungeon.

He got to his feet, looked up and heard the sound of an engine that made him think at first that the soldiers were leaving. But then the sound of more voices told him that a second vehicle had arrived. He craned his neck upwards but couldn’t see any movement, only the circular window of sky far above him.

Ben involuntarily ducked as a dark shape filled the mouth of the hole and came tumbling down. He pressed his back against the earth wall to avoid whatever it was landing on him. It hit the ground at his feet with a crunch.

It was the dead body of an African. One of the prisoners he’d tried to save from the firing squad.

Three more bodies tumbled down the hole, piling up at the bottom in a grisly heap. All four had had their throats cut, their eyes gouged out and their hands and feet chopped off. Perhaps not in that order.

There was more activity above. Ben caught a glimpse of movement, heard the rev of an engine and saw a dark shadow pass overhead as one of the trucks drove over the mouth of the hole. It kept on going. Ben heard the clink of chains. Something heavy being dragged along the ground, obscuring the circular patch of sky like an eclipse spreading over the face of the sun. It was a steel plate or large manhole cover, and they were towing it into place to close off the mouth of his prison.

Sealing him off. No escape.

Suddenly, the dungeon was plunged into pitch blackness.

And after that, Ben heard nothing more. He was alone with the dead.