The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 16

Aside from the fear of being murdered at any moment, by the end of his first day in captivity Jude was discovering that his biggest problem was going to be boredom. He was actually starting to look forward to Promise’s visits, not for the delicious rice-based concoction his kidnappers were feeding him, but just to have someone to harangue who couldn’t talk back, and probably didn’t understand a word of what Jude was saying even if he could have responded.

The routine come evening was exactly as before: Promise’s entrance was announced by the jangling of keys and rattling of locks, then Jude was made to step to the back of the cage to have his hands cuffed through the bars while the cage door was opened, his empty bowl and cup were removed and replaced with fresh food and water, if fresh was the word.

‘Hey, what about a napkin?’ Jude called to Promise.

No reply.

‘There’s got to be a Domino’s Pizza place nearby. Can you order me a pepperoni with extra cheese? Get an extra-large and we can share. I won’t tell Masango if you won’t.’

No reply.

‘Sorry I can’t offer you a tip for this wonderful service. I seem to have mislaid my wallet.’ No reply.

The worst was the bucket. Jude loathed having to be mucked out like an animal. But at least the bucket’s exchange for an empty one made the atmosphere of the hut more pleasant for a while. After Promise had finished his chores and closed him in for the last time that day, Jude sat cross-legged on the floor of the cage and gulped down his food with the tablespoon. Eat when you can, sleep when you can. It was getting dark outside, and he polished off his dinner quickly before he lost the light from the window.

But there had to be more to do than eating, sleeping and passively waiting for tomorrow. With no idea how long he might be kept prisoner in this stinking hut, he was determined not to let his strength ebb and his body start to waste away. He stood up, kicked aside his empty dish, and dropped to the floor on palms and toes to knock out twenty press-ups. Then twenty more, and twenty more again, enough to work up a sweat in the humidity of the hut.

He sprang to his feet and looked up. There was still just enough light coming in to make out the steel bars overhead. The cage roof was about eight feet high. Jude stood five-ten, an inch or so shorter than his father, but it was an easy jump to reach the bars, grab hold and let himself dangle. He hung there for a few moments, letting his muscles and spine stretch out, then crossed his ankles and bent his knees slightly, and pulled himself up until he could kiss the cool steel bars. Up and down. Up and down. Ten vertical raises, a few seconds’ rest, then ten more, and again, over and over until he was breathing hard and the sweat dripped down and splashed the cage floor like rain.

On the last raise he kicked his feet up, hooked his toes through the gap between the bars and let go with his hands, now tentatively hanging upside down from his feet. Six months of practice at this, he thought, and maybe he could get a job in a circus. Roll up, roll up, see the Amazing Monkey Boy in action. Jude laughed at the idea. Laughter made him feel a little better. Or maybe he was already losing his mind. And it was only the second night.

He soon found out that hanging from his feet made for a great stomach workout if he tried to jerk his body back up to reach his toes. He managed it two or three times, but it was hard work. He was panting. The whole cage was rattling with every rep.

Jude stopped and hung there upside down, frowning at the realisation that this was something new. Why was the cage rattling? It had felt solid and immovable before.

He bent his body upwards one more time, grabbed two parallel bars and let his feet drop down, then inched along the bars, one hand at a time, until he’d squirmed his way as far as the corner. It was still rattling like an old iron bed frame. As he wiggled his weight around and swung his legs, he could tell where it was loose. He braced himself against the two adjacent cage walls and let go with one hand so that he could examine the joints.

‘Hello,’ he muttered to himself. The joints weren’t welded, as he’d initially assumed. As he now realised, the cage was bolted together out of sections.

In fact, he reflected as he groped about in the darkness, it was remarkably similar in construction to the dive cages he’d experienced in New Zealand, during his epic and unforgettable holiday spent diving in waters full of large, hungry sharks. The sections of stainless-steel cage had been flat-packed on the deck of the boat. It was Jude’s nature to muck in and get his hands dirty, and he’d helped the crew guys bolt it all together. One of them, Nicko, had told him that if you didn’t use the exact right size of bolt to match the hole it passed through, it didn’t take much vibration and movement to make the structure work itself loose and start flexing at the joints. Not what you wanted to happen, when you were being offered as a potential snack to a thirty-foot Great White.

Jude soon discovered the bolt that had come loose. Maybe the Africans hadn’t used the right size for the hole. A torch would have been useful at this moment. Having to rely on feel alone, he fingered the loose bolthead. Its hexagonal faces were smooth to the touch and felt shiny, maybe galvanised or zinc-plated. He thought it felt a little smaller than the bolts that had held the shark cage together. Jude was good at remembering numbers, and recalled that those had needed a thirteen-millimetre spanner to tighten up. But he had no way to measure the size of these bolts, any more than he had anything to use as a spanner to turn them with.

He let himself drop to the floor with a soft thud. His fingers were stiff from all the dangling, and the healing cut on his palm where Scagnetti had gashed him with a knife was sore and sticky, as if it had opened up again. But the pain didn’t matter to him as he stood thinking for a long minute.

Then it came to him. Of course! He’d no idea if it would work, but it had to be worth a go.

He went over to his discarded food bowl, hunted around in the darkness and found the tablespoon. It was flimsy metal and easy to bend, but was it strong enough? Would it snap? He folded it into a U, then squeezed the U into a tighter shape, like a hairpin. There was enough springiness to the metal for it to bend without snapping.

‘No harm in trying,’ he muttered. He clamped the bent spoon in his teeth, then craned his neck upwards to peer at the darkness, bent his knees and sprang up once more. On the first blind attempt his fingers hit the bars painfully, but on the second he got a solid grip and started working his way to the corner where the loose joint was. Like before, he wedged himself into the corner using his feet to brace himself. Taking the bent spoon from his mouth he reached out carefully with it towards the loose bolthead. He was scared the spoon might drop, hit the cage floor and bounce out of reach through the bars, where Promise would find it the following day and know the prisoner had been up to no good. Gripping it tightly, he fumbled and scraped until he’d managed to close the U-shape of the bent spoon like a primitive kind of pincer around the bolthead and squeezed to tighten it against the flats. It seemed to get a purchase. He twisted it, and felt the bolt turn, and a flash of hope went off like a magnesium flare inside his heart.

It took a long time and a lot of impatient twiddling, but eventually he was able to get the bolt loosened enough to undo the rest of the way with his fingers. When it slid out, he tucked it carefully in his pocket.

One down. How many more to go before he could detach the whole roof section of the cage and wriggle out? In darkness, not so easy to judge. But he had all night.

Jude spent the next two hours working as quietly as he could, listening out for the guard patrols that he knew came by occasionally through the night, and praying that the walls of the hut would muffle the metallic clinking and scraping sounds he was making. The cage grew more and more rattly as he hunted out and loosened each successive ceiling bolt in turn, clinging like an ape to the ceiling and gritting his teeth as he worked.

Then, at last, with a silent whoop of triumph, he pocketed the last bolt he needed to remove. He’d left two bolts in place at one end, so that the roof section was hinged like a lid and could be raised and lowered without danger of it falling off altogether with an almighty crash that would be sure to alarm the whole place and bring Promise running over with his Uzi.

At least, that was the theory. When it came to actually raising the lid, it was much heavier than Jude had anticipated and it took him a full thirty minutes to figure out how he could do it, by clamping himself like a limpet to the bars and using his head and shoulders to lift the ceiling up. He managed to get his head out first, then wriggled his upper torso through the gap with the weight of the ceiling panel crushing him; for a moment he began to panic, thinking he was trapped and they’d find him like this tomorrow, stuck like a snared animal. But then he was through, managing to scramble out with only a few bruises.

He let the lid of the cage down as gently as he could, winced as he pinched a couple of fingers, then slithered down the bars on the outside and dropped to the floor.

He was out! It was a thrilling achievement. But he was still locked inside a metal hut with a barred window. He stepped over to it, feeling the coolness of the night air drying the sweat on his face. He gazed out into the night. Nothing but darkness and silence.

The window bars were solid and riveted to the metal frame, but a quick inspection of the seams of the hut itself revealed that they were bolted together like the cage. He still had his improvised spanner, and thought about dismantling the whole hut — but that would take him so long he’d still be at it when Promise came to check on him in the morning. Abandoning that idea, he paced around the inside walls until he realised that the floor was nothing but compacted earth and that maybe he could dig his way out.

That was, if he’d had anything to dig with. The bent spoon wouldn’t do him much good there.

But something else might. Jude hurried back to the cage, slipped an arm through the bars and fetched out his metal food bowl, careful not to let it clatter. Maybe a steel dog dish wasn’t a bad thing to have as crockery, after all. A few experimental digs at the earth floor with its rim convinced him that he could do it. He quickly decided that the best place to burrow his way out was directly opposite the door, behind the cage, where the dirt was softest.

With his heart pounding and the sweat running in rivulets, he hacked and chopped and scraped. Working like a madman, in less than half an hour he’d managed to excavate a rathole under the metal wall that he could get his arm through. Twenty more minutes of frenzied digging, and he could poke his head and shoulders out. With a wriggle and a heave, he forced his whole body through the hole.

He was free.