The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 18

Eighteen hours after they threw him in the dungeon along with the hacked-up corpses, they came back to release him. The pickup truck came lurching over the rough ground with six of Khosa’s soldiers aboard, and pulled up next to the mouth of the hole. In the back of the truck was a coil of sturdy rope, to yank out one thoroughly defeated and humbled white prisoner who had dared to defy their Captain Xulu.

But, like the biblical myrrh-bearers who discovered the empty tomb of Christ, they were in for a shock. The cast-iron plate covering the hole had been moved aside. The mouth of the dungeon shaft was a mess of freshly dug earth. The hole itself appeared to have been completely filled in. And their prisoner was sitting on the ground nearby, relaxing in the fresh morning air as he waited for them. He looked like a wild man, every inch of him from head to toe plastered and smeared with dirt as if he’d crawled through solid ground to reach the surface. This impossible feat terrified them, and the piercing blue eyes that gazed at them out of the mask of mud terrified them even more.

Ben rose to his feet as they stumbled out of the truck and uncertainly pointed their rifles at him. ‘Hello, boys. What kept you?’

In fact, he hadn’t expected them to return so soon. It had been less than an hour since he’d crawled out of the hole. Just long enough for him to do what he needed. Now that they were back, the message was clear: Nothing you can do will stop me. No prison will hold me. I am in control. I own you. And the looks on the soldiers’ faces told him that they were reading it loud and clear.

As for the dungeon, it no longer existed. Nothing remained but a grave, at whose deep bottom Ben’s dead cellmates had been buried sometime during the long and very busy night. Using a flat piece of stone as his tool, he’d steadily chiselled and scraped at the walls of his dungeon until the dirt was up to his knees. Once he’d stamped it all flat, the floor had been raised about six inches and he was ready to add a new layer. He’d kept at it without a break. After four hours, his gruesome companions were beneath his feet. After twelve, he was more than halfway up the shaft of the hole, where it was narrowest and therefore easiest to fill up. No water, little air. Sweat stinging his eyes and dirt and grit crunching between his teeth as he worked. Five more hours of gruelling work, and he’d finally heaved the iron manhole cover aside and hauled himself out into the sunlight like a revenant.

Escape hadn’t been his plan. Not yet. The time for that would come soon enough.

Much more wary of him now than before, the soldiers hooded him and put him in the truck. Thirty minutes later, he was back before General Khosa, dropping bits of dried earth all over the office floor.

‘My men are all talking about you, soldier,’ Khosa said, leaning back in his chair and puffing thoughtfully on a cigar. On the desk in front of him lay an attaché case with an open handcuff bracelet chained to its handle. Ben wondered if the case contained what he thought it did.

Khosa continued, ‘They say you can work miracles. Your appearance tells me that their story is true.’

Ben shrugged. ‘Just felt like some fresh air.’

‘Then you were not planning on leaving us?’

‘Not without my son,’ Ben said. ‘Or my friends. If you had either, you’d understand.’

‘You perplex me, soldier. I hope for your sake that we have seen the end of your rebellious behaviour. Next time, I might have to order my men to pour concrete into the hole. And perhaps your son and your friends could join you. What do you think?’

‘I think I’d like a shower, some breakfast and a change of clothes,’ Ben said.

‘Granted. But first, let me tell you why I decided to release you early from your punishment. I have a new task for you.’

‘Teaching your officers how to wipe their own arses? Sorry, not my concern.’

Khosa stood and walked to the window. The office overlooked the flower gardens and the street, where Ben could see some activity taking place. Troops were massing outside, and a line of three heavy transport trucks had parked up in front of the hotel. Something was happening, and whatever it was, Ben didn’t like it.

‘You say I have no friends, soldier. This is false, as I think you already know. More loyal followers are joining me every day. But when you say I have no children, this is true. I love children. The younger generation of my country are its future.’

‘And what a rosy future they have in store,’ Ben said.

‘I wish to embrace this generation as though they were my own offspring,’ Khosa went on, with a grandiose air. ‘From all over the nation, I want them to flock to me. I will feed them, clothe them, nurture them as their real parents could never do. Today will see the foundation of a special new division of my army, made up entirely of children.’

‘The Khosa Youth,’ Ben said. ‘That’s a novel idea.’

The General swept away from the window and pointed at him with the cigar. ‘Yes. That is a very good name. The Khosa Youth. I like it.’

‘Seems to me that the average age of your troops is already a bit low,’ Ben said. ‘Are the old men of fourteen or fifteen not good enough anymore?’

‘The younger the better,’ Khosa said, puffing a huge cloud of smoke. ‘They cost little to feed, take up less room to house, learn fast and are easy to control. But that is not all. A boy of eight can fire a rifle and kill his enemy just as effectively as a fighter twice or three times his age. Even more effectively, as men will hesitate to return fire on one so young, and that hesitation is what costs them their life. All across the country are many thousands of boys aged between eight and twelve who are being denied the chance of glory in my service. It is time that we put a stop to this waste of resources. You, soldier, will have the honour and privilege of helping to gather the first wave of recruits to my new regiment.’

Ben said nothing. He so badly wanted to snap Khosa’s neck that his fingers were twitching.

Khosa walked over to a desk where a map had been spread out. ‘Here is where we begin,’ he declared, prodding the paper. ‘There is a school for orphans in a place called Kbali, three hours’ drive to the south. The school is run by a French Christian missionary and a dozen or so nuns. My scouts report that there are more than a hundred children there, none older than twelve years. You will accompany a division of soldiers under the command of Captain Xulu. Your orders are to take the orphanage, deal as necessary with any resistance, and bring me these hundred children, so that we can induct them into the army and begin their training immediately. Is this all clear to you, soldier?’

‘Oh, it’s clear, all right,’ Ben said.

Khosa glanced at the gold ingot on his wrist. ‘I am pleased. And now I must be leaving. I have an important rendezvous and I do not wish to be late.’

‘Your helicopter is waiting, Excellency,’ the secretary informed him.

And so it began. Ben wanted to check in on Jeff and Tuesday, but it wasn’t to be. He was taken directly from Khosa’s office to a waiting Jeep, which whisked him several city blocks to a large, slab-sided four-storey building on a square he’d never seen before. He quickly discovered what it was being used for. From the ground floor up, the whole building had been subdivided into tiny wood-partitioned rooms that served as dormitories for Khosa’s troops: bunks stacked three high, nine to a room with barely space to turn around.

Ben was shown to a rudimentary bathroom and given exactly five minutes to wash off the dried dirt that caked him all over. When he came out, he was thrown a new uniform of mismatched combat clothing and then led to a rough-and-ready canteen with grease-streaked walls and rows of bench tables, where a scowling African in a filthy apron gave him a look of disgust and a bowl of boiled chicken mixed in with some kind of sticky mess made from cassava flour. Ben had had worse breakfasts. He wolfed it down without tasting it, a skill he’d learned in his own army, long ago. Three minutes later, he was marched back outside. The convoy was departing. They weren’t the only ones leaving the city in a hurry. Ben glanced skywards and saw a chopper flying off into the distance. Khosa, off to attend to more dirty business.

Ben hoped the helicopter crashed and burned in the jungle.

The troop transporters were rugged six-wheel-drive Urals with huge knobbly tyres, canvas tie-down canopies and metal benches in the back. The two at the rear of the line were empty, for the purposes of bringing home Khosa’s youthful new recruits. Ben was put into the lead truck, crammed in with thirty other men, the only one of them not armed. He received a few suspicious looks from the soldiers, but they quickly ignored him. Through a gap in the canopy Ben caught a glimpse of Captain Xulu strutting towards the front of the truck, sporting a swollen lip that made it look as if he was pouting. Then they were off.

The military convoy rumbled noisily through the streets and across the no-man’s land separating the city from the perimeter fences. The gates were already open for them and they streamed through, obscuring the gate guards behind billows of dust. The smooth concrete roadway became a rutted track as the procession of vehicles was swallowed up by the jungle.

For the next three hours the truck swayed and rocked and bumped and lurched. Ben had sat in a hundred army trucks in a dozen countries, though never before as a noncombatant observer. He barely registered the rough ride, the dust and flies, the odour of thirty sweaty troops or the sweltering heat that built and built as midday approached. He slouched back on the bench, leaning against the canvas, closed his eyes and became very still. Outwardly, he might have looked as if he was sleeping. Inwardly, his mind was burning up with thoughts of what he’d seen that day.

The hour he’d spent between escaping from his makeshift dungeon and being picked up by the soldiers hadn’t been spent idly. He’d made the most of the opportunity to explore his surroundings alone and unobserved. The hole was situated among scrubland, through which a dirt road snaked roughly southwards away from the city perimeter. That was where Khosa had let it slip that the hydroelectric station that powered the city was located. Ben had spotted it from the top of a thornbush-covered rise, where he’d lain flat and observed some interesting activity.

The hydro plant straddled a wide river. Like the city itself, it was startlingly modern and new: a massive concrete dam holding back countless millions of tons of murky water on its eastern side. On its eastern side, six enormous waterfalls gushed in spectacular torrents of white foam and rainbow-hued spray from sluices in the dam, dropping eighty feet like miniature Victoria Falls before the river continued on its journey east.

It was a seriously impressive installation. Ben couldn’t begin to estimate what it must have cost to build. Now more than ever, he was wondering about the strange partnership Khosa seemed to enjoy with his Chinese business associates. Clearly, even more Far Eastern money was being invested into this place than Ben had first realised. But why? He had no idea.

Until he gazed a little further south, past the plant, beyond the far side of the river. That was when the beginnings of understanding began to dawn on him.

The dam was more than just a dam. Its concrete spine doubled as a bridge, with heavily guarded gates at both ends to control vehicles crossing the river. And over the bridge, visible here and there through the thicket of trees that lined the riverside, was a long stretch of security fence that protected what Khosa had described as ‘the industrial zone’.

Ben could have done with a pair of powerful binoculars to observe the place in better detail, and take a closer look at the movements of men and machinery that were happening over there. But he saw enough.

They were mining.