The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 2

At various and frequent points throughout the ups and downs of what was turning out to be an unusually eventful existence, Ben Hope was in the habit of pausing to take stock of his life. To evaluate his current situation, to consider the sequences of events — planned or not — that had got him there, to ponder what lay ahead in the immediate and longer-term future, and to reflect on how he was doing generally.

All things considered, he had always thought of himself as being a pretty normal type of guy, and so he figured that this stocktaking exercise must be something most normal folks did, even though most normal folks probably didn’t tend to find themselves in the kinds of situations that invariably seemed to keep cropping up in his path. Just like most normal folks didn’t have to do the kinds of things he had to do in order to get out of those situations in one piece.

In his distant past, Ben’s stocktaking had involved thoughts like: Okay, so passing selection for 22 SAS might be the toughest challenge you’ve ever taken on, but you will not fail. You can do this. You will be fine.

Many years later it had been more along the lines of: All right, so you’ve walked away from the military career you struggled so hard to build and the future looks uncertain. But it’s a big world out there. You have skills. You will make it.

Or, some years further down the line again: So she’s left you for good this time, and you feel like shit. But you won’t always feel this way. You’ll survive, like you always do.

If there was one thing Ben had learned, it was this: that wherever the tide might carry him, whatever fate might throw at him, however desperate his situation, however impossible the task facing him, however dark his future prospects or slim his chances of survival, he would live to fight another day. He would not be defeated or deterred, not by anything, not by anyone. That spirit was what had driven him, bolstered him, enabled him to be the man he was. Or the man he’d thought he was.

But not now. Not anymore.

Everything had changed.

Because at this moment, as he sat there helpless and surrounded by aggressive men with guns, slumped uncomfortably on the dirty open flatbed of an old army truck with his knees drawn up in front of him and his head resting on his hands and every jolt of the big wheels and stiff suspension on this rough road somewhere in the middle of the Congo jarring through his spine, he was fighting a rising black tide of emptiness.

If there was a way out of this one, the plan had yet to come to him. And if there was a tomorrow, it wasn’t one that he was sure he wanted to face.

Sitting next to Ben, staring silently into space with a pensive frown, was his trusted old friend, Jeff Dekker, with whom he’d survived so many narrow scrapes in the past and come through in one piece. Beside Jeff was the tough young Jamaican ex-British army trooper named Tuesday Fletcher, on whom Ben had quickly learned he could absolutely depend.

But Ben was barely even aware of their presence. All he could think about — all that really mattered to him — was that his son Jude Arundel, just at the point in their troubled relationship where it looked as if they were finally bonding, was lost to him and there wasn’t a single thing Ben could do about it. And that riding happily at the front of the irregular militia convoy speeding along this dusty road, wearing a self-satisfied grin and probably smoking another of his huge cigars in victory, was the man who had taken Jude from him.

That man’s name was Jean-Pierre Khosa. Known as ‘the General’ to the army of heavily armed Congolese fighters who both feared and loyally served him, Khosa had every reason to be smiling. Most men would be, when they were carrying inside their pocket a stolen diamond worth countless sums of money and there was nobody to stop them from gaining every bit of power that wealth like that could afford.

Ben knew little about Khosa, but he knew enough, and had seen enough, for the seeds of doubt inside his own heart to grow into a chilling conviction that here, now, at last, was an enemy he couldn’t defeat. That Khosa could beat him.

And that maybe Khosa had already won.

Khosa seemed to know it, too.

There was no telling how many miles they’d driven through this jungle, coming across no sign of human habitation for hour after bruising, spine-jarring, mind-numbing hour. Ben had lost his watch before the start of the journey, and with it all track of time, except for the position of the sun which told him it would soon be evening again. They’d been travelling like this all day, and most of the night before with only a short stop in the middle of nowhere, for the troops to rest, brew coffee and gulp down a bowl of nondescript dried meat, beans, and rice. Ben hadn’t been hungry but he’d taken what he was offered. Military wisdom, left over from his past. Eat when you can, sleep when you can, preserve your strength.

They’d come a long way since then, and they were still in the middle of nowhere. There was an awful lot of nowhere around these parts.

The truck in which Ben and his friends were passengers was a dozen or so vehicles back from the spearhead of the convoy. To the rear, the long procession of armoured pickup trucks and Jeeps stretched out far in their wake like a cobra winding its way between the verdant thickets of wide-bladed leaves and tangled shrubbery that overhung the track and formed a tunnel overhead, blotting out much of the harsh sunlight that would otherwise have been cooking them inside their vehicles. Ben had counted thirty-five vehicles behind them when they’d set off, but the tail end of the snake had soon become obscured by the plume of dust thrown up by so many chunky off-road tyres pounding the rutted, sunbaked surface.

The dirt road seemed to go on and on forever, hardly changing. Now and then they would cross a rickety river bridge, and now and then the endless forest would break to offer views of sweeping plains and mountain valleys and mist-shrouded peaks in the distance. The Congo was a vast territory the size of most of Western Europe’s countries combined, but with barely any paved roads to connect it together and even less chance of running into any kind of major traffic, let alone a contingent of police or government troops. The authorities had the good sense to keep to the cities and give outlying areas a wide berth. Khosa’s small army rode through the jungle as if they owned the place — and to all intents and purposes they did. They were making no secret of their presence as they roared along to the soundtrack of angry African rap music that was blasting from a boombox wired to PA speakers somewhere back along the line, with all the aggressive confidence of two hundred or more pepped-up and hot-blooded young men with enough military hardware to level a town and the will to deploy it at the drop of a hat.

Ben was suddenly aware that Jeff Dekker was watching him, and glanced up to meet his friend’s gaze. Jeff’s face, his dark hair, and the DPM combat jacket he was wearing were all caked in dust. He looked weary and careworn, but there was a twinkle in his eye and his smile was irrepressible. Jeff was like that.

‘Mate, it’s going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?’

Ben said nothing. He tried to smile back, but his face felt numb.

‘Jude’ll be all right,’ Jeff said. ‘He’s as tough as his old man. Tougher.’

Ben didn’t reply. He appreciated his friend’s attempt to reassure him. But he didn’t believe a word he was saying.

‘We’ll get out of this,’ Jeff said. ‘We’ll find him. Hear me? Wherever these bastards have taken him, we’ll find him.’

Ben remained silent. Finding people was something he’d done a lot of in his time. He thought about all the kidnap victims he’d saved in the past, during the years between leaving the military and going into business with Jeff, when he’d called himself a ‘crisis response consultant’ — that catch-all phrase that didn’t quite do justice to the things he’d had to do or the methods he’d employed to help people who needed it.

Many of those he’d rescued had been children. All of them had been someone’s loved one. All of them strangers to him, and yet he’d risked his own life — and taken a good many others — to preserve theirs. And now, the victim incarcerated out there somewhere in conditions Ben didn’t even want to imagine was one of only two people in the world he could call his kin, and he was utterly powerless to help.

Ben couldn’t close out of his head the image of the last time he’d seen Jude, being forced at gunpoint into a black Mercedes limousine and taken away by a well-dressed African named César Masango. General Jean-Pierre Khosa called Masango his ‘political attaché’. Ben could think of better terms to describe him.

Kidnapper. Gangster. Walking dead man. That was just three.

‘Where we are going, you will be too busy to look after your son,’ Khosa had said as Masango took Jude. ‘So my friend César will be looking after him now.’

And that had been it. Jude was gone. Where he was now, Ben had no way of knowing.

And even though it had been only a matter of hours ago, it seemed like weeks had gone by. That final image of Jude disappearing into the car was tearing Ben’s mind apart. Half of him wanted to forget it, erase it, pretend it never happened. The other half of him needed to cling to it, like a fading photograph of a loved one that, once gone, would take the memory of that person with it.

‘I’ll come for you.’ Those had been his last words before they’d parted. It was a promise that Ben did not know if he could keep.

Ben wondered whether he’d ever see Jude again.

Jeff must have been able to tell from Ben’s expression that the reassurance wasn’t working. The optimism seemed to drain from him. When he spoke again, his tone was sullen. ‘It’s all my fault this happened to Jude. Hadn’t been for me, he’d never have set foot on that fucking ship in the first—’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben cut in before Jeff could finish. He’d said it before, and he’d say it again. Ben knew all about the ravages of a guilty conscience from his own past. Come what may, he didn’t want Jeff to bear the responsibility for what had happened. When Jeff had pulled strings with his contacts to get Jude the crewman gig with the American merchant vessel MV Svalgaard Andromeda on the East Africa run from Salalah in Oman to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he couldn’t have known that the ship would be attacked. Any more than he could have known that one of its secret passengers, a crook named Pender, was carrying a stolen diamond bigger than a man’s fist, which ruthless killers would do anything to acquire. Events had unfolded from there the way they had, nobody could have done anything to prevent them, and only one man still living could be held responsible for the things that had taken place.

Khosa. Ben had the man’s face pinpointed in his mind like a sniper’s target in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And what a face it was. A demon’s face, bearing the hideous tribal scars that you couldn’t look at without a shiver of apprehension. But as evil as he looked, Khosa’s lunatic mind was the thing Ben feared most.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben repeated to Jeff.

One of the soldiers guarding them in the back of the truck reached across with the barrel of his AK-47 and jabbed Ben painfully in the ribs with it. Like many of Khosa’s fighters he was a young guy, no more than twenty or so. He had a red bandana tied around his head and was wearing a faded Legion of the Damned T-shirt with an ammunition belt for a heavy machine gun draped around his lean shoulders like a fashion accessory.

‘Quiet! No talking!’ the young trooper yelled. English was taking over from French as the main European language in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the militia troops spoke it, or something close to it. That made it difficult to have any kind of a private conversation; all the more so when conversation was forbidden altogether.

Ben slapped the rifle barrel away. ‘Watch how you speak to me, sonny. You’re addressing General Khosa’s military advisor.’

Which, technically, was true. That was the essence of the blackmail deal between Ben and the General: in return for Jude’s safety, whenever they got to wherever the hell they were going, Ben was to begin his new role of training Khosa’s troops and impart to them his military skills, with Jeff and Tuesday as his second- and third-in-command. Train them for what purpose, exactly, Ben didn’t yet know. It wasn’t a prospect he relished, but right now his agreement to Khosa’s terms was the only thing keeping them all alive.

‘You listening, you scummy little arsemonger?’ Jeff said, glaring a hole in the soldier with the full authoritative weight of a former Special Boat Service non-com officer. He’d been a Royal Marine Commando before that, and used to a slightly higher calibre of military personnel than Khosa’s army had to offer. ‘So point that weapon somewhere else before I stick it through your left ear and out your right, and ride you up and down this road like a fucking motorbike.’

The soldier moved back and leaned his rifle across his knees, eyeing them with wary uncertainty.

‘Bloody bunch of numpties,’ Tuesday said, giving the soldier a headshake and a look of contempt.

Ben had to smile then. The warmth of their camaraderie touched him like a glimmer of sunshine on a cloudy day. It wasn’t much, but it was good.

Along with Ben, Jeff, and Tuesday Fletcher, there was a fourth prisoner crouched in the back of the lurching truck. Lou Gerber had served as a staff sergeant with the United States Marine Corps many years earlier, before he’d taken to the sea as a merchant mariner. Besides Jude, the white-bearded, bald-headed Gerber was the last surviving crew member of the Svalgaard Andromeda, out of more than twenty men who had set out from Salalah Port in Oman not two weeks earlier.

Ben had spent a lot of time thinking about the men who had died aboard that ship. Some had been killed during the storming of the vessel by Khosa’s men, hired by Pender to pose as Somali pirates. More had died in the aftermath of the attack, while Jude and the other survivors rushed to lock themselves into the safety of the engine room. One, a vicious thug named Scagnetti, Ben had been forced to dispose of himself when he tried to hurt Jude. Soon after that had come the typhoon that had scuppered the ship and drowned all but a handful of the remaining crew.

In the days since the shipwreck they’d been whittled down even further, one by one. Condor, hacked to death by Khosa’s men in an earth-floored hut somewhere in Somalia; Hercules, a gentle giant of a man who had loved his pet bird and his freewheeling life at sea, thrown into a pit with a hungry man-eating lion in a grotesque parody of an ancient Roman gladiatorial spectacle.

Gerber was alone now, and for the first time since Ben had met the guy, he looked all of his sixty-seven years plus a good bit more. Already hit hard by the death of his close shipmate Condor, he’d barely spoken a word since they’d all been forced to witness Hercules’s cruel end. He seemed to have given up. His head was bowed and he stared at the floor of the truck with eyes that looked like holes out of which his soul had leaked away.

‘Gerber,’ Jeff said, trying to catch his attention. ‘Hoi, Gerber, you awake?’

If Gerber could hear him, he made no sign of showing it. Jeff shrugged and sighed.

Ben closed his eyes and tried to relax his muscles into the jarring motion of the truck. He knew how Gerber felt. But if indeed Gerber had given up, that was something Ben couldn’t allow himself to do. The black feeling kept coming and going in tides, like chill surges of floodwater that threatened to overwhelm his defences and drown all the strength and resolve he had left. He clenched his fists and told himself to ride it. He willed himself to believe that he would come through. And so would Jude. Ben didn’t know if he believed it. But he knew that if he didn’t convince himself it was true, he’d go crazy.

Soon afterwards, the convoy arrived at its destination deep in the heart of the jungle.

And soon after that, Ben began to think he really was going crazy.