The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 31

‘I think we’re caught,’ Jude said, turning away in panic from the window as the glare of headlights and revving of engines drew rapidly closer.

‘Hide,’ Rae hissed frantically from inside the cage. ‘Don’t let them see you. Maybe you can still get away.’

‘Not without you,’ Jude said. ‘I’m staying.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Jude! You have to run! Run! Get out of here!’

But there was nowhere to run to, even if Jude had wanted to. He dared to steal another quick glance through the window. There were five vehicles speeding across the compound towards the huts. Four were jacked-up pickup trucks with all kinds of ancillary grille and roof bar lights that dazzled him as he looked. The fifth, bringing up the rear, looked to be a conventional sedan, long and wide and much lower than the others. Like an executive car, or a limousine.

César Masango.

No place to run. And not enough time to finish unbolting Rae’s cage and get her out. They’d be here any second. Throwing open the door of the hut. Crashing inside with weapons loaded and cocked. Catching the would-be escapees red-handed. Jude sank down the wall, screwed his eyes shut and tried desperately to think of a way out of this. Think!

Rae pleaded with her eyes. Her fists clutched the cage bars. ‘Jude!’

‘I told you, I’m not going anywhere without you,’ he said.

‘They’ll kill you if they catch you here.’

‘Bollocks to them.’

‘You hardly know me. I won’t let you die for me.’

‘Right now, you’re all I’ve got,’ he said, and he’d never meant anything with more sincerity in his life.

Outside, the vehicles skidded to a halt one after the other on the loose dirt. Their stationary headlights blazed through the hut window above Jude’s head. He heard doors slamming, footsteps running, a confusion of voices. The elongated sedan was Masango’s black Mercedes, all right. Jude would have recognised that car anywhere. The man was back. And that couldn’t mean anything other than bad news.

Jude was resolved not to hide. He would sit quietly and wait for them to come bursting into the hut. If he was caught, he was caught — even if he didn’t understand how or why it had happened. He’d tried his best, and failed, but at least he’d tried. He would tell them that Rae had had nothing to do with this. He’d do all he could to protect her. Then he would take whatever punishment they had to dish out, and he’d spit in their faces as they did it.

Half a minute ticked by, the longest of his life. Then a whole minute had passed, and still the men hadn’t come storming into the hut to unleash a world of hurt on them both.

Jude opened his eyes. Maybe… just maybe…

… He and Rae weren’t caught after all.

‘Stay down!’ she rasped at him. But he couldn’t resist. Slowly, cautiously, hardly daring even to breathe, he straightened up on jelly legs and risked another tiny peek out of the window.

Whatever was happening out there, Jude was becoming increasingly certain that it had nothing to do with the two of them. A whole crowd of people was milling outside one of the other huts, just a stone’s throw away. One of them was César Masango, every bit as gangster-chic as before in a three-piece suit that shimmered in the lights. Also present was Promise, carrying his Uzi slung from his shoulder. Jude couldn’t tell if Promise had been in one of the vehicles or come out to greet their arrival.

What were they doing? As Jude stared, unable to tear himself away, he saw one of the armed guards hop onto the back of a pickup and grab hold of a large, obviously heavy object that he started dragging off the truck’s flatbed. Another came to help him. In the bright lights Jude realised that it was a wooden block, a section of trunk sawn top and bottom, maybe three feet long. As the two men heaved it down to the ground, another was setting up a kerosene burner, like a kind of stove, next to the hut. Masango stood by, waiting. Promise was at his side, the pair of them looking very serious and purposeful as they watched the kerosene burner being lit. Meanwhile, the wooden block was down on the ground and being rolled over to them. Jude blinked and went on watching in bewilderment.

‘What’s happening out there?’ Rae asked urgently. ‘Speak to me, for Chrissakes.’

‘I don’t know. It’s weird.’

But he was beginning to understand that something ugly was in the offing. Very ugly, and very nasty. That didn’t come as a huge surprise.

One of the Africans had taken out a long, glittering thing that Jude realised with a chill was a machete. The man was inspecting it, running his fingers up and down the blade as though checking to see how sharp it was. The wooden trunk section had been set up on end, like a chopping block. The kerosene burner was lit nearby, its flame glowing and flickering beneath the iron pot that the guards had hung over it. Whatever was inside the pot quickly began to smoke. Jude sniffed a familiar odour that for some reason evoked a childhood memory of the playground at his primary school in rural Oxfordshire, when maintenance men with shovels and a van used to come to resurface it. It was the smell of hot tar.

‘What’s that stink?’ Rae whispered.

‘Hush.’

Promise reached down to his belt, unhooked something that glinted in the light and handed it to Masango. It was a large ring of keys, the one that Promise carried with him on his rounds. Masango stepped up to the door of the hut they were all gathered around, fiddled with the keys until he found the right one, then unlocked the door and walked in. Promise and one of the guards followed him inside. The rest stood by, clutching their weapons.

At least now Jude knew which of the other two wasn’t the guard hut.

‘They’re not here for us,’ Jude whispered over his shoulder to Rae, now that he was completely sure.

‘What are they doing? What’s happening now?’

‘I can’t see them. Oh, wait. Here they come. They’re bringing someone out with them.’

He was a white man. Promise had him by the scruff of the neck and was physically pulling him from the hut. He was dirty and dishevelled and looked exactly like a man who had been cooped up like an animal in a cage for quite a few days. Whoever the poor bastard was, Jude thought, it didn’t take much to see that he was reluctant to be brought out. He was kicking and struggling and doing all he could to prevent himself from being dragged across the dirt towards the chopping block.

Jude swallowed hard and told himself, Get ready for this. ‘What does Craig look like?’ he asked Rae, with all the calmness he could put into his tone.

‘He’s forty-eight. Tall, thin, glasses, greying hair, wears it kind of long. Why?’

Then it was just as well that Rae couldn’t see what was going on, Jude thought. He wasn’t sure he wanted to either, but he couldn’t look away. Promise dragged the prisoner up to the block and let him go. Munro’s hair was sticking out in all directions and his glasses had been knocked askew. The eyes behind the lenses were crazed with fear.

‘Please! Don’t do this!’ he screamed hoarsely. ‘I’ll give you anything! I’ll give you everything I own if you’ll just let me go!’

Rae heard the cries, recognised her colleague’s voice, and began rattling the bars of her cage as though she could have torn them apart. ‘What are they doing to him? Jude! Tell me!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Jude said. ‘Take your hands off the bars, and clamp them over your ears. Hard as you can. Do it now, Rae.’

She hesitated, staring at him with all kinds of emotions etched into her face. Then she took her hands off the bars and pressed them hard over her ears as he’d said. She closed her eyes and bowed her head.

The guards simply laughed at Munro’s terrorised pleas. ‘It is just business,’ Jude heard Masango say. ‘The General’s orders.’

Then the inevitable horror unfolded in front of Jude’s eyes. Munro wasn’t a strong man. He was a desk guy, a city guy, not a fighter. It took only one guard to pin him down and another to seize his left wrist and stretch his arm out over the top of the wooden block. A third, the one with the machete, took up his position in the middle. He did a couple of practice swings to judge the fall of the blade, like a golfer about to let rip from the first tee. Then his face hardened, he raised the machete above his head and accelerated it hard downwards. The steel struck flesh and then wood, with a dreadful crunch that Jude wished he’d never heard before and certainly never wanted to hear again.

Rae pressed her hands harder against her ears and cringed.

There was a terrible wailing scream, followed by another as the guards dipped the amputated stump of a forearm into the hot tar to cauterise the jetting wound. The fact that they’d gone to so much trouble meant that they had no intention of killing Munro — not that night, at any rate. But Munro was in no state to think that logically. He rolled and thrashed on the ground for a few moments, squealing inhumanly. Then he did the worst thing. He scrambled to his feet and tried to get away, and the guards levelled their weapons and cut off his escape to nowhere with a rattling blast of gunfire. Munro stopped in his tracks and arched over backwards as the bullets slammed into his spine. He collapsed into the dirt and lay still under the lights of the vehicles.

Rae’s clasped palms over her ears couldn’t block out the sound of gunfire. She clamped them over her mouth to stifle the scream that, if the guards had heard it, would have brought them all running. Jude met her eyes with an urgent glare and pressed his finger to his lips.

Outside, the guards shuffled over to the body and nudged him a couple of times with their feet, looking as though they were disappointed that he’d died so quickly. For reasons that Jude couldn’t yet understand, Masango seemed more interested in the severed hand. He walked up to where it lay on the ground, bent down and picked it up by its little finger and held it at arm’s length so as not to get any blood on his expensive suit. Carrying it like a dead starfish that a beachcomber might have stumbled upon at low tide, he took it back to his car, where he dropped it into a plastic bag the driver gave him.

The guards gathered up the rest of Munro and slung his body onto the flatbed of one of the trucks. Promise and Masango exchanged a few brief words, and then Promise turned and walked away towards his own hut. Nobody had even glanced in the direction of Rae’s.

The Mercedes was the first to leave, followed by the trucks, a line of burning red taillights receding into the night. The gates closed behind them, and then the compound was still and dark once more.

Rae was in pieces. Jude held her hand for a while and did what he could to comfort her, but he had more pressing matters on his mind. ‘We’re getting out of this madhouse,’ he promised her. She retreated to a corner of the cage and sobbed quietly while he clambered up on top of it and resumed his attack on the bolts with renewed vigour.

An hour later, they were running free.