The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 35

The dawn had ripened into a sunburst of golds and crimsons over the city by time Ben was finally let out of the prison cell, surrounded by a squad of guards. They were eyeing him with extreme suspicion and keeping their distance, as though their dangerous captive might be about to fly at the nearest one with a neck-snapping kick. At this moment Ben wouldn’t have swatted a scorpion about to sting him.

Outside, a frenzy of activity was taking place as an excitable, jabbering crowd of armed men massed around a long and rapidly building line of armoured cars, troop transporters and pickup trucks, military transport vehicles queuing up in front of the building. It looked as though some kind of mass mobilisation was taking place.

If Khosa had decided to invade Europe and set himself up as its king, Ben wouldn’t have given a damn. As he watched the goings-on with total detachment, he saw Jeff Dekker being led outside with his own escort of wary guards. Jeff’s left cheek was mottled from a punch or two. His eyes opened wide in surprise and alarm at the sight of Ben. The soldiers hustled them towards the street, but the two were quickly left alone as the men hurried to join the throng.

‘Your face looks like a butcher’s shop window,’ Jeff said. ‘Going to need stitches.’

‘I’ll survive,’ Ben said, so quiet it was almost a whisper.

‘Christ, mate, I thought you’d got away.’

‘Apparently not,’ Ben said.

‘Where’s Tuesday?’

‘He’s alive. And running.’

Jeff grinned with relief, but his grin quickly dropped as he understood from Ben’s expression that there was grimmer news. ‘What?’

Ben could barely even bring himself to say it. Four simple words. A statement of factual information. Just to utter it felt like climbing a mountain. And then throwing himself off its peak.

He said, ‘They took Jude’s hand.’

Jeff flinched as though he’d been hit by a bullet. His brow crumpled into a thousand anguished frown lines and his lips became a pale razor slash. Ben could see the thought process racing through his head: something like this, you don’t take anyone’s word for it; which meant that if Ben believed what he’d just told him, he must know for certain; and if he knew for certain, he must have seen some kind of proof; which had to mean—

‘They showed it to me,’ Ben said. ‘I saw it.’

Jeff had gone very pale. He took a step backwards. For a second, he looked as if he was about to fall over with shock. ‘I… fuck… I… You’re sure it was his?’

Denial. Clutching at straws. The way anyone would have responded. Ben had anticipated the question.

‘They cut it off as a punishment for what I did,’ Ben told him, sounding outwardly as calm as he could force his voice to remain. ‘I might as well have cut it off myself.’

‘Don’t say that, mate. I can’t stand hearing you say that.’

‘Khosa warned me more than once. I didn’t listen to him. I kept pushing. And now…’

Ben stared into space, letting his words trail off and unable to say more. When the brain reaches a point where the weight of emotions is too much to bear, it shuts down and becomes numb. Ben was at that point. It felt as though he’d been pumped full of Demerol. He wanted to lie down on the ground and sleep for a thousand years. But the numbness wouldn’t last. When it wore off and the true starkness of the reality pierced through, other emotions would take its place and he’d want to stick a pistol in his mouth. But only after he’d finished setting the world ablaze. Soon, he would start to feel his faint, sluggish pulse wind itself up into a rising drumbeat, and the dull fire in his chest slowly grow into white-hot rage, an unstoppable flow of molten lava pushing its way up through the earth’s crust, hungry for cataclysmic destruction.

‘I told you,’ Jeff said. ‘He’s tough. Tougher than his old man, even. He can survive this. He’s alive. You need to focus on that. Ben? Look at me. Do you hear me?’

But Ben was no longer listening. Jeff could see that from the look in his friend’s eyes. Jeff knew that look, but he’d never seen it burn so intensely, and he feared what was coming. He decided to keep his mouth shut.

Not that there was time to talk, even if Ben had been in the mood for conversation. The mobilisation, whatever its purpose and wherever its destination, was entering full swing as Khosa’s forces appeared to swell right before their eyes. A volume of troops neither of them had seen in the city before seemed to have come flooding in during the night, with more appearing every minute. Khosa’s mobile forces were being joined by a steady stream of olive-green trucks, munitions lorries, missile carriers, and an endless procession of stripped-down four-wheel-drive technicals armed with everything from light machine guns to anti-aircraft cannon. Almost every vehicle was overloaded with clinging bodies. Where there wasn’t room to sit or hang on to the sides, they clustered aboard the roofs of trucks and Jeeps. Many of the newcomers were clad in the same kind of quasi-military uniforms that had been cobbled together for Khosa’s Leopards and regular fighters. Many more had turned up in civilian clothing, in flip-flops and shorts and brightly coloured T-shirts draped in as many cartridge belts as their wearers could carry. Clutched in virtually every fist, or dangling on a webbing strap from every shoulder, was the ubiquitous AK-47. It would be decades before the gushing flow of modern Chinese military arms into the continent would replace the good old ex-Soviet ‘Kalash’ as the unofficial symbol of Africa.

Caught up in the crush of bodies were the boys of Khosa’s youth regiment, the new recruits mixed together with the older hands and already hard to tell apart. Ben thought he caught a glimpse of eight-year-old Mani as the youngsters were loaded aboard one of the trucks, but then he disappeared from view. Engines grumbled. Diesel fumes belched. Shots were fired in the air, crackling sporadically over the clamour of thousands of men preparing for war. Through the yells and the cheering and the gunfire came the steady chant, ‘Luhaka! Luhaka!’

‘What’s Luhaka?’ Jeff asked, having to raise his voice to be heard above the din. Ben could have told him that it was the name of the province of which Khosa’s brother Louis was governor. He could have shared his guess that Khosa had decided this was the moment to make his move against his beloved rival sibling. But he said nothing.

If there’s going to be war, he was thinking, then let there be war.

Just then, the crowds parted and a roar went up as the massive squat shape of a Hummer came growling by. The soldiers dropped their chant and began instead yelling KHOSA! KHOSA! From the passenger window of the Hummer, dark glasses flashing in the sunlight and cigar clamped between his teeth, the General gave them a gracious wave and then passed on.

‘Looks like someone got themselves a new motor,’ Jeff muttered.

Through the chaos now appeared the strutting figure of Captain Umutese, who within an incredibly short time had transformed himself into a virtual clone of the lamented Xulu. With his predecessor’s beret clamped to his head and gold braid on his shoulder he screamed and pointed and delegated duties as though he’d been doing it all his life. He spotted Ben and Jeff in the crowd and his brows beetled. ‘You! Get in the truck!’ he yelled as he stalked up to them, jabbing an angry finger in the direction of one of the Russian six-wheelers.

‘Smoking or non-smoking?’ Jeff said. ‘Do we get a window seat? I can’t travel if I don’t get a window seat.’

‘Get in the truck!’

Within thirty minutes the war expedition was rolling out of the city. Ben and Jeff sat in the back of the crowded, swaying troop transporter, surrounded by a mixture of uniformed and militia soldiers who were so worked up by the joyful prospect of battle that they scarcely paid any attention at all to the two white men in their midst. Khosa had them all well and truly in his spell. Their eyes shone at the opportunity to fight and die for their beloved leader. As the procession of trucks cleared the perimeter gates and hit the open road, the soldiers burst into song.

One of the soldiers sitting near Ben and Jeff had a couple of packs of cigarettes and was sharing a few of them out with his comrades. Ben reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Hey, you,’ he said in Swahili, ‘you got one of those for me?’

‘What do you have to trade?’ the soldier asked cagily.

‘I won’t ram your teeth down your throat and throw you out of the moving truck like a sack of shit,’ Ben told him. ‘That’s what I have to trade. Sound fair?’

Having a face like a boxer’s the morning after a bloody title fight can be an intimidating asset. Ben received four cigarettes in return for his promise. He gave two to Jeff without a word, eased one painfully between his cracked lips and kept the other for later, and their new friend obligingly lit up for him. Ben leaned back and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. It wasn’t a Gauloise, and that was for sure, but he’d gladly have smoked dried elephant dung if it helped to take the edge off his mood. It didn’t. He smoked it anyway.

‘I’m worried about Tuesday,’ Jeff said after a while.

Ben said nothing.

‘I’m sorry about Jude.’

Ben was silent.

‘You okay, mate?’

Ben went on smoking and didn’t reply.

The long, dusty line of vehicles rolled on through the morning, as the sun climbed and burned steadily hotter. The dial on Jeff’s watch was reading just after eleven when the convoy slowed, then ground to a halt amid a lot of shouting and excitement. ‘Some kind of RV,’ Jeff said, leaning out of the side to peer forwards. ‘Looks like our little war party just got a little bigger.’

‘A little bigger’ was a typical Dekker understatement. Getting out to stretch his legs, Ben pushed his way up the line towards the front, and glimpsed Khosa for the first time since his release from the prison cell. The General looked jaunty and merry as he jumped down from his Hummer at the head of the line to greet the leader of the forces that had come to join up with them: a small, trim, pigeon-chested commander in mirror shades and a green beret. The strength of troops he’d brought with him more than doubled their fighting capability, complete with an additional four armoured personnel carriers and a pair of towed artillery howitzers on wheeled carriages. By Ben’s rough estimate, they were now marching with some six or seven thousand men. It was starting to look like an army.

War was coming, all right.

Bring it on, Ben thought.

The sudden swelling of their forces created more logistical complications while the line reorganised itself before the convoy could move on. The chaos lasted more than twenty minutes, a break that hundreds of the troops took advantage of to jump down from the trucks and relieve themselves in the bushes. It was during that interval that Ben noticed little Mani again.

Buttoned into his badly oversized uniform and weighed down by a bandolier of assault rifle cartridges, the shaven-headed boy bore little physical resemblance to the child that Xulu had captured from the St Bakanja orphanage. Something had changed inside, too. There seemed to be a weight of indescribable sadness hanging from him that no child should ever experience. The AK-47 rifle he’d been issued was far too big for his little hands and short arms, and seemed to have completely baffled him with its alien workings. He’d managed to get a round jammed in the receiver while trying to cock the action, and was vainly wrestling with the weapon to free the trapped cartridge. As Ben approached him, the boy stopped and looked up, seeming not to recognise him for a moment. That was no surprise. Ben was pretty sure his own German shepherd dog, Storm, wouldn’t know his master’s face right now behind the mask of purple and yellow bruises.

‘Let me fix that,’ Ben said brusquely. Taking the gun out of the boy’s hands, he released the magazine and yanked the bolt briskly to clear the jam. ‘It’ll work now. Hey, Umutese! Come here!’

Umutese had been strutting past; Ben’s sharp command halted him in his tracks, and he stared in astonishment at this white man who only last night had been strung up helplessly before him and now dared to speak to him like an underling.

‘If we’re going to fight in this army,’ Ben told him in a businesslike tone, ‘we’re going to need weapons. I’m taking this rifle, and I’ll have another for my colleague, plus three spare mags each. Any objections?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Didn’t think so. As for the boy here, go and get him something he can handle. Understood? So what are you waiting for, man? Jump to it!’ Umutese boggled speechlessly at Ben, then hurried off to obey the stern order.

Jeff had dismounted from the truck and was secretly watching from a distance as Ben dealt with the kid and bossed Umutese. What Jeff observed did nothing to ease the sense of apprehension that had been building in his mind all that morning. A change seemed to have come over Ben since last night, as if a dark cloud had descended on him and had been growing thicker and more ominous with every mile they’d travelled from the city.

In all the years they’d known each other, Jeff had never seen Ben appear so hard and cold. He’d barely spoken a word since the trucks had set off from base. Now he seemed as if he couldn’t wait to wade into battle — the dirtier and bloodier the better. It was a look Jeff had seen before, in a lot of crazy trigger-happy nimrods who generally ended up coming to a sticky end. To see it in Ben was deeply worrying. Because when you put a man like Ben Hope into a fight where he cared even less about his own fate than he did about either side winning, what you had was a recipe for serious trouble.

Jeff wasn’t a man to show his own feelings too openly. He found it hard to express his gut-wrenching dismay over what Khosa had done to Jude, but that didn’t detract from the pain. Whatever Jeff was going through, he knew that the depth of Ben’s suffering at this moment must be a thousand times worse. How much pain could a man bear before he finally reached the limit of what his spirit could endure, and began to crack?

Soon afterwards, the redoubled military convoy continued on its way. The choking red dust thrown up off the road by the pounding of a thousand tyres found its way through every crack and into every crevice, until you could feel it crunching between your teeth and rubbing like sand between your skin and clothing. The men aboard the trucks sweated in the airless heat, and smoked, and fiddled with their weapons, and gradually spoke less and less. The atmosphere grew more intense with every mile as they rolled onwards, as if the turning of their wheels was generating a static charge that kept building and building until the whole jungle seemed to vibrate and pulse with it. Birds screeched and exploded from the treetops in flapping flocks that swooped away to safety at the passing of the convoy. Troops of monkeys chittered and howled unseen from high up in the dense canopy, sharing warning signals that could be heard for miles. The sky grew overcast with leaden clouds, threatening thunder.

Onwards and onwards the vehicles rumbled, crossing bridges over small rivers and passing villages. People at the roadside stared. Some waved, but most looked frightened. A young mother gathered her infant and ran away, yelling loudly to alert her fellow villagers.

But the villagers, for once, had nothing to fear. Jean-Pierre Khosa had bigger fish to fry that day as he led his army towards Luhaka, and glory.