The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 37

If sneaking into the coltan mine had been fraught with problems, getting out again had proved even trickier. Jude and Rae had managed to retrace their steps back through the boneyard of the cavern and up to where the tunnel joined the main shaft, but for a long time it had looked as though they would make it no further without getting caught. The buzz of activity around the mine entrance had, if anything, grown even more frenetic with soldiers milling around, trucks roaring, lights blazing. There was no way out, and no choice but to hide in the rocky shadows of the narrow side tunnel until the coast cleared.

They’d waited there for hours, huddled together in the darkness. Rae had eventually dozed off, with her head resting on Jude’s shoulder. As much as he found the closeness and the touch of her hair against his cheek exciting, Jude was on edge with the constant worry of the diamond in his pocket. The instant Khosa discovered it had been stolen and a lump of rock substituted in its place, he would have the whole place torn apart looking for it. Without any doubt, he would have the thief torn apart too. Dismembered, dissected, and eaten…

Jude could hear Khosa’s and Masango’s laughter. He could see his own heart, still beating, torn from his chest. Khosa’s teeth biting into it. Ripping. Gouging. Swallowing.

Jude’s eyes flickered open. He realised with a start that he’d been sleeping, though hardly very restfully. He was still pressed uncomfortably against the rocks with Rae’s head on his shoulder. She was stirring in her sleep, making small twitching movements as her own unpleasant dreams played out in her mind. Jude peered past the mouth of the tunnel, in the direction of the main shaft, and saw that it was empty. He could hear nothing. The faint light of early morning was shining in from outside.

‘Wake up,’ he whispered in Rae’s ear, and gently prodded her. Her eyes snapped open in alarm and she gasped. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The soldiers have gone,’ he murmured.

They crept out of the passage and ventured tentatively up the slope of the shaft, the way they’d come the night before. Emerging into the daylight, they found the mine entrance completely deserted.

‘So Khosa wasn’t kidding when he said he was marching on Luhaka at first light,’ Rae said. ‘He really means to attack his brother.’

‘Khosa never kids,’ Jude said. ‘I can tell you that much about the bastard. He’s gone, all right. And it looks like he’s taken every last scrap of his army along with him. But what happened to all the workers?’

‘Locked up somewhere,’ Rae said. ‘Or killed.’

‘They wouldn’t kill their own workers, surely. Not all of them.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me. Plenty more where they came from.’

The walk through the deserted camp was an unsettling experience. The dirt road was scored with countless fresh tyre tracks where the trucks had sped away at first light or even before. Jude and Rae reached the gates and found them unmanned. They climbed the wire, dropped down to the other side and kept walking towards the bridge, glancing nervously around them every few moments in case of an ambush. Jude kept fingering the diamond in his pocket. A huge part of him bitterly regretted taking it, just the same way he’d felt after he’d stolen it from Pender aboard the ship. It felt like a giant homing beacon that could be seen from space, screaming: ‘Here I am!’ But so far, they seemed to be getting away clean.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

She nodded, after a pause and a small shudder. ‘I’m okay,’ she replied, although both of them knew that nobody who witnessed what they had just hours earlier could ever really, truly, be okay — not ever, as long as they lived.

There wasn’t a vehicle or a living soul in sight as they made their way along the concrete roadway that spanned the top of the dam. To their right, the early morning sun glittered on the river; to their left, the cascading water powering the hydro plant roared and foamed and filled the air with a vibrant freshness that seemed to help wash away the dark memory of last night.

‘That way to the city,’ she said, pointing ahead once they’d reached the far riverbank.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, stepping up his pace, but she clasped his arm and held him back. ‘Jude—’

‘What?’

‘I hate to say this, but if Khosa’s gone…’

‘He’s taken my dad with him. I know. And Jeff, too. They’re not here any more.’

‘Jeff? Don’t tell me. Another Special Forces warrior friend of yours.’

He ignored the jibe. ‘How far away is Luhaka from here?’

She replied, ‘Sixty miles, give or take. Further away than it sounds, in the Congo. The transport system isn’t exactly state of the art, as you may have noticed.’

‘But I can still get there within a few hours,’ Jude said. ‘There’s got to be some kind of vehicle in the city. A truck, a car, anything with wheels and an engine.’

‘You want to go to Luhaka,’ she said, staring at him as though he were nuts.

‘I have to find them.’

The sun was climbing fast in the east, growing warmer by the minute. After half an hour’s hot, dusty walk, during which they spoke little, Jude and Rae reached the deserted fence and could see the city buildings beyond.

‘If you’re sure,’ she said.

‘Dead sure.’ He grabbed the wire and started to climb.

As they reached the outskirts, they met with the first signs of life they’d seen that morning. The construction crews toiling away on the half-built edge of the city gave them a few strange looks as they walked by, then returned to their business. ‘Those guys are all Chinese,’ Jude muttered. ‘Every single one of them.’

Rae smiled with a hint of triumph. ‘Told you, didn’t I? Khosa’s army, the coltan mining operation, the Chinese building a city in the middle of the jungle that no African civilian will ever set foot in. It all fits. This is the proof of everything we’ve been saying. God, if only Craig could have seen this place close up.’ Her smile fell at the thought of Munro, and she was silent for a while as the two of them walked on. Leaving the construction zone behind, they found themselves trekking through the eerie, empty streets of a ghost town.

‘This reminds me of one of those zombie movies,’ Jude said, looking around him.

‘Relax, I don’t think we’re going to find any zombies here.’

‘I wouldn’t care, as long as we could find some transport. Not so much as a bloody bicycle, damn it.’ He touched the lump in his pocket and gave a bitter chuckle.

She asked, ‘What’s funny?’

‘I was just thinking, this thing I’m carrying could buy us a thousand Ferraris, or all the private jets we wanted to fly anywhere in the world. And we’re scratching around looking for any old banger that’ll get us out of here.’

‘That’s no chunk of glass, is it?’

‘It certainly is no chunk of glass.’

‘Where the hell did it come from? How did you know Khosa had it?’

‘Long story,’ he said.

‘You know what’ll happen when he finds out it’s gone, don’t you? He’ll kill you, too.’

‘I had to take it,’ Jude said defensively.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

Jude was about to reply, ‘Screw the bastard,’ when the sound of an engine froze the words in his mouth. Moments later, his search for a vehicle was over.

The problem was, there were three soldiers sitting in it.

The open Jeep came speeding around a corner, raced towards them and screeched to a halt. The driver stayed behind the wheel, but the other two spilled out and aimed their weapons at the pair of intruders walking in the middle of the road.

‘Put your hands up! You are not permitted here!’

Rae glowered at them indignantly and snapped, ‘How dare you point those guns at us? Don’t you know who I am? Lijuan Wu, Assistant Executive Director of the Zyu Industries Corporation that owns this city. So lower those weapons at once, before I report this incident to your superior officer.’

Jude was almost as taken aback by her fierce display of authority as the soldiers were. Despite her filthy clothes and dishevelled appearance, Rae was suddenly quite believable as a high-flying exec come to check on her company’s foreign investment. The Africans hesitated, seemingly unsure as to how to handle a situation so far above their pay grade. The one who appeared to be in charge chewed his lip and then flapped a vague hand in the direction of the battered green military radio set that nestled in the back of the Jeep. ‘We will radio Captain Umutese. He will know how to deal with this.’

But just as the soldier was reaching for the radio, he jerked backwards as though he’d been hooked up by a cable to an invisible speeding train. The sound of the gunshot came a fraction of a second later, but he was already dead by then. His body bounced off the side of the Jeep and hit the ground.

Jude hauled Rae back as the firefight erupted. The second soldier dived behind the front wing of the Jeep and rattled off a deafening stream of bullets in a wide arc, unable to see the hidden shooter. But the hidden shooter could see him just fine, and picked him off with a bullet that raked over the top of the Jeep and caught him high in the chest. The soldier let out a yell and staggered back, finger still on the trigger, emptying what was left in his gun’s magazine straight through the flimsy metal of the Jeep’s bonnet and side before collapsing on his back. The third soldier, still sitting behind the wheel when the shooting began, was trying to scramble away to safety when he too was hit and went down in a sprawling heap.

The shooting stopped. Jude and Rae were painfully exposed in the middle of the street with nowhere to take cover, but it seemed that whoever had killed the soldiers had no interest in gunning them down as well. They stood rooted in the sudden silence, stunned by the suddenness of the attack and the speed with which it had ended.

Just then the shooter appeared, stepping out from between two buildings across the street with a black automatic weapon in his hands and a huge grin plastered across his very familiar face as he started walking towards Jude and Rae.

‘Well, look what the cat dragged in,’ he laughed.