The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 3

Ben was slumped in the back of the truck with his eyes still shut when he sensed that the vehicle’s motion had become smoother and he was no longer being shaken about. He opened his eyes and peered out of the back of the truck. Dusk was melting into evening. He must have been dozing. The headlights of the vehicles behind dazzled him; he shielded his eyes with his hand and saw that the rutted dirt track had either joined, or become, a properly surfaced road. The concrete looked newly-laid. The trees were cut back from the edges and ditches had been dug out on both sides. The clean-cut ends of sawn branches, still fresh, told him that the work must have been done not long ago.

Ben threw a quizzical look at Jeff and Tuesday.

‘Seems like we’re getting somewhere,’ Tuesday commented. ‘Wherever somewhere is.’

‘I don’t know, mate. Looks to me like we’re still in the arsehole of the bloody jungle,’ Jeff said. ‘Who’d build a road like this out here?’

It wasn’t too long after that, maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, before the convoy rolled to a halt. Hot metal ticking, engines growling, exhaust fumes drifting in the headlights. Ignoring the soldiers and guns, Ben clambered to his feet on the flatbed and turned to gaze past the truck’s cab. His legs felt like two planks of wood and his back was aching.

In the bright glare of the convoy’s lights, he saw that Khosa’s Land Rover at the front of the line had stopped at a wire-mesh double perimeter fence that stretched away in both directions until it was lost in the darkness. The convoy had pulled up at a set of steel-mesh gates inset into the outer fence, ten feet high and plastered in warning KEEP OUT signs in English, French, Kituba, Lingala and Swahili, just in case the locals didn’t get the message from the heavily armed guards who were manning the gates on the inside. The inner and outer fences were spaced about ten metres apart, creating a corridor between them in which Ben could see the figures of patrolling guards. In a pool of bright halogen floodlight beyond the chain-link mesh of the inner fence sat a cluster of guard huts, around which more soldiers were standing cradling automatic weapons and squinting into the procession of headlights queued up at the gates. The tall fences themselves were supported by steel posts and topped with spikes and coils of razor wire. High-perched security cameras peered down.

Ben had seen a thousand perimeter fences just like it, around army bases all over the world. More recently, Khosa’s men had taken them to a rundown ex-military airfield in Somalia, another forgotten leftover from another fruitless civil war. There, the fence had been hanging in disrepair, abandoned for many years. This one, like the road leading to it, looked as if it hadn’t been there long at all. Along the perimeter’s length for as far as Ben could see, the trees had been severely cut back in what must have been a major clearing operation involving a large number of men and machines. Such a new and well-constructed installation was an incongruous sight in the midst of this green wilderness with its unmade roads and shambolic wooden bridges.

From this side of the wire it looked as though a large area of jungle had been cleared on the inside of the perimeter as well. Did Khosa really have that kind of manpower? Ben’s initial assumption had been that the man’s army was no different from any number of ragtag tinpot militia forces he’d come across during his SAS days, when his squadron would occasionally be sent to various parts of the African continent to deal with the more troublesome gangs of marauding thugs who stepped out of line by massacring and raping the locals and abducting UN aid workers. But he’d been learning from the outset that his assumption was a shaky one. General Jean-Pierre Khosa was full of surprises. Never pleasant ones.

What Ben didn’t yet realise was that the biggest surprise was yet to come, one he couldn’t have foreseen in a thousand years.

Jeff and Tuesday were on their feet next to him in the truck, following his gaze. Lou Gerber hadn’t moved or even looked up.

‘What do you reckon?’ Jeff said.

Ben shook his head. ‘Whatever it is, we’re about to find out.’

There was a lot of activity going on at the head of the stationary convoy. Doors were opened and soldiers were milling about. Greetings were exchanged, laughter shared, backs slapped. Ben looked for Khosa but couldn’t see him. The General must be still in his Land Rover, puffing on a Gran Cohiba and fondling his diamond, maybe thinking about who he was going to order hacked to death next, or whose head he might blow off on a whim using the magnum revolver he carried on his belt. Those burdensome decisions of leadership.

The soldiers inside the compound opened the outer gates first, followed by those in the inner fence. The men outside returned to their vehicles, slammed their doors, and the convoy slowly began to roll through the gates, waved in by the grinning guards. The convoy accelerated and sped onwards, pushing a bubble of light into the darkness beyond the perimeter.

The concreted road continued for a quarter of a mile up a steep rise that had been completely shorn of vegetation, creating a barren landscape of ploughed earth and craters where countless trees had been ripped out by their roots. The more Ben looked, the more perplexed he was by this place. He could sense Jeff and Tuesday’s growing sense of bewilderment, too. Far behind them, the tail end of the convoy had passed through the inner gates and the soldiers had closed up the perimeter with an air of finality that took away any doubts Ben might have had that this place, whatever it might be, was their final destination.

Ben narrowed his eyes when he saw the glow lighting up the sky from beyond the crest of the rise ahead. If it was a military camp, it was on a grand scale. The biggest he’d seen in Africa, rivalling major NATO bases in Europe. But that was impossible.

Khosa’s Land Rover crested the rise and dropped out of sight. A dozen vehicles later, the truck reached the top of the hill — and then Ben saw it, and his mouth fell open at the sight.

It wasn’t the biggest military camp in Africa. It wasn’t a military camp at all.

The manmade valley below was illuminated across its length and breadth by thousands of lights. The single road swept down the deforested hillside into what, unbelievably and yet undeniably, appeared to be a whole city.

A city enclosed behind a militarised security perimeter.

Khosa’s own city?

Ben blinked. His mouth went dry. He blinked again, tore his gaze from the surreal sight and exchanged looks of bewilderment with Jeff and Tuesday.

The road had widened into a smooth and immaculate double carriageway by the time they reached the final security fence. Blinding halogen spotlamps blazed down from masts. The gate was heavily guarded by a unit of at least a dozen sentries and a six-wheeled armoured personnel carrier with twin machine guns swivelled their way.

‘I’m not believing this,’ Jeff said. ‘Tell me I’m fucking dreaming, guys.’

‘It’s real,’ Ben replied. ‘Don’t ask me how, but it’s real.’

Once more, there were waves and happy greetings as the convoy rolled through the gates. Some three hundred yards down the single straight road that crossed what had once been a valley deep in the jungle, now transformed into a barren no-man’s land, the line of vehicles rumbled past the first buildings. Side streets radiated left and right, forming a geometric grid system of two-hundred-foot-square blocks. Many of them were still empty and undeveloped patches of land; others sprouted semi-erected multi-storey buildings; others again were fully finished with high-rises and office blocks. Signs of recent construction were everywhere, cranes looming into the night sky and heavy plant equipment filling every empty corner. Street after street after empty street, all still, all silent, all lit up but eerily deserted. There were no cars. There was no movement. Not a single civilian to be seen anywhere, as if the entire population had fled or been vaporized by a hydrogen bomb leaving behind only empty buildings.

Like a vision from a post-apocalyptic world, or the most expensive movie set that had ever been built and was waiting for the film crews and herds of extras to move in.

‘What in hell’s name…?’ Jeff muttered.

Tuesday was shaking his head. ‘Please don’t tell me that Khosa built this place.’

‘Whoever built it,’ Ben said, ‘I’ve a feeling you won’t find it on any maps.’

‘Khosa City,’ Jeff grunted. ‘Jesus Christ. Who is this guy?’

The deeper the convoy rolled into the city, the fewer construction sites they passed and the more finished the place appeared to be, as if it had been built from the centre outwards. The main drag had grown into a broad boulevard. The architects had planted neat avenues of maple trees down its length, and laid clipped green lawns either side, and pavements and modern street lighting that glowed off the brand-new buildings.

Here and there they passed small patrol units of militia. Any non-military personnel in the place were either locked down tight in a curfew, or there simply weren’t any in the first place. The streets were lit up but almost every window of every building was dark and empty. The only other vehicle they saw was a six-wheeled APC identical to the one guarding the inner perimeter, which emerged from a side street and rumbled past them in the opposite direction.

Jeff said, shaking his head, ‘Where did they get the workforce? The materials? The money?’

Ben could have added a thousand more questions, but there were no answers to be had. Not yet. All he could do was stare at the surreal scene. Maybe Khosa had had their coffee last night spiked with LSD.

The convoy rumbled on, past empty parks and deserted squares and block after block of high-rise apartment buildings, all giving off the same uninhabited aura. Then the line of trucks and pickups veered across an intersection and rounded a corner, and Ben’s stupefaction racked up to a new level. Because the grandiose eight-storey building he could now see ahead, nestled a little way from the road next to an enormous and extravagantly illuminated plane tree, was the Dorchester Hotel in London’s Park Lane.

The Dorchester, here in the Congo. Complete with its sweeping nineteen-thirties façade and grand entrance and garden frontage of sculpted shrubs, ornamental railings, stone fountains, and flower beds. Ben closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, it was still there.

Not dreaming.

The hotel was the first building they’d seen thus far that showed any sign of life. Light streamed from the entrance and many upper-floor windows were aglow against the night sky. At the head of the convoy, Khosa’s Land Rover turned off the street to park outside the building. The following vehicles kept on going down the street, and for a moment Ben thought the truck was going to do the same — until it too broke from the moving line and pulled to a halt directly behind Khosa’s personal transport.

The soldiers in the back of the truck jumped up and stabbed and poked with their rifles to get the prisoners moving. ‘Keep your panties on, girls,’ Jeff growled at them. Gerber seemed to take no notice of anything much that was happening around him. Ben and Jeff helped him to his feet, and down the wooden ramp from the flatbed to the pavement.

Outside the Dorchester Hotel. In the Congo. If Gerber was having the same hard time as the other three accepting reality, he wasn’t letting it show.

The night air was fresh and still, and fragrant with the scent of the hotel garden flowers whose perfume was strong enough to mask the lingering tang of exhaust fumes left by the convoy. A billion stars twinkled above the silhouetted city skyline. Khosa had stepped down from his Land Rover and paused outside the hotel, his tall bulky outline bathed in golden light shining from the entrance, clasping his hands behind his back in statesmanlike fashion as he exchanged a few words with one of the men who had been riding along with him at the head of the convoy.

While his soldiers looked dusty and tired from the long journey, the General appeared as fresh and energetic as if he’d just finished a leisurely breakfast and donned a crisp new uniform to attend to the first business of the day. His combat boots gleamed as though he’d spent the whole drive polishing them, the gold Rolex on his thick wrist was resplendent under the lights, and the red beret on his head sat at a jaunty angle. If it hadn’t been for the tribal scarring that distorted his face into a monstrous demon’s mask, he might have seemed almost jovial.

As the soldiers prodded and shoved the four prisoners in his direction, Khosa turned to give Ben a beaming white smile that looked like the last thing a shark’s dinner might see before being swallowed up in one bite. It was usual for him to ignore Jeff and Tuesday as the underlings they were. As for Gerber, Khosa viewed the ‘Goat Man’ with as much regard as for an inchworm. Ben had twice had to persuade him not to have the old sailor hacked to death by his men.

‘Ah, it is very good to be home again,’ Khosa said in his deep, resonant voice. ‘Soldier, welcome to my executive headquarters.’