The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 40

Buildings to the left, buildings to the right. Nothing that offered safe cover from the destruction of the heavy machine gunners hunkered down behind the street barricade sixty yards away. But out of sight was better than being mowed down like the bodies already piling up beside the stopped vehicles. Instants after Ben was the last man to jump from the truck, it took a hit from a grenade and burst violently ablaze, belching smoke and flame.

Jeff was making a break for the shelter of a recessed doorway on the right side of the street. Ben followed. Squibs of dust exploded at his heels, chasing him down. He moved fast, but not hurriedly. He reached Jeff in the doorway. The masonry was taking hits, bullets chewing bite-size chunks of stone out of the wall just inches from where they crouched for shelter. Behind them, in front of them, across the street, dozens of Khosa’s fighters were doing the same. Some cowering, others ducking around the edge of the disintegrating walls and loosing off bursts of return fire.

‘Take your time, eh,’ Jeff yelled over the noise as Ben joined him in the nook of the doorway. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, mate, we’re being shot at here — and you’re strolling about like John fucking Wayne!’

The look on Jeff’s face made Ben smile. Like an angry mother chastising a reckless child for skating on thin ice or riding no-hands on his racing bike.

‘I can see that,’ Ben said. A second grenade hit the burning truck and it exploded, taking out windows and blowing shrapnel like confetti. For a few seconds they were shrouded in blinding smoke.

‘So what’s the plan, Mr Wayne?’ Jeff yelled.

Ben already knew what he wanted Jeff to do. ‘Find the boy.’

Jeff blinked. ‘What boy?’

‘Mani. You know the one I mean. Find him and keep him safe. Get yourselves out of here.’

Jeff stared at him, not understanding. Ben wanted the boy to be safe. He didn’t deserve to be in this. But Ben wanted Jeff to be safe, too. Using the wellbeing of the kid was his way of forcing his friend’s hand.

Jeff, though, wasn’t so easily persuaded. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, get myself out? What about you?’

‘I have my own plans,’ Ben said.

‘Like getting yourself killed.’

Ben shrugged. ‘I won’t be the only one. But not you.’

‘No bloody chance, mate. I’m staying right by your side where I can watch your stupid back, like always.’

They ducked deeper into the doorway as a raking line of bullets strafed the wall, clawing brickwork into dust, leaping right and left like a living thing. One of the men taking cover a few yards ahead of them fell back as the side of his head disappeared in a pink mist, and his weapon clattered out of his hands.

Ben moved closer to Jeff and looked long and hard into his friend’s worried eyes. ‘I need you to do this. Don’t make me beg, Jeff.’

Jeff just stared at him, with a kind of desperation in his expression as he tried to read Ben’s thoughts. A terrible realisation filled Jeff’s face as he understood. ‘Don’t tell me — you’re going after Khosa?’

‘It has to end here.’

‘You’re a lunatic. There are thousands of the bastards everywhere.’

‘Then I guess I’ll just have to even the odds a little.’

‘You can’t kill them all.’

‘If Jude’s alive,’ Ben said, ‘tell him that I’m sorry I failed him. Make him understand I had to do this.’

It was goodbye. Ben had nothing more to say. Before Jeff could reply or try to stop him, and before Jeff could see the sadness that suddenly welled up inside him, he slipped out of the doorway and moved quickly back out into the street, using the wall of smoke that was gushing from the ruins of the truck as cover from the gunsights of the governor’s soldiers. He didn’t look back. Felt the heat of the fire on his face and the sting of the smoke in his eyes as it enveloped him. More gunfire rattled up the street, making it impossible for Jeff to chase after him.

Ben skirted around the rear of the burning truck and reached the opposite pavement, moving fast up the street past the dead and the dying. Bullets snapped past him and kicked craters out of walls. More vehicles were on fire and pumping curtains of black smoke, like a blanket of night through which the enemy’s muzzle flashes lit up like burning stars.

But they weren’t Ben’s enemy. He had only one enemy, along with the men who fought for him, and anyone who stood in Ben’s way as he went after him.

You can’t kill them all. Jeff’s words echoing in his head. Jeff had been right about that. But then, Ben didn’t intend to kill them all. Just the ones he saw.

Twenty yards further on, a group of Khosa’s men were sheltering behind a Jeep. Its windows were gone and its bodywork was buckled and riddled with holes. All seven men had their backs to him and were firing indiscriminately over the top and around the sides of the wreck, in that way that inexperienced soldiers have of thinking if they build a wall of bullets around them, nothing can touch them. They were wrong.

Ben recognised two of the soldiers. One was the man who had put the rope around his ankles to string him up. The other had been the pickup truck driver who’d enjoyed playing chicken with the prisoner as he’d dangled upside down, bound and helpless.

So Ben shot those two first. Single shots, in rapid succession, two for two, punching out their lungs and hearts before any of them had time to register his presence. Normally, he preferred not to shoot a man in the back; today he didn’t give a damn. Their comrades whirled around. One of them was quicker than the others, and Ben shot him third, before he shot numbers four, five, and six, his rifle sights gliding from one target to the next, bang-bang-bang, fast and smooth, drilling centre of mass with instant killing power. The seventh man managed to duck down behind the Jeep before Ben could get to him, squeezed off a wild shot from his AK that went a mile wide and then bolted like a frightened rabbit, running straight into incoming fire from the barricade up the street. The governor’s forces had saved Ben a bullet.

Collaboration. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, no matter who they are.

Ben filled his combat jacket pockets with spare magazines from the dead men and moved on, slipping from cover to cover, just a ghost in the fog of the burning vehicles. The convoy was a mess, but two armoured cars were slowly advancing and focusing intense fire on the enemy positions, a line of technicals following in their wake spitting fire from their rear-mounted Chinese machine guns.

Ben peered through the smoke of the wreckage and saw the governor’s soldiers falling back as Jean-Pierre Khosa’s superior numbers wore them down by attrition. In this sort of savage street fighting, there was just no substitute for good old-fashioned brute firepower. Ben could only guess at the number of times General Khosa had fought such engagements before. It didn’t matter to Khosa if he left thousands of men and boys dead on the battlefield, as long as he gained his objective. Napoleonic tactics weren’t obsolete yet in the age of modern warfare.

The armoured cars rumbled onwards, two abreast in the middle of the road. By the time they reached the blockade, it had been abandoned by the governor’s fleeing soldiers. They trampled the remains of the barriers and crushed the bodies of the dead and wounded under their all-terrain tyres, and rolled relentlessly on through. Ben wasn’t inclined to tangle with the steel monsters, or the procession of armed technicals that followed in their imposing wake. He was content to let them lead him towards the epicentre of the conflict. Wherever Louis Khosa made his final stand, that was where Ben knew he would find Jean-Pierre.