The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 41

But the battle for the streets of Luhaka City was far from being over. Another two blocks further east, the invading forces were being hampered by a rooftop sniper. By the time Ben arrived on the scene he was already causing mayhem and had single-handedly stalled their advance by firing down on them with what Ben realised must be some type of big-bore anti-tank rifle with a supply of incendiary rounds as well as regular armour-piercing ammunition. One armoured car and three technicals vehicles were already blackened wrecks being consumed in an inferno of flame and smoke; many more of them had detoured away up a side street to escape destruction. Dozens of troops were taking cover where they could and firing up at the sniper’s elevated position overlooking the street.

He was nested in tight behind sandbags on the top-floor balcony of what had once been a handsome colonial-era townhouse but was now rapidly becoming reduced to a cratered ruin as it was pummelled with gunfire. So far, they hadn’t managed to dislodge the sniper, and he was leading them a merry dance. All that was visible of him was his muzzle flash every time he fired, keeping up a steady WHAM — WHAM — WHAM every few seconds that had the soldiers pinned.

Ben smiled and thought, Good luck to you. As he watched, a direct hit on the fuel tank of a battered Mitsubishi pickup blasted it apart in a sunburst of igniting gasoline, engulfing a couple of soldiers who were too close and slicing up another with flying shrap. Ben watched them die and felt no trace of pity.

That was when Ben spotted another familiar face. Captain Umutese was commanding the operation against the sniper from the safety of the pavement directly below, where the angle of the wall prevented him from becoming a target. He seemed to have claimed the space for himself and wouldn’t allow anyone else to take cover there, as he jabbed fingers and arms in all directions and screamed so loudly he could be heard over the gunfire. At his command, four terrified soldiers were braving the sniper fire while trying to figure out the operation of the Chinese HJ-10 surface-to-air missile whose twin-tube launcher was mounted on the back of a Russian heavy truck. The sniper had been picking them off one by one as if he enjoyed the sport. Every time one was slammed off the flatbed by the force of an incoming round, Umutese was sending in another hapless trooper to take his place. Despite their terror they eventually got the SAM up and running; and now the sniper had taken his last shot.

The blast of the rocket burned brighter than the glaring late-morning sun and shook the street like a five-magnitude earthquake. Umutese seemed only to realise at the last moment that the townhouse walls would come toppling down to bury him where he stood if he didn’t get out of the way. He scrambled for safety as the rocket blasted the top floor, obliterating the sniper and taking out much of the roof of the building. Twenty tons of wreckage came down in an avalanche that filled the street with a sandstorm of dust.

The sniper would not be seen or heard again. He’d had a good innings, but now he was out of the game. Shame, Ben thought.

Now it was his turn.

‘Umutese!’

Umutese turned at the sound of his name, blinking and squinting through the smoke and the dust to see who had called out to him. Then he saw Ben striding towards him out of the fog. His eyes locked on Ben’s face and then flicked downwards to take in the AK in Ben’s hands, and he froze.

There are a lot of things you can say to a man you have witnessed taking part in the sadistic slaughter of innocent people, immediately before you mete out the punishment he deserves. See you in hell. You had it coming. Say hello to St Peter for me. Eat lead, motherfucker.

But why waste the words?

Ben stepped up to within ten yards of him and hammered a three-shot burst into his chest. Umutese belched a gout of blood that arced from his mouth as he toppled over backwards, arms flailing. One second, and it was over. It seemed like an anticlimax.

Out of the drifting pall of smoke and dust came a gang of Umutese’s troopers, alerted by the shot. They should have run in the opposite direction. Ben flipped his fire selector to full-auto, clamped his finger on the trigger and the AK rattled like a road drill as he mowed them down left to right and then engaged the three on the flatbed of the heavy truck. He’d burned through most of his magazine. Ejected it and slapped in another.

More men were emerging from their hiding places, spotting him and moving his way. Ben sidestepped to put the big truck between him and them as cover. A few rifle shots popped his way and bounced harmlessly off the SAM launcher. He popped a couple of shots back at them.

But bigger trouble was looming. The machine-gun turret of the armoured car was swivelling to point at him. Those rounds wouldn’t bounce off a granite mountain, and if he didn’t do something about it he had about three seconds before the fifty-cal turned him into stewing beef.

In three fast paces Ben reached the truck and vaulted up onto the flatbed. The SAM launcher was still angled upwards on its rotating pivot, pointing at the empty patch of sky where the top floor of the townhouse had been. Ben grabbed the mount with both fists and yanked it around, fifty degrees right and forty degrees down, so that the remaining missile was levelled straight towards the armoured car at point-blank range, and let it rip.

The rocket was midway between the launch tube and the armoured car when Ben threw himself off the flatbed. The explosion slammed him to the ground like a hot wave. The side of the truck shielded him from the worst of the blast, but even as he hit the ground hard, driving the air from his lungs, he had to scramble desperately out of the way as the shockwave from its own missile lifted the truck off its wheels and flipped it like a child’s toy halfway across the street, narrowly missing crushing him.

Ben’s ears were ringing, his hands were scuffed and bloody from the flying leap, and the hair on the left side of his head was scorched. He struggled to his feet, and took a few moments to get his breath back. The armoured car was a burning shell and nothing at all was left of the soldiers who’d been anywhere close to it. The rest had had enough. Ben saw the figures disappearing through the curtain of smoke. He raised his AK to fire at them, but the barrel had been uselessly bent by the fall. He threw the weapon away and quickly found another in the clawed hands of one of the dead men. He slung it over his shoulder and walked over to the dusty heap that was Umutese’s body, kicked it a couple of times to make sure he was properly dead, then bent down to unclip the walkie-talkie handset from his belt, thinking he might be able to locate Khosa by listening in on their radio transmissions.

As an afterthought, he returned to the dead soldiers and relieved one of them of the handheld launcher and a cluster of 40mm grenades he’d been toting through the battleground. The weapon was nothing more than a stubby fat tube connected by a hinge to a rudimentary wooden butt, like a sawn-off shotgun with a single oversized barrel. Ancient, but still pretty damned effective. Ben calmly popped open the breech and slid in a grenade cartridge.

The tower of black smoke from the burning remains of the armoured cars and trucks was blotting out the sun to make the sky look like dusk. The street was half filled with rubble. The place was starting to look like a real war zone. He could tell from the sporadic outbursts of gunfire crackling over the rooftops that the governor’s forces had broken and scattered into smaller pockets of resistance here and there. The invading army would mop them up one at a time until, probably no more than a few hours from now, Luhaka would be totally under their control.

That was, if they still had a new governor to put in the old one’s place. Ben walked on towards the heart of the city. Looking for more of his enemies to take down.

He didn’t have to walk far before he found some. Barely two hundred yards further up the ravaged street, a pair of pickup trucks came skidding around a corner, each carrying four of the militia soldiers who’d joined up with Khosa en route to Luhaka. They looked if they were part of the general rearguard mopping-up operation, scouring the defeated sectors of the city in search of hold-outs to polish off.

Veiled in the dusky light, Ben was nothing more than a silhouetted outline and they flashed right by him. But he had ways of getting their attention. He trained his grenade launcher at the lead truck, tracked it through the sights, and fired just ahead of it like a hunter shooting at a flying bird.

The pickup sped straight into the path of the grenade and caught the impact on its front wing. A flash of bright flame and the truck flipped and rolled, driver and passengers hurled like straw dolls out of its open cab. The second truck swerved to avoid the wreck, then slithered to a halt. Hostile eyes turned back to stare in Ben’s direction as he walked towards them, cracking open the launcher and ejecting the smoking spent cartridge. It hit the ground and rolled away. He walked another step. Loaded another grenade and snapped the tube shut.

The pickup driver slammed his gearstick into reverse, hit the gas and spun the vehicle around. It was a heavily modified Toyota Hilux with a thirty-cal Browning mounted on the back, the cab chopped down and spare fuel cans strapped to the bonnet like the Special Ops Land Rovers Ben’s SAS unit had deployed in the deserts of the Middle East. The driver crunched it into forward gear and floored the pedal as if he wanted to run Ben down. The rear gunner angled the thirty-cal.

It was just a matter of who pulled the trigger first.

Ben fired from the hip, still walking. The grenade whooshed towards the pickup and smacked into its radiator grille. The Toyota’s back wheels bucked up in the air and it turned a somersault as the fuel cans ignited like a bomb and the vehicle was swallowed up in a mushrooming fireball. Ben felt the heat singe his face and ducked back. The Toyota landed belly-up with its wheels still turning. The tyres were on fire. A burning figure of a man struggled free of the wreck and staggered a few paces. Ben let go of the launcher, quickly shouldered his AK, fired twice and dropped him like a sack of washing. He wouldn’t let a man burn to death. But that was where his sympathy ended.

Ben took out the second cigarette he’d got from the soldier on the truck. He paused to light it from the flames of a burning tyre and took a long, deep draw. He walked on, the rifle cradled in his arms. Deeper into the war zone. Looking for trouble and ready to cause more.

Ben Hope, evening the odds.