The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 46

‘Bloody hell,’ Jeff burst out. ‘Am I dreaming, or is that—’

Ben held up a hand to silence him.

‘Be… pe… re you re… ing me? This is… ude. Over.’ Pause. Then moments later: ‘… en Hope? If y… out there, pl… respond… This… Jude. Ov… ’

Ben’s hands were suddenly shaking so badly that he could barely press the transmission button. He cleared his throat. ‘Copy Lima Charlie—’ he began out of habit, which was army radio-speak for ‘receiving you loud and clear’. Catching himself, he reverted to non-military language but decided on the spot to use code to identify themselves only by their inverted initials. This was an open channel and anyone could be listening. ‘Alpha Juliet, this is Hotel Bravo. Acknowledged. Where are you? What’s happening? Over.’

‘I’m… city. H… with Tuesday… coming to find you.’

‘He’s at Khosa’s base,’ Jeff blurted incredulously. ‘How the buggery bollocks did he get there?’

Ben closed his eyes. His legs felt suddenly weak under him, and he badly needed to sit down. He could hardly believe he was talking to Jude, and that Jude was alive and safe. ‘Alpha Juliet, are you okay? Over.’

Pause. Buzz. Chatter. Then, ‘I’m… kay.’

‘But your hand—’

Burp. Fizz. ‘Wh… about it?’

‘They cut it off. The bracelet. I saw it. I—’

The signal seemed to falter for a moment, and Ben was scared he was going to lose it. Then he heard Jude say, ‘N… mine. Just… trick. I’m okay. Not hurt. Com… to find you. Over.’

A trick! Ben was so stunned, his head was spinning. He no longer cared if any number of Khosa’s soldiers, even Khosa himself, might be listening in on their conversation. Let them.

‘Negative,’ he replied, almost yelling into the radio. ‘Maintain your position. Do you copy? I repeat, stay put. Do not leave the city. We will come to you. Over.’

‘Tell him we’ll be with him in thirty,’ Jeff said.

Ben looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Give or take. Trust me. Go on, tell him.’

Not understanding what his friend was talking about, Ben hit the transmission button again and said, ‘Hold tight, Alpha Juliet. We’ll be with you soon. Repeat, we will be with you soon. Over and out.’

‘Let’s go,’ Jeff said the instant Ben shut down the call. ‘I have a Jeep out the back.’

They ran through the house and outside into the sun-blanched heat of the empty street. Jeff’s vehicle was a Suzuki four-wheel-drive with a badly buckled front end that looked like recent damage. Its screen was cut down and a light machine gun on a swivel mount pointed between the front seats, overhanging the bonnet. They jumped in, stowing their weapons at their feet where they could get to them fast if needed. Jeff fired up the engine and the acceleration jerked them back in their seats.

Jeff seemed to know where he was going. He swerved out onto the deserted Avenue Laurent Kabila and hung the next right, clipping the corner of the kerb and taking them up an adjoining street that flanked the tree-lined grounds of the governor’s residence. The warm wind and the scent of tree blossoms swirled around them in the open cab, mixed with the tang of cordite and burning diesel fuel wafting in from the battle zones all over the city.

‘As long as we don’t run into too many of our friends,’ Jeff yelled over the roar of the engine, ‘we should make it all right. Get ready to jump on that LMG, just in case.’

The weapon looked like a relic from World War II. ‘Does it work?’

‘Ticks away smooth as a sewing machine,’ Jeff said.

Ben didn’t bother to ask how he knew. He had a more pressing question, one that he couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘Mind explaining to me how you plan to get back to base in just half an hour?’

Jeff pressed his foot down harder and flashed Ben another of his trademark grins. ‘Like I said, I figured I’d find you somewhere around the governor’s pad, because that’s where both of the Khosa brothers would be. Got myself in a couple of tangles on the way and had to take a bit of a roundabout route. Anyway, while I was hunting about, I came across… well, you’ll see soon enough.’

They skirted around the back of the mansion and kept going, zigzagging north across the city, swerving now and then to bypass burning vehicles and bodies that lay in their path. A few blocks on from the centre, the roads were mostly unpaved and the buildings looked more like a shanty town. Jeff turned a sharp corner onto a long, straight avenue crowded on both sides with dismal tin-roofed shacks and graffiti-covered concrete huts that looked like bunkers. He suddenly hit the brakes, bringing them to a sliding halt.

‘Uh-oh. Company.’

Ben had spotted them at the same instant — a line of trucks and Jeeps speeding towards them, a hundred yards away and approaching fast. They were bristling with so much weaponry that from a distance they looked like giant spiked porcupines.

‘Keep going,’ he warned Jeff. ‘Sudden moves will only draw their attention.’

Jeff wet his lips and eased the Jeep onwards towards the oncoming vehicles. The distance was closing fast. Either the soldiers would open fire on them, or they’d recognise them as the two white men drafted into Khosa’s army. Neither was a desirable option. Ben was shifting towards the centre machine gun, ready to act first if trouble kicked off. If it came to a fight, their chances didn’t look so great either.

They were just sixty yards away when the approaching vehicles suddenly swerved off at a right angle across a junction. Swaying on their suspension, big wheels biting down hard on the loose road surface, the soldiers packed aboard all clinging on tight. Wherever they were going in such an urgent hurry, the solitary Suzuki was obviously not a priority.

Ben’s instinct told him this had to do with the way Khosa had rushed away from the governor’s mansion. Nobody would abandon their prize like that, after having gone to such trouble winning it. Something had happened — and whatever it was, it made Ben very uncomfortable.

‘Looks like Khosa’s pulling a whole bunch of them out,’ Jeff said as the last vehicle roared out of sight across the junction. ‘Got to be sixty, seventy trucks down there. Maybe a thousand troops.’

‘Heading west,’ Ben said. ‘Same direction we are.’

‘You think—?’

‘They’re returning to base? Possible.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘But if they are, we need to get there before they do. Whatever you’ve got, Jeff, it had better be good.’

Two blocks further north, the cheap housing ended abruptly at the edge of a large compound, several acres of open tarmac surrounded by a high mesh fence topped with razor wire and plastered with stern warning signs.

‘This is it,’ Jeff said, turning in through a metal gate that had been buckled off its hinges. Now Ben knew what had caused the damage to the front of the Jeep.

As they sped into the compound, Ben realised it was an airfield. Jeff aimed the Jeep towards a cluster of buildings, the largest of which was a metal hangar with some of its green paint flaked away where the lock on the sliding double doors had been shot away.

Jeff screeched to a halt outside, killed the engine, and honked the horn three times, like a signal. ‘They’re freaked out enough to start shooting at us,’ he said to Ben. ‘Gunned down by an eight-year-old, after all we’ve been through. That would be a right pisser, wouldn’t it?’

Ben looked at him. ‘They?’

‘Wasn’t going to leave them all behind, was I?’

As the two of them jogged from the Jeep towards the hangar, the small khaki-clad figure of Mani stepped shyly out of a narrow gap in the sliding doors. He was dwarfed by the submachine gun in his little hands. The boy looked solemnly at Ben and Jeff and then glanced back inside the dark interior with a jerk of his chin as if to say, ‘It’s okay, you can come out.’ Five more of Khosa’s child soldiers emerged into the sunlight, blinking up at Ben and Jeff with big anxious eyes. A couple of them were Mani’s age, the rest a year or two older.

‘These were all I could find,’ Jeff said, shaking his head. ‘I can only hope the rest of the poor little sods managed to lie low somewhere out of harm’s way. Here, mate, help me with these doors, will you?’

Behind the doors was Jeff’s discovery, a small red and white Cessna Skyhawk single-engined light aircraft. Its silver nose cone gleamed in the sunshine that streamed into the hangar. The official seal of the governor of Luhaka was painted on its side.

‘All fuelled up and ready to rock,’ Jeff said with a smile. ‘The owner obviously didn’t manage to get to her in time, or he’d have legged it out of here like a rabbi from a pig roast. Think you can manage not to crash her?’

Ben swung open the flimsy cockpit door and peered inside. He’d flown plenty of small planes in his time, and some bigger ones too. He’d only crashed a couple of them. Once on purpose; and the other hadn’t really been his fault. Although his sister Ruth hadn’t bought that excuse at the time.

‘I count eight of us,’ he said. ‘This plane’s only a four-seater.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to locate a 747 to accommodate us all in comfort,’ Jeff said acerbically. ‘They’re kids. They’ll cram in. So what do you reckon?’

‘I can fly it,’ Ben said. ‘But our destination’s a little hazy. Khosa told me Luhaka was about a hundred kilometres north-east of his base. That’s not exactly pinpoint navigation.’

‘Always looking on the gloomy side,’ Jeff complained. ‘Then aren’t you lucky that someone happens to know the exact GPS coordinates to get there?’ He tapped a finger to his brow. ‘Memorised them off of the sat nav in Khosa’s Range Rover last night. All we have to do is punch in the numbers and Bob’s your uncle. Now, is that genius, or what? Don’t all rush in to thank me at once.’

Mani looked up at Ben, reached up and plucked timidly at his sleeve. He asked in Swahili, ‘Are we going home?’

Ben touched the boy’s bristly little shaven head. ‘You’re going to be safe,’ he replied. And he could only hope he was telling the truth.