The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 48

Jude yanked out the leather pouch and rolled the diamond onto the flat of his palm. ‘There,’ he said, looking at the glittering stone as if it was a turd.

‘I’m not even going to ask how you got that,’ Ben said. He’d have been happier if Jude had produced a stick of dynamite from his pocket with the fuse lit. ‘On second thoughts, I am going to ask.’

‘It wasn’t hard. Lifted it when he was sleeping.’

‘How the hell did you get that close to him?’

‘He and Masango knocked themselves out drinking.’

‘And other things,’ Rae added with a shiver.

Jeff eyed the diamond for a second, then looked up at Jude from under a furrowed brow. ‘Wow, clever move, son. No wonder your best friend’s racing back here faster than shit through a tin horn. You didn’t reckon on him missing his pretty little bauble at any point? Thought maybe he wouldn’t mind you borrowing it?’

‘What was I supposed to do, let him keep it?’ Jude protested. ‘You’ve no idea what kind of power this has given him. He’s a total maniac. He worships the devil.’

Ben looked at him. ‘Now you’re talking like a vicar’s son.’

‘I’m being literal,’ Jude said, vigorously shaking his head. ‘Khosa and Masango are actual Satanists. We saw them at it. Chanting in Latin. Wearing black robes. Drinking blood. I’m talking human sacrifice. The whole works.’

‘Jude’s telling the truth,’ Rae said. ‘We witnessed it together. It was just… horrible. They killed a woman and ate her heart.’ She shook her head dismally. ‘You hear of these things happening. I don’t think I ever really believed it.’

Tuesday looked ready to throw up in horror. Jeff cocked an eyebrow at the mention of Satanism, but Ben gave no response. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if Khosa was a Jehovah’s Witness, a Quaker or prayed to the great god Xenu from outer space. He would still be Khosa. A man’s actions, not his beliefs, determined who and what he was. Bad was simply bad, whatever ism anyone tagged it with.

‘Believe me, we have a pretty good idea what kind of power he has,’ Ben told Jude. ‘I also know very well what he’s capable of doing to get that thing back. You’re crazy, you know that?’

‘Like father, like son,’ Tuesday said, trying to inject some levity if only for his own sake. It didn’t work. Father and son both glared at him, and he quickly shut up.

‘You’d best pray Khosa doesn’t know it was you who pinched it,’ Jeff warned Jude, pointing at his heart. ‘Or he’ll gobble that up for afters.’

‘Of course he knows,’ Ben said. ‘Who took it off him before, on the ship? Who’s just escaped? You don’t think Khosa can put two and two together? He may be insane and evil and a lot of things besides, but one thing he’s not is an idiot.’

‘All right, fine. Maybe he does know,’ Jude said defiantly. ‘But that can’t be helped. I did what I thought was the right thing at the time, and I still do. He can’t be allowed to have it.’

‘Suit yourself. Then what are you going to do with it?’

‘You take it,’ Jude said, pushing it towards Ben.

‘I’ve told you before, I don’t want it,’ Ben said.

‘But you let me pass it on to you the other time.’

‘Yeah, and I should have thrown it in the sea, like I wanted to.’

‘Whose is it anyway?’ Rae asked. It was the first time she’d been able to get a good look at the diamond close up, and her eyes were fixed on it as though mesmerised.

Jude shrugged. ‘The truth? We have no idea. A crook called Pender had it, but we don’t know where he stole it from.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘It’s trouble,’ Ben said. ‘Everywhere it goes, it leaves a trail of dead men.’

‘Sounds like someone else we know,’ Jeff said.

Jude shook his head. ‘Not anymore. The authorities will know what to do with it. They have databases. If it’s been reported stolen, they’ll be able to return it to its proper owner.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jeff said with a snort. ‘Did you just say “the authorities”? In Africa? Are you kidding? That’s one way to make it disappear. And some bent police chief will have a nice retirement.’

‘Then tell me what to do with the bloody thing,’ Jude said irritably.

‘How about you wait here for Khosa to return, tell him nicely you’re very sorry there was a misunderstanding, and give it back to him? I’m sure he’ll be okay about it. Maybe he’ll just settle for a kidney.’

Jude went pale. ‘That’s not funny, Jeff.’

The children distracted them at that moment by emerging from the plane, obviously satisfied that it was safe to come out. They jumped down one by one and clustered shyly in a group, none of them quite confident enough yet to approach the group of adults. Sizwe’s hard expression melted when he saw them. Ben noticed the way he was staring at them, particularly little Juma, and knew he was reliving his grief over his dead son, Gatete, all over again. Seeing this big, powerful man struggling not to break down was hard to bear. Ben looked away.

‘Who are these kids?’ Rae asked, amazed.

‘Khosa’s boy soldiers,’ Ben said. ‘The ones we were able to get out of there, thanks to Jeff.’

Tuesday had been frowning at the diamond, and now he was frowning even more at the children. ‘That’s great. Only… what are we going to do with them?’

‘Get them out of here, for one thing,’ Ben said. ‘Before Khosa rolls up with a thousand men.’

Jeff looked at his watch. ‘Which won’t be long, boys and girls. Sixty-three miles as the crow flies, call it eighty by road. It took a few hours in the other direction, but that was with stopping to RV with some reinforcements en route. Khosa’s already well on his way back here with about seventy truckloads of troops, and he’s not stopping to smell the roses. We’ve been in the air forty minutes and standing around talking for fifteen. Doesn’t leave an awful lot of time. So I’d advise that we start thinking about making a sharp exit.’

‘That’s where we might have a bit of a problem,’ Tuesday said. ‘I’ve just spent the last two hours over at what passes for an airport in this place, trying to get one of Khosa’s damned choppers up and running. Remember the piece of junk Puma that they used to pick us up from the ocean? It’s there, but it’s in pieces. Someone’s taken the rotors off, and it’s not exactly a one-man job to get them back on again, even if you had the right tools, which are missing. As is one of the rotor blades. I searched everywhere, no sign. Then you have the two even shittier Hueys that escorted us from Somalia. Some half-arsed mechanic’s been at one of them, too. Nothing but a dirty great hole where the engine used to be.’

‘What about the other one?’ Jeff asked, still clinging to hope.

‘It’s all there, as far as I could tell,’ Tuesday said. ‘But there’s some kind of fuckup in the electrics. Every time you go to fire it up, it goes snap, crackle, pop and smells like burning. Wiring must be shot to shit. Can’t say I’m surprised. These crocks have been flying since before I was born.’

‘More like since before us old guys were,’ Jeff grunted, waving a hand at himself and Ben. He shook his head grimly and pointed back at the Skyhawk. ‘Not a chance in hell of all of us getting into that. If we rip out the seats and chuck away anything non-essential, we might just about cram a couple extra bodies on board. But not twelve of us. No way we’d ever get off the ground.’

‘And there’s not a single road-going vehicle left in this whole city,’ Tuesday said. ‘Khosa took them all, apart from one Jeep, which is scrap now.’

‘Then we risk it on foot,’ Jude said. ‘We can hide in the forest, and make our way to a town.’

‘You haven’t been in that jungle, Jude,’ Tuesday said. ‘An army squadron with machetes would take days to hack a mile through it.’

‘And there’s about a million square miles of it all around us,’ Jeff added. ‘Trust me, Ben and I have just flown over it. You’re not in the Oxfordshire countryside anymore, mate. There are no towns, and if there were we’d never get that far. Not with a bunch of kids in tow, and a—’

‘A woman,’ Rae said angrily. ‘That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?’

‘Whatever,’ Jeff said. ‘This is the Congo, not Chicago.’

‘I can rough it as much as any man, sweetie pie,’ she retorted.

‘Don’t take it personally,’ Jeff said. ‘If it was a Special Forces commando unit taking their chances out there in the arsehole of nowhere with a thousand of Khosa’s troops hunting them, I’d say the same thing. These bastards are on their home ground. They’ve been fighting nasty little jungle wars since they weren’t much more than his age.’ He pointed at Mani, and shook his head again. ‘We wouldn’t last half a day out there.’

Nobody could doubt that Jeff was making sense. ‘Ben?’ Tuesday said, and everyone looked at Ben.

‘I’m no aircraft mechanic,’ Ben said. ‘But it looks to me like we have only one option here, and that’s for us all to head for the airport and try and fix the chopper with the electrical problem.’

‘And if we can’t?’ Tuesday asked, chewing his lip.

‘Then we figure out another way,’ Ben said.

Jude was thinking, looking at the plane. ‘If you reckon you can fit two more aboard that, then I say do it. Jeff and Ben, get these kids to safety. Tuesday and Sizwe, you go with them.’

‘Unless I’m missing something, that leaves two,’ Tuesday said, pointing at Jude and Rae.

‘We’ll be okay,’ Jude said. ‘We gave them the slip before. We can do it again.’

‘And I still need to find my camera gear,’ Rae added. ‘If it’s not here, maybe it’s back at the mine compl—’

‘Forget it,’ Ben interrupted her.

‘But it’s important,’ she protested. ‘Without it, I don’t have the evidence to prove what’s been happening here, and Craig died for nothing.’

‘Then he died for nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Tough shit. He wouldn’t be the first.’

Rae looked as if she’d been slapped across the face. Jude flushed. ‘You can’t mean that.’

‘I mean it,’ Ben said. ‘Nobody else dies. Nobody stays behind.’ He aimed a finger at Jude and Rae. ‘You’re both coming with us, if I have to knock the pair of you out and carry you over my shoulders like two sacks of rice. Understood?’

Jude fell silent.

‘To the airport,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’