The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 49

The little Cessna couldn’t fly a dozen bodies across the city to the airport, but it could serve as a makeshift people carrier. Jude and Rae climbed up onto the port wing, Tuesday and Sizwe perched on the starboard side, and with everyone else crammed inside the cockpit Ben got the engine ticking over at a thousand revs, enough power to taxi them through the streets. He steered awkwardly using the rudder to control the nose wheel and the toe brakes to control the main landing gear, keeping to the middle of the road so as not to snag the wingtips on any corners. It wasn’t ideal, but it was quicker than walking.

The airport lay behind wire-mesh fences a few hundred yards beyond the stadium on the western edge of the city. The runway was unfinished and only about half the length it would eventually need to be to land anything much bigger than a single-engined prop. A few prefabricated buildings stood on concrete near the chain-link gates at the western end. The largest of those was a big hangar with steel roller doors locked down to galvanised posts buried deep in the ground.

‘What’s in there?’ Ben asked Tuesday, and Tuesday explained that he hadn’t been able to open it. Some fresh gouges and several bullet holes around the locks were evidence of his attempts to break them open using a lump hammer before resorting to his weapon. Nothing doing. Extremely aware of time ticking by, Ben nodded and turned to survey the rest of their options.

Those were exactly as Tuesday had described. Ben recognised the ancient military helicopters from Somalia: the two Bell Iroquois combat choppers and the medium-lift Aérospatiale Puma that had rescued the survivors from the wreck of the Svalgaard Andromeda and carried them all to shore. They’d have been safer staying on their raft in the middle of the shark-infested ocean, and not a day had passed since that Ben hadn’t wished they’d never got into that damned Puma. Now, he found himself cursing the fact that he couldn’t. Its partially dismantled hulk squatted on the hot concrete like a rotting whale on a beach that the gulls had been gradually pecking to pieces, surrounded by grimy old tools and disassembled rusty components, nuts and bolts and gears and springs and brackets and the battered rotor blades themselves — all three out of four of them, seven metres long apiece and showing the signs of extreme wear that had probably accounted for the missing fourth.

‘If I was Khosa, I’d get myself a new mechanic,’ Jeff commented dryly. ‘And maybe shoot the old one while I was at it.’

The first Bell Iroquois was in an even worse state, just as Tuesday had said. Ben couldn’t tell whether it was being overhauled or cannibalised for parts — either way, it was scrap. By contrast, the second Iroquois initially looked much more promising, at least on the outside. As a light, fast transport for mobile infantry during Vietnam, the old ‘Huey’ had been designed to carry twelve troops along with its crew. It would have been the perfect escape for their motley band. But again, just as Tuesday had found out before him, like the rest of Khosa’s sad little air force it had fallen prey to the gremlins of long-term neglect, abuse, and inexpert maintenance. Hauling himself behind the controls and flipping all the right switches to initiate the start-up procedure, Ben had to quickly shut everything back down as sparks flew and something began to give off an acrid plastic burning smell. Moments later, a lick of yellow flame appeared from the instrument panel. Ratty old military helicopters in Africa didn’t come equipped with foam extinguishers; Ben managed to dig a bit of grimy rag out from under the seat, and used it to beat out the fire before it got a hold on anything seriously flammable.

‘Damn it,’ he said.

Standing framed in the open cockpit hatch beside him, Tuesday spread his hands. ‘I wasn’t kidding, was I? Reminds me a little of that old Land Rover you guys have in France. I’ve checked the main fuses, replaced all the ones I could find from the other Huey, but it’s still doing it. Gets a little worse each time. I dare say, you flip that switch again, the whole thing will just go blammo. So unless you have a brilliant idea, looks like we’re grounded.’

Ben wasn’t getting any brilliant ideas, and he’d meant it when he said he wasn’t an aircraft mechanic.

‘Probably just as well,’ Tuesday said, his worried look dissolving into a sudden cheery grin. ‘If it started playing up once we were in the air, we’d be in a right jam. I like to think of these kinds of situations as our guardian angels looking out for us.’

You could always count on Tuesday Fletcher to look on the bright side at a time like this.

Ben jumped out of the helicopter. He could almost hear the wheels turning as Khosa’s army grew closer with every passing moment. ‘Damn it,’ he said again.

Jude and Rae had found a shady spot next to the big hangar and were crouching there together, side by side. Jude was talking to her in a low voice, and she was looking intently at him as he spoke. Ben could see the closeness in their body language. He smiled, watched them a moment longer and then swivelled his gaze a few degrees left towards the hangar’s steel shutter door. Locked down tight, while the other buildings had been left open. He couldn’t imagine why. Unless there was something in there that Khosa wanted to protect more than a bunch of dead helicopters.

‘I want to get in there,’ he said.

‘It’d take an RPG to bust those locks,’ Tuesday told him.

Ben nodded. ‘I reckon you’re right,’ he said.

‘And, like, we don’t have an RPG?’ Tuesday said quizzically, watching Ben’s face.

Ben said nothing. He swivelled his gaze back away from the hangar, back past where Jude and Rae were still sitting talking, eighty degrees east towards the sports stadium. A few hundred yards away beyond the airport fence, the grey concrete arena walls shimmered in the heat.

Ben said, ‘Hm.’

Tuesday blinked and craned his head forward. ‘What?’

Ben said, ‘I wonder.’

‘Me too. I wonder what you’re on about.’

‘You stay here and keep an eye on the kids,’ Ben told him.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To check something out,’ Ben said. ‘Jeff, you want to come with me?’

‘Anything’s better than standing about gawping at this junkyard,’ Jeff said.

Without explaining the idea that had come into his mind, Ben led the way at a run out of the airport gates and across the barren, weed-strewn stretch of ground that separated it from the stadium. They skirted the circumference of the high walls until they reached the same shady concrete arch through which Captain Xulu had led them on their first day in the city. They trotted through the coolness of the tunnel and emerged back out into the heat of the sun with the enormous bowl of the arena encircling them.

‘What’s up?’ Jeff asked.

‘That is,’ Ben said, pointing at a green mountain in the middle of the arena.

It was as he’d thought.