The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 50

The mountain in front of them was a large canvas tarpaulin that had been draped over something even larger and weighed down with rocks around its edges to hold it in place and keep off the rain. Ben ran up to it, kicked away one of the rocks and lifted the tarp to peer underneath. Jeff joined him and bent to look as well. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered. Looks like someone’s been doing a spot of shopping.’

‘Or had another delivery from their sponsors,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my guess.’ They pulled the tarp back further and Ben saw the stencilled Chinese lettering on the wooden crates that were piled fifteen feet high underneath.

‘They’re not messing about, are they?’

‘Must have arrived while we were in Luhaka.’ Ben grabbed the rope handles of a crate and dragged it off its pile, letting it crash to the ground at his feet. It broke open. He bent to pull out handfuls of straw packing that protected the grenades inside. He grabbed half a dozen grenades and stuffed them in his pockets. But it wasn’t grenades he’d come looking for. Some of the crates were much larger and more interesting.

He turned and looked across the expanse of the arena, measuring it up and running numbers through his mind as he thought out loud, ‘Need about nine hundred feet, should be able to do it. Max payload’s a little under two and a half thousand pounds. Might need to dump some fuel to lose weight.’

‘What are you muttering about?’ Jeff asked.

‘Come on,’ Ben said, and set off running towards the concrete arch. Jeff scratched his head in confusion, then heaved an exasperated sigh and followed.

Fifteen minutes later and a few hundred pounds lighter, the Cessna buzzed over the stadium, dropped sharply down over the banked auditorium and hit the rough grass with a thump and a bounce. Once they were down Ben had to brake hard to slow the plane. He was taking a chance with the landing distance, like he was taking a chance by dumping out most of their fuel.

He taxied the plane round in a wide curve and they stopped with one wing almost touching the mountain of crates. Leaving the engine running he flung open the cockpit door and jumped out, clutching a claw hammer he’d found among the mess of disassembled helicopter parts on the runway. He attacked the piles of crates, shoving the smaller ones out of the way until he identified those he wanted and began prising them open.

The ones containing the RPG launcher and rockets. Working doggedly with the seconds cracking off like gunshots in his head, Ben grabbed the five-foot-long weapon from its box and tossed it to Jeff, who stowed it in the cockpit. That left plenty of room for half a dozen or so of the spear-like 40mm rockets, plus as many kilos of small arms and ammunition as Ben dared to cram on board the plane. Lastly, Ben grabbed a crate full of Kevlar body armour vests he’d found among the pile. Then they were off again, taxiing back in a loop over the rough grass to point the aircraft towards the widest stretch of ground.

‘Here goes,’ Ben said, and hit the throttle. The roaring Cessna accelerated faster and faster towards the opposite side of the auditorium until it seemed as if they were hurtling towards certain destruction. Just as the look of terror began to spread over Jeff’s face Ben yanked the yoke back almost hard enough to rip it from its mounting, and the plane left the ground and skimmed the auditorium. Its undercarriage cleared the wall with inches to spare and Ben climbed to four hundred feet to peel it back round in a smooth arc towards the airport.

‘I’m getting too old for this dangerous shit,’ Jeff said, eyes closed with a hand clutching his chest.

‘Don’t be such a cissy, Dekker.’

‘I hope you know what to do if I have a bloody heart attack.’

‘The heart’s a muscle like any other,’ Ben said. ‘A little bit of excitement can only be good exercise for it.’

Another five minutes later, Ben had everyone cleared out of the way and he was facing the hangar shutter with the Chinese Type 69 rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his shoulder, aiming it towards the doors at an angle to lessen the chances of destroying whatever Khosa was keeping locked up in there. The thick steel would protect it from the explosion. At any rate, that was the plan.

Chances. Sometimes you just had to take them.

Ben said a quick prayer and fired. He felt the recoil of the rocket push him back on his heels, and the heat on his face as the hangar door was engulfed in a fierce bright flash and buckled inwards. Hardly waiting for the flames to subside, Ben dropped the RPG and ran into the smoke, ducking low to slip through the ragged hole that had appeared in the shutter door. The hangar was at least eighty feet deep and well over a hundred feet wide, but the only light came from narrow slotted windows high up in the walls and it was completely blotted out with the dark smoke still belching through the hole in the door, making it hard to see. Jeff joined Ben as he probed his way through the murk. Ben’s leg touched against something solid and he put out a hand to feel what it was.

It was the front end of a four-wheel-drive pickup, jacked up on raised suspension and fitted with a light bar across the grille. Ben ran his hand along the crusty paintwork and wondered what a battered old pickup was doing locked inside a hangar. Still, it was transport, and with luck they might just about be able to cram everyone aboard.

It was then that Ben sensed a much larger presence inside the hangar. He looked up and saw the huge shape overhead, slowly becoming more visible as the smoke cleared. He was standing beneath a wing. He traced its line to the long, thick fuselage it was joined to. The aircraft filled most of the hangar.

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Jeff breathed, and smiles broke out on both their faces as they gazed up at the hulk of the resting Douglas DC-3 Dakota airliner. The last time they’d seen the big plane had been moments after it had crash-landed with them on board, in remote countryside somewhere near the Rwanda — Congo border.

‘They fixed it up,’ Jeff muttered in surprise, stepping over to inspect the undercarriage strut that had been wrecked in the forced landing. ‘I take back what I said about the mechanic. Someone’s been busy.’

Tuesday stepped tentatively inside the hangar, followed by Jude, then Rae, then the kids. Sizwe was the last to enter. He stood behind the clustered children and laid a protective hand on Juma’s shoulder, saying nothing.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Tuesday burst out when he saw the Dakota. ‘Now this is what I call cool. Guys, look no further. We just found our ticket out of here.’

‘You can fly this?’ Rae asked, looking at Ben.

‘He can fly anything,’ Jude answered for him.

The smoke had almost completely cleared. With the natural exploratory curiosity of an investigative journalist, and with Jude hovering close behind, Rae stepped beneath the Dakota’s wing and started making her way deeper inside the hangar. She glanced at the pickup truck parked next to it. Walked on another step. Then froze, and whirled round to gape at the back of the truck. Her shout echoed through the hangar.

‘My stuff!’

Jude rushed to her side. She was excitedly clambering onto the cargo bed to examine the aluminium flight cases piled up against the back of the cab. ‘It is! It’s my equipment!’ She dropped to her knees, set one of the cases down in front of her, and popped the catches. ‘Oh, boy, this is incredible. Everything’s here. It’s all here, Jude. This is where they stashed it away.’ She couldn’t stop smiling.

Jude jumped up onto the truck and hugged her. ‘That’s fantastic, Rae.’

‘Someone’s happy, at least,’ Ben said in an aside to Jeff.

Jeff raised an eyebrow. ‘And someone else has gone el mucho hotto for a pretty face,’ he muttered, looking at Jude.

Ben was surprised. ‘What? You think?’

‘Come on, mate. He practically has his tongue hanging out whenever he gets within five yards of her. And I don’t think she minds it one bit, either.’

‘So fast?’

‘At their age?’ Jeff nudged Ben with his elbow and grinned. ‘Come on, old timer, let’s check out this flying coffin and see if we’ve got a real chance of getting out of here this time, or just another pig in a poke.’

A Dakota’s main hatch was a rectangular panel on the port side of the fuselage, behind the wing. It was open, with a metal ladder propped against it. Ben scrambled up it first. When he reached the top of the ladder, six thirty-calibre muzzles within a cylinder of black metal stared him in the face and he realised that the repairs to the undercarriage weren’t all that Khosa’s plane mechanic had been busy working on.

And now Ben had the answer to a small mystery that had come to his notice during the attack on Luhaka. He’d vaguely wondered at the time why no use was being made of the three Hua Qing rotary cannons they’d unpacked on their first day in the city. Capable of delivering an incredible rate of fire from their whirling multiple barrels hooked up to a motor drive, they were one of the most potent weapons in any small-arms arsenal. Their absence from the invasion force had seemed to him something of an omission. But now he knew better. Because he’d just found them.

Khosa’s mechanic had fashioned a crude but perfectly serviceable mount out of hardened steel plate, welded to the floor and allowing the weapon to be deployed against targets on the ground if the pilot banked the plane over at an angle. The second cannon was poking from a fuselage window a few feet away. The third was fitted neatly into the tail pointing rearwards, so as to present a serious disincentive to any pursuing aircraft.

Cartridge belts lay coiled all over the floor like anacondas. Miles of them. To Ben’s practised eye it looked like about twenty-five or thirty thousand rounds all told: enough ammunition to give a decent-sized combat division a really bad day. The pointed bullets were all black-red tipped to denote that they were armour-piercing incendiary rounds. If you were going to punch through the side of a tank, you might as well torch its insides into the bargain.

‘I humbly retract everything I said,’ Jeff chuckled. ‘The crafty bastards have taken a DC-3 and turned it into Puff the Magic Dragon.’

That had been the unofficial nickname for the AC-47 attack/cargo ‘Spooky’ gunship developed by the US Air Force from the civilian Dakota airliner as an exceptionally effective means of providing close air support to ground troops in Vietnam. By the time they were superseded in ’69 by faster, more powerful gunships they’d flown over 150,000 successful combat missions, fired nearly a hundred million rounds and become the scourge of the Viet Cong, who lived in such fear of the ‘dragon’ that their commanders issued orders not to attack it lest they infuriate the monster. The aircraft’s armament of side-firing General Electric mini-guns, of which the Hua Qings were descendants, were operated from a selective trigger on the pilot’s yoke.

When Ben and Jeff made their way forward to the cockpit, they found that the same modification had been made to Khosa’s plane.

‘Why didn’t they use it in Luhaka?’ Ben wondered out loud.

Jeff shrugged. ‘A few passes from old Puff here could flatten half the bloody city. Maybe Khosa didn’t want to rip the place up too badly. No point in being governor of a burning heap of rubble, after all.’

‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘Or maybe it’s just not operational yet. For all we know, it won’t fly.’

‘Only one way to find out, mate.’

Ben got behind the controls. While the original American AC-47 gunships had been equipped with a special reflector gunsight mounted in the left-hand cockpit window, Khosa’s home-brewed variant made do with a crude arrangement of rear-view mirrors bolted to the outside of the canopy for the pilot to be able to direct his fire on targets on the ground and to the rear. Not exactly a precision setup. A little bit of Kentucky windage, a little bit of ‘spray and pray’, would be the order of the day.

Ben looked around him. Everything in the cockpit was sheet metal and rivets. Spartan and functional, the way he liked it. Better still, whoever had last sat in the pilot’s seat had left a pack of African Tumbaco cigarettes tucked behind the yoke, with a disposable lighter slipped inside.

Ben lit one up. Once again, it wasn’t a Gauloise, but any port in a storm. Blowing smoke, he flipped some of the clunky old-fashioned switches and instrument lights came on. Nothing went snap, crackle, or pop. No flames started licking out from behind the dials.

‘So far, so good,’ Jeff said, then looked up and pointed through the cockpit window. ‘Now all we need to do is find a way to open that shutter door.’

Ben puffed some more smoke. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. They didn’t make these old planes out of recycled Coke tins.’

Jeff looked at him. ‘You’re going to ram your way out, aren’t you, you mad bastard.’

‘Whatever works,’ Ben said. He glanced up at the afternoon sky. The sun was beginning its slow descent in the west. ‘What time is it?’

‘Time we got out of here,’ Jeff replied. ‘They must be getting close by now.’

But Jeff was wrong. Khosa wasn’t getting close.

Khosa had already arrived at the city.