The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 52

The roar of the Dakota’s engines inside the enclosed space of the hangar was even louder than the cyclone that had capsized the Svalgaard Andromeda. The entire building was shaking as if an earthquake had hit it.

All twelve of them were aboard, along with their small cargo. Jeff was in the co-pilot’s seat that Khosa had occupied on the flight from Somalia. Tuesday and Sizwe were anxiously hovering at the back of the cockpit. Jude and Rae were sitting in the passenger section with the children and Rae’s recovered boxes, all carefully stowed and lashed down to protect their important contents from damage. She kept glancing at them, smiling to herself despite everything that had happened. Jude was smiling, too.

A thrumming vibration filled the bare fuselage, as though the Dakota was alive and quivering with eagerness to get into action. ‘Ready?’ Jeff yelled over the roar.

‘As ready as we’ll ever be,’ Ben replied. He flicked his cigarette stub out of the open window. Halfway through the pack of Tumbacos already. They helped. He took a deep breath. The engines were clattering away at five hundred revs. Ben gently increased the throttle speed and eased the plane forwards towards the steel shutter. This was no time for doubts.

Ramming his way out wasn’t quite Ben’s plan. The aircraft’s big rounded nose cone didn’t smash violently through the hangar door. It made contact with a kind of shudder that turned into a rending screech of metal, and pushed on relentlessly through as though the shutter had been made of tinfoil. The hinges gave way and the door collapsed outwards under the massive thrust.

The Dakota’s nose emerged into the daylight. Its big wheels trampled over the buckled metal. The sunshine flooded inside the cockpit, lighting up the grin that Jeff was giving Ben along with a double thumbs-up. Ben taxied the Dakota out of the hangar and onto a concrete runoff apron that led to the unfinished runway, with the airport gates to their right and a broad rough grassy runoff area to the left, between the runway and the fence. The strip ran parallel with the fence for about a thousand feet before it dissolved into a wasteground of dirt and rocks. No modern airliner would have stood a chance of getting off the ground in so short a distance, but the Dakota hadn’t become legendary for no reason. Smooth concrete was a needless luxury for an old warbird that could have taken off in a ploughed field if necessary.

Ben had spent all the time available getting familiar with the controls as best he could. If flying a little Cessna Skyhawk was like driving a Fiat family hatchback, the vintage Dakota was like getting behind the wheel of a Sherman tank. A multitude of dials and gauges clustered around the throttle quadrant at the heart of the instruments, an assortment of levers that looked like white, black, and red golf balls on sticks acting as the prop pitch, power and fuel mixture controls. Below and behind them were various other wheels and levers, each with its specific function.

He ran through his final pre-takeoff checks. Oil pressure, hydraulic pressure, fuel pump pressure, manifold pressure, mixture richness for takeoff, and a dozen other details. He racked his brain for anything he might have forgotten or overlooked, came up blank, thought, Fuck it, here we go, and throttled the plane forwards away from the hangar. Jeff was grinning like a gambler as the dice were rolled. Tuesday’s eyes were as big as Frisbees. Only Sizwe looked unhappy at the idea of escape. The further away he was from Khosa, the more it delayed his quest for revenge.

Sizwe’s disappointment would soon prove to be short-lived.

The Dakota had only just begun its lumbering approach to the start of the runway when the first bullet hit. The shot impacted its belly below the starboard wing opposite where Jude and Rae were sitting, punched its way through the fuselage at an angle and skipped across the floor right by Jude’s feet with a metallic yowl that pierced through the engine roar.

For the briefest moment Jude stared, dumbfounded, at the pencil-thin shaft of sunlight poking through a hole in the fuselage opposite him. He opened his mouth to shout out in alarm, but by then all hell was already breaking loose.

The first bullet was like the first raindrop in a thundering deluge. Within an instant they were being strafed by heavy fire up and down their right flank as the plane accelerated towards the runway. From where he sat Ben felt the shudder of every impact through the controls, as if the aircraft was flinching in pain with each fresh wound to its body. He glanced out of the pilot’s window and saw the large military convoy storming towards them through the airport gates. A thousand men or more, packed into a stream of vehicles, speeding straight towards them. Muzzle flash bursting from the overcab guns of the jacked-up technicals. Soldiers clustered like bees on the sides of the heavy trucks, clinging on tight with one hand and firing their weapons with the other.

In front was the same black Hummer he’d last seen leading the troops away from the defeated governor’s residence in Luhaka. Khosa was back. Right behind him rolled a pair of armoured cars. Their turrets were swivelled straight at the aircraft, ready to blow them off the runway.

Ben gritted his teeth as the bullets kept raking their unarmed right flank. Any second now, a round was going to find its mark and kill someone. Worse still, one of those armoured cars would hit them with an explosive missile and light up their fuel tanks, roasting every man, woman, and child on board in a fiery conflagration.

Jeff was crouched low in the co-pilot’s seat. Tuesday was wedged in the hatchway between the cockpit and the cargo section. Sizwe had gone to the children, who were screaming in fear as mayhem erupted all around. Ben twisted round and yelled, ‘Everyone down! Jude! The vests!’

Jude had dragged Rae down to the floor and was shielding her with his body. The crate with the Kevlar body armour vests was just a few feet away from him in the cargo bay. He looked up at Ben, understood, and scrambled towards it, keeping his head down as bullets punched holes in the fuselage and burned past him.

Meantime, all Ben could do was increase throttle power and hope the Dakota’s tired old engines would respond in time to leave their pursuers behind. The clatter of the propellers picked up a notch but the plane’s rate of acceleration seemed agonisingly slow. In the air, it was a formidable dragon, the terror of the sky. On the ground, it was nothing but a big, fat, slow-rolling target, as soft and easy to hit as a pumpkin on a backyard shooting range. The vehicles kept coming on fast, outpacing them easily and pouring fire into them.

Keeping his head down, Jude managed to reach the crate, ripped the lid away and yanked out the heavy Kevlar vests which he draped over himself as he scrambled back towards Rae. He covered her with one, then flung three more vests to Sizwe to lay over the children. The vests could stop a .44 Magnum or a twelve-gauge slug at point-blank range, but they wouldn’t protect anyone from a direct hit by a heavy military round.

At last the plane began to respond. Ben felt the acceleration pressing him into his seat and determination burned brighter in his heart. The airspeed indicator needle flickered up to fifty knots. Everything in the cockpit was vibrating and rattling as though about to fall apart. Sixty knots. He urged the Dakota on harder, wringing every ounce of power out of its straining engines. Maybe more than the plane could take. Only one way to find out.

But now the enemy put their strategy into action as the hunt closed in. Ben glimpsed the black Hummer veering off to one side, letting the others take the lead. The column splitting into a two-forked pincer formation with an armoured car at the head of each. One fork swerved to its right and put on a spurt of speed, intending to race ahead and slice across their starboard bow, blocking the runway ahead to force the Dakota to a halt. The other fork veered left and passed across Ben’s rear-view mirror like an express train as it curved around behind them, rounded their tail and started trying to come up their port flank, hanging cautiously back to stay out of the line of the Dakota’s side-mounted port guns. One armoured car drawing level with their cockpit on the right, another keeping pace with their tailplane on the left. Not an ideal situation. Ben gripped the yoke and held his breath, waiting for which one would fire first.

The one on the left did. The bright flash filled the port rear-view mirror, followed by a violent shockwave as a missile exploded directly below their wing, making the plane lurch and swerve drunkenly all over the runway and tip over to the right as Ben fought to straighten their line. He realised the enemy were trying to take out the undercarriage. Khosa didn’t want to destroy the plane and have to sift through burning wreckage for his prized possession. If he could, he was going to intercept them and take as many of them alive as he could. Then the General’s fun would begin as he dissected them slowly, one at a time, watching and smiling as he fondled his diamond.

Ben couldn’t let that happen. Not while he was still breathing.

To the aircraft’s right, the machine gun on the armoured car spat flame as it aimed for their starboard engine and propeller, missed, and stitched holes up the side of the cockpit. Sparks flashed. Metal flew. Something stung Ben’s cheek and he felt wetness there. The Dakota juddered and lost momentum. Ben swore and pressed it on even harder, but not in time to prevent the armoured car to his right and the line of trucks speeding along behind it from cutting in front of the Dakota’s nose.

The runway ahead was suddenly blocked. Ben could either ram right into them and risk ripping off a wheel or buckling a propeller, or he could take evasive action. No choice.

Ben heard a cry close behind him and twisted his head to see Tuesday slump over sideways and crumple to the floor. There was blood on his jacket and on the bulkhead next to him. He wasn’t moving.

Jeff yelled, ‘Tues!’

No response. No time to check how badly Tuesday was hit. Just feet away from ploughing into the armoured car and trucks that were heading him off, Ben slackened off the throttle and slammed on the port landing gear brake. They were going much too fast for crazy taxi manoeuvres. The plane slewed violently to the left as the wheel locked, sending Rae’s camera cases and the rest of their cargo tumbling across the floor.

The children were crying and screaming more loudly than ever, despite all Sizwe could do to subdue them. He was using his muscular bulk as a human shield, lying across them and pinning them with his weight with the bulletproof vests sandwiched between them, protecting as much of their little bodies as they could cover.

Jude had managed to haul Rae over behind one of the mini-gun mounts where the hardened steel plate offered more protection from bullet strikes than the flimsy aluminium shell.

Tuesday hadn’t moved.

The Dakota came lurching in a wild anticlockwise arc off the runway and hit grass and hard-baked ruts. It was the move the enemy wanted from Ben, diverting the aircraft from taking off. Forty knots. Thirty-five. Even at low speed it was a rough, bone-jarring ride, and Ben just held on tight and prayed the undercarriage would take it as they went bouncing and rocking over the rough ground, the propellers whipping up a storm of dust. A big, lumbering target a hundred feet wide and sixty feet long. The roar was deafening. Muzzle flashes twinkled like Christmas lights from the line of vehicles blocking the runway behind them. They were absorbing so much fire that soon the plane would have more holes in it than solid material.

Ben had to do something fast, or they’d all be dead.