The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 53

So Ben did do something.

Because the enemy were playing a reckless game. They might think they had Ben where they wanted him — but now, as the plane’s tail end swept away from the runway in an arc, he had the armoured car lined up slam bang in the middle of his rear-view mirror and perfectly positioned for a demonstration of what kind of sting the old Dakota had in its tail. They’d taken a hell of a beating. Now it was their turn to reciprocate.

The gun control attached to the pilot’s yoke was a green metal box fitted with two triggers that were nothing more than simple rigged-up electrical switches soldered to two wires that were taped down the length of the stick and disappeared aft to hook up to the electric motor drives for the rotary cannons. A first-year engineering student could have built the simple device. But simple was good, in Ben’s book. Each switch had a stuck-on label with a hand-drawn arrow marked on it. One arrow pointed to the left, the other pointed back at Ben and towards the rear of the plane.

Ben figured that the backward-pointing arrow was for the rear gun. He pressed that one.

And suddenly the mild-mannered lumbering old airliner was transformed into a ferocious, death-dealing war machine. The fuselage filled with thunder as the recoil from the tail gun jolted the Dakota forwards and spent shell casings spewed out of the mini-gun’s ejection port like chippings from a wood shredder. Six thousand rounds a minute. A high-powered armour-piercing incendiary bullet firing off every hundredth of a second, so fast that the noise blended together into a continual roaring screech like no other sound on earth. Every fifth cartridge on the belt was a tracer round, with a small pyrotechnic magnesium charge designed to ignite in flight. The laser-like trail they made as they flew towards their targets, brightly visible even in daylight, was designed to help military machine gunners direct their aim.

And Ben’s aim was good.

In his mirror he saw the stream of the tracers, like a streak of dragon’s breath, engulf the armoured car. The men inside would never know what had hit them as the tank-busting rounds slammed through their plating and erupted in fierce flame. The armoured car instantly erupted in a violent fireball that swallowed the trucks either side of it.

Ben kept his finger on the button and brought the plane round in a tighter arc to port, so that his tail slewed in an arc to the right and directed the stream of fiery devastation along the line of vehicles on the runway. At such close range, the Dakota’s fire pummelled everything in its path into instant, total ruin. In a heartbeat, it looked as if the runway had taken a direct hit from a fighter squadron dropping napalm bombs. A curtain of fire leaped forty feet into the air and blocked out the sun with black smoke.

The soldiers never stood a chance. It was murder. Sheer, brutal overkill. Ben almost felt bad about it.

Almost.

The noise from the mini-gun was insane. Jude and Rae had their hands over their ears. Ben kept his finger on the fire button and his eye on the rear-view mirror and braked the Dakota’s starboard wheel to flip the tail sideways in the other direction. The blazing tongue of fire blazing from the Dakota was like some kind of death ray that obliterated everything in its path. Trucks and pickups erupted in flames. The soldiers trying to escape were mowed down like grass by the awesome power of the dragon.

Ben released the button and the tail gun fell silent. The clattering drone of the engines sounded oddly quiet by comparison. He could hear the children still wailing in terror. Eight seconds of continuous fire, eight hundred rounds expended. The enemy was badly disabled. But still dangerous.

The line of vehicles that had been coming up the Dakota’s left flank on the runway was now massed dead ahead of the plane, twenty or thirty of them, as Ben held his line. Bullets splatted the Dakota’s nose and punched through the windows, forcing Ben and Jeff to duck in their seats. The second armoured car was swivelling its turret towards them, ready to fire a rocket.

Not if Ben could help it. He veered the plane sharply to the right, its big wheels bouncing over the uneven ground, crashing over ruts. The enemy’s fire raked down their port flank as he brought the Dakota around broadside to the barrage.

Until now, the Dakota’s twin side-mounted guns hadn’t spoken a word. Now the moment had come for them to have their say. Ben’s finger went to the trigger box and found the button with the left-pointing arrow.

Ben had been around a lot of weaponry in his life. He’d seen a lot of destruction and death in more war-torn battle zones than he could easily list. But he’d never witnessed anything quite like the carnage of devastation that tore into Khosa’s troops as the old gunship delivered its broadside against them. One touch of a button, and he was directing two hundred rounds a second into the enemy’s ranks at little more than point-blank range.

A whirlwind of death hit them like a nuclear blast wave. One instant there had been a formidable fighting force of massed military vehicles and heavily armed soldiers doing everything they could to stop the aircraft and slaughter everyone inside it. The next, there was nothing but blazing wreckage and twisted metal and shattered glass and pulped bodies. Escaping trucks swerved, flipped, rolled, exploded. Swarms of shrapnel, blown-off wheels, body parts flew through the air. The armoured car that had been about to fire on them was a carbonised shell with flames belching and roiling from its windows and turret hatch.

Ben released the fire button. The torrent stopped. The Dakota rolled onwards over the rough grass, towards the airport fence. Through the smoke he could see vehicles and running men as the enemy fell back in disarray. He didn’t want to know how many he’d killed just now, how many more ghosts would come to haunt his dreams for the rest of his days. He just wanted this to be over.

Jeff had jumped from his seat and was bent over where Tuesday lay bleeding on the floor behind the cockpit. ‘He’s alive,’ Jeff yelled, sounding worried. ‘Took a round in the arm. Must’ve fallen and hit his head.’

The interior of the fuselage was hazy with gunsmoke. Ben twisted in his seat and couldn’t see much. ‘Jude! Everyone okay back there?’

‘We’re okay,’ came a hoarse voice. ‘Nobody’s hurt. Just get us out of here!’

Relief thudded through him as Ben taxied the Dakota in a lurching circle, clear of the fence, past the burning wreckage on the runway and back up onto the smoothness of the concrete. Now he had a clear run ahead of him. Less than a thousand feet to take off in, but the old plane could do it. He gunned it hard, bringing the revs and the airspeed indicator back up again. Forty knots. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. Tail wheel locked to keep them straight. Cowl flaps open to cool the engines under maximum load. Power throttle set. Propeller speed up to 2,500 rpm. The wheels began to skip on the runway. The front of the plane started to feel light.

But the enemy hadn’t given up yet. They were regrouping and giving chase one more time, looming larger in the rear-view mirror. The black Hummer was in the lead, tearing after the plane in a frenzy to catch up. Two technicals raced along either side of it, laying down a continuous stream of automatic fire that threatened to shred the Dakota’s tail fin and rear flaps.

Ben pressed the button to activate the rear cannon.

Nothing happened.

It couldn’t have run out of ammunition. It had to be a breech jam or a dud round that had stopped the mechanism, or a power failure, or damage. The Hummer and its followers kept coming. Ben thought he could see Khosa’s furious face screaming at him from behind the Hummer’s tinted glass.

The Dakota was now almost at full takeoff speed and the end of the runway was rushing towards them fast. Then the nose lifted and the ground was suddenly falling away beneath them. A few moments ago, Ben hadn’t thought they would ever get airborne. He wiped the sweat from his face, and his fingers came away red from the fresh gash he’d barely even felt until now. His shirt was sticking to his back and his whole body ached from tension. Thinking of Tuesday, he yelled over his shoulder, ‘Jeff! How is he?’

‘I’m all right.’ Tuesday’s voice was shaky, but the sound of it sent another flood of relief through Ben. Jeff eased their injured friend to a metal bench, helped him peel off his shirt, and examined the damage to his arm. ‘Not as bad as it looks. Small-calibre flesh wound. Bullet passed right through.’

The plane climbed. Ben reduced throttle. Levelled off. Checked his settings. The roar of the engines settled to a steady rumbling drone that resonated all through the aircraft. Time to breathe again, at least for a few seconds.

Jude was making his way forward, stepping carefully over the mass of scorched cartridge casings that were rolling all across the floor. He stood framed in the hatch behind the cockpit, ashen-faced and tousle-haired. Rae was behind him, clutching at a rail for support. ‘Is it over?’ Jude asked. ‘Are we getting away?’

‘Not quite yet,’ Ben said.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Finishing this,’ Ben said. ‘Hold on tight.’

He banked the plane around in a curve. The airfield was a miniature model below them. The black Hummer and the cluster of trucks that was all that remained of Khosa’s troops had reached the end of the runway and kept going, bouncing like crazy over the rutted ground and sending up plumes of dust. The Hummer barely slowed for the perimeter fence. It crashed on through the wire. Small starbursts of muzzle flash rippled from the machine guns aboard the technicals. Tracer fire arced up at the plane and popped against the fuselage. Ben should have climbed out of range, but instead he kept banking around in a curve with his port wing dipped towards the ground two hundred feet below.

He watched the little vehicles scuttling like beetles. Ben had never deliberately stepped on a beetle in his life. But these ones needed to be crushed flat and ground into the dirt. Which was exactly what he intended to do. It was a fine balancing act getting the small moving targets centred in his mirrors. His finger hovered over the fire button.

Wait for it… wait for it… now.

The drone of the engines was drowned once again by the thunder of the gunship’s twin cannons. The spectacular tongue of flame raked the ground like a searchlight. The recoil of the cannons shifted the aircraft’s trajectory and Ben had to compensate with small adjustments as he watched the mirrors and tracked the scattering bugs with his stream of fire. Not the most precise gunsighting arrangement, but he was getting the hang of it. ‘Good shooting,’ Jeff called out as an explosion blossomed like a rose two hundred feet below them. One down. A second truck went into a wild slalom to escape the hurricane of aerial gunfire chasing after it, but in vain as it was pummelled and ripped apart in a flash of flames. ‘Got another!’ Jude crowed.

‘It’s not a damned video game,’ Rae yelled over the deafening blast. ‘People are dying.’

‘They have it coming,’ Jude yelled in reply. Rae couldn’t answer that.

It was the black Hummer Ben wanted. Sizwe was on his feet and steadying himself on the tilted floor to gaze fixedly through one of the porthole windows, clutching little Juma tightly to his side. He wanted the black Hummer, too.

With two of his escort already destroyed and hellfire raining down from the sky on the rest of them, Khosa had turned around and was speeding back towards the airport.

Ben ignored the rest. Let them scatter. He brought the Dakota steeply down and went after the black Hummer.

‘Splatter the bastard,’ Jeff said, clambering back into the co-pilot’s seat. His hands were shiny with Tuesday’s blood.

The Hummer raced back down the runway, speeding towards the airport buildings. With no forward-firing guns, Ben could chase him but he couldn’t shoot until he was in position. And Khosa knew that. The Hummer was going hell for leather down there. It must have been doing ninety miles an hour down the runway. Now it was reaching the buildings. Swerving left past the mouth of the hangar. Heading for the open airport gates. Skidding out of them and accelerating hard away.

Ben dropped his altitude to a hundred feet. The Dakota roared over the airport buildings, the big hangar, the derelict helicopters. Ahead, the Hummer was swerving and fishtailing all over the road in its wild haste to get away. Khosa’s face appeared, looking up at the aircraft from the passenger side window. Just a small dot, the features too far away to be readable, but Ben could feel the hatred in his eyes. And maybe if Khosa had been able to make out Ben’s expression from such a distance, he’d have seen something of the same.

‘He’s heading for the stadium,’ Jeff yelled.

Ben nodded. It was what he’d been afraid of, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The Hummer followed the exact same route that Ben and Jeff had taken on foot earlier. It traced the contour of the stadium’s curved outer wall until it reached the concrete archway that led through to the arena, darted inside, and disappeared from view.

The Dakota thundered over the stadium, banking to port with its guns poised and Ben’s finger resting lightly on the trigger button, ready to press it at the first sign of the black Hummer emerging into the arena. But there was no sign of it. Khosa had stopped and was hiding in the arch.

‘Torch it,’ Jeff said.

Ben hit the trigger. The gunship lit up the arena, churning the ground, reducing the arsenal of weapons to scrap metal and matchwood, pulverising the auditorium, blowing craters out of the walls and the roof of the concrete arch, laying waste to everything until there was so much fire and smoke rising up it was impossible to see. Ten seconds of sustained fire, then another ten, firing blind into the smoke, the recoil juddering the Dakota so heavily that it was almost stalling.

Ben let go of the trigger.

‘He’s toast,’ Jeff said.

Ben said nothing. He hadn’t had enough yet. He flew three more passes over the stadium and resumed his fire, hammering at it as if he wanted to wipe it completely off the face of the planet. This was the man who had taken Jude. This was the man who had inflicted so much pain and suffering on the innocent.

Ben couldn’t stop. The guns kept firing until they ran dry and the rotary barrels whirred silently in their housings. He’d expended more than ten thousand rounds of ammunition. The depleted cartridge belts lay limp over the floor like heaps of dead snakes.

Ben went on circling. Looking for movement, seeing only the aftermath of the destruction. What remained down there on the ground, beneath the pall of smoke and flames, must be little more than rubble. Surely nothing could have survived. Not even Jean-Pierre Khosa.

Ben felt Jude’s hand on his shoulder.

‘It’s time to leave,’ Jude said. ‘It’s over, Dad. Let it go.’

Ben nodded. He placed his own hand over Jude’s. He couldn’t explain the sadness that suddenly came over him at that moment. Like a lead blanket of sorrow and fatigue that made him want to curl up in a corner somewhere. He sighed and blinked the feeling away.

They headed for the wide open sky. Climbing to a thousand feet. Pointing west, into the afternoon sun. Khosa’s city lay below them like a ghost town, a column of black smoke still rising from one end, the twist of river and the mining camp beyond on the other. As they left it behind, the emerald green jungle seemed to stretch out to infinity all around, the jagged ridges of hazy mountains floating like a mirage above the horizon in the far distance.

It looked beautiful from up here. You could almost forget what went on down below. Rae and Jude went to a window and linked hands as they gazed down on the scene, seeing it for the very last time.

‘You’re going home now,’ he said to her, and tears came into her eyes, and he held her. Sizwe clutched little Juma as if he were his own son, and cried too.

They thought it was over.