The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 54

Alphonse and Serge had been best buddies for nearly fifty years, and for over forty of them had religiously met up at least twice a week to knock golf balls around Brazzaville’s only course. After decades of practice neither of them was ready to enter the Africa Open anytime soon, and now that Alphonse’s knees had gone bad it was taking them longer to get around all nine holes than it used to.

Alphonse wasn’t having a good day today, and their round had dragged on extra late. The light was starting to fade, but at least that spared them from the pain of watching the balls fly into the snake-infested rough. Both men were looking forward to winding up their game and heading across to the club bar for a nice cold beer or two before each went home to their respective dinners and beds.

Serge was shuffling up to tee off on the ninth, a tricky uphill drive that needed to clear the rise ahead, when the two of them suddenly cringed and ducked as a huge roaring thunder filled the air.

At first they thought it was a violent storm descending on them, though there’d been no lightning flash. Then an enormous dark shape came swooping low out of the sky, skimming the trees, its noise and wind almost knocking the two old men flat. Their jaws dropped open in shocked amazement as it blasted overhead, so close they could almost have reached up with their clubs and scraped its great green underbelly. What the hell was an aircraft doing coming in to land on the golf course?

The roaring plane disappeared out of sight over the rise. Alphonse and Serge exchanged stupefied looks, then dropped their clubs and set off as fast as they could after it. It took poor old Alphonse a few minutes to scale the rise, though Serge wasn’t much quicker. As veteran members of the club they knew the top of the slope overlooked the fairway of the second hole, a long par five. When they finally reached the summit, gasping for breath, their eyes opened wide at the sight of the landed aircraft three hundred yards away on the second green.

By the time the club manager had been summoned and a party of puzzled staff and members had plucked up the courage to march up the fairway and investigate, all they found inside the abandoned, bullet-riddled aircraft were a pile of weapons whose ammunition had apparently been ditched overboard before landing, a mass of spent shell casings lying all over the floor, and some crates containing photographic equipment.

It was all a bit of a mystery. As was the whereabouts of the plane’s occupants, who had long since slipped away into the darkness.

‘Do you make a habit of stealing cars?’ Rae asked from the back as the crowded vehicle drove through the night.

‘It’s not a car, it’s a Land Rover,’ Ben replied.

He and Jeff had found the thirty-year-old twelve-seater station wagon parked behind what appeared to be the groundsman’s hut at the golf club, with the keys left in the ignition. It had been the easiest theft in Ben’s long and undistinguished career as a car criminal. ‘And we’re only borrowing it,’ he added.

‘Heard that one before,’ Jeff said with a grin.

The decision to cross the border into the Republic of Congo had been made in the air as they headed west towards Kinshasa. Jeff’s suggestion, based on the fact that ROC was a comparatively more stable country than its neighbour, for what it was worth — even though the capital cities of the two countries lay just a few kilometres apart, within sight of one another across the waters of the Congo River. Nobody had argued with the choice, or with the idea of leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo behind them, never to return. Brazzaville had a US Embassy where Rae could present herself as an American citizen in distress and be flown home to her family. Jude had other plans of his own to set in action.

But first they had to find a place to hole up for the night, and get Tuesday seen to. The bullet wound to his arm was less serious than they’d first feared, but he was in pain and needed medical attention.

The hot, sultry night had fully descended by the time they found an auberge on the edge of a less rundown suburb of the city. The place was run by a woman named Mama Lumumba: four hundred pounds, sixty years old and as formidable as a lioness. They’d done what they could to clean up and divest themselves of obvious military-looking garb before knocking on her door. Nonetheless, one look at Ben and Mama had been ready to slam the door in their faces — but had melted when she saw the half-dozen ragged and hungry-looking children getting out of the Land Rover and agreed to let them have three rooms for the night.

How Ben was going to pay her was something he’d leave until morning to worry about. If they could get to a computer, they could wire some money from the heavily depleted Le Val business account to a local bank and make a cash withdrawal. Then again, this was Africa. Ben expected complications, though none as tough as the prospect of himself, Jude, Jeff, and Tuesday getting home with no passports and without entanglements with ROC officials who, inevitably, would be full of awkward questions about what four foreigners, some more battered than others, were doing in their country without ID or visas in the first place. If they twigged the fact that three of the four had British military backgrounds, the next word out their mouths would be ‘mercenary’. And that would bring a ton of trouble.

But there were more immediate concerns to address in the meantime. Their story was that they’d been involved in a car accident out in the bush. When Ben enquired about the chances of finding a doctor this time of night to treat his friend’s injured arm, Mama said there was a nice young fellow down the street who used to work at the hospital.

That nice young fellow turned out to be a seventy-something retired doctor named Paul Bakupa who lived alone and, by Congolese standards, in relative comfort in a small bungalow a short walk from the auberge. The old doctor also kept a well-equipped first-aid cabinet. For the offer of 500,000 central African francs — which sounded like a fortune but equated to only about 750 euros — he at first reluctantly agreed to clean, stitch up, and dress Tuesday’s arm and dose him with painkillers and antibiotics. While he was at it, he insisted on taking a look at Ben’s battered face, which he painfully but gently swabbed with alcohol, sticking plasters here and there before putting three stitches in Ben’s split lip.

As he finished working on Ben, Bakupa said softly, speaking French, ‘I understand I’m not intended to ask too many questions, or else you would not have offered to pay me so much money. But I have to say, my curiosity is aroused. A bullet wound is not the kind of injury one would normally associate with a car accident. However, you and your friends do not seem to me like criminals or villainous people. Thus I can only infer that you must have encountered some kind of trouble that was not of your making.’

Ben touched his lip. The stitching felt solid. Bakupa was a good surgeon, and a good man. Someone who could be trusted. He said, ‘Have you heard the name Jean-Pierre Khosa?’ The numbness from the local anaesthetic made talking difficult.

‘I have,’ Bakupa said, nodding sagely. ‘Some people say that animal will be president of the Democratic Republic one day. The Lord help us all if such a disaster should occur.’

Ben said, ‘Unlikely to happen. Unless they have dead men as presidents. That’s all I can tell you about the nature of the trouble that my friends and I encountered. Except to say that you’ll get none from us. I promise you that.’

A glimmer came into Paul Bakupa’s crinkly eyes. ‘I see. Then Africa has just become a better place. Say nothing more, mon jeune ami. I have heard all I need to know.’ He tapped the side of his nose, then glanced at the children. Mani seemed to have attached himself to Ben and was hanging around nearby, while Juma seemed to want to be close to Sizwe. The others were sitting quietly together in a corner. ‘What of these children?’ the doctor asked Ben with concern.

‘Boy soldiers from Khosa’s army,’ Ben said. ‘Demobbed, as of today.’

‘What is to become of them?’

‘Anything’s better than where they were until now,’ Ben said. Though the truth was, he had no idea what he was going to do with six young kids.

‘God bless them, I hope they will survive,’ Bakupa said.