The Devil's Kingdom

by Scott Mariani

  ‘No kidding. I might have seen one or two of those before.’

  Tuesday weighed the grenade in his hand. ‘Now, the way I see it, we have a couple of choices open to us here. We can use this to blow the door down and take out the guards on the other side of it, in which case we’ll probably catch half the shrap when the bloody thing goes off in this tiny room. Which doesn’t strike me as a great plan. Alternatively, we can use it to stir things up a bit outside and create a diversion.’

  Jeff stared as Tuesday went to the window and peered out at the bars bolted to the wall outside. ‘Just as I thought, it’ll fit between those bars no problem. We pop it out of the window, it goes bang in the street, all hell breaks loose, Khosa thinks there’s an attack kicking off or another assassination attempt or whatever, and in twenty seconds flat everyone’s running about like a headless chicken and we’re the last thing on their minds. In the meantime we bust out of here, take a Jeep, go and cut Ben down, pray he’s still breathing, and get the hell out of Dodge before anyone’s the wiser.’

  ‘Just like that,’ Jeff grunted.

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’

  ‘You forgot one minor detail. Jude. Wherever they’re keeping him, he stays alive for exactly as long as we toe the line. We make a move, especially that kind of a move, they’ll cut his throat in a second.’

  Tuesday nodded. ‘I agree, there’s that risk. But let’s be totally realistic here, Jeff. I hate to say it, but we don’t actually know for sure that Jude’s even still alive. These bastards will murder anyone at the drop of a hat, and they don’t exactly play by the rules. You trust them to keep a bargain?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. But what if he is alive, mate? We can’t be sure he isn’t.’

  ‘One thing we can be sure of,’ Tuesday said. ‘All three of us are leaving this place feet first if you and I don’t act, and soon. And nor is Jude. If he isn’t dead already, he will be the moment they decide he’s become surplus to requirements.’

  Jeff shook his head. ‘I still don’t like it. It’s taking a big fucking chance. I got Jude into this whole mess. I’m not going to be responsible for him getting offed. Not when there’s still a choice.’

  ‘What choice is there? Jude’s best chance is that we get out of here and try and find him before they pull the plug on him. Maybe one of the guards will know where he’s being held.’

  ‘Doubtful.’

  ‘Okay, then, we could kidnap Khosa and take him with us as a hostage.’

  ‘Are you serious? They’d shoot us to pieces before we got within twenty feet of the bastard,’ Jeff said. He paused, and his eyes brightened as an idea came to him. ‘But, on the other hand …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s Dizolele. A senior officer like him is more likely to know where Jude is. Gerber put him in the hospital, and with a hole that size in his leg he won’t be coming out anytime soon. I’ll bet we can find him easy enough.’

  ‘Can we get him to talk?’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Jeff said. ‘And he’ll tell us where he keeps his stash of ladies’ underwear. No problem there. But it’s still going to be awful tight.’

  ‘You know it’s our best bet, Jeff. What’s the alternative? I’d rather die trying than not try at all. And I’m pretty certain Ben would say the same thing.’

  Jeff snorted. ‘You’re as mad as he is.’

  ‘Who dares wins,’ Tuesday said.

  Jeff’s face was drawn and lined with worry. After a long pause he heaved a sigh and said, ‘I hate to say it, but I think you’re right.’

  ‘Course I am.’

  ‘Screw it, let’s do it. Not now, though. We wait until four in the morning. Best time for a surprise attack.’

  They turned off the lights and sat in the darkened room, counting down the minutes as both thought about Ben out there, bleeding at the end of a rope. At exactly 4 a.m., Jeff said, ‘You still up for this?’

  ‘Eager beaver,’ Tuesday replied, his eyes shining in the darkness.

  ‘Then let’s give these bastards a wake-up call.’

  Tuesday used his elbow to smash the window glass. He pulled the pin from the grenade, squeezed his arm through the bars outside the broken window and tossed the grenade as far as he could into the street below.

  ‘Show time,’ he said.

  Chapter 28

  They ducked away from the window milliseconds before the violent explosion shattered the still of the night. The response was exactly as Tuesday had predicted. Within seconds, soldiers from Khosa’s personal guard were rushing out of the hotel, firing off shots at the unseen attackers. A Jeep had caught fire across the street, billowing smoke. Moments later, the first armoured car came screeching onto the scene with its machine guns at the ready, quickly followed by another. Troops spilled out and ran in all directions.

  ‘Look at them go,’ Jeff said with a smile. ‘It’s total anarchy down there.’

  ‘Looks like our cue,’ Tuesday said.

  The flimsy bunk-room door didn’t take much breaking down. The corridor outside it was empty, just as anticipated. Jeff and Tuesday sprinted through the hotel, found a fire exit staircase leading downwards and within sixty seconds were bursting out of a ground-floor doorway that opened onto a side alley. Chaos was still raging all around the front of the hotel. The burning Jeep had exploded in a blast even more violent than the grenade, scattering blazing wreckage all across the street.

  ‘All we need now is a vehicle,’ Jeff said.

  ‘What about that one?’ Tuesday pointed at the hulking black shadow of the Range Rover parked at the side of the hotel. ‘That’ll piss off the generalissimo even more, when he finds out we nicked his wheels.’

  ‘You cheeky sod. I love it.’

  khosa 1 was unlocked, as befitting a man of his fearsome status, and the keys were still in the ignition. Better still, a submachine gun and QBZ rifle complete with sheathed bayonet lay on the back seat, both loaded. The bayonet would come in handy to cut the rope. Both men hoped they wouldn’t need to use the guns.

  The inside of the Range Rover smelled of leather and cigars. The dashboard lights and instruments lit up brighter than the flight deck of a jumbo as Jeff twisted the key and the engine burst into life with a rasping twelve-cylinder roar. Where the grid of the city should have appeared on the built-in sat nav, the screen showed only a blank, unmapped nothingness with their GPS coordinates in one corner. Jeff hit the gas hard and the SUV took off like a spurred stallion.

  As they sped away from the hotel, Jeff glanced in the rear-view mirror at the scenes of mayhem they were leaving behind. If any of the panicking soldiers spotted Khosa’s vehicle taking off at high speed, they would assume for now that the General was escaping to safety. That might buy a little time. Jeff powered the car through the empty streets, driving like a wild man.

  ‘That way. Next left,’ Tuesday said, pointing ahead. The dying braziers of the square came into view up ahead, then the makeshift gallows.

  ‘He’s still there. He’s not moving.’

  Jeff screeched to a halt. They leaped out and ran to where Ben’s limp body hung upside down from the wooden beam.

  ‘He’s alive,’ Jeff said, feeling Ben’s pulse. ‘Mate, can you hear me? Ben?’

  Tuesday reached inside the Range Rover to detach the bayonet from the rifle, then clambered up onto the gallows and used the sharp blade to slash the rope. Jeff held Ben tightly in his arms and caught his falling weight as the rope parted. Tuesday jumped back down to the ground. ‘Jesus, he’s a mess,’ he breathed, staring down at Ben’s bloody form.

  Jeff said, ‘He’ll be okay. Take his ankles and help me carry him to the car.’

  ‘Then we head for the hospital and grab Dizolele.’

  ‘And a big bag of salt,’ Jeff said with a snarl. ‘For me to rub into his wounded leg if the bastard won’t talk.’

  They had carried the still-unconscious Ben just halfway to the Range Rover when floodlights burst into life and the whole square was
suddenly lit up like day. Soldiers swarmed from the barracks building. More burst out of hiding from behind another building across the street.

  ‘It’s a trap!’ Jeff yelled as shots cracked off and bullets flew overhead. ‘Hurry!’ They made it to the vehicle and with grunts of effort managed to heave Ben into the back. Tuesday slammed the rear hatch. The enemy force that had appeared out of nowhere was overwhelming. More shots rang out. A side window of the Range Rover exploded from a bullet strike and showered Tuesday with glass fragments as he kept his head down and raced for the driver’s door. Jeff was just a couple of yards further away from the vehicle, but a couple of yards made all the difference with eighty soldiers bearing down on him at full pelt, screaming and brandishing their automatic weapons. ‘Get out of here!’ he bellowed at Tuesday.

  Tuesday knew that if he hesitated or looked back even for a second, neither of them was going to get away. He had no choice but to leave Jeff standing there, and regret it later. The Range Rover spun its wheels and fishtailed away in a cloud of burning rubber smoke with the driver’s door flapping.

  Alone, Jeff could do nothing as the soldiers flooded towards him from both sides of the street. He was taken – but at least Tuesday was getting away. He launched himself at a soldier who was firing at the escaping Range Rover. He managed to slap the gun down before a rifle butt caught him in the back and slammed him to the ground. More shots blasted out at the vehicle, punching holes in its bodywork and smashing the back window. Captain Umutese had appeared on the scene and was yelling at them to cease fire, cease fire! The white soldier was not to be killed!

  Tuesday glanced wildly back out of the shattered rear windscreen as he screamed away with his foot hard to the floor. He saw Jeff being taken by the soldiers, and knocked to the ground; then a street corner was flashing towards him and he sawed at the wheel and went skidding around it on four locked wheels. His heart was pounding like crazy. ‘Hold on, Ben,’ he yelled over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m getting you out of here!’

  It had been an ambush. The rescue attempt was badly compromised, but maybe there was still a chance of escape before a whole fleet of Jeeps and armoured cars came tearing after them. Tuesday gritted his teeth and gripped the wheel, driving like he’d never driven before. Buildings flashed by in a tunnelled blur. Nothing looked even faintly familiar and he was beginning to panic, thinking he was lost in the maze of streets.

  Then he caught sight of a park on the left that he recognised from the inward journey in the truck, and shortly after that the Range Rover’s headlights were blazing off the fast-approaching construction plant machinery at the edge of the city and he knew he was on the right road out of here.

  Moments later, Tuesday was speeding along the smooth, broad stretch of highway that separated the city from the first perimeter fence. His rear-view mirror was empty. He’d given them the slip, but he still had the heavily guarded gates to deal with. He swallowed and pressed his foot down harder.

  When the gate guards saw their leader’s personal Range Rover bearing down on them and obviously in a great hurry, they rushed to open the gates in time for it to speed through. They were used to seeing their commander come and go at all kinds of odd times. Though it was highly unusual for him to be travelling without an armed escort, it wasn’t their duty to ask questions.

  It was only when the vehicle hurtled past them through the open gates and some of the soldiers noticed the smashed glass and bullet-holed tailgate that they understood that something was wrong. One of them pointed in alarm and began to jabber to his comrades that the single visible occupant he’d glimpsed through the Range Rover’s broken windows was definitely not General Khosa. Realising their mistake in letting it escape, they quickly got on the radio to warn the outer gate that a vehicle was attempting an unauthorised exit. At the other end, the guards muscled up their defences around the gate and got ready to intercept the speeding car with a wall of gunfire that nothing could possibly get through.

  It never got there.

  The soldiers would find the abandoned vehicle minutes later, left on a dirt slope at the side of the road somewhere in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer perimeters. In the back they discovered a loaded submachine gun and a semi-conscious, battered white man whom they instantly took to be an escaping prisoner, and swiftly recaptured. The unidentified young black driver had vanished into the night.

  Chapter 29

  Ben was slowly coming to as the soldiers slung him into the back of a technical and delivered him back to the city. As consciousness returned, with it came the pain. There wasn’t much of him that didn’t hurt so badly that the nerves screamed in protest at every movement and every bump of the pickup truck’s suspension. It was almost a relief when the jarring trip ended and he was grabbed and thrust into prison.

  Khosa’s jail block was a crude basement beneath the barracks building. Crude, but effective. The walls were solid, the doors were sheet steel and the only window in Ben’s tiny cell was twelve feet above the floor and barely large enough for a monkey to scramble through. Let alone a monkey with multiple contusions over just about every square inch of flesh on its body.

  Ben knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The first thing he did was to check himself over for serious damage. He was no stranger to hurt. The last time he’d taken such a thrashing had been at the hands of a bunch of sadistic prison guards in Indonesia. Even that was nothing next to the joyful memory of the roughest phase of SAS training, where the lucky candidates who’d already managed to endure weeks of hell on earth were manhunted through forests and hills, inevitably caught, hooded and knocked about fairly brutally to make them divulge their name, rank and serial number. It was called RTI, Resistance to Interrogation training. Ben had actually evaded capture the first three times they’d tried it on him – a regimental record that to his knowledge was still unbroken. The fourth time he hadn’t been as fortunate, although his interrogators had got nothing out of him.

  What you took away from those experiences was the knowledge of where your personal limitations lay; Ben had learned that to physically break him, you’d have to kill him. Then wake him up and kill him again. It was a valuable lesson, earned the hard way.

  Khosa’s men hadn’t done any lasting damage, as far as Ben could tell from his painful self-examination. His nose wasn’t broken and none of his teeth felt loose. He’d be spectacularly black and blue for a while, and it would take a few days for the swellings across his cheekbones and jawline to go down. But he’d mend in time, and be fully functional again long before then. He lay on the wooden bench that was the only form of bedding in the cell, and gazed up at the ceiling, trying to relax his aching body.

  His mind, though, would not relax. Jumbled fragments of half-memory told him that something bad had just happened to Jeff and Tuesday. He’d only vaguely registered being cut down from the rope, but he’d have recognised those voices anywhere. There had been a commotion. Shots fired, then lots of shaking around in the back of a truck. A rescue attempt, one that touched him with gratitude to the deepest core, but thwarted for some reason. Where were his friends now?

  The stars were fading in the small rectangle of dark sky above him. The first glimmers of a dawn the colour of blood were threading in from the east. He closed his eyes, alone and weary and in pain. And desperately thirsty. His lips were cut and parched, and his throat was so dry he could barely swallow.

  He’d had worse.

  But the worst of all, by a long shot, was still to come.

  Ben’s eyes opened at the sound of his cell door opening. He raised himself painfully up on one elbow and blinked as harsh torchlight shone in his face. Two guards entered his cell, one carrying a dish and a sloshing bucket, the other pointing a rifle as though he seriously expected Ben to try something on. They weren’t alone. The broad, tall figure that stepped into the cell with them was instantly recognisable.

  ‘I have brought you some food and water, soldier,’ Khosa said. �
��Do not tell me I am not fair and considerate, even towards a man who has shown me nothing but disrespect.’

  ‘Where are Jeff and Tuesday?’ Ben asked. His voice was just a croak.

  ‘Your friends, unlike you, are very loyal. They would risk death to save you. Such courage is to be honoured. This is the only reason I have decided to spare the white one from execution. He is in a cell down the hall. We have not hurt him very much. As for the black boy, my men will find him soon enough. If he is as clever as he is brave, he will come quietly. If not, perhaps they will have to kill him.’

  Ben smiled despite the pain in his broken lips. They were alive, for now at least. That piece of news was more important to him at this moment than his dignity. The slosh of the water bucket was more than he could bear. He rolled off the bench and went to drink thirstily from it.

  Then recoiled with a loud yell at the thing in the water.

  Sunk to the bottom of the bucket, palely illuminated in the torchlight, was a human hand.

  It had been hacked off by a cleaver or a machete, leaving about four inches of wrist and a nub of bone. But it wasn’t the sight of a severed body part that brought out Ben’s involuntary cry of horror. It was the bead bracelet looped around the stub of the wrist. A bead bracelet that Ben had seen before, lettered to spell the name ‘Helen’.

  Ben kicked out at the bucket, spilling its contents across the floor. The hand flopped out and fell on its back, fingers curled into a claw like the legs of a huge dead spider. It was colourless and puffy, the flesh swollen and macerated from being immersed in the water. He didn’t recognise it. But how well did he know his own son’s hand?

  Ben’s eyes filled with tears that stung the raw bruises on his cheeks like acid. He looked up at Khosa in pure hatred. ‘What have you done to him?’

  ‘He is alive. That is all you need to know. And he still has one hand, two feet and his head. For the moment. Perhaps you will reflect on this before you commit any further acts of insubordination. I hope you appreciate that your punishment could have been much worse. You have only my good grace to thank for this act of mercy. The next time I will not be as lenient. Even my benevolence has its limits.’