Collaboration. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, no matter who they are.
Ben filled his combat jacket pockets with spare magazines from the dead men and moved on, slipping from cover to cover, just a ghost in the fog of the burning vehicles. The convoy was a mess, but two armoured cars were slowly advancing and focusing intense fire on the enemy positions, a line of technicals following in their wake spitting fire from their rear-mounted Chinese machine guns.
Ben peered through the smoke of the wreckage and saw the governor’s soldiers falling back as Jean-Pierre Khosa’s superior numbers wore them down by attrition. In this sort of savage street fighting, there was just no substitute for good old-fashioned brute firepower. Ben could only guess at the number of times General Khosa had fought such engagements before. It didn’t matter to Khosa if he left thousands of men and boys dead on the battlefield, as long as he gained his objective. Napoleonic tactics weren’t obsolete yet in the age of modern warfare.
The armoured cars rumbled onwards, two abreast in the middle of the road. By the time they reached the blockade, it had been abandoned by the governor’s fleeing soldiers. They trampled the remains of the barriers and crushed the bodies of the dead and wounded under their all-terrain tyres, and rolled relentlessly on through. Ben wasn’t inclined to tangle with the steel monsters, or the procession of armed technicals that followed in their imposing wake. He was content to let them lead him towards the epicentre of the conflict. Wherever Louis Khosa made his final stand, that was where Ben knew he would find Jean-Pierre.
Chapter 41
But the battle for the streets of Luhaka City was far from being over. Another two blocks further east, the invading forces were being hampered by a rooftop sniper. By the time Ben arrived on the scene he was already causing mayhem and had single-handedly stalled their advance by firing down on them with what Ben realised must be some type of big-bore anti-tank rifle with a supply of incendiary rounds as well as regular armour-piercing ammunition. One armoured car and three technicals vehicles were already blackened wrecks being consumed in an inferno of flame and smoke; many more of them had detoured away up a side street to escape destruction. Dozens of troops were taking cover where they could and firing up at the sniper’s elevated position overlooking the street.
He was nested in tight behind sandbags on the top-floor balcony of what had once been a handsome colonial-era townhouse but was now rapidly becoming reduced to a cratered ruin as it was pummelled with gunfire. So far, they hadn’t managed to dislodge the sniper, and he was leading them a merry dance. All that was visible of him was his muzzle flash every time he fired, keeping up a steady WHAM – WHAM – WHAM every few seconds that had the soldiers pinned.
Ben smiled and thought, Good luck to you. As he watched, a direct hit on the fuel tank of a battered Mitsubishi pickup blasted it apart in a sunburst of igniting gasoline, engulfing a couple of soldiers who were too close and slicing up another with flying shrap. Ben watched them die and felt no trace of pity.
That was when Ben spotted another familiar face. Captain Umutese was commanding the operation against the sniper from the safety of the pavement directly below, where the angle of the wall prevented him from becoming a target. He seemed to have claimed the space for himself and wouldn’t allow anyone else to take cover there, as he jabbed fingers and arms in all directions and screamed so loudly he could be heard over the gunfire. At his command, four terrified soldiers were braving the sniper fire while trying to figure out the operation of the Chinese HJ-10 surface-to-air missile whose twin-tube launcher was mounted on the back of a Russian heavy truck. The sniper had been picking them off one by one as if he enjoyed the sport. Every time one was slammed off the flatbed by the force of an incoming round, Umutese was sending in another hapless trooper to take his place. Despite their terror they eventually got the SAM up and running; and now the sniper had taken his last shot.
The blast of the rocket burned brighter than the glaring late-morning sun and shook the street like a five-magnitude earthquake. Umutese seemed only to realise at the last moment that the townhouse walls would come toppling down to bury him where he stood if he didn’t get out of the way. He scrambled for safety as the rocket blasted the top floor, obliterating the sniper and taking out much of the roof of the building. Twenty tons of wreckage came down in an avalanche that filled the street with a sandstorm of dust.
The sniper would not be seen or heard again. He’d had a good innings, but now he was out of the game. Shame, Ben thought.
Now it was his turn.
‘Umutese!’
Umutese turned at the sound of his name, blinking and squinting through the smoke and the dust to see who had called out to him. Then he saw Ben striding towards him out of the fog. His eyes locked on Ben’s face and then flicked downwards to take in the AK in Ben’s hands, and he froze.
There are a lot of things you can say to a man you have witnessed taking part in the sadistic slaughter of innocent people, immediately before you mete out the punishment he deserves. See you in hell. You had it coming. Say hello to St Peter for me. Eat lead, motherfucker.
But why waste the words?
Ben stepped up to within ten yards of him and hammered a three-shot burst into his chest. Umutese belched a gout of blood that arced from his mouth as he toppled over backwards, arms flailing. One second, and it was over. It seemed like an anticlimax.
Out of the drifting pall of smoke and dust came a gang of Umutese’s troopers, alerted by the shot. They should have run in the opposite direction. Ben flipped his fire selector to full-auto, clamped his finger on the trigger and the AK rattled like a road drill as he mowed them down left to right and then engaged the three on the flatbed of the heavy truck. He’d burned through most of his magazine. Ejected it and slapped in another.
More men were emerging from their hiding places, spotting him and moving his way. Ben sidestepped to put the big truck between him and them as cover. A few rifle shots popped his way and bounced harmlessly off the SAM launcher. He popped a couple of shots back at them.
But bigger trouble was looming. The machine-gun turret of the armoured car was swivelling to point at him. Those rounds wouldn’t bounce off a granite mountain, and if he didn’t do something about it he had about three seconds before the fifty-cal turned him into stewing beef.
In three fast paces Ben reached the truck and vaulted up onto the flatbed. The SAM launcher was still angled upwards on its rotating pivot, pointing at the empty patch of sky where the top floor of the townhouse had been. Ben grabbed the mount with both fists and yanked it around, fifty degrees right and forty degrees down, so that the remaining missile was levelled straight towards the armoured car at point-blank range, and let it rip.
The rocket was midway between the launch tube and the armoured car when Ben threw himself off the flatbed. The explosion slammed him to the ground like a hot wave. The side of the truck shielded him from the worst of the blast, but even as he hit the ground hard, driving the air from his lungs, he had to scramble desperately out of the way as the shockwave from its own missile lifted the truck off its wheels and flipped it like a child’s toy halfway across the street, narrowly missing crushing him.
Ben’s ears were ringing, his hands were scuffed and bloody from the flying leap, and the hair on the left side of his head was scorched. He struggled to his feet, and took a few moments to get his breath back. The armoured car was a burning shell and nothing at all was left of the soldiers who’d been anywhere close to it. The rest had had enough. Ben saw the figures disappearing through the curtain of smoke. He raised his AK to fire at them, but the barrel had been uselessly bent by the fall. He threw the weapon away and quickly found another in the clawed hands of one of the dead men. He slung it over his shoulder and walked over to the dusty heap that was Umutese’s body, kicked it a couple of times to make sure he was properly dead, then bent down to unclip the walkie-talkie handset from his belt, thinking he might be able to locate Khosa by listening in
on their radio transmissions.
As an afterthought, he returned to the dead soldiers and relieved one of them of the handheld launcher and a cluster of 40mm grenades he’d been toting through the battleground. The weapon was nothing more than a stubby fat tube connected by a hinge to a rudimentary wooden butt, like a sawn-off shotgun with a single oversized barrel. Ancient, but still pretty damned effective. Ben calmly popped open the breech and slid in a grenade cartridge.
The tower of black smoke from the burning remains of the armoured cars and trucks was blotting out the sun to make the sky look like dusk. The street was half filled with rubble. The place was starting to look like a real war zone. He could tell from the sporadic outbursts of gunfire crackling over the rooftops that the governor’s forces had broken and scattered into smaller pockets of resistance here and there. The invading army would mop them up one at a time until, probably no more than a few hours from now, Luhaka would be totally under their control.
That was, if they still had a new governor to put in the old one’s place. Ben walked on towards the heart of the city. Looking for more of his enemies to take down.
He didn’t have to walk far before he found some. Barely two hundred yards further up the ravaged street, a pair of pickup trucks came skidding around a corner, each carrying four of the militia soldiers who’d joined up with Khosa en route to Luhaka. They looked if they were part of the general rearguard mopping-up operation, scouring the defeated sectors of the city in search of hold-outs to polish off.
Veiled in the dusky light, Ben was nothing more than a silhouetted outline and they flashed right by him. But he had ways of getting their attention. He trained his grenade launcher at the lead truck, tracked it through the sights, and fired just ahead of it like a hunter shooting at a flying bird.
The pickup sped straight into the path of the grenade and caught the impact on its front wing. A flash of bright flame and the truck flipped and rolled, driver and passengers hurled like straw dolls out of its open cab. The second truck swerved to avoid the wreck, then slithered to a halt. Hostile eyes turned back to stare in Ben’s direction as he walked towards them, cracking open the launcher and ejecting the smoking spent cartridge. It hit the ground and rolled away. He walked another step. Loaded another grenade and snapped the tube shut.
The pickup driver slammed his gearstick into reverse, hit the gas and spun the vehicle around. It was a heavily modified Toyota Hilux with a thirty-cal Browning mounted on the back, the cab chopped down and spare fuel cans strapped to the bonnet like the Special Ops Land Rovers Ben’s SAS unit had deployed in the deserts of the Middle East. The driver crunched it into forward gear and floored the pedal as if he wanted to run Ben down. The rear gunner angled the thirty-cal.
It was just a matter of who pulled the trigger first.
Ben fired from the hip, still walking. The grenade whooshed towards the pickup and smacked into its radiator grille. The Toyota’s back wheels bucked up in the air and it turned a somersault as the fuel cans ignited like a bomb and the vehicle was swallowed up in a mushrooming fireball. Ben felt the heat singe his face and ducked back. The Toyota landed belly-up with its wheels still turning. The tyres were on fire. A burning figure of a man struggled free of the wreck and staggered a few paces. Ben let go of the launcher, quickly shouldered his AK, fired twice and dropped him like a sack of washing. He wouldn’t let a man burn to death. But that was where his sympathy ended.
Ben took out the second cigarette he’d got from the soldier on the truck. He paused to light it from the flames of a burning tyre and took a long, deep draw. He walked on, the rifle cradled in his arms. Deeper into the war zone. Looking for trouble and ready to cause more.
Ben Hope, evening the odds.
Chapter 42
The governor’s forces had been badly outnumbered even before the invading army’s arrival. Now they were dwindling by the minute as those troops not prepared to give up their lives defending their governor took to their heels and fled, and the battle for Luhaka became a rout.
To the sound of screams and rattling gunfire, the two hundred men of Jean-Pierre Khosa’s advance guard stormed the grounds and buildings of the governor’s mansion firing on anybody who attempted to stand in their way, and anyone who tried to escape. The tall spiked iron gates hung mangled from their hinges where the General had ordered them to be rammed through by an armoured personnel carrier. Dead soldiers, invaders and defenders in about equal numbers, littered the front lawns. The somewhat neglected neo-classical façade of the governor’s palatial home, with all its yellowed white stone columns and balustrades, was pocked and cratered from small-arms fire, and its dozens of windows were nearly all shot out.
Inside, several of the governor’s personal bodyguards lay scattered about the wide entrance hall. Their blood was spread across the marble floor and up the main staircase and adjoining corridors by hundreds of red boot-prints. Gunfire echoed from all around the building as the invaders hunted down and systematically wiped out those who remained. No prisoners were to be taken: General Khosa’s orders. Only one resident of the building, the governor himself, was to be left alive for his brother to deal with personally. The dead body of a maid dangled from an upper-floor balcony, shot in the back as she attempted to fling herself to her probable death to the ground below. The butler who had refused to tell the invaders where the governor was hiding had been beheaded, along with all the staff who hadn’t managed to get out in time.
Jean-Louis Khosa wasn’t a commander to lead from the rear. He had been the first man inside, and the first of his brother’s bodyguards to die had been dropped by a bullet from his Colt revolver. Now he swept triumphantly through the residence ahead of a phalanx of his men, surveying his new prize and the spoils of war it would yield. In truth, there was little of value in the place. The Persian rugs now littered with spent cartridge casings were tatty and frayed. Along every wall were empty patches where large gilt-framed paintings had been taken down to auction off. For all that he filled his own pockets from the coffers of his province, Louis Khosa had been living far beyond his means for a long time and the signs of decay were everywhere.
‘We will have to redecorate this place after we take power,’ the General said to his men, and they laughed. Just then, his cellphone buzzed in his breast pocket. He hesitated a moment before realising what it was, having spent so much of his time recently out of signal range, then fished it out and saw that the caller ID was César Masango.
‘Are you calling to receive the news of my victory, César? Then you may be the first to congratulate me, ha, ha, ha!’
Masango didn’t sound as though he shared Khosa’s jocular mood. His tone was anxious, even frightened. ‘I have been trying to call you, Jean-Pierre. There is a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘I received a text message from Promise Okereke. It is the hostages. The American girl and … and …’ Masango hesitated as if he was too afraid to finish. ‘The son of the white soldier. They have escaped.’
Khosa gripped the phone so tightly that the plastic casing creaked. ‘How could this happen? When did they escape?’
A heavy sigh on the end of the line. ‘They were found missing this morning, during Okereke’s rounds. I swear I do not know how they managed to get out, Jean-Pierre. I assure you, this is only a temporary setback. They cannot have gone far. We will find them.’
‘Yes, you will, César. And this time we really will cut off the boy’s hands. Both of them. And the girl’s, which we will send to her family with a demand for more money. And, one more thing, César.’
Masango replied hesitantly, ‘Yes, Jean-Pierre?’
‘I want Okereke blinded as a punishment for his incompetence. Put out his eyes with a hot iron.’
‘I will see that it is done, Jean-Pierre.’
The news risked spoiling Khosa’s day. He steamed on through his brother’s mansion with gnashing teeth and a face like thunder. Moments later, though, there was better news f
rom a wiry soldier in a sergeant’s uniform who scurried up to say, ‘Mon général, we have cleared every room and there are no more of the enemy left alive. We found the governor hiding in a bathroom in the servants’ quarters.’
‘Very good, Sergeant. Take me to him.’
‘Oui, mon général.’
Louis Khosa was being held at gunpoint in a small storeroom on the top floor. The yellowed paint was peeling off the walls and there was a smell of mildew, but not sharp enough to mask the scent of fear coming off the governor himself. Like his younger sibling he was a large, powerfully built man, but his body posture was slumped in defeat. He was wearing a rumpled white cotton robe that hung open at the chest, as if the attack that morning had caught him unawares and still in bed. Life in the political fast lane.
‘Leave us,’ the General snapped at his men. The soldiers filed out of the room. Face to face for the first time in years, the brothers stood looking at each other in uneasy silence – though most of the unease was on Louis’s side.
The General took off his mirror sunglasses, and his wide-set eyes penetrated deeply into his brother’s face. He took in the greying, receding hairline, the sallow complexion, and the paunch that the bathrobe couldn’t hide. His brother’s use of skin-lightening cream, something Jean-Pierre abominated, didn’t extend to his whole body and his bare chest was several shades darker than his face and hands.
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