‘And there’s not a single road-going vehicle left in this whole city,’ Tuesday said. ‘Khosa took them all, apart from one Jeep, which is scrap now.’
‘Then we risk it on foot,’ Jude said. ‘We can hide in the forest, and make our way to a town.’
‘You haven’t been in that jungle, Jude,’ Tuesday said. ‘An army squadron with machetes would take days to hack a mile through it.’
‘And there’s about a million square miles of it all around us,’ Jeff added. ‘Trust me, Ben and I have just flown over it. You’re not in the Oxfordshire countryside anymore, mate. There are no towns, and if there were we’d never get that far. Not with a bunch of kids in tow, and a—’
‘A woman,’ Rae said angrily. ‘That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?’
‘Whatever,’ Jeff said. ‘This is the Congo, not Chicago.’
‘I can rough it as much as any man, sweetie pie,’ she retorted.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ Jeff said. ‘If it was a Special Forces commando unit taking their chances out there in the arsehole of nowhere with a thousand of Khosa’s troops hunting them, I’d say the same thing. These bastards are on their home ground. They’ve been fighting nasty little jungle wars since they weren’t much more than his age.’ He pointed at Mani, and shook his head again. ‘We wouldn’t last half a day out there.’
Nobody could doubt that Jeff was making sense. ‘Ben?’ Tuesday said, and everyone looked at Ben.
‘I’m no aircraft mechanic,’ Ben said. ‘But it looks to me like we have only one option here, and that’s for us all to head for the airport and try and fix the chopper with the electrical problem.’
‘And if we can’t?’ Tuesday asked, chewing his lip.
‘Then we figure out another way,’ Ben said.
Jude was thinking, looking at the plane. ‘If you reckon you can fit two more aboard that, then I say do it. Jeff and Ben, get these kids to safety. Tuesday and Sizwe, you go with them.’
‘Unless I’m missing something, that leaves two,’ Tuesday said, pointing at Jude and Rae.
‘We’ll be okay,’ Jude said. ‘We gave them the slip before. We can do it again.’
‘And I still need to find my camera gear,’ Rae added. ‘If it’s not here, maybe it’s back at the mine compl—’
‘Forget it,’ Ben interrupted her.
‘But it’s important,’ she protested. ‘Without it, I don’t have the evidence to prove what’s been happening here, and Craig died for nothing.’
‘Then he died for nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Tough shit. He wouldn’t be the first.’
Rae looked as if she’d been slapped across the face. Jude flushed. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘I mean it,’ Ben said. ‘Nobody else dies. Nobody stays behind.’ He aimed a finger at Jude and Rae. ‘You’re both coming with us, if I have to knock the pair of you out and carry you over my shoulders like two sacks of rice. Understood?’
Jude fell silent.
‘To the airport,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’
Chapter 49
The little Cessna couldn’t fly a dozen bodies across the city to the airport, but it could serve as a makeshift people carrier. Jude and Rae climbed up onto the port wing, Tuesday and Sizwe perched on the starboard side, and with everyone else crammed inside the cockpit Ben got the engine ticking over at a thousand revs, enough power to taxi them through the streets. He steered awkwardly using the rudder to control the nose wheel and the toe brakes to control the main landing gear, keeping to the middle of the road so as not to snag the wingtips on any corners. It wasn’t ideal, but it was quicker than walking.
The airport lay behind wire-mesh fences a few hundred yards beyond the stadium on the western edge of the city. The runway was unfinished and only about half the length it would eventually need to be to land anything much bigger than a single-engined prop. A few prefabricated buildings stood on concrete near the chain-link gates at the western end. The largest of those was a big hangar with steel roller doors locked down to galvanised posts buried deep in the ground.
‘What’s in there?’ Ben asked Tuesday, and Tuesday explained that he hadn’t been able to open it. Some fresh gouges and several bullet holes around the locks were evidence of his attempts to break them open using a lump hammer before resorting to his weapon. Nothing doing. Extremely aware of time ticking by, Ben nodded and turned to survey the rest of their options.
Those were exactly as Tuesday had described. Ben recognised the ancient military helicopters from Somalia: the two Bell Iroquois combat choppers and the medium-lift Aérospatiale Puma that had rescued the survivors from the wreck of the Svalgaard Andromeda and carried them all to shore. They’d have been safer staying on their raft in the middle of the shark-infested ocean, and not a day had passed since that Ben hadn’t wished they’d never got into that damned Puma. Now, he found himself cursing the fact that he couldn’t. Its partially dismantled hulk squatted on the hot concrete like a rotting whale on a beach that the gulls had been gradually pecking to pieces, surrounded by grimy old tools and disassembled rusty components, nuts and bolts and gears and springs and brackets and the battered rotor blades themselves – all three out of four of them, seven metres long apiece and showing the signs of extreme wear that had probably accounted for the missing fourth.
‘If I was Khosa, I’d get myself a new mechanic,’ Jeff commented dryly. ‘And maybe shoot the old one while I was at it.’
The first Bell Iroquois was in an even worse state, just as Tuesday had said. Ben couldn’t tell whether it was being overhauled or cannibalised for parts – either way, it was scrap. By contrast, the second Iroquois initially looked much more promising, at least on the outside. As a light, fast transport for mobile infantry during Vietnam, the old ‘Huey’ had been designed to carry twelve troops along with its crew. It would have been the perfect escape for their motley band. But again, just as Tuesday had found out before him, like the rest of Khosa’s sad little air force it had fallen prey to the gremlins of long-term neglect, abuse, and inexpert maintenance. Hauling himself behind the controls and flipping all the right switches to initiate the start-up procedure, Ben had to quickly shut everything back down as sparks flew and something began to give off an acrid plastic burning smell. Moments later, a lick of yellow flame appeared from the instrument panel. Ratty old military helicopters in Africa didn’t come equipped with foam extinguishers; Ben managed to dig a bit of grimy rag out from under the seat, and used it to beat out the fire before it got a hold on anything seriously flammable.
‘Damn it,’ he said.
Standing framed in the open cockpit hatch beside him, Tuesday spread his hands. ‘I wasn’t kidding, was I? Reminds me a little of that old Land Rover you guys have in France. I’ve checked the main fuses, replaced all the ones I could find from the other Huey, but it’s still doing it. Gets a little worse each time. I dare say, you flip that switch again, the whole thing will just go blammo. So unless you have a brilliant idea, looks like we’re grounded.’
Ben wasn’t getting any brilliant ideas, and he’d meant it when he said he wasn’t an aircraft mechanic.
‘Probably just as well,’ Tuesday said, his worried look dissolving into a sudden cheery grin. ‘If it started playing up once we were in the air, we’d be in a right jam. I like to think of these kinds of situations as our guardian angels looking out for us.’
You could always count on Tuesday Fletcher to look on the bright side at a time like this.
Ben jumped out of the helicopter. He could almost hear the wheels turning as Khosa’s army grew closer with every passing moment. ‘Damn it,’ he said again.
Jude and Rae had found a shady spot next to the big hangar and were crouching there together, side by side. Jude was talking to her in a low voice, and she was looking intently at him as he spoke. Ben could see the closeness in their body language. He smiled, watched them a moment longer and then swivelled his gaze a few degrees left towards the hangar’s steel sh
utter door. Locked down tight, while the other buildings had been left open. He couldn’t imagine why. Unless there was something in there that Khosa wanted to protect more than a bunch of dead helicopters.
‘I want to get in there,’ he said.
‘It’d take an RPG to bust those locks,’ Tuesday told him.
Ben nodded. ‘I reckon you’re right,’ he said.
‘And, like, we don’t have an RPG?’ Tuesday said quizzically, watching Ben’s face.
Ben said nothing. He swivelled his gaze back away from the hangar, back past where Jude and Rae were still sitting talking, eighty degrees east towards the sports stadium. A few hundred yards away beyond the airport fence, the grey concrete arena walls shimmered in the heat.
Ben said, ‘Hm.’
Tuesday blinked and craned his head forward. ‘What?’
Ben said, ‘I wonder.’
‘Me too. I wonder what you’re on about.’
‘You stay here and keep an eye on the kids,’ Ben told him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To check something out,’ Ben said. ‘Jeff, you want to come with me?’
‘Anything’s better than standing about gawping at this junkyard,’ Jeff said.
Without explaining the idea that had come into his mind, Ben led the way at a run out of the airport gates and across the barren, weed-strewn stretch of ground that separated it from the stadium. They skirted the circumference of the high walls until they reached the same shady concrete arch through which Captain Xulu had led them on their first day in the city. They trotted through the coolness of the tunnel and emerged back out into the heat of the sun with the enormous bowl of the arena encircling them.
‘What’s up?’ Jeff asked.
‘That is,’ Ben said, pointing at a green mountain in the middle of the arena.
It was as he’d thought.
Chapter 50
The mountain in front of them was a large canvas tarpaulin that had been draped over something even larger and weighed down with rocks around its edges to hold it in place and keep off the rain. Ben ran up to it, kicked away one of the rocks and lifted the tarp to peer underneath. Jeff joined him and bent to look as well. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered. Looks like someone’s been doing a spot of shopping.’
‘Or had another delivery from their sponsors,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my guess.’ They pulled the tarp back further and Ben saw the stencilled Chinese lettering on the wooden crates that were piled fifteen feet high underneath.
‘They’re not messing about, are they?’
‘Must have arrived while we were in Luhaka.’ Ben grabbed the rope handles of a crate and dragged it off its pile, letting it crash to the ground at his feet. It broke open. He bent to pull out handfuls of straw packing that protected the grenades inside. He grabbed half a dozen grenades and stuffed them in his pockets. But it wasn’t grenades he’d come looking for. Some of the crates were much larger and more interesting.
He turned and looked across the expanse of the arena, measuring it up and running numbers through his mind as he thought out loud, ‘Need about nine hundred feet, should be able to do it. Max payload’s a little under two and a half thousand pounds. Might need to dump some fuel to lose weight.’
‘What are you muttering about?’ Jeff asked.
‘Come on,’ Ben said, and set off running towards the concrete arch. Jeff scratched his head in confusion, then heaved an exasperated sigh and followed.
Fifteen minutes later and a few hundred pounds lighter, the Cessna buzzed over the stadium, dropped sharply down over the banked auditorium and hit the rough grass with a thump and a bounce. Once they were down Ben had to brake hard to slow the plane. He was taking a chance with the landing distance, like he was taking a chance by dumping out most of their fuel.
He taxied the plane round in a wide curve and they stopped with one wing almost touching the mountain of crates. Leaving the engine running he flung open the cockpit door and jumped out, clutching a claw hammer he’d found among the mess of disassembled helicopter parts on the runway. He attacked the piles of crates, shoving the smaller ones out of the way until he identified those he wanted and began prising them open.
The ones containing the RPG launcher and rockets. Working doggedly with the seconds cracking off like gunshots in his head, Ben grabbed the five-foot-long weapon from its box and tossed it to Jeff, who stowed it in the cockpit. That left plenty of room for half a dozen or so of the spear-like 40mm rockets, plus as many kilos of small arms and ammunition as Ben dared to cram on board the plane. Lastly, Ben grabbed a crate full of Kevlar body armour vests he’d found among the pile. Then they were off again, taxiing back in a loop over the rough grass to point the aircraft towards the widest stretch of ground.
‘Here goes,’ Ben said, and hit the throttle. The roaring Cessna accelerated faster and faster towards the opposite side of the auditorium until it seemed as if they were hurtling towards certain destruction. Just as the look of terror began to spread over Jeff’s face Ben yanked the yoke back almost hard enough to rip it from its mounting, and the plane left the ground and skimmed the auditorium. Its undercarriage cleared the wall with inches to spare and Ben climbed to four hundred feet to peel it back round in a smooth arc towards the airport.
‘I’m getting too old for this dangerous shit,’ Jeff said, eyes closed with a hand clutching his chest.
‘Don’t be such a cissy, Dekker.’
‘I hope you know what to do if I have a bloody heart attack.’
‘The heart’s a muscle like any other,’ Ben said. ‘A little bit of excitement can only be good exercise for it.’
Another five minutes later, Ben had everyone cleared out of the way and he was facing the hangar shutter with the Chinese Type 69 rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his shoulder, aiming it towards the doors at an angle to lessen the chances of destroying whatever Khosa was keeping locked up in there. The thick steel would protect it from the explosion. At any rate, that was the plan.
Chances. Sometimes you just had to take them.
Ben said a quick prayer and fired. He felt the recoil of the rocket push him back on his heels, and the heat on his face as the hangar door was engulfed in a fierce bright flash and buckled inwards. Hardly waiting for the flames to subside, Ben dropped the RPG and ran into the smoke, ducking low to slip through the ragged hole that had appeared in the shutter door. The hangar was at least eighty feet deep and well over a hundred feet wide, but the only light came from narrow slotted windows high up in the walls and it was completely blotted out with the dark smoke still belching through the hole in the door, making it hard to see. Jeff joined Ben as he probed his way through the murk. Ben’s leg touched against something solid and he put out a hand to feel what it was.
It was the front end of a four-wheel-drive pickup, jacked up on raised suspension and fitted with a light bar across the grille. Ben ran his hand along the crusty paintwork and wondered what a battered old pickup was doing locked inside a hangar. Still, it was transport, and with luck they might just about be able to cram everyone aboard.
It was then that Ben sensed a much larger presence inside the hangar. He looked up and saw the huge shape overhead, slowly becoming more visible as the smoke cleared. He was standing beneath a wing. He traced its line to the long, thick fuselage it was joined to. The aircraft filled most of the hangar.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Jeff breathed, and smiles broke out on both their faces as they gazed up at the hulk of the resting Douglas DC-3 Dakota airliner. The last time they’d seen the big plane had been moments after it had crash-landed with them on board, in remote countryside somewhere near the Rwanda–Congo border.
‘They fixed it up,’ Jeff muttered in surprise, stepping over to inspect the undercarriage strut that had been wrecked in the forced landing. ‘I take back what I said about the mechanic. Someone’s been busy.’
Tuesday stepped tentatively inside the hangar, followed by Jude, then Rae, then the kids. Sizwe
was the last to enter. He stood behind the clustered children and laid a protective hand on Juma’s shoulder, saying nothing.
‘I don’t believe it!’ Tuesday burst out when he saw the Dakota. ‘Now this is what I call cool. Guys, look no further. We just found our ticket out of here.’
‘You can fly this?’ Rae asked, looking at Ben.
‘He can fly anything,’ Jude answered for him.
The smoke had almost completely cleared. With the natural exploratory curiosity of an investigative journalist, and with Jude hovering close behind, Rae stepped beneath the Dakota’s wing and started making her way deeper inside the hangar. She glanced at the pickup truck parked next to it. Walked on another step. Then froze, and whirled round to gape at the back of the truck. Her shout echoed through the hangar.
‘My stuff!’
Jude rushed to her side. She was excitedly clambering onto the cargo bed to examine the aluminium flight cases piled up against the back of the cab. ‘It is! It’s my equipment!’ She dropped to her knees, set one of the cases down in front of her, and popped the catches. ‘Oh, boy, this is incredible. Everything’s here. It’s all here, Jude. This is where they stashed it away.’ She couldn’t stop smiling.
Jude jumped up onto the truck and hugged her. ‘That’s fantastic, Rae.’
‘Someone’s happy, at least,’ Ben said in an aside to Jeff.
Jeff raised an eyebrow. ‘And someone else has gone el mucho hotto for a pretty face,’ he muttered, looking at Jude.
Ben was surprised. ‘What? You think?’
‘Come on, mate. He practically has his tongue hanging out whenever he gets within five yards of her. And I don’t think she minds it one bit, either.’
‘So fast?’
‘At their age?’ Jeff nudged Ben with his elbow and grinned. ‘Come on, old timer, let’s check out this flying coffin and see if we’ve got a real chance of getting out of here this time, or just another pig in a poke.’
A Dakota’s main hatch was a rectangular panel on the port side of the fuselage, behind the wing. It was open, with a metal ladder propped against it. Ben scrambled up it first. When he reached the top of the ladder, six thirty-calibre muzzles within a cylinder of black metal stared him in the face and he realised that the repairs to the undercarriage weren’t all that Khosa’s plane mechanic had been busy working on.
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