The Devil's Kingdom

by Scott Mariani

  And now Ben had the answer to a small mystery that had come to his notice during the attack on Luhaka. He’d vaguely wondered at the time why no use was being made of the three Hua Qing rotary cannons they’d unpacked on their first day in the city. Capable of delivering an incredible rate of fire from their whirling multiple barrels hooked up to a motor drive, they were one of the most potent weapons in any small-arms arsenal. Their absence from the invasion force had seemed to him something of an omission. But now he knew better. Because he’d just found them.

  Khosa’s mechanic had fashioned a crude but perfectly serviceable mount out of hardened steel plate, welded to the floor and allowing the weapon to be deployed against targets on the ground if the pilot banked the plane over at an angle. The second cannon was poking from a fuselage window a few feet away. The third was fitted neatly into the tail pointing rearwards, so as to present a serious disincentive to any pursuing aircraft.

  Cartridge belts lay coiled all over the floor like anacondas. Miles of them. To Ben’s practised eye it looked like about twenty-five or thirty thousand rounds all told: enough ammunition to give a decent-sized combat division a really bad day. The pointed bullets were all black-red tipped to denote that they were armour-piercing incendiary rounds. If you were going to punch through the side of a tank, you might as well torch its insides into the bargain.

  ‘I humbly retract everything I said,’ Jeff chuckled. ‘The crafty bastards have taken a DC-3 and turned it into Puff the Magic Dragon.’

  That had been the unofficial nickname for the AC-47 attack/cargo ‘Spooky’ gunship developed by the US Air Force from the civilian Dakota airliner as an exceptionally effective means of providing close air support to ground troops in Vietnam. By the time they were superseded in ’69 by faster, more powerful gunships they’d flown over 150,000 successful combat missions, fired nearly a hundred million rounds and become the scourge of the Viet Cong, who lived in such fear of the ‘dragon’ that their commanders issued orders not to attack it lest they infuriate the monster. The aircraft’s armament of side-firing General Electric mini-guns, of which the Hua Qings were descendants, were operated from a selective trigger on the pilot’s yoke.

  When Ben and Jeff made their way forward to the cockpit, they found that the same modification had been made to Khosa’s plane.

  ‘Why didn’t they use it in Luhaka?’ Ben wondered out loud.

  Jeff shrugged. ‘A few passes from old Puff here could flatten half the bloody city. Maybe Khosa didn’t want to rip the place up too badly. No point in being governor of a burning heap of rubble, after all.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘Or maybe it’s just not operational yet. For all we know, it won’t fly.’

  ‘Only one way to find out, mate.’

  Ben got behind the controls. While the original American AC-47 gunships had been equipped with a special reflector gunsight mounted in the left-hand cockpit window, Khosa’s home-brewed variant made do with a crude arrangement of rear-view mirrors bolted to the outside of the canopy for the pilot to be able to direct his fire on targets on the ground and to the rear. Not exactly a precision setup. A little bit of Kentucky windage, a little bit of ‘spray and pray’, would be the order of the day.

  Ben looked around him. Everything in the cockpit was sheet metal and rivets. Spartan and functional, the way he liked it. Better still, whoever had last sat in the pilot’s seat had left a pack of African Tumbaco cigarettes tucked behind the yoke, with a disposable lighter slipped inside.

  Ben lit one up. Once again, it wasn’t a Gauloise, but any port in a storm. Blowing smoke, he flipped some of the clunky old-fashioned switches and instrument lights came on. Nothing went snap, crackle, or pop. No flames started licking out from behind the dials.

  ‘So far, so good,’ Jeff said, then looked up and pointed through the cockpit window. ‘Now all we need to do is find a way to open that shutter door.’

  Ben puffed some more smoke. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. They didn’t make these old planes out of recycled Coke tins.’

  Jeff looked at him. ‘You’re going to ram your way out, aren’t you, you mad bastard.’

  ‘Whatever works,’ Ben said. He glanced up at the afternoon sky. The sun was beginning its slow descent in the west. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Time we got out of here,’ Jeff replied. ‘They must be getting close by now.’

  But Jeff was wrong. Khosa wasn’t getting close.

  Khosa had already arrived at the city.

  Chapter 51

  ‘They are not here, General.’

  The convoy had come to a halt, filling the main drag with a ragged line of dusty vehicles that tailed almost all the way back to the construction zone on its eastern side. The smell of hot metal and diesel fumes was rich in the air, along with the sounds of running boots and spluttering radios and barked commands as over a thousand soldiers were deployed into units that hurried here and there, spreading out in a wide circle and scouring every street, alley, and building. Within minutes, the sentries posted to guard the city in their absence had been found dead, presumed murdered by the escaped prisoners. The soldiers were under orders to bring both the American woman and the yellow-haired boy to the General for interrogation. It was whispered that the wicked foreigners had stolen something of great, great importance, though the rumour was vague. Whatever the nature of the crime, the soldiers were confident that its perpetrators would be suitably punished – and they couldn’t wait to watch.

  Jean-Pierre Khosa stood beside his Hummer at the head of the line. His revolver was drawn and cocked in his fist. The wide-set eyes behind the mirrored shades scanned the surrounding buildings, their windows and doorways and rooftops, for any sign of movement. He sensed their presence nearby. He could feel them. He could almost smell the blood in their veins and hear their hearts beating. They would not remain beating for long, once his property was returned to him.

  The General appeared calm, but as everyone who knew him understood, sometimes it was when he was at his most calm that he was also at his most volatile. He didn’t seem to have heard the soldier who’d reported back to him after the initial search of the area. Nervously, the soldier cleared his throat and repeated himself. ‘General, the city is empty. The escaped prisoners are no longer here.’

  Khosa slowly turned to look at him, expressionless and inscrutable. He shook his head, and replied with absolute certainty, ‘No, Sergeant, they are here. Search again. Every inch of the city. Every crack and hole. Then search the mines. The river. The forest. They are not far away, and you will find them.’

  Or heads will roll. Literally. The subtext wasn’t in any way lost on the sergeant, who had seen enough heads literally rolling before now to take it seriously.

  ‘Where is Pascal Wakenge? Where is my doctor?’ Khosa demanded.

  ‘With the convoy, General, as you ordered.’

  ‘Bring him to me.’

  The sergeant snapped a salute and ran to carry out the command. Moments later, he returned with the witch doctor, who looked a little bulkier than usual as he was wearing body armour under his robe. Wakenge had accompanied the Luhaka invasion force in a Land Rover near the front of the column, as Khosa liked to keep him on hand for his superhuman powers. Being known to be completely impervious to bullets, the old man’s safety in the midst of battle had not been considered a concern. Strangely, though, Wakenge did seem most relieved to be back in the relative safety of the city. Nobody seemed to have noticed the Kevlar padding around his torso.

  ‘Oui, mon fils?’ Only the witch doctor could be allowed to call Khosa ‘my son’.

  Khosa explained that he wanted Wakenge to use his magic to find the person who had stolen his most precious belonging from him. Wakenge hesitated for the briefest moment and then nodded sagely. He screwed his eyes shut with a look of intense concentration, so that his old face wrinkled up like a walnut as he shook his monkey skulls and chanted softly to himself in a language he alone understood
. Khosa watched him with rapt attention. This went on for a good half-minute. Wakenge opened one eye to a slit, saw the General was watching him, closed it again, and continued his strange chant a while longer. Some kinds of magic took longer than others.

  But before old Wakenge was able to finish working his wonders, Khosa interrupted him by suddenly reaching out and grasping his skinny arm in a powerful fist.

  ‘What is it, mon fils?’ Wakenge looked alarmed. Had his patient, pupil and protégé rumbled him at last?

  Khosa took off his dark glasses and stared at the old man with bulging eyes. ‘I can hear them,’ he hissed.

  Wakenge’s tension melted. He could hear nothing himself, being rather deaf in one ear. ‘This is good, Jean-Pierre. You are learning well.’

  ‘No, I mean I can hear them,’ Khosa said. He held up a hand. ‘Can you not hear it?’ He stood very still, listening. Then bellowed at the sergeant, ‘Tell those men to be quiet!’

  The sergeant shouted orders at the troops. A hush fell over the street. Soldiers glanced at one another in confusion and began crowding around their leader as he stood like a statue, his scarred face locked in concentration. Whatever he could hear, it was no surprise to them that he was alone. His incredible powers of auditory perception were, after all, part of his legend, like his ability to read your thoughts and predict the future.

  But then the sound grew a little louder and became audible to ordinary human ears. The soldiers could hear it, too. And if old Pascal Wakenge hadn’t been slightly deaf, he also would have been able to detect the distant familiar drone emanating over the rooftops from the western edge of the city.

  A sound like no other. The unmistakable low-pitched rumble and chattering clatter of a large, old-fashioned propeller aircraft warming up its twin nine-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engines and taxiing into position as it prepared for takeoff.

  Khosa snapped his eyes open and turned to his troops.

  ‘The airport!’ he shouted. ‘They are at the airport! Hurry!’

  Chapter 52

  The roar of the Dakota’s engines inside the enclosed space of the hangar was even louder than the cyclone that had capsized the Svalgaard Andromeda. The entire building was shaking as if an earthquake had hit it.

  All twelve of them were aboard, along with their small cargo. Jeff was in the co-pilot’s seat that Khosa had occupied on the flight from Somalia. Tuesday and Sizwe were anxiously hovering at the back of the cockpit. Jude and Rae were sitting in the passenger section with the children and Rae’s recovered boxes, all carefully stowed and lashed down to protect their important contents from damage. She kept glancing at them, smiling to herself despite everything that had happened. Jude was smiling, too.

  A thrumming vibration filled the bare fuselage, as though the Dakota was alive and quivering with eagerness to get into action. ‘Ready?’ Jeff yelled over the roar.

  ‘As ready as we’ll ever be,’ Ben replied. He flicked his cigarette stub out of the open window. Halfway through the pack of Tumbacos already. They helped. He took a deep breath. The engines were clattering away at five hundred revs. Ben gently increased the throttle speed and eased the plane forwards towards the steel shutter. This was no time for doubts.

  Ramming his way out wasn’t quite Ben’s plan. The aircraft’s big rounded nose cone didn’t smash violently through the hangar door. It made contact with a kind of shudder that turned into a rending screech of metal, and pushed on relentlessly through as though the shutter had been made of tinfoil. The hinges gave way and the door collapsed outwards under the massive thrust.

  The Dakota’s nose emerged into the daylight. Its big wheels trampled over the buckled metal. The sunshine flooded inside the cockpit, lighting up the grin that Jeff was giving Ben along with a double thumbs-up. Ben taxied the Dakota out of the hangar and onto a concrete runoff apron that led to the unfinished runway, with the airport gates to their right and a broad rough grassy runoff area to the left, between the runway and the fence. The strip ran parallel with the fence for about a thousand feet before it dissolved into a wasteground of dirt and rocks. No modern airliner would have stood a chance of getting off the ground in so short a distance, but the Dakota hadn’t become legendary for no reason. Smooth concrete was a needless luxury for an old warbird that could have taken off in a ploughed field if necessary.

  Ben had spent all the time available getting familiar with the controls as best he could. If flying a little Cessna Skyhawk was like driving a Fiat family hatchback, the vintage Dakota was like getting behind the wheel of a Sherman tank. A multitude of dials and gauges clustered around the throttle quadrant at the heart of the instruments, an assortment of levers that looked like white, black, and red golf balls on sticks acting as the prop pitch, power and fuel mixture controls. Below and behind them were various other wheels and levers, each with its specific function.

  He ran through his final pre-takeoff checks. Oil pressure, hydraulic pressure, fuel pump pressure, manifold pressure, mixture richness for takeoff, and a dozen other details. He racked his brain for anything he might have forgotten or overlooked, came up blank, thought, Fuck it, here we go, and throttled the plane forwards away from the hangar. Jeff was grinning like a gambler as the dice were rolled. Tuesday’s eyes were as big as Frisbees. Only Sizwe looked unhappy at the idea of escape. The further away he was from Khosa, the more it delayed his quest for revenge.

  Sizwe’s disappointment would soon prove to be short-lived.

  The Dakota had only just begun its lumbering approach to the start of the runway when the first bullet hit. The shot impacted its belly below the starboard wing opposite where Jude and Rae were sitting, punched its way through the fuselage at an angle and skipped across the floor right by Jude’s feet with a metallic yowl that pierced through the engine roar.

  For the briefest moment Jude stared, dumbfounded, at the pencil-thin shaft of sunlight poking through a hole in the fuselage opposite him. He opened his mouth to shout out in alarm, but by then all hell was already breaking loose.

  The first bullet was like the first raindrop in a thundering deluge. Within an instant they were being strafed by heavy fire up and down their right flank as the plane accelerated towards the runway. From where he sat Ben felt the shudder of every impact through the controls, as if the aircraft was flinching in pain with each fresh wound to its body. He glanced out of the pilot’s window and saw the large military convoy storming towards them through the airport gates. A thousand men or more, packed into a stream of vehicles, speeding straight towards them. Muzzle flash bursting from the overcab guns of the jacked-up technicals. Soldiers clustered like bees on the sides of the heavy trucks, clinging on tight with one hand and firing their weapons with the other.

  In front was the same black Hummer he’d last seen leading the troops away from the defeated governor’s residence in Luhaka. Khosa was back. Right behind him rolled a pair of armoured cars. Their turrets were swivelled straight at the aircraft, ready to blow them off the runway.

  Ben gritted his teeth as the bullets kept raking their unarmed right flank. Any second now, a round was going to find its mark and kill someone. Worse still, one of those armoured cars would hit them with an explosive missile and light up their fuel tanks, roasting every man, woman, and child on board in a fiery conflagration.

  Jeff was crouched low in the co-pilot’s seat. Tuesday was wedged in the hatchway between the cockpit and the cargo section. Sizwe had gone to the children, who were screaming in fear as mayhem erupted all around. Ben twisted round and yelled, ‘Everyone down! Jude! The vests!’

  Jude had dragged Rae down to the floor and was shielding her with his body. The crate with the Kevlar body armour vests was just a few feet away from him in the cargo bay. He looked up at Ben, understood, and scrambled towards it, keeping his head down as bullets punched holes in the fuselage and burned past him.

  Meantime, all Ben could do was increase throttle power and hope the Dakota’s tired old engines would respond in
time to leave their pursuers behind. The clatter of the propellers picked up a notch but the plane’s rate of acceleration seemed agonisingly slow. In the air, it was a formidable dragon, the terror of the sky. On the ground, it was nothing but a big, fat, slow-rolling target, as soft and easy to hit as a pumpkin on a backyard shooting range. The vehicles kept coming on fast, outpacing them easily and pouring fire into them.

  Keeping his head down, Jude managed to reach the crate, ripped the lid away and yanked out the heavy Kevlar vests which he draped over himself as he scrambled back towards Rae. He covered her with one, then flung three more vests to Sizwe to lay over the children. The vests could stop a .44 Magnum or a twelve-gauge slug at point-blank range, but they wouldn’t protect anyone from a direct hit by a heavy military round.

  At last the plane began to respond. Ben felt the acceleration pressing him into his seat and determination burned brighter in his heart. The airspeed indicator needle flickered up to fifty knots. Everything in the cockpit was vibrating and rattling as though about to fall apart. Sixty knots. He urged the Dakota on harder, wringing every ounce of power out of its straining engines. Maybe more than the plane could take. Only one way to find out.

  But now the enemy put their strategy into action as the hunt closed in. Ben glimpsed the black Hummer veering off to one side, letting the others take the lead. The column splitting into a two-forked pincer formation with an armoured car at the head of each. One fork swerved to its right and put on a spurt of speed, intending to race ahead and slice across their starboard bow, blocking the runway ahead to force the Dakota to a halt. The other fork veered left and passed across Ben’s rear-view mirror like an express train as it curved around behind them, rounded their tail and started trying to come up their port flank, hanging cautiously back to stay out of the line of the Dakota’s side-mounted port guns. One armoured car drawing level with their cockpit on the right, another keeping pace with their tailplane on the left. Not an ideal situation. Ben gripped the yoke and held his breath, waiting for which one would fire first.