The Devil's Kingdom

  It took a long time and a lot of impatient twiddling, but eventually he was able to get the bolt loosened enough to undo the rest of the way with his fingers. When it slid out, he tucked it carefully in his pocket.

  One down. How many more to go before he could detach the whole roof section of the cage and wriggle out? In darkness, not so easy to judge. But he had all night.

  Jude spent the next two hours working as quietly as he could, listening out for the guard patrols that he knew came by occasionally through the night, and praying that the walls of the hut would muffle the metallic clinking and scraping sounds he was making. The cage grew more and more rattly as he hunted out and loosened each successive ceiling bolt in turn, clinging like an ape to the ceiling and gritting his teeth as he worked.

  Then, at last, with a silent whoop of triumph, he pocketed the last bolt he needed to remove. He’d left two bolts in place at one end, so that the roof section was hinged like a lid and could be raised and lowered without danger of it falling off altogether with an almighty crash that would be sure to alarm the whole place and bring Promise running over with his Uzi.

  At least, that was the theory. When it came to actually raising the lid, it was much heavier than Jude had anticipated and it took him a full thirty minutes to figure out how he could do it, by clamping himself like a limpet to the bars and using his head and shoulders to lift the ceiling up. He managed to get his head out first, then wriggled his upper torso through the gap with the weight of the ceiling panel crushing him; for a moment he began to panic, thinking he was trapped and they’d find him like this tomorrow, stuck like a snared animal. But then he was through, managing to scramble out with only a few bruises.

  He let the lid of the cage down as gently as he could, winced as he pinched a couple of fingers, then slithered down the bars on the outside and dropped to the floor.

  He was out! It was a thrilling achievement. But he was still locked inside a metal hut with a barred window. He stepped over to it, feeling the coolness of the night air drying the sweat on his face. He gazed out into the night. Nothing but darkness and silence.

  The window bars were solid and riveted to the metal frame, but a quick inspection of the seams of the hut itself revealed that they were bolted together like the cage. He still had his improvised spanner, and thought about dismantling the whole hut – but that would take him so long he’d still be at it when Promise came to check on him in the morning. Abandoning that idea, he paced around the inside walls until he realised that the floor was nothing but compacted earth and that maybe he could dig his way out.

  That was, if he’d had anything to dig with. The bent spoon wouldn’t do him much good there.

  But something else might. Jude hurried back to the cage, slipped an arm through the bars and fetched out his metal food bowl, careful not to let it clatter. Maybe a steel dog dish wasn’t a bad thing to have as crockery, after all. A few experimental digs at the earth floor with its rim convinced him that he could do it. He quickly decided that the best place to burrow his way out was directly opposite the door, behind the cage, where the dirt was softest.

  With his heart pounding and the sweat running in rivulets, he hacked and chopped and scraped. Working like a madman, in less than half an hour he’d managed to excavate a rathole under the metal wall that he could get his arm through. Twenty more minutes of frenzied digging, and he could poke his head and shoulders out. With a wriggle and a heave, he forced his whole body through the hole.

  He was free.

  Chapter 17

  Jude scrambled to his feet on the other side and brushed the dirt from his hair and hands. Free!

  He stood still, barely able to suppress a wild grin as he listened for the footsteps or voices of a lurking security patrol. He could hear nothing, except for the thudding of his own heart and the whisper of the night air. He’d been working in the dark for so many hours that his night vision was sharp and clear. For the first time since he’d been locked up, he was able to see all three of the other huts. He wished he knew which one was the guard hut. It was worrying to imagine Promise lying there so close by, probably just half asleep and ready to spring up at the slightest noise, machine gun at the ready.

  But Jude had no intention of rousing him, just as he intended to be long gone by the time Promise got up for his rounds and found the cage empty. All Jude had to do was slip past the armed patrols, make it over two manned perimeter fences topped with razor wire, and then try to figure out where the hell to run to without getting himself shot by soldiers or lost in the middle of the Congo wilderness. But anything was better than being caged.

  Jude took a deep breath, steeled himself, then started to make his escape. He ran lightly over the compacted earth, freezing every few steps to listen hard. Still nothing. He ran on, barely making a sound. It reminded him of when he’d been on board the ship, ducking and dodging the pirates as he slipped from deck to deck. The memory made him think of his shipmates who hadn’t made it. Mitch, Diesel, poor Park, Condor, Hercules, all of them. Jude’s grin fell and he felt suddenly sombre and much more frightened.

  In the dim moonlight he could see clear across the compound to the metal fence. Beyond the fence was the terrible place they’d come through in Masango’s limo, with the piles of earth and machinery and those poor people cruelly burned at the stake like a scene from hell. He shuddered at the thought that he was going to have to make his way back through it.

  Jude was about to make a sprint for the fence when he froze. Two sentries were standing near the metal gates, barely visible in the darkness except for the metallic sheen of their weapons and the glowing red dots of burning cigarettes. He ducked behind the last hut and pressed himself tightly against its side. He’d have to thread his way back through the huts and try to escape from the opposite end of the compound.

  Jude’s racing thoughts were interrupted by a sound from inside the hut. He tensed, alarmed at first and not sure what he’d heard. Then he heard it again. A female voice, coming from the other side of the tin wall he was leaning against.

  It was the same voice he’d heard crying the night before, carried on the wind. All that day he’d wondered about it, undecided whether it had been real or imagined.

  But it had been real, after all. She was sobbing softly. It was a heart-rending sound, and he wondered who she was and why they were keeping her prisoner. Just like his hut, hers had a single barred window. It faced away from where the sentries were standing guard. He could slip around the wall of the hut and look inside, and they wouldn’t spot him.

  Jude moved silently to the window. He didn’t want to alarm the woman inside, for fear that she would cry out and draw the sentries’ attention or, worse, wake Promise. He tapped gently on the hut wall and whispered, ‘Hello?’

  The sobbing instantly stopped. He thought he heard a snatch of breath; then rigid silence.

  Jude gripped the bars of the window and peered in. It was very dark inside the hut. He blinked and thought he could make out the vertical lines of cage bars, just like his own, gleaming dully in the near-pitch blackness. ‘Hello?’ he repeated softly. ‘Who’s there?’

  There was such a long pause that he began to wonder if he’d imagined it after all. Then, out of the darkness, came a tiny whisper.

  ‘Who are you?’ The voice sounded very scared, and even more suspicious, unsure whether to trust him. The accent was American.

  He was afraid to say too much in case his voice carried. ‘My name’s Jude. They’re holding me here. I managed to get out. Are you alone in there? What’s your name?’

  ‘Ray,’ said the whisper, and for an instant Jude thought the voice must belong to a young boy, maybe a teenager, before he realised that she’d said ‘Rae’. Staring hard into the darkness, he could just about make out a slender shape in the middle of the cage. Black hair framing a pale face, out of which gleamed two frightened eyes. She was sitting bolt upright, watching him intently, like a startled deer whose path had crossed with a t
raveller’s in the forest.

  ‘Are they holding you here too?’ he whispered.

  The pale face gave a quick nod. ‘Yes,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Why?’

  A long pause. Then, ‘Don’t you know? For the same reason as you. Money. What else? They’re holding us for ransom.’

  Jude knew that wasn’t the reason in his case. But it might be in hers. Four huts. One for Promise, left three. ‘Who else is here?’ he whispered.

  The woman called Rae murmured in reply, ‘Craig. They have him too. Have you seen him?’

  ‘No. Is he American? Your relative? Husband?’

  ‘I work for him. We’re journalists. We were taken.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Eight days. Maybe nine. I … I lost count.’

  Jude edged away from the window. The sentries were still standing by the gate. One of them was laughing about something.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ said Rae’s voice. ‘Come back.’

  Stepping back to the window, Jude saw the shape inside the cage move. She stood up, clutching the bars and pressing her face through the gap to get as close to him as possible. The fear in her voice had lessened, her tone more urgent as she hissed, ‘What are you doing out there?’

  ‘I got out. I’m getting out of here.’

  ‘They’ll catch you.’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he said. He sounded much more confident than he really was.

  ‘Then you have to get me out, too. And Craig.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Please. You have to help us. If we stay here, we’ll die.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Jude had been so distracted that he hadn’t heard the approaching voices until it was almost too late. He glanced breathlessly around the edge of the hut. The sentries were strolling towards the huts for one of their routine patrols.

  ‘I have to go,’ he hissed through the window. ‘I’m sorry. I have to—’

  ‘Please!’

  But there was no time to talk more. He broke away and dashed as fast and as quietly as he could away from the hut, losing himself in the shadows.

  He would wait until the sentries passed by, and then he would sprint for the gate and take his chances getting over without being seen. He could do it. He had to believe it was possible.

  Or was it?

  He sighed. ‘Shitbags,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Bollocks.’

  No, of course it wasn’t possible. Everything had just changed, now that he knew there were other captives here, locked up in inhuman conditions to face death, or worse.

  Jude pictured Rae’s frightened face. Heard her voice in his mind, begging for his help. Then he pictured the charred, semi-skeletal bodies left hanging to rot from the post at which they’d been burned alive.

  And he knew that he couldn’t run away and leave her here.

  He was getting out. But he was no longer doing it alone. And not tonight. He needed more time to plan how he was going to get her and her friend Craig away from this awful place.

  Unseen by the patrolling sentries, just a shadow flitting through the darkness, Jude made his way back to his hut.

  Chapter 18

  Eighteen hours after they threw him in the dungeon along with the hacked-up corpses, they came back to release him. The pickup truck came lurching over the rough ground with six of Khosa’s soldiers aboard, and pulled up next to the mouth of the hole. In the back of the truck was a coil of sturdy rope, to yank out one thoroughly defeated and humbled white prisoner who had dared to defy their Captain Xulu.

  But, like the biblical myrrh-bearers who discovered the empty tomb of Christ, they were in for a shock. The cast-iron plate covering the hole had been moved aside. The mouth of the dungeon shaft was a mess of freshly dug earth. The hole itself appeared to have been completely filled in. And their prisoner was sitting on the ground nearby, relaxing in the fresh morning air as he waited for them. He looked like a wild man, every inch of him from head to toe plastered and smeared with dirt as if he’d crawled through solid ground to reach the surface. This impossible feat terrified them, and the piercing blue eyes that gazed at them out of the mask of mud terrified them even more.

  Ben rose to his feet as they stumbled out of the truck and uncertainly pointed their rifles at him. ‘Hello, boys. What kept you?’

  In fact, he hadn’t expected them to return so soon. It had been less than an hour since he’d crawled out of the hole. Just long enough for him to do what he needed. Now that they were back, the message was clear: Nothing you can do will stop me. No prison will hold me. I am in control. I own you. And the looks on the soldiers’ faces told him that they were reading it loud and clear.

  As for the dungeon, it no longer existed. Nothing remained but a grave, at whose deep bottom Ben’s dead cellmates had been buried sometime during the long and very busy night. Using a flat piece of stone as his tool, he’d steadily chiselled and scraped at the walls of his dungeon until the dirt was up to his knees. Once he’d stamped it all flat, the floor had been raised about six inches and he was ready to add a new layer. He’d kept at it without a break. After four hours, his gruesome companions were beneath his feet. After twelve, he was more than halfway up the shaft of the hole, where it was narrowest and therefore easiest to fill up. No water, little air. Sweat stinging his eyes and dirt and grit crunching between his teeth as he worked. Five more hours of gruelling work, and he’d finally heaved the iron manhole cover aside and hauled himself out into the sunlight like a revenant.

  Escape hadn’t been his plan. Not yet. The time for that would come soon enough.

  Much more wary of him now than before, the soldiers hooded him and put him in the truck. Thirty minutes later, he was back before General Khosa, dropping bits of dried earth all over the office floor.

  ‘My men are all talking about you, soldier,’ Khosa said, leaning back in his chair and puffing thoughtfully on a cigar. On the desk in front of him lay an attaché case with an open handcuff bracelet chained to its handle. Ben wondered if the case contained what he thought it did.

  Khosa continued, ‘They say you can work miracles. Your appearance tells me that their story is true.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘Just felt like some fresh air.’

  ‘Then you were not planning on leaving us?’

  ‘Not without my son,’ Ben said. ‘Or my friends. If you had either, you’d understand.’

  ‘You perplex me, soldier. I hope for your sake that we have seen the end of your rebellious behaviour. Next time, I might have to order my men to pour concrete into the hole. And perhaps your son and your friends could join you. What do you think?’

  ‘I think I’d like a shower, some breakfast and a change of clothes,’ Ben said.

  ‘Granted. But first, let me tell you why I decided to release you early from your punishment. I have a new task for you.’

  ‘Teaching your officers how to wipe their own arses? Sorry, not my concern.’

  Khosa stood and walked to the window. The office overlooked the flower gardens and the street, where Ben could see some activity taking place. Troops were massing outside, and a line of three heavy transport trucks had parked up in front of the hotel. Something was happening, and whatever it was, Ben didn’t like it.

  ‘You say I have no friends, soldier. This is false, as I think you already know. More loyal followers are joining me every day. But when you say I have no children, this is true. I love children. The younger generation of my country are its future.’

  ‘And what a rosy future they have in store,’ Ben said.

  ‘I wish to embrace this generation as though they were my own offspring,’ Khosa went on, with a grandiose air. ‘From all over the nation, I want them to flock to me. I will feed them, clothe them, nurture them as their real parents could never do. Today will see the foundation of a special new division of my army, made up entirely of children.’

  ‘The Khosa Youth,’ Ben said. ‘That’s a novel idea.’

  The G
eneral swept away from the window and pointed at him with the cigar. ‘Yes. That is a very good name. The Khosa Youth. I like it.’

  ‘Seems to me that the average age of your troops is already a bit low,’ Ben said. ‘Are the old men of fourteen or fifteen not good enough anymore?’

  ‘The younger the better,’ Khosa said, puffing a huge cloud of smoke. ‘They cost little to feed, take up less room to house, learn fast and are easy to control. But that is not all. A boy of eight can fire a rifle and kill his enemy just as effectively as a fighter twice or three times his age. Even more effectively, as men will hesitate to return fire on one so young, and that hesitation is what costs them their life. All across the country are many thousands of boys aged between eight and twelve who are being denied the chance of glory in my service. It is time that we put a stop to this waste of resources. You, soldier, will have the honour and privilege of helping to gather the first wave of recruits to my new regiment.’

  Ben said nothing. He so badly wanted to snap Khosa’s neck that his fingers were twitching.

  Khosa walked over to a desk where a map had been spread out. ‘Here is where we begin,’ he declared, prodding the paper. ‘There is a school for orphans in a place called Kbali, three hours’ drive to the south. The school is run by a French Christian missionary and a dozen or so nuns. My scouts report that there are more than a hundred children there, none older than twelve years. You will accompany a division of soldiers under the command of Captain Xulu. Your orders are to take the orphanage, deal as necessary with any resistance, and bring me these hundred children, so that we can induct them into the army and begin their training immediately. Is this all clear to you, soldier?’