Jude soon realised that wasn’t the case.
‘What’s that stink?’ Rae whispered.
He could smell it too, a foul sweetish odour like rotting fruit. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered back. ‘Bats, maybe.’
‘Bats? Are you nuts?’
‘Bats, rats, how the hell do I know? It’s nasty, whatever it is.’
It was Rae who produced the first dry crunching, crackling sound as they made their uncertain way through the shadowy gloom. ‘I think I stood on something,’ she muttered. ‘Shine the light, will you?’
Jude was about to lower the lantern when he felt the brittle snap of something giving way under his own heel, like the crisp, thin ice of a frozen puddle on a wintry walk in the countryside. Somewhere, a million light years away, it was November in the familiar surroundings of rural Oxfordshire. Oh, to be there and not here!
Jude shone the lantern down at their feet and saw the crunched fragments of what had once been somebody’s head. Then he swept the light a little left, then right, and realised that it wasn’t just a couple of skulls that littered the floor of the cavern. ‘There are bloody dozens of them,’ he gasped, horrified.
‘No,’ Rae said, taking the lantern from him and raising it high, turning in a circle as she did it. ‘There are hundreds of skulls, Jude. They’re everywhere.’
Empty eye sockets stared at them, and lipless teeth grinned at them from all around. Skulls were crammed into crevices in the rock, piled in heaps on the floor. Many of them had still-recognizable faces, not yet decomposed all the way to bare bone, wearing hideous distorted expressions of terror and pain. Semi-skeletal corpses were impaled here and there on stalagmites, many of them still shrouded in tatters of clothing.
It was an open grave. The stink suddenly seemed fifty times worse, knowing what was causing it. ‘We have to get out of here,’ Jude muttered, choking up.
‘God, I wish I had my camera.’
He was about to say something else when she suddenly gripped his hand and squeezed it so tightly that it hurt. ‘Shhh!’ He listened, and heard what she’d heard. Voices. It sounded like two men talking, but their words were muffled and distant.
‘Look,’ she murmured, pointing. Up ahead, the cavern twisted around to the right. There was a soft glow of light shining from around the corner.
Jude took the lantern from her hand and quickly twiddled the knob to lower the wick all the way down. The lantern sputtered and died, leaving them in total darkness except for the strange glow up ahead. Jude took Rae’s hand again, and the two of them crept towards the sound of the voices, treading tentatively so as not to crunch any more skulls underfoot.
When they reached the corner, they were in for another surprise. The cavern narrowed sharply to a natural fissure no more than about three feet across; it was from there that the light was shining. Hardly daring to breathe, Jude and Rae moved towards the fissure and peered through.
Beyond it was a room, but it was like no room either of them had ever seen, or could have even imagined. It was a large chamber carved from solid rock deep under the ground, roughly square in shape, with a high ceiling that echoed the conversation of the two men inside, now clearly audible.
The strange light was coming from scores of candles that had been placed inside human skulls, making them glow like lanterns and shining from their eye sockets and open jaws. Fixed with iron clamps to the two walls that Jude could see, and perhaps the other two that he couldn’t, stood a pair of bleached-white skeletons which had been grotesquely wired up to clutch burning torches in their bony hands.
At the chamber’s centre was a broad stone slab raised on a plinth. The surface and sides of the slab were mottled with a dark stain that was black in places, brownish-purple in others, running down the craggy stone in dried rivulets. There was little doubt what had created the staining.
Neither of the two men inside the chamber was visible through the fissure, but Jude recognised both voices instantly.
They were those of Jean-Pierre Khosa and César Masango.
Chapter 34
‘It has been a very good month,’ Khosa was saying, his deep, rich voice resonating around the chamber. ‘Did I not always tell you, César, that I would make us both rich?’
‘You are a little bit richer than me, Jean-Pierre,’ Masango replied jokingly.
‘What is this? Are you telling me that I should have given you all of the fifty million dollars?’ Khosa chided him in mock indignation, and both men laughed out loud.
Jude’s eyes met with Rae’s in the glow of the flames as the astounding figure of $50 million hung in the air. It was bad enough that a man like Khosa could get hold of that kind of money. The real terror was contemplating what he was liable to do with it.
‘Not everybody is as greedy as Nkunda,’ Masango went on, serious again. ‘That Tutsi cockroach refuses to lower his price for joining us.’
‘I have told you, César, that you should not worry about five million. You must spend money to make money, my friend. Nkunda may be a cockroach, but he has many soldiers and until I kill him he will be a useful ally. With his forces joining themselves to ours, we will become so strong that many more commanders will come to us like sheep and thousands of new fighters will join us every day. From Kenya, from Uganda, from Zambia, from Angola. For another twenty million dollars, in one month we can bring together the biggest army you have ever seen. A hundred thousand fighters. Two hundred thousand. With tanks and artillery and strike aircraft. Not even General Amin could have dreamed of such power as we will have at our disposal.’
‘The city will not hold them all,’ Masango laughed.
‘Forget the city,’ Khosa said. ‘It has served its purpose, but that purpose is coming to an end. I do not trust the yellow men, and I do not need their money any longer. Let them find themselves another security guard to protect their business. My days of helping others make themselves rich are over, and I have business of my own to attend to.’
‘Louis?’
‘Yes. Louis.’
Khosa had started pacing the floor, and now he was visible through the fissure through which Jude and Rae were peering, holding their breaths. Khosa waved his arms animatedly as his voice continued booming around the echoey chamber. His face was half lit by the flames. Rae shuddered at the sight of him.
The last time Jude had seen the General, he had been clad in full uniform with the red beret pulled tight over his stubbly hair and the massive holstered pistol slapping on his belt. Now, to Jude’s amazement and consternation, Khosa wore a plain black robe that draped him from head to toe, like some kind of weird bishop. What was he up to?
‘I told you that my time would come before long, César. Now it has arrived, and there is no time to waste. That is why I want you to wire the five million to Nkunda tonight, but only on condition that he can mobilise his troops immediately and meet me on the road to Luhaka at eleven hundred hours tomorrow.’
‘You plan the attack so soon?’
‘You know me, César. I do not believe in wasting time. Bosco Gatarebe’s forces will be with us at first light. Joshua Mikune’s men are already here, two thousand of them. In the morning we will march on Luhaka City with seven thousand troops. By evening, my dear brother Louis will have fallen and I will have taken his place.’
‘Do you wish for me to come with you?’
‘You are a politician, not a soldier, César. After you have wired the money to Nkunda, go home and wait for a telephone call from the new governor of Luhaka Province.’
Masango laughed loudly. ‘I am looking forward to making his acquaintance, Jean-Pierre.’
‘It will be soon, I can promise you. And this is only the beginning. Once we have achieved this small victory, we will be ready to move on to greater things. Nothing will stand in our way. And best of all, we will still have this!’
Khosa slipped a hand inside his robe and, with a flourish that was almost theatrical, pulled out a large object that caught the fireligh
t with a shimmering sparkle. He held it out on his open palm, admiring it lovingly.
The diamond. The same unbelievable stone that Jude had first seen on board the cargo ship Andromeda and reluctantly possessed for a short time, before Khosa had retaken it from him somewhere off the Somali coast. Even though the diamond was so familiar to him, the sight of it still stunned Jude. Rae, of course, had never laid eyes on it, or anything like it, before. Few people ever had. Her mouth fell open with amazement.
‘This is our ticket to glory, César,’ Khosa marvelled, clutching his fingers tightly around it and shaking it. ‘The very moment I first saw it, I knew that my destiny had brought it to me. Thanks to this diamond, I will grow so rich, I will be able to walk into the Palais de la Nation in Kinshasa and buy the presidency without firing a single bullet!’
Both men found this wildly amusing, and their laughter echoed around the macabre chamber. ‘Forgive me, but I do not think that is your style, my old friend,’ Masango chuckled.
‘You are perfectly right, César. It is not my style. I would rather take the city by storm and place the heads of the president and all his cabinet on the fence spikes of the palace for all the people to see. And think of the money I will save!’ This was apparently even funnier, and had both of them in stitches for quite some time. Khosa slapped his thigh and rocked and quaked and gasped with mirth. ‘Tomorrow will be a day of victory and the beginning of a new era for our country,’ he declared when he could speak again. ‘But tonight, my friend, tonight is for our pleasure.’
Jude and Rae glanced at each other, both wondering what kind of pleasure Khosa had in mind.
They soon found out.
It started with the entrance of six of the largest and most fearsome-looking soldiers of Khosa’s personal guard, a couple of whom Jude remembered from the attack on the Andromeda and the journey inland from the Somali coast. Except they, too, had switched their military garb for the same long black robes as Khosa. They appeared from the shadows, as if from nowhere, carrying silver tankards and bottles of some kind of clear liquor. There must be another way into the chamber, Jude realised.
The bottles were set down on the stone slab. Khosa yanked the first stopper and glugged out the drink into generous servings for everyone. ‘To the future!’ he yelled as they clashed tankards. Jude could see Masango now. His shiny, expensive shoes poked out from under the hem of his robe.
What were they doing?
The soldiers chanted in unison, ‘One country, one father, one ruler! Khosa! Khosa!’ The first round of drinks rapidly swallowed, Khosa smacked his lips and attacked the next bottle.
‘Bring in the slave,’ he called.
Rae and Jude looked at one another. Oh no, her eyes said. Not this.
The African woman was no older than twenty, in a short white cotton dress. She was struggling in the grip of the men who dragged her into the chamber. Khosa and Masango watched with wolfish eyes as she was forced to lie on her back on the stone slab. Several pairs of hands held her writhing body down while her head was lifted and she was made to drink some of the liquor. She choked and spluttered and shook her head wildly, but they held her firmly and forced more of it down her throat. Whatever the stuff was, its intoxicating effect on her was quick. Her cries diminished. Her eyes began to roll.
And then they got started on her. It wasn’t the gang rape that Jude and Rae had feared they were about to witness. It was something unimaginably more horrible.
The soldiers all circled the prone body on the slab. Hands reached into the folds of the black robes. The knives came out. Long, thin blades that glittered like liquid flame in the firelight. The quick-fire popping sounds of steel puncturing flesh were horrific in the echoing chamber. Tchak, tchak, tchaktchaktchak. Just as fast as her screams died out, the white dress was soaked in blood and it was running off the edges and pooling on the floor.
Khosa stepped forward, clutching something in his big hands that Jude saw was a jawless human skull with the top of its cranium removed to form a bony chalice. He held the chalice under the edge of the slab until it was filled with thick bubbling blood, and then raised it to his lips and drank. He passed it to Masango. Masango did the same, gulping greedily until red dribbles ran from the corners of his mouth and spotted his robe.
The first part of the ritual was complete. There was more to come. With his eyes half shut, head gravely bowed, Khosa recited the incantation in a solemn monotone:
‘In nomine Dei nostri Satanas, Luciferi Excelsi—
‘In the name of Satan, ruler of the earth, true God, almighty and ineffable, who hast created man to reflect Thine own image and likeness, I invite the forces of darkness to bestow their infernal power upon me—
‘Open the gates of Hell to come forth and greet me as your brother. Keep me strong in my faith and service, that I may abide always in Thee, forever and ever—’
Masango and the others joined in for the final chorus: ‘Ave Satanas! Ave Satanas!’
The woman on the slab was dying, but still faintly stirring. Khosa took up one of the daggers and drove it down into her chest, making her whole body convulse in a violent spasm. Then he tossed away the dagger with a clatter and plunged both hands into the gory wound, ripping and cracking his way deep inside.
Jude closed his eyes and backed dizzily away. But not before he saw Khosa raise the woman’s still-beating heart in his bloody hands and rip into it with his teeth.
‘Ave Satanas! Ave Satanas!
‘Khosa! Khosa! KHOSA!’
Afterwards, the soldiers left the chamber and disappeared through the unseen doorway. Left alone, Khosa and Masango drank more blood. They daubed it on their faces and splashed it over their heads until their robes were slick with it. They mixed it with the liquor and kept drinking until the bottles were empty and the rivulets dripping from the slab had run dry. By now, the wall torches were burning low and the candles were guttering one by one, gradually swallowing the chamber in deep shadow. Masango was the first to curl up on the floor, completely sated and drunk on blood and alcohol. Khosa stood motionless for a long time with his back to the fissure in the wall, his head slightly bowed, muttering to himself in that deep, low voice words that Jude and Rae couldn’t understand. Then, at last, the tall, broad shape in the darkening chamber settled on the floor, his robe pooled around him, and became still.
Jude slipped out of the fissure before Rae could grab his arm. He paused nervously in the middle of the chamber, glancing around him. Then bent down and picked up the dagger that Khosa had dropped on the floor. Its hilt was sticky in Jude’s palm. He walked over to Khosa’s slumped form, his teeth clenched and ready to do murder.
But even then, despite all that he’d just witnessed, Jude couldn’t bring himself to kill a man in cold blood. His father was right. Jude was not that person.
So he took the thing whose loss he knew would hurt Khosa far more than death. The thing whose power this lunatic could not be allowed to possess.
Jude took the diamond.
Oh, so gently, afraid to wake the sleeping maniac, by the glow of the dying light he reached into the folds of Khosa’s black robe and found the leather pouch in which the stone was kept. He carefully slipped the diamond into his own pocket, and was about to run when an afterthought came to him. He hunted half blindly around the floor for a few moments until he found a lump of rock that felt about the same size and weight, stuffed it into the pouch and replaced it where he’d found it.
And then he and Rae fled, running like crazy through the cavern, as though they could ever escape the memory of the blood ritual.
Chapter 35
The dawn had ripened into a sunburst of golds and crimsons over the city by time Ben was finally let out of the prison cell, surrounded by a squad of guards. They were eyeing him with extreme suspicion and keeping their distance, as though their dangerous captive might be about to fly at the nearest one with a neck-snapping kick. At this moment Ben wouldn’t have swatted a scorpion about to sting h
im.
Outside, a frenzy of activity was taking place as an excitable, jabbering crowd of armed men massed around a long and rapidly building line of armoured cars, troop transporters and pickup trucks, military transport vehicles queuing up in front of the building. It looked as though some kind of mass mobilisation was taking place.
If Khosa had decided to invade Europe and set himself up as its king, Ben wouldn’t have given a damn. As he watched the goings-on with total detachment, he saw Jeff Dekker being led outside with his own escort of wary guards. Jeff’s left cheek was mottled from a punch or two. His eyes opened wide in surprise and alarm at the sight of Ben. The soldiers hustled them towards the street, but the two were quickly left alone as the men hurried to join the throng.
‘Your face looks like a butcher’s shop window,’ Jeff said. ‘Going to need stitches.’
‘I’ll survive,’ Ben said, so quiet it was almost a whisper.
‘Christ, mate, I thought you’d got away.’
‘Apparently not,’ Ben said.
‘Where’s Tuesday?’
‘He’s alive. And running.’
Jeff grinned with relief, but his grin quickly dropped as he understood from Ben’s expression that there was grimmer news. ‘What?’
Ben could barely even bring himself to say it. Four simple words. A statement of factual information. Just to utter it felt like climbing a mountain. And then throwing himself off its peak.
He said, ‘They took Jude’s hand.’
Jeff flinched as though he’d been hit by a bullet. His brow crumpled into a thousand anguished frown lines and his lips became a pale razor slash. Ben could see the thought process racing through his head: something like this, you don’t take anyone’s word for it; which meant that if Ben believed what he’d just told him, he must know for certain; and if he knew for certain, he must have seen some kind of proof; which had to mean—