‘Where we are going, you will be too busy to look after your son,’ Khosa had said as Masango took Jude. ‘So my friend César will be looking after him now.’
And that had been it. Jude was gone. Where he was now, Ben had no way of knowing.
And even though it had been only a matter of hours ago, it seemed like weeks had gone by. That final image of Jude disappearing into the car was tearing Ben’s mind apart. Half of him wanted to forget it, erase it, pretend it never happened. The other half of him needed to cling to it, like a fading photograph of a loved one that, once gone, would take the memory of that person with it.
‘I’ll come for you.’ Those had been his last words before they’d parted. It was a promise that Ben did not know if he could keep.
Ben wondered whether he’d ever see Jude again.
Jeff must have been able to tell from Ben’s expression that the reassurance wasn’t working. The optimism seemed to drain from him. When he spoke again, his tone was sullen. ‘It’s all my fault this happened to Jude. Hadn’t been for me, he’d never have set foot on that fucking ship in the first—’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben cut in before Jeff could finish. He’d said it before, and he’d say it again. Ben knew all about the ravages of a guilty conscience from his own past. Come what may, he didn’t want Jeff to bear the responsibility for what had happened. When Jeff had pulled strings with his contacts to get Jude the crewman gig with the American merchant vessel MV Svalgaard Andromeda on the East Africa run from Salalah in Oman to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he couldn’t have known that the ship would be attacked. Any more than he could have known that one of its secret passengers, a crook named Pender, was carrying a stolen diamond bigger than a man’s fist, which ruthless killers would do anything to acquire. Events had unfolded from there the way they had, nobody could have done anything to prevent them, and only one man still living could be held responsible for the things that had taken place.
Khosa. Ben had the man’s face pinpointed in his mind like a sniper’s target in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And what a face it was. A demon’s face, bearing the hideous tribal scars that you couldn’t look at without a shiver of apprehension. But as evil as he looked, Khosa’s lunatic mind was the thing Ben feared most.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben repeated to Jeff.
One of the soldiers guarding them in the back of the truck reached across with the barrel of his AK-47 and jabbed Ben painfully in the ribs with it. Like many of Khosa’s fighters he was a young guy, no more than twenty or so. He had a red bandana tied around his head and was wearing a faded Legion of the Damned T-shirt with an ammunition belt for a heavy machine gun draped around his lean shoulders like a fashion accessory.
‘Quiet! No talking!’ the young trooper yelled. English was taking over from French as the main European language in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the militia troops spoke it, or something close to it. That made it difficult to have any kind of a private conversation; all the more so when conversation was forbidden altogether.
Ben slapped the rifle barrel away. ‘Watch how you speak to me, sonny. You’re addressing General Khosa’s military advisor.’
Which, technically, was true. That was the essence of the blackmail deal between Ben and the General: in return for Jude’s safety, whenever they got to wherever the hell they were going, Ben was to begin his new role of training Khosa’s troops and impart to them his military skills, with Jeff and Tuesday as his second- and third-in-command. Train them for what purpose, exactly, Ben didn’t yet know. It wasn’t a prospect he relished, but right now his agreement to Khosa’s terms was the only thing keeping them all alive.
‘You listening, you scummy little arsemonger?’ Jeff said, glaring a hole in the soldier with the full authoritative weight of a former Special Boat Service non-com officer. He’d been a Royal Marine Commando before that, and used to a slightly higher calibre of military personnel than Khosa’s army had to offer. ‘So point that weapon somewhere else before I stick it through your left ear and out your right, and ride you up and down this road like a fucking motorbike.’
The soldier moved back and leaned his rifle across his knees, eyeing them with wary uncertainty.
‘Bloody bunch of numpties,’ Tuesday said, giving the soldier a headshake and a look of contempt.
Ben had to smile then. The warmth of their camaraderie touched him like a glimmer of sunshine on a cloudy day. It wasn’t much, but it was good.
Along with Ben, Jeff, and Tuesday Fletcher, there was a fourth prisoner crouched in the back of the lurching truck. Lou Gerber had served as a staff sergeant with the United States Marine Corps many years earlier, before he’d taken to the sea as a merchant mariner. Besides Jude, the white-bearded, bald-headed Gerber was the last surviving crew member of the Svalgaard Andromeda, out of more than twenty men who had set out from Salalah Port in Oman not two weeks earlier.
Ben had spent a lot of time thinking about the men who had died aboard that ship. Some had been killed during the storming of the vessel by Khosa’s men, hired by Pender to pose as Somali pirates. More had died in the aftermath of the attack, while Jude and the other survivors rushed to lock themselves into the safety of the engine room. One, a vicious thug named Scagnetti, Ben had been forced to dispose of himself when he tried to hurt Jude. Soon after that had come the typhoon that had scuppered the ship and drowned all but a handful of the remaining crew.
In the days since the shipwreck they’d been whittled down even further, one by one. Condor, hacked to death by Khosa’s men in an earth-floored hut somewhere in Somalia; Hercules, a gentle giant of a man who had loved his pet bird and his freewheeling life at sea, thrown into a pit with a hungry man-eating lion in a grotesque parody of an ancient Roman gladiatorial spectacle.
Gerber was alone now, and for the first time since Ben had met the guy, he looked all of his sixty-seven years plus a good bit more. Already hit hard by the death of his close shipmate Condor, he’d barely spoken a word since they’d all been forced to witness Hercules’s cruel end. He seemed to have given up. His head was bowed and he stared at the floor of the truck with eyes that looked like holes out of which his soul had leaked away.
‘Gerber,’ Jeff said, trying to catch his attention. ‘Hoi, Gerber, you awake?’
If Gerber could hear him, he made no sign of showing it. Jeff shrugged and sighed.
Ben closed his eyes and tried to relax his muscles into the jarring motion of the truck. He knew how Gerber felt. But if indeed Gerber had given up, that was something Ben couldn’t allow himself to do. The black feeling kept coming and going in tides, like chill surges of floodwater that threatened to overwhelm his defences and drown all the strength and resolve he had left. He clenched his fists and told himself to ride it. He willed himself to believe that he would come through. And so would Jude. Ben didn’t know if he believed it. But he knew that if he didn’t convince himself it was true, he’d go crazy.
Soon afterwards, the convoy arrived at its destination deep in the heart of the jungle.
And soon after that, Ben began to think he really was going crazy.
Chapter 3
Ben was slumped in the back of the truck with his eyes still shut when he sensed that the vehicle’s motion had become smoother and he was no longer being shaken about. He opened his eyes and peered out of the back of the truck. Dusk was melting into evening. He must have been dozing. The headlights of the vehicles behind dazzled him; he shielded his eyes with his hand and saw that the rutted dirt track had either joined, or become, a properly surfaced road. The concrete looked newly-laid. The trees were cut back from the edges and ditches had been dug out on both sides. The clean-cut ends of sawn branches, still fresh, told him that the work must have been done not long ago.
Ben threw a quizzical look at Jeff and Tuesday.
‘Seems like we’re getting somewhere,’ Tuesday commented. ‘Wherever somewhere is.’
‘I don’t know, mate. Looks to me like we’re still
in the arsehole of the bloody jungle,’ Jeff said. ‘Who’d build a road like this out here?’
It wasn’t too long after that, maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, before the convoy rolled to a halt. Hot metal ticking, engines growling, exhaust fumes drifting in the headlights. Ignoring the soldiers and guns, Ben clambered to his feet on the flatbed and turned to gaze past the truck’s cab. His legs felt like two planks of wood and his back was aching.
In the bright glare of the convoy’s lights, he saw that Khosa’s Land Rover at the front of the line had stopped at a wire-mesh double perimeter fence that stretched away in both directions until it was lost in the darkness. The convoy had pulled up at a set of steel-mesh gates inset into the outer fence, ten feet high and plastered in warning KEEP OUT signs in English, French, Kituba, Lingala and Swahili, just in case the locals didn’t get the message from the heavily armed guards who were manning the gates on the inside. The inner and outer fences were spaced about ten metres apart, creating a corridor between them in which Ben could see the figures of patrolling guards. In a pool of bright halogen floodlight beyond the chain-link mesh of the inner fence sat a cluster of guard huts, around which more soldiers were standing cradling automatic weapons and squinting into the procession of headlights queued up at the gates. The tall fences themselves were supported by steel posts and topped with spikes and coils of razor wire. High-perched security cameras peered down.
Ben had seen a thousand perimeter fences just like it, around army bases all over the world. More recently, Khosa’s men had taken them to a rundown ex-military airfield in Somalia, another forgotten leftover from another fruitless civil war. There, the fence had been hanging in disrepair, abandoned for many years. This one, like the road leading to it, looked as if it hadn’t been there long at all. Along the perimeter’s length for as far as Ben could see, the trees had been severely cut back in what must have been a major clearing operation involving a large number of men and machines. Such a new and well-constructed installation was an incongruous sight in the midst of this green wilderness with its unmade roads and shambolic wooden bridges.
From this side of the wire it looked as though a large area of jungle had been cleared on the inside of the perimeter as well. Did Khosa really have that kind of manpower? Ben’s initial assumption had been that the man’s army was no different from any number of ragtag tinpot militia forces he’d come across during his SAS days, when his squadron would occasionally be sent to various parts of the African continent to deal with the more troublesome gangs of marauding thugs who stepped out of line by massacring and raping the locals and abducting UN aid workers. But he’d been learning from the outset that his assumption was a shaky one. General Jean-Pierre Khosa was full of surprises. Never pleasant ones.
What Ben didn’t yet realise was that the biggest surprise was yet to come, one he couldn’t have foreseen in a thousand years.
Jeff and Tuesday were on their feet next to him in the truck, following his gaze. Lou Gerber hadn’t moved or even looked up.
‘What do you reckon?’ Jeff said.
Ben shook his head. ‘Whatever it is, we’re about to find out.’
There was a lot of activity going on at the head of the stationary convoy. Doors were opened and soldiers were milling about. Greetings were exchanged, laughter shared, backs slapped. Ben looked for Khosa but couldn’t see him. The General must be still in his Land Rover, puffing on a Gran Cohiba and fondling his diamond, maybe thinking about who he was going to order hacked to death next, or whose head he might blow off on a whim using the magnum revolver he carried on his belt. Those burdensome decisions of leadership.
The soldiers inside the compound opened the outer gates first, followed by those in the inner fence. The men outside returned to their vehicles, slammed their doors, and the convoy slowly began to roll through the gates, waved in by the grinning guards. The convoy accelerated and sped onwards, pushing a bubble of light into the darkness beyond the perimeter.
The concreted road continued for a quarter of a mile up a steep rise that had been completely shorn of vegetation, creating a barren landscape of ploughed earth and craters where countless trees had been ripped out by their roots. The more Ben looked, the more perplexed he was by this place. He could sense Jeff and Tuesday’s growing sense of bewilderment, too. Far behind them, the tail end of the convoy had passed through the inner gates and the soldiers had closed up the perimeter with an air of finality that took away any doubts Ben might have had that this place, whatever it might be, was their final destination.
Ben narrowed his eyes when he saw the glow lighting up the sky from beyond the crest of the rise ahead. If it was a military camp, it was on a grand scale. The biggest he’d seen in Africa, rivalling major NATO bases in Europe. But that was impossible.
Khosa’s Land Rover crested the rise and dropped out of sight. A dozen vehicles later, the truck reached the top of the hill – and then Ben saw it, and his mouth fell open at the sight.
It wasn’t the biggest military camp in Africa. It wasn’t a military camp at all.
The manmade valley below was illuminated across its length and breadth by thousands of lights. The single road swept down the deforested hillside into what, unbelievably and yet undeniably, appeared to be a whole city.
A city enclosed behind a militarised security perimeter.
Khosa’s own city?
Ben blinked. His mouth went dry. He blinked again, tore his gaze from the surreal sight and exchanged looks of bewilderment with Jeff and Tuesday.
The road had widened into a smooth and immaculate double carriageway by the time they reached the final security fence. Blinding halogen spotlamps blazed down from masts. The gate was heavily guarded by a unit of at least a dozen sentries and a six-wheeled armoured personnel carrier with twin machine guns swivelled their way.
‘I’m not believing this,’ Jeff said. ‘Tell me I’m fucking dreaming, guys.’
‘It’s real,’ Ben replied. ‘Don’t ask me how, but it’s real.’
Once more, there were waves and happy greetings as the convoy rolled through the gates. Some three hundred yards down the single straight road that crossed what had once been a valley deep in the jungle, now transformed into a barren no-man’s land, the line of vehicles rumbled past the first buildings. Side streets radiated left and right, forming a geometric grid system of two-hundred-foot-square blocks. Many of them were still empty and undeveloped patches of land; others sprouted semi-erected multi-storey buildings; others again were fully finished with high-rises and office blocks. Signs of recent construction were everywhere, cranes looming into the night sky and heavy plant equipment filling every empty corner. Street after street after empty street, all still, all silent, all lit up but eerily deserted. There were no cars. There was no movement. Not a single civilian to be seen anywhere, as if the entire population had fled or been vaporized by a hydrogen bomb leaving behind only empty buildings.
Like a vision from a post-apocalyptic world, or the most expensive movie set that had ever been built and was waiting for the film crews and herds of extras to move in.
‘What in hell’s name …?’ Jeff muttered.
Tuesday was shaking his head. ‘Please don’t tell me that Khosa built this place.’
‘Whoever built it,’ Ben said, ‘I’ve a feeling you won’t find it on any maps.’
‘Khosa City,’ Jeff grunted. ‘Jesus Christ. Who is this guy?’
The deeper the convoy rolled into the city, the fewer construction sites they passed and the more finished the place appeared to be, as if it had been built from the centre outwards. The main drag had grown into a broad boulevard. The architects had planted neat avenues of maple trees down its length, and laid clipped green lawns either side, and pavements and modern street lighting that glowed off the brand-new buildings.
Here and there they passed small patrol units of militia. Any non-military personnel in the place were either locked down tight in a curfew, or there simply weren
’t any in the first place. The streets were lit up but almost every window of every building was dark and empty. The only other vehicle they saw was a six-wheeled APC identical to the one guarding the inner perimeter, which emerged from a side street and rumbled past them in the opposite direction.
Jeff said, shaking his head, ‘Where did they get the workforce? The materials? The money?’
Ben could have added a thousand more questions, but there were no answers to be had. Not yet. All he could do was stare at the surreal scene. Maybe Khosa had had their coffee last night spiked with LSD.
The convoy rumbled on, past empty parks and deserted squares and block after block of high-rise apartment buildings, all giving off the same uninhabited aura. Then the line of trucks and pickups veered across an intersection and rounded a corner, and Ben’s stupefaction racked up to a new level. Because the grandiose eight-storey building he could now see ahead, nestled a little way from the road next to an enormous and extravagantly illuminated plane tree, was the Dorchester Hotel in London’s Park Lane.
The Dorchester, here in the Congo. Complete with its sweeping nineteen-thirties façade and grand entrance and garden frontage of sculpted shrubs, ornamental railings, stone fountains, and flower beds. Ben closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, it was still there.
Not dreaming.
The hotel was the first building they’d seen thus far that showed any sign of life. Light streamed from the entrance and many upper-floor windows were aglow against the night sky. At the head of the convoy, Khosa’s Land Rover turned off the street to park outside the building. The following vehicles kept on going down the street, and for a moment Ben thought the truck was going to do the same – until it too broke from the moving line and pulled to a halt directly behind Khosa’s personal transport.
The soldiers in the back of the truck jumped up and stabbed and poked with their rifles to get the prisoners moving. ‘Keep your panties on, girls,’ Jeff growled at them. Gerber seemed to take no notice of anything much that was happening around him. Ben and Jeff helped him to his feet, and down the wooden ramp from the flatbed to the pavement.