‘Now, everyone, please stand back a little,’ Ben said. ‘This could get a little messy.’
And he pointed the pistol muzzle right up close to Captain Terminator’s face, averted his own to avoid the worst of the spatter, and pulled the trigger. Just as Khosa had done to his own soldier earlier that day, except with slightly less spectacular results. Only slightly. The remains of the man’s face wouldn’t have been instantly recognisable to his own mother.
‘Christ, Ben,’ Tuesday breathed when the ringing in their ears had subsided.
‘Whatever works,’ Ben said grimly.
‘This is the man who wanted to kill Gatete,’ Sizwe said through bared teeth. ‘You should have let me shoot him.’
Ben applied the pistol’s safety catch and stuffed it into the baggy side pocket of his combat jacket. ‘I’m not leaving you out, Sizwe. If you’re up to it, that is.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Six sets of tags and a head in a bag,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what the man asked for. That’s what we’ll give him. Do you want to do the honours, or shall I?’
Sizwe was only too happy to perform the service, clutching his machete with a look of animal ferocity while Ben stepped away to give him room. Sizwe was a very strong man. It took only two strokes of the blade to sever Captain Terminator’s head from his shoulders.
After what they’d all witnessed that day, the horror of the moment barely even seemed to register.
Ben held the bag out, and Sizwe dropped the head into it.
‘Tags,’ Ben said. The six Africans unlooped the strings of military dog tags from around their necks and dropped them into the bag, now heavy and dripping in Ben’s hands. Ben knelt back down beside the headless body, set the bag down for a moment and unclipped the bunch of grenades from the dead man’s belt. Five of them would do fine for what he had in mind. He stuffed them in his jacket pockets with the pistol.
‘Now what?’ Tuesday said, staring aghast at the bag.
‘So far, so good,’ Ben said. ‘Now we move to the next phase.’
As it turned out, none of the remaining sentries scattered around the edge of the thicket had shown the same initiative as their comrade Captain Terminator. Not that it did them any good.
Ben and the others found each of the five in turn either lounging smoking or half-asleep against a tree trunk with his rifle between his knees, or standing in a daze with his back to the thicket and a mouthful of khat cud. The sounds of gunshots evidently hadn’t bothered them. All part of the game.
But now they were sitting ducks. One after the other.
Ben and Jeff killed two each. Sizwe killed the last. It was quick, it was quiet, and it was bloody. No mercy deserved and none given. They dragged the bodies into the heart of the thicket, laid them out in a row and collected their weapons into a pile.
‘We’ve been out here long enough,’ Ben said. ‘Khosa will be wondering what’s going on. It’s time for us three to return to the village, before he sends more soldiers out here.’
This was the part of the plan that Sizwe and his friends still weren’t convinced about. ‘If you tell him you have won, he will kill our families.’
‘No more innocent blood,’ Ben said. ‘Not today.’ He dug the grenades out of his pocket and handed one each to the village men. ‘You remember what I said about how these things work? Pull the pin and throw, and keep your head down. And for the love of God, don’t fumble and drop them at your feet.’
‘We remember.’
‘What about those?’ Ben asked, pointing at the Kalashnikovs on the ground.
Sizwe nodded. ‘Even a child can shoot a gun.’ It went beyond a figure of speech. Sizwe was more than old enough to have seen at least some of the mass genocide that had rocked Rwanda only a few years earlier, in the wanton bloodbath of the so-called civil war. He had probably seen plenty of child soldiers just as proficient with automatic weapons as adults.
Ben pointed at his Omega, now on Sizwe’s wrist. ‘Give us four minutes. Count them exactly on the second hand. During that time, the six of you split up into pairs, with the rifles and the grenades. Work your way around the edges of the village. When the four minutes are up, Sizwe throws the first grenade. That’s the signal. When you others hear the explosion, you let loose as fast as you can, one after another.’
‘We will destroy our huts,’ Uwase protested. ‘The village will burn.’
‘A few outer huts you can rebuild,’ Ben said. ‘And it’s the rainy season. The thatch is still damp. It won’t burn easily. Now, once that last grenade has gone off, I want you to start firing your guns. Point them up in the air, and keep firing until they’re empty.’
‘I do not see what good is firing in the air,’ Rusanganwa said with a doubtful frown.
‘I’m not asking you to get into a fight with these people,’ Ben reminded him. ‘And we can’t afford for a stray bullet to go anywhere near the hut where your families are, or near any of our people. I just want you to make as much noise as you can. Make it sound as if the village is under attack by many fighters. Do you understand?’
Sizwe nodded. ‘We can do all of this.’
‘Then, when your guns are empty, I want you to stay hidden. All hell will break loose in there. Most of Khosa’s troops will panic and run. Only a few will stay near their general. We’ll take care of those.’
‘And Khosa?’
‘You leave him to me,’ Ben said.
‘You are going to kill him?’
Ben nodded. ‘Most definitely. And then I’ll get started on him.’
Chapter 57
In war, as in life, nothing is guaranteed. Few combat strategies, however carefully planned, ever survive first contact with the enemy. Military tacticians had been saying it for centuries, and Ben was acutely aware of it at this moment as he, Jeff and Tuesday made their way back towards the village.
His scheme wasn’t perfect, by any means. It was a desperate, last-resort, seat-of-the-pants kind of deal that he didn’t want to over-analyse for fear that all the potential holes in it might put him off. But it was all they had. Another chance like this might never come. There was only one thing he knew for sure: if he did nothing, if he didn’t grasp this one tiny fragile opportunity and give it all he had, sooner or later Jude and all the rest of them would be dead men.
Ben, Jeff and Tuesday walked into the village square to find Khosa sitting on an upturned bucket as though it were a golden throne, still luxuriating in the cigar he’d promised himself, and surrounded by twenty of his men. Jude was kneeling on the ground at the General’s side, looking ashen and sick to the stomach. A few yards away, Gerber and Hercules had been made to kneel with guns to their heads. All around them lay the pitiful body parts and hacked corpses of the villagers, red slowly turning to russet brown.
‘You have returned victorious, soldier,’ Khosa said with a smile. ‘I knew it would be so. Though it took you longer than I thought. I was beginning to wonder what tricks you were playing, hmm?’
Ben dropped the soggy, heavy sackcloth bag on the ground between Khosa’s feet. ‘There’s what you asked for. We passed your stinking test. Now let us go.’
Khosa flicked ash from his Cohiba, then reached casually inside the bag. He rummaged around as though it were a lucky dip, then came up with a bloody fistful of the dog tags. Counted one, two, three, four, five, six. He nodded. Tossed them away.
Next he reached back inside the bag and pulled the head out by a handful of its owner’s short, wiry, Afro-textured hair. He raised it up in front of him at arm’s length, like holding a lantern to light the way. Blood dripped from the ragged stump of the severed neck, not yet congealed and pattering into a small pool between his feet. He peered closely into the ruined features of the disembodied face, then rotated the head a few degrees clockwise to examine the earring hooked through the left earlobe, with its beads and coiled wire pendant. He nodded once more. Then, much to his soldiers’ amusement, he plucked the half-smoked cigar fro
m his mouth and stuck it between what was left of the head’s open lips.
‘This cockroach Sizwe looks much better now,’ he proclaimed to the laughing soldiers, raising the head higher to display it to them. ‘Do you not think?’
Khosa plucked out the cigar and replaced it in his own mouth, puffing clouds of smoke. He dropped the head back into the bag and kicked it away like a football. It rolled a few yards and came to a rest in the dirt.
‘You have indeed passed the test, soldier,’ Khosa said to Ben. ‘But I cannot let you go. That was not the agreement.’
Ben was counting down the seconds in his mind. He’d told Sizwe to hang back for four minutes. That left one minute and forty-five seconds to go before Sizwe and his companions kicked off the diversion. Ben could feel the weight of the Browning Hi-Power in his pocket. He was mentally running through the motions, visualising every detail. Khosa would be the first to die. To shoot him now would be suicide for Ben himself, and certain death for the others. But to shoot him when all hell started breaking loose: at least then there was a good chance that all six of them would survive it.
Khosa frowned, gazing left and right. He blinked as if he’d suddenly remembered something, and raised a hand. ‘Wait. Someone is missing. Where are the guards I sent with you?’
‘The lion got one of them,’ Ben said. ‘Isn’t that right, Jeff?’
‘Happened right in front of me,’ Jeff said. ‘Most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’
Khosa blinked again. ‘The lion took one of my men?’
Ben shrugged, as if such things were a daily occurrence for British army soldiers. ‘What did you think would happen, sending men in there with a man-eater? You want to send a team to find the remains, that’s up to you. Personally, I’d let it go. That’s not a happy cat in there.’
‘One man,’ Khosa said. ‘Where are the others?’
One minute, twenty-eight seconds to go.
Ben shook his head. ‘Sorry to be the one to tell you, General, but your men have deserted you. I heard them talking. It’s a coup. They’re probably still out there right at this moment, conspiring how to kill you.’
It might have been a flimsy psychological thread to hang a whole strategy on, but it was every bit as effective as Ben could have wished. Khosa leapt to his feet, propelled into an all-consuming hurricane of outrage, a raptus of seething, foaming psychotic fury. He jumped up and down. He ripped the cigar from his lips and dashed it to sparking pieces in the dirt with the heel of his boot as though it had personally offended him. He tore his Colt Anaconda out of his holster, cocked its hammer and waved it like a man possessed at his terrified soldiers.
He screamed so loudly that his voice was distorted. ‘YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, AND YOU FOUR. GO AND FIND ME THESE DESERTERS AND BRING THEM BACK TO ME ALIVE! GO! RUN! GO!’
Eight of the soldiers jumped to it, clutching their rifles, probably glad to have been ordered off the scene of what could be an imminent massacre.
Ben kept counting. Sixty seconds to go.
‘WHO ELSE WANTS TO BETRAY ME?’ Khosa bellowed, waving his revolver at the rest of the soldiers. ‘YOU?’
Not me, General.
‘YOU?’
Never, General. We swear.
Forty seconds. Ben watched and listened to the raging fury that was the General storming up and down and pointing accusing fingers at his men. His enraged bellowing diminished in volume as his rage passed its apoplectic peak and began to hit the downslope. He was now merely screaming very, very loudly. ‘Am I not a fair and generous leader? Do you not enjoy many privileges thanks to my kindness?’
Of course, General.
Twenty seconds.
‘You! Do you want to lead this army in my place? What about you?’
We follow only you, General.
Amid all the noise, Ben counted down the last remaining seconds. So far, the plan seemed to be going all right. But Sizwe was taking his precious time. The four minutes were up.
Then they were more than up.
Nothing was happening, except that Khosa was beginning to calm down. Which was more frightening than the peak of his rage. There was no telling what he would do next. And there was a limit to how long Ben could keep this lunatic distracted with mind games.
Come on, Sizwe, Ben thought. Where the hell are you?
Nothing happened.
Not until twenty seconds later, when Ben knew that his plan had started to go badly wrong. From one instant to the next, it was suddenly unravelling worse than he could have possibly anticipated.
Half a dozen of the soldiers Khosa had sent out to hunt for the deserters were marching back into the heart of the village. They weren’t alone.
Walking in front of them, heads bowed in defeat and arms raised in submission, were Uwase, Ntwali, Gasimba, Mugabo and Rusanganwa.
Chapter 58
‘We caught these five cockroaches just as they were going to attack us, General,’ the lead soldier reported. ‘And we found these.’
The captured rifles and grenades clattered to the ground.
An electric shock prod stabbed at Ben’s heart. Outwardly he let nothing show, but it was the collapse of everything. All hope was gone. Sizwe was on his own now, alone and running scared, having seen his companions caught and marched away at gunpoint, and probably convinced that more soldiers would be combing the brush for him at any moment. There was no way he was going to launch a diversionary attack on the village single-handed.
Run, Sizwe, Ben was thinking. Run like hell and don’t look back, no matter what.
If the soldiers caught him too, Khosa would soon find out for sure that Ben had tricked him. Things were bad enough already.
Uwase, Ntwali, Gasimba, Mugabo and Rusanganwa were thrown down on their knees and made to grovel in a line as Khosa strode up to them, gnashing his teeth in rekindled fury.
‘Where did you get these?’ he demanded in a roar, and pointed at the weapons and grenades. When he got no reply, he spun around to face Ben with bulging eyes.
‘What kind of deception is this, soldier? I ordered you to kill these men. Do you take me for an idiot? Is this how you repay my mercy?’
Ben’s right hand was just inches from the pistol in his pocket. The urge to make a grab for it and start shooting was hard to suppress. If he put a bullet in Khosa’s head, right here, right now, before the soldiers cut him down, what would happen next? Without their general to give the order, would they fall into disarray like the rabble they were, or would they simply open fire on the prisoners and not stop shooting until every single one of them was dead? If Ben pulled the trigger, was he saving Jude or was he killing him?
It was just too great a chance to take. Ben knew he couldn’t risk it. In the blink of an eye, the gun in his pocket had now gone from being his best chance to being his greatest liability. Khosa had only to order the men to search Ben, and the jig would be up.
‘Your orders were to bring back one head and six sets of tags,’ Ben said, gazing coolly into Khosa’s blazing eyes. He was having to use every last bit of his training and discipline to remain outwardly calm. ‘That’s what we did. I killed one and let the other five run. As your military advisor, I would respectfully suggest that a commanding officer’s orders should be as clear and specific as possible, to the letter. If you meant differently, you should have said so.’
Khosa stared at him, clamping his jaws so hard that Ben half expected to see blood foaming out of his mouth.
‘Where did they get the grenades?’ Khosa demanded.
‘From the dead body of the soldier the lion killed,’ Ben said. ‘That’s my best guess. Maybe they chased it off.’
Khosa stared at him for ten long, drawn-out seconds. Ben could almost feel the rage from those bulging eyes boring into his head like beams of energy, scouring his mind, ransacking his thoughts for any trace of a lie. To look away now, to show the slightest sign of doubt or weakness, would be fatal.
Khosa said, ‘Hm.’
> Then turned back to point at the five kneeling Africans on the ground. ‘I want these cockroaches DEAD!’ he screamed at his soldiers. ‘But first, kill the women and children. Every last one of them! Bring them out here and chop off their arms, legs and heads! I want this village razed to the ground! Let it be removed from the earth as if it had never existed! Spill their blood! SPILL THEIR BLOOD!’
The soldiers cheered and waved their guns in the air. They took up their general’s chant, over and over, like a chorus from hell.
SPILL THEIR BLOOD!
SPILL THEIR BLOOD!
Jeff and Tuesday were standing rooted to the spot. Jude was staring wildly at Ben. Gerber and Hercules both had their eyes closed, as if trying to shut out the nightmare unfolding around them, just wanting it to be over.
SPILL THEIR BLOOD!
SPILL THEIR BLOOD!
Ben felt the weight of the pistol like a brick inside his pocket. In that moment, he very nearly thought ‘Fuck it’ and went for the weapon.
But before Ben was able to do anything that crazy, the explosive rattle of gunfire from beyond the outskirts of the village startled him back to his senses. The terrible chanting faltered and stopped. Khosa and his soldiers all turned towards the gunfire, momentarily distracted.
Ben’s immediate thought was, Sizwe. He hadn’t made his escape after all. He was back. The man was mounting a heroic solitary assault to claim back his village. The diversion was happening, after all. It could change everything.
And that could be all the chance Ben needed. He slipped his hand inside his pocket. His fingers closed around the butt of the Browning.
Now or never, he thought. Do it.
But he hadn’t got the weapon half out of his pocket before everything changed again. And got worse. Much, much worse.