The Devil’s Kingdom: Part 2 of the best action adventure thriller you'll read this year!

‘If he didn’t build it, then who did?’ Tuesday asked.

Ben shook his head. ‘And whoever did, why would they let him take the place over? You don’t create something like this and leave it empty with just a bunch of crazies with guns running around the streets. There’s got to be an angle.’

Tuesday thought about it. ‘What if a property developer built it as an investment, and then Khosa and his boys just muscled in and took it from him? For all you know, the poor sod’s buried in the hotel gardens.’

‘Do you know what the average Congolese makes per year?’ Ben said. ‘Six hundred dollars. These people couldn’t afford a broom cupboard in this place. What kind of luxury property development can possibly pay off in one of the world’s poorest nations?’

The APC rumbled on through the deserted city, using the whole road as there was absolutely no traffic. For a full twenty minutes they saw not a single motor vehicle or sign of life except for a pair of hyenas that had slipped through the perimeter and were running through the streets foraging for scraps. The turret machine-gunner decided it would be fun to have a pop at them, and for a few seconds the shell of the vehicle was filled with the deafening hammer-drill noise of sustained fully automatic fire. From the laughter of the crew, Ben guessed they must have hit something; then as the APC rumbled on he saw the carcass of one of the animals lying in a blood pool in the road. The other had fled.

‘Great shooting, boys,’ Jeff said. ‘Bet that made them feel like real soldiers.’

The blocks thinned out as the edge of the city gave way to a less developed construction zone with earth and cranes everywhere. Soon afterwards, Captain Xulu gave the order to stop, and the APC juddered to a halt. The hatch was flipped open and the soldiers started scrambling out, yelling at their three passengers to do the same. As Ben pushed his head and shoulders out of the hatch he saw the huge building in whose shade they had pulled up. It was the half-built sports stadium that Khosa had mentioned. Until now, Ben hadn’t known whether the General was even being serious.

They were at the far western edge of the city, with nothing except razed jungle and some airport buildings between them and the distant perimeter fence Ben could just about make out through the growing heat haze. The sun was climbing higher in the pale sky, the air buzzing with insects and growing chokingly humid as the temperature rose. Ben’s shirt was sticking to him within moments. All twelve of them got out of the APC, leaving it empty. Which was something trained troops would never do, but Ben wasn’t inclined to say so to Xulu. Sloppy was good, as far as he was concerned.

They entered the stadium through a deep concrete arch, like a semicircular tunnel that was cool and dank. Xulu strutted imperiously in front and the soldiers cautiously brought up the rear as though they believed that the three foreigners were about to bolt. The emptiness around them was almost tangible. Such a desolate and abandoned-feeling space would normally have been scrawled all over with graffiti and strewn with the litter of vagrants and kids, but everything was strangely immaculate and untouched. It was as if barely a living soul had ever set foot here.

The echoing passage opened up into a vast empty arena, oval in shape. Around its outside edge the auditorium was steeply banked like an amphitheatre. The arena itself might eventually become a sports field or race track, but was as yet nothing but a waste ground of patchy yellowed grass and prickly weeds. Ben felt very small in the big open space, and as nervous as a gladiator stepping out to meet his fate. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Khosa were planning on staging a few bloodbaths in this arena for the entertainment of his troops.

But not today. Today, something else awaited him. Something he couldn’t have expected. In retrospect, it would come to make perfect sense.

Chapter 7

Following Captain Xulu towards the centre of the arena, Ben observed a large circular area of rough grass in the middle of the field that had been squashed flat. He’d seen enough helicopter LZs in his life to recognise the after-effects of a powerful downdraught from some type of serious load-bearing transport chopper coming in to land. He knew it had to be a big one, because the cargo it had dropped in the middle of the stadium was a substantial quantity of crates. Piles upon piles of them, stacked messily on the ground and waiting to be unpacked or loaded onto trucks. Now Ben was beginning to understand what Xulu had meant by their duty for that day.

The captain marched up to the nearest stack of crates and jabbed a finger at it, turning to Ben. ‘This is your first task as military advisor to General Khosa. You are to inspect the contents of this shipment and ensure that everything is in order.’

‘What is it, fresh socks and underwear for the troops?’ Jeff said. ‘By the stink of them, I’d say it hasn’t come too soon.’

Xulu ignored him with contempt. ‘The General wishes for everything to be itemised and logged. You will report any problems to me.’

‘And where will you be?’ Ben asked.

‘Over there, where I can see you,’ Xulu said, motioning towards the middle section of the auditorium, where some rows of seats were shaded by the overhang of the half-finished roof.

‘So he gets to sit on his chubby arse and watch while we sweat in the sun,’ Jeff muttered. ‘How jolly nice.’

They were given a claw hammer and a couple of short crowbars to open the crates with. Now that the foreigners were so dangerously armed, the soldiers kept their rifles pointed and retreated to a distance that was far enough to be safe while close enough to watch every move they made. Even in his craziest moments, Ben didn’t think he’d have tried to take on eight trigger-happy Kalashnikov-toting militiamen with nothing more than a piece of bent forged steel in his hand. But it was strangely satisfying to know that they feared him. Tactical advantages always start with the enemy being afraid of you.

‘Let’s get to work,’ he said to Jeff and Tuesday.

A quick inspection of the crates revealed sixteen untidy stacks of between a dozen and fifteen boxes of varying size each, plus many more dumped any-old-how on the grass – adding up to over two hundred and fifty of the things to open and check. They were nailed together out of roughly-sawn pine slats and stencilled in black paint with consignment numbers and Chinese character symbols, rope handles at each end. And they were heavy, the larger ones requiring two people to lift. It was hard to say without the means to weigh it properly, but Ben’s estimate was around ten tons of freight sitting there in front of them, more or less equivalent to the payload of a Chinook or some other variety of heavy-lift cargo helicopter.

Chinese stencilled lettering. A Chinese armoured personnel carrier. Even before they’d levered open the first box, Ben had a hunch what they’d find inside. It wasn’t underwear for the troops, and that was for sure. And it wasn’t antique furniture for Khosa’s luxury command post, either.

They started with the smaller boxes and worked their way up. As the lids came off, their faces grew grimmer.

Half of the smallest boxes contained six semiautomatic pistols of the type issued to the Republic of China military as the QSZ-92, brand-new and gleaming under their sheen of preservative oil, while the other half were packed with the 5.8mm bottlenecked cartridges to feed them with. But wars weren’t won with pistols. In the crates of the next size up, they found dozens of brand-new examples of what the Republic of China’s military brass termed We-ishe-ng Co-ngfe-ng, literally ‘silenced assault gun’. The British and US military would have called them bullpup submachine guns, and in the hands of Khosa’s army they’d have called them trouble. More crates were stuffed with spare fifty-round magazines for them, and large quantities of the 9mm ammo they were chambered to fire.

‘A bunch of ratty old AK-47s is one thing,’ Tuesday sighed. ‘This stuff is going to take these idiots to the next level.’

‘And we’re helping it happen,’ Ben said through gritted teeth.

The bigger the crates, the more destructive the weapons inside. The QBZ-95 rifle was a grown-up version of the more compact submachine guns, this time chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round of which copious quantities nestled in more boxes. The PK machine gun was China’s answer to the classic British General Purpose Machine Gun or GPMG, lovingly referred to by generations of soldiers as the ‘gimpy’. It was only natural, after all, to love something that could cut a car in half, level trees and demolish brick walls all day long without a misfire.

But the firepower of the PK was outdone by the W-85 heavy machine gun, the People’s Army’s rendition of the venerable fifty-calibre M2 Browning heavy machine gun that had adorned armoured vehicles, fighting aircraft and naval vessels from the Thirties to the present day and been used in every single human conflict of any scale during that long period. There was little that could resist it – and the same was just as true of the Chinese version, built around a Soviet-designed 12.7mm cartridge that, if anything, packed just a little more punch than John M. Browning’s trusty old fifty-cal. If you wanted to tear apart a fortified position from a mile or two away and an artillery strike or air assault was out of the question, these monsters would do the job in fine style, especially if you used the optional explosive-tipped round. And if you wanted a lighter bolt-action rifle chambered for the same carrot-sized cartridge that you could use to vaporize individual human targets too far away for the naked eye to see, that requirement was catered for by the AMR-2 sniper rifle. Ben found six of them packed in one of the cases, complete with five-round magazines and long-range mil-dot tactical scopes. They were almost identical in practical terms to the anti-materiel rifles that Tuesday had trained to use as a British army sniper. Nobody needed to tell him what mischief they were capable of inflicting. His jaw fell slowly open when he saw them.

Just about the only thing that could escape unriddled from the power of such weapons was the almost impenetrable skin of a modern main battle tank. But the shipment of arms had that contingency thoughtfully covered, too. The longest, heaviest crates contained enough HJ-10 armour-piercing anti-tank missiles, the Chinese equivalent of the American Hellfire surface-to-air or surface-to-surface rocket, to take out an entire battalion. The launch systems were in a separate freight container.

‘This is not good, guys,’ Jeff said. ‘Not good at all.’

‘Funny,’ Ben said. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’

‘I’ll tell you something else that’s funny,’ Jeff said. ‘If these fuckers were Muslim jihadists, you’d have security services the world over shitting bricks at the thought that this little lot might fall into their hands. There’d probably be a satellite right overhead as we speak, and a dozen CIA spooks goggling at us live on the big screen in Langley, Virginia. But because Khosa’s just your regular African warlord nutcase who’s really only a threat to a bunch of other Africans, nobody’s going to give a rat’s arse. He’s got carte blanche to run his fucked-up little kingdom out here any way he likes and do whatever he pleases. How’s that for a joke?’

‘Hilarious. Then why’m I not rolling on the floor pissing my pants laughing?’ Tuesday said.

By the time they’d prised open every single crate and the ground was covered with lids and packing materials, the arsenal had grown to include a trio of fearsome Hua Qing belt-driven rotary ‘miniguns’, a useful quantity of grenades, several mortars and two flamethrowers. Down to the last nut, bolt, and bullet, the entire consignment had come direct from China.

‘Our friends in the east,’ was how Colonel Dizolele had described the senders of the shipment. Finally, one or two pieces of the puzzle were coming together. But that wasn’t what was uppermost in Ben’s mind at this moment, as he debated two possible options.

The first was the matter of how easily he might be able to slip a weapon onto his person unnoticed, for future use in aiding their escape from this damn place. One of the pistols would be best. There would be the difficulty of getting it loaded, as shoving loose twenty cartridges from an ammo crate into a magazine couldn’t be done quickly or discreetly enough while being watched. The soldiers, and especially Xulu, were scrutinising everything the three of them did, most likely suspicious about the very thing that Ben was thinking of. Any false moves, and they might just decide to shoot him. Which wasn’t going to help Jude’s situation.

The second thought hovering in Ben’s mind was the notion of sabotage. Whatever kind of business arrangement existed between Khosa and his friends in the east, it was unthinkable that such a lethal shipment could be allowed to enter into the man’s possession. Ben wasn’t about to forget the horrors that Khosa had already inflicted with just a handful of scuffed, battered old assault rifles and a few rusty old machetes. Give him state-of-the-art ordnance like this, and there was no telling what he’d be capable of.

But disabling ten tons of weaponry wasn’t a quick and easy prospect. For a few moments Ben played with the insane idea that a loose grenade dropped into the wrong box could set off a fireworks display that would wreck most of the stadium and be seen and heard for miles. Goodbye shipment. But goodbye Ben, Jeff, and Tuesday too. Maybe that wasn’t such a good plan.

With the boxes opened, the job was only just beginning. The sun grew meltingly hot as, for the next three hours, Ben and his companions checked and itemised every single piece of ordnance in the shipment.

‘That’s the last one,’ Jeff said, tossing a rifle back into its crate.

‘I’m done,’ Tuesday said. He’d been checking the ammo supply for obvious duds such as dented cases or badly seated heads. Sadly, every round he’d examined had been shipshape and ready for business.

‘Only question now is, when’s the delivery of tanks and fighter jets due to arrive?’ Jeff said.

‘Don’t joke about it,’ Ben told him. ‘That could be our next job.’

‘Even if it’s not, Khosa’s still got enough toys here to kick off a pretty decent little war.’

‘But who against?’ Tuesday said.

‘This is Africa, old son,’ Jeff told him. ‘There’s never any shortage of folks to attack. Military rivals to overthrow, civilians to slaughter, other races to exterminate. It’s what people do all over the world, always have, but here it’s the national sport.’

Xulu had left the comfort of the shade and was strutting towards them, sipping from a bottle of water in one hand and carrying a radio handset in the other.

‘You have done good work this morning, soldier,’ he said to Ben, smacking his lips after a long drink. He didn’t offer any of it to them.

‘Delighted to be of service. I hope you didn’t strain yourself with too much rest back there.’

Xulu held up the radio. ‘We have been called back to headquarters. The General wishes to see you.’

‘To inform us what our next duty of the day is?’ Ben said. ‘Maybe he’ll have us spend the afternoon drilling some sense into your so-called troops. Starting with teaching them to tell their right hand from their left, and their arse from a rocket crater in the ground. You might want to join in. Might learn something.’

Xulu’s gold teeth glinted in the sunlight. ‘No, soldier. He wishes to see just you, alone. You are invited to lunch.’

Chapter 8

Just what it was about the idea of Ben having lunch with Khosa that Xulu found so amusing, Ben didn’t want to dwell on. Maybe the General had special plans. Maybe it was also lunchtime for another poor starving lion captured by the soldiers, or a cageful of Rhodesian Ridgeback hounds that Khosa kept out back somewhere, and he’d decided to have Ben served up as the main course. When it came to murdering prisoners, the man was as inventive as he was unpredictable.

So it was with a degree of trepidation that, on their return to the Khosa City Dorchester, Ben let himself be escorted to the top floor and shown inside the luxurious command post. His guards closed him in and left.

There was no sign of Ben’s gracious host in the palatial suite’s living room. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed for another door and found himself in an enormous dining room with a table that could have seated twenty people. No sign of places set for lunch. No sign of Khosa, either.

Ben went on exploring. Beyond the dining room, he discovered a narrow hallway with more rooms off it. He silently cracked open a door to his right, peered through the gap and saw it was a bathroom the size of his whole safe-house apartment in Paris, all marble and gilt and mirrors everywhere. The toilet, sink, and bath were pink with gold-plated taps. Ben pulled a face as if he’d drunk vinegar, closed the door and tried another, only to find a walk-in wardrobe even bigger than the bathroom but empty of clothes except for Khosa’s uniform jacket and trousers hanging neatly from a rail.

The third door was a bedroom.

Like the rest of the suite it was richly decorated in silks and fine wood, but it appeared that Khosa had added some personal touches. Like the leopardskin covering on the enormous sofa on which the man himself was sprawled with his head lolling backwards and his legs splayed out in front of him.

The General was either asleep or unconscious. The sheets of the giant four-poster that dominated the room behind him were rumpled and looked as if he hadn’t long since got up. He was wearing a burgundy silk dressing gown, crocodile cowboy boots, and a gunbelt with the ever-present .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda revolver strapped to his side. Ben wondered if he wore the gun in bed at night.

Khosa had obviously been enjoying a late, liquid breakfast. A half-empty, unlabelled bottle of some kind of pale liquor rested on the coffee table in front of him, next to an empty crystal wineglass and a carved ebony ashtray in which the stub of a Cohiba Gran Corona stood crumpled, nose-down, like a crashed plane. The room stank of stale cigar smoke. Khosa’s eyes were closed, but they snapped sharply open as Ben stepped into the room, instantly focused on him. The General made no attempt to get up.

‘So you accepted my invitation, soldier,’ he said, as though there had been any choice in the matter. His voice betrayed no trace of drunkenness.

‘You’ll forgive me if I didn’t get time to change into something a little smarter,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, this is not a formal occasion. I very much enjoyed our last conversation. I thought it time that we talked some more.’

That conversation had been back at Khosa’s forward operating base in Somalia. They’d discussed war, strategy, the General’s grand future plans, and the fact that he’d cottoned onto the father–son relationship between Ben and Jude. Ben had had more pleasant conversations.

‘Where’s Jude?’

‘I told you, soldier. He is in a safe place and being very well looked after. There is no need for you to worry about him.’

‘I want to talk to him.’

‘That is not possible. You will have to accept my word on this. Do you not trust me, soldier? Do you not yet believe that what I say I will do, I always do?’

Ben made no reply. He did believe it. Khosa could invariably be taken at his word, and that was precisely what worried Ben the most.

Khosa straightened up and waved towards an armchair across the coffee table. ‘Come and sit down. I want you to talk to me.’

‘I don’t have a lot to say to you.’

‘Oh, that is not true. There is so much I can learn from a great warrior from the British army.’

‘So that you can get better at killing people? Looks to me as if you’re pretty adept at that already.’

Khosa found that highly amusing, and laughed loudly. ‘Ah, soldier, you never tire of teasing me. You are a very impudent fellow. But as you know, I admire your frankness. Nobody else speaks to me the way you do. It is refreshing to have such open discussions, man to man.’ He reached forwards for the bottle and poured himself another glass of whatever was in it. After knocking down half the glass in a single gulp, he offered the bottle to Ben. ‘Would you like some Kotiko? Try it, soldier. It is made from palm trees. Very strong. I have many more bottles. Get yourself a glass from the cabinet.’

Ben glanced at the bottle and visualised himself smashing it over the edge of the table and slitting Khosa’s throat with the jagged end. ‘It’s a little early in the day for me,’ he lied.

Khosa shrugged, took another gulp, and refilled the glass once more. ‘As I was saying,’ he resumed, ‘there is much I can learn from a man of your experience. You see, I believe strongly in education. Education is something lacking here in my country, and this is very sad. There is no end to learning, not even for the wisest or strongest leader. This is why I read. Military strategists tell us, “The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”’

Ben recognised the quotation from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Khosa loved to show off his erudition. First it had been history and Greek mythology. Now it was ancient military tactical wisdom from the fifth century bc.

‘So you’re preparing for battle, are you?’ Ben asked.

Khosa smiled, his facial scars crinkling like horror-movie latex. ‘Oh yes. A very big battle. I have been waiting for it a long time.’

‘And it seems to me that Sun Tzu isn’t the only Chinese military expert you’ve been taking advice from lately. Used to be it was the Russians who did most of the arms trading in Africa.’

‘You are referring to the shipment you inspected this morning. I trust everything was to your satisfaction?’

‘It’s not the goods that trouble me,’ Ben said. ‘It’s their recipient, and what he plans to do with them.’

‘The Chinese are a worthwhile ally,’ Khosa said. ‘They despise us even more than we despise them. But this is acceptable. In business there is no room for friendship. I give to the yellow men what they need. In return, they will help me to achieve my goals. It is – how do you say? – a square deal. One that has suited me well. But things are soon about to change. Thanks to this, I will not need the Chinese for much longer.’

Khosa dipped his fingers into the bulging pocket of his dressing gown and took out his precious diamond. Its uncut faces caught the light from the window and reflected it into Khosa’s face, casting a diaphanous glow over his nightmare features. Dozens of millions of dollars’ worth of gemstone. Maybe hundreds of millions, for all Ben knew. And Khosa was carrying it around in his pocket as though it was a handful of change. He weighed the enormous glittering rock on his outstretched palm, gazing at it for a moment in rapt admiration.

Ben found it hard to take his own eyes off the thing. It was as big as the Chinese hand grenades he’d inspected that morning. And in its own way, it was infinitely more deadly. Ben had as little knowledge of its history or origin as he had of its value. He only knew that people had already died for it. And the dying wasn’t over yet.

‘It is not by chance that this diamond has come to me,’ Khosa said, still gazing at it. ‘To possess it was my destiny, all along. I have always known that, one day, it would find me. Now nothing will stand in my way. I will build the greatest army in all of Africa and avenge the wrong that was done to me by my brother.’

Chapter 9

Ben was surprised by the mention of a brother. It seemed strange that a man like this could have anything as normal as a family. That would imply that he’d been born of a human mother, and had a childhood, and once been something other than a murdering lunatic.