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

Ben and Jeff had known each other a long time and could communicate on a level that wasn’t quite telepathic, but not far off it. Might just have to kill this one, Ben knew Jeff was thinking from the set of his jaw.

Soon, Ben’s return glance told Jeff.

Jeff twitched one eyebrow and gave a tiny jerk of his chin, indicating as clearly as if he’d spoken it out loud, Why wait? Let’s pitch the fucker out of the window, snap the necks of these worthless two, take their weapons, and storm the building. You know you want to.

Ben gave a half-smile. The idea had merit. Its time might come, but that time wasn’t now.

The silent conversation between the two men wasn’t lost on Tuesday Fletcher, but it went straight over the head of Xulu, who planted his hands on his hips and glared around the room. His disapproving eye settled on Gerber. ‘You! Old man! You should stand up when I speak to you!’

‘He isn’t well,’ Ben said. ‘Leave him alone.’

‘Is he drunk?’ Xulu demanded. ‘Is he sick? What is wrong with him?’ He reached out to grab Gerber’s arm and yank him off the bunk.

‘He has the simian herpes genitalis virus,’ Ben said. ‘Caught it from a macaque in Addis Ababa. Very contagious.’

‘Makes your bollocks shrivel up and drop off,’ Jeff said, pointing downwards. ‘And everything else down there with them, if you’re really unlucky.’

‘Pretty grim,’ Tuesday added, pulling a face. ‘You can get it just by touching an infected person.’

‘We’re all vaccinated against it,’ Ben said. ‘If you’re not, I wouldn’t get too close.’

‘But the infection only lasts a little while,’ Jeff concluded. ‘He’ll be fine by tomorrow.’

Evidently not much of a doctor, Xulu had quickly pulled back his arm and now stepped away from Gerber’s bunk with a disconcerted frown. ‘Very well. He is excused duty for today.’

‘And what duty might that be?’ Ben asked.

The nasty gold smile. ‘You will soon find out. Come with me.’

Three more soldiers awaited downstairs in the lobby, to escort them to the armoured personnel carrier parked in the street in front of the hotel. Ben was able to get a better look at the six-wheeled APC in daylight and recognised it as a Chinese Type 92. Essentially it was a small tank, except it was fully amphibious. Hardware like it wasn’t cheap to come by, even in central Africa where military-grade weapons of all shapes and sizes could be had for a few dollars.

‘I wonder what surprises are in store for us today,’ Jeff mused as they walked from the entrance. The sun was already hot, burning a hole in the early morning clouds over the city.

‘Surprises are foolish things,’ Tuesday replied. ‘The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.’ He caught Jeff’s look and shrugged. ‘It’s from Emma.’

‘Who the hell’s Emma?’

‘You know, Jane Austen?’

Jeff looked blank. ‘Sounds like you know some strange women.’

But Tuesday was right about the pleasure not being enhanced as the three of them were made to clamber inside the stuffy, baking-hot interior of the APC. The three-man crew was already in place and the additional five soldiers, plus Xulu, plus their three charges, made twelve people crammed in like herrings in a cask. ‘Anybody farts in here,’ Jeff muttered, ‘and he’s dead meat.’

Captain Xulu sat near the front and gave orders to the crew as the hatch was slammed down above them and the heavy vehicle got moving. From his cramped fold-down seat in the back, Ben was able to peer out through a bulletproof-glass porthole. The sight of the empty city streets rolling by was even more surreal in daylight than when they’d first arrived. ‘There’s no way Khosa built this place,’ he said, voicing his thoughts from last night in a low tone that only Tuesday and Jeff would hear. ‘His resources don’t stretch this far, nothing like it. And if they did, he’d have spent the money on building a proper military base.’

‘Then again,’ Jeff said. ‘Khosa’s as loony as a shithouse rat. If anyone’s capable of it, he is.’

‘He might be loony, but he’s also got a plan. I don’t see how this place fits with it.’

‘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 (#ulink_93e97c80-c6ec-52b0-b1c9-739d098a0e65)

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.