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

‘We’re Americans,’ she said. ‘All Americans are rich. Everybody knows that, right?’

The commander laughed. ‘What about him?’ He pointed at Joseph Maheshe.

‘He is just a stupid farmer,’ another of the soldiers volunteered. ‘How can he pay?’

‘This man is our driver,’ Rae protested. ‘He has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.’

The commander stepped closer to Joseph and examined him. Joseph had the classic Tutsi ethnicity, with fine features and a rather narrower nose, slightly hooked, that generally, though not always, distinguished them from Bantu peoples like the Hutu. During the Rwandan genocide it had been the worst curse of the Tutsi people that they could often be recognised at a glance.

‘This one looks like a cockroach,’ the commander said. It wasn’t the first time Joseph had heard his people described that way. Cockroach was what the Hutu death squads had called his brother and their parents, before hacking them all to death.

‘Get on your knees, cockroach.’

Without protest, Joseph Maheshe sank down to his knees in the roadside grass and dirt and bowed his head. He knew what was coming, and accepted it peacefully. He knew the Americans might not be as lucky as this. He was sorry for them, but then they should not have come here.

The commander drew his pistol, pressed it to the side of Joseph’s head and fired. The sound of the shot drowned out Rae’s cry of horror. Joseph went down sideways and crumpled in the long grass with his knees still bent.

‘We will take these American spies to General Khosa,’ the commander said to his men. ‘He will know what to do with them.’

The soldiers tossed the camera equipment into the back of one of the armed pickup trucks. The two prisoners were shoved roughly into the other, where they were forced to crouch low with guns pointed at them.

‘You saved my life,’ Munro whispered to Rae.

Eventually, that would come to be something he would no longer thank her for. But for now they were in one piece. Rae looked back at the abandoned Toyota as the pickup trucks took off down the rough road. Joseph’s body was no more than a dark, inert smudge in the grass. Just another corpse on just another roadside in Africa. The vultures would probably find him first, followed not long afterwards by the hyenas.

As for Munro’s fate and her own, Rae didn’t even want to think about it.

Chapter 2 (#ulink_09287569-0ced-5bd6-8339-73163bf768ae)

At various and frequent points throughout the ups and downs of what was turning out to be an unusually eventful existence, Ben Hope was in the habit of pausing to take stock of his life. To evaluate his current situation, to consider the sequences of events – planned or not – that had got him there, to ponder what lay ahead in the immediate and longer-term future, and to reflect on how he was doing generally.

All things considered, he had always thought of himself as being a pretty normal type of guy, and so he figured that this stocktaking exercise must be something most normal folks did, even though most normal folks probably didn’t tend to find themselves in the kinds of situations that invariably seemed to keep cropping up in his path. Just like most normal folks didn’t have to do the kinds of things he had to do in order to get out of those situations in one piece.

In his distant past, Ben’s stocktaking had involved thoughts like: Okay, so passing selection for 22 SAS might be the toughest challenge you’ve ever taken on, but you will not fail. You can do this. You will be fine.

Many years later it had been more along the lines of: All right, so you’ve walked away from the military career you struggled so hard to build and the future looks uncertain. But it’s a big world out there. You have skills. You will make it.

Or, some years further down the line again: So she’s left you for good this time, and you feel like shit. But you won’t always feel this way. You’ll survive, like you always do.

If there was one thing Ben had learned, it was this: that wherever the tide might carry him, whatever fate might throw at him, however desperate his situation, however impossible the task facing him, however dark his future prospects or slim his chances of survival, he would live to fight another day. He would not be defeated or deterred, not by anything, not by anyone. That spirit was what had driven him, bolstered him, enabled him to be the man he was. Or the man he’d thought he was.

But not now. Not anymore.

Everything had changed.

Because at this moment, as he sat there helpless and surrounded by aggressive men with guns, slumped uncomfortably on the dirty open flatbed of an old army truck with his knees drawn up in front of him and his head resting on his hands and every jolt of the big wheels and stiff suspension on this rough road somewhere in the middle of the Congo jarring through his spine, he was fighting a rising black tide of emptiness.

If there was a way out of this one, the plan had yet to come to him. And if there was a tomorrow, it wasn’t one that he was sure he wanted to face.

Sitting next to Ben, staring silently into space with a pensive frown, was his trusted old friend, Jeff Dekker, with whom he’d survived so many narrow scrapes in the past and come through in one piece. Beside Jeff was the tough young Jamaican ex-British army trooper named Tuesday Fletcher, on whom Ben had quickly learned he could absolutely depend.

But Ben was barely even aware of their presence. All he could think about – all that really mattered to him – was that his son Jude Arundel, just at the point in their troubled relationship where it looked as if they were finally bonding, was lost to him and there wasn’t a single thing Ben could do about it. And that riding happily at the front of the irregular militia convoy speeding along this dusty road, wearing a self-satisfied grin and probably smoking another of his huge cigars in victory, was the man who had taken Jude from him.

That man’s name was Jean-Pierre Khosa. Known as ‘the General’ to the army of heavily armed Congolese fighters who both feared and loyally served him, Khosa had every reason to be smiling. Most men would be, when they were carrying inside their pocket a stolen diamond worth countless sums of money and there was nobody to stop them from gaining every bit of power that wealth like that could afford.

Ben knew little about Khosa, but he knew enough, and had seen enough, for the seeds of doubt inside his own heart to grow into a chilling conviction that here, now, at last, was an enemy he couldn’t defeat. That Khosa could beat him.

And that maybe Khosa had already won.

Khosa seemed to know it, too.

There was no telling how many miles they’d driven through this jungle, coming across no sign of human habitation for hour after bruising, spine-jarring, mind-numbing hour. Ben had lost his watch before the start of the journey, and with it all track of time, except for the position of the sun which told him it would soon be evening again. They’d been travelling like this all day, and most of the night before with only a short stop in the middle of nowhere, for the troops to rest, brew coffee and gulp down a bowl of nondescript dried meat, beans, and rice. Ben hadn’t been hungry but he’d taken what he was offered. Military wisdom, left over from his past. Eat when you can, sleep when you can, preserve your strength.

They’d come a long way since then, and they were still in the middle of nowhere. There was an awful lot of nowhere around these parts.

The truck in which Ben and his friends were passengers was a dozen or so vehicles back from the spearhead of the convoy. To the rear, the long procession of armoured pickup trucks and Jeeps stretched out far in their wake like a cobra winding its way between the verdant thickets of wide-bladed leaves and tangled shrubbery that overhung the track and formed a tunnel overhead, blotting out much of the harsh sunlight that would otherwise have been cooking them inside their vehicles. Ben had counted thirty-five vehicles behind them when they’d set off, but the tail end of the snake had soon become obscured by the plume of dust thrown up by so many chunky off-road tyres pounding the rutted, sunbaked surface.

The dirt road seemed to go on and on forever, hardly changing. Now and then they would cross a rickety river bridge, and now and then the endless forest would break to offer views of sweeping plains and mountain valleys and mist-shrouded peaks in the distance. The Congo was a vast territory the size of most of Western Europe’s countries combined, but with barely any paved roads to connect it together and even less chance of running into any kind of major traffic, let alone a contingent of police or government troops. The authorities had the good sense to keep to the cities and give outlying areas a wide berth. Khosa’s small army rode through the jungle as if they owned the place – and to all intents and purposes they did. They were making no secret of their presence as they roared along to the soundtrack of angry African rap music that was blasting from a boombox wired to PA speakers somewhere back along the line, with all the aggressive confidence of two hundred or more pepped-up and hot-blooded young men with enough military hardware to level a town and the will to deploy it at the drop of a hat.

Ben was suddenly aware that Jeff Dekker was watching him, and glanced up to meet his friend’s gaze. Jeff’s face, his dark hair, and the DPM combat jacket he was wearing were all caked in dust. He looked weary and careworn, but there was a twinkle in his eye and his smile was irrepressible. Jeff was like that.

‘Mate, it’s going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?’

Ben said nothing. He tried to smile back, but his face felt numb.

‘Jude’ll be all right,’ Jeff said. ‘He’s as tough as his old man. Tougher.’

Ben didn’t reply. He appreciated his friend’s attempt to reassure him. But he didn’t believe a word he was saying.

‘We’ll get out of this,’ Jeff said. ‘We’ll find him. Hear me? Wherever these bastards have taken him, we’ll find him.’

Ben remained silent. Finding people was something he’d done a lot of in his time. He thought about all the kidnap victims he’d saved in the past, during the years between leaving the military and going into business with Jeff, when he’d called himself a ‘crisis response consultant’ – that catch-all phrase that didn’t quite do justice to the things he’d had to do or the methods he’d employed to help people who needed it.

Many of those he’d rescued had been children. All of them had been someone’s loved one. All of them strangers to him, and yet he’d risked his own life – and taken a good many others – to preserve theirs. And now, the victim incarcerated out there somewhere in conditions Ben didn’t even want to imagine was one of only two people in the world he could call his kin, and he was utterly powerless to help.

Ben couldn’t close out of his head the image of the last time he’d seen Jude, being forced at gunpoint into a black Mercedes limousine and taken away by a well-dressed African named César Masango. General Jean-Pierre Khosa called Masango his ‘political attaché’. Ben could think of better terms to describe him.

Kidnapper. Gangster. Walking dead man. That was just three.

‘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.