Star Of Africa Part 31

To be continued ...

THE DEVIL'S KINGDOM Sequel to STAR OF AFRICA and the concluding part of.

Ben Hope's epic African adventure.

Available November 2016.

Read on for an exclusive extract ...

Chapter One.

South Kivu Province.

Democratic Republic of Congo.

It was a rough road that the lone Toyota four-wheel-drive was trying to negotiate, and the going was agonisingly slow. One moment the worn tyres would be slithering and fighting for grip in yet another axle-deep rut of loose reddish earth, the next the creaking, grinding suspension would b.u.mp so hard over the rubble and rocks strewn everywhere that the vehicle's three occupants were bounced out of their seats with a crash that set their teeth on edge.

At this rate, it was going to be some more hours before they reached the remote strip where the light plane was due to pick up the two Americans and fly them and their precious cargo to Kavumu Airport, near Bukavu. Once safely arrived at the airport, the pair intended to waste no time before jumping on the first jet heading back home and getting the h.e.l.l out of here. But safety and escape still seemed a long way beyond their reach right now. They were still very much in the danger zone, a fact that didn't escape them for a moment.

The battered, much-repaired old Toyota was one of the few possessions of a local man named Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e who now and then hired himself out as a driver and guide to tourists. Not that many tourists came here any more, not even the thrill-seeking adventurous ones. It was a precarious place and an even more precarious trade for Joseph, but the only one he knew. He'd been a taxi driver in Kigali, back over the border in neighbouring Rwanda, when the troubles there twenty years earlier had forced him and his wife, both of them of Tutsi ethnicity, to flee their home never to return. Joseph had seen a lot in his time, and knew the dangers of this area as well as anyone. He wasn't overjoyed that the two Americans had talked him into coming out here. He was liking the grinding sounds coming from his truck's suspension even less.

While Joseph worried about what the terrible road surface was doing to his vehicle, his two backseat pa.s.sengers had their own concerns to occupy their minds. They were a man and a woman, both dishevelled and travel-stained, both s.h.i.+ning with perspiration from the baking heat inside the car, and both in a state of great excitement.

The man's name was Craig Munro, and he was a middlingly-successful freelance investigative reporter based seven thousand miles from here in Chicago. In his late forties, he was nearly twice the age of his female companion. They weren't any kind of an item; their relations.h.i.+p was, always had been and would remain professional, even though the lack of privacy when camping out rough for days and nights on end in this wilderness sometimes forced a degree more intimacy on them than either was comfortable with.

The woman's name was Rae Lee, and she had worked for Munro as an a.s.sistant and photographer for the last eighteen months. Rae was twenty-five, second-generation Taiwanese American, and she'd been top of her law cla.s.s at Chicago University for two years before switching tracks and studying photography at the city's prestigious Art Inst.i.tute. She had taken the job with Munro more for the experience, and for ideological reasons, than for the money money being something that wasn't always in good supply around her employer's shabby offices in downtown Chicago. The camera equipment inside the metal cases that jostled about in the back of the Toyota was all hers. But as expensive as it was, its true value at this moment lay in the large number of digital images Rae's long lens had captured last night and early this morning from their concealed stakeout.

It was an investigative journalist's dream. Everything they could have wished to find. More than they'd dared even hope for, which was the reason for their excitement. While at the same time, it was also the reason for their deep anxiety to get away and home as fast as possible. The kind of information and evidence they'd travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to acquire was precisely the kind that could get you killed. And the Congo was a very easy place in which to disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.

The hammering and lurching of the 4x4's suspension made it impossible to have any kind of conversation, but neither Munro nor Rae Lee needed to speak their thoughts out loud. They were both thinking the same thing: that when they got back to the States, that was when their work would begin in earnest. The physical danger would be behind them, but the real grind would await, and Munro's endless deskbound hours of writing the sensational article would be just part of it. There would be scores of calls to make, dozens more contacts to chase, many facts to verify before they could go live with this thing. It was serious business. While what they'd found would cause a substantial stir in certain quarters, not everyone would be pleased. Including some very wealthy and powerful people who would use every ounce of their influence to block the publication of this information in every way possible. But what they had was pure gold, and they knew it. They were going to be able to blow the lid off this whole dirty affair and open a lot of eyes to what was really happening out here.

'How much further?' Munro yelled, leaning forwards in the back and shouting close to Joseph's ear to be heard.

'It is a very bad road,' the driver replied, as if this were news to them. He was a French speaker like many Rwandans past a certain age, and spoke English with a heavy accent. 'Three hours, maybe four.' Which put them still a long way from anywhere.

'This is hopeless,' Munro complained, flopping back in his seat.

Rae's long hair, normally jet black, looked red from all the dust. She flicked it away from her face and twisted round to throw an anxious glance over her shoulder at the camera cases behind her. The gear was getting a h.e.l.l of a jolting back there, though it was well protected inside thick foam. 'We'll be okay,' she said to Munro, as much to rea.s.sure herself as him. 'Everything's fine.'

But as the Toyota b.u.mped its way around the next corner a few moments later, they knew that everything wasn't fine at all.

Rae muttered, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t.'

Munro clamped his jaw tight and said nothing.

The two pickup trucks that blocked the road up ahead were the kind that were called 'technicals'. Rae had no idea where that name had come from, but she recognised them instantly, because they weren't hard to recognise. The flatbed of each truck was equipped with a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount, with ammunition belts drooping from them and coiled up on the floor like snakes. The machine guns were pointed up the road straight at the oncoming Toyota. A soldier stood behind each weapon, ready to fire. Several more soldiers stood in the road, all sporting the curved-magazine Kalashnikov a.s.sault rifles that Rae had quickly learned were a ubiquitous sight just about everywhere in the eastern Congo and probably all across the entire country, over a land ma.s.s bigger than all of Europe.

'Could be government troops, maybe,' Munro said nervously as the Toyota lurched towards the waiting roadblock. In a badly decayed and impoverished state where even regular army could closely resemble the most thrown-together rebel force, sometimes it was hard to tell.

'Maybe,' Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e said. He looked uncertain.

There was no driving around them, and certainly no way to double back. Joseph stopped the Toyota as the soldiers marched up and surrounded them, aiming their rifles at the windows. The unit commander was a skinny kid of no more than nineteen. He was draped in cartridge belts like a rapper wears gold chains and had a semiauto pistol dangling against his ribs in a shoulder holster. A marijuana roll-up the size of a small banana drooped from his mouth. His eyes were rolling and his finger was on the trigger of his AK47.

'Let me handle this,' Munro said, throwing open his door.

'Be very careful, mister,' Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e cautioned him. Anxiety was in his eyes.

As Munro stepped from the car two soldiers grabbed his arms and roughly hauled him away from the vehicle. Rae swallowed and emerged from the other pa.s.senger door, her heart thudding so hard she could hardly walk. She'd heard the stories. There were a lot of them, and they generally ended the same way.

The soldiers in the trucks and on the ground all spent a second or two eyeing the Oriental woman's skimpy top, the honey flesh of her bare shoulders and as much of her legs as were made visible by the khaki shorts she was wearing. Her attractiveness was an unexpected bonus for them. A few exchanged grins and nods of appreciation, before the teen commander ordered them to search the vehicle. They started swarming around it, wrenching open the doors and tailgate and poking around inside. Munro and Rae were held at bay with rifles pointed at them. Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e didn't try to resist as they hauled him out from behind the wheel.

The soldiers instantly took an interest in the flight cases in the back of the Toyota. The unit commander ordered they be opened up.

'Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute,' Munro said, putting on a big smile and brus.h.i.+ng past the guns to speak to the commander. 'You guys speak English, right? Listen, you really don't need to open those. It's just a bunch of cameras. What do you say, guys? We can come to an agreement. Nothing simpler, right?' As he spoke, he reached gently into the pocket of his shorts, careful to let them see he wasn't hiding a weapon in there, and slipped out a wallet from which he started drawing out banknotes marked BANQUE CENTRALE DU CONGO, the blue hundred-franc ones with the elephant on them.

The commander grabbed the wallet from him, tore out all the Congolese money that was inside as well as the wad of US dollars Munro was carrying, his credit cards and American driver's licence, and stuffed it in his combat vest. He tossed away the empty wallet.

'Hey. I didn't mean for you to take all of it,' Munro protested.

'Shut up, motherf.u.c.ka!' the commander barked.

'Give me back my dollars and my cards, okay? Come on, guys. Play fair.'

Rifles were pointed at Munro's head and chest. Beads of sweat were breaking out on his brow and running into his eyes. He held up his palms.

'What is your business here, American b.a.s.t.a.r.d?' the commander asked.

'Tourists,' Munro said, his face reddening. 'Me and my niece here. So can I have my dollars back, or what?'

Rae was thinking, Please be quiet. Please don't make this worse. How could she be his niece? For such a gifted investigator, he was a hopeless liar.

The commander shouted orders at his men. Two of them stepped up, grabbed Munro by the arms and flung him on the ground. Rifle muzzles jabbed and stabbed at him, like poking hay. Rae screamed out, 'Don't shoot him! Please!'

More of the weapons turned to point at her. She closed her eyes, but they didn't shoot. Instead, all three of them were held at gunpoint while the soldiers went on ransacking the Toyota. They opened up the camera cases, spilled out Rae's gear and quickly found the Canon EOS with the long lens. The commander turned it on and flicked through the stored images, calmly puffing on his joint, until he'd seen enough to satisfy him. He shook his head gravely.

'You are not tourists. You are motherf.u.c.ka spies. We will report this to General Khosa.'

At the mention of the name Khosa, Rae went very cold. That was when she knew that nothing Munro could say or do would make this situation worse. It was already as bad as it could be.

'Spies? What in h.e.l.l are you talking about? I tell you we're tourists!' But it wasn't so easy for Munro to rant and protest convincingly while he was being held on the ground with a boot sole planted against his chest and a Kalashnikov to his head.

'Kill this mkundu,' the commander said to his soldiers. 'When you are finished with the wh.o.r.e, cut her throat.'

Rae felt her stomach twist. She was going to be gang-raped and left butchered at the roadside like a piece of carrion for wild animals to dismember and gnaw on her bones. She wanted to throw up.

She had to save herself somehow.

And so she said the first thing that came to her.

'Wait! My family are rich!' she yelled.

The commander turned and looked at her languidly. He took another puff from his joint. 'Rich? How rich?'

'Richer than you can even imagine.'

He showed her jagged teeth. 'Rich like Donald Trump?'

'Richer,' Rae said. That was an exaggeration, admittedly. It might have been true back in about 1971, twenty years before she was born. 'If you don't harm us, there will be a big, big reward for you.' She spread her arms out wide, as if to show him just how much would be in it for him.

The commander digested this for a moment, then glanced down at Munro and kicked him in the ribs. 'This motherf.u.c.ka says he is your uncle.'

Munro grimaced in pain and clutched his side where he'd been kicked.

'He's my friend,' Rae answered, fighting to keep her voice steady.

The commander seemed to find this hard to believe, but his main concern was money. 'Is his family rich too?'

'We're Americans,' she said. 'All Americans are rich.'

The commander laughed. 'What about him?' He pointed at Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e.

'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 cla.s.sic 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 c.o.c.kroach,' the commander said. It wasn't the first time Joseph had heard his people described that way. c.o.c.kroach was what the Hutu death squads had called his brother and their parents, before hacking them all to death.

'Get on your knees, c.o.c.kroach.'

Without protest, Joseph Mah.e.s.h.e sank down to his knees in the roadside gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. 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 Two.

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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+t. 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 any more.

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 in the back of the truck, staring silently into s.p.a.ce with a pensive frown, was his trusted old friend, Jeff Dekker, with whom he'd survived so many narrow sc.r.a.pes 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 at this moment was that his son Jude, just at the point in their troubled relations.h.i.+p 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 hundreds of millions of dollars and there was n.o.body 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.

Has Ben Hope met his match at last?.

Read The Devil's Kingdom and find out ...

Where ex-SAS major Ben Hope goes, trouble always follows...

The first part of a sensational new two-book sequence that will be the biggest and most epic Ben Hope adventure yet!.

Coming May 2016.

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