Scott Mariani - The Devil’s Kingdom

As the soldiers prodded and shoved the four prisoners in his direction, Khosa turned to give Ben a beaming white smile that looked like the last thing a shark’s dinner might see before being swallowed up in one bite. It was usual for him to ignore Jeff and Tuesday as the underlings they were. As for Gerber, Khosa viewed the ‘Goat Man’ with as much regard as for an inchworm. Ben had twice had to persuade him not to have the old sailor hacked to death by his men.

‘Ah, it is very good to be home again,’ Khosa said in his deep, resonant voice. ‘Soldier, welcome to my executive headquarters.’

Khosa led the way to the entrance, a bodyguard flanking him each side and one step back, their guns ready as though they were expecting an ambush inside the grand foyer. Khosa himself seemed completely at ease, like a guy strolling in his front door and about to hang up his jacket and hat and call, ‘Honey, I’m home!’

Ben followed, with Jeff and Tuesday in his wake both keeping a concerned eye on Gerber. The rest of the soldiers from the truck strutted along behind, their loaded and cocked Kalashnikovs trained on their new guests and menacing scowls on their faces. The real Dorchester didn’t know how lucky it was.

‘I know what you are thinking, soldier,’ Khosa declared.

Ben said nothing. He was painfully aware of the man’s bizarre ability to read minds, so there didn’t seem any point.

‘Yes, yes. You had not expected anything quite like my little camp.’ Khosa chuckled. ‘Even if you do not want to admit it.’ He paused at the entrance and turned to admire his little camp for one last moment before stepping inside, arms spread wide.

‘It is not a big city,’ he said modestly. ‘Big enough for eighty thousand people at the moment, but growing every week. Tomorrow I will have my Captain Xulu show you around, and you will see for yourself what we have here. The sports stadium is still under construction, to the west. So is the airport, on the other side of it. Both will be finished soon. The hydroelectric power station is to the north, where the river runs. On the other side of the river lies the industrial zone.’ He grinned, obviously delighted by the bewildered expression that Ben couldn’t hide. ‘You are realising, at last, that you should not have underestimated me. Did I not tell you? But you would not listen. Now let us go inside.’

It had been years since Ben had last set foot in the real Dorchester, and he’d had more on his mind that day than to admire the decor. But from hazy memory the architect of this bizarre recreation seemed to have done a creditable job, right down to the marbled pillars and magnificent tiled floor. The only thing missing from the lobby was any kind of reception staff. Khosa’s boots rang on the tiles as he led them briskly towards the lifts.

Behind him, Ben heard Jeff say to one of the soldiers, ‘Hey, arsehole, take my luggage up to my room and see to it that everything is cleaned and pressed, okay?’ If Jeff couldn’t blast his way out of a tight spot, he’d joke his way through it. Tuesday was either being more restrained, or he was just too stunned to speak.

The lift glided up to the top floor. Its doors slid open to an empty corridor with Persian carpeting and artwork on the walls. A sharp-eyed visitor might have noticed the assortment of automatic weaponry propped along one wall, but as far as Ben could tell the rest was authentic.

Ben was understanding less and less. His confused thoughts whirled back to the events in which Jude had been caught up aboard the cargo ship, the Andromeda of the Svalgaard Line. Jude had described it all in detail afterwards. His take on the situation was that the jewel thief called Pender, travelling in secret under the assumed name Carter, had hired Khosa and his crew to intercept the vessel in the guise of Somali pirates as a means of smuggling off the ship the enormous diamond he had in his possession. Pender had sensibly attempted to conceal the true nature of his precious package from Khosa, until things had started to go badly wrong for him and he quickly ended up as fish bait. In retrospect, he’d made a serious error of judgement in choosing Khosa for the task. That had probably been Pender’s own final thought, too, as the machetes came out.

Ben hadn’t doubted his son’s account of those events for a moment. But if Jude was right, then Khosa’s discovery of the diamond had been no more than a lucky accident – lucky for him, less so for Pender. Which in turn meant that, up to that point, all that Khosa had stood to gain from the deal was whatever Pender was paying him by way of a cash fee.

That was where it all stopped making sense, as far as Ben could see. Why would this brutal, sadistic warlord, apparently endowed with the limitless resources needed to build his own private city in the middle of the jungle on such an unbelievably lavish scale, bother to travel all the way to the Indian Ocean to take on a mercenary job for the likes of Pender? If Khosa was already so fabulously rich and powerful, he wouldn’t even have been on that ship to begin with. Especially if he hadn’t known about the diamond in advance.

Ben thought about the motley assortment of aircraft that had brought them here in stages from where Khosa had found them drifting in the Indian Ocean. The air-sea ‘rescue’ had been carried out with an ancient Puma helicopter the best part of fifty years of age, even more battered and worn out than the two Bell Iroquois choppers, relics from the Vietnam War, that made up the rest of Khosa’s helicopter fleet. Then there had been the prehistoric DC-3 Dakota that had taken them almost to the Congolese–Rwandan border when it ran out of fuel and almost killed them. If Khosa could afford to build a city in the jungle, what was he doing flying around in piles of scrap metal?

None of it added up.

Khosa strode along the corridor and threw open a gleaming set of double doors to reveal a suite of palatial proportions. ‘This is my command post,’ he declared proudly, sweeping an arm to usher them inside.

Ben’s confusion deepened when he stepped into the suite. He’d never set foot inside the White House, or been invited into the Oval Office. But this was the nearest thing. The vast room was decked out in sumptuous style, dominated by a carved hardwood desk the size of a Buick. Its gleaming surface was bare, apart from an old-fashioned dial telephone in red plastic, and a scale model of a Napoleonic-era field cannon.

Seated at the desk was a small, slender African man of about sixty, with thick spectacles and silvery hair buzzed to a stubble. He wore a crisp short-sleeved khaki shirt that hung on his reedy frame, with a mass of colourful military decorations over his heart and epaulettes studded with regalia. The man rose with a delighted smile as Khosa entered the room. Ignoring the motley crew of prisoners and soldiers who had filed through the doorway, he hurried from the desk and rushed over to greet his commander. They shook hands warmly. ‘It is good to see you again, Your Excellency. I believe the mission was a great success.’

Ben had never heard a lower-ranking officer refer to a general as ‘Your Excellency’. But this was hardly a normal kind of army.

‘Oh, yes. A very great success,’ Khosa replied, patting the lump in his hip pocket that made it look as though he was carrying an apple in there. He removed his beret and skimmed it into the nearest antique armchair, threw his bulk into a silk-upholstered sofa with a deep sigh of satisfaction, drew another of his trademark Cuban cigars from a breast pocket and took his time lighting it. Through a dragon’s breath of pungent smoke, he turned to Ben.

‘Soldier, allow me to introduce my second-in-command, Colonel Raphael Dizolele. Colonel, I would like you to meet Major Hope of the SAS, our new military advisor. He is going to help train the army for us.’