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

‘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. ‘Two hours, maybe three.’ 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 hell of a jolting back there, though it was well protected inside thick foam. ‘We’ll be okay,’ she said to Munro, as much to reassure herself as him. ‘Everything’s fine.’

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

Rae muttered, ‘Oh, shit.’

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. The flatbed of each truck was equipped with a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount, drooping with ammunition belts that 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 assault rifles that Rae had quickly learned were a ubiquitous sight just about everywhere in the Congo, across a land mass 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 Maheshe 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 an urban gangsta wraps himself in gold chains and had a semiauto pistol dangling against his ribs in a shoulder holster. A marijuana reefer the size of a small banana dangled from his mouth. His eyes were glassy and his finger was hooked around the trigger of his AK-47.

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

‘Be very careful, mister,’ Joseph Maheshe 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 passenger 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 on 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 swarmed 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 Maheshe 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.

‘Hey, hey, hold on a minute,’ Munro said, putting on a big smile and brushing 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 all in his combat vest. He tossed away the empty wallet.

‘Hey. I didn’t mean for you to take everything,’ Munro protested.

‘Shut up, motherfucka!’ the commander barked.

‘Give me back my dollars and my cards, okay? The rest you can keep. 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 bastard?’ 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 pitchforks 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 motherfucka 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 hell 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 whore, 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, but the Lee family fortunes had dwindled somewhat since then. ‘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 motherfucka says he is your uncle.’