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

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.

Jeff must have been able to tell from Ben’s expression that the reassurance wasn’t working. The optimism seemed to drain from him. When he spoke again, his tone was sullen. ‘It’s all my fault this happened to Jude. Hadn’t been for me, he’d never have set foot on that fucking ship in the first—’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben cut in before Jeff could finish. He’d said it before, and he’d say it again. Ben knew all about the ravages of a guilty conscience from his own past. Come what may, he didn’t want Jeff to bear the responsibility for what had happened. When Jeff had pulled strings with his contacts to get Jude the crewman gig with the American merchant vessel MV Svalgaard Andromeda on the East Africa run from Salalah in Oman to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he couldn’t have known that the ship would be attacked. Any more than he could have known that one of its secret passengers, a crook named Pender, was carrying a stolen diamond bigger than a man’s fist, which ruthless killers would do anything to acquire. Events had unfolded from there the way they had, nobody could have done anything to prevent them, and only one man still living could be held responsible for the things that had taken place.

Khosa. Ben had the man’s face pinpointed in his mind like a sniper’s target in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And what a face it was. A demon’s face, bearing the hideous tribal scars that you couldn’t look at without a shiver of apprehension. But as evil as he looked, Khosa’s lunatic mind was the thing Ben feared most.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben repeated to Jeff.

One of the soldiers guarding them in the back of the truck reached across with the barrel of his AK-47 and jabbed Ben painfully in the ribs with it. Like many of Khosa’s fighters he was a young guy, no more than twenty or so. He had a red bandana tied around his head and was wearing a faded Legion of the Damned T-shirt with an ammunition belt for a heavy machine gun draped around his lean shoulders like a fashion accessory.

‘Quiet! No talking!’ the young trooper yelled. English was taking over from French as the main European language in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the militia troops spoke it, or something close to it. That made it difficult to have any kind of a private conversation; all the more so when conversation was forbidden altogether.

Ben slapped the rifle barrel away. ‘Watch how you speak to me, sonny. You’re addressing General Khosa’s military advisor.’

Which, technically, was true. That was the essence of the blackmail deal between Ben and the General: in return for Jude’s safety, whenever they got to wherever the hell they were going, Ben was to begin his new role of training Khosa’s troops and impart to them his military skills, with Jeff and Tuesday as his second- and third-in-command. Train them for what purpose, exactly, Ben didn’t yet know. It wasn’t a prospect he relished, but right now his agreement to Khosa’s terms was the only thing keeping them all alive.

‘You listening, you scummy little arsemonger?’ Jeff said, glaring a hole in the soldier with the full authoritative weight of a former Special Boat Service non-com officer. He’d been a Royal Marine Commando before that, and used to a slightly higher calibre of military personnel than Khosa’s army had to offer. ‘So point that weapon somewhere else before I stick it through your left ear and out your right, and ride you up and down this road like a fucking motorbike.’