Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) (24 page)

Condor didn’t regain consciousness right away. Not when the four men grabbed him by the wrists and ankles and hauled him like a sack of rice across the floor. Not when they rolled him over on his back, and not when all four of them drew their machetes from their belts and stood around him in a circle, grinning down at him with glints of dental gold catching what little light was inside the building.

But when the first chopping blade cut into his flesh, the pain and shock jolted Condor out of his semi-coma and he started to scream.

The screaming went on for several minutes. It could have been much quicker, but Khosa’s men were experts in prolonging things.

Lou Gerber sank to his knees and vomited. Jude had his eyes screwed shut and his fingers in his ears to block out the chopping sounds and the awful tortured wailing. Hercules had his head bowed with his chin on his chest and his big fists clenched and trembling at his sides. Even Jeff had to look away. Tuesday watched it all from beginning to end, unable to tear his gaze away, as if frozen into a trance of horror.

Ben’s eyes stayed on General Jean-Pierre Khosa the whole time.

The blades kept rising and falling and hacking and chopping in the hands of the silent killers. Condor’s screams reached a sickening pitch that didn’t even sound human any more. Then, mercifully but much, much too long afterwards, they died to a gurgling whimper. Then finally to nothing.

By the time Khosa’s four men stepped away, panting with exertion and mahogany-shined with sweat and sheathing their bloody blades, Condor wasn’t Condor any more. He was an unrecognisable heap of diced meat and exposed innards and separated body parts and tattered shreds of clothing at the centre of a huge dark stain that soaked deep into the earth.

Gerber was curled up on his knees with his arms wrapped around himself, racked with sobbing. ‘Tell the goat man to stand,’ Khosa ordered, pointing at him. Slowly, very slowly, Ben and Jeff took Gerber’s arms and gently pulled him upright. Gerber stood bent and bowed, suddenly a very old man.

‘I want you to look,’ Khosa said, swivelling his pointing finger away from Gerber and towards the remains of Condor. ‘Look, and remember. This is what happens to men who do not make the grade in my army.’

None of them did look, but they would always remember.

It’s nothing next to what will happen to you
, Ben was thinking. The stench of death and vomit in the building was sharp and acrid and he had to control his own desire to throw up. He put a hand on Jude’s shoulder. Jude’s muscles were as tight as rope and his skin felt cold through the damp material of his T-shirt.

‘And now,’ Khosa said brightly, spreading his arms wide like a TV conjuror who’d just wowed his audience with a spectacular trick, ‘the show is over. I am sure that my new recruits are hungry and thirsty. We have a long journey ahead of us and I want all my soldiers to have their strength.’

Seven prisoners had gone into the building. Six came out. Now it was Gerber who needed to be held by the arm to steady him as he walked, like a survivor pulled unscathed but badly shaken from the rubble of an earthquake. His eyes were glazed and he was still trembling violently. Ben was trembling too, not with shock but with rage. He couldn’t look at Jeff. He knew that if he did, that if they exchanged even the slightest glance, the two of them would do something reckless. Nobody spoke. Nobody could find words to say what they were feeling.

Khosa strode out ahead of them and went off in the direction of the fuel truck to attend to whatever business he needed there. A V-formation of his soldiers trailed closely in his wake, including the four who had just finished hacking a sick, defenceless man to death. Now they were back to their regular duty, until the next time. The General’s personal guard, rifles held in the low-ready position as if expecting a horde of assassins to attack the perimeter at any moment.

A larger group of soldiers led by the nose picker escorted the prisoners across a stretch of open ground to another long, low, windowless building on the same side of the avenue. The prone body of the fat soldier that Hercules had laid flat was no longer there. He’d either managed to crawl away, or he’d been dragged away. The only remaining sign of him was a patch of blood on the dusty ground. Ben gave it a brief glance and then looked away. He’d seen enough blood-soaked earth today.

But however sickened he might have felt by what they’d all just witnessed, the smell of cooking wafting out of the open doorway as they approached the building made Ben feel dizzy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything.

This building wasn’t in much better condition than the first, but at least there were no dismembered bodies inside. Ben was beginning to realise that Khosa’s unit had adopted the derelict compound as a forward operating base away from home, wherever home was. Ben’s army unit had set up camp in a hundred similar locations in a dozen countries. The avenue between the buildings most likely served as a rough kind of drill or assembly ground. One of the buildings either side of it was probably being used as a barracks hut for the men. The best of them was presumably the CO’s personal quarters, while the worst of them would be the camp latrines.

This one was being used as a makeshift cookhouse and mess, Africa-style. The building’s dank, dark interior was dimly lit by oil lamps hanging from nails in the walls. Some wooden tables and benches had been knocked up out of whatever bits of timber had been lying around. A large battered cauldron of some kind of homogenous brown stew was bubbling and simmering on a portable stove. The smell of the food was mingled with the petroleum fumes of whatever fuel the stove was burning up, and the unmistakable oily stink of paraffin lamps being run on diesel. A fog of smoke drifted and swirled overhead.

They were made to sit at a table. Guns surrounded them. Not the most comfortable mess facilities Ben had ever seen, but marginally better than the slaughterhouse they’d just come from. The nose picker marched over to their table carrying an aluminium water canteen, which he slammed down on the tabletop in front of them. ‘You drink.’

Ben picked it up, unscrewed the nozzle and tasted the water first, to ensure it was fit for consumption. It was, just about. ‘Go easy,’ he told Jude as he passed the canteen to him. ‘Take it in small sips or you’ll be sick.’ Standard SAS survival advice to any trooper who had been deprived of water for too long.

Jude refused the water, even though his lips were parched and cracked from dehydration. He took the canteen from Ben and passed it across to Gerber. Gerber ignored the offer and kept doing what he was doing, which was staring emptily at the tabletop like a man who’d just been told he had inoperable cancer.

‘Drink it, Lou, for God’s sake,’ Jude said strongly. ‘You want to end up like Condor?’

Gerber flinched at the words. He shot Jude a hesitant glance. Then slowly reached out with a hand that was still shaking from traumatic shock, took the canteen and raised it to his mouth for a few choking sips. He wiped the nozzle with his hand and then passed it to Hercules.

‘I won’t take water from these motherfuckers,’ Hercules said, crossing his huge arms and leaning back on the bench. ‘Not one solitary drop. I’ll die first.’

‘Then the rest of us know who we can rely on,’ Ben said. ‘Or not. If you want to live, you’re one of us. If you don’t, you’re on your own. That’s how things are going to work between us from now on. Because we need to be able to depend on each other one hundred and ten percent if any one of us has a chance of getting out of this alive. We need to be strong for each other. We need to be a team. And team members all drink from the canteen, or they get left behind. I want you on my team, Hercules. What do you say, Jeff?’

‘Damn right,’ Jeff growled. ‘Every inch of the way.’

‘And me,’ Tuesday said.

‘Your choice,’ Ben said. ‘Live or die. Starting now.’

Hercules stared at him. He nodded. Took the canteen and drank from it, spluttered and sighed and smacked his lips and passed it on. The canteen went all around the table. Jude was the last to drink.

When the canteen was empty, the nose picker came back over to the table carrying a mess tray. He banged it down in the middle. On it were six bowls of the steaming concoction from the cauldron. A tin spoon had been stabbed into the centre of each bowl and stood upright in the thick stew.

‘I hope this guy’s not expecting a tip for service like this,’ Jeff said. ‘He could get a job at the greasy spoon caff I used to go to in Islington.’

‘You eat,’ the nose picker said, jabbing a finger at the bowls.

Ben peered at the food. It was a thick, glutinous, lumpy morass of boiled-down beans and some kind of shredded dark meat.

‘It is goat,’ the nose picker said. He smiled and pointed at Gerber. ‘Like him.’

The rest of the soldiers thought this was hysterically funny. Laughter filled the mess hut.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Jude said.

‘Nor me,’ Hercules growled. ‘And if I was, I wouldn’t touch this shit nohow.’

Normally, Gerber would have waded right in there with a crack about Hercules’s cooking. He said nothing.

Ben grabbed a bowl off the tray and slid it across the table towards himself. Snatched up the spoon and took a mouthful. The trick was not to think too much about how it tasted, or what it might contain apart from goat and beans. He chewed and swallowed and shovelled up another steaming spoonful. Jeff grabbed a bowl and dived in, eating hungrily. Tuesday hesitated, then followed their example.

Jude watched the three of them in horror. ‘How can you eat? After we just saw Con— after what just happened?’

‘I’d advise you to get it down you,’ Ben said between spoonfuls. ‘Number one rule is, eat when you can, drink when you can, sleep when you can. Your future trainers in Special Forces will tell you the same thing.’

Jude made no reply.

‘I went to Sweden once,’ Jeff said through a mouthful of stew. ‘If you can swallow their
surströmming
, you can swallow this stuff. It’s really not all that bad.’

‘Everyone eat,’ Ben urged them. ‘Khosa’s right when he says we’re going to need our strength. Like he said, this isn’t the end of the line. We have a trip ahead of us.’

‘Where is he taking us?’ Jude asked.

‘Beats me,’ Jeff said.

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Tuesday said.

Jude reluctantly took a small spoonful of stew and ate it, pulling a face. ‘I’m not waiting. I want to know.’ He stabbed the spoon back into the bowl and turned to face the nose picker, who was standing over them like a kennel-hand at feeding time. ‘Hey, you. What’s this journey we’re being taken on?’ Jude asked him.

‘The General is bringing you home,’ the nose picker replied with a grin that was more like a sneer. ‘Long, long way. Very far from here.’

‘Well, there’s your answer,’ Jeff said.

But it wasn’t good enough to satisfy Jude. ‘Home? What’s home?’ he said to the nose picker. ‘Hey. Oi. Didn’t you hear me? I asked you where your so-called general is taking us.’

‘Watch it, Jude,’ Ben said softly. There was a ripple of annoyance passing through the crowd of soldiers, and too many Kalashnikovs pointing at Jude for him to start getting arsy.

‘Ask him yourself, White Meat,’ the nose picker said.

The soldiers filtered aside as their commander appeared in the doorway and walked into the mess hut. Khosa strode up to the table. ‘I am pleased to see you eating. The food is to your liking?’ He laughed, then waved a hand at Ben as if to order him to stand. Ben ignored him, scraped up the last spoonful of stew from his bowl and took his time eating it. Only when he’d swallowed it did he lay down his spoon and slowly rise to his feet.

‘Come with me, soldier,’ Khosa said. ‘I wish to speak to you. Alone.’

Jude, Jeff, Tuesday, Gerber and Hercules all watched in silence as Ben followed Khosa towards the doorway. The General paused to snap a command at the soldiers in Swahili. ‘Guard them closely. Especially the boy.’

Outside, the sun was sinking and cooling a little as evening set in. Ben’s T-shirt didn’t immediately stick to his skin, and he didn’t have to shade his eyes with his hand. The four men acting as Khosa’s personal guard formed a tight semicircle behind him, their weapons pointing at his back. Khosa led the way from the mess hut, across the beaten-earth avenue and past the parked choppers and the fuel truck to the smallest of the buildings on the far side. It was the one in the best state of repair, the one Ben had guessed a unit using this place as a forward operating base would designate as the CO’s temporary quarters.

He’d been right about that, though the place was less than palatial. Like the others, the building consisted of a single, unpartitioned room. It smelled of mildew, stale cigar smoke and another tangy odour that was familiar to Ben but which he couldn’t put his finger on. The floor was concrete, the walls bare. It was minimally furnished, even by military standards. There was no bunk. Maybe Khosa didn’t sleep here, Ben thought. Maybe he never slept at all. A folding metal table was set up in one corner, with a folding metal chair next to it. On the table lay a walkie-talkie handset, a GPS navigation device, a half-smoked Cohiba Gran Corona resting in a carved ebony ashtray, and the assorted rods and brushes and solvents of a cleaning kit for a handgun. Now Ben recognised the odd smell.

‘Hoppe’s Number Nine,’ Khosa said grandly, picking up a small labelled bottle and brandishing it as though it were the elixir of life. ‘The finest bore-cleaner in the world, manufactured since 1903, specially imported from America. I never travel without it. It removes all trace of powder fouling, lead and copper and brings everything up so nicely. Do you not say so, soldier?’ To make his point he drew the magnum revolver from his holster, twirled it cowboy-style around his finger and gazed lovingly at the bright, burnished stainless steel of his cherished weapon.

‘I’ll have to make a note to get myself some for Christmas,’ Ben said.

Khosa chuckled. ‘For Christmas. That is a good one. You know, soldier, you have upset me very much. This was a matched pair of Colts. Custom engraved and specially accurised, with handles of genuine mammoth ivory. Now I only have one, thanks to you. But I am prepared to find it in my heart to forgive you.’

‘That’s awfully decent of you, General,’ Ben said.

Khosa twirled the Colt back into his holster and stepped towards Ben, until he was less than a foot away. He was an inch taller than Ben, maybe two. Ben’s shoulders were broad from the regular routine of two hundred press-ups a day that he’d stuck to for years, but Khosa’s were broader by at least four inches. He was a powerful man and an imposing presence, even more so up close. The horribly scarred face topped it all, like a nightmarish mask from which his wide-set eyes bored penetratingly into Ben’s. The temptation was to look away, but Ben had never looked away from a challenge in his life.

Instead, Ben was thinking of how easily he could kill this man. If Khosa was a tiger, Ben was a panther. Ben could have killed him before he even knew he was dead. An elbow to the throat, crushing his trachea. Faster than fast. Then the revolver would be out of the holster and in Ben’s hand, and one of those big forty-four-calibre slugs would be on its way to Khosa’s brainpan at about fifteen hundred feet per second. One shot was all it would take to end this and go home.

But then Ben thought about the four, or six, or eight high-powered rifles that were pointing at Jude’s head at this moment.

Not good. Not wise.

It would have to wait, just a little longer. The time would come.

‘You would like to kill me,’ Khosa said with a knowing look.

‘Whatever gives you that idea?’

Khosa smiled. ‘I perceive many things, soldier. It is my gift to understand what goes on inside a man’s head. I can see much in you. You are a warrior of great skill, and you do not fear any man. I respect this very much. That is why I wished to talk to you alone. Because you and I have business together.’

‘I doubt that,’ Ben said.

‘Never doubt me,’ Khosa said. ‘I am a man of my word. What is your name, soldier?’

‘Hope. Ben Hope. Not that it’s any of your damn business.’

Khosa nodded. ‘You are named after a mountain in Scotland. Perhaps this is what makes you strong. Are you from Scotland, soldier?’

‘My mother was from Ireland. Not that that’s any of your damn business, either.’

‘A fine country. I know it very well. This surprises you, I see. You think I am just a stupid, uneducated African peasant, do you not, soldier? You will learn that I am nothing of that kind.’

‘Nice place you have here,’ Ben said, looking around him. ‘Very swish. Like your air force. State of the art. The envy of the world and enough to make any superpower tremble in its boots. I take it you see yourself as some kind of great military leader. But all I see is a murdering sack of lowlife shit in a mongrel uniform. And someone I wouldn’t do business with in a thousand years. So whatever it is you have to say, you can save your breath and stick it up your arse instead.’

Khosa’s smile dropped. The wide-set eyes seemed to burn with a dark light Ben could almost feel on his face. ‘Very few men would speak to me this way. Those who have dared to defy me now lie rotting in the dirt, their bones scattered and chewed by animals.’

‘Except this one,’ Ben said. ‘And that’s the way it’s going to stay. I’ll still be here a long, long time after the world’s had the pleasure of forgetting your ugly mug ever existed.’

Khosa boggled at him in utter astonishment. Then he threw his head back and roared with mirth. His laughter boomed and echoed through the building. His whole body shook and doubled up with it. He laughed so hard that he choked and spluttered and had to rest his hands on his knees as tears rolled through the furrows of scar tissue on his cheeks.

‘Oh, oh,’ Khosa gasped, and wiped the tears away. ‘You are a very unusual fellow. Such boldness and insubordination, I have never seen. I should have my men take you out there and put you against a wall and shoot you as a punishment. But there is a time and place for everything. Do you not think?’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Ben said.

‘And this is not your time. I like you, soldier. Yes, I like you very much. I wish for you to live for many more years. Just as you say.’

‘I’m so delighted to hear it,’ Ben said. ‘But you’re wrong about me, General. I’m just a man. I’m not a soldier. Not any more.’

Khosa wiped away the last of his tears and studied Ben intently. ‘A man cannot hide what he is. Nobody has ever defeated me the way you did on that ship. You appeared from nowhere. You exploded my boat and killed many of my men. Zolani Tembe was my best fighter, yet you squashed him like a worm.’ Khosa clapped his hands together to illustrate the point. ‘Three men did this. Three! It takes a special kind of adversary to get the better of me. Tell me, Ben Hope. Your accent is not American. You served in the British army?’

‘For a while,’ Ben said.

‘I knew this must be so. For how many years did you serve?’

‘A few.’

‘What was your unit? What was your rank?’

‘Catering corps,’ Ben said. ‘I was a pot scrubber. Sometimes they let me make the tea for the troops.’

Khosa eyed him warily, and wagged a finger at him. ‘No, no. I think you are lying. Come, tell me the truth.’

Ben eyed him back. ‘All right, then. I will tell you the truth. I served with a regiment called 22 Special Air Service. You might have heard of it. Final rank of major.’

‘Ah. Much better. This is very acceptable. And you have fought many battles, yes?’

‘More than you can count,’ Ben said. ‘Against much better men than you.’

‘And killed many enemies?’

‘These days I only kill the ones who deserve it the most,’ Ben said.

Khosa chuckled and clapped Ben on the shoulder. ‘I will have to watch out, hmm? Now, tell me about Dekker. He is a warrior like you, yes?’

‘The best,’ Ben said. ‘Worth a hundred of your soldiers at least.’

‘A hundred. That is many. And this young black man you have in your group. He is African?’

‘His name’s Tuesday and he’s from Jamaica. He also fought with the British army. He was the best sniper they’ve ever had. He can kill a man from two miles away with a rifle.’

Khosa raised his eyebrows. ‘Two miles! This is a man of extraordinary skill.’

Ben had no idea whether his wild claim was anywhere near the truth. He only knew that the more he played up the martial prowess of his companions, the less likely this lunatic might be to have them summarily chopped up into mincemeat.

‘And what about the goat man?’ Khosa asked. ‘Is he really a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, or were you only trying to protect him?’

‘He was a staff sergeant,’ Ben said. ‘In Africa, he’d have been made a colonel.’

‘And the big one? You can vouch for him also, or should I have my men kill him? I did not like the way he looked at me.’

‘They call him Hercules,’ Ben said. ‘And he’s as strong as his name implies. He could tear this building down with his bare hands. A man like that is worth keeping alive, well fed and well cared for.’

‘Hercules,’ Khosa repeated thoughtfully. ‘From Greek mythology. Interesting. Very interesting.’ He looked at Ben. ‘It surprises you that I am so educated, yes?’

Ben chose not to reply to the question.

Khosa’s eyes twinkled. ‘Ah, soldier. I am happy. It is good that we can talk like this, you and me.’ He waved a hand towards the doorway. ‘We are not ordinary men like the others out there. They are loyal to me, but they have no understanding. They are just mindless vassals who do what I command them.’

‘Like hack a defenceless man to death,’ Ben said.

Khosa shrugged, as if to brush off such trivial accusations. ‘You are speaking about the cripple? I have done him a favour by ending his misery in this way. But I do not think he is your main concern, is he, soldier? You are thinking about the boy. There is a special reason for this. He is your son.’