Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13)

by Scott Mariani

  Jeff nodded back. It was agreed. For a few seconds the two of them prepared themselves, mentally and physically, to explode into action. Each had his own way of handling it. Jeff was winding up like a steel spring, as intense as a racehorse waiting for the gate to open on Derby day. Ben’s own heartbeat was dropping. His muscles relaxing. A familiar calm descending on him, in the certain knowledge that he would move fast, and hit hard, and strike with accuracy. Getting the weapons from the guards was theoretically going to be the hardest part, and the biggest danger was from the fat one’s shotgun. One blast from that thing could kill all of them. But surprise was on their side. Once the five were permanently out of action, it would just be a question of getting to Khosa before Khosa could draw that big revolver of his and get his bulk twisted round in the co-pilot’s seat to be able to get off a shot. A lot depended on Khosa’s speed of reflexes and combat readiness. Risky, but not impossible. Not by a long stretch. Ben didn’t foresee too many problems there. As for the pilot, he’d have a gun to his head before he’d fully registered what was even happening.

  Hijack complete. Five seconds from start to finish. Six, on the outside.

  Ben felt ready. He moved his right hand to his right knee and splayed three fingers. On my count of three.

  Jeff nodded.

  Ben mouthed, ‘One’.

  Jeff waited.

  Ben mouthed, ‘Two’.

  Tuesday was watching them with huge eyes, understanding that something was about to happen, and holding his breath. He knew. He could feel it. He’d been there before. It was the pulse-pounding moment before the eruption into all-out balls-to-the-wall combat, when the lips were dry and the whole body was tingling and the senses were ready to burst with anticipation of the green light and the command GO GO GO, from which there was no turning back. Adrenalin running so thick and fast through your blood that you could taste it, just one of a whole hormone cascade pushing alertness and reflex speeds through the roof, pumping blood to the skeletal muscle, preparing the body to ignore pain and injury, dilating the pupils to draw in maximum light. Excitement and terror intermingled into a heady cocktail like no other sensation on earth.

  Ben pursed his lips to mouth, ‘Three’.

  Then something happened that nobody had expected.

  Chapter 38

  Khosa suddenly did something very strange. He broke off as sharply from his conversation with the pilot as if a rifle shot had cracked out behind him. He turned in his seat, leaning so that he could peer back out of the cockpit and down the aisle. His eyes went straight to Ben and fixed him with a look of complete knowing. Seeming to bore right through Ben’s head and penetrate his mind. A brief, peculiar smile twisted his grotesque features.

  Ben stared back at the African, feeling as if he’d been caught out. The conspirators nabbed red-handed around their table as the secret police kicked in the door and burst in on the clandestine meeting.

  Khosa’s smile dropped. He got to his feet quickly, ducked out of the cockpit and moved up the aisle, steadying himself against the pitch and sway of the helicopter. His revolver was out of its holster and clenched in his fist. It was a monster handgun, a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda, an exact duplicate of the one Ben had flung off the deck of the Andromeda. His men all snapped to attention like soldiers on inspection, and snatched up their weaponry. Khosa barely glanced at them, instead glaring at Ben, then at Jeff, then up and down the facing rows of seats at the rest of the prisoners. His gaze seemed to linger on Jude for a moment.

  Sensing that something was up, though oblivious of what it could be, Jude was startled out of his reverie and looked up in confusion. Gerber and Hercules did the same. Condor was too out of it to be doing much of anything.

  Khosa barked a command to his men that Ben couldn’t make out over the noise of the turbine. But his men heard it fine, and obeyed instantly. The nose picker and the skinny one stalked over to where Jude was sitting, grabbed his arms, one either side, and yanked him out of his seat and dragged him to his feet and started marching him up the aisle towards the nose of the aircraft. The other three had their guns up and pointed straight at Ben. Ben froze. Not breathing. Heart stopped.

  Khosa’s little smile was back. He pointed at Jude, then barked another command, and the two men shoved Jude roughly against the curve of the fuselage just behind the cockpit bulkhead and pressed him down to the floor. Jude thought they were going to shoot him. He raised his hands to protect his face and head, in that instinctive way people do under threat, as if their hands could stop a rifle bullet.

  Jude wasn’t the only one convinced that he was about to be shot. Ben was certain of it. His heart restarted, pulse racing, and he felt himself redden as he half-rose out of his seat with his guts twisting and fists clenched. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t, couldn’t allow that to happen to Jude.

  Khosa pointed his .44 Magnum at Ben, with the same half-smile curling his lips. Now it was Khosa’s turn to shake his head and say Don’t even think about it.

  Ben froze. There were just too many guns. And there was nothing he could do, except die a futile death trying in vain to save his son. He lowered himself into his seat. In that moment, he wanted this man Khosa gone more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Sooner or later, one way or another, it was going to happen. Khosa had just sealed his own fate.

  The rifles pressed against Jude’s head. Jeff’s face was drawn so tightly that the bunched muscles in his jaws looked as if they were about to snap. Tuesday’s eyes were wide and his face was as pallid as it was possible for an Afro-Jamaican’s face to be.

  But Khosa’s men didn’t shoot Jude. That wasn’t Khosa’s intention. Not yet.

  The two who had grabbed Jude stepped back and steadied their backs against the fuselage with their rifles still pointing at his head, holding him in his uncomfortable curled-up position on the floor, jammed up against the curve of the opposite wall and the bulkhead next to him. The other three resumed their positions at the ends of the facing rows of seats, guns aimed at the rest of the prisoners, and especially at Ben.

  Khosa nodded to himself in satisfaction, holstered his revolver and returned to the cockpit. His orders were clear. If they try any of their tricks, the boy dies. As if he really had been able to read their thoughts and predict their intentions down to the last detail.

  It was uncanny. Ben was shaken by it.

  Jeff looked at Ben with a ‘what now?’ expression.

  Ben shook his head. Stand down. Mission aborted. Their one chance had come, and now it was gone again. There was no longer anything they could do, except sit very still, and wait to find out what Khosa planned for them, and hope that another chance might come their way. That didn’t look very likely right now.

  The helicopter thudded on.

  An hour passed. Ben kept his eye on the cockpit and noticed the way the pilot’s head kept dipping, as if he was anxiously checking his gauges. Ben could guess which gauge in particular. The chopper must be literally running on fumes by now. And they must have passed over the Somali coastline by now, too, although there was no way to tell from where he sat. All he could see through the cockpit windows up ahead was clear blue sky.

  Ben was still counting the minutes a little while later when he saw Khosa, up front, turn to the pilot and say something. He was pointing through the glass. The pilot nodded and they seemed to exchange a few words.

  The chopper began to descend. The view through the windscreen changed from open clear sky to an arid and endless semi-desertified rock-strewn landscape dotted here and there with sparse, sun-withered vegetation. They had passed over the coast, that was for sure. They were some indeterminate distance inland, apparently far from any kind of civilisation, which in Somalia accounted for the vast majority of the country’s land mass.

  Minutes later, the helicopter finally touched down. There was a bump as the skids settled on solid ground. Back on land again for the first time since driving Geedi’s Land Cruiser off the beach and into the sea
at Hobyo. For Jude and his fellow Andromeda crew survivors, it was their first landfall since Djibouti. But there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t rather still be drifting at sea aboard their raft with only sharks for company.

  The chopper pilot began shutting everything down. The screech of the turbine slackened to a roar, then to a rumble. Khosa’s men burst into action, over-enthusiastically pointing their weapons here and there as they jabbered in Swahili. The fat one with the shotgun yanked open the side hatch. Searing-bright sunlight flooded into the Puma. ‘Up! Up!’ he yelled in English, jerking his big black autoloader at the prisoners. The nose picker and the skinny one standing guard over Jude seized him by the arms and hauled him to his feet.

  The rotors were winding gradually to a standstill as the seven prisoners were made to disembark at gunpoint. Condor was just too sick to jump down unaided from the edge of the hatch. Ben and Jeff took charge of helping him down to the ground. Within moments, the glaring white heat of the late afternoon sun was already sticking their T-shirts to their backs. The air was still and oppressive and almost too thick to breathe. After the shade and cool of the draughty aircraft it was like stepping into a kiln.

  ‘Hurry! You hurry!’ the fat soldier yabbered impatiently at them, looking as if he wanted to loose off a whole magazine of twelve-gauge buckshot.

  ‘Tell that bastard if he doesn’t get out of my face, I’m going to skin him and wear him as a fucking wetsuit,’ Jeff said between clenched teeth as they carried Condor down from the edge of the hatch and set him carefully on his feet.

  ‘Ten sizes too big for you,’ Tuesday said.

  Ben said nothing, but gave the fat soldier a look that made him back off a step.

  The Puma had landed inside a large compound that at first glance appeared to Ben to be a deserted government installation or military base. The ground was pounded earth that had been levelled flat and cleared of rocks, everything lightly covered with a layer of sandy dust blown in from the deserts of the north. Roughly in its centre, arranged into two strung-out blocks either side of a long, broad avenue like a street, there stood a dozen or so cinder-block buildings of different sizes and in different states of repair ranging from more or less undamaged to crumbling ruin. The wider compound was a stretched-out rectangle, maybe a hundred metres across at its narrowest, and maybe three times as long. Its outer perimeter was ringed with sagging wire mesh hung from concrete posts and topped with curls of razor wire. Outside the fence, the rocky ground stretched out flat to infinity, dotted here and there with sparse clumps of bush and the odd stunted-looking tree standing sad and alone.

  At some time in its history the place could have been a base for government troops, or for one of the many rebel factions that had been vying for power in Somalia during the country’s civil war years. But, much like the hopes of most of those same factions that they could create from the ashes of war a better, happier Somalia for themselves and their children, it had been abandoned years ago and was on the fast track to becoming completely derelict. The largest of the buildings had a long, windowless side wall that was as heavily pocked and bombarded with so many bullet craters that it resembled the lunar surface. Africa was full of walls like that, where you could only guess at how many poor souls, the young with the old, had been lined up and then executed by firing squad.

  Khosa’s Puma wasn’t the only aircraft on the ground within the compound’s perimeter. A second and a third helicopter rested on their skids a short distance away, parked in ragged single file close to the buildings on one side of the broad beaten-earth avenue. They had got there long enough ahead of the Puma for their rotors to have stopped turning, the heat shimmer from their engines to have faded away and their heavily armed occupants to disembark and hang around waiting for their commander to arrive.

  Ben’s guess had been right when he’d thought Khosa wouldn’t have undertaken a search of a vast spread of ocean with a single aircraft. He’d evidently marshalled his whole private air force. Which, even by African standards, was nothing to write home about.

  The choppers were a matched pair of antique Bell Iroquois that looked as if they’d been in service through the whole of the Vietnam war and gone on to see heavy action in every African conflict of the last forty or so years. They were in even worse shape than the Puma, and seemingly just as low on gas after what must have been a long, intensive search launched from the moment that Khosa had reached shore in the MOB lifeboat. The fourth vehicle in sight was a battered commercial truck with a ripped canvas soft-top and oversize wheels. It too was parked alongside the buildings, tucked in to the side of the avenue with its rear backed up close to the leading Iroquois. Hitched up behind the truck was a long trailer with a pair of large, rust-streaked metal tanks bolted to its flatbed, which Ben realised was a transportable fuel bowser for the choppers. A rubber hose was connected between the nozzle on the fuel bowser and the first Iroquois. A motorised pump was roaring and grinding away. The rubber hose was twitching and pulsing on the hard-packed dirt like some bloated snake as fuel flowed through to the helicopter’s tanks. Some of the men were attending to the refuelling. Others lounged nearby, talking and joking among themselves and smoking cigarettes with reckless disdain for the flammable fumes Ben could smell all the way from where he was watching.

  In his time Ben had seen a lot of military units that could have been described as ‘irregular’. Spit-and-polish parade-ground perfection and exact adherence to regulations meant little to him in the real world, because some of those irregular units had contained the best fighting men anyone could wish to have on their side, or fear to have as their enemy. He’d seen Delta Force guys on operations in Sudan and Afghanistan who looked like bearded hobos. SAS operatives in deep-cover missions in the Middle East whom you couldn’t tell apart from the insurgents they were hunting. He’d been one of those men himself, in another life.

  But there was a line. Irregular on one side, tin-pot on the other. On the right side of the line it didn’t matter how the soldiers looked, because underneath they were all about iron discipline and unflinching professionalism. Men you could stake your life upon in even the direst of circumstances. On the wrong side of the line, they were just a disorganised rabble that would crumble into chaos at the first shot fired.

  And Khosa’s unit was exactly that: an undisciplined, untrained, unsoldierly bunch of clowns with guns. Ben had seen it during the storming of the container ship. He was seeing it now. Most of the men were draped in bandoliers of gleaming pointed rifle cartridges looped diagonally around their torsos or draped around their necks like a kind of twenty-first-century lion-tooth necklace. Wraparound Ray-Bans and mirrored aviator shades were pretty much standard issue in this squadron, along with the gold chains and gold teeth on display when they laughed, which they were doing a lot of. Several had clusters of grenades fixed to their vests like bunches of strange fruit. Others had machetes thrust into their belts, like pirate cutlasses of old, or dangling sheathed from leather baldrics slung over their shoulders. In a nod to proper military dress a few were wearing red berets, and several had the four-colour DPM combat jackets of the pattern Ben had seen on Kenyan UN-affiliated peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone, back in the day.

  But even a tin-pot bunch of clowns with guns were dangerous, if there were enough of them. Worse than dangerous.

  Ben did a quick head-count. He could see eleven of the enemy around the Bells, plus four more around the truck. Plus the five soldiers from the Puma, plus the pilot, plus Khosa himself, made twenty-two. Not counting any who might be inside the buildings. Not one man he could see wasn’t armed with some variety of automatic weapon. Mostly Kalashnikovs, naturally, which in their tens of millions were the most abundant piece of hardware in Africa; a few American M16s, a few ancient FNs, a couple of Uzi submachine guns, plus a couple of heavy machine guns. It all added up to an awful lot of bullets that would be coming their way, if any of the prisoners made any rash moves.

  Not good. Not the most sensib
le thing at this point.

  Then as Ben watched, Khosa jumped down from the co-pilot side of the Puma’s cockpit and went to meet his troops.

  Chapter 39

  The crews from the two Bell Iroquois and the men by the fuel truck all turned as Khosa made his appearance. He strode across the avenue between the rows of buildings, kicking up clouds of dust with his boots. As he neared the gathered crowd of his men, he reached into his pocket and brought out the diamond in its leather pouch for all to see. He held it high in the air like a trophy and yelled ‘I have it! You see? I have it!’

  His men greeted him like a conquering hero returning from a victorious military campaign. Laughter and yells and whoops of triumph echoed around the compound, and a few did the tin-pot army thing of stabbing their rifles straight up like spears and loosing off a string of shots in celebration. The crackle of the gunfire sounded hollow and flat in the oven-dry air.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ben asked Jude, squeezing his shoulder.

  Jude gave a nod and managed a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘I never really thought they were going to shoot me. Just playing around, acting tough. I wasn’t worried.’

  ‘Nor was I,’ Ben lied. ‘It’ll all be fine. Just you wait and see.’

  ‘Move! Move!’ barked a voice behind them. It was the fat soldier again, joined now by the skinny one and the nose picker, jabbing gun muzzles at them and motioning urgently towards the buildings.

  Jeff pointed a warning finger at the fat one. ‘Hey. You. Back off. I’m telling you. Before I ram that shotgun down your throat so hard it’ll come out of your arse, butt end first.’