Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13)

by Scott Mariani

  Khosa, the victor. Khosa, the king. The unquestioned lord of all he surveyed, wherever he went. With the diamond in his pocket, a gigantic fortune at his fingertips. And nothing to stop him.

  Ben sat still, silent and numb. He felt as though his heart had broken, for Jude, for the villagers, for Hercules, for all of them. It was as if all his strength had left him and would never return. A feeling he’d never experienced with such overwhelming intensity before. He played back in his mind things that had happened in the course of his life. The grief of losing loved ones. The bitter wrench of failure. The worst times he’d come through.

  He’d thought he’d known what it felt like to be swallowed up in absolute black despair.

  He’d been wrong.

  He’d had no idea what it felt like. Not until this moment.

  The trucks rumbled on through the rain, and then through the night, and on through the first glimmers of morning when the sunrise turned the light the colour of blood. Deeper and deeper into a different world. One in which human life was cheaper than dirt. Where a man with absolute power and the ruthlessness to wield it could do anything he liked, unchecked.

  This was not Ben’s world any more.

  Ben was in Khosa’s world now.

  Later that day, they crossed from Rwanda into the Congo, over a flimsy river bridge at a point on the border where there were no checks, no stops, no authorities within fifty miles. Soon after that, as they rumbled along an arrow-straight dirt highway that shot ahead to infinity through a vista of rolling green plains and faraway hazy mountains, they were met by a contingent of Khosa’s forces that had been contacted by radio to rendezvous with them.

  They appeared at first like a shape-shifting spectrum of colour through a heat shimmer where the road met the sky, moving fast at the heart of a great swirling dust cloud that resembled an approaching sandstorm. Moving fast, detail falling into focus as they sped closer and closer. The dull glint of sunlight on matt-painted bodywork and bull bars and dusty windscreens. Big brutal tyres crunching the road surface. The line stretched out far behind the lead vehicle. There must have been thirty or forty of them. It was a whole fleet of what irregular armies called ‘technicals’, which were civilian pickup trucks modified for warfare. Most of them crudely spray-painted in splodges of green and brown camouflage. Several were equipped with half-inch-calibre American Browning heavy machine guns or Russian-made anti-aircraft cannons fixed on swivel mounts behind the cab. The kind of firepower that could level a forest or decimate a whole town. They were the only vehicles in sight, as if they owned the road. Perhaps they did own it. Nobody, not even regular government troops, would have stood in their way in any case.

  The approaching convoy blasted a symphony of honking horns as they recognised their leader. Khosa had the Land Rover pull off the road, followed by the Mercedes box truck, and moments later they were surrounded by a roaring, bouncing mass of vehicles that skidded to a halt on the rough ground and spewed scores of Khosa’s militia fighters all running to greet and welcome him like a returning hero. The force of thirty that had travelled from Somalia had now swelled to over two hundred heavily armed soldiers. Ben hadn’t seen this many guns all together in one place in a long time.

  Then the final vehicle at the tail end of the convoy came into view, still far off, a speeding black dot trailing a dust cloud and gradually growing larger. As he stepped down from the Land Rover and tried to spot Jude, Jeff and the others among the crowd disembarking from the box truck, Ben detected a palpable sense of excitement among the soldiers and heard exclamations of ‘Here he comes!’ and ‘Masango is coming!’

  The car wasn’t an armoured pickup, nor a four-wheel-drive of any description, but a long Mercedes limousine, shiny black coachwork stained with the dirt of a long drive on unmade roads. It slowed as it reached the mass gathering of vehicles and pulled gently off the road, wallowing and rocking on its soft suspension. Its windows were a smoky tint just short of black, and Ben could make out no more than dark shapes in the front seats and nothing at all in the rear.

  The limousine rolled to a halt. The driver stayed where he was and kept the engine purring while the front-seat passenger got out. He looked like a bodyguard. A tough, burly African, incongruously well dressed in the midst of all the military khaki. Italian silk draped over planes of sculpted muscle. Dark glasses. Stubby Uzi submachine pistol. He stalked around to the rear door and opened it, and out stepped a tall, thin and elegant black man with silvering hair and an expensive light grey suit.

  This would be Masango, Ben thought. But who was he?

  Khosa had been doing an exultant victory lap of his two-hundred-strong fighting force when he saw the limo pull up and broke away from his men to come striding to meet it. He and the tall man in the grey suit shook hands and patted each other’s shoulders like old friends.

  As much as Ben wanted to go and find Jude and his friends, he wanted to know who this man Masango was. He walked around the front of the parked Land Rover and leaned on its square wing, watching and listening.

  ‘You had us worried, Jean-Pierre,’ the tall man was saying. ‘When I heard about the plane—’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Khosa laughed, brushing it off. ‘I decided to take the scenic route.’

  The scenic route, Ben thought, and went on watching the two men in disgust as they laughed and backslapped and bantered some more. Khosa seemed to sense Ben’s eyes on them. He turned and guided the tall man by the elbow to meet him, as if doing polite introductions on the country club lawn at a society party.

  ‘Soldier, I want you to meet César Masango,’ Khosa said, curling an arm around Masango’s shoulders. ‘He is my political attaché. He is the man who is going to help put me into power one day very soon.’

  Masango offered his hand to Ben. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mister—?’

  Ben ignored the hand and didn’t move or speak.

  ‘The soldier is my military advisor, but sometimes does not say very much,’ Khosa said, flashing a look at Ben.

  Masango shrugged, as if saying, if he doesn’t want to talk, fine, fuck him. They clearly had more important matters to discuss. ‘So, Jean-Pierre. Is it true? You have it?’

  ‘I have it,’ Khosa said with a slow smile that he couldn’t suppress, and took out the enormous diamond to show his colleague. Under the bright sunlight, the unreal fist-sized rock seemed to be filled with dancing fire.

  Masango shook his head in awe. ‘May I hold it?’

  ‘Careful, or my men will shoot,’ Khosa said, and they both laughed.

  Masango clenched the diamond in his hands, gaping. ‘With this,’ he said, ‘anything is possible.’

  ‘And everything is within our grasp,’ Khosa said with a fire dancing in his own eyes.

  Masango asked, ‘Can I take it to show my wife? She will be amazed.’

  ‘Of course. Take it, take it. Just make sure that you bring it back in the morning.’ Khosa burst out laughing and punched Masango’s arm playfully. Just two guys messing around. What a double act.

  ‘And now,’ Khosa said, turning his attentions back towards Ben, ‘the time has come to say goodbye.’

  Ben stared at him, not understanding.

  Khosa snapped his fingers. Two soldiers immediately hurried off towards the box truck. They came hurrying back seconds later, now three. They had Jude by the arms. His wrists were cuffed in front of him.

  Jolts of alarm shot through Ben. What was happening here? ‘Jude?’

  ‘Ben? I don’t know where they’re taking me.’

  ‘What’s this about, Khosa?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘Where we are going, you will too busy to look after your son,’ Khosa said. ‘So my friend César will be looking after him now.’

  Ben’s heart was skipping beats and his hands were beginning to tremble. The sun was burning hot, but a chill like a freezing fog was descending over him. ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ Khosa said. Then he chu
ckled and added, ‘Safe from his father. Do not worry, soldier, we will not let him come to too much harm. He is there to protect our investment.’

  ‘Investment in what?’ Ben snapped.

  Masango said, ‘In you, Mister Hope.’ The political attaché made a big show of checking his watch. ‘Now, we have a long drive back, so …’

  ‘Do not let me keep you, César,’ Khosa said warmly. ‘Safe journey. We will talk soon, hmm?’

  The soldiers transferred Jude into the hands of the bodyguard with the Uzi. He held Jude’s arm in a pincer grip and began steering him towards the limo, but Ben blocked his way and ignored the nine-millimetre snout of the machine pistol pointing at his midriff.

  ‘Let it go, Ben,’ Jude said. ‘You’ll only make it worse.’

  ‘This isn’t over,’ Ben told him. ‘You hear me? This is not over. I’ll find you.’

  ‘Put him in the car,’ Khosa said.

  ‘I’ll come for you, Jude,’ Ben said. He couldn’t disguise the catch in his voice.

  ‘Dad—’

  Dad.

  And then Jude was being dragged towards the open back door of the limo. The man with the Uzi climbed in beside him, reached for the door handle and shut it with a soft clunk. Ben stared at the black-tinted rear window but could no longer see Jude inside.

  César Masango gave Khosa a last wave and climbed into the other side of the limo’s rear. The car purred slowly off, bouncing and lurching over the rough ground until it reached the road, then accelerated smartly away.

  Ben watched it go.

  ‘You will see him again, soldier. One day. Perhaps alive, too.’ Khosa walked away laughing.

  Ben watched the limo shrink into the distance. He watched until all that could be seen was a tiny rooster-tail of dust on the horizon where the road melted hazily into the sky.

  Then it was gone.

  Jude was gone.

  Ben closed his eyes and the ice wave of despair broke over him.

  Then he opened them again. Said out loud, ‘No.’ Looked at his clenched fists and felt the power of his rage surging through him, as if it could boil his blood in his veins.

  Khosa hadn’t won this thing yet. He just thought he had.

  Ben pictured Khosa’s face in front of him, and made his promise to the man.

  I will finish you. Sooner or later. No matter what. You’re a dead man walking. You might as well start digging your own grave.

  And Ben didn’t know if he was imagining it or not, but from somewhere inside his mind he thought he could hear the echo of maniacal laughter.

  END OF PART ONE

  To be continued …

  THE DEVIL’S KINGDOM

  Sequel to STAR OF AFRICA and the concluding part of

  Ben Hope’s epic African adventure

  Available November 2016

  Read on for an exclusive extract …

  Chapter One

  South Kivu Province,

  Democratic Republic of Congo

  It was a rough road that the lone Toyota four-wheel-drive was trying to negotiate, and the going was agonisingly slow. One moment the worn tyres would be slithering and fighting for grip in yet another axle-deep rut of loose reddish earth, the next the creaking, grinding suspension would bump so hard over the rubble and rocks strewn everywhere that the vehicle’s three occupants were bounced out of their seats with a crash that set their teeth on edge.

  At this rate, it was going to be some more hours before they reached the remote strip where the light plane was due to pick up the two Americans and fly them and their precious cargo to Kavumu Airport, near Bukavu. Once safely arrived at the airport, the pair intended to waste no time before jumping on the first jet heading back home and getting the hell out of here. But safety and escape still seemed a long way beyond their reach right now. They were still very much in the danger zone, a fact that didn’t escape them for a moment.

  The battered, much-repaired old Toyota was one of the few possessions of a local man named Joseph Maheshe who now and then hired himself out as a driver and guide to tourists. Not that many tourists came here any more, not even the thrill-seeking adventurous ones. It was a precarious place and an even more precarious trade for Joseph, but the only one he knew. He’d been a taxi driver in Kigali, back over the border in neighbouring Rwanda, when the troubles there twenty years earlier had forced him and his wife, both of them of Tutsi ethnicity, to flee their home never to return. Joseph had seen a lot in his time, and knew the dangers of this area as well as anyone. He wasn’t overjoyed that the two Americans had talked him into coming out here. He was liking the grinding sounds coming from his truck’s suspension even less.

  While Joseph worried about what the terrible road surface was doing to his vehicle, his two backseat passengers had their own concerns to occupy their minds. They were a man and a woman, both dishevelled and travel-stained, both shining with perspiration from the baking heat inside the car, and both in a state of great excitement.

  The man’s name was Craig Munro, and he was a middlingly-successful freelance investigative reporter based seven thousand miles from here in Chicago. In his late forties, he was nearly twice the age of his female companion. They weren’t any kind of an item; their relationship was, always had been and would remain professional, even though the lack of privacy when camping out rough for days and nights on end in this wilderness sometimes forced a degree more intimacy on them than either was comfortable with.

  The woman’s name was Rae Lee, and she had worked for Munro as an assistant and photographer for the last eighteen months. Rae was twenty-five, second-generation Taiwanese American, and she’d been top of her law class at Chicago University for two years before switching tracks and studying photography at the city’s prestigious Art Institute. She had taken the job with Munro more for the experience, and for ideological reasons, than for the money – money being something that wasn’t always in good supply around her employer’s shabby offices in downtown Chicago. The camera equipment inside the metal cases that jostled about in the back of the Toyota was all hers. But as expensive as it was, its true value at this moment lay in the large number of digital images Rae’s long lens had captured last night and early this morning from their concealed stakeout.

  It was an investigative journalist’s dream. Everything they could have wished to find. More than they’d dared even hope for, which was the reason for their excitement. While at the same time, it was also the reason for their deep anxiety to get away and home as fast as possible. The kind of information and evidence they’d travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to acquire was precisely the kind that could get you killed. And the Congo was a very easy place in which to disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.

  The hammering and lurching of the 4x4’s suspension made it impossible to have any kind of conversation, but neither Munro nor Rae Lee needed to speak their thoughts out loud. They were both thinking the same thing: that when they got back to the States, that was when their work would begin in earnest. The physical danger would be behind them, but the real grind would await, and Munro’s endless deskbound hours of writing the sensational article would be just part of it. There would be scores of calls to make, dozens more contacts to chase, many facts to verify before they could go live with this thing. It was serious business. While what they’d found would cause a substantial stir in certain quarters, not everyone would be pleased. Including some very wealthy and powerful people who would use every ounce of their influence to block the publication of this information in every way possible. But what they had was pure gold, and they knew it. They were going to be able to blow the lid off this whole dirty affair and open a lot of eyes to what was really happening out here.

  ‘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 s
poke English with a heavy accent. ‘Three hours, maybe four.’ 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, because they weren’t hard to recognise. The flatbed of each truck was equipped with a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount, with ammunition belts drooping from them and 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 eastern Congo and probably all across the entire country, over a land mass bigger than all of Europe.