The Devil’s Kingdom. Scott Mariani
out here?’
It wasn’t too long after that, maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, before the convoy rolled to a halt. Hot metal ticking, engines growling, exhaust fumes drifting in the headlights. Ignoring the soldiers and guns, Ben clambered to his feet on the flatbed and turned to gaze past the truck’s cab. His legs felt like two planks of wood and his back was aching.
In the bright glare of the convoy’s lights, he saw that Khosa’s Land Rover at the front of the line had stopped at a wire-mesh double perimeter fence that stretched away in both directions until it was lost in the darkness. The convoy had pulled up at a set of steel-mesh gates inset into the outer fence, ten feet high and plastered in warning KEEP OUT signs in English, French, Kituba, Lingala and Swahili, just in case the locals didn’t get the message from the heavily armed guards who were manning the gates on the inside. The inner and outer fences were spaced about ten metres apart, creating a corridor between them in which Ben could see the figures of patrolling guards. In a pool of bright halogen floodlight beyond the chain-link mesh of the inner fence sat a cluster of guard huts, around which more soldiers were standing cradling automatic weapons and squinting into the procession of headlights queued up at the gates. The tall fences themselves were supported by steel posts and topped with spikes and coils of razor wire. High-perched security cameras peered down.
Ben had seen a thousand perimeter fences just like it, around army bases all over the world. More recently, Khosa’s men had taken them to a rundown ex-military airfield in Somalia, another forgotten leftover from another fruitless civil war. There, the fence had been hanging in disrepair, abandoned for many years. This one, like the road leading to it, looked as if it hadn’t been there long at all. Along the perimeter’s length for as far as Ben could see, the trees had been severely cut back in what must have been a major clearing operation involving a large number of men and machines. Such a new and well-constructed installation was an incongruous sight in the midst of this green wilderness with its unmade roads and shambolic wooden bridges.
From this side of the wire it looked as though a large area of jungle had been cleared on the inside of the perimeter as well. Did Khosa really have that kind of manpower? Ben’s initial assumption had been that the man’s army was no different from any number of ragtag tinpot militia forces he’d come across during his SAS days, when his squadron would occasionally be sent to various parts of the African continent to deal with the more troublesome gangs of marauding thugs who stepped out of line by massacring and raping the locals and abducting UN aid workers. But he’d been learning from the outset that his assumption was a shaky one. General Jean-Pierre Khosa was full of surprises. Never pleasant ones.
What Ben didn’t yet realise was that the biggest surprise was yet to come, one he couldn’t have foreseen in a thousand years.
Jeff and Tuesday were on their feet next to him in the truck, following his gaze. Lou Gerber hadn’t moved or even looked up.
‘What do you reckon?’ Jeff said.
Ben shook his head. ‘Whatever it is, we’re about to find out.’
There was a lot of activity going on at the head of the stationary convoy. Doors were opened and soldiers were milling about. Greetings were exchanged, laughter shared, backs slapped. Ben looked for Khosa but couldn’t see him. The General must be still in his Land Rover, puffing on a Gran Cohiba and fondling his diamond, maybe thinking about who he was going to order hacked to death next, or whose head he might blow off on a whim using the magnum revolver he carried on his belt. Those burdensome decisions of leadership.
The soldiers inside the compound opened the outer gates first, followed by those in the inner fence. The men outside returned to their vehicles, slammed their doors, and the convoy slowly began to roll through the gates, waved in by the grinning guards. The convoy accelerated and sped onwards, pushing a bubble of light into the darkness beyond the perimeter.
The concreted road continued for a quarter of a mile up a steep rise that had been completely shorn of vegetation, creating a barren landscape of ploughed earth and craters where countless trees had been ripped out by their roots. The more Ben looked, the more perplexed he was by this place. He could sense Jeff and Tuesday’s growing sense of bewilderment, too. Far behind them, the tail end of the convoy had passed through the inner gates and the soldiers had closed up the perimeter with an air of finality that took away any doubts Ben might have had that this place, whatever it might be, was their final destination.
Ben narrowed his eyes when he saw the glow lighting up the sky from beyond the crest of the rise ahead. If it was a military camp, it was on a grand scale. The biggest he’d seen in Africa, rivalling major NATO bases in Europe. But that was impossible.
Khosa’s Land Rover crested the rise and dropped out of sight. A dozen vehicles later, the truck reached the top of the hill – and then Ben saw it, and his mouth fell open at the sight.
It wasn’t the biggest military camp in Africa. It wasn’t a military camp at all.
The manmade valley below was illuminated across its length and breadth by thousands of lights. The single road swept down the deforested hillside into what, unbelievably and yet undeniably, appeared to be a whole city.
A city enclosed behind a militarised security perimeter.
Khosa’s own city?
Ben blinked. His mouth went dry. He blinked again, tore his gaze from the surreal sight and exchanged looks of bewilderment with Jeff and Tuesday.
The road had widened into a smooth and immaculate double carriageway by the time they reached the final security fence. Blinding halogen spotlamps blazed down from masts. The gate was heavily guarded by a unit of at least a dozen sentries and a six-wheeled armoured personnel carrier with twin machine guns swivelled their way.
‘I’m not believing this,’ Jeff said. ‘Tell me I’m fucking dreaming, guys.’
‘It’s real,’ Ben replied. ‘Don’t ask me how, but it’s real.’
Once more, there were waves and happy greetings as the convoy rolled through the gates. Some three hundred yards down the single straight road that crossed what had once been a valley deep in the jungle, now transformed into a barren no-man’s land, the line of vehicles rumbled past the first buildings. Side streets radiated left and right, forming a geometric grid system of two-hundred-foot-square blocks. Many of them were still empty and undeveloped patches of land; others sprouted semi-erected multi-storey buildings; others again were fully finished with high-rises and office blocks. Signs of recent construction were everywhere, cranes looming into the night sky and heavy plant equipment filling every empty corner. Street after street after empty street, all still, all silent, all lit up but eerily deserted. There were no cars. There was no movement. Not a single civilian to be seen anywhere, as if the entire population had fled or been vaporized by a hydrogen bomb leaving behind only empty buildings.
Like a vision from a post-apocalyptic world, or the most expensive movie set that had ever been built and was waiting for the film crews and herds of extras to move in.
‘What in hell’s name …?’ Jeff muttered.
Tuesday was shaking his head. ‘Please don’t tell me that Khosa built this place.’
‘Whoever built it,’ Ben said, ‘I’ve a feeling you won’t find it on any maps.’
‘Khosa City,’ Jeff grunted. ‘Jesus Christ. Who is this guy?’
The deeper the convoy rolled into the city, the fewer construction sites they passed and the more finished the place appeared to be, as if it had been built from the centre outwards. The main drag had grown into a broad boulevard. The architects had planted neat avenues of maple trees down its length, and laid clipped green lawns either side, and pavements and modern street lighting that glowed off the brand-new buildings.
Here and there they passed small patrol units of militia. Any non-military personnel in the place were either locked down tight in a curfew, or there simply weren’t any in the first place. The streets were lit up but almost every window of every building was dark and empty. The