If there was one thing Ben had learned, it was this: that wherever the tide might carry him, whatever fate might throw at him, however desperate his situation, however impossible the task facing him, however dark his future prospects or slim his chances of survival, he would live to fight another day. He would not be defeated or deterred, not by anything, not by anyone. That spirit was what had driven him, bolstered him, enabled him to be the man he was. Or the man he’d thought he was.
But not now. Not anymore.
Everything had changed.
Because at this moment, as he sat there helpless and surrounded by aggressive men with guns, slumped uncomfortably on the dirty open flatbed of an old army truck with his knees drawn up in front of him and his head resting on his hands and every jolt of the big wheels and stiff suspension on this rough road somewhere in the middle of the Congo jarring through his spine, he was fighting a rising black tide of emptiness.
If there was a way out of this one, the plan had yet to come to him. And if there was a tomorrow, it wasn’t one that he was sure he wanted to face.
Sitting next to Ben, staring silently into space with a pensive frown, was his trusted old friend, Jeff Dekker, with whom he’d survived so many narrow scrapes in the past and come through in one piece. Beside Jeff was the tough young Jamaican ex-British army trooper named Tuesday Fletcher, on whom Ben had quickly learned he could absolutely depend.
But Ben was barely even aware of their presence. All he could think about – all that really mattered to him – was that his son Jude Arundel, just at the point in their troubled relationship where it looked as if they were finally bonding, was lost to him and there wasn’t a single thing Ben could do about it. And that riding happily at the front of the irregular militia convoy speeding along this dusty road, wearing a self-satisfied grin and probably smoking another of his huge cigars in victory, was the man who had taken Jude from him.
That man’s name was Jean-Pierre Khosa. Known as ‘the General’ to the army of heavily armed Congolese fighters who both feared and loyally served him, Khosa had every reason to be smiling. Most men would be, when they were carrying inside their pocket a stolen diamond worth countless sums of money and there was nobody to stop them from gaining every bit of power that wealth like that could afford.
Ben knew little about Khosa, but he knew enough, and had seen enough, for the seeds of doubt inside his own heart to grow into a chilling conviction that here, now, at last, was an enemy he couldn’t defeat. That Khosa could beat him.
And that maybe Khosa had already won.
Khosa seemed to know it, too.
There was no telling how many miles they’d driven through this jungle, coming across no sign of human habitation for hour after bruising, spine-jarring, mind-numbing hour. Ben had lost his watch before the start of the journey, and with it all track of time, except for the position of the sun which told him it would soon be evening again. They’d been travelling like this all day, and most of the night before with only a short stop in the middle of nowhere, for the troops to rest, brew coffee and gulp down a bowl of nondescript dried meat, beans, and rice. Ben hadn’t been hungry but he’d taken what he was offered. Military wisdom, left over from his past. Eat when you can, sleep when you can, preserve your strength.
They’d come a long way since then, and they were still in the middle of nowhere. There was an awful lot of nowhere around these parts.
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