The Mercedes whisked him onwards, away from the checkpoint and along a narrower, bumpier dirt track that wound past earth-moving machinery and piles of dirt and rock as large as hills. Garbage was everywhere. A bonfire was burning, sending embers like fireflies into the night air and casting flickering orange shadows across a patch of empty ground to a row of makeshift wooden shacks. Jude saw movement in the firelight and realised there were people over there: some who looked like soldiers, and more who didn’t. A crowd of them, thin, bent, ragged Africans, men and women, being herded at gunpoint towards the shacks. The way they shuffled along, their bare feet dragging on the ground, they looked ready to collapse from exhaustion. Even in this light Jude could see that their clothes were in tatters and caked with filth.
Who were they? Jude wanted to ask, but then another sight killed the words in his mouth before they could come out.
Planted in the ground on the far side of the shacks, dimly bathed in the fire’s dancing light, stood a thick wooden post. The wood was all burnt and blackened, wrapped around with chains. Three blackened skeletons were held with their backs to the post. The burnt debris around the base of the post was still gently smouldering.
Jude felt sick. This was what these animals were doing here, burning people at the stake. He sensed that César Masango was looking at him.
‘What is this place?’ Jude managed to say. The defiance was all gone from his voice now.
‘Your new home,’ Masango said. ‘Oh, do not worry. You will not be joining the slaves. Here is where you will live, behind these gates.’ He pointed ahead. The Mercedes was arriving at another gate inset in another fence, this one built out of galvanised sheet-metal like a high grey wall streaked with dirt and rust in the light of the car’s headlights. The gate was heavily chained and padlocked. As the Mercedes pulled up, Promise Okereke got out of the back. He swung the rear passenger door lightly shut and walked towards the gates, taking a key from his pocket. He stopped at the gate; then with his back to the car, brightly lit by the headlamps, he started to undo the padlock. The Uzi submachine gun was dangling from his shoulder.
Jude’s heart began to race at the crazy idea that nothing but Promise’s empty seat now separated him from the unlocked rear passenger door. All he had to do was make a scramble for it before Masango could stop him, fling the door open and run like hell. For the first time since Khosa had captured them on the ocean, there was a real possibility of escape. A window of opportunity that wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, forcing him to make a very quick decision. Could he manage to disappear into the darkness before Promise turned round and opened fire on him? How would he get past the rest of the gates, and the soldiers?
Ben wouldn’t be worried about the risk. Ben would go for it.
Jude was suddenly boiling with adrenalin and his muscles were winding up tight as mandolin strings. He was ready. He had to do it. One chance, now or never.
Then Jude felt something hard poke against his ribs. Masango had a small pistol pressed into his side.
‘Jean-Pierre told me you have changarawe,’ Masango said.
It was the only word of Swahili that Jude understood. It meant ‘guts’.
‘But there is bravery, and then there is foolishness. You have already been warned once, my young friend. Do not even think about it again.’
Jude sank back into the seat, defeated and furious with himself for being so cowardly. He wished Masango would just shoot him and be done with it. In the beam of the headlights, Promise was opening the tall sheet-metal gate. The driver eased the car through it and then paused while Promise closed and relocked the gate and got back in. The Mercedes purred on. The area within the metal fence wasn’t large, maybe eighty yards across, a roughly square compound made out of beaten earth and empty apart from four green metal prefab huts that stood planted in a row a few metres apart at its centre.
The car stopped again. The driver kept the engine running. Masango climbed out, stretching his muscles after the long journey. ‘Come,’ he said to Jude. Jude got cautiously out of the car, looking around him. Promise got out from the other door, with the Uzi in one hand and a long flashlight in the other, which he shone first in Jude’s face and then at the huts.
‘This one here is yours,’ Masango said to Jude. ‘It has been specially prepared for our important new guest.’ He pointed in the direction of the torch beam at a hut on the end of the row. It was bolted together out of sections of the same galvanised sheet metal as the fence. There was a single tiny window, no glass, barred with flat aluminium bars riveted to the outside. The metal door, equipped with bolts top and bottom as well as a hasp and a thick padlock, hung ajar. The hut was pitch dark inside.
Promise took hold of Jude’s arm and pushed him into the hut, lighting the way with the torch. The compound evidently didn’t stretch to electric power. The floor was the same compacted earth and reminded Jude of the derelict building in Somalia where Khosa’s men had murdered his shipmate and friend Steve Maisky, otherwise known as Condor.
But this was no execution room, and no such gruesome fate awaited Jude here. Not yet. The hut was designed for another, very obvious, purpose. Its sheet metal sections had been assembled around an inner steel cage, a cube welded together out of tubular bars, maybe eight feet long by eight wide by eight high.
The cage was serious business, the kind of solid affair that would have served for keeping dangerous animals inside. It was probably strong enough to contain a silverback gorilla. At one side was a mattress and a chair. In the opposite corner, two buckets. One empty, to use as a toilet, the other half full of water.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ Jude said. ‘This kind of luxury is much more than I have at home.’
‘You will be brought two meals a day,’ Masango said. ‘If you cause trouble, there will be no food until you learn to behave yourself. If you are good, there will be special privileges, like a magazine to read, and a blanket.’
‘Any chance of a pool table?’ Jude said. ‘A decent laptop with Wi-Fi connection would be handy, too.’
‘Guards come and go during the day and night,’ Masango told him. ‘But Promise will be close by you at all times, and bring your meals. He will also report any instances of uncooperative behaviour back to General Khosa and myself.’
‘How’s he going to do that, with no tongue?’
Masango looked stern in the torchlight. ‘Lock him up,’ he ordered Promise. Promise pulled open the cage door, grabbed Jude and shoved him inside. The heavy door shut with a final-sounding hollow clang that Jude didn’t like at all. Promise slid home the four bolts that fastened it, and clicked a padlock through each in turn. He rattled them to test they were secure, then stepped away.
Jude clasped the bars. They were cold and dreadfully rigid-feeling. ‘Let me tell you something, Masango,’ he said in a calm, serious tone. ‘You people are making the biggest mistake of your lives if you think this whole thing isn’t going to backfire on you. I’m getting out of here, and when I do, you’re in deep shit.’
‘Goodbye, White Meat,’ Masango said. Khosa had called him by the same name. They’d obviously been talking about him, which wasn’t a comforting thought. Masango walked out of the hut, followed by Promise, and Jude was left alone in the darkness. He heard the hasp close and the snick of the outer padlock. As if it was even necessary.
Jude stood clutching the bars, listening. Footsteps on the stony ground; Masango speaking to someone, either Promise or the driver, in Swahili. Then the car