LITMIR.BIZ

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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 that the reassurance wasn’t working. The optimism seemed to drain from him. When he spoke again, his tone was sullen. ‘It’s all my fault this happened to Jude. Hadn’t been for me, he’d never have set foot on that fucking ship in the first—’

      ‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben cut in before Jeff could finish. He’d said it before, and he’d say it again. Ben knew all about the ravages of a guilty conscience from his own past. Come what may, he didn’t want Jeff to bear the responsibility for what had happened. When Jeff had pulled strings with his contacts to get Jude the crewman gig with the American merchant vessel MV Svalgaard Andromeda on the East Africa run from Salalah in Oman to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he couldn’t have known that the ship would be attacked. Any more than he could have known that one of its secret passengers, a crook named Pender, was carrying a stolen diamond bigger than a man’s fist, which ruthless killers would do anything to acquire. Events had unfolded from there the way they had, nobody could have done anything to prevent them, and only one man still living could be held responsible for the things that had taken place.

      Khosa. Ben had the man’s face pinpointed in his mind like a sniper’s target in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And what a face it was. A demon’s face, bearing the hideous tribal scars that you couldn’t look at without a shiver of apprehension. But as evil as he looked, Khosa’s lunatic mind was the thing Ben feared most.

      ‘It’s not your fault,’ Ben repeated to Jeff.

      One of the soldiers guarding them in the back of the truck reached across with the barrel of his AK-47 and jabbed Ben painfully in the ribs with it. Like many of Khosa’s fighters he was a young guy, no more than twenty or so. He had a red bandana tied around his head and was wearing a faded Legion of the Damned T-shirt with an ammunition belt for a heavy machine gun draped around his lean shoulders like a fashion accessory.

      ‘Quiet! No talking!’ the young trooper yelled. English was taking over from French as the main European language in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the militia troops spoke it, or something close to it. That made it difficult to have any kind of a private conversation; all the more so when conversation was forbidden altogether.

      Ben slapped the rifle barrel away. ‘Watch how you speak to me, sonny. You’re addressing General Khosa’s military advisor.’

      Which, technically, was true. That was the essence of the blackmail deal between Ben and the General: in return for Jude’s safety, whenever they got to wherever the hell they were going, Ben was to begin his new role of training Khosa’s troops and impart to them his military skills, with Jeff and Tuesday as his second- and third-in-command. Train them for what purpose, exactly, Ben didn’t yet know. It wasn’t a prospect he relished, but right now his agreement to Khosa’s terms was the only thing keeping them all alive.

      ‘You listening, you scummy little arsemonger?’ Jeff said, glaring a hole in the soldier with the full authoritative weight of a former Special Boat Service non-com officer. He’d been a Royal Marine Commando before that, and used to a slightly higher calibre of military personnel than Khosa’s army had to offer. ‘So point that weapon somewhere else before I stick it through your left ear and out your right, and ride you up and down this road like a fucking motorbike.’

      The soldier moved back and leaned his rifle across his knees, eyeing them with wary uncertainty.

      ‘Bloody bunch of numpties,’ Tuesday said, giving the soldier a headshake and a look of contempt.

      Ben had to smile then. The warmth of their camaraderie touched him like a glimmer of sunshine on a cloudy day. It wasn’t much, but it was good.

      Along with Ben, Jeff, and Tuesday Fletcher, there was a fourth prisoner crouched in the back of the lurching truck. Lou Gerber had served as a staff sergeant with the United States Marine Corps many years earlier, before he’d taken to the sea as a merchant mariner. Besides Jude, the white-bearded, bald-headed Gerber was the last surviving crew member of the Svalgaard Andromeda, out of more than twenty men who had set out from Salalah Port in Oman not two weeks earlier.

      Ben had spent a lot of time thinking about the men who had died aboard that ship. Some had been killed during the storming of the vessel by Khosa’s men, hired by Pender to pose as Somali pirates. More had died in the aftermath of the attack, while Jude and the other survivors rushed to lock themselves into the safety of the engine room. One, a vicious thug named Scagnetti, Ben had been forced to dispose of himself when he tried to hurt Jude. Soon after that had come the typhoon that had scuppered the ship and drowned all but a handful of the remaining crew.

      In the days since the shipwreck they’d been whittled down even further, one by one. Condor, hacked to death by Khosa’s men in an earth-floored hut somewhere in Somalia; Hercules, a gentle giant of a man who had loved his pet bird and his freewheeling life at sea, thrown into a pit with a hungry man-eating lion in a grotesque parody of an ancient Roman gladiatorial spectacle.

      Gerber was alone now, and for the first time since Ben had met the guy, he looked all of his sixty-seven years plus a good bit more. Already hit hard by the death of his close shipmate Condor, he’d barely spoken a word since they’d all been forced to witness Hercules’s cruel end. He seemed to have given up. His head was bowed and he stared at the floor of the truck with eyes that looked like holes out of which his soul had leaked away.

      ‘Gerber,’ Jeff said, trying to catch his attention. ‘Hoi, Gerber, you awake?’

      If Gerber could hear him, he made no sign of showing it. Jeff shrugged and sighed.

      Ben closed his eyes and tried to relax his muscles into the jarring motion of the truck. He knew how Gerber felt. But if indeed Gerber had given up, that was something Ben couldn’t allow himself to do. The black feeling kept coming and going in tides, like chill surges of floodwater that threatened to overwhelm his defences and drown all the strength and resolve he had left. He clenched his fists and told himself to ride it. He willed himself to believe that he would come through. And so would Jude. Ben didn’t know if he believed it. But he knew that if he didn’t convince himself it was true, he’d go crazy.

      Soon afterwards, the convoy arrived at its destination deep in the heart of the jungle.

      And soon after that, Ben began to think he really was going crazy.

       Chapter 3

      Ben was slumped in the back of the truck with his eyes still shut when he sensed that the vehicle’s motion had become smoother and he was no longer being shaken about. He opened his eyes and peered out of the back of the truck. Dusk was melting into evening. He must have been dozing. The headlights of the vehicles behind dazzled him; he shielded his eyes with his hand and saw that the rutted dirt track had either joined, or become, a properly surfaced road. The concrete looked newly-laid. The trees were cut back from the edges and ditches had been dug out on both sides. The clean-cut ends of sawn branches, still fresh, told him that the work must have been done not long ago.

      Ben threw a quizzical look at Jeff and Tuesday.

      ‘Seems like we’re getting somewhere,’ Tuesday commented. ‘Wherever somewhere is.’

      ‘I don’t

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