where will you be?’ Ben asked.
‘Over there, where I can see you,’ Xulu said, motioning towards the middle section of the auditorium, where some rows of seats were shaded by the overhang of the half-finished roof.
‘So he gets to sit on his chubby arse and watch while we sweat in the sun,’ Jeff muttered. ‘How jolly nice.’
They were given a claw hammer and a couple of short crowbars to open the crates with. Now that the foreigners were so dangerously armed, the soldiers kept their rifles pointed and retreated to a distance that was far enough to be safe while close enough to watch every move they made. Even in his craziest moments, Ben didn’t think he’d have tried to take on eight trigger-happy Kalashnikov-toting militiamen with nothing more than a piece of bent forged steel in his hand. But it was strangely satisfying to know that they feared him. Tactical advantages always start with the enemy being afraid of you.
‘Let’s get to work,’ he said to Jeff and Tuesday.
A quick inspection of the crates revealed sixteen untidy stacks of between a dozen and fifteen boxes of varying size each, plus many more dumped any-old-how on the grass – adding up to over two hundred and fifty of the things to open and check. They were nailed together out of roughly-sawn pine slats and stencilled in black paint with consignment numbers and Chinese character symbols, rope handles at each end. And they were heavy, the larger ones requiring two people to lift. It was hard to say without the means to weigh it properly, but Ben’s estimate was around ten tons of freight sitting there in front of them, more or less equivalent to the payload of a Chinook or some other variety of heavy-lift cargo helicopter.
Chinese stencilled lettering. A Chinese armoured personnel carrier. Even before they’d levered open the first box, Ben had a hunch what they’d find inside. It wasn’t underwear for the troops, and that was for sure. And it wasn’t antique furniture for Khosa’s luxury command post, either.
They started with the smaller boxes and worked their way up. As the lids came off, their faces grew grimmer.
Half of the smallest boxes contained six semiautomatic pistols of the type issued to the Republic of China military as the QSZ-92, brand-new and gleaming under their sheen of preservative oil, while the other half were packed with the 5.8mm bottlenecked cartridges to feed them with. But wars weren’t won with pistols. In the crates of the next size up, they found dozens of brand-new examples of what the Republic of China’s military brass termed We-ishe-ng Co-ngfe-ng, literally ‘silenced assault gun’. The British and US military would have called them bullpup submachine guns, and in the hands of Khosa’s army they’d have called them trouble. More crates were stuffed with spare fifty-round magazines for them, and large quantities of the 9mm ammo they were chambered to fire.
‘A bunch of ratty old AK-47s is one thing,’ Tuesday sighed. ‘This stuff is going to take these idiots to the next level.’
‘And we’re helping it happen,’ Ben said through gritted teeth.
The bigger the crates, the more destructive the weapons inside. The QBZ-95 rifle was a grown-up version of the more compact submachine guns, this time chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round of which copious quantities nestled in more boxes. The PK machine gun was China’s answer to the classic British General Purpose Machine Gun or GPMG, lovingly referred to by generations of soldiers as the ‘gimpy’. It was only natural, after all, to love something that could cut a car in half, level trees and demolish brick walls all day long without a misfire.
But the firepower of the PK was outdone by the W-85 heavy machine gun, the People’s Army’s rendition of the venerable fifty-calibre M2 Browning heavy machine gun that had adorned armoured vehicles, fighting aircraft and naval vessels from the Thirties to the present day and been used in every single human conflict of any scale during that long period. There was little that could resist it – and the same was just as true of the Chinese version, built around a Soviet-designed 12.7mm cartridge that, if anything, packed just a little more punch than John M. Browning’s trusty old fifty-cal. If you wanted to tear apart a fortified position from a mile or two away and an artillery strike or air assault was out of the question, these monsters would do the job in fine style, especially if you used the optional explosive-tipped round. And if you wanted a lighter bolt-action rifle chambered for the same carrot-sized cartridge that you could use to vaporize individual human targets too far away for the naked eye to see, that requirement was catered for by the AMR-2 sniper rifle. Ben found six of them packed in one of the cases, complete with five-round magazines and long-range mil-dot tactical scopes. They were almost identical in practical terms to the anti-materiel rifles that Tuesday had trained to use as a British army sniper. Nobody needed to tell him what mischief they were capable of inflicting. His jaw fell slowly open when he saw them.
Just about the only thing that could escape unriddled from the power of such weapons was the almost impenetrable skin of a modern main battle tank. But the shipment of arms had that contingency thoughtfully covered, too. The longest, heaviest crates contained enough HJ-10 armour-piercing anti-tank missiles, the Chinese equivalent of the American Hellfire surface-to-air or surface-to-surface rocket, to take out an entire battalion. The launch systems were in a separate freight container.
‘This is not good, guys,’ Jeff said. ‘Not good at all.’
‘Funny,’ Ben said. ‘I was thinking the same thing.’
‘I’ll tell you something else that’s funny,’ Jeff said. ‘If these fuckers were Muslim jihadists, you’d have security services the world over shitting bricks at the thought that this little lot might fall into their hands. There’d probably be a satellite right overhead as we speak, and a dozen CIA spooks goggling at us live on the big screen in Langley, Virginia. But because Khosa’s just your regular African warlord nutcase who’s really only a threat to a bunch of other Africans, nobody’s going to give a rat’s arse. He’s got carte blanche to run his fucked-up little kingdom out here any way he likes and do whatever he pleases. How’s that for a joke?’
‘Hilarious. Then why’m I not rolling on the floor pissing my pants laughing?’ Tuesday said.
By the time they’d prised open every single crate and the ground was covered with lids and packing materials, the arsenal had grown to include a trio of fearsome Hua Qing belt-driven rotary ‘miniguns’, a useful quantity of grenades, several mortars and two flamethrowers. Down to the last nut, bolt, and bullet, the entire consignment had come direct from China.
‘Our friends in the east,’ was how Colonel Dizolele had described the senders of the shipment. Finally, one or two pieces of the puzzle were coming together. But that wasn’t what was uppermost in Ben’s mind at this moment, as he debated two possible options.
The first was the matter of how easily he might be able to slip a weapon onto his person unnoticed, for future use in aiding their escape from this damn place. One of the pistols would be best. There would be the difficulty of getting it loaded, as shoving loose twenty cartridges from an ammo crate into a magazine couldn’t be done quickly or discreetly enough while being watched. The soldiers, and especially Xulu, were scrutinising everything the three of them did, most likely suspicious about the very thing that Ben was thinking of. Any false moves, and they might just decide to shoot him. Which wasn’t going to help Jude’s situation.
The second thought hovering in Ben’s mind was the notion of sabotage. Whatever kind of business arrangement existed between Khosa and his friends in the east, it was unthinkable that such a lethal shipment could be allowed to enter into the man’s possession. Ben wasn’t about to forget the horrors that Khosa had already inflicted with just a handful of scuffed, battered old assault rifles and a few rusty old machetes. Give him
