have expected someone like Khosa to keep it fully loaded at all times, and he wasn’t disappointed.
He stepped back two paces and aimed it at Khosa’s head. He cocked the hammer and placed his finger on the trigger.
Khosa didn’t stir. His breathing was slow and deep. Ben stood over him with his finger on the trigger of the gun. He held the revolver in both hands, not just to steady his aim but because the .44 Magnum would kick hard when it went off. Which was a good thing, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If a handgun recoils brutally it’s because it has launched a very heavy bullet at a very high velocity. In this case, more than enough muzzle energy to blow Khosa’s brains all over his nice leopardskin sofa.
It was also going to be extremely loud. Ben wasn’t too worried about his eardrums. He knew from experience, repeated many times over, that they’d recover and the high-pitched whine would fade. He was more worried about the shot being heard all over the hotel, across the street and for a wide radius across the deserted city. The moment he squeezed the trigger he’d have to be out of the window and clambering down the nearest fire escape before the guards came rushing in.
Ben squared the sights on Khosa’s head with the muzzle at close to point-blank range. He wanted to kill this man more than anything. But it was hard to pull the trigger. The cause of his hesitation wasn’t the strange sense of pity that he felt, despite everything, for a man who was obviously deranged and had to die, like putting down a rabid dog. It was the knowledge that by killing him, he would set in motion an irreversible chain reaction. The initial panic and chaos over Khosa’s death would buy him a few minutes, maybe half an hour at best. The chain of command would disintegrate, but only temporarily, before Dizolele, or Xulu, or another of Khosa’s subordinates picked up a phone or a radio and put the word through to César Masango, the man on whom Jude’s fate would then rest.
Which meant Ben would have half an hour at best in which to locate Jude and prevent Masango from killing him in retaliation for Khosa. The odds weren’t exactly favourable. When Ben had received the message that Jude was in trouble aboard the MV Andromeda, he’d had the GPS coordinates to guide him more or less exactly to Jude’s location. Then, distance and time had been far less of an obstacle to rescuing him than the situation he faced now. Jude could be anywhere in the Congo. He could be in Burundi or Uganda or Zambia or Angola. He could be on another continent, for all Ben knew.
Ben’s thoughts whirled faster as he stood there pointing the gun and time rushed past him. Maybe there was a better option than killing Khosa. He could kidnap him and hold him hostage, forcing him to reveal Jude’s whereabouts and threatening to blow his brains out if Masango touched a hair on his son’s head. They could trade: Jude for Khosa. Prisoner exchange at dawn in some remote spot. Any tricks, the General cops it. It sounded good, except for the logistics of dragging a 250-pound comatose body past the guards outside the door, down the lift and into the street in the hope of finding a convenient escape vehicle, all without getting into a knock-down shootout with a small army of soldiers; one six-gun against armoured personnel carriers, heavy machine guns and mortars. And even if Ben did achieve the impossible and get away with his hostage – then what about Jeff, Tuesday, and Lou Gerber?
It would be them or Jude. Ben couldn’t save them all. He’d be leaving his friends behind to die, and it wouldn’t be a quick and easy death that Khosa’s enraged seconds-in-command would inflict on them.
Slowly, Ben lowered the gun. He uncocked the hammer and took his finger off the trigger and let the weapon droop limply at his side.
‘Damn,’ he said out loud. The moment of opportunity was slipping by him.
Then it was gone. Khosa’s inert bulk gave a twitch, followed by a lurch, and he awoke in a panic, as if still half in the grip of some terrible nightmare. His eyes darted and rolled for several seconds before he heaved himself violently off the sofa and crashed forwards into the coffee table, wrecking it and spilling its contents to the floor. Ben could only stand and stare as Khosa reeled back to his feet, staggered sideways several yards and hit the drinks cabinet with his hip, sending an array of wineglasses and a crystal decanter flying. Khosa was screaming and bellowing as if he’d lost what sanity remained to him. Either that, Ben was thinking, or else this was what two bottles of Kotiko on an empty stomach could do to even a sane person. Khosa fell to the floor, beating the carpet with his fists and filling the bedroom with his roaring, braying voice.
Ben had been right about the guards listening at the door for trouble. They burst into the suite and raced towards the sound of their commander’s screams. The same two soldiers who had escorted Ben earlier were quickly joined by two more, all of them wearing the same shocked expression as they took in the scene.
By then, Ben had already replaced the revolver in Khosa’s gunbelt. He’d moved quickly to the far side of the bedroom and raised his hands to show he was no threat to any of them. The soldiers yelled and pointed their rifles and jabbed and prodded him and fired a thousand questions in Swahili and broken English. What had he done to their illustrious leader? What was happening here? Keeping the other hand raised, Ben pointed at the bottles on the floor and told them the General had drunk something that disagreed with him. He was sick. He needed his doctor.
It took fifteen minutes for the doctor to arrive, by which time another half-dozen soldiers had crowded the suite and more were milling around in the corridor outside. Khosa had long stopped screaming like a mad bull and lapsed back into a comatose state, saliva oozing from his lips and one eye half open. Ben was pinned in a corner of the bedroom by four jumpy soldiers ready to blast him if he moved. He was beginning to worry that if Khosa died, they would accuse him of having poisoned their leader.
Khosa’s personal physician was tall and thin and stooped, possibly ninety years of age. He was barefoot and wore a long black robe intricately embroidered in gold thread and a necklace of what Ben at first thought were shrunken human skulls, then realised were those of monkeys. The old man appeared quite calm as he entered the room, took one look at the patient slumped full-length on the floor and strolled over to inspect him.
After a brief examination, the doctor turned, gazed around the room until he spotted the empty bottles still lying where they’d fallen, and in a voice as cracked and dry as parchment asked a soldier to pick one up and bring it to him. After a sniff of the bottle’s neck he nodded sagely to himself and then produced a smaller amber bottle from the folds of his robe and trickled a few drops of liquid into the unconscious Khosa’s open mouth.
Ben had heard of doctors like this. In French-speaking parts of Africa they called them féticheurs. The nearest English translation would be ‘witch doctor’, a purveyor of magic healing and weird potions of the kind that the patient’s brother had apparently tried to purge from his province of Luhaka.
Adolf Hitler had taken military guidance from his astrologer. Tsarina Alexandra had hung on every word of the mystic healer, Rasputin. Jean-Pierre Khosa had his witch doctor. It didn’t seem unfitting. With luck, the sorcerer’s medicine would finish the job the Kotiko had started, and then nobody could blame Ben for the General’s demise.
The old man creaked to his feet, his medical examination of the Supreme Being concluded. ‘There is nothing wrong with him,’ he declared, in the same hoarse, dry croak. ‘He has tired himself and needs to rest.’
‘That, and a good dose of lithium,’ Ben said.
The witch doctor motioned to the nearest group of soldiers to pick Khosa up and place him on the bed. It took three of them to heave him onto the rumpled four-poster.
