JAMES STEEL

Legacy

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

AVON

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Copyright © James Steel 2010

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be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847561602

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER, LUCAPA DIAMOND FIELD, ANGOLA

1501; CONSTANTINOPLE

THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER, LONDON

11 P.M., THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

AUGUST 1522, STELTZENBERG, SOUTHWEST GERMANY

SEPTEMBER 1522, PFÄLZERWALD FOREST, CENTRAL GERMANY

PRESENT DAY, 17 NOVEMBER, LONDON

17 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

SATURDAY 22 NOVEMBER

14 JANUARY 1525, NEUHOF FOREST, HESSE, CENTRAL GERMANY

PRESENT DAY, MONDAY 24 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

PRESENT DAY, TUESDAY 25 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

THURSDAY 27 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

6 FEBRUARY 1525, MÜHLHAUSEN, CENTRAL GERMANY

SATURDAY 17 JANUARY, GBADOLITE AIRPORT, EQUATEUR PROVINCE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

14 MAY 1525, FRANKENHAUSEN, CENTRAL GERMANY

EVENING, 20 OCTOBER 1525, BAHR EL GHAZAL REGION, THE KINGDOM OF SUDAN

30 MARCH 1941, HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, GERMANY

10 APRIL 1941, LESKOVAC, MONTENEGRO, THE BALKANS

PRESENT DAY, 24 JANUARY, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

15 APRIL 1941, TRIPOLI, LIBYA

PRESENT DAY, WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

14 JUNE 1941, IDEHAN UBARI. SAHARA

PRESENT DAY, THURSDAY 29 JANUARY, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

30 MAY 1945, OUTSIDE MUNICH, BAVARIA, GERMANY

FEBRUARY 1951, BONN, WEST GERMANY

FRIDAY 30 JANUARY, DORTMUND, CENTRAL GERMANY

Author’s note

By the same author

About the Publisher

LEGACY

James Steel is a writer and journalist based in the UK.

SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER, LUCAPA DIAMOND FIELD, ANGOLA

The whisper came through the African night.

‘Zero, this is Lima Three.’

He pressed the radio earpiece hard against his head, focusing on that quiet voice from the throat mike feeding him information. He clicked the transmit key twice to acknowledge his forward observer silently.

The voice whispered again.

‘Sighting report as at two-zero-four. At junction of Gully Red and Gully Yellow now. Infantry. Estimate platoon strength. Moving south.’

He checked the map. This was what it was all about, everything he did: contact with the enemy. They had waited for the moon to go down and hoped to hit the diamond mine just before dawn.

He turned round from his command post, a groundsheet hung up under an acacia tree with the radio on a stack of empty ammunition crates. Its dim glow was the only light. Behind him was the mortar platoon, black shapes in the darkness.

‘Fire Plan India,’ he called in an urgent whisper to the nearest crew, who repeated it down the line. The men twisted the elevation screws and the tubes rose slightly to lengthen the range. The 81mm mortars stared blank-eyed up into the night, blind to the destruction they would cause.

Yamba, the platoon sergeant, scuttled down the line to check the four crews were ready. Then he came close so that his dark face could be seen in the glow from the radio set. He nodded.

‘Zero, this is Lima Three. Fire mission.’

‘Lima Three, this is Zero. Fire mission. Out.’

He waited for the details; pencil stub paused over a dog-eared pad.

‘Fire mission. Grid: three-zero-eight-four-eight-one. Bearing three-two hundred mills. Infantry in gully. Destroy now. One minute. Over.’

He repeated the fire-control orders back to the observer. Then he stood up and turned to the mortar line. The time for action had come.

‘Open fire!’

He barked the order out in a harsh voice that tore away the veil of silence that had cloaked them.

The mortars made their distinctive thunk sound and spat their metal loads up into the night. White flames shot up out of the tubes. Base plates slammed and rang with the recoil.

The crews turned away from them when they dropped each round down. They jammed their fingers in their ears, but still it did not stop the feeling of being kicked in the head by the propellant burst.

After the first rounds dropped down the tube he grabbed the mike and called urgently: ‘Lima Three. Shot five!’ to indicate the number of seconds before impact.

The response came equally abruptly as the observer took cover.

‘Shot five. Out!’

They pumped round after round out at the stars. The forward observer, dug into a foxhole a mile away, could see the vivid flashes of orange in the night where the shells landed but he could not see the murderous swarms of metal splinters that they unleashed through the air when they burst.

The observer called in a correction.

‘Drop fifty! Over!’ he shouted loudly now over the din.

Range screws were twisted on the mortars.

‘On target! Over!’

Figures ran, stumbled and fell. They blundered around, shocked by the blasts. An officer’s whistle blew desperate signals but then stopped abruptly as a bomb hit. Eventually no more movement could be seen.

‘Cease loading!’ The shout went down the line and the last rounds fired off.

The crews froze and stared at their officer. The silence that followed was as stunning as the terrible noise that they had just been making.

He shouted brisk commands at them as he swept on his webbing and grabbed his assault rifle.

‘Col! You take Charlie fire team and a tracker, and sweep east of Gully Yellow. Yamba! Bring Delta fire team with me! We’ll sweep west!’

Alex Devereux looked down at the bodies laid in a row on the ground.

There were thirteen of them, teenagers mainly, but a couple of men in their twenties and one who must have been forty, a UNITA guerrilla veteran from the Angolan civil war, and presumably their commander. They were either barefoot or wore an assortment of wellies and trainers, with ragged T-shirts and patched trousers.

In the follow-up sweep to the mortar ambush their torches had revealed the carnage in the gully. In the confined space the blast of the bombs had blown the insurgents against the walls and ripped them apart.

The trackers had followed the blood trails from the scene. Dark splashes on the ground and smears on elephant grass stems led them to their quarry. Two had been injured and had crawled a few hundred yards before collapsing.

The trackers, Yamba and Sunday, knew their stuff. As the blood got fresher they signalled the squad to fan out in a line and switch off their torches. Eventually Alex’s squad heard the laboured breathing and mumbling of the wounded man as he dragged himself along.

Quick stabs of gunfire in the dark and he went down. No rules of engagement and warnings given here. He wasn’t in the regular army any more.

They went back and cast around for more tracks, but by the time they followed them up the survivors were long gone; the tracks showed them running wildly and crashing through bushes, terrified, desperate to escape.

The men dragged the bodies back to the gully and laid them out neatly. In the morning, the local Angolan army commander posed in front of them with a grinning thumbs up for the camera. He had the shots framed for the wall of his office back at the mine.

The captured weapons were laid out on the ground: nine AK-47s, four RPG launchers, three PKM light machine guns and some Claymores to cover their retreat. They were well armed.

All in all, a good night’s work.

Alex stood with his hands on his hips and frowned. Six foot four, broad shoulders, a strong masculine face — he looked very threatening like that. He ran his hand through his short black hair, rubbed the back of his neck and stared down at one of the boys; a mess of flies was fidgeting in a wound on his cheek.

Fourteen years old?

Major Alexander Devereux. Wellington College. Blues and Royals. Forty. Single. Child-killer.

A cold darkness of self-loathing settled over his heart.

1501; CONSTANTINOPLE

The dancers in the graveyard waited silently for the signal.

Their faces, lit by flames, stared at the huge man standing in the centre of their circle.

Abba Athanasius was a Nubian, dressed now as an Ishfaqi mystic. His body was a slab of black muscle, more like a force of nature than flesh and blood. He was naked but for a black loincloth and kudu-skin bands that decorated his arms and legs.

Sensing the hour, he held up his right arm and bellowed, ‘Dance for the darkness in your heart!’

‘Amen!’ they roared, and the music began.

In the centre of the circle, black men drummed on hollow logs; staring unseeing at the flames. Light gleamed off the sweat on their muscles.

Other musicians played flutes and horns. The cult was of every creed and colour: Muslims, Christians, Druze, Alawites, Copts, Maronites and Bogomils.

The crowd danced as if they were one. Concentric rings of people moved in and out like a giant organism breathing. Their stamping feet stirred up the dust in the moonlight.

The dancers ululated. They made sharp cracks with little brass hand-cymbals. The sound was deafening, a heavy cloth of noise draped over them, suffocating their senses.

Abba Athanasius ran to and fro in the middle of the rings. He held a small drum in one hand and struck it repeatedly with a stick. He bounded around the circle, leaped in the air and screamed at the crowd, urging them on.

A young German knight, Eberhardt von Steltzenberg, danced himself into a frenzy and opened his heart to a nefarious force.

The rhythm grew faster and faster. The crowd shouted louder and louder. The drummers beat harder and harder.

The witch doctor suddenly stood stock-still. Sensing a spiritual climax he threw an arm up into the air.

‘Silence!’ he bellowed, and the drummers and musicians stopped.

The crowd gave a great groan as though winded by a blow. A sorrowful sound; as if coughed up out of the recesses of their souls.

The silence was overwhelming. It pressed itself into their heads. Men cried out and fell down on their knees.

Abba Athanasius called out to the drummers, in a quiet voice, ‘Softly,’ and they began a gentle rhythm.

As they played, the black priest picked a large metal censer off the ground. It was made of three heavy iron chains attached to the rim of a metal pan. A lid with holes in it slid down the chains to cover the pan. Abba Athanasius flung the container into the fire and scooped it out, brimming over with hot coals.

As he was doing this, a gang of huge Nubian men pushed their way in through the crowd. They were naked as bulls, faces as powerful and impassive as cliffs.

Four of them were holding staves with solid metal ends, which they used to push the crowd aside. Behind them came a man lugging a narrow iron bucket, and two more carrying a heavy chest between them. Another four held the poles of a litter supporting a three-foot-long lump of rock like black glass. The Nubian Deathstone. The men staggered under its weight.

It was so dark and shiny that it seemed to have a light inside it, as if it knew something.

They pushed their way through the worshippers. When they came into the clearing they set the litter down. The priest leaped onto it, straddling the Deathstone, silhouetted in the light of the fire. His hands grasped the shaft of a sledgehammer and swung it up over his head. With a cry he brought down a swingeing blow on the stone.

The sound rang out and a lump the size of a fist split off. The priest scrambled to pick it up. He held the rock above his head to show to the devotees. They groaned like cattle.

Abba Athanasius flung the lump into the metal mortar that the Nubians had brought with them. The men with poles arranged themselves around it and began to pound the rock to powder with their metal staves, just like the women in their home villages pounded cassava. They drove the heavy poles down so that they thudded in a constant rhythm.

As they worked, the priest threw open the chest; using a trowel he heaped incense from it into the censer. Lumps of myrrh produced a cloud of sweet fragrance. Other spices threw up puffs of white smoke. Finally he poured in trowels of opium resin.

When the rock was ground to powder the priest stood up on the litter and raised the heavy mortar above his head. A Nubian held the censer up to him by its chains. Abba Athanasius bent down and carefully poured the fine black crystal powder onto the pile of ingredients and then slid the cover down the chains and over the pan.

Black smoke poured out of holes in the lid. The huge monk took hold of the chains and whirled the censer around his head, sending out clouds of sparks into the night whilst he chanted prayers.

He gestured to the crowd to kneel and made his way around the rings of worshippers with the censer, dispensing a strange benediction. As he moved along the lines of kneeling figures he held the chain so that the pan passed underneath each bowed head. Evil, black clouds of narcotic smoke poured out, and each worshipper took a deep inhalation.

Eberhardt kneeled and stared at the Deathstone. Its gleaming black depths mesmerised him; he could feel it reaching out to him, pulling him into its mystery.

What was its secret knowledge?

Where had it come from?

What was it saying to him?

He knew he had to find its source, hidden somewhere in the heart of Africa. It would be his purpose in life.

He heard the priest coming along the row. The young knight had been shaken by the worship; his broad shoulders trembled with each breath. He bowed his head as the priest neared; his long, brown hair fell around his face. Nervously he brushed it back behind his ears. The huge man was mumbling some blessing in a language that he did not understand, over and over again as he walked slowly along.

Eberhardt could see the red glow of the censer out of the corner of his eye and prepared himself.

The first whiff of smoke caught at his nose, intensely fragrant. He forced himself to take a huge gulp of it as it passed under him.

Hot, noxious vapour filled his throat and bronchioles. He felt a seizure in his respiratory tract under the powerful chemical assault.

His throat burned and convulsed. He could not breathe. The strong opiate hit his brain as the black miasma of the Deathstone worked its way into his body and being.

Darkness invaded his heart.

He felt both lifted up and cast down, overawed and appalled. He had been invested by something profound yet terrible.

He clutched at his throat but no air came in. He passed out and fell face down on the ground.

THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER, LONDON

‘Alexander, this is your father.’

The upper-class growl was slurred by drink.

His father’s use of Alex’s full name was a danger signal. He was in a fighting mood, when the frustrations in his life boiled over and he picked fights with those closest to him to displace his anger.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Alex was at his desk in his family’s house in Fulham. He did a quick mental calculation: it was after lunchtime so his father must be drunk. He could picture him now, wearing his old tweed suit, sitting in his worn armchair in the drawing room of Akerley, the family house in Herefordshire, where he lived alone, looking out of the big bay window over the parkland.

Sir Nicholas Devereux was an ex-cavalry officer and an alcoholic. The Devereux had been loyal servants of the Crown since Guy D’Evreux had fought for the Conqueror at Hastings. There had been one of the family serving in the Household Division every year since Waterloo — until Alex left without a son to replace him. Membership of the family might have its privileges but it came with its burdens as well.

Alex knew where his father’s problems stemmed from: the source of all known evil — his grandmother. She was an intelligent, strong-minded woman trapped by social convention in the role of an aristocratic adornment. Her talents had turned sour and she took to displacing her personal disappointments on others, dismembering their characters with a cold sadism. Her acidic remarks had been fired at her son from the end of the long dining-room table for years, and had knocked his confidence to bits, driving him to drink and then to taking out his frustration violently on his wife. She had told Alex later that the first time he had beaten her had been on their wedding night.

Alex sometimes wondered if he was next in line for this legacy. Whether he would simply repeat the pattern of negative behaviour, transmitted down through the generations in a cycle of anger and destruction. The Devereux might be an ancient, landed family but the poison and the privilege seemed to go hand in hand.

However, it was one thing to understand his father’s problems, another entirely to deal with them. Alex’s upbringing had been a painful one, surrounded by the conflict between the Devereux’s supposed noble grandeur and wealth, and the crappy reality of the life around him — his father’s drinking bouts and his attacks on Alex’s mother. He remembered the fear that gripped him and his younger sister, Georgina, when the fights erupted. The two of them used to run off to a barn to hide until they guessed that their father had passed out. They had avoided those conflicts but George hadn’t got away from the problem entirely. Anorexia had forced her to leave Wycombe Abbey and she was now married to a similarly vain, flashy man, Rory, a barrister who drank too much.

Alex and George’s mother had struggled valiantly to keep their dysfunctional home together, until stomach cancer had overwhelmed her when Alex was in his early teens. Things had started to go downhill soon afterwards. The electricity had been cut off regularly, and he remembered overhearing the shouting matches between his father and suppliers in the courtyard when they turned up at the house demanding payment.

The most humiliating episode for Alex had been when he was summoned to a meeting with his housemaster at boarding school, who explained in the kindliest tones that he was going to have to leave because his fees hadn’t been paid. Alex had gone home for a week until another field had been sold off to pay the bill. He had burned with shame as he had walked into breakfast on his first day back amid the other boys’ taunts and jeers.

Despite all this, Alex had been brought up to be loyal and dutiful. Wellington was an army school and had drilled the service ethic into him — although he couldn’t help seeing the irony of its motto: ‘Sons of heroes.’ His father had insisted that Alex follow him into the Blues and Royals straight from Wellington, without going to university: ‘You don’t need any of that leftie claptrap.’

His father’s reputation and his own lack of a degree had been key factors in Alex not being promoted from major to colonel. He had thus faced the prospect of becoming that stock figure of quiet ridicule in English society: the passed-over major. A Tim-Nice-But-Dim, a try-hard who had never made it. Traditionally they were to be found in retirement in the provinces, living off their pensions, running village fêtes or gymkhanas.

His upbringing had left Alex with a brittle pride. This touchiness would not let him face the ignominy of hanging around the regiment to complete sixteen years’ service before picking up his pension, so he had left and joined the world of private military companies. He was a romantic and hated the idea of joining his former colleagues in the usual safe jobs they went on to — insurance broking or estate agency — and so he had turned to becoming the original freelancer.

His father had objected virulently, spitting out the word ‘mercenary’ with contempt. In response Alex was quietly and bitterly angry at him for having ruined his chance of serving his country as he’d hoped. An intense suppressed tension had existed between them ever since.

‘Hello, Dad,’ Alex said now in a controlled voice. He tried above all things not to lose his temper. His father was pathetic but he was still his father.

‘So, have you fixed that roof of yours then?’

The roof in the family home in Bradbourne Road was leaking. His father had a sixth sense for picking out the things that were bothering Alex most and challenging him on them. ‘Keeping you on your toes’, he called it.

Alex had been back in London a month now since his contract in Angola had ended. He had effectively put himself out of a job by finishing off the bandits who had plagued the Lucapa diamond mine since the end of the civil war.

Money was the other main issue chiselling away at Alex’s heart. He had no new assignments lined up and his usual contacts in the defence business had not been able to pass on even the hint of a new project. It usually took several months to get a contract sorted out and he was not sure how he was going to pay the bills and fix his leaking roof in the meantime.

Lists of figures would drift through his head at night. There was the exorbitant estimate to redo the roof, which, combined with all the other repairs to his crumbling home, was over six figures, and his neighbours were threatening legal action if he didn’t get on with it. He had also recently received letters from another firm of lawyers, threatening him over his father’s debts. The old man had obviously lost control of Akerley entirely, although Alex still didn’t know the full extent of the problem.

He took a deep breath and tried to fend off his father’s jab. ‘Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got some quotes—’

‘Working on it! What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m not there yet but I will be.’

‘Working on it, Alex, always working on it,’ Sir Nicholas chuckled with derision. ‘You see, you need to be a bit more bloody decisive, like me.’

‘Hmm,’ Alex muttered.

‘Now look, the dry rot is getting very bad in the north wing here, lot of the roof timbers are about to go. Seeing as you’re just back from Africa and flush with funds I expect that you can fork out a bit to help keep the place running.’

‘Dad, I need to get Bradbourne sorted out first.’

‘Bugger Bradbourne, child! What about looking after your alma mater!’ This was a well-worn argument. His father knew that the family pile was no longer sustainable since he had sold off most of the farmland around it, but had made it his cantankerous cause célèbre to die in the house he was born in.

Alex’s jaw tightened. He stood up and began pacing back and forth in the living room. He pressed the receiver hard against his head and his dark brows drew together.

‘Look, let’s just get to the point here, Dad. We need to sell Akerley. Without the land the house is just a liability — we’re living in the ruins of our history. We can’t go on as if we’re …’ he raised his free hand in exasperation, ‘… in the Middle Ages or something. You know we—’

‘And you know damn well that I never will, so don’t you start that cant again! If you were earning some decent bloody money as a colonel, instead of pissing around with nignogs in the bush, you might actually be able to start putting something back into this family!’

Alex stopped pacing; his shoulders heaved and he put his head down, his eyes closed, as he summoned up all his strength not to retaliate.

With forced calm he said: ‘I am trying my best, Dad.’

‘Trying won’t do, Alexander! If you weren’t such a fucking failure the family wouldn’t be in this bloody mess!’

‘I am not a fucking failure!’ His voice cracked into a shout of rage.

Provoked.

Exposed.

Defeated,

Humiliated.

He had failed.

He had been drawn into an argument, allowing his father to score the petty victory he had been looking for to make himself feel better.

Alex slammed the phone down but he could hear the braying, triumphant laugh all the way from Herefordshire. His father’s uncanny ability to zero in on his weakness had worked yet again.

Alex was shaking with anger as he walked to the back of the living room and stood with his hands on his hips, staring out of the window at the overgrown back garden. He did not see or hear anything else as the scene played itself over in his head.

Murderous fury consumed half of him; the rest was simply crushed by his father’s scorn and his own fear of what he was.

I am not a fucking failure!

The phone rang again.

He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment and then snatched it off the cradle and barked, ‘Yes!’

‘Mr Devereux?’ asked a voice in a concerned tone.

Alex could not place the accent exactly, something Middle Eastern but with an American overtone.

He forced himself to sound more civil. ‘Yes, this is Alexander Devereux.’

‘My name is Mr Al-Khouri. I represent an organisation that is interested in doing some business with you, Mr Devereux.’

‘Yes?’ Alex replied cautiously.

‘I realise that you cannot talk on the phone but I would be interested to meet you tomorrow to outline a project.’

‘Right,’ Alex managed.

‘I have booked a table for tea at the Ritz at three o’clock tomorrow. Would that be acceptable?’

‘Fine …’ Alex said slowly, avoiding commitment as he desperately tried to think if he wanted to go. He knew he did not have any alternative, and the Ritz was about as unthreatening a place as one could meet in.

‘Very well, Mr Devereux. Just ask for my table, Mr Al-Khouri, and it’s jacket and tie,’ he said in a smug tone.

‘Right, OK. Thank you,’ Alex tried to end the conversation sounding as if he was in control.

As usual, Alex arrived early; army habits died hard.

He was wearing highly polished black Oxfords, his bespoke blue pinstripe suit with a crisply ironed white shirt, and his Cavalry and Guards blue and red striped tie.

He didn’t like being so obvious about his regiment — ‘cabbage’ was their derisory term for flaunting the connection too overtly — but this was business, and he knew it was one of the few British army symbols that foreigners in his line of work recognised and valued.

He walked up the side entrance steps on Arlington Street and was greeted by a smartly uniformed porter with white gloves tucked into one of the epaulettes of his overcoat.

He was shown along the broad entrance hall by an overly suave waiter in black tie and a white dinner jacket. The middle of the Palm Court tearoom was dominated by an enormous gilt urn decorated with palms. A lady in a sequined dress tinkled away at a piano on one side.

Alex cringed; the whole effect was one of stifling fussiness. The sparse clientele included grandmothers being taken out on their birthdays, aspirational fathers fulfilling their dreams by bringing cowed wives and children out for tea at the Ritz. Conversation was reduced to a subdued level by the formality.

‘Mr Al-Khouri is over there, sir,’ said the officious waiter, his arm extended grandly to point to a table in the far corner of the room. Alex straightened his shoulders and walked over slowly, eyeing his potential business partner carefully.

On first sight Mr Al-Khouri looked the epitome of a wealthy playboy: about thirty-five, blow-dried black hair, average height, slim build and cleanshaven. He was wearing a white shirt with a black Armani suit and tie.

The man stood up as Alex approached, all slick smiles and competitive bonhomie. ‘Mr Devereux. Please come, sit down, sit down.’

‘Alexander Devereux,’ said Alex unnecessarily, and gave his firmest handshake as he towered over the smaller man. It was all part of the male posturing, manoeuvring to show who was in charge.

‘Yes, yes. Kalil Al-Khouri. Thank you for coming, Mr Devereux. Tea for two, please.’ He signalled to the waiter hovering behind Alex. ‘Your finest Earl Grey,’ he added fastidiously.

‘A nice location.’ He swept his hand around the room.

‘Splendid,’ replied Alex.

‘I like to come to the Ritz when I am in town; it has a very … established feel. I do a lot of business in London.’ Kalil spread his hands and his voice dropped to a quieter conspiratorial tone. The word ‘business’ was deliberately vague, implying things far too important and secret to be spoken about in detail.

‘Right,’ Alex nodded, and waited for the posturing to stop.

‘So,’ Kalil tilted his head to one side, ‘my contacts tell me that you’ve been in Angola recently.’

Alex was not sure who Kalil’s contacts were but there was nothing secret in what he had said so far. Alex’s work was sanctioned tacitly by the Foreign Office so he had nothing to hide.

‘Yes, a contract on the Lucapa field in the north. Mine defence and security team training,’ said Alex.

‘And how did that go?’

‘It went well,’ he replied cautiously. ‘We had good support from the government,’ which was a lie, but he was always careful to sound positive about his employers. ‘We did a lot of clearing-up ops on the bandit groups in the area. Counterinsurgency, some armoured recce work.’ He wasn’t prepared to go into any more detail, and looked at Kalil, who was watching him carefully.

‘Well, that’s very much the line of work that we are interested in.’ He glanced around to see that the grandmother and her family two tables away were not taking notes. He steepled his fingers together and leaned towards Alex.

‘Can I confirm, in the first instance, that you would be free to be involved in a six-month project starting with immediate effect? The compensation package will be,’ again he paused for effect, ‘… extremely competitive.’

The waiter arrived with a triple-layered stand of cakes and a silver tea set on a tray. He fussed around laying them out and then left with a simpering smile.

Alex and Kalil resumed their conspiratorial huddle.

Alex nodded. ‘It would depend on the nature of the project, but yes, in theory, I would be available.’

‘Good.’ Kalil poured tea for them both and then sipped it slowly. Eventually he put his cup down and leaned over the table.

‘I represent a cartel of Lebanese diamond dealers,’ he continued quietly. ‘We are interested in hiring you to lead an operation involving a mechanised battle group in Africa. My understanding from your file is that this is your area of expertise?’

Alex stared him in the eye and nodded slowly.

Lebanese. They ran the diamond-trading networks in Africa and were famously secretive, but it sounded like a big job so in principle he was interested. The money would be good.

‘The cartel was extremely impressed with your file. You understand our position in the trade?’

‘In broad terms, yes.’ Alex had been involved in the business for long enough to have a good understanding of their role but he did not want to prevent any revelations so he held his hands out in a gesture inviting further comment.

‘We are the comptoirs — the middlemen on the ground — in Africa, who supply the markets in Amsterdam and the Far East. De Beers, Steinmetz and the rest have been getting very antsy about CSR and blood diamonds of late, but we’re not too angst-ridden about all that.’ He tossed his head dismissively.

Alex was pleased that Kalil was dropping the bullshit and speaking more openly.

Corporate Social Responsibility was a buzzword of all the multinationals. It was supposed to be about ethical behaviour towards indigenous peoples and the environment, and generally not behaving like rapacious capitalists. All well and good, but for small fry like Alex it meant that big firms were no longer prepared to operate in the sort of lawless areas where his skills would be in demand. He was not bothered to hear it denigrated.

‘I mean, we can’t afford to be.’ Kalil looked at Alex with his eyebrows raised to see if he was going to get precious.

Alex shrugged to indicate that he was not bothered about exact adherence to the codes of practice that the larger security firms followed these days. He was not in a position to be picky.

‘Let me be plain, Mr Devereux.’ Kalil took on a serious expression. ‘This operation would be illegal by all international law codes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about genocide, but it does involve an attack across sovereign borders. Not that that means squat in the parts of the world we’re talking about. It’s basically a dispute between two private enterprises over a diamond field in the Central African Republic. If you don’t feel comfortable in that situation, please tell me now.’

Alex looked at him. He didn’t know the man from Adam. Was he a plant sent to trap him into an admission of illegality? Was he wired? He couldn’t tell. He needed the money. He shrugged again.

‘I’ll take that as a yes. Don’t worry, Mr Devereux, the cartel is a bona fide organisation and we are as concerned to protect ourselves from outside scrutiny on this as you would be, so we are doing things very carefully. I think that is about as far as we can go on the operational details for now.’ He indicated the incongruous surroundings with an open gesture of both hands.

‘Tell me about your time in the army,’ he said, sitting back and switching topics. His hand hovered over the teacakes as he chose one. He ate it, catching the crumbs with one hand under his chin, as Alex detailed his career résumé.

‘I was commissioned into the regiment and served with them in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Bosnia. I trained for armoured recce with Striker, Spartan and Scimitar, and then main battle tanks with Challenger 2, so I am able to deal with all types of armoured warfare operations. We were also part of 5 Airborne when we were at Windsor so I have done paratrooper training and can handle infantry ops as well.’

‘And you left as a major?’

‘Yes.’

This was another tricky topic for Alex. He did not want to say that he could not face being a passed-over major.

‘The British Army is the best in the world,’ he went on, ‘but I wanted to get more action and independence so I went into the defence business …’ It was a downright lie but he was so used to telling it that he sounded like he meant it. What he had really wanted to do was to stay and serve his country as a colonel.

‘And have served with companies in Sierra Leone, Congo and Angola?’ Kalil dipped his head interrogatively.

‘Correct.’

Now that Kalil had dropped the act he seemed to be much more down-to-earth. Alex was not exactly warming to him but at least he thought he was someone he could do business with.

The chitchat continued until they had finished their cups of tea and then Kalil stood up, swept his hand through his hair, chucked a fifty-pound note dismissively on the table and led the way out.

As they walked to the hotel lobby Kalil’s quick eye caught the display of ‘Ritz Fine Jewellery’ cabinets arranged along one side. He stopped to look at the cases of rings, necklaces and brooches.

‘You see, this is what it’s all about.’ He pointed out a diamond pendant to Alex and spoke with sudden enthusiasm. ‘This is what we in the cartel do. This is a white diamond — yes?’

He looked at Alex, who bent down to inspect it and then nodded, wondering why he was asking such a question.

The immaculate sales manager stood up from her desk and came across to them. She was a suitably striking addition to the Ritz: tall, with long blonde hair and an elegant black dress.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ she asked Kalil in a voice as polished as one of her stones.

‘Hey, how are you?’ Kalil looked up, slightly startled, and fired off the standard American greeting rather defensively.

She had had enough American customers to know that the question was not meant to be answered and nodded in return as Kalil continued without pausing.

‘I’m looking for a coloured diamond. You gotta coloured diamond?’ His eyes were flicking over the displays.

‘We have some over here, sir.’ She led the way across to where a row of select-looking cabinets were set into the wall. The pieces in them sparkled alluringly under the lights.

‘We have a natural Vivid Yellow stone set in a necklace here and this is a natural Vivid Green stone in a ring.’

‘That’s it! OK, lemme do a price comparison. Can you get me a white stone the same carat as that, please?’

The manageress walked over to the cabinets in the middle of the room. Kalil’s black eyes flicked a quick glance over her svelte backside. He watched her intently as she paused to pull a pair of white cotton gloves onto her slender hands. She unlocked a cabinet, took out a ring, closed it carefully and walked back.

‘This is a one-carat white diamond.’ She held it up and it sparkled pure white light.

‘Can we compare it to the green one, please?’

She nodded obligingly and unlocked the cabinet on the wall. There was a soft peep of an alarm as it slid open.

‘Now, look at this, see?’ Kalil held the new ring up to Alex and turned it back and forth so that it caught the light. At first glance it appeared clear but as the light played on the facets it sparked green.

Alex had never had much interest in the aesthetics of diamonds before but he had to admit that it was captivating how the colour appeared from nowhere.

‘You see, same chemical structure as a diamond — it’s not an emerald — but totally different effect. They’re formed when the diamond is in the presence of radioactive minerals: uranium oxide, molybdenum, radon. You know, they get all hot and compressed in a kimberlite pipe, all that stuff,’ he said dismissively, assuming Alex knew the basics of diamond formation.

‘Hmm,’ Alex murmured with genuine interest, continuing to peer at the stone.

‘OK,’ Kalil held up the two rings and turned to the manageress. ‘What’s the price comparison between them?’

‘OK, well, this stone is—’

‘It’s a one-carat stone, ya?’

‘Yes, they are both one-carat stones. The value of this white diamond is eleven thousand.’

‘Dollars?’

‘Sterling.’

‘And the green diamond?’ Kalil held it up in anticipation of the punchline.

‘The value of this diamond is one hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’

‘You see …’ Kalil nodded and looked at Alex with a smug grin on his face.

‘OK, so we’re talking about a …’ Alex paused to do the maths, ‘… a fourteen times price differential.’

Kalil nodded again in satisfaction at having made his point.

‘OK. Thank you, ma’am.’ He handed the stones back to her. ‘We’re just looking around at the moment.’

He gave her his most charming smile and led the way out of the hotel and onto the darkened street. They stood under a streetlamp.

‘Ya, OK, so apologies about that. Got a little overexcited.’ Again the quick grin flashed. ‘But the point for us is this.’ He leaned towards Alex. ‘The field we’re gonna capture in Central African Republic produces green diamonds.’

11 P.M., THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

The man sat alone in the room watching the silent black-and-white film flicker awkwardly on the screen. The pictures jumped sometimes, the camerawork was amateur. The room was quiet but for the soft whirr of the projector and the whine of mosquitoes drifting through its beam.

The camera panned over a long table on a terrace; soldiers slouched around it on chairs. SS double lightning-flash tabs showed on their collars. The table was covered in the casual debris of a good lunch: messy plates, bowls of couscous, tagines, grapes and bottles of wine. The men were smoking. As the camera went closer and interrupted their conversations they smiled and waved good-naturedly.

The shot swung round to a tall man with blond hair, scraped down in a severe short back and sides. He was leaning back on a railing in front of a view — Tripoli harbour. The man in the room recognised it.

The soldier wore the field-grey tunic and insignia of a major in the Waffen SS. His tunic buttons were undone and he held a cigarette in an off-hand way. He had the commanding but relaxed air of natural authority as he talked to the camera. Standing next to him was a pretty, petite woman in a tight-fitting, floral print dress. She had black hair pinned up in a 1940s fashion and was listening attentively to what he was saying, her eyes sparkling.

The officer began pointing out sights in the harbour. The camera swung awkwardly back and forth between him and the ships in the bay. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth, said something, grinned cheekily at the camera and then looked quickly at her.

Handsome bastard.

The woman clapped her hands delightedly and flashed a black-eyed smile at the lens.

She was a looker as well.

Her gesture was all the more powerful for its complete lack of affectation. She was beautiful but modest with it. She kept her eyes lowered and the laugh only broke out when the girlish exuberance of her nature could no longer be contained.

The film continued with the woman listening to everything the major said and he touched her arm affectionately once. Eventually the film ran out and the scene cut off abruptly.

The man behind the projector continued to stare at the bright white square on the screen. His heart far away, his eyes filled with angry tears.

AUGUST 1522, STELTZENBERG, SOUTHWEST GERMANY

Eberhardt von Steltzenberg lay asleep on his four-poster bed in the tower of his castle, his barrel chest exposed. The canopy over the bed was worn and moth-eaten, full of dust and dead flies.

It was a hot night; a mass of cloud brooded over the single main tower of his cramped castle in the forest. It blotted out the moon and stars, pouring a thick darkness over the land. His bedchamber took up the whole of the first floor of the tower. The heavy old ceiling beams were hung with cobwebs. His accoutrements littered the room: a suit of armour, his lance, saddles, his chests of clothes.

On one side of the room was the trap door that led down to the great hall where his manservant and his ten hunting dogs slept; their excreta mixed with the rushes on the floor. The hot stench of it rose up through the gaps in the floorboards.

The tower was packed with heat. There had been clear summer skies for the last few weeks; the dark red sandstone had been baked like a kiln during the day and now emanated warmth. The main door was barred shut and no breeze could stir through the five thin arrow slits that punctured the walls of the knight’s chamber. A heavy weight pressed on the air in the room.

The figure on the bed breathed in slowly, his eyes fluttering in deep sleep, and then stopped.

Dreaming furiously, Eberhardt saw a black spot appear in his heart.

He could see it against the deep red in his chest.

It grew slowly.

He watched it.

What was it?

It was getting larger and heavier. He could feel the weight of it beginning to strain the fibres in his chest, like heartburn. It was hard and jet black, cutting into his soft tissues.

The Nubian Deathstone had returned.

He knew it.

What was it doing there? Why had it come back to him now after twenty-one years?

Blackness swirled out of it like a mist and began branching out along the blood vessels in his heart. The tendrils were reaching across his chest like black ivy.

Confusion at first but fear coming now.

He could feel the strength of the strands clutching at him, squeezing him. He could not breathe. Terror built, pouring through his veins.

‘I can’t breathe!’ he screamed.

The figure on the bed twitched and convulsed. It groaned and scrabbled at its chest with both hands.

His eyes flew open.

Now he could see it properly! He could see the Deathstone and the black miasma that was choking him. It was the smoke from the stone all over again — the cloud of it was now moving in and out of his body at will.

In the darkness he saw it clearly. The rock pressed down on him, forcing him deeper into the mattress. He struggled desperately against it, thrashing his arms and legs. He was a being of fear fighting a being of darkness.

A mighty effort and he was on his feet.

The darkness was all over him, both within and without, coiling around his body and weighing him down. The stone hung down inside him, the darkness wriggling through his blood vessels, penetrating out through his ears and his eyes, choking his throat. He had to escape it, he had to breathe!

He lurched across the room, blundered into a chest and fell onto his knees.

It had him on his knees now; he had to fight back.

He forced himself through the pain and straightened his legs. There in front of him was an arrow slit. He could sense the clean air outside. He could tear the slit open and escape the foulness that was forcing itself down his throat. His fingers gripped the thin stone edge of the slit where it narrowed in through the thick walls.

He tore at it with all his might. His huge shoulders knotted, the tendons tensed and sweat stood out on his skin.

It did not move. The stone blocks were ancient but well laid.

‘The Deathstone is conspiring against me. It has seeped into the stones here.’

He lurched around the edge of the room, supporting himself with one arm against the wall. His fingers found the next arrow slit and he heaved on that. Again it stayed resolute.

‘No!’

The figure blundered round the circular room, pawing at the wall and then tearing at the arrow slits. His fingers were torn and bleeding.

Five times he heaved and five times he failed. Finally he sank to his knees, wheezing for breath and clutching at his throat.

Above him the thunderheads were grinding against each other in the sky. Dark winds swirled around the tower. Lightning flashed, and then came an explosion of thunder that banged the room like a drum and shook the floorboards against his knees. The hunting dogs in the hall below started up, baying and howling.

The rain came in like a wave. It crashed against the stone, gushed off the guttering and spattered down the walls.

‘The sky. I can reach the sky.’

He lurched to his feet again and blundered up the crude wooden steps that led to the trap door in the ceiling. Scrambling up them on his hands and knees, he hit the trap door with his shoulder and flung it open. It banged back against the floorboards and terrified the old woman, his grandmother, who lived in the upper chamber. She shrieked from behind her bed curtains. Seizing her horsewhip, she threw them open and flew across the room in her nightgown, a white-clad banshee shouting obscenities and flailing at him with the whip.

‘A plague on you, you dog! Coming into a lady’s chamber!’

The new onslaught combined with the coiling darkness that still squeezed him. He ran from her and charged up the final steps to the roof. Flinging the next trap door open, he at last emerged into the air.

It was hot and thrashing down with rain. He was soaked instantly. He ran to the edge of the tower and leaned over a gap in the battlements, seventy feet up, whooping in air. The pressure in his chest began to ease.

The old woman caught up with him and laid the whip squarely across his back. He jerked with the pain, turned round and caught the whip. Anger at his oppressor filled him now that it had taken human form; at last he could fight back.

Strength flowed into his limbs; he seized the creature by the throat and lifted it off the ground. He grabbed one of its legs with the other hand, held it above his head.

A huge curtain of sheet lightning lit up the sky. The figure standing high up on the battlements was momentarily silhouetted against it.

It held the oppressor over its head for a second and then cast it down, down into the darkness.

SEPTEMBER 1522, PFÄLZERWALD FOREST, CENTRAL GERMANY

Eberhardt gently slit the soft white flesh on the inside of his forearm with his knife.

He clenched his fist and let the bright red blood run out and drip off his elbow. He aimed the drops so that they splashed richly on a patch of earth on the roadside.

‘Sir!’ Albrecht, his steward, shouted in alarm and tried to restrain him.

Eberhardt was enraged. ‘You swine!’ he bellowed, and angrily brushed the smaller man away. ‘Our blood cannot be separated from the soil that bore us! It will return! It will return again!’

He continued dripping blood, whilst he muttered through gritted teeth, ‘Blood and soil, blood and soil, we will become one again,’ like an incantation.

His hands held out, Albrecht wailed helplessly, ‘Sir, what are you doing?’ He screwed his eyes up and looked away.

‘I am a blood sacrifice for the German nation!’ Spittle flecked Eberhardt’s beard as he shouted through the pain. ‘I will become an oblation poured onto the soil. The soil that raised us, that has cradled us since our inception. Our father, our mother … our land!’

It was mid-morning, three days after the tragedy on the tower. Eberhardt was not sure what had happened to his grandmother. Her broken body had been discovered the next morning, cold and wet in the mud: did she jump or had he thrown her? He was unsure if he had experienced a dream or a spiritual visitation. Either way, his brush with the Deathstone had unsettled him. Why had it returned to him? What mission was it calling him to?

Albrecht had put it about in the village that his master’s grandmother had taken fright at the thunder and leaped to her death, and few had enquired further. He was a middle-aged, worrisome character who peered out suspiciously at the world from under a thatch of brown hair.

In contrast, his master was a big man in his forties, an old roué whose appetites had overrun his frame; his gut bulged out over his hose. He had a mane of silvery hair, with a heavy beard cut off square just under his chin. His eyes were rheumy and the skin of his face sagged like the canvas of an old tent.

Eberhardt was a Raubritter — a Robber Knight — although he preferred just to call himself a knight. He was from an ancient German family, but was really a bandit in charge of a cramped castle, a village and a few square miles of the Pfälzerwald.

The imminent Knights’ War against the Imperial Princes had revived some of his youthful passion.

He shouted at Albrecht, cowering in front of him, ‘The Pope and the Princes are ransacking the German people! The Emperor has banned our right of feud! The Knights won’t stand for it. The German people won’t stand for it!’

‘Yes, but—’

‘The good Dr Luther has raised the clarion call against the papists — Rome is leeching this country dry! We Knights will ride against the Princes. The time for sacrifice has come, Albrecht!’

They were two days’ ride from home in a shady spot in the forest, on the way south towards Landau, where the Knights were rallying. Eberhardt had spontaneously made his blood gesture on a break in their journey, having brooded on their mission as they rode along that morning.

‘Things can’t go on as they are.’

With this statement of fact he calmed down at last and stopped clenching his fist. He held his arm out to Albrecht.

‘Bind it up.’

Albrecht rummaged in the saddlebags of his horse for some spare cloth. He walked back over to Eberhardt and began binding his forearm. He was a simple man who focused on practical arrangements and left matters of national politics and religion to his lord. He was not even sure what Eberhardt meant by the concept of ‘the German people’. The Holy Roman Empire covered the area and was composed of hundreds of states run by Princes, and imperial free cities. Such ideas were beyond him.

The Knights had been able to hold their lands in this strange hotchpotch for centuries because they had the legal right from the Holy Roman Emperor to conduct armed feuds. This was supposed to allow the chivalrous art of war to be practised but was now just an excuse for murder and racketeering.

The new Emperor, Charles V, had tired of such anarchy and triggered the Knights’ War by banning their right of feud. The Knights had been declining for centuries and saw this as their last-ditch attempt to hold on to what little status they had left.

‘We’ll teach them a lesson,’ Eberhardt mused as he watched Albrecht tie off the white cloth.

‘There you go.’ His servant looked at his neat handiwork with satisfaction. Although he was used to his master’s outlandish manner, he was relieved that Eberhardt had calmed down.

He had known Eberhardt since he was a boy and he had always been a romantic. As a student at Heidelberg University he was an enthusiastic Renaissance man: a knight but a scholar as well, one who had joined the German intellectual revival that was shedding light into the Dark Ages. He was so inspired by the new thinkers that he’d begun writing his own magnum opus entitled The Quest for Glory, and had developed his own motto, Lumensfero!

However, these lofty ideas had been undermined when he was caught in bed with a professor’s wife. He had to flee, and travelled south where he fell in with a company of Landsknecht, German mercenaries, heading down to the Italian Wars, where he proved to be a brave soldier.

He journeyed on to Constantinople and fell in love with its exoticism. People of all creeds and cultures passed in front of him in a kaleidoscope of colours, languages and scents.

He felt preternaturally alive. His skin was taut; he could sense his body pushing against it, straining to take in all the new experiences. It was a wild, mad, beautiful time.

With sensations such as these it was no wonder that he had been writing like a fury. Every spare minute he had, he would sit and transcribe his adventures. He accumulated so many books that he had to bundle them up and send them back to Ludwig Fritzler, an old university friend working in the Heidelberg library.

When he thought back to those times, Eberhardt often wondered what had happened to Abba Athanasius, the Nubian mystic who led the Ishfaqi cult. He was such an odd mixture of religions. ‘Abba’ meant Father in Aramaic and ‘Athanasius’ meant immortal in Greek — both came from his background as a Coptic Christian priest. But he had then formed a cult that mixed elements of Islam and Christianity with animism, the worship of spirits. In this case the spirit was inside a large piece of black rock found in the heart of an extinct volcano in central Africa: the Deathstone.

The strange priest was the biggest human being that Eberhardt had ever seen, as forbidding and impenetrable as the Deathstone itself. With his bald head and black flowing robes he had a charisma as powerful and brooding as the volcano that the Stone came from.

He preached that the mountain was the new Mount Sinai and that it held the keys to the gates of death. The people there feared the Stone; those who had worked in mining it had all died of strange diseases.

Eberhardt was enthralled by the cult and took part enthusiastically in its ceremonies. In the Deathstone he was sure that he had discovered the nexus between life and death; an object that had true meaning.

The German had become a trusted follower of Abba Athanasius, with Latin their common language. His curiosity led him to ask the monk for the whereabouts of the holy mountain. Eventually he was given the task of organising an expedition to find the origins of the Stone.

He had set about planning avidly, obtaining directions from the monk and Arab traders that went into the area. Using rivers to mark out his route, he sketched a map along the Nile through the deserts of Egypt and Sudan and then southwest, cutting down right into the heart of the Dark Continent.

It was all planned out and he was getting ready to set off on his new odyssey when he received a letter from his mother. His father had died and he was summoned to return immediately to inherit his sestate before other greedy relatives tried to claim it.

It was a bitter blow; his heart had been set on the journey. In a daze he had walked into Abba Athanasius’ bare cell, clutching the letter, and with great sadness explained that he had to go home.

Eberhardt stared longingly at the sketch map he had drawn before folding it up and tucking it into his journal. Then he took a last look into the heart of the Nubian Deathstone, bade farewell to its mighty keeper and left.

But the Stone remained lodged deep inside him.

Eberhardt had gone back to be lord of his little patch of backwoods Germany. He had donated the remaining notebooks of The Quest for Glory to Ludwig and the library, and then for the past twenty years he had lived the life of a country squire in a damp and crowded castle, forced to stay put to retain his inheritance whilst going quietly mad, dreaming of foreign lands and the freedom of his youth.

Now though, the thrill of the campaign was beginning to awaken him once more as he mounted up and rode on south through the woods.

He could feel his skin tightening, his pulse quickening. The Deathstone was calling him for its purpose; he did not know what it was but he spurred his horse on to the coming war.

PRESENT DAY, 17 NOVEMBER, LONDON

‘OK, so here’s the plan for our war.’

Kalil stepped up to the projector screen and circled an area on the satellite image with his finger. Today he looked even more of a playboy than he had before. His black hair was neatly coiffured and he wore a pearlescent white shirt, designer jeans and expensive loafers.

‘This is the target area for the attack. The extinct volcano where they actually do the mining is here; the blue circle is the caldera lake in the crater.’

He smiled excitedly as he turned back to face Alex and Colin — ‘Col’ — Thwaites, a former sergeant-major from the Parachute Regiment, who were sitting on chairs in the plain meeting room. They watched him attentively, notepads on their knees. Kalil had provided a small rented mews office in Mayfair for them to work from. He apparently lived five minutes’ walk away but still drove to work and parked his silver Porsche Carrera in the basement garage.

‘This shot covers a four-hundred-square-mile area and as you can see there isn’t exactly a lot going on in the neighbourhood.’

Apart from some rivers, the lake was the only thing that broke the green carpet of jungle that filled the rest of the picture; the sharp cone of the volcano stood out from the flat terrain by its shadow.

‘OK, so if we zero in on this you can see some more detail of the actual buildings.’ Kalil clicked the remote and the image zoomed in.

‘These are very good shots.’ Alex nodded appreciatively. ‘Where did you get them from?’

The remark was well meant but Kalil reacted uncomfortably. ‘The cartel has … connections.’ He looked evasive and turned back to the screen.

Alex had not meant to be intrusive; he was just grateful to be back in work and was trying to show willing. He was in a much better mood than he had been lately. His restless mind needed to be constantly engaged, and sitting around at home fretting about bills had been driving him mad. With his first two months’ pay in advance in his bank account, and the promise of a lot more to come, he had been able to arrange for some builders to do the roof. Lavinia, his neighbour, was speaking to him again and had called off her lawyers.

However, he had also had a call from the bailiffs in Herefordshire saying that his father would be evicted in a month if bills for services and debt interest weren’t paid. Alex had handed over enough cash to fend them off for a while but he was anxious to get the project completed so that he could pay them in full. Despite everything, he was not going to see his father turned out onto the street and, strangely, now that the responsibility was his, he didn’t want to see his ancestral home lost either.

Apart from helping with his domestic problems, the project was also his chance to prove himself; to throw something to the dark wolves of self-doubt that had been biting him for so long. I can’t be a failure if I am responsible for all this? he thought.

It was the biggest thing he had been called on to organise — his own private army. Finally, his own independent command, the chance that had been denied him by the army. He furrowed his dark brows and concentrated on what Kalil was saying.

‘So, the mining goes on up here in the volcano. They have also built a little hydroelectric plant here, in this break in the crater wall, where the lake overflows. Smart way of getting power. The mine seems to be a pretty primitive setup, though: just shafts dug into the side of the crater by hand. We assume they must be using slave labour from somewhere as there is almost no local population in the immediate area apart from some Pygmies.

‘The ore from the mine gets dumped into a system of chutes down the side of the volcano here.’ Kalil traced a blurry line cut through the dense jungle on the mountainside. ‘Alongside them there seem to be ladders that they use to get the slaves up and down the slope. They then truck the ore along the road about a mile west to this complex here on the flat ground. This will be the actual focus for the attack.’

The photo showed a collection of buildings on the south shore of a small lake, which was fed by the stream flowing from the hydroelectric plant.

‘We’re not quite sure what all these buildings are — probably barracks for the slaves and soldiers.’ Kalil pointed to a series of evenly spaced long buildings. ‘There are two key areas for the assault — this factory structure here is where the power line comes in from the volcano plant and is presumably where the ore refining goes on.’ He turned back to face the two soldiers and raised an index finger for emphasis. ‘It is essential that this is seized intact at the first opportunity.’

Alex and Col nodded and noted this on their pads.

‘The second focus of the assault must be on these houses along the lake shore, where we guess the command and control element live.’ Kalil paused. Then:

‘I must emphasise to you that the cartel requires that you neutralise this command and control element permanently.’ He looked at Alex for a long moment.

Alex looked him straight in the eye and then nodded.

There was no point in being squeamish about it; killing people was his job. What else did he expect if he agreed to start an illegal private war?

Alex stood up and tapped the map with his Biro. ‘It’s got to be a helicopter assault.’ He stepped back and crossed his arms. The three of them looked at the detailed satellite photograph.

‘Hmm, I don’t fancy dropping into that lot with a parachute.’ Col pointed at the dense jungle foliage around the mine. ‘Might catch me bollocks on a palm tree.’

Col Thwaites was in his mid-forties and had been working with Alex through all his operations in Africa. Sharp, tough and a stickler for military professionalism, he was the mainstay of the group of freelancers that Alex was currently assembling for the job.

Like many Paras he was short, stocky and wiry; aggressive energy making up for what he lacked in size. He was balding on top, with close-cropped grey hair, a coarse-boned face with gimlet eyes, and a small moustache. Tattoos of Blackburn Rovers on his right forearm and the Parachute Regiment badge on his left completed the picture of a Northern hard man. Wry comments and an endless stream of poor-taste jokes were delivered in a harsh Lancashire accent.

He had been born on a council estate in Blackburn with a restless natural intellect that failed to achieve anything at school. Drifting into a life of glue-sniffing and petty crime, he had signed up for 2 Para with a mate one day because they had been watching The Professionals the night before and knew that the lead hard man, whom they worshipped, was a TA Para.

As with many wastrels before him, the strictures of army discipline had provided the channel to focus his energies. He had fought in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War and Bosnia. He had risen to be a sergeant-major in the Pathfinders, the Para’s élite reconnaissance unit, and done stints all over the world, training and advising Special Forces.

Alex and Col had been through a lot of combat together in Africa. Ordinarily toff officers from posh cavalry regiments were not respected by hardened Paras; ‘Ruperts’ was the standard dismissive name they used for them.

However, Col had grown to respect Alex as an intelligent and focused commander. He realised that he had some personal demons, whatever they were — and Col had never asked — but they never got in the way of his work. Rather they were controlled by his upper-class English reserve, so that they fulminated under his black brows only emerging through his vigour and intense looks.

The Lebanese turned to Alex now. ‘You think helicopters would work?’

The tall major nodded. ‘Hmm, we’ll probably need about a hundred men altogether. Insert them here, here and here.’ He pointed to landing sites around the complex.

He looked at Col, who stood next to him with his arms folded, staring hard at the photo.

‘Aye, it’s double all right. Yeah, get some Mi-17s, twenty-two blokes in each, say …’ he cocked his head on one side, ‘… five? Bit of an air force but …’ he shrugged.

Kalil turned to Alex. ‘Whatever you think is necessary to get the job done, Alex — the cartel will pay for it. We just want that mine.’

‘Hmm,’ Alex nodded thoughtfully. ‘We’ll need a gunship as well to suppress ground fire when the troops land.’

‘I’ve heard there’s a Shark going in Transdneister,’ said Col chirpily.

‘A what?’ Kalil frowned.

‘A Kamov Ka-50 Black Shark — NATO codename Hokum. Fooking beast of a thing: 30mm cannon, rocket pods, automatic grenade launcher, you name it — it’s got it. Evil-looking, an’ all. It’s got two contra-rotating main rotors on top of each other so it don’t need a tail rotor.’ Col made excited twisting actions with one hand over the other. ‘Russian Army uses ‘em. Heard about it from Arkady — a mate of ours what works for a Russian transport outfit. The Fourteenth Army Group in Transdneister …’

Kalil had obviously lost him here so Col broke off, realising that the enclave was not well known outside the mercenary community. ‘It’s a little strip of land on the border between Ukraine and Moldova — the Russkies have been there since some dodgy deal that Yeltsin did, and sort of run the area as a criminal country, like. They don’t get paid much so the general keeps “losing!” kit.’ He wagged his fingers to indicate the irony.

‘Anyway, Arkady reckons he could get it for one and a half mil US, plus parts and ammo — fooking bargain. He ships stuff out of there the whole time to Africa in them big Ilyushins — no questions asked. They’d sell their granny for a pack a fags, they would.’

‘OK, sounds good.’ Kalil nodded uncertainly; he could only understand half of the words in the heavy Lancashire accent, and his American English meant he was confused by the expression ‘pack a fags’. However, at the same time he was impressed by the detail.

‘Yeah, you’ll have to come shopping with us there sometime. It’s sorta like a military Dubai really,’ said Col enthusiastically.

Kalil laughed nervously.

Alex chipped in, ‘Pretty much all the kit we’ll use is Russian.’

‘How so?’ Kalil asked.

‘Because it’s cheap, it’s robust and it kills people. It’s the standard equipment used in Africa, so we won’t need to train the soldiers to use it. But we’re going to need to do a CTR first,’ he continued, before they got too carried away; he knew it was not going to be that simple.

‘A what?’

‘A close target recce, mate,’ Col filled in for the Lebanese’s lack of British Army jargon. ‘That means me and ‘im doing the sneaky-beaky bit on foot round the mine.’ He made wiggly motions with one hand to indicate creeping about. ‘You know, like carrying our own shit and not farting for a week in case we make a noise. Fooking love that, me.’

Kalil looked at him confused; he didn’t get the standard-issue British Army sarcasm either. ‘Erm …’

‘We’ll have to do it.’ Alex folded his arms authoritatively. ‘There’s no way we can stake this much on some maps and satellite shots.’

‘Well, they’re pretty good, aren’t they? It took a lotta trouble to get them for you guys, you know.’

‘I’m sure it did, but success in these operations is all in the detail. I mean, what’s this?’ He traced a blurry line around the edge of the complex with his finger.

‘Perimeter fence?’

‘Yes, but is that all? There’s a large cleared area either side of it that could contain a lot of nasties. There are also these checkpoints on the approach roads and these little covered huts dotted around the perimeter; we don’t know what’s under the cover. I’m not going to risk this many blokes on it; we’re going a hell of a long way from anywhere safe and if we mess up we’re all dead.’ He paused. ‘Plus you said you wanted to come on the op,’ he smiled.

‘OK, OK. You’re the experts; I’ve never been to Africa. You do the C-whatever,’ Kalil smiled and capitulated. ‘Just don’t get fucking caught! I don’t think they like visitors.’

He picked up the projector remote control again. ‘Right, so that’s the target set up then. Let me just take you through some of the background on Central African Republic.’

The other two sat down and resumed taking notes. Kalil clicked up a map of the country and its neighbours on the screen.

‘OK, so as you can see the country at the heart of Africa is roughly triangular, with the Democratic Republic of Congo running along its base here, the Ubangi River forms much of that border,’ he traced it with his finger, ‘Sudan up here to the northeast, and Chad over there to the northwest. We’re going to be here in the southeast bit in Mbomou Province.

‘Now, as I am sure you are aware, like a lot of failed states, CAR is not so much a country as a platform for criminal activity. It is completely wrong to apply the idea of a nation state to it because the central government has virtually no control outside the capital and a few of the main towns. The rest of the country is controlled by rebel groups, criminal gangs and tribal militias.’

He looked down at his notepad to check his facts.

‘So, in the shitty country stakes CAR is right up there with the best of them: the IMF ranks it a hundred and sixty-eighth poorest in the world, out of a hundred and seventy-five. A lot of that is due to there being either civil war and no government, or peace and a government that steals everything.’ He shrugged at the irony. ‘Total population of about three million and a lot of them are around the capital, Bangui, giving the country a very low overall population density. To put that in context for you Brits; it’s five times the size of England but with fourteen times fewer people living in it.’

‘So basically, what yer saying is that it’s a whole lot of fook all,’ said Col, scratching his jaw thoughtfully.

‘I guess that’s right.’

Col wrote something down on his pad.

Alex kept his face straight but winced internally. He valued Col for his direct nature but he wished he wouldn’t let it rip during their client’s introductory briefing.

Kalil got going again.

‘The terrain is mainly flat with semi-desert in the north, then savannah and finally dense rainforest in the Ubangi River basin in the south. That’s us,’ again he smiled at his audience, ‘nice and hot and humid.

‘Economy is nearly all subsistence farming although it does have a lotta diamonds, gold, uranium, and other minerals, but these are largely unexploited because transport links are so poor … apart from our friends here.’ He tapped the area of the map where the mine was.

‘And finally, some relevant recent history: French Equatorial Africa got its independence in 1958 and then there was the usual story of one crappy dictator replacing another, although,’ he held up an index finger to mark the point, ‘from 1965 to 1976 they did succeed in having one of the more entertaining guys — Emperor Bokassa — saw himself as an African Napoleon — spent twenty-two million dollars on his coronation, including twenty-four thousand bottles of champagne.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Some party.

‘Eventually, even the French got pissed with him and pulled their troops out, so he turned to Colonel Gaddafi for money and military training — the Libyans themselves were after his uranium deposits.

‘After Bokassa was overthrown there was a long civil war with heavy fighting, diseases and banditry spreading across the country. Troops from Libya, Chad and rebel groups from the Congo all got involved. Ended up with General Bozize toppling Ange Patassé and declaring himself President,’ he shut his notebook decisively, ‘of what was left.’

Alex leaned back in his chair and looked at Kalil. ‘So, what you’re saying is it’s a bloody mess?’

Kalil was suddenly ashamed of his flippancy. He nodded. ‘Ya … it’s a mess. OK, that’s enough to start planning the campaign on. Let’s take a break there.’

The other two nodded. Col needed a cigarette and Kalil had declared the office no smoking. Alex didn’t smoke but wanted a chat with him so they went out into the narrow mews.

‘Col, can I just have a quick word?’ Alex asked as they moved away from the office to confer. ‘There’s something Kalil said that’s bothering me.’ He looked at the short sergeant quizzically. ‘If he’s running diamonds out of Africa for his job, how come he’s never been there?’

17 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

There is no more mournful scene than the aftermath of a fire.

The morning air was still. Wisps of smoke twisted up into it from the ashes of the torched village. Everything was burned black and white: the stumps of the hut walls, the kapok tree in the centre, the men and women who had resisted the attack the night before.

Colonel Ninja looked at the burned-out village but was no longer capable of feeling anything for it. He took a slow drag on his cigarette; the sound of a child crying was coming from somewhere nearby; there was a burst of machine-gun fire and it stopped.

His real name was André Kakodamba but that belonged to a person who was no longer alive. He was eighteen now but André had died aged ten when his home village in Congo had been raided by MLC militia. They took away all the children and brutalised them into soldiers; forced to mutilate and murder; each action a blow falling on his soul until it was numbed and his eyes frozen into blocks of ice.

He had killed his own soul. Now all he knew was how to force others to do the same. He had learned that fear was the key to life: fear of being hungry, beaten or shot. Gradually he had learned that it was best to be feared — fear gave you first pick of the food, the drink, the drugs and the girls. Fear was now his friend — the more the better.

He cultivated it in the gang he led: the Muti Boys.

Muti: La Science Africaine, Black Magic. His child soldiers were captured on raids like this and forced to murder their relatives to make them complicit in the gang. They dreamed that in their sleep they would travel to a demi-world to kill and eat human flesh. Awake they were not much better.

He shouted in Sango at a boy dawdling under a tree smoking a joint. ‘Hey, hurry up! Get in the ute!’ and pointed him over to the Toyota that was waiting to drive out of the village ahead of the truck with the prisoners.

The boy was sixteen and dressed in combat trousers, dirty white singlet, round mirror shades and a woman’s curly blonde wig. Muti charms and amulets hung around his neck — Colonel Ninja had told him that the bullets of their enemies would flow off them like water. Ammunition belts for his light machine gun were wrapped around him. He hefted the gun on its sling and stumped over to join his eight friends in the back of the truck. Its windscreen was shattered by three bullet holes and the bonnet had a collection of filthy teddy bears strapped to it as charms.

The boys sat in the back with their legs sticking out over the side, displaying a collection of bare feet and flip-flops; they bristled with RPGs and AK-47s. Tired after their night of destruction and slaughter, they slumped against each other and passed round a plastic bottle of home brew.

Colonel Ninja was tall and heavily muscled; he deliberately fought stripped to the waist to show off his physique to the younger boys. As he slung his PKM machine gun over his shoulder the veins stood out on his biceps. He flicked his cigarette away, scratched his head and walked over to the blue truck behind the Toyota.

It was a battered container lorry specially adapted for its new job with the addition of airholes shot through the sides. They didn’t want anyone suffocating on the way back home. The Boss had said that they needed more labourers; for some reason they kept dying in the mine; coughing up blood and wasting away.

‘They all in?’ he asked the boy standing at the open rear doors, pointing his rifle at the prisoners inside; the terrified faces of the men and women stared at him out of the dark.

The boy nodded.

‘Bon, allez!’ Colonel Ninja swung the heavy door shut in their faces and locked it.

SATURDAY 22 NOVEMBER

Here we go again, Alex thought as the plane swept in over the rusty iron roofs and palm trees of the shantytown around the Aéroport de Bangui-M’poko in the capital of Central African Republic.

It was midday and as soon as the door opened, hot African air swept into the cabin like a slick of warm oil. By the time their Air France flight from Paris had disembarked and they had walked over the burning tarmac to the arrivals shed, Alex’s shirt was plastered to him with sweat.

The 1960s terminal was dilapidated and filthy. Windows were broken and chewed sugarcanes, nut husks and litter were piled in corners. The noise from the press of people battered him. The air was thick with the strong smell of body odour.

When he got to the customs desk the uniformed officer looked at him with the quiet stare of a hyena eyeing a gazelle on the savannah.

He tapped the table in front of him with the end of his large truncheon and Alex dutifully dumped his rucksack down. He glanced across to where Col was getting the same treatment at another desk.

Welcome to Africa, he thought, as his baggage was unpacked and items of interest removed. The new MP3 player and bottle of whisky that he had deliberately placed at the top disappeared behind the desk; then Alex accidentally dropped a fifty-dollar bill out of his breast pocket and was through.

‘How’d ya get on?’ said Col as they met up on the other side of customs.

‘Didn’t get anything we need.’ The important kit for the mission was buried at the bottom of their bags.

They scanned the brightly dressed scrum of Africans milling around them.

‘Bienvenue à Bangui, Monsieur Devereux.’

A large black face with three tribal scars cut down each cheek emerged out of the throng. A gigantic hand extended and gave him a soft handshake. ‘Je m’appelle Patrice Bagaza.’

A huge man with an understated manner, as if he was embarrassed by his size, he averted his eyes as he shook Alex’s hand. He was wearing a long red and green print shirt, jeans and flip-flops.

‘Bonjour,’ said Alex carefully.

‘Monsieur ‘Waites.’ Patrice didn’t attempt to pronounce the ‘Th’ at the start of his name and shook Col’s hand as well. He then turned and shouted in Sango to make a path through the crowd.

Patrice’s bulk forced a way and the two men followed in his wake, loaded down with rucksacks. Their visa said they were here to go big-game hunting and they were dressed in lightweight outdoor gear: boots, walking trousers, slouch hats and tan waistcoats with lots of pockets.

Once they were through the chaos of the terminal, Patrice led them across the road to an old yellow Peugeot estate in the car park.

They stashed their bags in the back with the equipment that Patrice had assembled for them. As he shut the boot he turned to Alex and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Devereux, I’m not going to make you speak French the whole way. That was just for the plainclothes security police in the crowd; they take an interest in whites coming in.’

Alex was caught off guard by the switch to American-accented English. Kalil had said they would be met by the cartel’s contact but Alex had not been sure what language they would be speaking. Besides, his French was passable from previous ops in Congo.

‘That’s fine,’ he smiled, conscious that he was reliant for now on this man.

They drove into town but Patrice didn’t seem to want to talk; he concentrated on steering them through the manic traffic. Old Peugeots, Renaults and Citroëns wheezed and limped alongside newer Toyotas and Mitsubishis. Trucks and buses were piled up with people and goods, and slouched on their axles; driven at top speed, they swerved around the worst potholes. Patrice was unfazed by it all, and weaved through them on the wide Avenue de I’Indépendance.

Alex and Col opened the windows to try to get a cool breeze but it was like having a hair dryer turned on your face. They looked out at the town; it had the rundown appearance of somewhere that had been taking a battering since its heyday in the 1960s. Most of the houses and buildings dated from then; their peeling whitewash was stained brown with red dust from the earth verges and were pockmarked by bullet holes. All the houses were heavily fortified against the outbreaks of rioting and looting over the years, with crude bars welded over windows and doors. Rubbish was strewn everywhere: plastic bags, newspapers, wrappers and cola nut skins. Sitting on beer crates at the roadside were ‘Gaddafis’ — youths selling stolen petrol from large jars; named after the oil-rich Libyan president, who had interfered in the country so often.

Driving through the centre, they circled the main traffic island. Alex saw it was covered with the distinctive spiky leaves of cassava plants; it had been turned into vegetable plots by civil servants used to being unpaid for months.

They headed out of town on Boulevard de Général de Gaulle, along the north bank of the Ubangi River. Alex looked out across it; it was over a mile wide, a great brown snake coiling through the heart of Africa.

Patrice drove them out east into the bush. The buildings gave way to vegetable patches and then the jungle began to take over. Dirt replaced tarmac, and they bumped past the mud huts of the village of Damara with red dust trailing behind them. A kilometre on and Patrice turned right up a small track to a football pitch surrounded by trees; long grass grew across it and the goal posts sagged at either end.

He parked in the shade out of the fierce sun. The three men got out and began unpacking the kitbags.

‘MP5s, as requested, with silencers,’ said Patrice, as he handed them machine guns. Both men checked them deftly, before pulling off their civilian kit and putting on camouflaged combat jackets and trousers. Alex prowled off round the field to make sure it was secure whilst Col went through the compasses, radios and homing beacons.

Patrice sat and smoked a Gauloise. When Col was satisfied that the kit was in order he sat with his back against a tree and read a biography of CAR’s former ruler, Emperor Bokassa, called Dark Age. Alex waited in the car with his long legs stretched out of the door and read through his maps and notes for the mission.

The hundred-degree heat sat heavily on the field. Nothing had the energy to make a sound. An hour passed and the men waited; Alex occasionally looked up at the sky and checked his watch.

When the distant noise of the helicopter broke the stillness he flicked his eyes at Col. They picked their kit up and readied themselves. Patrice grabbed his holdall out of the boot, then pulled a jerry can out and shook petrol over the inside of the car.

The camouflage-painted Mi-17 roared in; tree-tops thrashing in its wake. Alex never got over the shock of seeing such a huge, ungainly object hanging in midair, as if a bus were hanging over his head. Sunlight flashed off the cockpit windows as the pilot swung it round into the centre of the field and flared to hover two feet off the ground. Alex glimpsed Arkady Voloshin at the controls, cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth as ever; his eyes narrowed as he scanned the tree line.

The door in the side was open; Yamba Douala crouched in combat gear with a 7.62mm machine gun poking out of the door in case they needed cover.

Grass and dust billowed crazily in the downwash as the two whites ran out through it, hunched under their packs.

Patrice stood back from the Peugeot and flicked his Gauloise into it. The petrol whooshed and then the fuel tank exploded as he ran to join them in the helicopter. Yamba hauled him and his bag inside as the big turbofans lifted them up.

The huge aircraft disappeared east over the trees towards the next phase of the operation.

14 JANUARY 1525, NEUHOF FOREST, HESSE, CENTRAL GERMANY

Dark clouds hung threateningly over the snow-covered forest. A shaft of bleak winter light slid in under them, cold as a knife.

Eberhardt shifted the axe in his hand and stared at the figure slipping between the frosted tree trunks. Everything was still around him; all he could hear was his breathing. Each breath pulsed out, froze in the still air and then descended gently. His beard jutted out, thick with frost.

The weight of the axe felt reassuring. He and Albrecht could not see clearly who was coming along the track that merged with theirs up ahead. In such a remote spot as this, bandits and outlaws were his first fear. He could see only one man, but could there be more? Was he a scout for a gang of brigands coming along behind?

It was two years after the Knights’ War, and Eberhardt and Albrecht’s circumstances had changed greatly.

The war had been a disaster. The Knights’ desperate attempt to try to preserve their status in society had merely hastened their demise. The Imperial Princes had united and crushed them in a few short battles. Eberhardt had fled and lived now as a woodcutter to escape the punishment inflicted on his fellows.

The Princes assumed he was dead and, as he’d been a traitor, his castle and lands had been sold off. If they ever found out he was alive, far worse would be visited on him. He and Albrecht travelled around, surviving on day labour: cutting wood and ditching.

The pair of them wore heavy winter clothing: sheepskin jerkins, broad peasant hats and Bundschuhe, the peasant boots made of strips of leather bound together with thongs. On their backs were their worldly possessions: bedding rolls, cooking pots, and tools. Albrecht stood nervously behind his master, his cooking knife in hand, unsure what to do. He had stayed despite everything. He had no family in Steltzenberg, and with the seizure of Eberhardt’s lands his job was gone as well. His whole life had been one of service and he could not think of any other way. Stoic and dour, he plodded on, focusing on getting his master through one day at a time and trying hard not to think about their problems.

The whole country was in similar dire straits. The growing population led to land shortage so the ordinary folk starved and turned to crime. Riots and attacks on the nobles were common; Germany was in turmoil, hence Eberhardt’s fear as the man approached in the wood.

Eberhardt would not have taken this track by choice but he still feared discovery by the Princes. With the climate of fear, checkpoints had been put across the main roads to look for suspicious characters.

He gripped the axe and filled his deep chest with air, summoning his most commanding tones, and bellowed out at the stranger: ‘Who are you?’

The bellow echoed through the still woods. It died away and silence hung in the air like the clouds of his breath.

‘Thomas the Carpenter, good day to you!’ the man called through the trees, and walked towards Eberhardt and Albrecht. He approached at a steady pace with his hand thrust out in greeting.

Eberhardt was relieved to see that the man looked like a travelling artisan. He was short and slight; wearing undyed woollen hose and a shabby leather coat down to his knees. He had a broad-brimmed felt hat with a grey cloth wrapped round his head against the cold. A satchel was slung over one shoulder with a bedding roll and a cooking pot over the other.

Eberhardt was, without realising it, impressed by the confidence in the strong clear voice and the man’s open-handed approach. The hand he shook was small but the grip was sharp.

‘Eberhardt the Woodcutter,’ he said.

Albrecht could not look him in the eye but muttered, ‘Albrecht the Steward,’ whilst looking down at the man’s hand. He was used to appraising men for work and judging their capabilities. The thin-boned hand had no scars or calluses; it had never plied its trade as a carpenter.

‘Good day to you both. A fine day to be out walking across this great German land of ours,’ breezed the stranger, waving an arm at a shaft of light catching in the snow-laden treetops.

Eberhardt was puzzled by the man’s accent: the cadence was the flattened Schriftdeutsch of the educated élite, not some carpenter’s burr.

The man also had an intriguing face. He was in his mid-thirties, but seemed much older. His face was thin and pinched with hunger; it looked burned out, with large bags under his eyes that had been drawn down where his cheeks had shrunk in the cold. Yet the eyes themselves showed no signs of exhaustion. Indeed, quite the opposite: his glance was quick, taking everything in, his movements rapid and decisive.

‘There is, however,’ he continued, ‘rather a lot of our German nation.’ He indicated the path with an ironic smile and dip of his head. ‘It looks like our paths have joined — shall we?’ He held a hand out to indicate the road ahead.

‘Hmm,’ said Eberhardt, realising that there was no alternative and that the three of them would have to walk together for some time. He handed his axe wordlessly to Albrecht, who strapped it onto his pack and shrugged it back onto his shoulders.

They set off down the path. Eberhardt glanced at the stranger as he tried to work out what he was about. Albrecht tagged along behind. The tension of their sudden coming together made them all edgy and they plunged into conversation to relieve the awkwardness.

‘So where are you headed for?’ Thomas took command of the discussion.

‘Leipzig — I have friends there from …’ Eberhardt was about to say university, but realised that did not fit with his cover story so finished lamely, ‘from before … The German nation, you said,’ he blustered, trying to think of a way off the subject. ‘What do you mean by that?’

This was not just a diversion; the subject was of great interest to him. He had been trying to think who could be the new saviour of Germany ever since the Knights had failed.

‘Well,’ Thomas laughed, ‘Dr Luther and his Protestants would have us believe that we are the new nation of God,’ he said mockingly, ‘rising up to throw out the Whore of Rome!’ He laughed again.

‘It’s not a bad thing to give those Italians a taste of the Bundschuh,’ muttered Eberhardt.

‘No, they haven’t made themselves many friends,’ agreed Thomas, flicking a quick glance at Eberhardt to gauge his expression.

Albrecht had been walking along behind his master, fearing that his lack of discretion about the Knights would give them away. ‘That Luther’s bad news,’ he muttered.

Thomas chuckled again as if he didn’t really understand it all. ‘Well, he says he wants to reform the Church, to take it back to its roots.’

‘Yes, but he says there’s something special about Germans,’ continued Eberhardt, immune to his servant’s subtleties, ‘that God has chosen us to reform the Church and bring light into the darkness that has grown up under these popes.’

‘And what do you think?’ asked Thomas. He shot a sideways look at Eberhardt.

Instinctively he knew who the leader of the pair was, despite Albrecht ostensibly outranking him socially. A steward should not have been deferring to a woodcutter. Equally a woodcutter should not be discussing politics. None of the three of them was fitting his story well.

‘Well, he’s certainly stirred up the whole country,’ Albrecht cut across the question, trying to override Eberhardt’s tactlessness. ‘Stirred ‘em up good and proper down south last summer, he did.’

There had been riots, rent strikes and refusals to pay tithes by the peasants in Franconia, and open rebellion had broken out in the Schwarzwald.

‘Yes, but that’s not Luther, is it?’ Eberhardt turned round to look at Albrecht scornfully. ‘He’s not running round stirring up the peasants, is he? God knows who’s been doing that!’ He looked at Thomas for support.

‘Malefactors!’ said Thomas, and laughed. His tone mocked the term used by the authorities in their proclamations issued against the rebels.

Albrecht fell silent in the face of the rebuke from his master. He had tried what he could to keep him from self-incrimination but he seemed hell-bent on it. Albrecht retreated to following on behind the other two.

The track now turned left up the side of the valley and so the conversation slowed down as they leaned into the gradient and took breaths between sentences.

‘The peasants are just jumping on his cart. They don’t know a bloody thing about his theology, they just think it’s an excuse to get rid of their lords,’ Eberhardt continued. ‘… But we’re all just buggered as long as the Princes keep running the country. They’re the real problem! I would challenge any man to disagree, be he big Hans or little Hans.’

‘You’re no friend of the Princes then?’ asked Thomas.

‘The Princes betrayed the Knights in their attempt to cleanse the realm of Popish trash! May the Devil shit on them!’

Albrecht groaned inwardly. This was the rant that Eberhardt had brooded on since the war. The steward had heard it often enough, he just wished that the knight would be more careful about who he said it to. The Devil only knew who this man was.

‘Only the Knights could have saved Germany … but now their cause is lost …’

Eberhardt suddenly felt a strange need to confess all. He was big and could put on a show but inside he was a hollow man; Thomas was the more confident.

He stopped and turned to the carpenter. ‘I should say that I am not what I appear,’ he said hurriedly.

Thomas stared at him patiently as if he had been expecting some revelation.

‘I am a knight … Eberhardt von Steltzenberg. I fought in the Knights’ War. I wanted to serve the German nation — this land.’ He repeated Thomas’s phrase self-consciously. ‘Albrecht was my steward … We escaped the Princes and have been wandering ever since …’

He dried up as Albrecht stood behind him, aghast.

Thomas stared at the knight for a few seconds and then looked down. He bobbed his head, looked up at Eberhardt and said quietly, ‘I too am not what I appear. My name is Dr Thomas Müntzer.’

The name of the infamous rebel crashed into Eberhardt’s mind, stunning him.

PRESENT DAY, MONDAY 24 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

‘So how are they doing then?’

Yamba pointed to the Blackburn Rovers tattoo on Col’s forearm. He had a heavy Angolan accent, with a rising and falling cadence.

‘Er … not right up there like we were, you know … middling, like.’

‘Ah, but you are telling me forever that they are the best team in the world.’ Yamba rolled his eyes and chuckled, pleased to get one over on his friend.

Yamba was sitting in the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser and Alex was driving. Col had been leaning forwards in between the seats when Yamba had seen the tattoo on his arm and decided to break the monotony of the journey.

After their uplift, Arkady had flown them east to Gbadolite, just across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Patrice had arranged a meeting with the local militia group on a crucial part of the plan. They had then flown on to Rafaï, the nearest town to the mine, about a hundred kilometres south of it. Patrice had supplied the car and then waited in the town as the others set off north to complete the recce mission. They could have flown up there but Alex wanted to be careful not to create any disturbances in the vicinity of the mine. He guessed that helicopters were unusual in such a remote area and could set off alarm bells.

They were now thirty kilometres away from the mine but it had taken nearly two days to force their way along the appalling jungle road, a line of rutted red earth that made its way through the tunnel of green vegetation that was trying to overwhelm it. They were not expecting any contact with the mine forces this far out but were in combat gear and had their MP5 machine pistols within easy reach.

‘Now, look ‘ere, you cheeky booger,’ Col wagged his finger at Yamba, ‘they’re still better than bloody Soweto United, Joburg whatever …’ He waved his hands, trying to think of an insult.

But Yamba was cackling, rocking over away from him with laughter, his hands clasped together: he had him on another point.

‘Ah, but you see, my friend, I am not a South African, you know that! I am from Angola.’

‘Yeah, well, you know, whatever.’

Yamba was a former sergeant-major from 32 Battalion — The Buffalo Squadron — in the South African Defence Force. He had been born in Angola and as the brightest boy in his village had been sent to a strict Jesuit mission school run by Portuguese colonialists. Despite the beatings, he had done well and became head boy. Academically gifted, he had been dead set on becoming a surgeon and using his talents to save the lives of his countrymen.

It didn’t work out like that.

The country fell to the communists and his family were massacred. He was forced to flee into exile in the South African dependency of Namibia. Aged sixteen, he followed many other black Angolan refugees into the South African Army to fight for his adopted homeland.

He was now in his forties but still very lean and muscular; his bony head was shaved bald and his face had the hawk-like look of a disciplinarian. He had worked with Alex’s team for years.

Yamba was scarred by his experience in the crucial battle at Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle in Africa since the Second World War. His unit had fought a combined force of tough East German, Cuban and Angolan troops. Neither side won, but by simply staying operational Yamba’s unit prevented the fall of neighbouring Namibia. The action took its toll on him, and his men often regarded him as a narrow-minded stickler. He could not care less; he understood that military victory required obsessive attention to detail in planning. He was never going to be in such a desperate position again in his life.

Alex grinned at the exchange going on next to him, but his mind was busy turning over their mission. He was responsible for making an accurate survey of the target and Kalil’s initial briefing had worried him. Whoever was running the mine seemed very concerned to keep people out. Given its isolated position he couldn’t understand the heavy security precautions; he had never seen such measures in all his time in Africa.

‘Whoa, third gear!’ he called jokingly to the others as the road suddenly became less rutted and they actually stopped bumping along in second for the first time that day,

‘Bout time too — bloody Africans can’t build a road for love nor money …’

‘Ah, my friend! Now suppose we are in the United Kingdom, and I am a guest! A guest in your house, am I going to be going about saying things like, ah … you know, “Ah, this queen of yours, you know, she is getting a bit, er …’ he fished for the right idiom, ‘“long in the tooth”? Am I going to be—’

‘Shit!’

Alex hit the brakes as they turned a corner and the Toyota skidded over the dust. He managed to stop them from crashing into the bushes but the engine cut out and they stalled in the middle of the road. A cloud of red dust blew out from under them and everything became very quiet as the noise of the engine died away.

As the dust cleared Yamba and Col could see what the problem was. A large log had been laid across the track to stop traffic. If that was not enough physical impediment, a psychological one had been added: a naked body was hung by the neck from a tree on the right-hand side, its intestines strung out and hooked into a bush on the other side. Flies swarmed inside the man’s abdominal cavity and along the purple strands, making them into a living barrier.

Figures emerged from the bushes ahead of them like predators stirring as they sensed blood. They were teenagers and wore an assortment of T-shirts, outsize combat fatigues and wigs. Alex took in six assault rifles pointed at him. They were still thirty yards off and moved slowly forwards; hesitating at the unusual sight of whites in such a remote region.

Alex’s experience and training kicked in. He stared at the slowly advancing child soldiers and thought fast. He couldn’t restart the truck and reverse in time without being riddled with bullets. He sat still but spoke quickly and quietly out of the side of his mouth to the other two: ‘Don’t move. Wait until they’ve all come out of cover. When we’re ready, Yamba take the two on your side, Col take the middle two, I’ll take my side.’

Col and Yamba slipped their hands onto the grips of their machine pistols, thumbed the safeties off and clicked them to automatic. Alex slowly put his hand up out of the window. The boys’ eyes flicked onto the movement and they halted in their gradual advance to the truck. Alex slowly leaned himself out of the window, trying to make eye contact with them. They stood still, watching intently. He gently pulled the door lever, swung it open and got out so that the door shielded him. The MP5 that had been tucked down the side of his seat was in his hands. He stood for a second looking at them; estimating distances and angles.

‘Now,’ he said calmly and fired a long burst through the door panel. He dived to the side of the road, rolled and came up on one knee firing again on auto.

Col and Yamba opened up from inside the car; bullets punched out through the windscreen. Then they were out as well, diving into the dense bush.

The gunfire crashed against the silence, birds erupted out of the trees. Short aimed bursts snapped out from the mercenaries against wild chattering salvos from the boys that veered off overhead as their oversized guns kicked up. Bodies jerked and spun in the road; arms flung rifles haphazardly away from them and then it was over.

The mercenaries moved forwards quickly and purposefully through the bush at the side of the road; hunched over the sights of their weapons, scanning ahead of them. The sound of the shots died away into the forest and the smell of cordite drifted past. No other fighters emerged from cover and there was no sound of any panicked flight into the jungle. Alex nodded across the road at Col, who ran out to check the bodies as the others covered him. Their marksmanship had been accurate, the shots were tightly grouped around the chest; none of them was alive.

They quickly moved on and searched the area around the roadblock. There was a crude shelter of banana leaves set back from the road. The earth floor was littered with screwed-up blankets, plastic bowls of cassava bread, bundles of dagga — the powerful local marijuana — and a lot of plastic bottles of home brew.

With the immediate danger over, Alex’s brain switched to figuring out the next problem. Were these child soldiers linked to the mine? Had the contact just blown the recce mission?

Overall, he figured they were still too far from the target, and it was hard to believe that a normal commercial mining operation would use such unorthodox troops. Also, they had got too close now just to turn back — he couldn’t return to London and face Kalil without at least trying to go on.

An idea occurred to him and he barked out orders. They dragged the bodies back around the basha and scattered them as if there had been an argument and a shoot-out in the group. They placed bottles of liquor around the corpses and emptied some more so that the place stank of alcohol. They then wrapped two bodies in blankets and put them and their weapons in the back of the car as the ‘ones that got away’. They would dump them in the bush further on.

Alex wrapped a shirt round his face, took a forked stick and unhooked the intestines from the bush; they exploded with flies and he nearly threw up but he forced himself through it. At the same time, Yamba heaved the log aside so that Col could drive through. The two of them then replaced their respective barriers.

Col cut some branches and swept the vehicle tracks off the road whilst the others picked up their 9mm shell casings from the firefight, leaving only the boys’ 7.62mm ones. It was by no means perfect but Alex was banking on the fact that whoever commanded these guys probably did not have advanced ballistic forensic skills.

They drove on in tense silence.

Eberhardt reeled from the words — Thomas Müntzer! A man whose prophecy of the end of the world had recently set Germany on fire.

Associations flashed past him: a brilliant theologian, a firebrand preacher, an early associate of Luther’s who had split from him and was now leading the radicals against both him and the Catholic Church.

Zwickau.

Back in 1521, after Luther was condemned as a heretic and had had to go into hiding, the extremists took over the Protestant movement. They made the town of Zwickau the centre of the radical Reformation. The Zwickau Brethren were led by Müntzer and had been forced to leave with him by the town council, who had become fearful of their growing fanaticism.

Eberhardt had seen them: mad saints wandering the highways dressed in rags. They mumbled to themselves and jerked their arms wildly; staring and shouting as they imagined the millennium: the end of time that Müntzer said was coming soon.

Eberhardt looked at him now. The sallow face prematurely aged by the intensity of the prophecy he had made to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.

‘How …? But … I thought …’ Eberhardt mouthed frantically, trying to think how he came to be there.

Thomas nodded and explained calmly, ‘You probably last heard of me back in the summer, when I had my pulpit in Altstedt. I preached to the Princes and called on them to prepare the way for Christ’s coming. But the Devil stopped their ears and they would not hear me, the Dear Lord forgive them for they will burn in the hottest Hell. They chose to join with Satan because of their love of wealth.’ He shook his head at their folly. ‘So they drove me out and I had to flee into hiding. But through this trial the Lord showed me that the true Elect, His most faithful angels, will be the common man. They will be the new saviours of Germany.

‘I was organising secret meetings of the Elect in the Schwarzwald last year.’ He looked at Albrecht. ‘Those were the first stirrings you were referring to,’ he said, pitying him for his lack of understanding of the working of God in this world.

Albrecht nodded awkwardly.

‘I am now on my way north to Mühlhausen. You should join me,’ he said, looking intensely at Eberhardt. It was an instruction not a question. ‘We did not meet by chance. The Lord wanted you to hear His message; to be part of His movement — it is your destiny to be part of it!’ He held up a warning finger and hissed, ‘The end of this world is nigh!’

Eberhardt stared back at him, gripped by the certainty in the man’s eyes. He was presently a wanderer searching for a saviour for his nation and now he had found one.

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes … destiny, it is my destiny to join you, Thomas. We will save Germany!’

PRESENT DAY, TUESDAY 25 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

At first light the next day Alex twisted the focus on his binoculars and stared at the perimeter fence of the mine.

It was eight foot of razor wire with a coil of the stuff on top. Watchtowers with an armed guard in each were spaced along it, and a twenty-foot-wide swathe in front had been cleared of vegetation and covered with brown gravel.

Nice touch, he thought. We can’t sneak across that without making a noise. But it’s still not going to stop us if we drop in behind by helicopter.

Beyond the gravel strip, the trees had been cut down for a hundred yards into the jungle to clear the field of fire; clumps of tall grasses and bushes had grown up in their place and Alex was lying in a bush thirty yards from the gravel. The smell of damp earth and rotting vegetation was in his nostrils and he was soaked in cold dew from lying motionless on the ground for two hours waiting for dawn to come up. His body kept shivering and he fought to keep still.

The three of them had crawled into their observation post under cover of darkness in full combats, heavily camouflaged with cam cream on their faces and vegetation stuffed into their webbing and cam-netting head covers. Throat mikes on their radios meant they could communicate but radio silence was to be observed for all but emergency situations this close to the enemy.

They had wriggled forwards on elbows and knees with their weapons held in front of them; they had fitted their rifles with silencers, and had radio beacons to call on Arkady for emergency uplift, but Alex hoped to God that they did not have to make contact.

They were lying on the ground in a triangle shape, facing outwards. Yamba and Alex watched different sectors of the complex, whilst Col maintained a guard behind them. One foot lay over each other’s ankles so that a silent tap could alert them to any danger.

They were on the first leg of what Alex hoped would be three approaches to the perimeter; going in and out in a classic flower-petal pattern around the site to see it from all angles. He wanted to check the enemy’s defensive positions and weapons, their routines, and also to get some idea of what calibre of troops he was up against. Alex knew that a long day of discomfort lay ahead — it was going to be twelve hours before he could move enough to have a piss.

They were at the east end of the complex, where the road and the power line came in from the volcano. He had been able to see the outline of some of the buildings through the blurry green vision of his nightsight: the ends of a row of bar-rack huts and behind them the huge grey corrugated-metal shed they had to capture. However, he really needed daylight to get a detailed look at things.

As daylight seeped quickly into the air he pushed the night-vision goggles up onto his forehead so that he could use the binoculars. He twisted the focus again to zero in on the perimeter defences.

Shit, he muttered in his head. He was looking at one of the covered structures that had shown up on the satellite photo in Kalil’s presentation. From the air it looked like a simple square banana-leaf-roofed hut but underneath it was a concrete bunker.

Who the hell builds that kind of thing out here? he wondered as he looked at the squat hexagonal concrete structure. He could see that the walls were a good two foot thick from where the firing slits went through them. The long barrel of a heavy machine gun pointed out uncompromisingly from each of the three concrete pillboxes that he could see along the perimeter.

After that it just got worse. At seven o’clock an empty oil barrel was bashed with something metal as the camp wake-up call. Alex scanned the barracks as soldiers emerged from the long huts; they were mainly the same sort of teenagers that they had encountered at the roadblock, armed with a mixture of automatic weapons and grenade launchers.

So the boys at the roadblock were from the mine.

At first sight they looked dishevelled and scruffy, wearing a mixture of combats and ghetto-style Western fashion, but someone obviously had a grip on them. He noticed that they had jumped pretty quickly at the sound of the reveille and were hurrying across to a parade ground that he could just see between two huts. It was probably the tall, muscular guy stripped to the waist, who walked into his field of vision; he was shouting at the boys, urging them on.

What now?

Alex scanned on to two uniformed, middle-aged officers, who were now going from hut to hut checking that everyone was up. He didn’t recognise the camouflage pattern of their uniforms and caps, which was strange, as he had come across most nationalities.

White mercenaries?

He focused in on them. Swarthy and dark-haired, they didn’t look European.

Middle Eastern?

He couldn’t tell from this distance.

Yamba’s foot tapped his left ankle.

He looked round.

The black sergeant pointed to another wide hut structure halfway between two of the pillboxes, set back from the perimeter. Alex had skipped it in his initial scan. As he looked closer he could see more of the troops in proper uniforms get hold of the posts, lift up the ends in the ground and walk back with them so that the roof split neatly in two. As the camouflage netting pulled back he tensed.

The twin barrels of a Russian ZSU 23mm antiaircraft gun rose up smoothly from the horizontal position to the vertical and swept the sky in an early morning anti-aircraft drill. Any Mi-17 helicopter that got within a thousand yards of that would simply become a twenty-two-man coffin.

There goes the plan.

He put the binoculars down and rubbed his tired eyes; this was not going to be easy. He stared down at the ground in front of him for a while, deep in thought.

Eventually he looked up again at the complex but this time something outside the perimeter caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it before because he was either using the nightsight or the binoculars; he squinted and craned forward, peering at it for a minute.

Across the stretch of gravel he thought he had seen a slight shimmer just off the ground in the low dawn sun. He picked up the binoculars and twisted the focus all the way back to the nearest possible range. He peered at it again and then put the binoculars down and rubbed his forehead; the swathe of gravel was not just there for making a noise.

Yamba heard his sigh and twisted round to look at him. Alex rolled on his side so he had both hands free and put his fingers and thumbs together to make a large ‘O’ shape — the hand signal they used for mines.

The shimmer that he had seen was the early morning sun catching on droplets of dew that hung on tiny transparent rods and trip wires sticking up out of the gravel: spring mines. Once tripped, they shot up out of the ground to stomach height and then exploded in a shrapnel burst that left any man within fifty yards dead or writhing in agony. He could also see the tiny, pronged spigots of anti-tank mines mixed in with them.

The thick layer of gravel stopped the usual tropical plant growth from setting off the trip wires and disrupting the mines — weeding in a minefield was not something that you wanted to be doing every few weeks. Whoever was running this place was very organised.

How the hell were they going to do this?

That evening the flickering fire lit the exhausted faces huddled around it.

Eberhardt, Thomas and Albrecht were sitting on the earth floor of a tiny wooden hut on the edge of the forest with its owner, Joachim the Weaver, a follower of Thomas. The tiny fire did not succeed in heating the hut — their breath froze in the room — but it was better than being out in the snow.

Joachim was forty but looked seventy. His face in the firelight had deep creases cut into it by the strain of his life. Stoop-backed from his weaving, he was gap-toothed and bald, with shaggy grey locks hanging down the side of his head. Weighed down by suffering, he rarely spoke.

His wife and three remaining children were cramped in around the hut. Four others had died that winter already: tuberculosis and measles. The children were tucked in the bed head to tail, and a heavy racking cough came occasionally from it. They wouldn’t last long either.

These then were the poor.

Eberhardt had seen a lot of them since his fall, but such poverty still shocked him. Their faces were twisted by hardship, they stank of sweat, their hands were grubby and stained; their fingernails like claws with black grime under them.

Thomas seemed in his element. They had just shared a meal of thin gruel; he smiled and said graciously, ‘Joachim, you are too kind, too kind,’ gripping the man’s forearm.

With some dinner inside them now they perked up. Eberhardt looked at Thomas questioningly. ‘So you have prophesied that the end of the world is nigh?’

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