Golden Fox c-12

by Wilbur Smith

  "I have brought you a present,' Ramsey told him.

  "Thank you, Padre." 'Don't you want to know what it is?" 'You will show it to me,' Nicholas pointed out. 'And then I will know what it is." It was a plastic model of an AK assault-rifle. Although it was a miniature, it was perfect in detail with a removable magazine that was loaded with metallic painted bullets. Ramsey had bought it at a toyshop on his last visit to London.

  Nicholas's eyes shone as he raised it to his shoulder and aimed it down towards the beach. Apart from the first flash of fear, it was the only real emotion he had displayed since Ramsey's arrival. When he pulled the trigger the toy rifle made a satisfying warlike clatter.

  "It is very beautiful,' Nicholas said. 'Thank you, Padre." 'It is a good toy for a brave son of the revolution,' Ramsey told him.

  "Am I a brave son of the revolution?" 'One day you will be,' Ramsey told him.

  "Comrade Colonel, it is time for the child's bath,' Adra intervened diffidently.

  She took Nicholas and led him from the veranda into the cottage. Ramsey put aside the temptation to follow them. It was unseemly for him to participate in such a bourgeois domestic ritual. Instead he went to the small table at the end of the veranda where Adra had set out a jug of lime-juice and a bottle of Havana Club rum, indisputably the finest rum in the world.

  Ramsey mixed himself a mojito and then selected a cigar from the box on the table. He smoked only when he was at home in Cuba and then only the premium cigars of Miguel Fernandez Roig, and Adra knew this. Like the Havana Club, they were the finest in the world. He took the tall sugared glass and the cigar back to his seat and watched the sunset turn the waters of the bay to bloodied gold.

  From the bathroom, he heard the splashing and the happy cries of his son, and Adra's soft replies.

  Ramsey was a warrior and a wanderer on the face of the earth. This was the closest he would ever come to a home of his own; perhaps the child had made it so for him.

  Adra served a meal of chicken and Maros y Cristianos, or 'Moors and Christians', a mixture of black beans and white rice. Through the DGA, Ramsey had arranged a preferential ration-book for the little household. He wanted the boy to grow up strong and well nourished.

  "Soon you are going on a journey with me,' he told Nicholas as they ate.

  "Across the sea. Would you like that, Nicholas?" 'Will Adra come with us?" The question irritated Ramsey. He did not recognize his annoyance as jealousy. He answered shortly: 'Si." 'Then, I will like that,' Nicholas nodded. 'Where win we go?" 'To Spain,' Ramsey told him. 'To the land of your ancestors and the land of your birth." After dinner Nicholas was allowed to watch the television for one hour.

  When his eyelids drooped, Adra took him to his bedroom.

  When she returned to the small, starkly furnished living-room she asked Ramsey: 'Do you want me tonight?" Ramsey nodded. She was over forty years of age. However, her belly was flat, and her thighs were firm and powerful. She had never given birth, and she had extraordinary muscular control. At his request she often excited him with a little trick. He would hold one end of a lead pencil while she snapped it in half with a spasmodic constriction of her vaginal sphincter.

  She was an adept, one of the most natural and intuitive lovers he had ever known - furthermore she was terrified of him, which enhanced both her pleasure and his.

  In the dawn Ramsey swam down to the head of the bay and then made the hard two-mile return against the tide, ploughing in a crawl through the choppy water.

  When he came up from the beach, Nicholas was ready for school and there was an army jeep and driver waiting at the back door of the cottage. Ramsey was dressed in plain brown paratrooper fatigues and soft cap. This was revolutionary uniform, so different from the flamboyant Russian braid and scarlet piping and tiers of medal ribbons. Nicholas sat proudly beside him in the jeep for the short ride until they dropped him off at the nursery school near the main gate.

  The drive up to Havana took a little over two hours, for the sugar harvest was in progress. The sky over the hills was smudged with smoke from the cane fires, and the road was congested with behemoth trucks piled high with cargoes of cut cane enroute to the mills.

  When they reached the city, the driver dropped Ramsey at the far end of the vast Plaza de la Revolucien, with its 350400t obelisk to the memory of Josd Marti, hero of the people, who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party way back in 1892.

  The square was the scene of many of the moving rallies of the party, where a million and more of the Cuban people gathered to listen to Fidel Castro's speeches. The president's office was in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, of which El Jefe was the first secretary.

  The office in which he welcomed Ramsey was as austere as the revolutionary principle dictated. Under the revolving ceiling-fan, the massive desk was piled with working documents and reports. However, the white walls were bare of all ornament, except for the portrait of Lenim on the wall behind his desk. Fidel Castro came to embrace Ramsey.

  "Mi Zorro Dorado,' he chuckled with pleasure. 'My Golden Fox. It is good to see you. You have been away too long, old comrade. Much too long." "It is good to be back, El Jefe.' Ramsey truly meant it. Here was one man he respected and loved above all others. He was always startled by the size of the man he called the Leader. Castro towered over him, and smothered Ramsey in his embrace.. Then he held him at arm's length and studied his face.

  "You look tired, comrade. You have been working hard." 'With excellent results,' Ramsey assured him.

  "Come, sit down by the window,' Castro invited him. 'Tell me about it." He selected two Roig cigars from the box on the corner of his desk and gave one to Ramsey. He held the burning taper for him; then lit his own before he settled into the straight-backed chair and leant forward with the cigar stuck out of the corner of his mouth, puffing smoke around it.

  "So tell me what is the news from Moscow. You saw Yudenich?

  "I saw him, El jefe, and the meeting went well.

  Ramsey launched into his report. It was typical of them that there was no small-talk, no preamble to serious discussions. Neither of them had to manoeuvre for position or advantage. Ramsey could speak with total honesty, without worrying about giving offence or trying to improve his own position.

  His position was unassailable. They were brothers of the blood and of the soul.

  Of course, Castro could be changeable. His affections could shift. It had been that way with Che Guevara, another of the eighty-two heroes who came ashore from Granma. Che had fallen from grace after he had disagreed with Castro's economic policies and he had been driven out to become a wandering knight of the revolution, a Walt Whitman with grenade and AK 47. Yes, it had happened to Che, but it could never happen to Ramsey.

  "Yudenich has agreed to back our new export drive," Ramsey told him, and Castro chuckled. It was a little joke between them.

  Castro was an inspired political genius with that rare gift of being able to communicate his passionate vision to the masses of the people. However, although he was an educated man, a qualified lawyer who had practised his profession before the revolution had swept him up, he was no economist.

  His grasp of the whole arcane science of economics was weak. He could not bother himself with the balance of payments and employment and productivity. His vision was sweeping and transcended those petty aspects of the body politic. He liked the bold and the big. Ramsey had conceived the entire plan to appeal to El Jefe. It was bold and it was direct.

  The problem was that Cuba's island wealth was based on three staples: sugar and tobacco and coffee. These were insufficient to provide the hard currency to fuel Castro's ambitious plans for urban renewal and social welfare, let alone to provide full employment for an exploding population.

  Since the revolution the population had doubled. According to the forecasts it would double again in the next ten years. Ramsey's plan had been devised to counter these problems. It would provide hard cash, and go far to endin
g unemployment on the island.

  The 'new export drive' was simply the export of men, of fighting men and women. They would be sent out in their tens of thousands as mercenaries to pursue the revolution at the ends of the earth. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand, nearly ten percent of the island's total work force, could be exported. At one stroke they would end unemployment and swell the public coffer with the fees of a mercenary army.

  Castro had liked the plan from the first day that Ramsey had propounded it to him. It was the kind of economics that he could understand and applaud.

  "Yudenich will recommend it to Brezhnev,' Ramsey assured him, and Castro stroked his beard as though it were a shaggy black cat.

  "If Yudcnich recommends it, then we have no worries.' He leant forward with his hands on his knees. 'And we both know where you want them sent." 'I have meetings this afternoon, at the Tanzanian cmbassy," Ramsey said.

  There were seventeen African embassies in Havana, all of them representatives of socialist governments newly liberated from colonial oppression.

  Tanzania under Julius Nyerere was amongst the most Marxist of them all.

  Already Nyerere had declared that any person who owned more than one acre of property was a 'capitalist and enemy of the people' and that they would be punished by having all their property confiscated by the State. The Tanzanians were active in their support for those others struggling for liberation in the colonial slave states in the rest of Africa. They provided shelter for the freedom fighters from Portuguese Angola and Mozam bique, from that racist pariah South Africa, and from the medieval serfdom of the ancient tyrant Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. In all those countries there would be work for the army of Cuban mercenaries.

  "I am meeting officers of the Ethiopian army who are dedicated to the cause of Marxist socialism, and who are prepared to risk their lives to break the yoke of the oppressor." 'Yes,' Castro nodded. 'Ethiopia is ripe for us." Ramsey considered the ash of his cigar; it was firm and crisp, almost two inches long.

  "We both know that destiny has dictated that you play a rele beyond the shores of this lovely island. Africa awaits you." Castro leant back with satisfaction and placed his huge powerful hands on his knees, as Ramsey went on: 'The Africans have a natural distrust of Mother Russia. The Russians in the Kremlin are all Caucasians - the word originates in that country. It is an unfortunate fact that despite all their other virtues most Russians are racists. We cannot escape that fact.

  Many of the African leaders, especially the young ones, have studied in Russia. They have heard the name obezyana, "monkey", whispered as they pass in the corridors of Patrice Lumumba University. The Russians are white men and racists - deep in his heart the African does not trust them." Ramsey drew evenly on his cigar, and they were silent awhile. Castro broke the silence.

  "Go on." 'On the other hand you, El Jefe, are a great-grandson of Africa...' but Castro shook his head.

  "I am Spanish,' he contradicted.

  Ramsey smiled and went on. 'If you were to claim that your forefathers were sold on the slave block in Havana -who would doubt it?' he suggested delicately. 'And how vast might your influence become in Africa?" Castro was silent, contemplating that vision, and Ramsey went on softly: 'We must arrange a tour for you. A triumphant cavalcade beginning in Egypt and going southwards through twenty nations in which you could declare your concern, your commitment to the African people. If you could demonstrate your Africanism to two hundred million Africans, how great might your influence become.' Ramsey leant forward and touched his wrist. 'No longer the president of a tiny beleaguered island. No longer the plaything of America, but a statesman of world influence and power." 'My Golden Fox,' Castro said softly. 'No wonder that I love you."

  The Tanzanian embassy was temporarily accommodated in one of the Spanish colonial buildings in the old city.

  There the Ethiopians were waiting for Ramsey. There were three of them, all young officers in the imperial army of Emperor Haile Selassie. Only one of the three interested Rarnen Machado. He had met Captain Getachew Abebe on several previous visits to Addis Ababa.

  25e In Ethiopia ethnic lines cannot be distinguished. A thousand years of invasion and interbreeding between Caucasian tribes from across the Red Sea and those from the heartland of the African continent have resulted in a milange that cannot be separated. Definitions such as Galla and Amhara refer to linguistic and cultural groupings rather than to blood-lines.

  However, in Captain Getachew Abebe the pure African ancestral influence dominated. He was very dark-skinned with full lips and pock-marked skin. He was a product of the University of Addis Ababa. Joe Cicero had succeeded in infiltrating astrong cadre of American and British Marxists into the university in the reles of professors and lecturers. As one of their star students, Getachew Abebe had been transformed into a dedicated Marxist Leninist.

  Ramsey had studied and courted him over the years until now he judged that he was the right man. At the very least, he was intelligent, hard and ruthless - and totally committed to the cause. Although he was only in his middle thirties, he was Ramsey's provisional choice for the next leader of Ethiopia.

  As they shook hands in the shuttered sitting-room at the back of the Tanzanian embassy, Ramsey cautioned him with a glance and a small gesture towards the collection of African tribal masks that covered the walls. Any one of these could conceal a microphone.

  The conversation that followed was trivial and inconclusive and lasted less than half an hour. As they shook hands, Ramsey leant close to Abebe and whispered four words - a place and a time.

  The two of them met again an hour later in the Bodeguita del Medio. It was the most famous bar in the old city. There was sawdust on the floor, and the tables and chairs were scarred and battered. The walls were pitted and scratched with the graffiti and signatures of the famous and the ordinary: from Hemingway to Spencer Tracy and Edward, Duke of Windsor, they had all drunk here. Their faded yellowed photographs were tacked into plain wooden frames that hung, fly-spotted and askew, upon the grubby walls. The long narrow room was thick with smoke. The cacophony of a portable radio blaring 'Bembe' folk music and the shouted tiddly conversation of the customers covered their own quiet discussion.

  They sat in the furthest corner, with a mojito on the table in front of each of them. The condensation ran down the glasses and formed wet rings on the wood, but neither of them touched the drinks.

  "Comrade, the time is almost ripe,' Ramsey said, and Abebe nodded.

  "The lion of Amhara has grown old and toothless; his son is a weak indulgent idiot. The nation groans under his tyranny and hungers in the worst famine and drought for a hundred years. The time is ripe." 'There are two things we must avoid,'Ramsey cautioned. 'The first is an armed revolution. If the army rises and executes the emperor immediately, you will be passed over. You are still too junior in rank. One of the generals will seize power." 'Sof Abebe asked. 'What is the solution?" 'A creeping revolution,' Ramsey told him, and it was the first time Abebe had ever heard the term used, though he would not admit it.

  "I see,' he murmured, and Ramsey went on to enlighten him.

  "The Derg must call Haile Selassie to account and demand his abdication. As you say, the old lion has lost his teeth. He is isolated and out of touch.

  He must comply. You will use all your influence in the Derg, and I will exert all of mine." The Derg was the Ethiopian parliament, an assembly of all the tribal and army chiefs, the heads of government departments and the religious elders.

  The entire body. had been infiltrated by the Marxist products of the University of Addis Ababa. Most of them were under the direct influence of Ramsey's fourth directorate. All of them had accepted Getachew Abebe as their leader.

  "Then we will put in place a provisional military-based junta and I will arrange to move in a considerable Cuban force. With this we will consolidate your position. When it is secure we will be ready for the next step." 'What will that be?' Abebe asked.

  "T
he emperor must be eliminated,'Ramsey told him. 'To prevent a royalist backlash." 'Execution?" 'Executions are too public and too emotional." Ramsey shook his head. 'He is a sick old man. He will simply die, and then..." 'And then an election?' Abebe interjected, and Ramsey looked at him sharply.