Wilbur Smith - C08 Golden Fox

by C08 Golden Fox(Lit)

Then he leant so close to her that his warm breath fanned her cheek.

  "Come.' He touched her bare shoulder through the sheet. It had been so long that despite her happiness she felt strange and shy in his presence.

  "I will explain - come.' His eyes were so full of pain and suffering that she felt her joy waver.

  He took her hand that held the sheet to her chin and drew her, suddenly unresisting, from the bed. Still holding her hand, he led her, stark naked, to the bathroom. She was unaware of her nudity, and she staggered a little from the after-effects of the drug.

  In the bathroom Ramsey flushed the toilet, opened the taps in the handbasin and in the bath, and switched on the shower in the glass-walled cabinet.

  Then he came back to her. She drew away from him, afraid to touch him. Her naked back was pressed to the cold tiles.

  "What is happening to us? Are you one of them, Ramsey? I am so confused.

  Please tell me what is happening." His marvelous features contorted with agony. 'I am like you. I have to co-operate, for Nicky's sake. I can't explain now - forces greater than we are. We have been caught up, all three of us. Oh, my darling, how I have wanted to hold you and explain it all to you, but I have so little time." 'Ramsey, tell me you still love me,'she whispered timidly.

  "Yes, my darling. More than I ever did. I know what hell you must have lived through. I have shared it with you, every moment of it. I know what you must have thought of me. One day you will understand that everything I have done has been for Nicky and for you." She wanted to believe him, desperately, wildly she wanted it to be true.

  "Soon,'he whispered, taking her face between his cupped hands. 'Soon we'll be together, just the three of us - you and Nicky and me. You must trust me." 'Ramsey!' It came out as a choking sob, and she wound both arms around his neck and clung to him with all her strength. Against all reason or logic she believed him completely.

  "We have only a few minutes together. We dare not risk more. It is so dangerous. You can never know what terrible danger Nicky is in." 'And you also,' her voice quavered.

  "My life does not matter. It's Nicky.

  "Both of you,' she denied it. 'You are both so precious." 'Promise me that you will do nothing to harm Nicky.' He kissed her mouth.

  "Please do whatever they say. It will not be for much longer. I will get us free of this thing, if you will help me. But you must trust me." 'Oh, my love. Oh, my darling. I knew deep down. I knew there must be a reason. Of course, I trust you, my heart." 'Be strong for all of us." 'I swear it to you,' she nodded violently, her face smeared with tears. 'Oh God, how I love you. I have suppressed it so long." 'I know, my darling. I know." -'Please, please, make love to me, Ramsey. I've been without you for so long. I have been withering away. Make love to me before you have to go." He took her quickly, and yet it crashed over her like the winds of a hurricane and left her shattered.

  When he was gone, breaking away with a last long lingering kiss, her legs could no longer support her. She sank slowly down the tiled wall, and sat on the floor with her legs sprawled jointlessly under her. The taps roared and billows of steam filled the room. She didn't understand it ill. She didn't have to and she didn't care any more. All that mattered was Nicky and Ramsey.

  "Oh, thank God,' she whispered. 'It wasn't true. None of the horrors was true. Ramsey loves me still. We will be all right, the three of us. We'll come through this together. Somehow. Sometime." She dragged herself to her feet. 'Now I must pull myself together. They mustn't suspect. She staggered to the shower.

  She was still in bra and panties when, without a knock, the door opened and the large heavy-featured woman who had escorted her from the airport and had conducted that dreadful body-search entered the room. She looked at Isabella's body in a way that made Isabella's flesh crawl and she stepped hurriedly into the skirt of her grey suit.

  "What do you want?" 'You leave in twenty minutes to airport." 'Where is Nicky? Where is my son?" 'Child has gone." 'I want to see him, please." "Is not possible. Child has gone." Isabella felt the ebullient mood of hope, which her brief interlude with Ramsey had raised, begin to evaporate.

  The nightmare begins again, she thought, and tried to steel herself against the creeping sense of despair.

  must trust Ramsey. I must be strong." The woman sat beside Isabella in the back seat of the Cortina on the drive back to the airport. It was a hot morning, and the car was not air-conditioned. The woman's body odour was rank as a man's. Isabella felt she was going to be ill, and she opened the side-window and let the wind blow in her face.

  The driver of the Cortina stopped outside the international departures terminal and, while he went to unlock the boot and lift out Isabella's suitcase, the woman spoke for the first time since leaving the hacienda.

  "Is for you,' she said, and handed over a sealed unaddressed envelope.

  Isabella opened her handbag and secreted the envelope. The woman was staring straight ahead through the windscreen. She offered no word of farewell. Isabella stepped out of the Cortina and picked up her suitcase.

  The driver slammed the door and drove away.

  Standing on the pavement, in the midst of the throng of package-tour travellers, Isabella felt alone, more alone and frightened than she had been before she had seen Nicky and Ramsey again.

  "I must trust him,' she repeated to herself as a litany of faith, and went to the Iberian check-in desk.

  In the first-class lounge, she went to the women's washroom and locked herself in one of the cubicles. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and tore open the envelope.

  Red Rose, You will ascertain precisely what stage the development of a nuclear explosive device by Armscor and the nuclear research institute at Pelindaba has reached. You will report on the test site that has been selected and the date for the preliminary testing of the device.

  On receipt of this data a further meeting with your son will be arranged.

  The duration of this meeting will depend on the depth and scope of information that you deliver.

  There was, as usual, no signature, and the message was typed on a sheet of plain paper. She stared at it sightlessly.

  "Deeper and deeper,' she whispered. 'First the radar report.' That had not seemed so bad. Radar was a defensive weapon - but this? An atomic bomb?

  Would there ever be an end to it?

  She shook her head. 'I can't - I'll tell them, I can't." Her father had never even hinted at any interest in the Pelindaba Institute. She had never seen any file or even a single letter that addressed the subject of a nuclear explosive device. She had read in the press that the research at Pelindaba was directed towards refinement and processing of the country's huge uranium production, and towards the development of a reactor for industrial and urban electrical power. The prime minister had given repeated assurances that South Africa was not developing the bomb.

  Despite that, her instructions were not to ascertain if production were in progress. That was taken as a fact. She had been ordered to find out where and when the first device would be tested.

  She began to shred the message between nervous fingers.

  "I can't,' she whispered. She stood up and raised the toilet-seat. She dropped each tiny scrap of paper into the bowl separately, and then flushed them away.

  "I'll tell them I can't.' But already her mind was busy.

  I'll have to work on Pater, she thought, and immediately began to plan it.

  Isabella had been out of the country on her visit to Spain for only five days. Nevertheless, Nana was angry, and sniffed at her weak excuse for leaving in the middle of her election campaign. The Friday before polling day, the prime minister, John Vorster, addressed a meeting in the Sea Point town hall in support of the National Party candidate.

  It had taken all Centaine Courtney-Malcomess's wiles and wit to get him to cancel two other important engagements to make the speech. The party machine realized that Sea Point was a safe opposition seat and that they were simply going through the motions. They
were reluctant to wheel out their big gun; but Centaine prevailed, as she usually did. With the promise of hearing the prime minister speak, the town hall was jam-packed. The meeting began with the usual heckling from the body of the hall, but it was fly good-natured.

  Isabella spoke first. She kept it short, ten minutes. It was her best speech of the entire campaign. She had gathered valuable experience and confidence over the preceding weeks, and her jaunt to Spain seemed to have revitalized her. Both Nana and Shasa had gone over the text with her, and she had rehearsed her delivery in front of them. These two shrewd old political warhorses had given her valuable tips and suggestions.

  Standing on the platform in front of the crowded hall, Isabella cut a slim determined figure, and the heart of the audience seemed to go out to her youth and loveliness. They gave her a standing ovation at the end, while John 27e Vorster stood beside her, red-faced and benign, nodding and clapping his approval.

  The following Wednesday evening Shasa and Nana were standing on either side of Isabella, wearing huge party rosettes and straw boaters with the party colours, when the results of the polling were read out.

  There were no upsets. The Progressive Party regained the seat, but Isabella had cut their majority to a mere twelve hundred votes. Her supporters chaired her shoulder-high from the hall as though she were the victor and not the vanquished.

  A week later John Vorster invited her to a meeting in his office in the parliament building. Isabella knew the building intimately. When her father had been a cabinet minister in Hendrik Verwoerd's government, his office had been on the same floor only a few doors down the corridor from the prime minister's office.

  During his tenure Shasa had given her the run of his office, and she had used it as a club whenever she was in central Cape Town. It brought back so many memories to walk once again down the wide corridor. As a teenager she had not in any way appreciated the aura of history with which the magnificent old building was imbued.

  Now, with political aspirations thrust upon her against her will, she was entranced by portraits of great men, both good and evil, which decorated the panelled walls.

  The prime minister kept her waiting only a few minutes. When she went through into his office he came round his desk to greet her.

  "It's so good of you to want to see me, Oom John,' Isabella said in flawless Afrikaans. It was naughty of her to use such familiar address without being invited to do so. However, the term 'Oom', or 'Uncle', was one of great respect and the gamble paid off. Vorster's blue eyes twinkled in acknowledgement of her nerve.

  "I wanted to congratulate you on your showing at Sea Point, Bella," he replied, and she felt a thrill of acceptance. Use of her pet name was an unusual accolade.

  "I'm having a coffee-break.' Vorster waved at the silver and porcelain service on a side-table. 'Will you pour a cup for both of us?

  "Now, young lady,' he addressed her sternly over the rim of his cup. "What are you going to do with yourself? Since you aren't going to be an MP." 'Well, Oom John, I am working for my father-" 'Of course, I know that,' he interrupted her. 'But we can't let all that fresh young political talent go begging. Have you considered a seat in the Senate?" "The Senate?' Isabella gulped, and the coffee scalded her tongue. 'No, Prime Minister, I haven't. Nobody ever suggested-" 'Well, somebody is suggesting it now. Old Kleinhans is retiring next month.

  I have to nominate somebody to take his seat. It will do until we can find a safe seat in the lower house for you." The Senate was the upper of the two legislative houses of the Republic of South Africa. Its duties were similar to those of the House of Lords, and it had the power to hold up dubious legislation and refer it back to the lower house. It had been considerably expanded back in the when the then prime minister, Malan, had set out to disfranchise those coloured voters who had the vote. He had packed the upper house with senators nominated by himself in order to force through the distasteful Act that stripped the coloureds of their vote. Some of the seats in the upper house were stiff in the prime minister's gift, and Vorstcr was offering her one of these.

  Isabella set down her coffee-cup and stared speechlessly at him. Her mind was racing to keep up with this new development.

  "Will you accept the nomination?' Vorster asked.

  It was a marvelous short-cut, one that none of them -not Shasa nor even Nana - had dreamt of.

  Hcndrik Vcrwocrd himself had started his political career in the Senate. At twenty-eight years of age, she would almost certainly be the youngest, brightest and certainly the most attractive senator in the upper house.

  Appointments to various commissions and house committees would certainly follow her nomination. If she was only half as good as she knew she was, the National Party would turn her into their prime feminist political figure. Her entry to the innermost circles of power, to the innermost state secrets would come very swiftly.

  "You do me great honour, Prime Minister.' Her voice was a whisper.

  "I know that you will serve your country with even greater honour." Vorster held out his hand. 'Congratulations, Senator." As Isabella took his hand, she felt an icy finger of guilt trace down her spine, the chill of treason and treachery. She forced it back. The reaction followed swiftly - with a great surge of her spirits she realized that Red Rose was now invaluable to her masters. Soon she could set her own terms and demand her own rewards from them.

  Nicky and Ramsey, she thought. Ramsey and Nicky - it will be soon now. Much sooner than we could ever have believed. We will be together again.

  Isabella had come to love the austere grandeur of the Karoo.

  Shasa had purchased the vast sheep-ranch while she was still a child. On her first visit she had hated the grim stony kopjes and forbidding plains that spread aimlessly to a distant horizon blurred by sun and dust until the juncture of earth and a milky luminous sky was obscured. Then as a teenager she had read Eve Palmer's The Plains of Camdeboo and she had begun to understand just what a wondrous world the Karoo really was.

  With her father, she had hunted for fossils in the up-thrust sedimentary beds that had been a vast ante-

  diluvian swamp in the age of the great reptiles, and she had stood amazed and filled with awe by their petrified bones and fangs.

  The homestead was named Dragon's Fountain in memory of those terrible creatures, and for the spring of clear sweet water that gushed ceaselessly from a grotto at the base of one of the table-topped mountains. The sheer wall of red rock towered above the sprawling mansion with its green lawns and lush gardens nurtured by the spring. Vultures and eagles nested in the crags, and their droppings whitewashed the weathered precipice.

  The sheep-ranch spread over sixty thousand acres of this fascinating wilderness. Mingled with the flocks of merino sheep were vast herds of springbok. These graceful little antelope danced upon the plains like puffs of wind-driven dust. Their delicate bodies were pale cinnamon slashed with bars. of chocolate and blazing white. Their lovely patterned heads and lyre-shaped horns made them Isabella's favourite amongst all the multitudinous lifeforms that inhabited the plains of Camdeboo. Both sheep and antelope flourished on the low wiry desert bush, and the diet flavoured their flesh with the taste of sage and wild herbs.

  Each winter, at the commencement of the hunting season, Shasa invited a party to Dragon's Fountain to join the annual springbok cull. Anything over four inches of rainfall in the Karoo was considered a good year, and in such a season the springbok ewes lambed twice. The resulting explosion of the herds had to be controlled. In a year such as this it is necessary to cull a thousand head of springbok to protect the fragile desert growth from their ravages.

  Garry brought a party of his friends and their families down from Johannesburg. The landing-strip at Dragon's Fountain had been extended and macadamized to accommodate the new Lear jet. Shasa brought the rest of the guests up from Cape Town in the twin-engined Queen Air.

  Isabella had not been able to leave Cape Town until the 28o Senate went into recess. Then she dro
ve up with Nana in the silver-grey Porsche that her father had given her on her twenty-ninth birthday to replace the aged Mini. She enjoyed having Nana as a passenger. The old lady's stories whiled away the hours of the long drive. Unlike Shasa, Nana did not watch the speedometer. At one stage on the arrow-straight stretch of road between Beaufort West and the ranch, Isabella had wound the Porsche up to almost xeo miles per hour without a word of protest from Nana.

  It was mid-afternoon when they pulled into the kitchen yard at Dragon's Fountain. Servants and dogs came pouring from the kitchen and outbuildings to give them a riotous welcome. When at last Isabella escaped to her own room, Nanny was already running her bath and unpacking her three suitcases.

  "God, I'm bushed, Nanny. I'm going to sleep for a week." 'Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,' Nanny warned her darkly.

  "Don't come that with me, Nanny. You're a Muslim." 'We got the same rules,' Nanny sniffed haughtily.

  "Where are all the men?' Isabella flopped on to the bed.