Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  She turned her head towards the sea and stared out across the town. Seagulls were wheeling over the harbour, diving down to the quayside to grab dead fish as they fell from the nets that were being hauled off the fishing boats by the work gangs.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave?’

  ‘“Being planned or under way,” the Frenchman had said. He didn’t know they were less than fifty miles off even while we were promenading. Laurent’s brother and his boys were waiting with me by the boat yesterday morning while Daddy went to say goodbye to someone in town. He had just left when we saw it, a large grey launch covered in soldiers coming at full speed through the deep water channel. I told the boys to go below and hide and went after Daddy. But they must have dropped a landing party further up the beach because they were already in the Square and shooting. I backtracked but they were already in the harbour by then so I went to the only safe place I know. Daddy told me later he stayed awhile in a house in the Square and then he too went up to the pit. Can you imagine his face when he saw I was already there.’

  Pilger had been watching them for nearly an hour now. No one would see from below but from his position high above he had seen them leave the houses and had followed their movements through the vineyard. He was tempted to move down to meet them, help them the last half mile up the mountain, but it was a silly risk so he merely shifted his sitting position to the other side of the rock’s shadow. And then he saw the flash. Something shiny and metallic. Then the man. And he felt dizzy with panic.

  The soldier was less than two hundred yards below him and to the left, between him and the two figures climbing up. A sniper perhaps or a look-out, watching for movement in the town below. He hadn’t seen Elizabeth or Faraday yet because he was turned sideways to them, scanning the harbour and being much lower on the slope he would not have seen their movement through the vines. But now they had broken cover it was only a matter of time before he saw them too.

  He realized that Elizabeth and Faraday would walk into him, wouldn’t see him until it was too late and they were out on open ground now with nowhere to run. Then he saw the flash again as the sun reflected on the barrel of the soldier’s gun and he knew what he had to do.

  He edged back into the narrow tunnel that led into the pit. On the upturned plywood packing case that served as his table he saw the knife, long and double-edged with a thick plastic handle, one he had used on the rigging of his yacht and occasionally to descale the fish he caught.

  He wedged the flat stone against the entrance to the tunnel, pushed his way through the bushes that hid it and moved back again into the shadow of the overhang of granite. The soldier was still in the same position, his back to him. He seemed asleep. In the hot sun, he thought, sitting alone it would be very easy to doze off.

  Carefully and very quietly for a man of his size, he followed a narrow winding path, a strip of yellowing grass worn thin by roaming goats and sheep, crouched, holding the knife low in his left hand, balancing himself with his right arm outstretched. The path turned and twisted through the shallow gulleys and the scattering of small lava-stone boulders, but his eyes never left the hunched, still figure in the light green uniform below him. He could see him clearly now, legs bent, his arms resting on his knees, his hands touching his ankles and his face looking down at the ground in front of him.

  Pray God, he thought, let him be asleep, don’t let me see his face. Fifty yards and still no movement from the soldier. He glanced to his left, saw the two figures, so close now he could see they were hand in hand. Another few minutes and he would hear them as they walked over the slate and loose stones. And so would the soldier.

  Then he stopped abruptly, saw the shadow and went down on one knee. Shielding his eyes from the sun with his open palm he looked up and saw a kite hovering. Only the tips of its broad wings were moving, sudden sharp flicks as the wind tried to turn it in the air, but the decision of the bird was suddenly vital to Pilger. Its victim was somewhere in the grass but as long as it kept still, the kite would stay hovering above it. But if it moved forward down the slope, if its shadow moved closer to the soldier, it would alert him and he would turn.

  Pilger felt the warmth of the grass on his bare feet as he crept forward again, bent at the knees, the knife blade leading. He could see the soldier’s deep breathing, and the slow slight rise and fall of his shoulders. Fifteen yards now. The rifle and its familiar curved magazine stood upright against a boulder. Still the soldier didn’t move. Ten yards. Then he saw why. The soldier wasn’t asleep. He was reading. Between his legs spread out on the grass in front of him, neatly arranged, were small sheets of blue paper. A letter. He was reading a letter. All this time reading and rereading the pages of a letter.

  The kite hardly moved in the sky, patiently hovering, waiting to kill. Then it turned its head quickly to one side, made the decision and fell like a stone to the ground.

  It wasn’t the sound of the kite that alerted the soldier. It hit its prey so silently it was crushed before it even knew it had been touched. It was the soldier’s affinity with death and dying that made him suddenly aware it was nearby, and he turned with the knife-blade still a yard from him.

  He was young, twenty years, no more, but as he looked up from the knife to the face of the man tensed above him, he became old and weary, his eyes uncaring. Very casually, as if there was no reason ever to hurry again, he reached across for his rifle as Pilger, with two hands, lunged and pushed the blade through the boy’s ribs and into his heart as their eyes, in that instant, met.

  The kite soared, using the thermals and gusts of wind to carry it up to its ledge just below the thin layer of white cloud that still covered the peak of the mountain. As it dropped the small crushed ground-squirrel, its tiny dead paws relaxed and scattered the yellow petals of buttercup into the nest.

  Pilger sat by the dead boy, shuffling the pages of the letter together. The thin blue writing paper still smelt of the scent a wife had poured on to the envelope as she had posted it many weeks before from their home in the little village of Varadero, near Havana. Cuba.

  12

  ‘Cubans?’

  ‘Yes Cubans.’

  ‘Prentice thought they were African Nationals from Mozambique.’

  ‘No William! This has nothing to do with African Nationalism. This is Communism. The soldiers are Havana’s Hessians trooping for Moscow. The invasion was ordered from there.’

  ‘But why here? Why Union? What use can an island this size be to them?’

  ‘More use than ordinary people like us, William, could ever imagine. From here the Russians intend to consolidate and expand their influence through Central and Southern Africa. Doesn’t that sound absurd? Doesn’t that sound like the rantings of a paranoiac McCarthy-ite . . . seeing a Cuban under every bed? But it’s true, William, it’s true. Union is now about to be turned into a giant Soviet military base, managed by the Cubans and disguised as Africa’s newest “Will-of-the-People” Socialist Republic.’

  The three of them had dragged the soldier’s body sixty yards further up the mountain-side to a small copse of thornbush cut in two by a volcanic fissure and they threw the body into it, Pilger’s knife still wedged between the ribs. They had listened but they hadn’t heard it land.

  Pilger had stood at the edge of the fissure looking down, holding the Cuban’s rifle in one hand. For over a minute he remained there, not moving, just staring into the young Cuban’s grave, and Elizabeth and Faraday watched as he threw after it scraps of blue paper. Then he suddenly turned, put the webbing strap of the rifle over his shoulder and without a word led them up to the overhang of granite Elizabeth had pointed to. Pushing his way through the bush after him, Faraday found himself at the low tunnel entrance of a slave-pit, exactly like the one Elizabeth had shown him on that soft, warm afternoon a thousand years ago.

  It had been built on a broad rock ledge with the same square-cut stone by t
he same Arabs ten generations before. The granite overhang came to within a couple of feet of the top of the wall, and once the slave traders had stopped coming it had been overgrown with tree creepers, bamboo, thornbush and cactus so that now it was completely hidden.

  The smooth rock floor was partly covered in sisal matting and animal skins. There were two camp-beds and two sleeping bags, a methane gas-stove, an orange box turned on its side containing some paperbacks and an upturned plywood packing case with a small radio and a hurricane lamp on top. And by the lamp a tin of rat poison.

  Elizabeth explained that she and her father had used the pit as a base camp for their climbing expeditions. They had found it by accident, she said, shortly after they had arrived on the island, at a time when Pilger had a mania for butterflies. A green banded swallowtail had led him to it and it had remained their secret ever since.

  Elizabeth sat on a pile of rugs, Faraday on a camp-bed next to her. Pilger knelt by the gas-stove boiling water for tea.

  ‘I wouldn’t have asked you and Elizabeth to take so many risks, William, if I hadn’t thought it necessary. But many things could happen to me now . . . and please don’t think me melodramatic . . . so it’s essential that as many people as possible who can expect to be allowed to leave the island know what’s about to be done so that they can tell the story outside. And people outside must know.’

  He poured tea into three blue enamel mugs and stirred in milk powder. He dropped a saccharine into his, passed one to Faraday and sat down on the floor next to his daughter and gave her a mug.

  ‘D’you remember me telling you, William, that President Laurent was a clever man with a simple outline?’

  Faraday nodded. ‘Cunning enough, you said, to know that to be simple nowadays carries a lot of weight.’

  ‘He was clever, William, and his simpleness deceived many people. He found that information came his way that was denied and kept secret from other men. You see, he had never been involved in practical politics so he was never regarded at any level of government or at any level of the island’s Society as anything but a famous retired professor who went fishing with an eccentric Englishman. A Grand Blanc who fed his children on wine and walked barefoot.’ There was a pause as they sipped their tea.

  Pilger looked up again. ‘But a few days into the New Year, shortly after he’d returned from Paris, Laurent realized something was on. He picked up things, snippets, but he recognized the signals; they were historically familiar to him. A coup was being planned. He told me later he was delighted at the prospect. He had always considered the President a scoundrel and although he wasn’t prepared to take any positive role in a coup he wasn’t going to get in its way. He knew many young men in lower government who had the scruples and the training to do better than the playboy President who was squandering the island’s resources.

  ‘But to Laurent’s surprise, sometime in early March, he was approached and discreetly sounded out. There was a lot of ambiguity but there was no mistaking the final invitation. Laurent was to be nominated Union’s new President and the date was set for 14 July, the anniversary of the French Revolution.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Faraday. ‘That’s another three weeks away. Why did they bring it forward?’

  ‘They didn’t, William. He did. You see he pre-empted their coup with his own. To save the island.’

  Faraday looked from Pilger to Elizabeth and down to his mug of tea. A small crust of milk-powder was floating in the middle of it and sitting on top, as if it was a life-raft, was a small fly. He flicked it out, milk crust and all, and drank.

  Pilger went on. ‘You see, William, Laurent found out that his lovely island was to be turned into an arsenal for Russian weapons, a re-supply base for all the Soviet-backed governments and so-called liberation movements throughout East and Southern Africa. Apparently the supply-lines from Moscow and Eastern Europe had become too stretched and anyway the Russians realized their air and sea transports were being constantly and very accurately monitored by the Americans and the French and the South Africans, which annoyed them.

  ‘So during the past year they discreetly stockpiled in Angola, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Congo Brazzaville, planning to bring it all here, stored, ready to be sent wherever it was needed, whenever it was asked for.

  ‘And Laurent found out too, William, that the Russians had a second use for Union. It was to be turned into a training base for African Revolutionary leaders and their various guerrilla armies, commanded by Cubans. D’you see William, how superbly they’ve selected us. Our own airstrip, our harbour, excellent radio communications, a ready-made satellite tracking station to be commandeered and only three hundred miles from the African coast, with sympathetic countries on their doorstep. Can you see it? Tiny, delightful, innocent little Union, suddenly a massive Soviet arsenal and a training barracks for every African disciple of that hideous conviction that power comes from the barrel of a gun.’

  There was a scuffle on the far side of the pit and Faraday looked across. ‘Rats,’ said Pilger. ‘Still a couple here who won’t eat my poison, but they will. I’m sure they will eventually.’

  Faraday got up from his camp-bed and stood by the wall and felt the moisture on the stone. The air temperature was dropping, the warmth was going out of the sun and it was late afternoon outside.

  ‘How did you find all this out?’ he asked. ‘How did Laurent?’

  ‘I learnt it from him,’ answered Pilger, ‘and he learnt from a friend, the oddest thing. He returned from fishing one afternoon a month ago to find this friend waiting for him. He had come by special air charter from Mozambique, was on the staff of the French Embassy in Maputo, not all that senior, second secretary or something, but he’d known Laurent from Paris, had attended his seminars at the Sorbonne and they had got to know each other quite well. So the Embassy used him as their go-between.

  ‘The Frenchman told Laurent everything, gave him chapter and verse right down to the last detail of the Coup and the invasion, even its probable date. He told Laurent that the invitation to become President had not come from disaffected Unionese but from agents of the Soviets. All this, you understand, William, more than a month ago.

  ‘The Frenchman told him his Embassy had compiled a complete dossier from information they had received from their own people in Mozambique and from others in Zambia, Ethiopia, Angola and Havana.

  ‘Then the Frenchman, acting absolutely unofficially for his government, he stressed that, urged Laurent to pre-empt the Soviet plan and go for his own coup. He even promised his Embassy’s help with logistics and a few experienced members of their Bureaux in case there was opposition.

  ‘The Frenchman stayed the night and at breakfast Laurent gave his decision. Said he’d do it. He told me later that the French then moved incredibly quickly, adapted the Soviet plan to their own purposes without the Communist agents in Union being any the wiser. And on 20 June, Laurent proclaimed himself President and simultaneously presented his government to the island’s people, made up of men he knew were honest and, perhaps more important, popular.’

  ‘Which is when I came here,’ said Faraday.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the French had known all that time what the Soviets planned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘That’s what the Frenchman told Laurent and that’s what he later told me.’

  ‘And now they’ve let this happen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why? If they were so concerned to begin with, why aren’t they doing something now?’

  ‘From the start, Laurent was told that if his coup came off he was then on his own, the French could never get involved.’

  Faraday let his head rest back against the wall and shivered at the sudden coldness on his scalp.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘
Neither do I, William. I know the explanation Laurent was given by the French, but I don’t know that any reasonable man should accept it.’

  ‘But what about us?’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘The British . . . the British Government.’

  ‘My dear boy, the British had first to be told where Union was and then wait to be told by Washington what to do. Then when the Americans found out there was no oil involved, they couldn’t care less.’

  ‘And the Cubans?’ asked Faraday.

  ‘Three laps ahead and President Carter still waiting for his second wind.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. Really I can’t,’ said Faraday.

  ‘You’ve no choice, William. It’s fact.’

  ‘But it’s Russia . . .’

  ‘And Carter’s not Kennedy.’

  ‘So he’ll let them move where they like?’

  ‘Do you know what he said to me last time I saw him?’

  ‘Laurent?’

  Pilger nodded. ‘He said the Americans even now are suffering from chronic ignorance over Africa. They’ve just discovered it, he said, and they think they’ve invented the wheel. He said they’re not even sure of their geography. All they know for certain is that Africa is the eastward route to Vietnam.

  ‘Maybe that’s why they’re so terrified. Haven’t you ever noticed, William, how they always freeze at the mention of it? Say “Vietnam” and they jerk as if you’ve hit them on the knee with a hammer. They must feel they committed the most enormous sin. Like killing Jesus.’

  Pilger drank more tea and began patting himself, looking for his pipe.

  ‘According to the Frenchman,’ he went on, ‘the man who masterminded it all was the Soviet Ambassador in Lusaka, Dr Vassily Solodovnikov. Apparently he’s Moscow’s most highly-prized Foreign Affairs man. The Frenchman told Laurent everyone was puzzled when the Russians installed him there five years ago. They all assumed he must have crossed someone in the Politburo, because he had always been reckoned for a top post, Washington, London, Paris. Lusaka was then generally regarded as a backwater for the almost-made-its.