‘But it seems the Russians did it for their usual reasons. They were looking ahead, a long, long way ahead, and eventually this man, this Solodovnikov, installed the Cubans in Angola, forced the Chinese trade missions out of Tanzania, created the Katangese problems in Zaire, pulled the puppet strings of the Nationalist guerrilla armies in Rhodesia, did his best to push Zambia into the Eastern camp and liaised the airlift of Russian weapons to Ethiopia, the biggest airlift of its kind since the Second World War. He is Russia’s Administrator-General for the advancement of all things Soviet in Africa and one of the highest dignitaries of the KGB.
‘The Frenchman gave Laurent a detailed itinerary of Solodovnikov’s trips throughout Africa and all the comings and goings of top Russians and Cubans during the past year. Laurent was astounded. It started in 1978 with the Soviet President Podgomy’s trip to Lusaka, Mozambique and Tanzania. And shortly after Podgorny went home the Russians sent to Africa one of their very top military strategists. General Vassily Petrov. Now, Petrov is deputy commander of all USSR ground forces and a Second World War hero and, according to the French it was extraordinary for the Russians to send him to an ailing bankrupt country like Mozambique just to talk about, as the Russians put it, the deployment of Mozambique forces. They haven’t got many for a start and it would have taken Petrov half an hour on the telephone from Moscow to have done that.
‘No. According to the French, Petrov was there to tell the Mozambique Government what new Russian weapons were due to arrive, where they should be stored, when they would be leaving again and where to. Even while he was there Soviet ships were unloading tanks and jets at the port of Nacala. Petrov then met up with Dr Solodovnikov en route to Angola and together they finalized the plan for Union. There were apparently dozens of visits during 1979 by second-tier Russians, East Germans, Bulgarians and Cubans scudding from one Soviet-aligned African country to another. Then in May, the Russian news agency, Tass, reported that the Soviet Union had given three large merchant ships to the Angolans for what they called “general trading”. Of course they had Russian crews and their movements, as it turned out, were co-ordinated from Odessa. The Frenchman said that the idea was Solodovnikov’s and the vessels were to be used solely for the trans-shipment of weapons to Union as soon as it was convenient.
‘Finally confronted with all this, the Americans were forced to signal their own man in Lusaka, Solodovnikov’s counterpart in office if not in talent. They asked him to check out what he could. He did. He came back six hours later . . . six hours mind you . . . and said it was a load of bull. That’s what he called it . . . bull! My God! All this
lost. . . Laurent hanged, his two little boys . . .’
But he didn’t finish.
‘Daddy?’ Elizabeth spoke for the first time in over an hour. Faraday felt the voice, felt almost able to touch it and he knew Pilger had told her the dreadful sadness by not wanting to. As so often with people in love, the message had already been transmitted and already received, and Pilger turned, knelt by his daughter, put his large arms gently around her and pulled her tight to him as she began sobbing into his chest.
Faraday turned his head from them and looked up to the dark granite and saw in the blackness there, two little boys on the foredeck of a yacht with the sun going down behind them, their arms tight around their father’s legs, waving excitedly at a man they would never know, whom they had called the ‘Captain’s baby’. And he waving back, standing by the bronze monument in the warm orange evening light watching The Killing of Sister George sail into the harbour, as the seagulls tucked themselves away for the night on the mountain above Petit Royan.
Faraday felt he should cry too, but he didn’t know what of all the many things was the saddest.
13
The black dockers in the port of Beira on the northern Mozambique coast had for a long time been used to working under floodlights at night and handling unmarked cargoes, watched and directed by foreign armed sentries who spoke little or no Portuguese. But this evening they were all agreed. The security surrounding these particular three ships was extraordinary.
The freighters had come in the previous night and had waited bow to stem in their berths, hatches locked, for the cover of night again.
With the exception of eighty dockers, selected at random, the eastern docks had been evacuated and the gates had been closed. The sentries in light green uniforms and forage caps now stood guard by them and a hundred more patrolled the sheds and waited by the cranes, rifles held high across their chests.
The whistle blew at eight o’clock and the diesel engines on the cranes were started up, the hatches were unlocked and the covers stacked to one side. The dockers looked down into them and saw they were empty, and they realized the three cargo ships had not come to Mozambique’s second largest port to deliver, but to take away, and the cargo they would take with them later in the secure darkness was part of a stockpile of weaponry that had been gradually accumulated in the warehouses and sheds the soldiers had hastily erected some months earlier.
Of all the black dockers, he was perhaps the most surprised, not only by what he saw but that of all the hundreds of dockers ready to work that night, he should have been so randomly employed.
From his position, sixty feet up in the cab of the crane, he could see all three ships and he memorized their names, one Russian, two Yugoslav. He would be able to see every piece of crated cargo that was loaded aboard them. Inside his cab, on the left of the crane’s control panel, was a small steel square table, two feet by one. Quickly, as he watched his hydraulic pressures rise to working load, he emptied a large box of matches on to it and just as quickly he broke the matchsticks in two with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, pushing the sulphur tips in a pile to the far side. These were his artillery pieces. With the side of his hand he swept the bottom halves into a neat pile alongside. These were his crates of small arms and ammunition.
He saw the start signal from the foreman stevedore below him, two green torchlights flashing in an arc over his head ready to direct the giant crane and its hook. He waited for the second single green, his right hand firmly on the lever and his left foot steady on the accelerator pedal.
Again with this free left hand he reached back behind his seat to his jacket hanging there. From the inside breast pocket he pulled out a flat carton of cigarettes, flicked up the lid and counted them. More luck. He had bought them that afternoon but he had smoked only two. He tipped them out on to the table, short thin cigarettes filled with coarse black tobacco and rolled in cheap brown liquorice paper, known by their brand name to the dockers as ‘Havanas’.
He saw the green, pulled the lever back, pressed the accelerator and watched the long arm of the crane move right. His left hand eased forward the cable control until the foreman’s red light stopped the hook a foot from the ground. He saw the black shine of sweat on the backs of the dockers as they pulled the nylon straps of the cargo-net together for the lift.
Again with his left hand, he broke the cigarettes into two, wetting the broken ends with his lips and pressing them firm to stop the tobacco from spilling out. With the same care he pushed them with the edge of his hand to a neat pile alongside the artillery pieces. These were his tanks. One more pile of counters now and he was ready. The red torch flashed again and the cargo-net began its swing towards the ship.
He looked around but couldn’t see much of the cab’s interior. The order had been clear enough, and so had the penalty for breaking it. No lights except for the floods low down on the quayside.
He opened the drawers in the control cabinet but they were empty. He needed more counters, one more pile. It wasn’t his fault he was unprepared, it had been unexpected, a hundred to one chance that they’d do it tonight and even longer odds that he would be picked. So he couldn’t be blamed for not having his pack of playing cards - his usual method of counting - with him. How clever they were. Every time a
body search, every day, in and out. And a pencil and paper would mean immediate arrest. No ordinary docker would need the one or the other. Why should he? To record? And what? The comings and goings of ships and the cargoes they carried? And why? For whom? No! A pencil and paper meant certain interrogation and torture by the feared State Security Police and for-ever- after a slow death from malnutrition or dysentery inside the cells of Maputo’s Machava Penitentiary governed, he knew now, by East Germans. Or the same slow death at one of their re-education camps.
Then he saw what he wanted. Close to him on his right side was a small access window, dirty and filmed over with diesel fumes. Above it was a canvas roller-blind to protect the driver from the blinding morning sun that came up over the water towers on the dock’s eastern boundary and hanging from it was a cord of threaded china beads, square like tiny dice. He leant over and bit off the knot at the end and the beads fell into his hand. Carefully he placed them in the last pile on the right-hand side of the table. These were his crated aircraft, the MiG 21s that everyone in Beira knew about but no one ever dared speak of, even to their families.
The tanks too were public knowledge and a public secret. They had been too large to store in the freight sheds so they had been driven the three miles to the Frelimo army depot and parked there under khaki tarpaulins. The police and the army had cordoned off the entire east-side district of Beira during the transfer so that no one should see, but they couldn’t hide the deep gouges made by the tracks in the soft tarmac of the streets that led to the depot.
It was past midnight now and the moon was large and gave almost as much light as the floods themselves. For over four hours the row of cranes had been working the ships, three cranes to each. Below, he could see the scurry of the almost naked blacks, throwing the nets around the last of the wooden crates, and he watched his hook take the final consignment from the quay across the narrow gulley of water and disappear into the blackness of the hold.
And on the table, the piles of match-sticks, broken cigarettes and china beads which had, during the hours of loading, become neat straight columns, side by side.
The final hatch was battened down at twenty minutes past midnight and a few minutes later he saw his foreman cross two red lights above his head, the signal to cut engines and lock his crane. The ships were full and low in the water and the secret night loading was over. Soon he knew the tugs would nudge them out of port, past the lighthouse at the river’s head and within an hour they would be beyond Nova Sofala Point, steaming into the Mozambique Channel. And then where?
He switched off his engines, released the hydraulic pressures, locked the ground and cab gearings and began counting. All but one cigarette-end had been used, so thirty-five tanks had been loaded aboard the three ships. He counted the match tops . . . seventy-seven 105mm and 130mm Howitzer- type field guns. Eighty match-ends each representing a net-load of the arms and ammunition crates, twenty to a load, so one thousand, six hundred crates altogether. Finally the china beads. He pushed them apart two at a time. Smoke came from the ship’s funnel on the far left and he saw the white froth of water churning from the back of the tug nearest it as it took the strain of the tow.
Thirty-four china beads, thirty-four crated MiG 21s, Russia’s most successful supersonic fighter-bomber.
There was a whistle below on the quay and the black dockers began to assemble in a line, two abreast, as their armed escorts took up positions alongside them. Time to leave. Quickly he scooped up the cigarettes, rubbed them together in his hands to reduce them to loose tobacco and using the creases in his large palm, funnelled it back into the cigarette packet. He would roll his own later. He then scattered the beads over the floor of the cab by the window, an accident, a too hefty pull at the blind, easily explained. He opened the cab door, felt the warm sticky air and stood on the first rung of the steel ladder. He grabbed handfuls of the broken matches, threw them into the air and watched them scatter in the night breeze, tiny make-shift counters of the cargo of war that was now moving slowly, silently and most secretively into the darkness of Beira harbour and out into the open sea.
The French Military Attaché panicked. Suddenly woken by the ring of the bedside telephone in the middle of the night, he thought immediately of accidents, a car crash, a burglary, an assault. But only for a second, only for as long as it took the thought to flash through consciousness. Then he felt the warmth of his wife between the sheets next to him and as he reached in the dark for the receiver, he knew his teenage children were also home and safe.
It was an internal call from an extension in another part of the rambling building that served as both office and residence for the senior Embassy staff in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. The voice made no apology and spoke without introduction, quietly and in quick French.
‘The South Africans have been in touch. Their man in the docks has just reported to them. He seems to have had the most extraordinary luck, says that three large ones sailed out of Beira just over an hour ago. I’ve checked and we’ve no record of anything like them going in, so we’ll assume they went in by night, probably the three that unloaded the maize and tractors here last week, diverted. They went empty into Beira but they’ve left fully loaded, 35, 77, 1,600 and 34. Also, though he says he couldn’t keep a proper check, there was an assortment of ground-to-airs . . . forty, maybe more. The South Africans have alerted their naval people and they’ve promised to come back with the speed and course within the next hour.’
‘You didn’t tell him the destination?’ asked the tired Attaché, immediately regretting it. ‘ ’Course you didn’t,’ he went on quickly. ‘. . . Sorry, I’m still half asleep. Give me those numbers again. And the ships.’ He switched on the small night-light, opened his bedside table drawer for his pen and note-pad as the voice began again.
‘Two Yugoslav freighters . . . the Jaldo and the Mila Gojsalic, and the Russian Iosif Dubrovinsky. Between them, 35 T54 tanks, standard armour; 77 pieces of artillery from 105s up including the new Howitzers. 1,600 crates of small arms . . . AKs and AKMs, plus ammunition, Czech built. And 34 crated MiGs. Plus those ground-to-airs . . . probably SAM 6s and 7s and heat-seekers.’
‘Thank you. When would you expect them to arrive?’
‘I can be more accurate when the South Africans come back, but I’d guess some time tomorrow night. Around midnight.’
‘Then God help us,’ said the Attaché softly into the mouthpiece.
Neither man spoke for five seconds or more. Then the voice asked, ‘Our people will do nothing?’
But the Military Attaché was already replacing the receiver. It wasn’t really a question anyway. Both men had the answer.
He knew, of course, their people would do nothing. Nor would the Americans. Nor the British. No one would and nobody in the Service could understand why.
The tip of the sun was red above the sea and the air was chill when the clapping of hands woke them. Then shots were fired over the hangar roofs to hurry them out of their blankets.
Petit Royan had been completely evacuated and except for the work-gangs in the harbour, the men, women and children of the tiny capital had been transferred to the cargo and engineering sheds at the side of the airport terminal buildings. They had been allowed to bring with them only their blankets. With the coffee still percolating in their kitchens, the bread rolls still warming in their ovens and their animals still to feed, they had been herded at gunpoint into the streets and ordered to abandon their homes. The young and the old, the well and the sick, merchant and fisherman, cafe owner and coffee planter, peasant and paupers, line abreast in columns had marched out of the Square along the coast road to their rendezvous with the Cuban disciples of revolution.
It had been decided by the Cuban Command on a directive from the Russians, that the Socialist Revolution on Union, shortly to be renamed, was to be absolute. The Steering Committee of the Africa Institute in Moscow, who vetted all Soviet
-African adventures, had decided that the small island presented the perfect opportunity for total social change, a chance to experiment with some of the more recent revisions of Soviet Socialism. The population was small enough to be manageable and unsophisticated enough to be re-educated rapidly and thoroughly. The island base would be secure in every sense and Cuban soldiers would not then be confined to the role of an army of occupation, constantly looking over their shoulders.
The tall Black stood at the edge of the flat terminal roof, his skullcap as red as the sun. He was holding on to the radio mast with one hand and carrying a megaphone in the other and he watched the soldiers below push and prod the crowd into place. They sat huddled with their blankets around their shoulders, shivering in the dawn chill. Children whimpered, mothers caressed them and fathers bounced little boys on their knees to stop them crying.
The megaphone crackled and they looked up.
‘Comrades.’ The black guy held up his right hand in a sweeping movement, like a Pope’s blessing. ‘Since you were colonized by French Imperialists two hundred and fifty years ago, you have suffered a slow but deliberate process of de-humanization. You have been bullied and beaten and humiliated until you have forgotten your proud independent origins. The French mongrels coloured your skin lighter with their blood and made you thank them for it. They turned your land and simple farms into vast estates and made you thank them for that as well. They forced you to sweat from sunrise to sunset for money that wouldn’t keep your children alive and you lifted your hats to them for the privilege.
‘For every thousand oranges you picked they gave you one, for every basket of coffee beans they gave you a handful. Every sod of earth you turned made them richer. They ate lobster while you scratched for corn. Their houses got larger and their children fatter while yours died of simple sicknesses. Pain was as normal to you as the tides that swept your island. But somewhere in the history of your mind, some part of you knew another existence, a time when you were free and your own masters.’
Red Joker Page 15
