Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  Shasa realized that they all had very good reason to be worried.

  ‘The Americans and the Brits have warned that they won’t use their veto to save us if we test.’

  ‘You haven’t admitted anything, Prime Minister?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Vorster snarled at him. ‘But they want to inspect the drill site. They have aerial photographs – and they know the code-name Skylight.’

  ‘They have our code?’ Shasa stared at him, and Vorster nodded heavily.

  ‘Ja, man, they have the code-name.’

  ‘You know what that means, Prime Minister? We have a traitor – and at a very high level. At the very top.’

  In the United Nations the representatives of Third World and non-aligned nations rose one after the other in the General Assembly to castigate and condemn South Africa and her attempt to join the nuclear club. She was judged guilty as soon as the accusation was levelled. Both India and China had tested nuclear bombs in the previous year or two, but that was different. Despite assurances from the South African prime minister that no test had been conducted, the ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States insisted on a personal inspection of the site. They were flown up into the Kalahari in an air-force Puma helicopter. By the time they had arrived, the drilling rig and every other vehicle had been removed. There was only a borehole casing capped with fresh concrete left standing forlornly in an area of rutted and trampled earth.

  ‘What was the purpose of the drilling?’ the British ambassador asked Shasa, not for the first time. Sir Percy was an old friend who had dined at Weltevreden and hunted at Dragon’s Fountain.

  ‘Oil-prospecting,’ Shasa answered him with a straight face, and the ambassador lifted an eyebrow and made no further comment. However, three days later Great Britain vetoed the sanctions proposed in the Security Council, and the storm began to blow over.

  Aaron Friedman telephoned Isabella to tell her of his immediate departure for Israel. He wanted her to go with him. He didn’t, however, mention to her that the United States had put enormous pressure on the Israeli government for his recall to Jerusalem.

  ‘You are a darling, Aaron,’ she told him, ‘and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but you have your life and I have mine. Perhaps we’ll meet again some day.’

  ‘I’ll never forget you, Bella.’

  The South African Bureau for State Security began a witch-hunt for the traitor that dragged on for months without any conclusive results. In the end it was accepted that one of the four Israeli scientists who had by that stage all left the country must have been responsible.

  When Shasa read the secret report of the investigation he was embarrassed to learn that his darling daughter had signed into the Pelindaba residential compound and had apparently stayed overnight as a guest of the good professor.

  ‘Well, you didn’t think she was a virgin?’ Centaine asked, when he mentioned it to her. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Shasa admitted. ‘But, still, one doesn’t like having one’s nose rubbed in it, does one?’

  ‘One has not had one’s nose rubbed in it,’ she corrected him. ‘Bella seems to have been uncharacteristically discreet, for a change.’

  ‘Still, it’s a good thing he’s gone.’

  ‘He might have been quite a catch,’ Centaine teased him, and he looked shocked.

  ‘Good Lord, he was old enough to be her father.’

  ‘Bella is thirty,’ Centaine pointed out. ‘Almost an old maid.’

  ‘Is she that old?’ Shasa looked startled. ‘I often forget how the years go by.’

  ‘We must seriously do something about finding her a husband.’

  ‘There is no desperate hurry.’ Shasa did not relish the prospect of losing her. He had become accustomed to things just the way they were.

  Isabella’s reward came swiftly. Within months she was promised a holiday with Nicky and instructed to make arrangements to be absent from the country for two weeks.

  ‘Two weeks!’ she exalted. ‘With my baby! I can hardly believe it’s happening at last.’

  Her euphoria was enough to banish the crippling sense of guilt that she had lived with since the Skylight furore had made world headlines. She tried to appease her conscience by assuring herself that she had helped to avert an escalation of the nuclear menace and that her treachery would, in the long run, yield beneficial results for all mankind.

  Naturally, she registered a patriotic sense of outrage when she discussed the subject with her family or with other senators in the halls of the parliament building, but the truth haunted her in the night. She was a traitor – and the penalty was death.

  She told Nana and Shasa that she was meeting Harriet Beauchamp in Zurich. They planned to hire a kombi and cruise around Switzerland for two weeks, going wherever the snow was good, eating fondue and trying all the most famous runs.

  ‘Don’t expect to hear from me until I get back,’ she warned them.

  ‘Have you got enough money, Bella?’ Shasa wanted to know.

  ‘That’s a silly question, Pater.’ She kissed him. ‘Wasn’t it you who set up my trust fund – who gives me a ridiculous salary each month, twice as much as my pay from the Senate?’

  ‘Well, I’ll give you the name of somebody at Crédit Suisse in Lausanne, just in case you run short.’

  ‘You are sweet, but I’m not sixteen any more.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish you were, my love.’

  Isabella caught the Swissair flight for Zurich, but left the aircraft at Nairobi. She checked in at the Norfolk Hotel and the following morning telephoned Weltevreden and spoke to Nana, pretending that was calling from Zurich.

  ‘Have fun and keep your eyes open for a nice millionaire,’ Nana told her.

  ‘For you or for me, Nana?’

  ‘That’s enough of your sauce, missy.’

  As she had been instructed, Isabella caught the Air Kenya flight to Lusaka in Zambia and the airline bus from the airport to the Ridgeway Hotel. She found that a single room had been reserved for her. This was as far as her instructions took her.

  Before dinner she sat on the swimming-pool terrace and ordered a gin and tonic. A few minutes later, a tall good-looking black man sitting at the bar sauntered across to her table.

  ‘Red Rose,’ he said.

  ‘Sit down,’ she nodded, her heart pounding and her palms damp.

  ‘My name is Paul.’ He refused the drink she offered him. ‘I will not trouble you any longer than necessary. Will you please be ready at nine o’clock tomorrow morning? I will meet you with transport at the front entrance of the hotel.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he stood up. ‘And you shouldn’t ask.’

  She was waiting for him as he had instructed. He drove her back to the airport in a battered Volkswagen, but bypassed the commercial terminal and drove on to the gates of the restricted military area.

  The remains of Zambia’s squadron of MiG fighters stood on the apron in the sunlight. There had been four crashes in the last month alone. Not only had Zambian pilots been inadequately trained in East Germany, but also they had not adjusted well to the complexity of supersonic flight. In addition, the MiGs had done almost twenty years of service in eastern Europe before being sold to Zambia. Zambia’s copper-based economy had been sent reeling by the fall in the price of the metal, and by two decades of gross mismanagement. Costs had been pruned in the maintenance of the fighter squadron, and they were familiarly known as ‘The Flying Bombs’.

  Beyond the fighters was parked an enormous unmarked aircraft with four turbo-fan engines and a tail-fin taller than a two-storey house. Although Isabella did not recognize it as such, it was an Ilyushin Il-76 with the NATO reporting name ‘Candid’. It was the standard Russian military heavy freight-carrying transport.

  Paul, her escort, spoke to the guards at the gate and showed them a document from his brief-case. The guard commander studied the paper and then went into his
kiosk. He spoke on the telephone to a superior and then handed Paul back his papers, opened the gates and saluted as they drove through.

  Two pilots in flying-overalls were supervising the refuelling of the huge Candid. Paul parked the Volkswagen alongside the main hangar and walked across to the aircraft. He spoke to one of the pilots and then beckoned to Isabella to follow. They watched her struggling with her suitcase, but none of them offered to help her.

  ‘You will go with the aircraft,’ Paul told her.

  ‘What about my luggage?’ she asked, and the chief pilot shrugged and answered in a heavy accent: ‘Leave here. Me fix. Come.’

  Isabella looked round, but Paul was already halfway back to the Volkswagen. She followed the pilot up the loading-ramp of the Candid.

  The hold was filled with cargo. It was packed on wooden pallets under heavy nylon netting. There were literally hundreds of wooden cases of various sizes. Most of them were stencilled in black paint with letters and numerals in Cyrillic script. The pilot led her down the side-aisle of the cavernous compartment and up the ladder to the flight-deck.

  ‘Sit.’ He pointed at one of the folding jump-seats in the rear bulkhead of the flight-deck.

  There were no formalities when the Candid took off an hour later.

  From her seat in the rear of the compartment Isabella had a clear view of the instrument-panel over the pilot’s shoulder. The Candid levelled out into a cruise altitude of thirty thousand feet and settled on a course of 300 degrees magnetic.

  Surreptitiously, she checked the time on her wristwatch. She wanted to know how long they would fly on this northwesterly heading. She conjured up a map of the continent in her mind. Although she had no idea of the aircraft’s ground speed, the needle on the airspeed indicator quivered at around 475 knots.

  After an hour’s flight she guessed that they had crossed from Zambia into Angola, and she shivered slightly. Angola was not her number-one choice for a holiday. She had recently been nominated to the African Affairs Committee of the Senate, and she had attended all the special briefings on the subject of Angola. She had also read the confidential reports assembled by military intelligence on that country.

  She looked down at the mosaic of savannah and mountains and jungle that passed slowly beneath the Candid and tried to recall every detail that she had read about this troubled land.

  Angola had long been the pearl of the Portuguese empire. After South Africa itself, Angola was the richest and most beautiful of all African countries.

  This thousand-mile stretch of the West African Atlantic seaboard was rich with marine resources. Vast shoals of pelagic fish swarmed within easy reach of secure natural harbours. Offshore drilling by American companies had recently proved huge reserves of oil and natural gas. Inland lay rich and fertile plains and valleys, marvellous forests of hardwoods, pleasant well-watered highlands from which flowed numerous great rivers. In Africa water was a natural resource almost as precious as oil. Apart from her oil, Angola produced gold and diamonds and iron ore. Her climate was temperate and benign.

  Despite all these blessings, Angola had for a decade been racked by a savage and bitter civil war. Her indigenous African peoples had been struggling to throw off the five-hundred-year colonial rule from Lisbon.

  The liberation struggle had not been united. Many armies under all the usual flamboyant warlike names had fought not only the Portuguese but each other as well. There was the MPLA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola; the FNLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola; and a rash of other private armies and guerrilla movements.

  The Portuguese had held on grimly to their colony. Tens of thousands of young Portuguese conscripts had come out to Africa, many of them to bleed and die by bullet and mine and tropical disease far from their native land. Then suddenly had come the left wing coup d’état by the military junta in Mother Portugal, and shortly thereafter the declaration that Portugal was to give Angola its independence and hold popular elections to select a new government and write a constitution.

  Now, in the months leading up to the proposed elections, the country was in even greater turmoil than it had been during the civil war, as the various factions jockeyed for power, and the great powers and other African governments played their favourites, while the guerrilla leaders themselves indulged in an orgy of intrigue and torture and intimidation of a population already cowed by years of war. Reading between the lines of the intelligence reports, Isabella sensed that nobody really knew what was happening in Luanda, the capital, let alone in the remote jungles and mountains.

  Admiral Rosa Coutinho, the Red Admiral, appointed as the governor-general by the armed forces movement after the coup d’état, seemed to favour Agostinho Neto and his ‘purified’ MPLA. The purification process consisted of torturing all other factions of the party to death. This was done by gradually tightening a wooden frame around their heads until the skull collapsed.

  The American CIA, out of touch as always, appeared to be supporting the FNLA which was the weakest, most tribally based and corrupt of the three, slipping them niggardly amounts of financial aid which the United States Senate would not have approved, had it been aware of them. The Chinese were also betting on the FNLA, as were the North Koreans.

  The motorcade of black Chaikas crossed the moat bridge and entered the fortress of the Kremlin through the gate below the Borovitskaya Tower.

  The two Cuban generals rode in the leading limousine. Senen Casas Requerión was chief of staff of the Cuban army, and with him was his army logistics chief. Colonel-General Ramón Machado was in the second vehicle with President Fidel Castro, acting as host and interpreter for the visiting head of state.

  Ramón’s promotion had been announced within weeks of his return from Ethiopia where he had masterminded the abdication of the Emperor Haile Selassie, the abolition of the monarchy and the formal declaration by the Ethiopian Derg of a Marxist socialist state.

  He was now the second-youngest general in the entire Russian military service, and by far the youngest in the KGB. His immediate senior in the secret service was fifty-three years of age. His predecessor Joe Cicero had only been elevated to general officer rank just before his retirement. The promotion was all the more extraordinary in that Ramón was not a Russian national by birth. His naturalization papers had only been serviced eight years ago.

  Ethiopia had been a triumph for him. He had steered the first stage of the revolution through without any visible Russian presence in the country and, more importantly, with the expenditure of a paltry few million roubles.

  Following immediately had been his clandestine but equally successful visit to Luanda in Angola where Ramón had met the Red Admiral, Rosa Coutinho. Coutinho was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party. He had been appointed governor-general of Angola by the left wing military forces committee which now governed Portugal. He had been charged with organizing the popular elections to select an African government to bring the former Portuguese colony of Angola to independence. However, during his meeting with Ramón he had proven to be a political soulmate.

  ‘We must ensure that under no circumstances popular elections take place,’ he had told Ramón. ‘If we allow that to happen, then Jonas Savimbi will be the first president of Angola, if only because his Ovimbundu tribe is the largest in the country.’

  ‘We cannot allow it,’ Ramón agreed. He did not have to elaborate. Jonas Savimbi was the boldest and most successful of all the Angolan guerrilla leaders. His UNITA army had fought the Portuguese with skill and dogged determination for a decade. He was intelligent, educated and strong-willed. Although he had never declared his political allegiances, he was certainly not a Marxist, probably not even a socialist, and they could not take a chance on him coming to power.

  ‘The only possible solution,’ Ramón went on, ‘is for you to declare that, owing to the state of chaos in the country, it will be impractical to hold el
ections. You should then declare that the solution is to recognize the MPLA as the only party capable of assuming the reins of government, and to persuade Lisbon to transfer power to Agostinho Neto and the MPLA as soon as possible.’

  Neto was the Soviet choice. He was devious, weak, cruel and malleable. He could be controlled, whereas Savimbi could not.

  ‘I agree,’ Coutinho nodded. ‘But can I count on full support from Russia and Cuba?’

  ‘If I am able to promise you that support, will you be prepared to hand over to us strategic military bases and airfields to allow us to rush in troops and military supplies?’ Ramón countered.

  ‘You have my hand on it.’ The Red Admiral stretched across his desk, and Ramón took his hand with a soaring sense of triumph.

  He was about to deliver two nations into Soviet sovereignty. Surely no single man had achieved more in Africa.

  ‘I am flying directly from here to Havana,’ he assured Coutinho. ‘I anticipate that within a matter of days talks between Cuba and Moscow will be under way at the highest possible level. I will have your answer for you by the end of the month.’

  Coutinho rose to his feet. ‘You are an extraordinary man, Comrade Colonel-General. Seldom have I been privileged to work with one who sees so clearly to the very heart of a problem, and who is prepared to deliver the bold expert cut of a surgeon to excise it.’

  Now Ramón sat in the rear seat of the Chaika with President Fidel Castro beside him as they entered the citadel of Soviet socialism. The cavalcade led by the motorcycle escort moved swiftly up the broad cobbled avenue. They passed the famous armoury, the great treasure-house of imperial Russia which still housed a stunning wealth of ambassadorial gifts and Tsarist regalia, from the crown of Ivan the Terrible to the jewel-encrusted court robes of Catherine the Great.

  A queue of foreign tourists at the doors to the museum watched them pass, their expressions lighting with curiosity as they recognized the great bearded figure of Castro in the second car.