Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  Ramón felt an almost irresistible compulsion to embrace him. He sat very still while he overcame it, then he took Nicholas’s hand and returned his formal greeting.

  Nicholas rode in the front of the jeep beside his father. Adra sat in the back. They skirted the guerrilla camp on the way from the airstrip to the beach compound, and Nicholas could not contain his curiosity. He asked the first question hesitantly, in a subdued voice.

  ‘Why are all these men here? Are they sons of the revolution like we are, Padre?’

  When Ramón replied without any sign of irritability, the next question was bolder. When the reply to that was also friendly, he relaxed further and took a lively interest in everything around them.

  The men at the roadside saluted Ramón as the jeep passed. From the corner of his eye he saw Nicholas stiffen in the front seat and return the salute with all the aplomb of a veteran. Ramón had to turn his face away to hide his smile. The men had noticed it also and grinned after the departing vehicle.

  When they arrived at the compound, Ramón’s orderly had a batch of satellite messages for his attention. However, there was little of importance amongst them, and Ramón dealt with them swiftly. He went to the hut alongside his own that he had allocated for Nicholas and Adra. He heard the boy’s excited chatter as he stepped up on to the stoep, but it was cut off abruptly as he appeared in the doorway. Again Nicholas was strange and withdrawn, watching his father warily.

  ‘Did you bring your bathing-suit?’ Ramón asked him.

  ‘Yes, Padre.’

  ‘Good. Put it on. We will swim together.’

  The water inside the reef was calm and warm.

  ‘Look, Padre. I can swim the crawl now – no more baby paddle,’ Nicholas boasted.

  With Ramón swimming beside him, he made it out to the reef with only a half-dozen pauses to tread water while he regained his breath. They sat side by side on a coral head, and while they discussed seriously how the reef was formed by millions of tiny living creatures Ramón studied the boy carefully. He was well favoured, tall and strong for his age. His vocabulary had expanded again since they had last been together. At times it was almost like talking to a grown man.

  They ate dinner together on the veranda. Ramón discovered how much he had missed Adra’s cooking. Every minute Nicholas seemed more relaxed. His appetite was good. He asked for more of the baked mullet. Ramón allowed him half a glass of well-watered wine. Nicholas sipped it like a connoisseur, swelling with pride at being treated as an adult.

  When Adra came to fetch him to bed, he slipped off his chair without argument but pulled away from her hand and came around the table to his father.

  ‘I am very happy to be here, Padre,’ he said formally, and held out his hand.

  As Ramón shook his hand he experienced an actual physical constriction of his chest.

  Within a week Nicholas had become a favourite at Tercio camp. Some of the ANC instructors and recruits had their families with them. One of the wives was a trained primary-school teacher from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She had set up a school for the children in the camp. Ramón sent Nicholas to take part in the classes. The schoolroom was a thatched building with open sides and rows of benches made of roughly planed native timber.

  Almost immediately it was clear that Nicholas was as bright and advanced as children three and four years older than he was. English was the language of instruction, and he made swift progress in it. He had a clear sweet voice and led the singing. He taught them ‘Land of the Landless’ and the other revolutionary songs which the teacher translated into English. He had brought his soccer ball with him, and this gave him tremendous social prestige amongst his peers. A work detail from the camp under orders from Colonel-General Machado levelled a soccer pitch for the school, laid out the markings in lime and set up goal-posts. Such was Nicholas’s prowess on the field that they nicknamed him Pele, and the daily matches became a popular feature of camp life.

  As the general’s son, Nicholas had special standing and privilege. He had the run of the camp, including the induction classes for new recruits. The instructors allowed him to handle the weapons.

  Ramón watched with carefully concealed pride as his son stood up before a class of adult recruits and demonstrated the stripping and reassembling of an AK 47 assault-rifle. Then he took his place on the range and fired a magazine of live ammunition. Twelve of the twenty rounds struck the man-sized target at which he was aiming.

  Without Ramón’s knowledge, José, the Cuban driver, taught Nicholas to drive the jeep. The first Ramón knew of his son’s latest accomplishment was when Nicholas, sitting on a cushion, proudly drove him down to the airstrip to meet the incoming Ilyushin transport flight.

  The men along the road cheered them as they passed with cries of ‘Viva Pele!’

  The camp tailor made Nicholas his own set of camouflage combat fatigues and a soft Cuban-style cap. He wore the cap cocked at an angle over one eye, just as his father did, and imitated Ramón’s mannerisms, lifting his cap to rake his fingers through his hair or hooking his thumbs in his belt as he stood at rest. He became Ramón’s unofficial driver, and wherever they went huge grins of delight followed the jeep.

  On some afternoons Ramón and Nicholas took one of the boats powered by a fifty-horsepower outboard motor and raced out through the pass in the coral reef into the blue Atlantic waters. They anchored the boat over one of the deep reefs and fished with handlines. The coral teemed with fish of every possible shape and size and colour. Ramón taught Nicholas how to chop the carcass of a large fish, preserved from their previous expedition, into a fine mince. They mixed this with beach sand to make it sink swiftly and ground-baited the reef below the anchored boat.

  Soon they could make out the shadowy shapes of large fish darting and swirling in the blue depths sixty feet below their hull. The scent of the ground bait had goaded them into a feeding frenzy. As they dropped their baited hooks amongst them the thick line was jerked through their fingers and Nicholas squealed with glee.

  The reef fish glittered and glowed with peacock blue and iridescent green; with clear daffodil yellow and startling scarlet. They were spotted with jade and sapphire, striped like zebra and splashed with flaming ruby and opal. They were shaped like bullets and butterflies, and winged like exotic birds. They were armed with daggers and barbed spines and rows of porcelain-white fangs. They squeaked and grunted like pigs as they were hauled flapping and squirming over the gunwale of the assault-boat. Some were so large that Ramón had to give Nicholas a hand to drag them from the water. He hated anybody, even his father, to help him. He hated even more to stop fishing at the close of the day.

  ‘One more, Padre – just one more,’ he cried eagerly, and in the end Ramón had to take the line out of his hands.

  One evening they stayed later than usual. Darkness was falling as they hauled the anchor and started the outboard. The trade wind had turned chilly, and the wind of their passage blew over them as they bounced over the tops of the swells on their way back to the river mouth. Gooseflesh pimpled Nicholas’s arms as he hugged himself. He shivered with cold and exhaustion and the reaction from so much excitement.

  Steering the boat with one hand, Ramón put his other arm around Nicholas’s shoulders. For a moment the child froze with shock at his unfamiliar touch, and then his body relaxed and he crept closer to his father and cuddled against his chest.

  As he steered through the darkness with the small shivering body pressed to his, Ramón was assailed once again by the memory of the abuna of Addis Ababa’s sons propped against the front wall of their father’s home with empty eye sockets and each with his tiny dark penis protruding like a finger from between his dead lips. Ramón was not touched by either guilt or regret. It had been necessary, just as once it had been necessary to half-drown the child that now cuddled against his chest. Duty was often hard and cruel, but he had never flinched from its call. Still, he had never felt before the way he did now.


  They beached the boat, and handed it over to José, the Cuban driver, to care for. Then they made their way by lantern-light through the palm grove towards the stockade of the compound.

  Nicholas stumbled against him in the darkness, and Ramón took his hand to steady him. The child made no effort to pull his hand away.

  They walked on without speaking until they reached the gate of the compound, and then Nicholas whispered softly: ‘I wish I could stay here at Tercio with you always.’

  Ramón pretended he had not heard him, but he found it difficult to draw his next breath.

  The signals clerk woke him ten minutes after midnight. It needed only a light tap on the door of the hut for Ramón to come fully awake with the Tokarev pistol in his hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A Red Rose relay from Moscow,’ the clerk answered him. They had strict instructions to call him at any time of day or night for a Red Rose communication.

  ‘I will come immediately.’

  The message was in code, and Ramón fetched his copy of the code-pad from the steel safe. They used a ‘one time’ pad, a separate code randomly generated by computer for each sheet. He and Red Rose had the only existing copies of the pad, and used a single sheet for each message.

  He matched her sheet and began to decode the message.

  ‘Project is code-named Skylight,’ the message read. ‘First subterranean test of thirty-megaton fission device scheduled October twenty-sixth. Test site located 27°35'S 24°25'E. Full specifications of device on hand.’

  Ramón sent his driver to the main ANC camp upriver, and Raleigh Tabaka was in his office within forty minutes.

  ‘We must leave for London immediately,’ Ramón told him as Raleigh read the message. ‘This is too important to co-ordinate from here. We will orchestrate through the London embassy and the ANC office in the UK.’

  Ramón smiled with quiet satisfaction. ‘We will have the Boers on the mat in front of the Security Council before the week is out. Once again, they have played right into our hands.’

  He woke Nicholas to say goodbye to him.

  ‘When will you come back, Padre?’ the child asked bravely, hiding any sign of distress.

  ‘I don’t know, Nicky.’ Ramón used the diminutive of his name for the first time, and it sat awkwardly on his tongue.

  ‘You will come back, won’t you, Padre?’

  ‘Yes, I will come back. I promise you that.’

  ‘And you will let me and Adra stay here at Tercio? You won’t sent us away?’

  ‘Yes, Nicky. You and Adra will stay here.’

  ‘Thank you. I am glad,’ said Nicholas. ‘Goodbye, Padre.’

  They shook hands solemnly, and then Ramón turned away quickly and ran down the steps to the waiting jeep.

  Preventing the Skylight test was of secondary importance. It was almost three years since they had first learnt of the South African plans to build a nuclear bomb, and Ramón knew that by now they had a viable weapon. However, a nuclear weapon had very little practical application in the type of bush war that was typically African.

  What was of primary importance was to isolate South Africa even further from its last remaining support in the Western world. Already a political pariah, this was an opportunity that he had waited for, to brand her a nuclear rogue into the bargain.

  They met in the ambassador’s safe room in the cellar of the Soviet embassy. The embassy was set in that intimate diplomatic enclave behind Kensington Palace.

  Both General Borodin and Aleksei Yudenich had flown in from Moscow. Their presence gave weight to the deliberations. It underlined both the foreign ministry’s and the KGB’s renewed interest in the African section, and gave Colonel-General Machado tremendous personal prestige.

  The Africans were represented by Raleigh Tabaka and the secretary-general of the ANC. Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC, was on an unofficial visit to East Germany and could not return to London in time for the meeting.

  There was a great deal of urgency, for the South Africans were due to test Skylight within the coming week. Red Rose had reinforced her initial despatch with quite extensive information concerning the enriching of the uranium, the specifications of the actual bomb, its projected delivery in the new G5 artillery round, the position and depth of the test-hole and the ignition system that would be used to detonate the bomb.

  ‘What we have to decide today,’ Yudenich opened the discussion, ‘is how best to use this information.’

  ‘I think, comrade,’ the secretary-general of the ANC cut in eagerly, ‘that you should allow us to call a press conference here in London.’

  Ramón’s lips curled into a small cynical smile. Of course they wanted it. What a blaze of publicity the ANC would bring down upon itself.

  ‘Comrade Secretary-General,’ Yudenich smiled broadly, ‘I think the announcement would carry a little more weight if it were to be made by the president of the USSR, rather than the president of the ANC.’ His tone was heavy with sarcasm. Yudenich didn’t like blacks.

  In private, before this meeting, he had remarked to Ramón that it was a pity that they had been obliged to invite the ‘monkeys’ rather than deciding the issue between civilized human beings. ‘It is difficult to bring one’s mind down to their level,’ he had chuckled. ‘But, then, you have had much experience with them, Comrade. Should I have brought a packet of nuts for them, do you think?’

  Ramón sat aloof from the discussion for nearly twenty minutes. The voices of both Yudenich and the secretary-general were becoming louder and more strained. It was Borodin who at last suggested mildly: ‘Should we perhaps ask Comrade General Machado’s views? His source provided the information – perhaps he has ideas how best to take advantage of it.’

  They all looked down the table at him, and Ramón had his reply prepared.

  ‘Comrades, all that you have said has good sense and reason. However, if either the ANC or the president of the USSR breaks the news it will be a one-day sensation. I believe that to extract the most benefit we should draw out the process. We should release a few scraps of information at a time, and allow interest to build up over a protracted period.’

  They looked thoughtful, and Ramón went on.

  ‘I also believe that if we break it ourselves, either through Moscow or through the ANC, it will be looked upon as biased or at least highly prejudiced information. I think we should give the news to the most powerful voice in America to spread for us. The voice that governs the United States – and, through it, the Western world.’

  Yudenich looked confused. ‘Gerald Ford? The President of the United States?’

  ‘No, Comrade Minister. The news media. The true government of America. In their single-minded obsession with the freedom of speech, the Americans have created a dictatorship more powerful than anything we can devise. Let us give this to the American television networks. We make no announcements, we hold no press conferences. We simply give one of them a mere whiff of the scent, show them the tracks of the hare, and let them hunt it down and tear the animal to pieces themselves. You know well how it works; like a pack of hounds their excitement and their blood lust will be more thoroughly aroused if they believe that the prey is theirs alone. They call it “investigative journalism” and give prizes to the ones who do most damage to their government, their allies and to the capitalist system that supports them.’

  Yudenich stared at him a little longer before he began to chuckle. ‘I hear that in Africa they call you the Fox, Comrade General.’

  ‘The Golden Fox,’ Borodin corrected him, and Yudenich burst into full-throated laughter.

  ‘I see you merit your name, Comrade General. Let the Americans and the British do our work for us once again.’

  The total success of the Skylight operation reaffirmed Red Rose’s worth a hundredfold, but brought with it its own problems.

  The more valuable Red Rose became, the more skilfully and carefully she must be controlled. Every possible precau
tion had to be taken to protect and guard her in the field, and to give her incentive to continue. She must be rewarded immediately for Skylight and given access to Nicholas as soon as reasonably possible. However, this again was complicated by Ramón’s own changing attitude towards his son.

  He was determined that these sickly bourgeois sentiments which recently had intruded on his sense of purpose must never be allowed to interfere with his duty. He knew that, if necessary, given the right circumstances, he must be ready to sacrifice Nicholas, just as he was completely resigned to laying down his own life if duty dictated it.

  Until that day, however, Nicholas must never be placed in any position of danger. Especially there must never be the least possibility of Red Rose or any other person laying hands on the boy and removing him from Ramón’s custody.

  He considered once again arranging the next access at the hacienda in Spain. This would mean moving from Tercio; that involved a degree of risk, a very small degree, but a certain risk none the less. It was just possible that Red Rose – say, with the assistance of South African agents – might succeed in spiriting the child to the British embassy in Madrid. He knew that Red Rose possessed a British passport and dual nationality. Spain was no longer secure enough to satisfy Ramón.

  Of course, he could arrange the meeting in either Havana or Moscow. This entailed considerable logistical problems in getting Red Rose to those locations. It would also reveal to her beyond any doubt who were her ultimate masters. He wanted to avoid that if at all possible.

  The most secure location outside Cuba or Russia was Tercio base on the Chicamba river. It was remote and heavily guarded. There was no foreign embassy within a thousand miles. Nicholas was already installed there. Red Rose could be brought in with very little inconvenience. Once she was at Tercio she would be more completely under his control than in any other place on this earth.

  Tercio it would have to be.

  Isabella came fully awake with a guilty start. For a moment she did not know where she was or what had woken her. Then she remembered, and realized that it was the change in the sound of the Ilyushin’s engines and the canting of the deck beneath her that had woken her. Despite her best intentions, she had fallen asleep in the uncomfortable jump-seat.