Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  When they landed at Cape Town’s D. F. Malan Airport, Klonkie the chauffeur was waiting for them. He drove them directly to Weltevreden.

  Shasa and Centaine were waiting for them in the gunroom. By family tradition the gun-room was where the most dire and unpleasant subjects were addressed and thrashed out, both figuratively and literally. For it was here, across the big leather armchair, that Shasa had administered corporal punishment to his three sons. A summons to the gun-room was never taken lightly, and Isabella felt a prickle of apprehension as she and Garry entered.

  Nana and Shasa stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind the old desk, and their expressions were so bleak that Isabella stopped dead in her tracks and Garry bumped into her from behind. She hardly felt it.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked fearfully, and then she realized that Nanny was also in the room, standing in front of the stone fireplace. The old coloured woman had been weeping. Her face was swollen with grief, and her eyes were bloodshot. She clutched a sodden handkerchief in one hand.

  ‘Oh, Miss Bella,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry, child. I had to do it – for your sake . . .’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Nanny?’ Isabella started towards her, to comfort her – and then she stopped again.

  A dreadful sense of disaster overwhelmed her as she realized what lay on the desk in front of Nana and Shasa.

  ‘What have you done, Nanny?’ she whispered, chilled and stricken with despair. ‘You’ve destroyed us.’

  On the desk was her leatherbound journal. Nanny had been into her safe.

  ‘You have destroyed me and my baby. Oh, Nanny, how could you do this to us?’

  The journal was open at the page which contained the lock of Nicky’s hair. On the desktop beside it lay his knitted baby bootee and the copy of his birth certificate.

  ‘Oh, you stupid prying old woman.’ Isabella’s anger boiled over. ‘You’ll never know what harm you have done. You’ve killed my Nicky. I’ll never forgive you for this, never.’

  Nanny wailed with despair, then covered her mouth with her wet handkerchief and fled from the room.

  ‘She did it because she loves you, Bella,’ Shasa told her sternly. ‘She did what you should have done eight years ago.’

  ‘It was none of her business. It’s nothing to do with any of you. You don’t understand. If you meddle with this, you will put Nicky and Ramón in terrible danger.’

  She ran to the desk and snatched up the journal and clutched it to her chest. ‘This is mine. You have no right to interfere.’

  ‘What is happening here?’ Garry stepped up beside Isabella. ‘Come on, Bella. If you are in trouble, then it concerns all of us. We are a family. We stand together.’

  ‘Yes, Bella, Garry is right. We stand together.’

  ‘If only you had come to us right away—’ Centaine broke off, and sat down behind the desk. ‘Recriminations will not help us now. We have to work this thing out – all of us together. Sit down, Bella. We can guess most of it. You must tell us the rest of it. Tell us about Nicky and Ramón, all of it.’

  Isabella swayed on her feet, confused and torn by the torment of her emotions. Garry wrapped a thick muscular arm around her shoulders to steady her.

  ‘It’s OK, Bella. We are all here behind you now. Who is Nicky? Who is Ramón?’

  ‘Nicky is my son. Ramón in his father,’ she said softly, and buried her face against the great comforting barrel of his chest.

  They let her cry for a while, and then Centaine lifted the telephone. ‘I’ll call Doc Saunders. He can give her a shot to calm her.’

  Isabella spun towards her. ‘No, Nana. I don’t need anything. I’ll be all right. Just give me a minute.’

  Centaine set the telephone back on its cradle, and Garry led Isabella to the buttoned-leather sofa and sat beside her. Shasa came to sit on her other side, and they held her between them.

  ‘All right,’ Centaine said at last. ‘That’s enough. You can weep later. Now we’ve got work to do.’

  Isabella straightened up, and Shasa handed her the handkerchief from his breast pocket.

  ‘Tell us how it happened,’ Centaine ordered.

  Isabella took a deep breath. ‘I met Ramón at the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park when Daddy and I were living in London,’ she whispered. Her voice strengthened as she went on. She spoke for almost half an hour. She told them why she and Ramón had been unable to marry and how they had gone to Spain for Nicky’s birth.

  ‘I was going to bring him here to Weltevreden. Ramón and I planned to be married here just as soon as he was free.’

  She told them how Ramón and Nicky had been abducted. She told them of the water torture of the infant she had been forced to witness and the nightmare of her existence since then.

  ‘What did they want from you, these mysterious people? What price did you have to pay for Ramón and Nicky’s safety? What did you have to give them in exchange for the chance to visit Nicky?’ Shasa demanded harshly.

  Centaine thumped her cane on the wooden floor. ‘That is not important at the moment. We’ll deal with that later.’

  ‘No,’ Isabella shook her head. ‘I don’t mind answering. They wanted nothing from me. I think that they were forcing Ramón to perform some service for them. They rewarded him by allowing me to visit the two of them, Ramón and Nicholas.’

  ‘You are lying, Bella,’ Shasa accused her harshly. ‘Ramón Machado is using you. You are being forced to work for him and his masters.’

  ‘No.’ She was appalled that he had seen through her lies so easily. ‘Ramón is as helpless as I am. We are being threatened and blackmailed—’

  ‘Stop it, Bella,’ Shasa cut her short. ‘You are the one being forced to pay the price. Nicholas is the hostage. Ramón is the evil puppet-master who pulls the strings.’

  She cried out with anguish: ‘No! You are wrong! Ramón is—’

  ‘I’ll tell you Ramón de Santiago y Machado is. Yes, you provided us with his family-tree and his full names and date of birth,’ Shasa pointed out, and Isabella clutched the journal protectively. ‘You know that I have friends in Israel. One of them is the director of Mossad. I telephoned him. He ran Ramón’s name through their computer. They link into the CIA computer. Our own security forces also have an open file on Ramón de Santiago y Machado. In the three days since Nanny brought your journal to us, I have been able to discover quite a few interesting facts about your Ramón.’ He jumped up from the sofa and crossed to his desk. He pulled open one of the drawers and returned with a thick file which he slammed down on the coffee-table in front of her. Press cuttings and photographs and documents and reams of computer sheets spilled out from between the bulging covers.

  ‘This came in last night in the Israeli diplomatic bag from Tel Aviv. I didn’t call you until I had studied it. It makes interesting reading.’ Shasa picked out a photograph from the pile. ‘Fidel Castro’s victorious entry into Havana in January 1959. Those are Che Guevara and Ramón together in the second jeep.’ He flipped over another glossy black-and-white print. ‘The Congo, 1965. Patrice Lumumba Brigade. Ramón is the second white man from the left. The corpses are executed Simba rebels.’ He picked out another. ‘Ramón with his cousin Fidel Castro after the Bay of Pigs. Apparently, Ramón was instrumental in gathering the advance intelligence of the landing.’ He scuffled through the pack of photographs. ‘This one is fairly recent. Colonel-General Ramón de Santiago y Machado, head of the African section of the fourth directorate of the KGB, receiving the award of the Order of Lenin from General Secretary Brezhnev. Very handsome in his uniform, isn’t he, Bella? Look at all those medals.’

  She cringed away from the photograph as though her father held a black mamba.

  Garry leant across and took the photograph out of Shasa’s hand. ‘Is this Ramón?’ he demanded of her, holding it before her face. She dropped her eyes but would not answer.

  ‘Come on, Bella. You must tell us. Is this your Ramón?’

  Still s
he refused to reply. Shasa had to shock her into acceptance. ‘It is all an elaborate deception. He probably singled you out as his victim. He almost certainly arranged the abduction and the water torture of your son. He has been toying with you ever since then. Did you know that his nickname is El Zorro Dorado? It seems that Castro himself selected the name, the Golden Fox.’

  Isabella’s head jerked up. She remembered the remark made by José, the paratrooper, that had puzzled her at the time. ‘Pele is the club of the fox, El Zorro.’ Somehow that was the last tiny detail that forced her to face the truth.

  ‘El Zorro – yes.’ Her expression hardened. The first gleam of burning hatred showed in her eyes. She looked instinctively towards her grandmother.

  ‘What are we going to do, Nana?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, the first thing we are going to do is rescue Nicholas,’ she said briskly.

  ‘You don’t know what you are saying, Nana,’ Garry objected. His expression was stunned.

  ‘I always know what I’m saying,’ Centaine Courtney-Malcomess told him firmly. ‘I’m putting you in charge, Garry. This takes precedence over everything else. You can have whatever you need. I don’t mind what it costs. Just get me that child. That’s all that counts. Do I make myself clear, young man?’

  Garry’s bemused expression cleared slowly. He began to grin.

  ‘Yes, Nana, you make yourself abundantly clear.’

  Garry converted the gun-room at Weltevreden into his operations-room.

  He could have chosen any of a dozen better-equipped facilities is one of the Courtney conference-centres or boardrooms. Somehow none of these had the secure family atmosphere of this room, which had for so long been the centre of their lives. None of the others queried his choice.

  ‘This is restricted to the family. We bring in nobody from outside until it is absolutely necessary,’ he warned them.

  He set up two large boards on easels, one each side of the desk. On one he hung a large-scale map of Africa, south of the Sahara. The second board he left blank for the time being, except for a photograph which he pinned at the top.

  It was one that Isabella had taken of Nicholas on the beach. He was in bathing trunks, his hair tousled by sea-salt and wind as he was laughing into the camera.

  ‘That’s to remind me what this is all about,’ Garry told them. ‘I want to imprint that face on my mind. As Nana has said – from now on that is all that counts. That face. That child.’

  He scowled at it. ‘All right, young Nicky, where are you?’

  He turned to Isabella, who was seated at the desk, and placed the heavy volume of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft in front of her.

  ‘OK, Bella. Let’s presume that it was a Russian military freighter that flew you from Lusaka to this base where you met Nicky. Let’s find what type it was.’ He opened the book in front of her and began turning the pages.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, and stabbed at one of the illustrations.

  ‘Are you certain?’ he demanded, and leant over her shoulder.

  ‘Ilyushin Il 76. NATO reporting name Candid,’ he read aloud. ‘Jane’s lists its estimated cruise speed as 750 to 800 kilometres an hour.’

  He jotted it down on his navigation-pad. ‘OK, you say the course was 300 degrees magnetic and the flying time was two hours fifty-six minutes. We know it was on the Atlantic coast – let’s mark that up on the chart.’

  He went to the map and set to work with the dividers and protractor.

  ‘Garry’ – Isabella was worried – ‘just because Nicky was there last year does not mean that he will still be there, does it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he agreed without looking round from the chart. ‘However, from what you tell us, Nicky seemed to be settled at the camp. He was in school and had been there long enough to make friends and build a reputation as a soccer player – Pele?’ He turned and beamed at her through his spectacles like a friendly goldfish. ‘We know from both Israeli and South African intelligence reports that your friend El Zorro is still operating in Angola. He was spotted in Luanda by a CIA agent as recently as fourteen days ago. And we have to start planning somewhere. Until we find out for sure that Nicky is not there, we’ll presume he is.’

  He stepped back from the map. ‘There we go,’ he muttered. ‘It looks like somewhere north of Luanda and south of the Zaire border. There are five, no, six river-mouths in that general area within a hundred miles of each other. Cross-winds could have made a ten-degree deviation in the Candid’s course either way.’

  He came back to the desk and picked up the large sheet of art paper on which Isabella had sketched from memory a map of the airstrip and river-mouth. He studied it dubiously, and then shook his head. ‘It could be any one of the six rivers shown on the map.’ He peered closely at the map. ‘They are the Tabi, the Ambriz, the Catacanha, the Chicamba, the Mabubas and the Quicabo – do any of those names ring a bell, Bella?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nicky called the base Tercio.’

  ‘That is probably a code-name,’ said Garry, and pinned her sketch-map beside Nicky’s photograph on the second board. ‘Any comments so far?’ He looked across at Centaine and Shasa. ‘What about it, Pater?’

  ‘It’s a thousand kilometres from the Namibian border, which is our nearest friendly territory. We can forget about any overland attempt to reach Nicky.’

  ‘Helicopters?’ Centaine asked. Both men shook their heads simultaneously.

  ‘Out of range, without refuelling,’ Garry said, and Shasa agreed.

  ‘We’d be flying over a battle zone. According to our latest intelligence the Cubans have a solid radar chain covering the Namibian border and at least a squadron of MiG-23 fighters based just north of the border at Lubango.’

  ‘What about using the Lear?’ Centaine insisted, and both men laughed.

  ‘We can’t outrun a MiG, Nana,’ said Garry. ‘And they’ve got more guns than we have.’

  ‘Yes, but you can circle around them, fly ’way out over the Atlantic and come back in behind them. I know fighters can’t fly very far, and the Lear can go to Mauritius.’

  They stopped laughing and looked at each other. ‘You think she got rich by being stupid?’ Garry asked, and then addressed her directly.

  ‘Supposing we could get there in the Lear, then what? We can’t land or take off – the Lear needs a thousand-metre runway. From what Bella tells us, it’s a short strip and a guerrilla training base with South American or, more likely, Cuban paratroopers guarding it. They aren’t going to hand Nicky over to us, not without an argument.’

  ‘Yes. I expect we’ll have to fight,’ Centaine nodded. ‘So now it’s time to send for Sean.’

  ‘Sean?’ Shasa blinked. ‘Oh course!’

  ‘Nana, I love you,’ said Isabella, and picked up the telephone. ‘International, I want to put an urgent call through to Ballantyne Barracks at Bulawayo in Rhodesia.’

  The call took almost two hours to come through, by which time Garry had telephoned the airport and spoken to his pilots. The Lear was already on its way to Bulawayo when Sean finally came on the line.

  Garry said, ‘Let me talk to him,’ and took the telephone out of Isabella’s hand. They argued for less than a minute, and then Garry snarled: ‘Don’t give me that crap, Sean. The Lear will be at Bulawayo airport within the next hour to pick you up. I want your hairy arse on board, but pronto. I’ll phone General Walls or Ian Smith if necessary. We need you here. The family needs you.’

  He hung up and looked at Centaine. ‘Sorry, Nana.’

  ‘I have heard the expression before,’ she murmured. ‘And sometimes a little strong language works wonders.’

  Major Sean Courtney of the Ballantyne Scouts stood before the makeshift situation-board in the Weltevreden gun-room and studied the photograph of his nephew. His promotion to major and second-in-command of the Scouts was only three months old. Roland Ballantyne had finally manoeuvred him into a fulltime billet with the regiment.

  ‘Yo
u can see he’s Bella’s boy. Takes after her. Ugly little brat.’ Sean grinned at her. ‘No wonder she’s been keeping him up her sleeve.’

  She stuck out her tongue at him. He was good for her; he gave her hope again. He was so hard and competent and tough-looking, he brimmed with such sublime confidence in his own strength and immortality that she had to believe in it, too.

  ‘When will they let you see Nicky again?’ he asked, and she thought for a second. She could not tell him about the promise to give her access as soon as the Cyndex 25 tests were completed. That would mean admitting to all of them that she was a traitress.

  ‘I think it will be soon. I haven’t seen Nicky for almost a year. It must be soon. Days rather than weeks from now.’

  ‘You won’t go,’ Garry cut in. ‘We aren’t going to give you into their clutches again.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Garry,’ Sean snapped. ‘Of course she has to go. How the hell will we know where they are holding Nicky, if she doesn’t?’

  ‘I thought . . .’ Garry began, his face flushing with anger.

  ‘OK, matey. Let’s make a bargain here. I run the actual operation – you are responsible for all the logistics and back-up. How about it?’

  ‘Good!’ Centaine cut in. ‘That’s the way we’ll do it. Go on, Sean. Tell us how you’ll carry out the rescue.’

  ‘OK. In broad outline, this is it. We will work out the details later. First of all we have to accept that it’s a fully offensive operation. We are sure as hell going to run into heavy opposition. They are going to try to kill us – we’ve got to kill them first. We are not going to mess around. If we want Nicky, we have to fight for him. However, if things go wrong, we might have to face a political and legal storm both here and abroad. We might be deemed guilty of anything from terrorism to murder. Are we prepared to accept that?’

  He looked around the circle of attentive faces. They all nodded without hesitation.

  ‘Good. That’s settled. Now for practicalities. We assume Nicky is being held in northern Angola at this coastal base. Bella goes in as she did last time. Once she is in position with Nicky she calls us in.’