Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  She could not remain angry for long. Every minute they kept on this heading confirmed the fact that she was being taken to the base where last she had seen Nicky. Two hours later she made out the grey expanse of the Atlantic beneath the lowering cloud-banks ahead.

  The pilot turned south along the coast, and then she sat up straight in the seat and her spirits took wing. She recognized the oxbows in the river and the open mouth to the sea. The pilot pulled on flap and lined up for a landing on the red clay strip.

  Nicky, she thought. Soon now, my baby. Soon we’ll be free again.

  As they taxied in, she saw him. He was standing on the front seat of the jeep. He had shot up at least another two inches, and his legs seemed too gawky and coltish for his body. His hair was longer than she remembered and curled out from under his camo-cap, but his eyes were the same. That marvellous clear green that sparkled even at this distance. As soon as he recognized her behind the windscreen, he waved both hands over his head, and his teeth flashed in the darkly tanned and beautiful face.

  In the jeep with him were the driver and José, the Cuban paratrooper. They were grinning as widely as Nicky as she climbed out of the front seat of the aircraft.

  Nicky jumped out of the jeep and ran to meet her. For a heady moment she thought he might rush into her arms, then he got control of himself and offered her his hand.

  ‘Welcome, Mamma.’ She thought the strength of her love might choke her. ‘It is good to see you again.’

  ‘Hello, Nicky.’ Her voice was husky. ‘You have grown so much I hardly recognized you. You are becoming a man now.’

  It was the right thing to say. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and called imperiously to José and the driver: ‘Come and take my mother’s luggage.’

  ‘Right away, General Pele.’ José gave him a mock salute, and then to Isabella: ‘Greetings, señora. We have been looking forward to your visit.’

  I’m everybody’s favourite aunt now, Isabella thought cynically.

  From her box of goodies she gave José and the driver each a two-hundred pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and her popularity was enhanced a hundredfold. In Angola, Western cigarettes were hard currency.

  As Nicholas drove them down to the beach he chattered happily, and though she showed flattering interest in everything he had done and achieved since their last meeting she was checking her surroundings with a much more businesslike eye than she had previously. She realized that she had made serious errors in the sketch-map that she had drawn for Sean. The training base had been enlarged since her last visit. There must now be several thousand soldiers here, and she saw some kind of artillery parked under camouflage-nets. They looked like long-barrelled antiaircraft guns. Further on she noticed parked trucks with dish-shaped radar antennae pointed skyward, and she thought of her father and Garry bringing the Lear in overhead. There was no way to warn them of these changes.

  When they reached the beach compound, Isabella checked the distance registered on the speedometer. It was only 3.6 kilometres from the airstrip to the beach – much closer than she had estimated. She wondered just how this might endanger the rescue operation. Reinforcements could be rushed in more swiftly than Sean had allowed for.

  José carried her luggage into the guard-house. Waiting for her were the same two women who had met her before. However, their attitude was friendlier and more informal.

  ‘I have brought you a gift,’ Isabella greeted them, and gave them each a bottle of perfume which she had chosen for size rather than for subtle aroma. They were delighted and sprayed themselves so liberally that the air in the room was difficult to breathe. It was some minutes before they could get around to searching Isabella’s luggage.

  This time the camera was passed without comment, though they lingered longingly over her cosmetics. Isabella invited them to try a little of her lipstick, and they accepted with alacrity, and admired the results in the mirror of Isabella’s compact. The atmosphere was more that of a gathering of old friends than of a security screening.

  By the time they came to examine the box of gifts for Nicholas their hearts were obviously no longer in the task. One of them picked out the deflated soccer ball. ‘Ah, Pele will like this,’ she cried, and then Isabella’s nerves prickled with tension as she handled the pump.

  ‘For the ball,’ she explained.

  ‘Sí. I know, to pump air.’ The woman gave it a few desultory strokes and then dropped the pump back into the box.

  ‘I am sorry to have inconvenienced you, señora. We only do our duty.’

  ‘Of course. I understand,’ Isabella agreed.

  ‘You will stay with us two weeks. That is good. Pele has been very excited that you are coming. He is a good boy. Everybody likes him very much. Everybody is very proud of him.’

  She helped Isabella to carry her cases across to the same hut that they had given her on her last visit.

  Nicholas was sitting on her bed, already in his swimming-trunks.

  ‘Come, Mamma, we will go for a swim now. I will race you out to the reef.’

  He swam like an otter, and she was hard-pressed to keep up with him.

  That evening when just the two of them were alone in her hut, she gave him his gifts from the box. Although the soccer ball was the greatest hit, he also enjoyed her choice of books and clothes. She had brought a selection of colourful surfer’s baggies and T-shirts which delighted him. There was also a Sony cassette-player and a box of music cassettes. His favourites were Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beatles.

  ‘Can you rock ’n’ roll?’ she asked. ‘I’ll show you.’ And she put a Johnny Hallyday tape on the player.

  They gyrated around the hut in their bathing-suits, shrieking with laughter, until Adra called them for dinner. Adra was as taciturn and withdrawn as ever, and Isabella ignored her and concentrated all her attention on Nicholas. She had stored up a selection of elephant jokes for him.

  ‘How do you know that the elephant has been in the refrigerator? You see his footprints in the butter.’ He loved that one. In return he told her a joke that he had heard from José the paratrooper. It left her gasping for air.

  ‘Do you know what that means?’ she asked in nervous trepidation.

  ‘Of course,’ he told her. ‘One of the big girls at school showed me.’ And Isabella thought it prudent not to pursue the subject.

  After they had seen him to bed, Adra walked with her to the hut and Isabella whispered: ‘Where is Ramón, the Marqués? Is he here?’

  Adra looked around carefully before replying. ‘No. He will come soon. I think tomorrow or the next day. He says he will come to you. He says to tell you he loves you.’

  Alone in her hut, Isabella found that she was trembling at the prospect of meeting Ramón again, now that she knew him for what he was. She doubted whether she would be able to act naturally towards him. The thought of making love to him terrified her. Surely he would sense the change in her feelings towards him. He might take Nicholas away, or have her imprisoned.

  ‘Please, God, let Sean reach me before Ramón does. Keep him away until Sean comes.’ She lay awake that night, cold with dread that Ramón would suddenly appear out of the darkness and she must take him into her bed.

  As before, she and Nicholas spent the next two days swimming and fishing and playing with Twenty-Six on the beach. The puppy had grown into a lanky, long-tailed, cross-eyed dog with floppy ears that Nicholas adored. It shared his bed with him; Isabella did not have the authority to forbid it, even though Nicholas’s long legs were speckled with flea-bites.

  On the Monday night, while she watched Nicholas prepare for bed, she reached up casually and took down the bicycle pump from the shelf above his bed on which the new soccer ball held pride of place. She twisted the handle and heard the faint internal click as the transponder switched on. She replaced the pump on the shelf just as Nicholas came back from the bathroom smelling of the peppermint toothpaste she had brought from Cape Town for him.

  As she le
ant over the bed to tuck in the mosquito-net he reached up unexpectedly and threw both arms around her neck. ‘I love you, Mamma,’ he whispered shyly, and she kissed him.

  His mouth was soft and moist and warm and tasted of toothpaste, and she thought her heart would burst with love of him. Quickly embarrassed by his own display, Nicholas rolled over, pulled the sheet up to his chin, closed his eyes tightly and made ostentatious snoring sounds.

  ‘Sleep well, Nicky. I love you, too – with all my heart,’ she whispered.

  As she walked back to her own hut, thunder growled and lightning flickered across the night sky. As she looked up, a heavy drop of warm rain struck her on the centre of her forehead.

  It was very quiet in the cockpit of the Lear. They were at forty thousand feet, almost service ceiling, as high as they could get for maximum endurance and speed.

  ‘Enemy coast ahead,’ Shasa said softly, and Garry chuckled.

  ‘Come on, Pater. People only say things like that in World War Two movies.’

  They were high above the cloud mass in a world of enchanted silver moonlight. The cloud below them shone with the peculiar brilliance of an alpine snowfield.

  ‘One hundred nautical miles to run to the mouth of the Congo river.’ Shasa checked their position on the screen of the satellite nav system. ‘We should be almost exactly overhead Lancer’s station.’

  ‘Better give them a call,’ Garry suggested, and Shasa switched radio frequencies.

  ‘Hello, Donald Duck. This is the Magic Dragon. Do you read?’

  ‘Hello, Dragon. This is the Duck. Reading you ten and ten,’ the reply was immediate, and Shasa smiled with relief as he recognized his eldest son’s voice. ‘Sean must have had his thumb on the button,’ he murmured and keyed his microphone. ‘Stand by, Duck. We are heading for Disneyland.’

  ‘Have a nice trip. Duck is standing by.’

  Shasa swivelled in the co-pilot’s seat and looked back into the Lear’s passenger-cabin. The two technicians from Courtney Communications were crouched over their equipment. It had taken them ten days to install all the special electronics. Much of it was state-of-the-art equipment which was still under test with Armscor and had not yet been issued to the air force. It was not built into the Lear’s body, but strapped and screwed to the cabin floor. Their intent faces were painted a witch’s green by the glow from the display panel, and the enormous headphones distorted the shape of their heads.

  Shasa switched to the intercom. ‘How you doing, Len?’

  The head engineer glanced up at him. ‘No radar lash. We are receiving normal radio traffic from Luanda, Kinshasa and Brazzaville. No signal from the target.’

  ‘Carry on.’ Shasa turned. He knew that the new frequency-search equipment was skipping through the bands. It should pick up any military traffic from Luanda or Saurimo military bases. The antenna mounted under the Lear’s belly would warn them if they were detected by hostile radar. Len, the radio engineer, had been chosen for his command of Spanish. He would be able to monitor any Cuban radio traffic.

  ‘OK, Garry.’ Shasa touched his arm. ‘We are overhead the Congo mouth. Your new heading is 175.’

  ‘New heading 175.’ Garry stood the Lear on one wing-tip as they turned east of south to run parallel with the coastline.

  By some freak of wind and weather, a deep hole opened in the cloud mass beneath them. The moon was directly overhead and only two days from its full. Its light beamed down into the chasm, and forty thousand feet below they saw the platinum gleam of water and the dark shape of the African coast.

  ‘Ambriz river-mouth in four minutes,’ Shasa warned.

  ‘We have initiated search for target signal,’ Len confirmed in his headphones.

  ‘Overhead Ambriz,’ Shasa intoned.

  ‘No target signal received.’

  ‘Catacanha river-mouth in six minutes,’ Shasa said.

  He hadn’t really expected the Ambriz to yield results. It was the outer limit of their search-cone. He looked ahead and grimaced. Directly in their track a gigantic mountain of menacing black cloud rose hammer-headed into the stratosphere. He estimated its height at sixty or seventy thousand feet, ’way above the Lear’s ceiling.

  ‘How do you like that, Charlie Bravo?’ he asked, and Garry shook his head and looked down at the screen of the weather radar set. The enormous tropical thunderstorm showed up as a lurid and ferocious crimson cancer on the screen.

  ‘Ninety-six miles ahead, and it’s a real Lulu. Looks like it’s sitting right over one of our target river-mouths, the Chicamba.’

  ‘If it is, it will wipe out any signal from Bella’s transponder.’ Shasa was looking worried.

  ‘We wouldn’t be able to fly through that anyway,’ Garry growled.

  ‘Overhead the Catacanha, Len. Are you picking up anything from our target?’

  ‘Negative, Mr Courtney.’ And then his voice changed. ‘Hold on! Oh shit! Somebody is hitting us with radar lash.’

  ‘Garry’ – Shasa reached across to shake his shoulder – ‘they’ve picked us up on radar.’

  ‘Switch to the international frequency,’ Garry said, ‘and listen.’

  They sat frozen in their seats listening to the static of that great turbulent storm ahead.

  Suddenly the carrier band hissed and a voice cut in clearly. ‘Unidentified aircraft. This is Luanda control. You are in restricted airspace. Identify yourself immediately. I say again, you are in restricted airspace.’

  ‘Luanda control, this is British Airways Flight BA 051. We have an engine malfunction. Request a position fix.’ Shasa began a garbled delaying argument with Luanda. Every second he could gain was crucial. He asked them for a clearance to land at Luanda, and pretended not to be receiving or understanding their refusals and urgent orders to vacate national airspace.

  ‘They haven’t fallen for it, Mr Courtney,’ Len warned him as he swept the military frequencies. ‘They have scrambled a flight of MiGs from Saurimo airfield. They are vectoring them in on us.’

  ‘How long before we cross the Chicamba river-mouth?’ Garry demanded.

  ‘Fourteen minutes,’ Shasa snapped back.

  ‘Well, Lordy, Lordy!’ Garry grinned. ‘We are on a head-on course with those MiGs. They are coming in at Mach 2. This is going to be fun.’

  They sped southwards into the silver moonlight.

  ‘Mr Courtney, we have more radar lash. I think the MiGs have got us on their attack radar.’

  ‘Thank you, Len. Chicamba river in one minute thirty seconds.’

  ‘Mr Courtney.’ There was a strident tone to Len’s voice. ‘The MiG leader is reporting target acquisition. They are on to us, sir. The attack radar lash is increasing. The MiG leader is requesting weapons-free.’

  ‘I thought you said they couldn’t intercept us,’ Shasa asked Garry mildly. ‘I thought we were out of their operational range.’

  ‘Hell, Dad, anyone can make a mistake.’

  ‘Mr Courtney!’ Len’s voice was a shriek. ‘I have the target signal, weak and intermittent. About six kilometres. Dead ahead!’

  ‘Are you sure, Len?’

  ‘It’s our transponder for sure!’

  ‘The Chicamba river-mouth. Bella is at the Chicamba!’ Shasa shouted. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  ‘Mr Courtney, the MiGs are weapons-free and attacking. Radar lash is very strong and increasing.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Garry called. ‘Grab your hats.’

  He rolled the Lear wing-over into a dive.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Shasa shouted as he was pressed back into the co-pilot’s seat by the G force. ‘Turn and get out to sea.’

  ‘They’d nail us before we’d gone a mile.’ Garry held the Lear in the dive.

  ‘Christ, Garry, you’ll tear the wings off us.’

  The airspeed indicator revolved swiftly up towards the ‘never exceed’ barrier.

  ‘Take your choice, Pater. We tear the wings off her – or the MiGs shoot the arse off us.�
��

  ‘Mr Courtney, the MiG leader reports missile-lock.’ Len was stuttering with terror.

  ‘What are you going to do, Garry?’ Shasa grabbed Garry’s arm.

  ‘I’m going in there.’ Garry pointed at the soaring moon-washed mountain of the thunderstorm. It was a sheer precipice of turbulent cloud that obscured the heavens ahead of them. The cloud-banks boiled and seethed with the great winds and air-currents within. Lightning flashed and glowed deep in the belly of the storm.

  ‘You are crazy,’ Shasa whispered.

  ‘No MiG will follow us in,’ Garry said. ‘No missile will hold its lock with all that energy and electrical discharge burning around us.’

  ‘Mr Courtney, MiG leader has fired a missile – and another. Two missiles running . . .’

  ‘Pray for us sinners,’ Garry said, and held the Lear down in its death-dive; the airspeed needle went through the ‘never exceed’ barrier.

  ‘I think this is it.’ Shasa’s voice was matter-of-fact, and as he said it something struck the Lear a crashing blow. She flipped over on to her back, the ball of the flight director spun like a top in its cage, and then they were into the storm.

  All visibility was wiped out instantly and thick grey cloud like wet cottonwool engulfed them. They were thrown on to their safety-harnesses as the storm attacked the Lear. It was a ravening beast that clawed and lashed them.

  The Lear tumbled and swirled like a dead leaf in a whirlwind. The instruments on the control-panel spun and toppled, the altimeter yo-yo’d as they dropped into the void and then hit a vicious updraught that hurled them up two thousand feet and twisted them wing over wing.

  Suddenly the cloud was lit by internal lightning. It dazzled them, and rumbled through their heads, drowning out the agonized shriek of the Lear’s jets. Blue fire danced on the metal skin of the aircraft as though she were aflame. They hit the bottom of another hole with a force that plunged them against the padding of their seats and buckled their spines. Then they were hurled aloft only to plunge once again. All around them the bodywork of the Lear creaked and groaned as the storm tried to rip her apart.