Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  He drove himself down deep. The headlights burnt through the murk, and his underwater vision was blurred and distorted. He reached the carcass of the submerged jeep and pulled himself down under it. The air in the rear fuel-tank was holding it just clear of the muddy bottom, and he wriggled into the opening.

  Something pale loomed in front of him, and he reached out and touched a naked body. Quickly he ran his hands over it and touched large smooth breasts. He reached up and seized a handful of the long floating hair and dragged Isabella out from under the wreck.

  He surfaced with her in his arms and found with relief that she was choking and gasping and struggling weakly. He dragged her to the bank. One of the Scouts had shown enough presence of mind to drive the jeep to the lip of the bank so that the beam of the headlights shone down and gave them light.

  Isabella crawled naked and running with water to where Nicky lay and drew him into her lap. He began to struggle and kick.

  ‘My father,’ he wailed. ‘Mi padre!’

  Knee-deep in the mud, Sean peered down into the water. Water had flooded the engine of the jeep and stalled it, but the lights still burnt in the depths.

  Swiftly he weighed the need for haste against his desire to find Ramón Machado. He knew that reinforcements must even now be on the way from the guerrilla camp. They had only minutes in hand. He was about to turn away and go to help Isabella, to get her and the child up the bank, when he saw a flash of movement in the water. A shadow passed as though a shark had swum between him and the submerged headlights.

  Bastard! he thought, and shouted to his men on the bank above him: ‘Bring me my rifle.’

  One of them came sliding down the bank. Before he could reach Sean and hand him the AKM, there was a swirl in the muddy water. It was far out in the river at the edge of the light, and Ramón’s head burst through.

  ‘Get him!’ roared Sean. ‘Nail the bastard!’

  Ramón’s hair was slicked down over his eyes, and water streamed down his face as he gasped wildly for air. One of the Scouts on the bank fired a short burst, and the bullets flickered a spray of water from the surface around Ramón’s head. Ramón’s drew another breath, and ducked under. For a moment his bare feet showed above the surface, kicking in the air, and then he was gone.

  ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ Sean swore, and snatched his own AKM from the hands of his Scout as the man reached him. He fired a long angry frustrated burst into the river, and the bullets chopped up a patch of dancing froth on the spot where Ramón had disappeared.

  Then he checked his fury and waited for Ramón’s head to show again, but the tide was ripping downstream carrying everything with it. Out there were dark and twisted mangroves behind which Ramón could shelter, and beyond the beams of the headlights the waters were dark and obscure.

  After another minute he knew he had lost him. He had to let him go. He crushed down his frustration and his hatred and turned back to Isabella. She was wet and smeared with mud. The edge of the windscreen had opened a cut in her hairline, and a trickle of blood diluted by river-water was spreading down her face.

  Sean shrugged out of his sodden jersey and helped her into it.

  As she thrust her arms through the sleeves she gasped: ‘What happened to Ramón?’

  ‘The bastard gapped it.’ Sean hauled her to her feet. ‘Time is wasting. We’re out of here.’

  Nicky broke from his mother’s grip and darted to the edge of the water.

  ‘My father – I will not leave my father.’

  Sean grabbed him by one arm. ‘Come on, Nicky.’ Nicholas whirled and sank his small white teeth into Sean’s wrist.

  ‘You little swine.’ Sean clouted him open-handed across the side of his head, almost knocking him off his feet. ‘No more of your little dago tricks, matey.’

  He picked him up, kicking and fighting, and slung him over his shoulder.

  ‘I will not go. I want to stay with mi padre.’

  Sean grabbed Isabella’s hand and, carrying Nicky easily, he pulled her up the bank. There were other figures around the jeep, and for a moment Sean did not recognize them. He dropped Isabella’s hand and lifted the AKM by the pistol grip.

  ‘Hold it, Sean,’ Esau Gondele cautioned him as he ran forward.

  ‘Where did you spring from?’

  ‘You almost ran into our ambush,’ Esau told him. ‘You were just one second away from getting an RPG rocket up your backside. We are back there.’ He pointed up the track.

  ‘Where are your boats?’

  ‘Two hundred yards upriver.’

  ‘Pull your men out – we’ll hitch a ride back with you.’ He broke off and cocked his head.

  ‘Douse those lights,’ Esau Gondele snapped at one of his men. He leant into the parked jeep and hit the switch. The headlights faded.

  In the darkness they stood listening.

  ‘Trucks coming fast from the direction of the airstrip.’ They all heard them clearly in the stillness.

  ‘More gooks,’ Esau agreed.

  ‘Take us to the boats,’ Sean ordered. ‘Tout de suite – and the tooter the sweeter.’

  They ran in a group, keeping to the track. A hundred yards along, Esau Gondele whistled, the sharp double flute of a night-flying dikkop, one of the Scouts’ recognition-signals. The whistle was repeated from the darkness just ahead, and Sean stumbled over the dead palm trunks that they had dragged across the track as a road-block.

  ‘Come on,’ Esau Gondele called them off the track. ‘The boats are this way.’

  As he spoke they saw the moving headlights through the trees ahead. A convoy of vehicles was speeding down the track towards them from the direction of the airstrip.

  Nicholas was still kicking and struggling in Sean’s grip, and Isabella was trying desperately to reassure him.

  ‘It will be all right, Nicky darling. These people are our friends. They are taking us home to a safe place.’

  ‘This is my home – I want my father. They killed Adra. I hate them! I hate you! I hate them!’ he screamed in Spanish.

  Sean shook him violently. ‘One more peep out of you, my old China, and I’ll knock your cocky little head right off your shoulders.’

  ‘This way.’ Esau Gondele led them at a run away from the road-block. Within fifty yards they reached the river-bank where the boats were moored.

  Sean glanced back and saw the convoy of trucks come rumbling around a bend in the road. The beams of their headlights swept overhead, but they were hidden from them by the angle of the riverbank. In the lights Sean saw that the back of each truck was crowded with armed men.

  Sean lifted Isabella into the nearest inflatable boat, and she tripped on the wet folds of the jersey that hung around her legs and sprawled in the bilges.

  ‘Clumsy bint,’ he grunted, and threw Nicky into the boat after her. It was a mistake.

  Nicky rebounded like a rubber ball, and as Sean tried to grab him he ducked under his arm and shot up the bank.

  ‘You little devil.’ Sean whirled and went after him.

  ‘My baby,’ Isabella cried, and jumped out of the boat. She sloshed through the mud and raced up the bank in pursuit of the two of them.

  ‘Come back, Nicky – oh, please, come back.’

  He was running towards the approaching convoy. Like a hare he ducked and dodged through the brush ahead of Sean. He was twenty feet short of the track when Sean dived and caught him by the ankle. Seconds later Isabella tripped over them and sprawled full-length on the soft sandy earth.

  The headlights of the convoy swept over them, but the three of them were lying behind a clump of low bush, concealed from the men in the cab of the leading truck. Nicky screamed again and tried to crawl away, but Sean pinned him and covered his mouth with the palm of one hand.

  The trucks bore down upon them and then braked as they saw the palm trunks that blocked the road. The leading truck in the convoy drew up only twenty feet from where they lay in darkness.

  Still smothering Nicky under him,
Sean reached out and pushed Isabella’s face down to the earth. A white face shines like a mirror.

  From the cab of the truck a man jumped down and ran forward to inspect the road-block, then he turned and shouted an order. A dozen guerrillas in combat camouflage swarmed from the back of the truck and seized the tree trunks.

  As they lifted and dragged them clear, the headlights lit the face of the officer who commanded them. Isabella lifted her head and saw his features clearly. She recognized him immediately. It was not a face ever to forget. The last time she had seen this man he had been a passenger in the van driven by her half-brother, Ben Afrika. The two of them had been on their way to a rendezvous with Michael Courtney. He was probably the finest-looking black man she had ever seen, tall, regal and fierce as a hawk.

  He turned his head and, for a moment, seemed to stare directly at her. Then he turned again to watch his men roll the logs aside. The moment the road was clear he strode to the cab of the truck and vaulted into it. He slammed the door, and the truck roared forward.

  The troop convoy followed it. As the last pair of headlights swept past them, Sean tucked Nicky under his arm, pulled Isabella to her feet and hurried her back towards the riverbank.

  Sean kept a firm grip on the scruff of Nicholas’s neck in the leading boat as the flotilla ran back down-river. The glow from the burning huts lit the underbelly of the clouds, and even above the sound of the outboard motors they heard the shouts and the sound of automatic gunfire.

  ‘What are they shooting at?’ Isabella asked, as she huddled against Sean for warmth.

  ‘Probably at shadows – or at each other,’ he chuckled softly. ‘Nothing quite like a nervous gook with a rifle in his hand for burning up ammo.’

  The outgoing tide sped them through the mouth into the lagoon. Through his nightscope Esau Gondele picked up the wake of the other flotilla of inflatables heading back from the beach. They came together as they reached the pass in the reef and in line ahead headed out into the open sea.

  Lancer in her bright yellow paint showed up through the lens of the nightscope at half a mile distance.

  As soon as they had recovered the last inflatable through the stern chute of the trawler, she opened up her engines and ran for the open Atlantic.

  Sean turned to Esau Gondele. ‘What was the butcher bill, Sergeant-Major Gondele?’

  ‘We lost one man, Major Courtney,’ he replied as formally. ‘Jeremiah Masoga. We brought him back with us.’ The Scouts always retrieved their dead.

  Sean felt that familiar sickening pang; another good man gone. Jeremiah was only nineteen years old. Sean had already decided to give him his second stripe. He wished now that he had done it before this. You can never make amends to the dead.

  ‘Three wounded; nothing bad enough to make them miss the party tonight.’

  ‘Put Jeremiah in the refrigerated hold,’ Sean ordered. ‘We’ll ship him home as soon as we reach Cape Town. He’ll get a regimental burial with full honours.’

  When they were still two hundred nautical miles from Table Bay, Centaine Courtney sent out a Courtney helicopter to pick up Sean and Isabella and Nicky. The old lady could not wait any longer to meet her great-grandson.

  Ramón clung to the roots of one of the mangrove trees to steady himself against the drag of the out-going tide as it funnelled through the river-mouth. The razor-edged shells of the fresh-water mussels that covered the stem cut into his hand but he hardly felt the pain. He was staring out across the river.

  The reflection from the flames of the burning compound flecked the surface of the water with sovereigns of gold.

  The boats passed within fifty feet of where he crouched chin-deep in the mud and slime of the mangroves. Their motors buzzed softly in the stillness of the night. Their outlines were indistinct, three dark hippo shapes that passed swiftly on the tide heading for the mouth and the open sea – but he imagined that one of the figures in the leading boat smaller than the others and wore a pale T-shirt.

  It was only then, in the moment of losing him, that he realized that he was, after all, just another father. For the first time in his life he acknowledged his love and dependence upon that love. He loved his son and he was losing him. He groaned in anguish.

  Then rage boiled up in him and burnt away all other feeling. It was a consuming anger against all those who had inflicted this loss upon him. He stared into the empty darkness that had swallowed his son, and the fire of vengeance burnt through every fibre of his being. He wanted to shout this fury after them. He wanted to rail against the woman, he wanted to curse and scream out his frustration, but he caught himself. That was not his way. He must be cold and sharp as steel now. He must think clearly and with icy purpose.

  The first thought that came into his mind was that he had lost his hold on Red Rose. She was no longer of any value to him or the cause. Now she was the sacrifice. He knew how to destroy her and all those around her. The hilt of the weapon was in his head; it only remained to unsheathe it.

  He pushed off from the mangrove and let the tide sweep him into the curve of the river, swimming across it with an easy breast-stroke. The bottom shelved gently under him, and he touched sand and waded ashore.

  Raleigh Tabaka was waiting for him beside the burnt-out ruins of the communications centre. Ramón dressed hastily in borrowed trousers and jacket; his hair was still damp and matted with river-mud.

  Smoke from the smouldering buildings hazed the first grey light of dawn. Raleigh Tabaka’s men were recovering the corpses and laying them out in a long row under the palms. In rigor mortis they were locked into the attitudes in which they had met their deaths. It was a grotesque charade show.

  José, the paratrooper, had one arm thrown over his face as though protecting his eyes. His chest was mangled by grenade shrapnel. Adra’s arms were extended as though she hung on a crucifix, and half her head was missing. Ramón glanced at her without particular interest, as he might at a worn-out article of clothing which no longer had any utility for him.

  ‘How many?’ he asked Raleigh Tabaka.

  ‘Twenty-six,’ he replied. ‘All of them. There were no survivors. Whoever it was, they did thorough job. Who were they? Do you have any idea?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ramón nodded, ‘I have a very good idea.’ And before Raleigh could speak again Ramón told him: ‘I am taking over the Cyndex project – personally.’

  ‘Comrade-General’ – Raleigh frowned with affront – ‘that has been my operation from the very beginning. I have controlled the two brothers.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ramón agreed implacably. ‘You have done very well. You will receive all the recognition that you deserve. But I am taking over the direction of the project. I will leave for the south as soon as an aircraft is available. You will accompany me.’

  ‘It doesn’t end here, Bella,’ Shasa said gravely. ‘We cannot just pretend that nothing else happened. I did not want to complicate the rescue attempt by considering the full murky depths of this whole dreadful business. However, now Nicholas is safe here at Weltevreden we are forced to do so. Many people, including the members of your family, risked their lives for you and Nicholas. One gallant young man, a stranger, a trooper of Sean’s regiment, died to save you. Now you owe us the truth.’

  They were assembled in the gun-room once again, and Isabella was on trial before the family.

  Her grandmother sat in the chair to one side of the fireplace. She sat very straight. Her hand on the ivory head of her cane was blue-veined beneath the thin parchment of skin. Her hair, once a thick unmanageable bush, was now the purest silver cap washed with a hint of blue. Her expression was severe.

  ‘We want to hear it all, Isabella. You will not leave this room until you have told every detail.’

  ‘Nana, I am ashamed. I had no choice.’

  ‘I did not ask for excuses and self-abasement, missy. I want the truth.’

  ‘You must understand, Bella. We know that you have done terrible damage to the national interest, to
the family, to yourself. Now it is our duty to contain and control that damage.’ Shasa stood in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped under the tails of his blazer. His tone had moderated. ‘We want to help you, but we must know the truth before we can do so.’

  Isabella looked up at him with a hunted expression. ‘Can I talk to you and Nana alone?’ She glanced at her brothers. Garry lolled in the armchair under the window with thumbs hooked in his gaudy braces. He rolled an unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Sean sat on the window-still, his legs thrust straight out in front of him. His bare arms, tanned and sleek with muscle, were crossed over his chest.

  ‘No,’ said Centaine firmly. ‘The boys have risked their lives for you and Nicky. If you have stored up more trouble for yourself and the family, they are the ones who will be called upon to bail you out. No, you don’t get out of it that easily. They deserve to hear everything you have to tell us. Don’t leave anything out – do you hear me?’

  Slowly Isabella lowered her face into her hands. ‘They gave me the code-name Red Rose.’

  ‘Speak up, girl. Don’t mumble.’ Centaine banged her cane on the floor between her feet, and Isabella started and looked up.

  ‘I did everything they told me to,’ she said, looking the old lady in the face. ‘When Nicky was still an infant, just over a month old, they made a film and showed it to me. They almost drowned my baby. They held him by the feet and ducked him . . .’ She broke off, and then drew a deep breath to steady herself. ‘They warned me that in the next film they would cut off parts of his body and then send them to me – his fingers, his toes, his arms and legs and then . . .’ She choked on the word. ‘And then his head.’

  They were all silent and appalled until Centaine spoke.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They told me I must work for Daddy. I must inveigle myself into his Armscor work.’ Shasa winced, and Isabella twisted her fingers together. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. They told me that I must enter politics, stand for Parliament, use the family connection.’

  ‘I should have suspected your sudden political aspirations,’ Centaine said bitterly.