Wilbur Smith - C08 Golden Fox

by C08 Golden Fox(Lit)

  The sons of the abuna, the archbishop of the Coptic Church, were taken to one of the revolutionary courts and were tortured. Their hands and feet were crushed in steel vices and their bodies were burnt with electricity.

  Their eyes were gouged out and left dangling by the optic nerves on to their cheeks. Their genitalia were cut off and forced into their mouths.

  Then they were taken home and placed outside the front door. Once again the parents were forbidden to remove their bodies for Christian burial.

  The radio and television broadcasts harangued against the decadence and revisionism of the Church, and the death squads waited at the doors of the mosque when the muezzin began his chant. The faithful stayed at home.

  "All the sons of Brutus are dead,' Abebe told Ramsey, as they toured the quiescent city.

  "Not all of them,' Ramsey disagreed, and Abebe turned to stare at him. He knew what Ramsey meant.

  "It must be done,' Ramsey insisted. 'Then there can be no turning back. The ancient bourgeois taboo will be shattered for ever, as it was on the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde and in the Russian cellar when Tsar Nicholas and his family died. Once it is done, there will be no return and the revolution will be secure." 'Who will do it?' Abebe asked, and Ramsey answered without hesitation.

  (I will. P 'It would be best that way,' Abebe agreed, and looked away to conceal the relief he felt. 'Do it as soon as possible." Ramsey drove dowry through the old quarter of the city. He was alone at the wheel of the open jeep. The streets were deserted, except for the revolutionary patrols. The windows of the houses were shuttered and curtained. No face peered out at him, no children romped in the yards, no voices or sounds of laughter came from behind the closed doors of the mud-brick hovels.

  The revolutionary posters were pasted to the cracked and chipped plaster of the walls. 'The Red Terror shall flourish." There had been no hygienic services since the Red Terror began. The rubbish clogged the streets, and the sewagebuckets overflowed and puddled in the gutters. The bodies of the victims of the Terror were heaped like cords of firewood at the street-comers. They were so bloated and bullet-riddled that they were no longer recognizable as human. Gas-filled bellies stretched their clothing until it burst at the seams, and their flesh was empurpled and blackened by the sun. The only living things were the crows and kites and vultures that hopped and picked at the piles of the dead, and the fat gorged rats that scuttled away in front of the jeep.

  Ramsey wrapped his silk scarf across his mouth and nose to protect them from the stench, but apart from that he was unmoved by what he saw around him, as a victorious general is unaffected by the carnage of the battlefield.

  The hut was at the end of a noisome alleyway, and there were two guards at the front door. They recognized Ramsey as he parked the jeep and picked his way through the accumulated filth. They saluted him respectfully.

  "You are relieved of your duties. You may go,' Ramsey ordered.

  He watched them hurry to the end of the alley before he opened the door and stooped under the lintel.

  It was semidark in the room, and he removed his sunglasses. The walls were limed but bare except, for a silver Coptic cross suspended above the bed.

  There were rush mats on the stone floor. The room smelt of sickness and old age. An old woman sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. She wailed and pulled the hood of her robe over her head when she saw Ramsey.

  "Go.' He gestured to the door, and she crawled across the floor, her head stiff covered, making obeisance and wailing and drooling with terror.

  With the heel of his combat boot Ramsey pushed the door closed behind her and studied the figure that lay on the bed.

  "Negus Negusti, King of Kings,' he said with a dry irony, and the old man stirred and looked up at him.

  He was dressed in a spotless white robe, but his head was bare. He was thin, impossibly thin. Ramsey knew that he suffered from the ailments of great age, his prostate and digestion were diseased, but his mind was clear. His feet and hands protruding from the folds of the white robe were childlike and emaciated. Each tiny bone showed clearly through the waxen amber skin. His beard and hair were untrimmed and entirely bleached to the lustre of platinum. The flesh had melted from his face, so the nose was thin and aquiline. His lips had shrunk and drawn back. His teeth were yellow and too large for the delicate bones of his cheeks and brow. His eyes were enormous, black as pools of tar, bright as those of a biblical prophet.

  "I recognize you,' he said softly.

  "We have never met,' Ramsey corrected him.

  "Still, I know you well. I recognize the smell of you. I know every line of your face and the inflection and timbre of your voice." 'Who am I, then;" Ramsey challenged him softly.

  "You are the first of a legion - and your name is Death." 'You are wise and perceptive, old man,' Ramsey told him, and advanced to the bed.

  "I forgive you for what you do to me,' said Haile Selassie, Negus Negusti, Emperor of Ethiopia. 'But I cannot forgive you for what you have done to my people." 'Commend yourself to your God, old man,' said Ramsey as he picked up the pillow from the bed. 'This world is no longer for you." He pressed the pillow down over the old man's face and leant his weight upon it.

  Haile Selassie's struggles were like those of a trapped bird. His thin fingers clutched lightly at Ramsey's wrists and plucked softly at his sleeves. He kicked and danced, and the robe rode up above his knees. His legs were thin and dark as sticks of dried tobacco, and the knees were enlarged knots out of all proportion to the skinny shanks.

  Gradually his struggles grew weaker, and there was a soft spluttering under his robes as his sphincter relaxed and his bowels voided. Ramsey leant on the pillow for five minutes after the old man was completely still. He felt an almost religious ecstasy come over him. Nothing he had done before had ever given him this sense of gratification. It was physical and emotional, it was spiritual and at the same time deeply sexual.

  He had killed a king.

  He straightened up and removed the pillow. He plumped it up and then lifted the old man's head and set the pillow beneath it. He pulled the hem of the robe down to Haile Selassie's ankles, and folded the little childlike hands upon his breast. Then with thumb and forefinger he drew down his eyelids.

  He -stood for a long time studying the emperor's deathface. He wanted to fix the image in his mind for ever. He was unaware of the heat and the stench in the closed room. He sensed that this was one of the high points in his life. The frail body epitomized all that he had pledged to destroy in this world.

  He wanted the memory of that destruction to be strong and vivid enough to last a lifetime.

  All possible opposition had been eliminated. The voice of dissent was silenced. The sons of Brutus were all of them dead, and the revolution was secure.

  There were many other important issues needing Ramsey's attention elsewhere in Africa. With a clear conscience he could hand over his position as security adviser to the People's Democratic Government of Ethiopia. His successor in office was a general in the security police of the German Democratic Republic. He was almost as skilled as Rarnen Machado in the enforcement of pragmatic democracy on a recalcitrant population.

  Ramsey embraced Abebe and boarded one of the Ilyushin transports that now flew regularly in and out of Addis. It was a most convenient port of entry to the entire continent.

  They refuelled in Brazzaville and then flew south and west to land on the new airstrip at Tercio base on the Chicamba river just as the sun set into the blue Atlantic Ocean.

  Raleigh Tabaka met him. During the drive from the airstrip to Ramsey's new headquarters compound in the palm grove above the white coral beach, Raleigh brought him fully up to date with developments during his absence.

  Ramsey's private quarters were austere. A thatched roof and large unglazed windows with roll-up blinds of split bamboo; bare uncarpeted floors and chunky but comfortable furniture made by a local carpenter from hand-sawn indigenous timber. Only the electronic com
munications equipment was modem. He had direct satellite links to Moscow and Luanda and Havana and Lisbon.

  As Ramsey entered this simple dwelling he was reminded forcefully of the cottage at Buenaventura in Cuba. He felt immediately at home here, with the trade winds in the palms and the ocean breathing heavily on the white beach below his window.

  He was exhausted. This deep bone-weariness had accumulated over the weeks and months. As soon as Raleigh Tabaka left him, he dropped his combat uniform in a heap on the mud floor and crawled under the mosquito-net. The gentle warm gusts of the trades through the open window billowed the mosquito-net and caressed his naked body.

  He felt replete. He had performed a difficult but infinitely worthwhile task with skill and success. He knew that he had earned new honours and rewards, but none would be as satisfying as this deep sense of achievement that buoyed his weary spirit.

  His creation surpassed that of a Mozart or a Michelangelo. He had used as his raw materials a land and a people, mountains and valleys and lakes and rivers and plains and millions of human beings. He had mixed them on his palette and then, in blood and flames and gunfire, he had fashioned and worked them into a masterpiece. His creation surpassed that of any artist who had lived before him. He knew that there was no God - at least, not as the bishops and imams whom he had so recently disciplined and humiliated imagined God to be. The god that Ramsey knew was of this world. He was the twin god of power and political mastery - and Ramsey was his prophet. The work had only just begun. First a single nation, he thought, and then another and another, until finally an entire continent. His elation staved off sleep for a few minutes longer, but as he succumbed his mind took another turn.

  Maybe it was the hut and the wind and the sound of the sea - whatever the association of ideas, he thought of Nicholas. In the night he dreamt of his son. He saw again his shy reluctant smile, and heard his voice and his laughter in his head, and felt the small warm hand curled in his hand like the timorous body of a tiny creature.

  When he awoke the longing was even more intense. While he worked at his desk the image of his son's face receded and he could concentrate on the coded messages from Havana and Moscow that flashed down from the orbiting satellite. However, when he stood up from his desk and looked down through the open window to the beach, he imagined he saw a slim tanned little body splashing in the green surf and heard the sweet treble cries of the child.

  Perhaps it was merely a reaction from the slaughter in the streets of Addis Ababa, or the memory of the corpses of the sons of the abuna with their eyeballs hanging on their cheeks and their inunature genitals stuffed into their mouths, but over the next few days the desire to see his son became an obsession.

  He could not leave Tercio base now, not with so much in play, so many prizes at stake on the great gaming-board of Africa. Instead he sent a satellite message to Havana and within an hour had his reply.

  After Ethiopia they would deny him nothing. Nicholas and Adra were on the next transport flight from Cuba. Ramsey was waiting at the airstrip when the Ilyushin landed at Tercio base.

  He watched his son come down the ramp. He walked ahead of Adra, no longer clinging to her hand like a baby. There was alertness in the way he carried his head, a spring to his step, and a sparkle of curiosity and intelligence in his eyes as he paused at the bottom of the ramp and looked about him keenly.

  Ramsey felt an extraordinary emotion, an intensification of the longing and pride with which he had anticipated the boy's arrival. No other human being had ever moved him in this way. For long aching moments he watched his son in secret, concealed in the throng of disembarking troops and swarming porters, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He was reluctant to give a name to this emotion he felt.

  He would never have entertained the word 'love'.

  Then Nicholas picked him out. He saw the boy's entire attitude change. He started forward at a run, but within a dozen paces he took control of himself. The look of extreme pleasure on his lovely face was swiftly masked. He was expressionless as he walked calmly to the side of the jeep in which Ramsey sat and held out his hand.

  "Good day, Padre,' he said softly. 'How does it go with you?" Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey as the jeep passed. From the comer of his eye he saw Nicholas stiffen in the front seat and return the salute with all the aplomb of a veteran. Ramsey 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, Ramsey's orderly had a batch of satellite messages for his attention. However, there was little of importance amongst them, and Ramsey dealt with them swiftly. He went to the hut alongside his own that he had allocated for Nicholas and Adra. He heard 33e 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?' Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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. Ramsey 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. Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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. Ramsey 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 hi
m 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.

  Ramsey 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 assaultrifle. 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 Ramsey's knowledge, Jose, the Cuban driver, taught Nicholas to drive the jeep. The first Ramsey 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.