‘Now we can be sure they’ll shoot on sight and even if he has the time to shout out his explanation, it would be in English and they’d shoot him even faster. D’you see? If we tell them there is only one man with a gun and they kill your man, Pilger is safe again. We must tell them there are two. Simple really. And unfortunate, as I’ve said.’
The British Ambassador sat back deep in his armchair and was hidden by the wings. He crossed his leg, rested the shoe on his knee and began tapping the pipe on the heel of it.
The American and French Ambassadors looked across to the security policeman waiting for comment. But he stood silent. He had nothing more to say, no further protest. He had already made up his mind what he would do.
The Frenchman coughed and wiped his lips with his large white monogrammed handkerchief again.
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘We were quite prepared to be convinced of your man’s infallibility, but he has left it too late and we just cannot afford, as the American Ambassador has properly reminded us, to wait any longer.’ He looked directly at the policeman. ‘You see, my friend, if he fails to get the Englishman, the consequences, to quote your previous Prime Minister on another occasion, are too ghastly to contemplate. We all of us know what will happen.’
‘We all know what might happen,’ said the American Ambassador. ‘Let’s not forget that there’s a risk on both sides, and the Russians know it too. If Solodovnikov was shot, they could make one almighty rumpus that would take us years to recover from, but they tend to over-react by command and I personally think we would be wrong to assume Moscow need go really wild.’
‘With all respect,’ said the British Ambassador, ‘if we were talking of any other man I might agree with you. But this is no ordinary Russian. Ambassadors are expendable, we all know that, but this is no ordinary Ambassador.’
‘You are right,’ said the Frenchman. ‘He is vital to them, absolutely vital. Without him they’d be put back five years in Africa, maybe more. They just cannot afford to lose him. Why else should they send twenty-five of their top security men to protect him?’
‘And we’re worried he’ll be assassinated by a mad Englishman who catches butterflies,’ said the American, but really to himself.
‘And Sirhan Sirhan hadn’t even the intelligence for that.’ said the British Ambassador, and the American smiled and nodded back.
‘Gentlemen,’ the American said, ‘the clock tells me it’s ten to twelve - midday - and despite twenty-five top Russian guards, an island full of Cubans and a South African sniper who, we are asked to believe, is invincible, there is still the remote possibility that Vassily Solodovnikov has less than thirty minutes to live. Now maybe it’s a million to one chance that the Englishman will get him but to my mind even those odds are too short. We have a decision to make and it must be made now, and I mean now. By consensus preferably, nicer that way . . . but by a simple majority if necessary.’
‘And a draw . . . a deuce?’ asked the Frenchman, raising his eyebrows.
‘Then,’ replied the American, looking at them each in turn, ‘I shall assume the privilege of chairman and vote twice.’
The Frenchman raised his right hand. ‘I vote we kill them both.’
The British Ambassador put the empty pipe back in his mouth and smoothed out his moustache with the knuckles of his forefingers.
‘For the record,’ he said, ‘I would prefer to rephrase that. I would vote we alert the Russians, tell them exactly the situation and leave whatever there is to be done to them. That’s all that’s diplomatically possible now.’
The security policeman turned and walked quickly to the door. ‘I will inform my Government immediately and telephone you their decision.’
‘No time, sir,’ said the American across to him. ‘No time at all. You can merely tell your people that they have been outvoted three to one.’ He looked at the two other ambassadors. ‘I vote we alert the Russians now and leave the killings to them.’ And he pressed the switch on his desk that broke the electro-magnet seal so that the South African could leave.
A sudden draught of cold air made them shiver as the security policeman opened the door wide and slammed it hard with a bang and the American Ambassador had to repeat his order into his telephone.
‘I said put it on the scrambler now . . . an immediate alert to Maputo Soviet One. Their Number One, d’you understand? . . . right now.’
The South African Press Association reporter saw the security policeman leave by the side-door but he only just made it to the Embassy steps by the time the car was turning the corner.
Five minutes later the French Ambassador came out, the fur collar of his Astrakhan overcoat turned up high, touching the brim of his black trilby. He scowled as the reporter raised his notebook in an introductory gesture and his two bodyguards shepherded him across the pavement to the waiting black Mercedes.
The British Ambassador walked out alone, bareheaded, with a woollen scarf tied in a knot at his neck, to his black chauffeur and the white Jaguar with the tiny Union Jack fluttering on the nearside wing. He smiled at the notebook: ‘Chilly,’ he said. ‘Damned chilly,’ and jumped into the warm cosy leather interior and slammed the door shut.
The reporter watched the car move into the lunchtime traffic and then turned up Pretoria Street for a long cold walk back to his office. The wind cut into his face and he wondered if he could afford a scarf and maybe a pair of woollen gloves for himself.
The South African security policeman was already on the radio telephone from his car to his headquarters staff.
‘He is to abort immediately. Tell him to return to cover without delay, do you understand? Return to cover, and come out as a tourist with the American planes. But he must abort now. No RED JOKER DEAD.’
He put the receiver back on its rest behind his driver’s seat. He would not let them have him. The pompous British Ambassador had said that the Russians would kill the first man they saw. So he was just making sure there was only one man for them to find, the only one they needed to find. The Englishman.
He would make damned sure they didn’t get his boy.
20
The delegations arrived with great pomp in their own private jets, their national flags emblazoned on the fuselage and wings. Each in turn was greeted with extravagant ceremony by Union’s newest President, the third, as some remembered, in seven days.
He was a short man, very thin, a mulatto, and crippled. To prevent further spinal deformity he wore a steel brace so that his neck and back were rigid. When he walked he could see only two yards ahead of him, and whenever he wanted to look another person in the face he had to bend his knees and pivot his entire upper body backwards, supported by a thick hornbeam walking stick.
He was an ardent, lifelong Communist, and started his political career as a full-time paid agitator in France on the car factory floors of Lyons. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution he had been attracted to Maoism but returned to doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism after, and encouraged by, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had been one of seven candidates flown quickly to Moscow to be judged for the Presidency of the new Uzania. Although the selection board could find no fault with his background or ardour, they did not consider him the best available, not until, that is, he had undergone his medical examination. Then doctors discovered that his deformity was a symptom of something much more fatal and, as it happened, far more convenient to Soviet planning. They diagnosed terminal cancer of the spine which was soon to sever the spinal nerve cord. The doctors predicted he would die within three months, sooner perhaps but certainly no later. The Soviet planners were delighted. They kept the diagnosis secret and immediately nominated the hunchback President-Elect, perfectly suited they agreed. He would live just long enough on the island to implement Soviet Communism there and provide the critical non-Communist world with a legitimate, spontaneous revolutionary leader; but he would
not survive long enough to foster ambitions of his own, which had so often before, with other people in other places, confounded Soviet design.
When the little hunchback was told that he, among so many obviously abler candidates, had been selected, he was astonished, but he assumed that a lifetime’s dedication to World Socialism had been finally rewarded and his love for it was fired all over again.
One by one the jets screamed their way from the newly-laid runway extension to the welcoming group of newly-christened Uzanians waiting by the small terminal building. A thousand mulatto workers, men, women and children, stood in silence watching from behind a cordon of Cuban soldiers. Red flags fluttered from every post and every window, red bunting was nailed to every door and stuck to every wall and a long line of it was strung from the tall podium of lights high above the parking apron.
As each delegation walked down the steps of its aircraft a platoon of Cubans in their tight green machine- pressed uniforms with white helmets, belts and gaiters slapped the butts of their rifles loudly together and presented arms.
The aircraft arrived as distance and wind direction dictated, and it seemed in no particular order. The hunchback President escorted the head of each delegation to his car and then returned to the small square of red carpet to wait for the next. His own people flanked him, some still carrying sheaves of propaganda pamphlets they had tried to distribute a week before to the vulgar Capitalist-journalists in the bar of the Hotel de la Quai. They hadn’t had the time to change their publicity nor had they thought it necessary.
Not a word, not a paragraph, not even the title ‘Victim and Victor’ was altered, so adaptable is Marxist logic.
To the right-hand side of the red carpet square, twenty yards away, sheltered from the sun by the shadow of the water tower, stood a group of seven men. All wore similar dark double-breasted suits, and similar trilby hats; all stood in a military fashion, at ease.
Occasionally one would speak to the next in line, who would pass the whisper on to the next until the man at the end of the line would, with a nod, or shake of his head, whisper his reply for the return transmission.
Anyone close enough, and nobody was, might have recognized the language they whispered as German. And anyone with a knowledge of such things would have recognized the markings of the tailplane of the small jet the seven men had arrived in, as the registration number and letters of Mozambique.
They were the East German delegation attending Uzania’s celebrations. What was not known by the hunchback President and his associates was that the seven would stay behind on the island long after all the other visitors had left. They were Moscow’s emissaries, part of the larger plan, Moscow’s long-term plan that might still be in motion, still moving towards its completion even when these men were beginning to suffer the diseases and ailments of old age.
The seven, until three months ago, had never met, though each knew the others’ reputations. Then they had been instructed to rendezvous at the port of Beira in northern Mozambique to be briefed for the task ahead of them. All had responded with the same enthusiasm and dedication that Moscow had grown accustomed to in all its East German agencies.
One was an expert in satellite communications and would shortly take over control of the American tracking station. Another was a linguist, fluent in the dialects of Mozambique and Angola and in Zulu and Swahili. He also spoke French. The third was a political commissar, a graduate in psychology and political philosophy at the University of Greifswald. The fourth and fifth were colonels in the East German army, the sixth a civil engineer, specializing in water power. The seventh was a member of the Democratic Republic’s Abteilung, East Germany’s secret State police, an agent sent to monitor the enthusiasm and progress of his six compatriots.
They stood together, seeing, hearing everything. Patient, long-time disciples in sufferance, exiles in the cause of World Socialism.
At precisely midday with the sun large and hot overhead, the sea-mist already scorched away, they looked up and saw the last of the expected jets banking over the tip of La Souffrière, sharply defined against the blue sky. The hunchback nervously pulled the knot in his red tie tighter and wiped the sweat from his neck and face with a large red handkerchief. He muttered something to the man nearest him who went down on his knees and began picking small brown leaves off the red pile of the carpet square.
They heard the squeal of the tyres and saw the two puffs of blue smoke as the jet landed. It was much larger than the rest, silver with the letters CCCP painted in red on the fuselage forward of the wings. The hunchback bent his knees and tilted his body back, his right arm on the walking stick which was quivering with the strain. This was the one he had been waiting for. The others were necessary of course, he had been told that, vital for protocol and support, but this was the plane that would start the day proper. Its arrival, and its alone, meant that his career had properly begun and that the new Republic of Uzania was about to be launched.
The Cuban Guard of Honour ran forward as the jet engines died and even the silent crowd began to move against their will behind the soldiers, anxious to see better, almost excited. The door slid open and a dozen men ran down the steps, large men with large, cold white faces, all dressed in the same dark suits. Without apology they pushed back the group with the hunchback and left him standing there alone in the middle of the red square. Then down the steps came as many Russian officers, in decorated uniforms, some khaki, some grey, all heavy with ribbons and medals, gold brocade on their peak caps and epaulets. They ignored the hunchback’s outstretched hands and stood in a double column between him and the steps. Then, on an unseen, unheard command, the Cubans raised their rifles high and slapped them hard and loud in salute and stamped their right feet down hard behind their left.
A middle-sized, middle-aged man came out from the cabin, a dumpy man with untidy grey, thinning hair, wearing a grey baggy double-breasted suit done up tightly on all three buttons and creased. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and there was the slightest smile on his round face, a face white and colourless as if it had never before been shown to the African sun. His left hand moved a few inches from his side in what could have been the beginning of a wave, but quickly fell again.
The hunchback, unable to see him, unable to bend far enough back, suddenly rushed forward before the column of officers could stop him, moving so fast his stick hardly touched the ground. The large men in the dark suits pulled revolvers from their coat pockets, but the hunchback was already there. It was a warm, instinctive and spontaneous gesture done so quickly and without thinking that he found he was standing on the bottom steps shaking Dr Vassily Solodovnikov’s hands even before the Russian Ambassador’s feet had touched the soil of Uzania, whose brainchild it was.
As the convoy of cars left for the town, the first of the day’s many ceremonies over, the crowd was pushed, prodded and kicked back to their work reinforcing the edge of the new runway with stones and cement. Until more lights could be installed on the extra eight hundred yards of new runway, cans of paraffin with long stems that looked like goosenecks with tiny wicks hanging from them were placed at the edge, fifteen yards apart. At night they were lit so that the giant Russian airfreighters could continue their round-the-clock deliveries of arms and supplies.
Twelve half-moon-shaped hangars made of corrugated galvanized iron sheets had been erected a half mile from the terminal. Already they were full of wooden crates, codes and numbers stencilled in Russian on their sides. Occasionally a mulatto worker would glimpse a pile of aircraft tyres or the fuselage of a small jet or large field guns standing in wood shavings. One said he had seen Cubans in the hangar furthest from the terminal, breaking open massive crates, fifty feet long and he said he had seen a rocket with enormous fins and a sharp nose painted yellow.
Some work-gangs had been digging trenches close to the runway, others had dug much deeper and wider pits, fifteen yards across with sandbagg
ed floors. Someone said he had seen, sometime after midnight, lights at sea, ships he was certain, three of them moving slowly into the harbour. And hours later, long before it got light, they had all heard frightening sounds coming from beyond the airfield, moving towards the bottom of the mountain, like a convoy of earth-movers, the rumbling, snarling, churning sounds of huge engines. In the darkness they could just see tiny pinpoints of lights moving but no one could make out the shapes, and with so many Cuban sentries patrolling, they didn’t dare leave the hangars. But this morning they saw the tracks, sunk deep into the clay, tracks eighteen inches wide and someone said they were tanks. Others said. Rubbish, ships couldn’t carry tanks.
Then at ten o’clock, just before they had been ordered to the terminal to see the small planes come in, ten men came back with their Cuban guards. They had been working further away, closer to the mountain and higher up, digging the graves of the six men and two women who had been shot yesterday.
It had been the young woman’s fault. Everyone said that.
But it didn’t matter now, God rest them, they were better off. Everyone said that, too. The younger woman, she had been the wife of the man who had owned the smoking sheds in the harbour, had given birth to a still-born the day the Cubans came and she was still losing blood. She had said she couldn’t work; everyone could see she could hardly stand, and when the Cubans kicked her in the stomach, they saw blood trickle down the inside of her legs. Then another woman, much older and stronger, had shouted at the Cubans and told them to leave her alone and that she would do the work for the two of them. And the Cubans kicked her too.
Then the six men had joined hands around the woman facing out in a circle protecting them and the Cubans had shouted at everyone to get away and, knowing what was about to happen, mothers hid the faces of their children and covered their ears and then pushed their own faces into the arms of their men as the Cubans opened fire.
Red Joker Page 21