Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  At that moment there was a knock on the door and Katrina ushered the records clerk into his office. Ramón signed for the computer printout in the records-book, and after Katrina and the clerk and left he slit the envelope and spread the printout on his desk.

  Protea was the code-name of another of his South African agents. His real name was Dieter Reinhardt, a German national, born in Dresden in 1930. His father had commanded one of Admiral Doenitz’s U-boats with distinction. After the partition of Germany, Reinhardt had enrolled as a cadet officer in the fledgling navy of the German Democratic Republic, and two years later had been recruited by the KGB.

  Subsequently, his ‘escape’ over the Berlin Wall to the West had been carefully stage-managed by Joe Cicero personally. Reinhardt and his wife had emigrated to South Africa in 1960, and after he had become a naturalized South African citizen he had joined the South African navy and worked his way up to the rank of kommandant. He was presently chief of signals on headquarters staff at Silver Mine command bunker.

  The printout was a copy of the report that he had filed three weeks previously concerning the Siemens radar chain at Silver Mine.

  Ramón laid the Red Rose report of the same installation alongside Protea’s and began comparing them item by item, paragraph by paragraph. Within ten minutes he was satisfied that they were in total agreement, in general and in detail.

  The integrity of Protea was of the highest order. It had been tested repeatedly over a decade and long ago rated Class I, the highest-category source.

  Red Rose had just survived her first security check. She could now be considered as active and given a Class III rating. After almost four years of carefully executed preparation, Ramón considered the price acceptable. He smiled at the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev on the opposite wall, and the general secretary stared back at him solemnly from under beetling brows.

  Katrina rang through on his private line. ‘Comrade Colonel, you are expected on the top floor in six minutes.’

  ‘Thank you, comrade. Please come through to witness destruction of documents.’

  She stood at his side while he fed the printout of the Protea report into the paper-shredder and then countersigned the entry in his daybook to attest to the destruction.

  She watched him button his tunic and adjust the block of medal ribbons on his chest in the small wall-mirror. Then she handed him the sheaf of notes for the meeting.

  ‘Good luck, Comrade Colonel.’ She stood close to him with face upturned.

  ‘Thank you.’ He turned away without touching her: never in the office.

  Ramón waited alone in the secure conference-room on the top floor. They kept him waiting for ten minutes. The walls of the room were bare plaster, painted white. There was no panelling that might conceal a microphone. Apart from the obligatory portraits of Lenin and Brezhnev, there was no decoration. There were a dozen chairs at the long conference-table, and Ramón stood for the full ten minutes at the lower end.

  At last the door from the director’s suite opened.

  General Yuri Borodin was head of the fourth directorate. In his new capacity Ramón reported directly to him. He was a chunky grey-haired septuagenarian, a cautious devious man, in a shiny striped suit. Ramón admired him and held him in awe.

  The man that followed him into the conference-room deserved even greater respect. He was younger than Borodin, not much over fifty, and yet he was already a member of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet and a deputy minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

  Ramón’s report had drawn a much heavier reaction than he had anticipated. He was being invited to defend his thesis in front of one of the hundred most influential men in Russia.

  Aleksei Yudenich was short and slight in stature but he had the fierce penetrating gaze of a mystic. He shook Ramón’s hand briefly and started into his eyes for a moment while Borodin introduced them, and then he took the seat at the head of the table with his aides on each side of him.

  ‘You have novel ideals, young man,’ he began abruptly, and his choice of adjectives was not necessarily complimentary. Youth was not a commodity by which the Department of Foreign Affairs set as much store as they did by traditional and well-tried policies. ‘You wish to abandon our longstanding support for the liberation movements in southern Africa – the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party – and for the armed struggle in southern Africa in general.’

  ‘With respect, Comrade Director,’ Ramón replied carefully, ‘that is not my intention.’

  ‘Then, I have misread your paper. Have you not stated that the ANC has proved to be the most inept and unproductive guerrilla organization in modern history?’

  ‘I have pointed out the reasons for this, and the manner in which previous mistakes may be rectified.’

  Yudenich grunted and turned a sheet of his copy of the report. ‘Continue. Explain to me why the armed struggle should not succeed in South Africa as it did in, for instance, Algeria.’

  ‘There are basic differences, Minister. The settlers in Algeria, the pieds-noirs, were Frenchmen, and France was a short boat-ride away across the Mediterranean. The white Afrikaner has no such escape-route. He stands with his back to the Atlantic Ocean. He must fight. Africa is his motherland.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yudenich nodded. ‘Continue.’

  ‘The FLN guerrillas in Algeria were united by the Muslim religion and a common language. They were waging a holy war, a jihad. On the other hand, the black Africans are not so inspired. They are splintered by language and tribal enmities. The ANC, as an example, is an almost exclusively Xhosa tribal organization which excludes the most numerous and powerful tribe, the Zulu nation, from its ranks.’

  Yudenich listened for fifteen minutes without interruption. His gaze never left Ramón’s face. When at last Ramón finished speaking he asked softly: ‘So what is the alternative that you propose?’

  ‘Not an alternative.’ Ramón shook his head. ‘The armed struggle must, of course, continue. There are younger, brighter and more committed men coming forward in its ranks, men like Raleigh Tabaka. From them we may see greater successes in future. What I propose is an adjunct to the struggle, an economic onslaught, a series of boycotts and mandatory sanctions . . .’

  ‘We do not have economic contacts with South Africa,’ Yudenich pointed out brusquely.

  ‘I propose that we let our arch-enemy do the job for us. I propose that we orchestrate in America and Western Europe a campaign to destroy the South African economy. Let our enemies prepare the ground for us, and plant the seeds of revolution. We will harvest the fruits.’

  ‘How do you suggest we go about this?’

  ‘You know that we have excellent penetration of the American Democratic Party. We have access at the highest-possible levels to the American media. Our influence in such organizations as the NAACP and the Trans Africa Foundation is pervasive. I propose that we make South Africa and apartheid a rallying cry for the American left. They are looking for a cause to unite them. We will give them that cause. We will make South Africa a domestic political issue in the United States of America. The black Americans will flock to the standard and, to secure their votes, the Democratic Party will follow them. We will orchestrate a campaign in the ghettos and on the campuses of America for comprehensive mandatory sanctions that will destroy the South African economy and bring its government crashing down in ruins, unable any longer to protect itself or to keep its security forces in the field. When that happens we will step in and place our own surrogate government in power.’

  They were silent awhile, contemplating this startling vision. Aleksei Yudenich coughed and asked quietly: ‘How much will this cost – in financial terms?’

  ‘Billions of dollars,’ Ramón admitted and, when Yudenich’s expression tightened, he went on: ‘Billions of American dollars, Comrade Minister. We will let the Democratic Party call the tune for us and the American people pay the piper.’

  Minister Yudenich smiled for
the first time that afternoon. The discussions lasted another two hours before Yuri Borodin rang the bell to summon his aide.

  ‘Vodka,’ he said.

  It came on a silver tray, the bottle thickly crusted with frost from the freezer.

  Aleksei Yudenich gave them the first of many toasts.

  ‘The Democratic Party of America!’ And they laughed and drained their glasses and shook hands and clapped each other’s back.

  Director Borodin moved slightly, until he and Ramón Machado were standing shoulder to shoulder. It was a gesture that was not lost on any of them. He was aligning himself with his brilliant young subordinate.

  Katrina’s flat was in one of the more pleasant sections of the city. From her bedroom window there was a view of Gorky Park and the amusement-ground. On the skyline the big Ferris wheel, lit with myriad fairy-lights, revolved slowly against the cold grey clouds as Ramón stepped out of the Chaika and went in through the front entrance of the apartment-building.

  It was a relic from pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, a wedding-cake of a building in rococo style. There was no lift, and Ramón climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. The exercise helped clear the vodka fumes from his brain.

  Katrina’s mother had lovingly prepared the thick pork sausage with a side-dish of cabbage – always cabbage. The entire apartment-block smelt of boiled cabbage.

  Katrina’s parents treated Ramón with servile and fawning respect. Her mother served Ramón with the greater portion of the sausage, while Katrina poured pepper vodka into his tumbler. When they had eaten, Katrina’s parents took the child with them and went to watch television in a neighbour’s apartment, discreetly leaving Ramón and Katrina to say their farewells.

  ‘I shall miss you,’ Katrina whispered, as she led him to the single bed in her tiny room and let the skirt of her tunic fall around her ankles. ‘Please return soon.’

  They had an hour before Ramón had to leave for the airport. Her skin was velvety smooth and warm to his touch. There were tiny blue veins radiating out from around her large rosy brown nipples. There was plenty of time for Ramón to make it really good for her.

  He left her with barely enough strength to totter to the door. The threadbare dressing-gown was clutched around her flawless shoulders, and her crisp curls were in tangled disarray.

  At the door, she leant heavily against him and kissed him deeply. ‘Come back to me soon, please. Oh, please!’

  At this time of night there was very little traffic on the airport road, only a few rumbling military trucks. The journey took less than half an hour.

  Ramón travelled so often that he had his own régime for minimizing the adverse effects of jet-lag. He neither ate nor touched alcohol during the flight, and he had trained himself to sleep in any circumstance. A man who could fall asleep on a bed of jagged Ethiopian rock in a temperature of forty-two degrees, or in the hothouse of a dripping Central American rainforest with centipedes crawling over his skin, could do so even in the torturous seat of an Ilyushin passenger-jet.

  Although the sun burnt down with a peculiar brilliance and dampened his open sports-shirt along the spine and at the armpits, it was by his reckoning a Moscow winter midnight and not a balmy Caribbean noon when he stepped off the plane at Havana’s José Marti Airport. He made the local connection on a scheduled flight, an old prop-driven Dakota that flew him down to Cienfuegos.

  Lugging his own valise from the airport building, he bargained with the driver of one of the vintage Detroit model taxis standing at the ‘Piqueras’ rank and took the ride out to the military cantonment of Buenaventura.

  On the way they skirted the sparkling water of the Bahía de Cochinos and passed the museum dedicated to the battle of the Bay of Pigs. It always gave him a satisfied glow of achievement when he recalled his own rôle in that salutary humiliation of the American barbarians.

  It was late afternoon when the taxi dropped him at the gates of the Buenaventura camp. The day’s activity was coming to an end, and columns of the Che Guevara paratrooper regiment were marching back to barracks. These were crack troops in brown fatigues, trained especially for an assault rôle in any theatre of the world, but since the last meeting of the Politburo in Havana they had been exercising and training for deployment in Africa.

  Ramón paused to watch a unit of them pass by. Young men and women, they were singing one of the revolutionary songs that he remembered so well from the bitter days in the Sierra Maestra. ‘Land of the Landless’ was the title and the lyric made his skin prickle even though it was all so long ago. He showed his pass at the gate to the married officers’ quarters.

  Ramón was dressed in sports-shirt and light cotton slacks with open sandals on his feet, but the sergeant of the guard saluted him deferentially when he recognized his name and rank. Ramón was one of the eighty-two heroes. Their names were recited in the schoolrooms and sung in the bodegas.

  His cottage was one in a row of identical two-bedroomed flat-roofed adobe-walled dwellings set amongst the palms above the beach. The calm waters of the Bay of Pigs sparkled between the long curved stems of the palms.

  Adra Olivares was sweeping the narrow front veranda, but when he was still a hundred paces distant she looked up and saw him and her expression smoothed into neutrality.

  ‘Welcome, Comrade Colonel,’ she said quietly, as he stepped up on the veranda, and although she cast down her gaze she could not conceal the fear in her eyes.

  ‘Where is Nicholas?’ he asked as he dropped his valise on the concrete floor, and in reply she looked away down towards the beach.

  There was a group of children frolicking at the edge of the water. Their shrill excited cries carried above the clatter of the trade wind in the palm fronds. The children were all wearing bathing-suits, and their bodies were brown and sleek with sun and water.

  Nicholas stood a little apart from the other children, and Ramón felt his heart turn over as he recognized his son. It was only within the last year that he had begun to think of him that way. Before that it had always been ‘the child’ and in his departmental reports it had been ‘the child of Red Rose’. Insidiously it had become ‘my son’, but only in his mind. The words were never spoken or written down.

  Ramón left the veranda of the cottage and drifted down through the palms to the beach. At the high-water mark he sat on the low sea-wall and watched his son.

  Nicholas was just three years of age. He was precocious and physically well developed for his age. He would grow to be tall; already his limbs were long and coltish without any trace of baby fat. He stood with one hip thrust out, his weight all on one leg, his hand upon the hip in a pose that called to mind Michelangelo’s David.

  Ramón’s interest in the child had been awakened only after it became clear that he was exceptionally intelligent. The reports from his teacher at the camp nursery school had been euphoric. His drawings and his speech were those of a child many years older. Until that time Ramón had taken no active part in the child’s upbringing. He had arranged this accommodation for Adra Olivares and Nicholas through the DGA in Havana. Adra was now a lieutenant in the organization of state security.

  Ramón had arranged that also. It was necessary for her to have officer’s rank in order to qualify for one of the Buenaventura cottages, and to enable Nicholas to attend the military crèche and nursery school.

  For the first two years Ramón had not seen the child, although the various reports from the military clinic and the education department had passed over his desk when he prepared despatches for Red Rose. Eventually these reports and the accompanying photographs had piqued his interest. He had made the journey down to Buenaventura from the capital.

  It seemed that the child recognized him immediately. He had hidden behind Adra’s legs and peered out at Ramón fearfully. The last time he had seen his father was in that white-tiled operating-theatre in the Buenaventura military clinic when Ramón had staged his partial drowning in front of the camera to coerce Red Rose into accepting his
authority. Nicholas had been only a few weeks old at the time. It was impossible that he could remember the incident – and yet his reaction to Ramón had been too intense to be merely coincidental.

  Ramón had been taken unawares by his own response to the child’s terror. He was accustomed to other people’s trepidation in his presence. It seldom needed one of his ruthless demonstrations to instil fear in those around him, but this had been different.

  Apart from his own mother and his cousin Fidel, he had felt no deep sympathetic response to any of his fellow human beings. He had always deemed this to be one of his great strengths. He was almost impervious to sentimental or emotional considerations. This allowed him to make his decisions and base his actions entirely upon logical and intellectual judgement. When necessary he was able to sacrifice a comrade of many years’ standing without flinching and with no futile and debilitating regrets later. He could make tender and unselfish love to a beautiful woman and only hours later, without a moment’s hesitation, order her execution. He had trained himself to be above all feeble mundane considerations. He had forged and tempered himself into one of Lenin’s steely men, and honed the edges of his strength and resolve into a terrible shining weapon – and then, unexpectedly, he had found this flaw in the metal of his soul.

  ‘A tiny flaw,’ he consoled himself, as he sat on the seawall in the bright Caribbean sunshine and watched the child. ‘Only a hairline crack in the blade, and then only because this is part of me. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, and my hope for immortality.’

  He cast his mind back to that episode in the military clinic. In his imagination he saw once again the infant squirming in the doctor’s grip and heard the outraged terrified squeals and the painful choking breath as he lifted the sodden little head from the waters of the tank. He did not flinch from the memory.