by Wilbur Smith
The corpses were tied in bunches by the heels and dragged behind a truck through the streets to the main rubbish-dump outside the city limits.
‘The populace must witness the course of revolutionary justice and the price of disobedience,’ Ramón explained the necessity of these exhibitions.
The court ruled that the corpses should not be removed from the rubbish-dump, and their families were forbidden to indulge in the ritual of mourning or to exhibit any public signs of grief. The grim work went on until after midnight, and the last batch of criminals was executed in the beams of the headlights of the trucks waiting to drag them to the rubbish-tip.
Although they were both exhausted, neither Ramón nor the future president could afford to sleep until the revolution was secure. Ramón had a bottle of vodka in his pack. He and Abebe shared it as they sat beside the radio and listened to the reports coming in.
One after the other, Abebe’s loyal officers with Cuban support took over command of the various units of the Army and seized all the important points in the city and its surroundings.
As the sun rose, they had control of the airport and railway station, the radio and television broadcasting studios, and all the military forts and barracks. Only then could they snatch a few hours’ sleep. Guarded by Ramón’s paras, they stretched out on mattresses on the chamber floor, but at noon they were in fresh uniforms for the meeting of the purified Derg. There were armed paras at the door of the chamber and T-53 tanks drawn up in the street outside.
As Colonel-General Machado congratulated Abebe, he said quietly: ‘If you kill Brutus, then you must kill all the sons of Brutus. In 1510, Niccolò Machiavelli said that, Mr President, and it is still the best-possible advice.’
‘So we must begin at once.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Ramón. ‘The Red Terror must be allowed to run its course.’
‘The Red Terror shall flourish.’ The hastily printed posters in four languages were pasted on every street corner, and the hourly radio and television broadcasts proclaimed the new president and exhorted the populace to denounce all traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
There was so much work to do that Abebe divided the city into forty cells and appointed a separate revolutionary court for each cell. The presidents of these courts were loyal junior officers who were given full power to ‘undertake revolutionary action’. Each had a team of executioners working under him. They began with the members of the nobility, the rases and the chieftains and their families.
‘The Red Terror is a proven tool of the revolution,’ Ramón Machado explained. ‘We know those who will prove awkward later. We know those who will oppose the pure doctrine of Marxism. It is more expedient to eliminate them now, in the first wild flush of victory, rather than undertake the tedious business of dealing with them piecemeal at a later date.’ He lifted his cap and raked his fingers through his thick dark curls. He was tired, his marvellous classical features were strained and drawn. Dark smudges underlined his eyes, but there was no uncertainty in those deadly green eyes. Abebe was at once grateful for this strength and awed by this iron resolution.
‘We must root out every rotten apple from the barrel. We must eliminate not only the opposition, but also the thought of opposition. We must break the nation’s will to resist. They must be cowed and deprived of any sense of self or self-determination. The board must be swept entirely clean. Only then will we be in a position to rebuild the nation in its new and shining image.’ The corpses of the nobles and the petty chieftains and their entire families were piled like garbage on the street-corners. The revolutionary patrols drove through the city and picked up at random the children they found playing in the streets.
‘Where do you live? Take us to your parents’ home.’
The parents were dragged out of their houses and forced to watch as their children were shot in the head at point-blank range. The little corpses were left at the front door, swelling and stinking in the heat. The parents were forbidden to remove them or to mourn them.
‘The Red Terror will flourish,’ decreed the posters, but in the mountains some of the old warriors and their families resisted the death squads.
The tanks surrounded the villages, and the women and children and old men were driven into their huts. The huts were set on fire, and the screams mingled with the crackle of the flames. The men were marched to the fields and forced to lie face-down in rows. The tanks drove over them, locking their tracks to pivot on the piles of bodies and grind them into a paste with the drought-stricken earth.
‘Now for the priests,’ Ramón said.
‘The priests were instrumental in the overthrow of the monarchy,’ Abebe pointed out.
‘Yes, the church and the mosque, the bishops and priests and the imams and the ayatollahs are always useful in the beginning. The revolution can be nurtured in the pulpit, for the priests are by their training unworldly and idealistic creatures who respond to a vision of freedom and equality and brotherly love. They can be easily persuaded, but always remember that they are also in competition with us for the souls of men. When they witness the revolution in action they will challenge us. We cannot brook that competition. The priests must be disciplined and controlled – just as all other men must be.’
They entered the great mosque and arrested the imam’s fourteen-year-old daughter. They put out her eyes and cut out her tongue, then they placed two ounces of raw chili pepper in her vagina and took her back to her father’s house. They locked her in a room of the house with guards at the door. Her parents were forced to squat outside the door and listen to their daughter’s death agonies.
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 Ramón, as they toured the quiescent city.
‘Not all of them,’ Ramón disagreed, and Abebe turned to stare at him. He knew what Ramón meant.
‘It must be done,’ Ramón 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 Ramón answered without hesitation.
‘I will.’
‘It would be best that way,’ Abebe agreed, and looked away to conceal the relief he felt. ‘Do it as soon as possible.’
Ramón drove down 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 sewage-buckets overflowed and puddled in the gutters. The bodies of the victims of the Terror were heaped like cords of firewood at the street-corners. 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 wer
e 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.
Ramón 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 Ramón 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,’ Ramón ordered.
He watched them hurry to the end of the alley before he opened the door and stooped under the lintel.
It was semi-dark 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 Ramón.
‘Go.’ He gestured to the door, and she crawled across the floor, her head still covered, making obeisance and wailing and drooling with terror.
With the heel of his combat boot Ramón 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. Ramón 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,’ Ramón 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?’ Ramón challenged him softly.
‘You are the first of a legion – and your name is Death.’
‘You are wise and perceptive, old man,’ Ramón 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 Ramón 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 Ramón’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. Ramón 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 death-face. 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 Ramón’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 Ramón Machado in the enforcement of pragmatic democracy on a recalcitrant population.
Ramón 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 Ramón’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.
Ramón’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 communications equipment was modern. He had direct satellite links to Moscow and Luanda and Havana and Lisbon.
As Ramón 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 Ramón knew was of this world. He was the twin god of power and political mastery – and Ramón 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 fla
shed 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 immature 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. Ramón 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.
Ramón 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 Ramón sat and held out his hand.
‘Good day, Padre,’ he said softly. ‘How does it go with you?’