by Wilbur Smith
She glanced quickly at her wristwatch. Two hours fifty minutes since take-off from Lusaka.
She lifted herself slightly in her seat and checked the instrument panel over the pilot’s shoulder. They were still on the same heading, but they were beginning their descent. The altimeter began to unwind steadily.
She looked ahead through the windscreen of the cockpit. It was late afternoon and hazy, but suddenly the low sun flashed on a large body of water ahead.
Lake? she thought, and searched her memory for one that large. The African lakes all lay along the Great Rift Valley, thousands of miles in the opposite direction. Then suddenly it occurred to her.
‘The Atlantic! We have reached the west coast.’ She reassembled the map of Africa in her mind. ‘Angola or Zaïre, or the Enclave.’
The Candid banked on to an approach heading. The undercarriage whined and vibrated as it was lowered. Ahead she saw white coral beaches, and the shape of the reefs beneath the blue Atlantic waters.
There was a river mouth, with a low surf breaking on the bar and a deeper serpentine channel crawling into the lagoon. The river was broad and brown, but not large enough to be one of the major African drainages, not the Congo nor the Luanda river. She tried to memorize every detail. A few miles above the lagoon the river formed a distinctive ox-bow, a double S. Dead ahead was a long red clay landing-strip, and she made out the thatched roofs of a large settlement in the bend of the river beyond it.
The Candid touched down and taxied to the far end of the strip. As the pilot shut down the engines, a convoy of trucks trundled out to surround it. She saw many armed men in camouflage and combat fatigues.
‘Wait,’ the pilot told her. ‘Men come fetch.’
Two officers entered the flight-deck. One was a major. They were both swarthy and wore moustaches. They were dressed in camouflage with no insignia apart from their badges or rank.
South Americans, she thought. Or Mexicans. And this was confirmed when the major addressed her in Spanish.
‘Welcome, señora. You will please come with us.’
‘My suitcase.’ She indicated her luggage with all the hauteur she could muster, and the major snapped an order at his junior. The lieutenant carried her baggage down the ramp and loaded it into a waiting truck.
They drove her in silence for twenty minutes, passing the barbed-wire stockade beyond which stood the thatched buildings she had first seen from the air. There were armed guards at the gate. They followed a single track, and she caught glimpses of the river through the trees. The track became progressively softer and sandier, and she guessed that they were headed towards the river mouth and the sea.
They reached another smaller stockade. The gate was guarded, but they were allowed to pass straight through. The huts were thatched, but seemed smaller and neater than the others she had seen. There were nine of them along the edge of the beach.
As she stepped down from the truck she looked around her. It was a pretty spot, and reminded her of one of the brochures for a Club Méditerranée holiday – sea, sand, palms and thatched huts.
The major escorted her politely into the largest hut, and as soon as Isabella saw the two uniformed females who were waiting to meet her she felt her flesh crawl. She remembered the degrading deep body-search that had been inflicted on her on the previous occasion.
Her fears were without substance. The two young women were almost apologetic as they searched her suitcase and handbag. They patted her down, but did not force her to undress for a body-search.
There was minor consternation when they discovered her camera. It was a small ‘Swinger’ type Kodak. They discussed it with obvious alarm, and Isabella resigned herself to losing it.
‘It is of no value,’ she told them in Spanish. ‘You may take it if you wish.’
In the end, one of the women took the camera and the two spare rolls of film and disappeared with them through the door at the back of the room.
Ramón was watching through the peep-hole in the wall as the two women signallers conducted the search. He had ordered them to behave with circumspection and not to give unnecessary offence, so he nodded with approval when one of them came through and handed him the camera and film.
He examined them quickly but thoroughly. He exposed a single frame to ensure that the trigger mechanism functioned and that the film wound on properly. Then he nodded and handed the camera back to the woman.
Isabella was surprised and obviously pleased when it was returned to her. Through the peep-hole, Ramón studied her expression with interest. She had grown her hair longer, and her features had matured and become stronger. She was even more poised and self-possessed than she had been when last he had seen her in Spain. She carried authority and success well, and he reminded himself of her considerable achievements and the high place that she had carved for herself in a few short years.
She had obviously kept herself in top physical condition. She was slim and fit-looking. Her legs and arms under the short cotton blouse and Bermuda shorts were tanned and shapely. Her muscle tone was as taut as that of a professional athlete. He considered her objectively and he thought that she was probably one of the three or four physically most attractive women of the hundreds he had known. He was highly pleased with her. She was in large measure responsible for his own career success.
The two women finished the search and repacked and closed Isabella’s suitcase. One of them picked it up and asked Isabella to follow her. She took her to the end of the compound to a gate in the screen fence made of dried palm-fronds. Isabella found herself in a small enclosure that contained only two huts.
The woman led her to the nearest of these and ushered her into a single large living-room, with a mosquito-netted bed in a side-alcove. She deposited the suitcase on the bed and left Isabella alone.
Isabella explored quickly. There was a shower-room and earth toilet at the rear. All very bucolic but more than adequate for her needs. It reminded her of one of Sean’s hunting camps in the Chizora concession.
She began unpacking her suitcase. There were hanging-space and shelves behind a curtain, but before she could finish the chore a sound carried to her through the open window overlooking the beach.
It was a sound that pierced her soul, the high joyous shout of a child that she would have recognized wherever or whenever she heard it.
She rushed to the window.
Nicholas was on the beach. He wore only bathing-trunks, and at first glance she saw that he had grown inches since their last meeting in Spain.
He had a puppy with him, a black and white spotted mongrel with a thin muzzle and a long whippy tail. Nicholas was holding a stick out of reach as he raced along the water’s edge, and the puppy gambolled and leapt beside him trying to reach the stick. Nicholas was shrieking with laughter, and the puppy yapped hysterically.
Nicholas hurled the stick out into the sea and shouted, ‘Fetch!’ And the puppy plunged in gamely and swam out to the floating stick. It picked it up in its jaws and turned back.
‘Good boy! Come on!’ Nicholas encouraged him, and as the puppy came ashore it shook a gale of waterdrops over him. Nicholas howled with protest, and seized one end of the stick. Boy and dog began a laughing growling tug-of-war.
Isabella found her vision misting over, and she had to blink rapidly to clear her eyes. She left the hut and went down softly to the high-water mark. Nicholas was so absorbed with his pet that she was able to sit still and observe him for almost ten minutes before he noticed her.
Immediately his manner altered. He pushed the puppy away. ‘Down!’ he commanded sternly, and it obeyed. ‘Sit!’ he said. ‘Stay!’
He left it at the water’s edge and came to Isabella.
‘Good day, Mamma.’ He held out his hand solemnly. ‘How goes it with you today?’
‘Did you know I was coming?’
‘Yes. I am to be good and kind to you,’ he replied frankly. ‘But I will not be allowed to go to school while you are here.’
‘Yes, Mamma, very much. I can read now. And we are learning in English,’ he replied in that language.
‘Your English is very good, Nicky. Luckily I have brought you some English books.’ She tried to make up for denied pleasure. ‘I think you will like them.’
‘Thank you.’
She felt rejected, an interloper in his compact little world.
‘What is your puppy’s name?’
‘July Twenty-Six.’
‘That is an odd name for a puppy. Why do you call him that?’
He looked astonished at her ignorance. ‘July Twenty-Six. It is the date of the beginning of the revolution. Everybody knows that.’
‘Of course. How foolish of me.’
He took pity on her. ‘I call him just plain Twenty-Six.’ He whistled the puppy, and it came bounding up the beach. ‘Sit!’ he ordered. ‘Shake hands.’
The puppy offered her its paw.
‘Twenty-Six is very clever. You have trained him well.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed calmly. ‘He is the cleverest dog in the world.’
‘My baby,’ she lamented silently, ‘what are they doing to you? What tricks are they playing on your susceptible young mind that you call your puppy after some violent political event?’ She did not know what revolution Nicholas was referring to, but the anguish must have twisted her features, for he asked: ‘Are you all right, Mamma?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I will take you to meet Adra,’ he invited. As they walked back through the palms she casually tried to take his hand, but he firmly and politely disengaged her fingers.
‘I still have the soccer ball you gave me,’ he mollified her. She knew she would have to win his confidence and liking all over again, and the knowledge made her eyes sting once more.
‘I must take it very easily,’ she cautioned herself. ‘I mustn’t press him too hard.’
She was totally unprepared for the shock of first seeing Nicholas in his combat fatigues. With the cap cocked over one eye and his thumbs hooked in his belt, he swaggered like a legionnaire and strutted for her approval. She covered up her distress and made suitable noises of admiration.
She had brought with her a selection of books that she hoped might appeal to a boy of Nicholas’s age. By a fortunate chance one of these was the African classic Jock of the Bushveld, a story of a man and his dog.
The illustrations intrigued Nicholas immediately, and he professed to see in Jock a resemblance to his own Twenty-Six. They discussed this at great length, and then Nicholas wanted to read the text. It was a simple story, but beautifully written. He read aloud. Despite herself she was impressed by his ability, although once or twice he appealed to her for help with a difficult word or the name of an African animal with which he was unfamiliar.
By the time that Adra came to fetch him to bed, they had made up most of the lost time and ground, and were once again on the slippery footing of tentative friendship.
‘Don’t push too hard,’ she had to keep warning herself.
As he said goodnight and shook her hand formally, he suddenly blurted out: ‘It is a good story. I like Jock the dog, and I am glad you have come to see me again. I don’t really mind not going to school.’ His outburst had clearly embarrassed him, and he hurried from the room.
Isabella waited until she saw the light go out in his bedroom, then she went to find Adra. She wanted to speak to her alone, and try to make some estimate of just what part she had played in Nicholas’s abduction and where her sympathies now lay. She also wanted news of Ramón, and to find out from Adra when she would see him again.
Adra was in the kitchen, washing the dinner-dishes, but as Isabella entered her expression went dead and she withdrew behind an iron-cold reserve. She replied to Isabella in monosyllables and would not meet her eyes. Very shortly Isabella gave up the effort and went back to her own hut.
Despite the fatigue of travel she slept fitfully and woke in the dawn light, eager for her first full day with her son.
They spent the entire day with Twenty-Six on the beach. In the bag of gifts that Isabella had brought with her was a tennis ball. This kept boy and dog amused for hours on end.
Then they swam out to the reef. Nicholas showed her how to hook the sea-cats out of their holes in the coral. He was delighted by her horror of the writhing slimy legs of the miniature octopuses and the huge luminous eyes which gave them their name.
‘Adra will cook them for dinner,’ he promised.
‘You love Adra, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘Adra is my mother.’ He caught himself as he realized his gaffe. ‘I mean you are my mamma, but Adra is my real mother.’
The hurt made her want to weep.
On the second morning Nicholas came to her hut and woke her while it was still dark. ‘We are going fishing,’ he exulted. ‘José is going to take us out in the boat.’
José was one of the camp guards she had noticed on her arrival. He was a dark-skinned young man with crooked teeth and pock-marked face. He was obviously one of Nicholas’s favourites. The two of them chatted easily while they readied the boat and the fishing-lines.
‘Why do you call him Pele?’ she asked José in Spanish, and Nicholas answered for him.
‘Because I am the champion soccer-player in the school – not so, José?’
Nicholas showed her how to bait her line, and was patronizingly indulgent of her inability to remove the hook from the mouth of a leaping, quivering fish.
That evening they read another chapter of Jock together. When Nicholas was in bed, Isabella tried once again to engage Adra in friendly conversation. She received the same taciturn and hostile response. However, when she gave up and left the kitchen, Adra followed her out into the darkness and gripped her arm. With her lips almost touching Isabella’s ear she hissed: ‘I cannot talk to you. They are watching us every minute.’
Before Isabella could recover, Adra had disappeared back into the kitchen.
In the morning Nicholas had another surprise for her. He took her down to the beach where José waited for them. At a word from Nicholas he handed over his weapon and stood by grinning with crooked teeth while the boy stripped the AKM. Nicholas’s fingers were nimble and fast. He called out the name of each separate part of the weapon as he detached it.
‘How long?’ he demanded of José as he finished.
‘Twenty-five seconds, Pele.’ The guard laughed with admiration. ‘Very good. We will make you a para, yet.’
‘Twenty-five seconds, Mamma,’ he repeated to Isabella proudly, and although she was appalled by the demonstration she tried to make her congratulations sound sincere.
‘Now, José, you must time me again when I reassemble,’ Nicholas ordered. ‘And you must take my photograph, Mamma.’
The camera was a great attraction, and she obeyed. Then Nicholas posed with the rifle and demanded another photograph. Watching him through the lens, she was reminded strongly of the photographs she had seen of the child warriors trained by the Vietcong. They were children dwarfed by the weapons they carried, little boys and girls with faces like cherubs and big innocent eyes. She had read also of the atrocities committed by these aberrant little monsters. Was Nicholas being turned into one of these? The thought made her physically sick.
‘Can I shoot, José?’ Nicholas wheedled him, and they argued playfully until at last José allowed himself to be won over.
He threw an empty bottle out into the lagoon, and Nicholas stood at the edge of the water and fired with the selector of the rifle on single shot. The sound of gunfire brought half a dozen paratroopers and the women signallers from the compound. They stood at the high-water mark and cheered him on. On the fifth shot the bottle exploded and there were shouts of ‘Viva, Pele!’ and ‘Courage, Pele!’ from the onlookers.
‘Take my picture again, Mamma,’ Nicholas pleaded, and posed with his admirers on either side of him and the rifle hel
d at high port across his chest.
Adra gave them a picnic lunch of fruit and cold smoked fish to eat on the beach. As they sat together Nicholas remarked suddenly through a mouthful of food: ‘José has fought in many battles. He has killed five men with his rifle. One day I will be a true son of the revolution – just as he is.’
That night she lay under her mosquito-net and tried to fight off the dark waves of despair and helplessness that flooded over her.
‘They are turning my baby into a monster. How can I stop them? How can I get him away from them?’
She did not even know who they were, and her sense of helplessness was overwhelming.
‘Oh, where is Ramón? If only he would come to me. With his help, I know I can be strong. With him beside me, we can see this dreadful thing through.’
She tried to approach Adra again, but the woman was cold and intractable.
Nicholas was becoming restless. Although he was still polite and friendly, she could tell that he was becoming bored with her company alone. He spoke of school and soccer matches and his friends and what they would do when he was allowed to return to them. She tried desperately to distract him, but there was a limit to the games she could devise, to the fascination of the books and stories she provided for him.
A kind of wild desperation came over her. She dreamt of escaping with him to the safe and sane world of Weltevreden. She imagined him dressed in the uniform of a first-class public school, rather than in military camouflage. She fantasized making some bargain with the mysterious powers that controlled their destinies so completely.
‘I would do anything – if only they would give my baby back to me.’ Yet, even as she thought it, she knew it was in vain.
Then in the dark and hopeless watches of the night her imagination became morbid. She thought of ending it, ending the torment for both herself and her son.
‘It would be the only way to save him, the only way out for both of us.’