Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  Garry was helpless. He knew better than to fight the wheel and rudders and increase the brutal stress on her control-surfaces. The Lear was fighting for her life. He whispered encouragement to her and held the control-wheel with a light and loving touch, trying to ease her nose up out of the graveyard spiral.

  ‘Courage, darling,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, baby. You can do it.’

  Shasa was clinging to the arm-rests of his seat and staring at the altimeter. They were down to fifteen thousand feet and still dropping. None of the other instruments was making any sense. They jerked and wavered and kicked.

  He concentrated on the altimeter. It unwound jerkily. Ten thousand, seven, four thousand. The strength of the storm increased; their heads were whipped back and forth, threatening to snap their spines. The shoulder-straps cut painfully into their flesh.

  Something broke in the fuselage with a tearing crash. Shasa ignored it and tried to focus on the altimeter. His vision was starred and disorientated by the Lear’s vicious plunges.

  Two thousand feet, one thousand – zero. They should have hit the ground, but the tremendous changes of barometric pressure within the swirling body of the storm had thrown out the reading.

  Suddenly the Lear steadied, the turbulence abated. Garry pressed on rudder and stick, and she responded. The flight director stabilized and rotated towards the vertical as the Lear rolled back on to even keel and they burst out of the cloud.

  The change was stunning. The noise of the storm gave way to the low hum of the jets. Moonlight flooded into the cockpit, and Shasa gasped with shock.

  They were almost upon the surface of the sea, skimming over it like a flying fish rather than a bird. A drop of another hundred feet would have plunged them beneath the green Atlantic rollers.

  ‘Cutting it a little fine, son.’ Shasa’s voice was hoarse, and he tried to grin, but his eye-patch had been shaken loose and hung down under his ear. He adjusted it with fingers that trembled.

  ‘Come on, Navigator,’ Garry chuckled unconvincingly. ‘Give me a course to fly.’

  ‘New course is 260 degrees. How is she handling?’

  ‘Like a breeze.’ Garry turned gently on to the new heading. The Lear came round serenely and sped out into the Atlantic leaving the dark continental mass astern.

  ‘Len.’ Shasa turned in the seat and looked back into the cabin. The technicians’ faces were pale and washed lightly with the sweat of terror. ‘What do you make of the MiGs?’

  Len stared at him like an owl as he tried to adjust to the shock of still being alive.

  ‘Pull yourself together, man,’ Shasa snapped at him, and Len stooped quickly to his control-panel.

  ‘Yes, we still have contact. MiG leader is reporting target destroyed. He is short of fuel and returning to base.’

  ‘Farewell, Fidel. Thank the Lord that you are a lousy shot,’ Garry murmured, and kept the Lear low down in the surface clutter where the shore radar would have difficulty picking them up. ‘Where is Lancer?’

  ‘Should be dead ahead.’ Shasa thumbed the microphone.

  ‘Donald Duck, this is the Magic Dragon.’

  ‘Go ahead, Dragon.’

  ‘It’s the Chicamba. I repeat the Chicamba. Do you copy that? Over.’

  ‘Roger. Chicamba. I say again Chicamba. Did you have any trouble? We heard pom-pom jet traffic south-east of here. Over.’

  ‘Nothing to it. It was a Sunday-school picnic. Now it’s your turn to visit Disneyland. Over.’

  ‘We are on our way, Dragon.’

  ‘Break a leg, Duck. Over and out.’

  It was half-past five on Tuesday morning when Garry put the Lear down on the tarmac at Windhoek Airport. They climbed down stiffly and stood in a group at the foot of the steps, overcome by a sense of anticlimax. Then Garry walked to the nearest engine which was softly crackling and pinking as it cooled.

  ‘Pater,’ he called. ‘Come and have a look at this.’

  Shasa stared at the alien object that had buried itself in the metal fuselage below the pod of the Garrett turbo-fan engine. It was painted a harsh industrial yellow, a long finned arrow-like tube, that protruded six feet from the torn metal skin of the Lear.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Shasa asked.

  ‘That, Mr Courtney,’ said Len, who had come up behind him, ‘that is a Soviet ATOLL air-to-air missile that failed to explode.’

  ‘Well, Garry,’ Shasa murmured, ‘Fidel wasn’t such a lousy shot after all.’

  ‘Bless Russian workmanship,’ Garry said. ‘Perhaps it’s a little early, Dad, but could you stand a glass of champagne?’

  ‘What a splendid idea,’ said Shasa.

  ‘The Chicamba river.’ Shoulder to shoulder, Sean and Esau Gondele leant over the chart-table. ‘There she is.’

  Sean laid his finger on the tiny insignificant nick in the outline of the continent. ‘Just south of Catacanha.’ He looked up at the trawler skipper. Van Der Berg was built like a Sumo wrestler, squat and heavy, with a leathery skin burnt and desiccated by sun and wind.

  ‘What do you know about it, Van?’ he asked.

  ‘Never been in that close,’ Van shrugged. ‘Just another piss-willy little river. But I’ll get you as close as you want to go.’

  ‘A mile off the reef will do very nicely.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Van promised. ‘When?’

  ‘I want you to keep below the horizon all of tomorrow, then at nightfall you can take us in at 0200 hours.’

  For the Scouts, the witching hour was always two hours after midnight. It was then that the enemy would be at his lowest ebb, both physically and mentally.

  At one o’clock in the morning Sean held his final briefing in the crew mess of Lancer. He checked each man separately. They were all dressed in navy-blue fisherman’s jerseys and jeans, and black canvas rubber-soled combat-boots. On their heads were knitted black woollen caps, and all their faces and hands were black, either naturally or with camo-cream.

  The only uniform items they wore were their webbing, all of it supplied by the South African defence force from Cuban equipment captured in the south of Angola. Their weapons were Soviet AKM assault-rifles, Tokarev pistols and Bulgarian M75 anti-personnel grenades. Three men in Esau Gondele’s section would carry RPG 7 anti-tank rocket-launchers. Part of the agreement with the South Africans for their co-operation was that nothing would ever be traced back to them.

  One at a time, they stepped up to the table and handed over all their personal items, signet rings and dog-tags and pay-books, wallets and wristwatches, and any other form of identification. Esau Gondele sealed them in separate envelopes and issued each of them with an identical black waterproof digital wristwatch to replace their own.

  While this was happening the trawler captain called on the intercom from the bridge: ‘We are seven nautical miles off the river-mouth. Bottom is shoaling nice and gently. I’ll have you in position a few minutes before time.’

  ‘Good on you,’ Sean told him, and then turned back to the ring of black faces. ‘Very well, gentlemen, you know what we are after. Just a few airy thoughts to occupy those busy little minds of yours – if you are going to cull anybody, just make sure that you don’t take out the woman or the child. She’s my sister.’ He let that sink in for a moment. ‘Thought number two. The sketch-maps I have shown you are more fantasy than fact. Don’t rely on them. Thought number three. Don’t get left behind on the beach when we pull out. Chicamba is no place to spend a holiday. The food and the accommodation are rotten.’ He picked up his rifle from the bunk. ‘So, my children, let’s go and do it.’

  Lancer groped towards the shore with radar and depth-sounder. All her running lights were extinguished. Her engines were ticking over, so she barely maintained steerage. In the darkness ahead Sean could make out the intermittent luminous flare of the surf breaking on the outer reef. There were no lights ashore. The land itself had been absorbed by the night. The cloud overhead was unbroken. No glimmer of star or moon came through.r />
  Van Der Berg straightened up from the radar-hood. ‘One mile off,’ he said quietly. ‘Water is six fathoms and shoaling.’ He glanced across at the dark figure of his coloured helmsman. ‘Stop engines.’

  The tremble of the engines through the deck beneath their feet ceased, and Lancer wallowed like a log.

  ‘Thanks, Van,’ Sean said. ‘I’ll bring you back a nice present.’ He ran lightly down the companionway to the main deck.

  They were waiting in the stern, each team standing by its own black rubber landing-boat. Sean smelt the musky odour in the air and grimaced. He didn’t like it, but the use of ‘boom’ before a contact had become a tradition in the Scouts.

  ‘It’s an old African custom,’ he consoled himself. ‘The mad Mahdi’s fuzzy-wuzzies smoked it before they revved old Kitchener at Khartoum.’

  ‘Sergeant-Major, the smoking-light is out,’ he grated, and he heard them shuffle in the darkness as they rubbed out their cannabis cigarettes on the deck. Sean realized that the smoke dulled the edge of their fear and bolstered that reckless bravado that was also part of the Scouts tradition, but he had never used it. He relished the sensation of fear; it throbbed in his blood and beat in his brain. He was never more alive than at a time like this, going into battle and mortal danger. He would not wish to shade that pure clean flame of fear.

  One at a time the flexible rubber hulls, laden with men and equipment, slid down the stern chute of the trawler and splashed softly on to the water. The boatmen started the Toyota outboards and they burbled gently in the night. Even on a still and windless night like this, the sound would not carry a hundred yards.

  They formed up into a long black snake, a boat’s length between them. Sean was in the leading inflatable with three of his best men. The boatman shone a hooded pen light over the stern to keep the boats that followed on station. They moved off quietly towards the land.

  Sean was standing in the stern. On a lanyard around his neck was a small luminous compass, but he relied mainly on the nightscope to bring them into the shore. It was a Zeiss image-enhancer. It looked like a large pair of plastic-coated binoculars.

  Ahead of him the breaking surf flared green fire in the lens, and he made out clearly the dark spot in the line that marked the river-mouth. He touched the boatman’s shoulder to redirect him. The next wave lifted and shoved them as it slid by under the hull, and they heard its hoarse susurration on either hand as they ran through the pass into the calmer waters of the lagoon.

  Through the Zeiss lens he saw the shaggy tops of the palms silhouetted against the cloud-banks and the open throat of the river ahead. He flicked the pen light, and Esau Gondele’s boat moved up alongside.

  ‘There she is.’ He leant over to whisper to the big Matabele and pointed out the river-mouth.

  ‘I see it.’ Esau had his own nightscope held to his eyes.

  ‘Tear their nuts out!’ The pod of three attack-boats moved off together, and Sean watched them disappear into the river and merge with the loom of the land.

  He whispered to the boatman and they turned parallel with the beach. As they ran down the lagoon, Sean scanned the shore through the Zeiss lens. Half a mile from the mouth he made out in the gloom of the palm grove the square outline of a hut and then beyond it a second. ‘It fits with Bella’s description,’ he decided.

  They ran towards the beach. Now he saw the gleam of metal above the nearest hut. It was the tall Christmas-tree antenna and dish of a satellite communications centre.

  ‘That’s it.’

  Sand grated softly beneath the keel of the inflatable and they leapt over the side into blood-warm water that reached to their knees. Sean led them ashore. The beach sand was so white that he could see the little ghost crabs scuttling away ahead of them. The men raced to the edge of the palm grove and dropped into cover below the high-water ridge.

  Sean took a few moments to check his bearings. According to Isabella’s description of her first visit, the communications centre was where they had received and searched her. She told him there were two or three female radio operators running the centre. In addition she had counted approximately twenty para guards who were billeted in the barracks beyond the wire.

  The gate to the compound was always locked at sunset. She had warned him of that. There was always a sentry posted there. He patrolled the wire, and they changed the guard every four hours.

  ‘Here he comes now,’ Sean murmured as he saw the dark shape of the sentry moving along the barbed-wire fence. He lowered the nightscope, and whispered to the Scout who lay beside him: ‘Twenty paces ahead, Porky. He’s moving left to right.’

  ‘Got him.’ Porky Soaves was a Portuguese Rhodesian whose speciality was the slingshot. He could hit a dove on the wing at fifty metres. At ten metres he could drive a steel ball-bearing clean through the bone of a man’s skull.

  He slid forward like a night adder, and as the Cuban sentry came level he rose on one knee and drew like a longbow man. The double surgical-rubber strands of the slingshot snapped, and the sentry collapsed without a sound into the fluffy white sand.

  ‘Go!’ said Sean softly, and the second Scout ran forward with the heavy wire-cutters. The strands of barbed wire made little musical pinging sounds as they parted. Sean ran to the opening.

  As each of the Scouts slipped through the hole in the wire, he slapped their shoulders and pointed them to their targets. He sent two of them to the main gate to take the sentries there, two to shut down the communications centre and the rest of them to hose down the barracks at the rear of the compound and to cull the garrison guards.

  If the arrangements were the same as last time, the first hut on the right of the radio room should be Isabella’s. Nicky would be in the second one with his Cuban nursemaid. Isabella called her Adra. From Sean’s estimate of the situation, the nursemaid was one of the uglies. She would have to go. He would cull her at the first opportunity.

  Sean ran towards the line of huts, but before he reached them a woman started to scream in the communications hut. The sharp hysterical bursts of sound raked Sean’s nerve-endings. The screams were cut off by a short burst of automatic fire.

  Here we go! Sean thought, and the night erupted with gunfire and flame and the mortal thrill of combat.

  Isabella slept fitfully and woke a little before midnight to the sound of thunder and of jet engines passing at altitude overhead. She threw aside the mosquito-net and ran out into the night.

  The wind generated by a mighty thunderstorm that was moving up from the south flapped the skirts of her nightdress around her bare legs and rattled the palm fronds.

  The sound of jet engines rose and fell as wind and cloud blanketed it. It seemed to her that there was more than one aircraft up there above the cloud. She hoped that one of them was the Lear with her father and Garry aboard.

  ‘Have you picked up the signal?’ she wondered, as she strained her eyes into the black heavens. ‘Can you hear me, Daddy? Do you know I’m here?’

  She saw nothing, not even the shine of a single star, and the sound of engines overhead faded and left only the soughing of the wind and the rumble and crash as the thunderstorm fired its opening broadsides.

  The rain began to fall again, and she ran back into the hut. She dried her hair and her bare feet and stood at the window looking down towards the beach.

  ‘Please God. Let them know we are here. Help Sean to find us.’

  At breakfast, Nicholas said to her: ‘I haven’t had a chance to try out my new soccer ball.’

  ‘But we’ve played with it every day, Nicky.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . I mean with good players.’ And then, realizing what he had said: ‘You are a good player – for a girl. I think you would make an excellent goalkeeper – with some more practice. But, Mamma, I would like some of my friends from school.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Isabella looked at Adra. ‘Are your friends allowed here?’

  Adra did not look round from the wood-stove. ‘Ask José,’ she
said. ‘Perhaps it will be allowed.’

  That afternoon José and Nicholas arrived at the compound with a jeep-load of small black boys. The soccer match on the beach was noisy and passionately contested. On three occasions Isabella and José had to untangle a knot of punching and kicking bodies. After each battle, play was resumed as though nothing had happened.

  Isabella was selected as goalkeeper for the Sons of the Revolution. But after she had let through five goals Nicholas, the team captain, came to her tactfully. ‘I think you are tired, Mamma, and would like to rest now.’ And she was sent to the sidelines.

  The Sons of the Revolution beat the Angolan Tigers twenty-six goals to five, and Isabella felt very guilty about those five. After the final whistle Isabella produced a two-kilo bag of toffees and chocolates from her gift-box, and her lack of athletic prowess was immediately forgiven by her captain and both teams.

  At dinner Nicholas chatted easily, and Isabella tried to act as naturally, but her eyes kept straying to the window of the hut and the beach. If Sean were coming, he would come tonight. She noticed Adra watching her thoughtfully. She made another effort to follow Nicky’s conversation, but she was thinking about Adra now.

  Could they take her with them? she pondered. Would she want to come? Adra was such a reticent and secretive person that she could never even guess at her true feelings, except her love for Nicky – that was all that was certain.

  Could she trust her enough to warn her of the rescue? she wondered. Should she give Adra the choice of coming away or remaining? In fairness, could she take Nicky from her after all these years of devotion to him? Surely it would break her heart, and yet could she trust her enough to tell her? Could she risk their freedom, hers and Nicky’s, and could she risk the lives of her brother and all those other gallant young men who were attempting to rescue them? More than once during the meal she was on the point of speaking to Adra, but each time she shied away from it at the last moment.

  When she tucked Nicky into bed he lifted his face to her and she kissed him quite naturally. He held her tightly for a moment.