Golden Fox

Eleven years ago when last he had passed this way there had been nothing but open grassland here, with a few scrawny goats grazing amongst the red wounds with which erosion and neglect had raked the earth.

"Nobs Hill.' The driver of the van chuckled at his surprise. 'Beautiful, hey?" Such is the determination and fortitude of men that even in the face of the most adverse circumstances there are those few who will not only survive, but who with courage and ingenuity far beyond the average will flourish and rise high above the obstacles and pitfalls with which their path is strewn.

Along the low ridge of ground, standing above the huddled shacks and cottages of Drake's Farm, were the homes of the black dlite. There were a hundred or so of these successful men set apart from all the million inhabitants of Drake's Farm. Through business acumen and natural ability and hard work they had wrested material success from the hands of their white political masters, from those who had attempted to dictate their fate through the monumental framework of interlocking laws and regulations which was the Verwoerd-inspired policy of apartheid in action.

Yet their victory over circumstances was hollow. No matter that they could afford to make their home in any part of this land, they were constrained by the Group Areas 2oe Act to live only in these areas which those architects of apartheid had set aside for them. The homes that these black businessmen and doctors and lawyers and successful criminals had built for themselves would have graced the elegant suburbs of Sandton or La Lucia or Constantia where their white counterparts lived.

"See!' the driver of the van pointed proudly. 'The pink house with big windows. It is the home of Josia Nrubu, the famous witchdoctor. He sells his charms and potions and spells by mail order all over Africa, even to Nigeria and Kenya. He sells a charm to make all men and women love you, and lion bones to give you success in business and money matters. He can give you the fat of vultures for your eyesight and another potion made from the hymen of a virgin that will make your meat-plough hard as granite and tireless as a war assegai. He has four new Cadillac motor-cars and his sons go to university in America." 'I'll take the lion bones,' Michael chuckled. The Golden City Mail had run at a loss for the last four years, much to the chagrin of Nana and Garry.

"See! The house with the green roof and the high wall. There lives Peter Ngonyama. His tribe grows the weed that we call dagga or boom and which you whites call cannabis. They harvest the dagga in the secret places in the hills and send it by the truckload to Cape Town and Johannesburg and Durban. He has twenty-five wives and is very rich." They left the crumbling surface of the old road for the smooth blue asphalt expanse of the newly laid boulevard. The driver accelerated down between the green lawns and high brick walls of Nobs Hill, officially designated Drake's Farm Extension IV.

Suddenly he braked and turned off to pause before the steel gates of one of the more luxurious mansions. The electric gates slid aside silently and then closed again behind them as they drove through into a garden of planted shrubs and green lawns. There was a free-form swimming-pool below the terrace with a rock fountain at the centre. Sprink-

lers played upon the lawns, and Michael noticed two black gardeners in overalls working amongst the flowering plants.

The building was of ultra-modern design with plate-glass picture-windows and exposed woodwork. The roof was split into various levels and planes.

The driver parked below the main terrace, and a tall figure came down the steps to welcome Michael as he stepped out of the van.

"Michael!' Raleigh Tabaka's greeting took him unprepared, as did the friendly smile and hand-clasp. It was so different from the spirit of their last meeting in London.

Raleigh wore casual slacks and a white open-necked shirt which emphasized his fine unblemished skin and his romantic African features. Michael felt a charge of sexual electricity ripple across his fingertips as they shook hands. Raleigh was still one of the most impressive and attractive men that he had ever met.

"You are welcome,' he said, and Michael looked around him and lifted an eyebrow.

"Not bad, Raleigh. You are still keeping fine style." 'This does not belong to me.' Raleigh shook his head. 'I own nothing other than the clothes on my back." 'Who does all this belong to, then?" 'Questions, always questions,' Raleigh chided him with an edge to his voice.

"I am a journalist,' Michael pointed out. 'Questions are my meat and drink." 'Of course. This house was built by the Trans Africa Foundation of America for the lady you are about to meet." 'Trans Africa - that's an American civil rights group?' Michael asked.

"Isn't it run by the coloured evangelist preacher from Chicago, Doctor Rondall?" 'You are well informed.' Raleigh took his arm and led him up on to the wide terrace.

"It must have cost half a million dollars,' Michael persisted, and Raleigh shrugged and changed the subject.

"I promised to show you the children of apartheid, Michael, but first I want you to meet their mother, the mother of the nation."

2ohe led Michael across the terrace. There were beach umbrellas spread in the sunshine, like a field of brightly coloured mushrooms. A dozen black children sat at the white plastic tables drinking Coca-Cola from the cans and listening to one of the ubiquitous portable transistor radios from which blared the driving rhythms of African jazz.

They were boys ranging in age from eight or nine years to the late teens.

All of them wore canary-yellow T-shirts with the legend 'Gama Athletics Club' printed across the chest. None of them stood up as Michael passed, but they watched him with flat incurious stares.

The glass doors of the main building stood open to the terrace, and Raleigh led the way into a split-level living-room whose walls were decorated with carved wooden masks and fetish statuettes. The stone floor was covered with animal-skin rugs.

"Something to drink, Michael?' Raleigh asked. 'Coffee or tea?" Michael shook his head. 'Nothing, but do you mind if I smoke?" 'I remember your habit,' Raleigh smiled. 'Go ahead. I'm sorry I can't offer you a match." Michael paused with the lighter in his hand and glanced towards the upper level of the spacious room.

A woman came down the steps towards them. Michael took the unlit cigarette from his lips and stared at her. He knew who she was, of course. They called her the black Evita, the mother of the nation. However, none of the photographs had been able to capture her particular dark beauty and regal presence.

"Victoria Gama,' Raleigh introduced them. 'This is Michael Courtney, the newspaperman I told you about." 'Yes,' Vicky Gama said. 'I know who Michael Courtney is. , She swept towards him with a stately dignity. She wore a full ankle-length caftan in striking green and yellow and 209 black, the colours of the banned African National Congress. Around her head was an emerald-green turban; the caftan and the turban were her trademarks.

She held out her hand to Michael. It was fine-boned, but the grip of her long tapered fingers was firm and cool, almost cold. Her skin was velvety smooth and the colour of dark amber.

-'Your mother was my husband's second wife,' she told Michael softly. "She bore Moses Gama a son, as I did. Your mother is a fine woman, one of us." Michael was always astounded by the total lack of jealousy between the wives of an African man. His wives regarded each other not as rivals, but rather as sisters with family ties and loyalties.

"How is Tara?' Vicky persisted, as she led Michael to one of the sofas and seated him comfortably. 'I have not seen her for many years. Is she still living in England? And how is Moses's son, Benjamin?" 'Yes, they are living in England,' Michael told her. 'I saw them both in London recently. Benjamin is a big lad now. He is doing very well. He is studying chemical engineering at Leeds University." 'I wonder if he will ever return to Africa.' Vicky sat down beside him.

They chatted easily for a while, and Michael found himself coming under the spell of her charming personality.

At last she asked: 'So you want to meet some of my children, the children of apartheid?" It struck Michael that this was the only title for his article or perhaps series of articles that he would write.

"The children of apartheid,' he repeated. 'Yes, Mrs. Gama, I would like to meet your children." 'Please call me Vicky. We are of the same family, Michael. Dare I also hope that our dreams and hopes are the same?" 'Yes, I think that we have a great deal in common, Vicky." She led him back to the terrace and she called the children and youths around her and introduced them to Michael.

"He is our friend,' she told them. 'You may speak freely to him. Answer his questions. Tell him whatever he wants to know." Michael threw off his jacket and tie and sat under one of the umbrellas.

The boys crowded around him. With Vicky Gama's endorsement and assurance they seemed to accept him immediately and were delighted that Michael spoke their language. Michael knew how to draw them out. Soon they were competing for his attention. He did not use his notepad to write down what they told him, for he knew that would inhibit them. He valued their spontaneity and frankness. Besides which, he did not need notes. He would not forget their words, and the sound of their young voices.

They told him stories that were funny and others that were harrowing. One of the boys had been at Sharpeville on that fateful day. As an infant he had been strapped to his mother's back. The same police bullet that had killed her had shattered one of his legs. The bone had set crookedly, and the other children called him 'Cripple Pete'. Michael wanted to weep as he listened to his story.

The afternoon passed too swiftly. Some of the boys left the group to swim in the pool. They stripped naked and plunged into the clear bright waters.

They shrieked with laughter and splashed each other as they played.

Raleigh sat aside with Vicky Gama and watched the scene. He saw the way that Michael looked at the naked children and he said to Vicky: 'I want you to keep him here tonight.' She nodded, and he went on: 'He likes boys. Do you have one for him?" She laughed softly. 'He can take his pick. My boys will do whatever I tell them to do." She stood up and walked across to where Michael sat and placed her hand on his shoulder.

"Why don't you write your articles here? Stay with us tonight. I have a typewriter upstairs that you can use. Spend tomorrow with us also. The boys like you, and there are so many stories to hear..." Michael's fingers flew over the typewriter keys in an exuberant allegro, and the words appeared on the blank white page in serried ranks like warriors of the mind, ready to charge into the battle. The story wrote itself It was not the smoke that spiralled up from the cigarette between his lips that made Michael's eyelids prickle as he read what he was writing. Very seldom did he have this conviction of the vital worth and weight of his own composition. He knew, deep in his guts, that this was good, really good. This was the story of the 'children' as the world should hear it.

He finished the article which he knew now was only the first of a triumphant series and found that he was trembling with excitement. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was a few minutes before midnight, but he knew he could not sleep. The story still fizzed in his blood and seethed in his brain like some heady champagne.

There was a demure tap on the door that startled him. He called softly in Xhosa: 'It is open. Enter!' And one of the boys slipped into the bedroom.

He was dressed only in a pair of blue soccer-shorts.

"I heard you typing,' he said. 'I thought that you might like me to bring you some tea." He was the youth whom Michael had most admired in the swimn-thing-pool. He had told Michael that he was sixteen years old. His body was sleek and inviting to stroke as a black cat.

"Thank you.' Michael found that his voice was husky. 'I would like that very much." 'What are you writing?' The youth came to stand behind his chair and leant over him to read the page. 'Is this what I told you today?" 'Yes,' Michael whispered, and the boy placed his hand on Michael's shoulder and turned his head to smile shyly into Michael's eyes. His breath was warm on Michael's face. 'I like you,' he said.

Raleigh Tabaka read the article as they sat together beside the pool in the early-morning sunlight. When he finished he held the sheaf of pages in both hands and was silent for a long while.

"You have a special genius,' he said at last. 'I have never read anything so powerful. But it is too powerful. You dare not publish this." 'Not in this country,' Michael agreed. 'The Guardian in London has invited me to submit it to them." 'It would have the greatest effect there,' Raleigh agreed. 'I congratulate you. Something like this turns the bullets of the oppressor to water. You must finish the series as soon as possible. Stay here another night at least. You seem to work so well when you are close to your subjects."

As Michael came awake he was not certain what had disturbed him. He reached out and touched the warm smooth body of the boy who lay beside him. The boy muttered and rolled over in his sleep. One of his arms was flung out across Michael's chest.

Then the sound that had woken Michael came again. It was faint, from the floor below in the far reaches of the house. It sounded like a cry of terrible pain.

Michael lifted the arm of the sleeping boy from his chest and slipped out from under it. There was a glimmer of moonlight through the open window, sufficient for him to find his underpants. He moved quietly across the bedroom and let himself out into the passageway. He crept towards the head of the stairs and stood there listening. The sound came up to him again much louder, another wild cry like the voice of a seabird, and it was punctuated by a sharp snapping sound that Michael could not place.

He started down the stairs, but had not reached the bottom before a voice arrested him.

"Michael. What are you doing?' Raleigh Tabaka's voice was sharp and accusing, and Michael started guiltily and looked back up the stairs.

Raleigh stood on the landing in his dressing-gown.

"I heard something,' Michael said. 'It sounded like-" 'It is nothing. Go to your room, Michael." 'But I thought that I heard-" 'Go to your roornp Raleigh spoke softly, but it was not an order that Michael could disobey. He turned and went back up the stairs. Raleigh reached out to touch his arm as he passed.

"Sometimes one's hearing plays strange tricks in the night. You heard nothing, Michael. It was a cat, perhaps - or the wind. Go to sleep now. We will talk in the morning." Raleigh waited until Michael had returned to his bedroom and closed the door before he ran down the stairs. He went directly to the kitchen door and threw it open.

Victoria Gama, the black Evita, the mother of the nation, stood in the centre of the tiled floor. She was naked to the waist. Her breasts were beautifully shaped. Smooth as velvet, black as the fur of sable, large as the ripe ts melons of the Kalahari desert.

In her right hand she held a supple whip made of cured hippo hide, the terrible African siambok. It was slim as one of Vicky's elegant fingers and as long as her arm. In her other hand she held a glass. She was drinking from it as Raleigh burst into the room. The gin-bottle stood on the sink behind her.

There were two members of the Gama Athletics Club in the kitchen with her.

They were the eldest and biggest of all her bodyguards. Both of them were in their late teens. They were also bared to the waist. They stood at either end of the long kitchen table and held a naked body pinioned down upon the table.

The flogging must have been in progress for some considerable time. The whip-weals were latticed closely across the shiny black skin, raised and purple. Some of them had cut through into the flesh and were bleeding. The blood formed a puddle under the body and spilled over to drip on to the tiled kitchen floor.

"Are you mad?'Raleigh hissed at her. 'With the journalist in the house?" "He is a police spy,'Vicky snarled at him. 'He is a traitor. I have to teach him a lesson." 'You are drunk again.' Raleigh struck the glass from her hand, and it spun into the comer and shattered against the wall. 'Can't you enjoy your little boys without having to warm yourself up to it?" Her eyes blazed with fury, and she lifted the whip to slash at his face. He caught her wrist and held it easily. He twisted the whip out of her fingers and flung it into the sink. Still holding her wrist, he spoke to her young bodyguards.

"Get rid of this.' He indicated the bleeding figure on the table. 'Then clean the place up. No more of this sort of thing while the white man is in the house. Do you understand?" They lifted the boy off the table, and he moaned and blubbered as they half-carried him to the door.

As soon as they were alone, Raleigh turned back to Vicky. 'You bear an illustrious name. If you bring dishonour upon it, I will kill you myself Now, go to your room." She marched from the room. Despite the gin, her step was regal. She carried her liquor well. If only she could carry her fame and the adulation of the media as well, he thought grimly.

He had watched her change over a few short years. When Moses Gama married her, she had been a bright and pure flame, committed to her husband and the struggle. Then the American left had discovered her, and the media had showered praise and money upon her to the point where she believed all they said about her.

From there the disintegration had been swift. Of course, the struggle was fierce. Of course, freedom must be won through rivers of blood. However, for Vicky Gama the spilling of blood had become a pleasure and not a duty, and her personal glory had eclipsed the call of freedom. It was time to consider carefully what must be done about her.

They took Michael back to the car park where he had left his old Valiant.

Raleigh Tabaka sat up beside the driver in the front seat of the butchery-van while Michael crouched in the back. Michael was surprised to see that his car was still standing where he had left it.

"Nobody took the trouble to steal it,' he remarked.

"No,' Raleigh agreed. 'It was guarded by our people. We look after our own." They shook hands, and Michael began to turn away, but Raleigh was not yet ready to let him go.

"I believe you own an aircraft, Michael?' he asked.

"Of a sort,' Michael laughed. 'It's an old Centurion that has already flown over three thousand hours." 'I have a favour to ask of you." 'I owe you one,' Michael agreed. 'What do you want me to do?" 'Will you fly to Botswana for me?' Raleigh asked.

"With a passenger?" 'No. Fly there on your own - and return on your own.) Michael hesitated a moment longer. 'Is it to do with your struggle?" 'Of course,' Raleigh replied frankly. 'Everything in my life is to do with the struggle." 'When do you want me to go?' Michael asked, and Raleigh did not let his relief show in his expression.

Perhaps, after all, it might not be necessary to use the 2xe material that they had filmed in the ballet-dancer's flat in London.

"When can you get away for a few days?' he asked.

Unlike his father or his brothers, Michael had not taken to flying early in life. Looking back on it, he realized it was because of their passionate love of aircraft that he had shied away from them. Instinctively he had resented his father's efforts to interest him and to instruct him. He didn't want to be like them. He refused to be forced into the mould his father had prepared for him.

Later, when he moved outside the cloying family influence, he discovered the fascination of flight all for himself. He had bought the Centurion out of his own savings. Despite its age, the aircraft was fast and comfortable.

She cruised at 2 1 o knots and took him up to Maun in northern Botswana in a little over three hours.

He loved Botswana. It was the only truly democratic country in all of Africa. It had never been colonized by any of the European powers, although Britain had been its protector from the 188os when the Boer Republic had threatened to muscle in and take the land from the Tswana tribe.

After Britain had relinquished her status as protector and handed the country back to the people, it had swiftly transformed itself into a model for the rest of the continent. It was a multi-party democracy with universal suffrage and regular elections. The Government was truly responsible to the electorate. There were no tyrants or dictators. By African standards, very little corruption existed. The minority white population was accepted as a useful and productive section of the population. There was little inverse racism or tribalism. After South Africa, it was the most prosperous state in all of Africa. In fact it had achieved almost effortlessly the condition that Michael prayed his own country would some day be able to arrive at, after all the suffering and strife. Michael loved Botswana and was happy to be going back there.

At Maun he cleared the formalities in the small singleroomed building that housed both Customs and Immigration and then took off again for a short northern leg into the Okavango delta.

The delta was an extraordinary wetland area where the mighty Okavango river debouched into the northern Kalahari desert and formed a vast swamp. It was not a swamp of reeking black mud and dreary wastes. The waters were clear as a trout stream. The sandbanks; and bottoms of the maze of waterways were of sugary white sands. The islands were decked with palms and luxuriant growth. The wild fig trees were loaded with yellow fruit, and the fat green pigeons swarmed in their branches. Strange and rare fishing owls, seeming more like apes than like birds, nested in the tall African ebony trees.

The fabled lions of the Okavango with manes like russet haystacks were quick as otters in the lambent waters. Great herds of buffalo grazed in the reed-beds with a canopy of snowy egrets hovering over them. Weird sitatunga antelope with elongated hoofs, corkscrew horns and shaggy coats spent their entire amphibian lives in the tall papyrus, and clouds of duck and geese and waterfowl shaded the blazing orange sunsets.

Michael landed the Centurion on an airstrip on one of the larger islands.

There were two river bushmen in a dugout canoe to ferry him across a lagoon perfumed with water-lilies to the camp.

The camp was called the Gay Goose Lodge, and catered for up to forty guests who lived in picturesque little reed huts. The ostensible reason for their visit was to study and photograph the animals and birdlife of the delta or to troll for the glittering striped tigerfish that shoaled in the waterways. Each morning and evening expeditions of guests ventured out in the primitive canoes, to be poled silently through the reed-beds and channels by one of the black boatmen.

However, the guests were almost exclusively male, and the name Gay Goose had been chosen with good reason. All of the staff were good-looking young Tswana lads who were also chosen with good reason. The camp was run by a political refugee from South Africa. Brian Susskind was a striking-looking fellow in his mid-thirties. He had long blond hair, bleached almost white by the sun. He wore ear-rings in his pierced ear-lobes, gold chains around his neck that tinkled on his bare muscular chest, and bangles of ivory and plaited elephant hair at his wrists.

"God, darling,' he greeted Michael, 'it's just so lovely to meet you.

Raleigh has told me all about you. You are going to absolutely love it here. We've got such fun people with us. They are in an absolute tizz to meet you, too." Michael spent a long and exciting weekend at Gay Goose Camp, and when it was time to leave Brian Susskind came across the lagoon in the Makorro canoe to see him off.

"It's been such fun, Mickey.' He squeezed Michael's hand. 'I think we'll be seeing a lot more of each other. Don't forget to trim your plane. You may be a touch tail-heavy on take-off." Michael took off without looking in the hidden compartment below the passenger-seats, but he noticed the small alteration in trim that Brian had warned him of. The cargo that Brian had loaded must be very heavy for its bulk. He had been told not to touch it or try to examine it. He followed his instructions strictly.

As he cleared Customs on his arrival at Lanseria Airport his nerves were stretched tight and he puffed on his cigarette. He need not have worried.

The Customs officer recognized him from many previous occasions and did not even bother to examine his luggage, let alone traipse out on to the tarmac to inspect the Centurion.

That night one of the black nightwatchmen in the Lanseria hangar unloaded a heavy box from under the Centurion's back seat and passed it through the fence to the driver of a small blue butcher's delivery-van.

In the kitchen at Nobs Hill in Drake's Farm township, Raleigh Tabaka inspected the seals on the crate. They were all intact.

Nobody had tampered with the cargo. Raleigh nodded with satisfaction and unscrewed the lid. The crate contained seventy copies of the Holy Bible.

Michael Courtney had passed another test.

Michael flew up to Gay Goose Camp five weeks later. This time, on his return the crate contained twenty minilimpet mines of Russian manufacture.

He paid another nine visits to Gay Goose over the following two years, and each time the entry through the South African Customs at Lanseria was easier on his nerves.

Five years after he had first met Raleigh Tabaka, Michael was invited to join the African National Congress as a member of its military wing, Urnkhonto we Sizwe, 'the Spear of the Nation'.

"I've been thinking about this a lot recently, he answered Raleigh, 'and reluctantly I've already reached the conclusion that sometimes the pen alone is not enough: At last I've come to realize that, even though it goes against my deeply ingrained feelings, there comes a time when a man must take up the sword. Even a year ago I would have refused what you are offering me, but now I accept the dictates of my conscience. I am ready to join the armed struggle."

"All right, Bella,' Centaine Courtney-Malcomess nodded firmly. 'You will begin at the far end of the street - and I'll take this end.' Then she transferred her attention to the back of the chauffeur's head. 'Klonkie, drop us round the comer, then you can pick us up again at lunchtime." Obediently Klonkie slowed the yellow Daimler, eased it around the comer and pulled into the pavement.

The two women climbed out and watched the limousine pull away. 'You don't want the voters to see you in a great luxury wagon with a chauffeur,'Centaine explained. 'Envy is a corrosive emotion, and you'll find it at every level of society.' She turned her full attention upon her granddaughter and inspected her carefully from head to foot.

Isabella's hair was freshly shampooed and gleaming with ruby highlights in the sunshine. However, Centaine had insisted that she pull it back into a severe bun behind the head. Her make-up was limited to a moisturizing cream that gave her a scrubbed schoolgirl complexion. She wore no lipstick, although her lips were a natural youthful pink.

Centaine nodded, and ran her eyes downwards. Bella wore a classic cashmere outfit with low-heeled sensible shoes. Centaine nodded again with complete satisfaction. She smoothed the tweed skirt over her own hips.

"All right, Bella. Remember we are aiming at the ladies this morning." They had timed their visit for mid-morning, when the men were out of the house, the children were at school, and the main chores were behind the lower-middle-class housewives who lived in this area below the slopes of Signal Hill, overlooking the city and the harbour of Cape Town.

The previous evening Isabella had addressed a predominantly male audience in the Sea Point Masonic Hall. Most of them had come out of curiosity to listen to the first ever female National Party candidate in their constituency.

On that occasion Bella's dress and make-up had evoked a chorus of wolf-whistles from the body of the hall when she stood up to speak. They had heckled her good-naturedly for the first few minutes while she struggled to overcome her nervousness. However, the horseplay had roused her anger, and she had flushed and snapped at them.

"Gentlemen, your behaviour does none of us credit. If you have any sense of fair play, you'll give me a sporting chance." They grinned shamefacedly, shuffled their feet and relapsed into a silence that grew more attentive as she spoke. She and Centaine had studied the issues that concerned them most, and they listened as she addressed herself to them.

It had been a good baptism of fire, and Centaine was proud of her, without making it too obvious.

"All right,' she said now. 'You'll do, missy. Here we go for St. George, for Harry, and for England." The war-cry was entirely inappropriate to the occasion, Isabella smiled wryly, and misquoted to boot, but who would dare tell Nana that? They separated and went to their respective ends of the street.

Number twelve was a semidetached cottage with bullnosed corrugated-iron roof and a Victorian fretwork castiron trellis beneath the eaves. The front garden was five paces deep, but the dahlias were in full bloom. Isabella went up the'path and quietened the yapping fox terrier on the stoep with a sharp word. She had always been good with dogs and horses.

The housewife came to the door and peered suspiciously at Isabella through the fly-screen. Her hair was in yellow plastic curlers.

"Yes? What do you want?" 'My name is Isabella Courtney and I am your National Party candidate for next month's by-election. May I talk to you for a few minutes?" 'Hold on,.' The woman disappeared, and came back a minute later with a headscarf over her curlers.

"We are United Party supporters,' she declared her allegiance, but Isabella distracted her.

"What beautiful dahlias!" This was an opposition party stronghold. Isabella was a political fledgling. Her own party would never have allowed her to contest a safe Nationalist seat. Those were reserved for others who had already proven their worth. As it was, it had taken all Nana's influence and persuasive ability, together with Isabella's own personality and presentability, to win the opportunity from the party machine to make this foredoomed attempt.

The very best Isabella could hope for was a good showing and a gallant defeat. Nana had set their objective. In the last general election the United Party had taken this seat with a five thousand majority.

"If we can cut the majority to three thousand, then in 2= the next election we can force them to give you a better constituency to contest." Now the housewife softened with gratification as Isabella looked at her prize-winning dahlias and wavered.

"May I come in?' Isabella smiled her sweetest and most winning smile, and the woman stood aside reluctantly.

"Well, just for a few minutes." 'What work does your husband do?" 'He's a motor mechanic." 'What does he think about trade fragmentation and black trade unions?" Isabella struck hard, and the woman looked grave. Isabella. was talking about family survival and the bread in her children's mouths.

"May I get you a cup of coffee, Mrs. Courtney?' she asked and Isabella did not correct her form of address.

Fifteen minutes later she shook the housewife's hand and went back down the short garden path. She had followed Nana's maxim: 'Be forceful, but be brief' She felt a flush of achievement. Her victim had begun as a definite 'No' and gradually mellowed under Isabella's persuasive logic to a tentative 'Maybe'. Isabella marked her so on her copy of the voters' roll.

"One down,' she whispered. 'Two thousand more to go." She marched across the street to the door of number eleven, and a child opened the door.

"Is your mummy at home?" The child was a freckle-faced little boy with curly blond hair and sticky lips. He held a half-devoured slice of bread and jam in one hand, and smiled at her shyly. He was at least five years old, but she thought of Nicky, and her resolve hardened.

"I am Isabella Courtney,' she said, as the mother came to the door, 'and I am your National Party candidate in next month's by-election." After the third call she found to her astonishment that she was starting to enjoy herself. She was seeing a side of life that she had never imagined existed. She found herself warming to these ordinary simple folk, and developing an understanding and concern for their problems and fears and their way of life which was so alien from her own existence.

"Privilege carries responsibilities.' She had heard her father say it so often. 'Noblesse oblige.' She had not thought deeply about it, but believed that she understood the concept. Not that she had ever intended doing anything about it, of course. Up until now, life had been too busy. Her own needs and desires had been too pressing to care or worry about other, insignificant, people such as these.

Now she felt herself drawn to them. She felt a genuine warmth for them, a sympathy and a desire to understand and protect them.

Perhaps motherhood has mellowed me a little, she thought, and the ache of her loss immediately followed the thought. Was this some displacement emotion, a diversion of her frustrated maternal instincts? She did not know, and also she did not really care. All that was important was that she wanted to do this, she truly wanted to help these people. She wanted very strongly to win a seat in Parliament, and to put her time and her talents to good unselfish use.

She felt a genuine regret when after the eighth call she checked her wristwatch and found that it was time to meet Nana and call it a day.

Centaine was waiting for her at the rendezvous at the street-comer. She looked fresh and alert, bubbling with the energy of a much younger woman.

"How did you go, Bella?' she demanded briskly. 'How many calls?" "Eight,' Bella told her with satisfaction. 'Two "Yesses" and a "Maybe". How about you, Nana?" 'Fourteen calls and five "Yesses". I don't count "Maybes" or "Might have beens". Never have." She took Isabella's arm as the yellow Daimler came into view and slowed to pick them up.

"Now, as soon as we get home you will send them each a personal handwritten note - I hope you noted their children's names and ages, and some personal details about each of them." 'Do I have to write to all of them?" 'All of them,' Centaine confirmed. "'Yesses", "Noes" and "Maybes". Then we will follow it up with another note a few days before polling, just to remind them." 'You make it such hard work, Nana," Isabella protested mildly.

"Nothing of value is ever achieved without hard work, missy.' She stepped into the Daimler and settled on to the cream leather seat. 'And don't forget the meeting this evening. Have you got your speech written yet?

We'll go over it together." 'Nana, I've still got a pile of work to do for Pater." 'Keep you out of mischief,' Centaine agreed complacently. "Home to Weltevreden, Klonkie,' she told the chauffeur.

Isabella cheated a little. She had her secretary type a standard letter to all of the constituents that she and Nana had visited, but she checked and signed each of these personally. By exercising these little economies of time she was able to discharge her political aspirations and also keep abreast of the work that her father piled upon her desk.

Shasa had given her a corner suite of offices in Centaine House. Her new secretary was one of the stalwarts who had worked for Courtney Enterprises for twenty years. She occupied the outer office of the suite. Isabella's inner office was panelled in indigenous yellow wood that Shasa had salvaged from a two-hundred-year-old building that had been demolished to make way for a block of modem apartments in Sea Point. The wood had a glorious buttery glow. Shasa had loaned her four paintings from his collection, two Pierneefs and a pair of landscapes by Hugo Naude. Their colours stood out very well on the light-toned panels. All the books on the shelves were fully bound in royal blue calf leather, though Isabella doubted that she would have much call for thirty years' worth of Hansard's parliamentary reports.

The windows of her suite looked out on to the park and St. George's Cathedral, with a backdrop of Table Mountain beyond. There was a saying that you hadn't arrived in Cape Town unless you had a view of the mountain from your window.

She signed the last of her form letters to her prospective constituents and carried the batch through to her secretary's office. The secretary's office was empty, and the cover was on the Underwood typewriter. Isabella checked her wristwatch.

"Good grief - it's after five already." She felt a quick relief in the fact that time had passed so swiftly and painlessly. It hadn't always been like that since she had lost Nicky. She had come to rely on hard work and long hours as the opiate for the deep gnawing pain of her bereavement.

Dinner at Weltevreden was at eight-thirty sharp, cocktails thirty minutes before. She had time to fill, so she went back to her own desk. Shasa had left a draft copy of his report on her desk with a note: 'I need it back tomorrow a. m. Love you, Pater." During their time together at the embassy they had fallen into this routine in which she checked his speeches and written reports for style and syntax.

Shasa did not truly need such assistance. He could craft a telling phrase with the best of them. However, the custom gave them both pleasure, and Shasa occasionally went over the top with a metaphor or let an unseemly clichd creep into his compositions. At the very least he enjoyed her praises.

She read the twelve-page report through carefully, and suggested one change. Then she wrote 'What a clever father I chosev on the foot of it, and took it down to his office at the end of the long carpeted corridor.

His office was locked. She had a key and let herself in.

Shasa's office was four times larger and grander than 22e hers was. His desk was reputed to have come from the Dauphin's apartments at Versailles. He had an original auctioneer's receipt dated 1791 which showed that provenance.

Isabella placed the corrected report in the centre of the delicate marquetry desk-top, and then changed her mind. The report was destined to be read only by the prime minister and members of his cabinet. Some of the facts and figures that it contained were highly confidential, and crucial to the nation's security. Shasa should not have left it unprotected on her desk but, then, he was often careless with important documents.

She retrieved the report and took it to his personal safe. The safe was concealed behind a false bookcase. The mechanism was incorporated into the lamp on its wallbracket above the bookcase. The release was in the shape of a bronze nymph in art deco style, holding the lightbulb, above her head like a torch.

Isabella rotated the bracket on its hinge, and the false bookcase slid noiselessly aside, revealing the massive green-painted steel Chubb door.

Shasa's choice of numerals for the combination lacked either subtlety or originality. It was simply his own birthdate in inverted sequence. Apart from Shasa himself, Isabella, in her capacity as his personal assistant, was the only one who had the combination. He had not even given it to Nana or Garry.

She set the combination, swung the heavy steel door open and walked into the cavernous strongroom. She often had to nag her father to keep the room tidy, and now she clucked her tongue with disapproval as she saw two green Armscor files piled haphazardly on the central table. She tidied up quickly, locked the strongroom and then stopped in the ladies' washroom on her way back to her own office.

As she settled into the driving-seat of the Mini, she sighed. It had been a long day, and she still had the election meeting after dinner. She wouldn't. be in bed until long after midnight.

For a moment she considered the shortest route back to Weltevreden.

However, the Mini took the road up the slope of the mountain almost of its own volition, and fifteen minutes later she parked in the side-street round the comer from the Camps Bay post office.

She felt that familiar heavy rock of dread in the pit of her stomach as she approached her post-box. Would it be empty, as it had been for so many weeks? Would she never have word of Nicky again?

She opened the box, and her heart seemed to bounce against her ribs with a single wild lunge. Like a thief she snatched out the slim envelope and thrust it deep into her jacket pocket.

As was her habit she parked above the beach, under the palms, and read the four lines of typewritten instruction with a mixture of dread and anticipation.

This was something new.

In strict accordance with her standing instructions she memorized the contents of the letter and then burnt it and crushed the ashes to dust.

On the Friday morning three days after receiving the Red Rose letter, Isabella left the Mini in the car park of the new Pick 'n' Pay supermarket in the suburb of Claremont.

She locked the driver's door, but left the side-window open an inch at the top as she had been instructed. She entered the back door of the bustling supermarket. It was the last Friday of the month, and pay-day for tens of thousands of office workers and civil servants. The queues at the checkout tills were scores long.

Isabella passed quickly out through the front entrance into the main street of the suburb and turned left. She pushed her way along the crowded pavements until she reached the new post office building. There was a pair of teenage girls in the glass cubicle of the first public telephone booth from the left. They giggled into the receiver and 228 jangled their fake gold ear-rings and rolled their eyes at each other as they listened to the boy on the other end of the line, sharing the earpiece of the telephone.

Isabella checked her watch. It was five minutes short of the hour, and she felt a stab of anxiety. She tapped imperiously on the glass door, and one of the girls pushed out her tongue at her and went on speaking.

A minute later Isabella tapped again. With ill grace the pair hung. up the receiver and flounced away angrily. Isabella darted into the booth and closed the door. She did not lift the receiver, but made a show of searching for small change in her purse. She was watching the minute-hand of her wristwatch. As it touched the pip at the top of the dial the telephone rang and she snatched it up.

"Red Rose,' she whispered breathlessly, and a voice said: 'Return immediately to your vehicle.' The connection was broken and the burr of the dialling tone echoed in her ears. Even in her perplexity, Isabella thought she had recognized the heavy accent of the large powerful woman who had picked her up in the closed van on the Thames Embankment almost three years previously.

Isabella dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and fled from the booth. It took her three minutes to reach the Mini in the Pick 'n' Pay car park. As she inserted the key in the door-lock she saw the envelope lying on the driver's seat, and she understood. She had read the books of Le Carrd and Len Deighton, and she realized that this was a dead-letter drop.

She knew that she was almost certainly under observation at that moment.

She glanced around the car park furtively. It was almost two acres in extent, and there were several hundred other vehicles parked around her.

Dozens of shoppers pushed their laden shopping-trolleys to the waiting motor-cars, and beggars and off-duty schoolchildren loitered and idled about the car park. Cars pulled in and out of the gates in a steady two-way stream. It would be impossible to pick out the watcher from this crowd.

She slipped behind the wheel and drove carefully back to Weltevreden. The letter was obviously too important to be entrusted to the postal service. This was an ingenious form of hand delivery. Locked in the safety of her own private bedroom suite she at last opened the envelope.

First, there was a recent colour photograph of Nicky. He was dressed in bathing-trunks.- He had developed into a sturdy and beautiful child of nearly three years of age. He stood on a beach of white coral sand with the blue ocean behind him.

The letter that accompanied the photograph was terse and unequivocal: As soon as possible, you will acquire full technical specifications of the new Siemens computer-linked coastal radar network presently being installed by Armscor at Silver Mine naval headquarters on the Cape peninsula.

Inform us in the usual way once these plans are in your possession. After you have delivered, arrangements will be made for your first meeting with your son.

There was no signature.

Standing over the toilet-bowl in her bathroom, Isabella burnt the letter and, as the flames scorched her fingertips, dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ashes away. She closed the toilet-cover and sat upon it, staring at the tiled wall opposite.

So it had come at last - as she had known it must. For three years she had waited for the order to commit an act that would finally put her beyond the pale.

Up until now she had been instructed merely to inveigle herself into her father's complete confidence. She had been told to make herself indispensable to him, and she had done so. She had been ordered to join the National Party and seek election to parliamentary office. With Nana's help and guidance, she had done so.

However, this was different. She recognized that she had at last reached the point of no return. She could turn back from treason - and abandon her son; or she could go forward into the dangerous unknown.

"Oh, God help me,' she whispered aloud. 'What can I do - what must I do?" She felt the great serpentine coils of dread and guilt tighten about her.

She knew what the answer to her question must be.

A copy of the Siemens radar installation report was in her father's strongroom in Centaine House at this moment. On Monday the file would be returned by special courier to naval headquarters in the nuclear-proof bunker complex built into Silver Mine mountain.

However, her father was flying up to the sheep ranch at Camdeboo over the weekend. She had already refused the invitation to accompany him on the excuse that she had so much work to catch up on. On Saturday and Sunday, Nana was judging the Cape gun-dog trials. Garry was in Europe with Holly and the children. Isabella would have the top floor of Centaine House to herself for the entire weekend. She had full security clearance, and the guards at the front door knew her well.

The wind was out of the north. The first snowflakes eddied down, silver bright against the grey sow's belly of the sky.

There were a dozen men at the graveside, no women. There had been no women in Joe Cicero's life, just as now there was none at his death. All the mourners were officers from the department. They had been delegated to this duty. They stood stolidly to attention in a single rank. All of them wore uniform greatcoats and scarlet-piped dress caps. All their noses were red, with cold rather than with grief. Joe Cicero had no friends. He had seldom evoked any emotion in his peers other than envious admiration or fear.

The honour guard stepped smartly forward and, at the order, raised their rifles and pointed them to the sky. The volleys rang out, punctuated by the rattle of the bolts. At the next order they shouldered their weapons and marched away, boots slamming into the gravel path and clenched fists swinging high across the chest.

The official mourners broke their ranks, shook hands briefly and expressionlessly then hurried to the waiting vehicles.

Ramsey Machado was the only one left at the graveside. He also wore the full-dress uniform of a KGB colonel, and beneath his greatcoat the gaudy lines of his decorations reached below his ribcage.

"And so, you old bastard, for you the game is over at last - but it took you long enough to clear the stage.' Although Ramsey had been head of section for two years now, he had never truly felt that he had succeeded to the title while Joe Cicero was still alive.

The old man had died grudgingly. He had held the cancer in remission for long agonizing months. He had even kept his office in the Lubyanka right up to the last day. His gaunt spectral presence had presided at every meeting of section heads, his will and his enmity had inhibited Ramsey at every turn, right to the last.

"Goodbye, Joe Cicero. The devil can have you now.' Ramsey smiled, and his lips felt as though they might tear in the cold.

He turned away from the grave. His car was the last one remaining under the row of tall dark yews. With his rank, Ramsey now rated a black Chaika and a corporal driver. The driver opened the door for him. As Ramsey settled into the back seat he brushed the snowflakes from his shoulders with his gloves.

"Back to the office,' he said.

The corporal drove fast but skilfully, and Ramsey relaxed and watched the streets of Moscow unfold ahead of the departmental pennant on the shining black bonnet of the Chaika.

Ramsey loved Moscow. He loved the broad boulevards that Joseph Stalin had built after the Great Patriotic War. He loved the pure classical lines of some of the buildings and the brilliant contrast that they struck with those in the rococo style alongside the skyscrapers that Stalin had built and topped with their red stars. The concept of Soviet giantism excited him. They drove past the massive bronze statues of the heroes of the people, the monstrous figures of men and women marching forward together brandishing submachine-guns and sickles and hammers, raising high the socialist banner and the red star.

There were no commercial advertisements, no exhortations to drink Coca-Cola or to smoke Marlboros or invest with Prudential Insurance and read the Sun.

That was the most striking difference between the cities of Mother Russia and those of the crass and avaricious capitalistic West. It offended Ramsey's instinct that the appetites of the people should be stimulated for such shoddy and indulgent goods, that a nation's productive capacity should be diverted from the essential to the trivial.

From the back seat of the Chaika he looked upon the Russian people and he felt a glow of righteous approval. Here was a people organized and committed to the good of the State, to the betterment of the whole not the individual parts. He observed them, patient and obedient, standing at the bus-stops, standing in the food-queues, orderly and regimented.

In his mind he compared them to the American people. America, that fractious childlike nation, where each pulled against the other; where avarice was considered the greatest virtue; where patience and subtlety were considered the greatest vice. Was there any other nation in history which had perverted the ideal of democracy to the point where the freedom and the rights of the individual had become a tyranny on the rest of society? Was there any other nation which so glorified its criminals - Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, Billy the Kid, the Mafia, the black drug-lords? Would Russia or any other sensate government emasculate and shackle its armed forces with such rules of disclosure and publicly debated budget allocations?

The Chaika stopped at a set of traffic-lights. It was the only vehicle on the broad thoroughfare apart from two public buses. Where every American had his own automobile, there was no such wasteful ownership in Russian society. Ramsey watched the pedestrians cross the street in an orderly stream in front of his vehicle. The faces were handsome and intelligent, the expressions patient and reserved. Their dress had none of the wild eccentricity that would be evident in any American street. Apart from the predominance of military uniforms, the clothing of both men and women was sober and conservative.

Compared to this educated and scholarly people, the Americans were illiterate oafs. Even the workers in the Russian fields could quote Pushkin. The classic books were amongst the most sought-after items on the black market. Any day that one visited the cemetery at the monastery of Alexander Nevsky in Leningrad you would find the graves of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky piled with fresh flowers, daily tributes from ordinary people.

By contrast, half the American high-school graduates, especially the blacks, had reading skills barely adequate to follow the captions in a Batman comic-book.

Here, then, was the reward for almost sixty years of the socialist revolution. A structured and delicately layered society, secretive and protected in depth. Ramsey often compared it to the Matryoshka dolls in the Beriozka tourist stores, those cunningly carved nests of human figures which fitted one within the other, the outer layers protecting and hiding the precious centre.

Even the Russian economy was deceptive to the Western eye. The Americans looked at the food-queues and the lack of consumer goods in the gigantic GUhf- departmental stores, and in their naive and simple-minded way they saw this as the sign of a failed or at least an ailing system. Hidden from them was the internal economy of the military productive machine. A vast, highly efficient and powerful structure which noi only matched but far outstripped its American capitalistic counterpart.

Ramsey smiled at the story of the American astronaut perched in the nose capsule of his rocket waiting for the blast-off who, when asked by ground control if he was nervous, answered: 'How would you like to be sitting on top of the efforts of a thousand low-bidders?' There were no low-bidders in the Russian armaments industry.

There was only the best.

In much the same way there were no siftings from the eequal opportunity' school of employment, or rejects from IMB and GM, in the upper echelons of the Russian military. There were only the best. Ramsey was aware that he was one of them, one of the very best.

He straightened up in his seat as the Chaika entered Dzerzhinsky Square and passed the heroic statue of the founder of the organization of state security on its raised plinth, and moved up the hill towards the elegant but substantial edifice of the Lubyanka.

The driver pulled into the narrower street which ran behind the headquarters and parked with the rows of other official KGB vehicles in the rank reserved for them. Ramsey waited for him to open the door and then he crossed the road to the rear entrance and entered the building through the massive cast-iron grille doors.

There were two other KGB officers ahead of him at the security-desk. He waited his turn for clearance. The captain of the security guard was thorough and painstaking. He compared Ramsey's features to those of the photograph on his identity document the regulation three times before allowing him to sign the register.

Ramsey mounted to the second floor in the antique lift of etched glass and polished bronze. The lift and the chandeliers were relics from pre-revolutionary times when the building had been a foreign embassy.

His secretary stood to attention beside her desk when he entered his office and greeted him as he hung his greatcoat at the door.

"Good morning, Comrade Colonel.' He saw that overnight she had set her hair with hot curling-tongs into crisp tight curls. He preferred it loose and soft. Katrina's eyes were almond-shaped and hooded, a legacy from some distant Tartar ancestor. She was twenty-four years old, the widow of an air-force test pilot who had died flying a prototype of the new Mig-27 series.

Katrina indicated the cardboard box on the corner of her desk. 'What should I do with these, Comrade Colonelf She opened the lid, and Ramsey glanced at the contents. They were all that remained of General Cicero's presence. She had cleared the drawers of the desk that now, at last, belonged to Ramsey alone.

Apart from a gold-plated Parker ballpoint pen and a leather wallet, there were no personal items in the box. Ramsey picked out the wallet and opened it. There were half a dozen photographs in the compartments. In each of them Joe Cicero posed with a prominent African leader, Nyerere, Kaunda, Nkrumah.

He dropped the wallet back into the box, and his hand brushed against Katrina's soft pale fingers. She trembled slightly, and he heard her catch her breath.

"Take it all down to Archives. Get a receipt from them,' he ordered.

"Immediately, Comrade Colonel." She was an attractive placid woman, with a narrow waist and wide comfortable hips. Of course, she had the highest security clearance, and Ramsey had meticulously recorded their relationship in his daybook. Their relationship had the tacit sanction of the head of department. Her flat was a convenient base for him while he was in Moscow, even though she shared the two rooms with her elderly parents and her three-year-old son.

"There is a green-flash despatch on your desk, Comrade Colonel,' Katrina said huskily as she picked up the cardboard box. Her cheeks were still lightly flushed from the brief physical contact. Ramsey felt a shaded regret that he would be leaving Moscow at midnight. On the average he spent only a few days in the mother city in any one month. He saw so little of Katrina that her appeal was still fresh, even after two years.

She must have read his mind, for she dropped her voice 23e to a whisper. "Will you dine at the flat tonight, before you leave? Mamma has found an excellent sausage and a bottle of vodka." 'Very well, little one,' he agreed, and then went through to his own office.

The green-flash box was on his desk, and he unbuttoned his tunic and split the security seal that the cipher department had affixed.

As he read the code Red Rose he felt a sharp elevation of his pulse rate.

That annoyed him.

Red Rose was merely an agent like a hundred others under his control. If he allowed personalities to intrude, his own efficiency was diminished. Even so, as he lifted the Red Rose folder from the box he was struck suddenly by a mental image of a naked girl perched on a black boulder in a Spanish mountain stream. The picture was extraordinarily vivid, even down to the deep indigo blue of her. eyes.

He opened the file and saw at a glance that it was the report on the South African naval radar chain that he had called for. It had come in via the London embassy bag. He nodded with satisfaction and then consulted his daybook. With the log open before him he lifted the handset of his departmental intercom and dialled Records.

"A printout. Reference "Protea", item number 1178. Urgent, please." While he waited for the printout to be delivered, he rose from his desk and crossed to the windows. The view was novel enough to engage his interest.

Over the statue of the founder he looked across the stately forest of buildings to the colourful onion-shaped domes of the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed and the walls of the Kremlin.

He was still disturbed by the memories that the Red Rose despatch had evoked. On a logical train of thought his mind went on to the journey that would begin for him at midnight from Sheremetyevo Airport, and the child who would be waiting for him at the journey's end.

He had not seen Nicholas for over two months. He would have grown again and he would be speaking even more fluently. His vocabulary was quite unusual for his age. Paternal pride was a bourgeois emotion, and Ramsey sought to suppress it. He should not be standing dreaming out of the window while there was so much work to be done. He checked his wristwatch. In forty-eight minutes there was a meeting scheduled, the result of which would vitally affect his career over the next decade.

He returned to his desk and took his notes for the meeting from the top drawer. Katrina had typed them out in double spacing. He flipped through the pages, and found that he still knew every word by heart. His presentation was memorized word-perfect. Further study would only affect the spontaneity of his delivery. He set the report aside.

At that moment there was a knock on the door and Katrina ushered the records clerk into his office. Ramsey signed for the computer printout in the records-book, and after Katrina and the clerk had 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 Ger 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 igeo, 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.

Ramsey 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, Ramsey 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.

Ramsey 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 239 conference-table, and Ramsey 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 Ramsey reported directly to him. He was a chunky grey-haired septuagenarian, a cautious devious man, in a shiny striped suit. Ramsey 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 Praesidiurn of the Supreme Soviet and a deputy minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Rarnen'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 Ramsey's hand briefly and stared 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 ideas, 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 long~standing 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,' Ramsey 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 Ramsey's face. When at last Ramsey finished speaking he asked softly: 'So what is the alternative that you propose?" 'Not an alternative.'Ramsey 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,' Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey with servile and fawning respect. Her mother served Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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 Ramsey 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, pleasev 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.

Ramsey travelled so often that he had his own regime 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 Jose 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 Bahia 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 rele 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 rele 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.

Ramsey 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.

Ramsey 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. Ramsey 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 to 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 Ramsey 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.

Ramsey 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'.

Ramsey'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 Ramsey 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.

Ramsey 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 creche and nursery school.

For the first two years Ramsey 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 Ramsey fearfully. The last time he had seen his father was in that white-tiled operating-theatre in the Buenaventura military clinic when Ramsey 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 24e time. It was impossible that he could remember the incident - and yet his reaction to Ramsey had been too intense to be merely coincidental.

Ramsey 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 we an 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 sea-wall 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.

At the time, it was necessary, he thought. Never regret the strong, the necessary action, the deed of steel.

The child stooped and picked a shell from the sand at his feet. He turned it in his hands, and bowed his head to examine the iridescent pearly fragment.

Nicholas's curls were dark and dense, and, although damp with sea-salt, the sun struck little reddish sparks from them. He had inherited many features from his mother. Even Ramsey could recognize that chiselled classical nose and the clean sweet line of his jaw. However, the green eyes were Ramsey's eyes.

Suddenly the child threw back his arm and sent the shell skimming out. It hopped across the still water leaving a series of tiny dimples where it touched the surface. Then Nicholas turned away and began to walk alone along the edge of the water, but at that moment there came an anguished squeal from the group of children further up the beach. One of the little girls had been knocked over in the rough and tumble, and she sprawled on the white sand and howled.

"Nicholas!" With a patient sigh Nicholas turned back to her and lifted her to her feet.

She was a pretty little imp, with sand on one cheek and tears welling from her huge dark eyes. Her costume had slid halfway down to her knees revealing the cleft between her chubby pink little buttocks.

Nicholas hauled up her costume for her, restoring her modesty but almost lifting her off her feet in the process, then he led her by the hand to the water. He washed the sand off her cheek and wiped the tears from her eyes.

The girl gave one last convulsive sniff and stopped howling.

She took Nicholas's hand and trotted beside him as he led her up the beach.

"I will take you back to your manuna,' Nicholas was telling her, and then he looked up and saw his father. He stopped abruptly and stared at him.

Ramsey saw the flare of terror in his eyes that was instantly hidden. Then Nicholas lifted his chin in a defiant gesture, and his expression went dead.

Ramsey liked what he saw. It was good that the boy felt fear, for fear was the basis of respect and obedience. It was good also that he could control and hide that fear. 'Me ability to conceal fear was one of the qualities of leadership. Already he showed a strength and resolve far beyond his tender years.

He is my son, Ramsey thought, and raised one hand in a gesture of command.

"Come here, boy,' he said.

The little girl shrank away from him. Then she released Nicholas's hand and fled up the beach, bawling once again, but ihis time for her mother. Ramsey did not even glance in her direction. He often had that effect on children.

Nicholas steeled himself visibly and then came to his father's bidding.

"Good day, Padre.' He held out his hand solemnly.

"Good day, Nicholas.' Ramsey took the proffered hand. He had schooled the child to shake hands like a man, but Adra had taught him the term of address. 'Padre.' He should- not have allowed it, but was pleased that in the end he had done so. It gave him another little twinge of sentimentality to be addressed as Father, but that was an indulgence he could afford.

There were few enough that he allowed himself.

"Sit here.' Ramon indicated the wall beside him, and Nicholas scrambled up and sat with his little legs dangling.

They were silent for a while. Ramsey did not approve of childish chatter.

When he asked finally, 'What have you been doing?' Nicholas considered the question gravely.

"I have been to school every day." 'What do they teach you at school?" "We learn the drills and the songs of the revolution.' Nicholas thought about it a little longer. 'And we paint." They were silent again until Nicholas added helpfully: 'In the afternoons we swim and play soccer, and in the evenings I help Adra with the housework. Then we watch the TV together."

He was three years old, Ramsey reminded himself. A Western child who was asked the same question might have replied 'Nothing' or 'Just stuff.

Nicholas had spoken like a man, a little old man.

"I have brought you a present,' Ramsey told him.

"Thank you, Padre." 'Don't you want to know what it is?" 'You will show it to me,' Nicholas pointed out. 'And then I will know what it is." It was a plastic model of an AK assault-rifle. Although it was a miniature, it was perfect in detail with a removable magazine that was loaded with metallic painted bullets. Ramsey had bought it at a toyshop on his last visit to London.

Nicholas's eyes shone as he raised it to his shoulder and aimed it down towards the beach. Apart from the first flash of fear, it was the only real emotion he had displayed since Ramsey's arrival. When he pulled the trigger the toy rifle made a satisfying warlike clatter.

"It is very beautiful,' Nicholas said. 'Thank you, Padre." 'It is a good toy for a brave son of the revolution,' Ramsey told him.

"Am I a brave son of the revolution?" 'One day you will be,' Ramsey told him.

"Comrade Colonel, it is time for the child's bath,' Adra intervened diffidently.

She took Nicholas and led him from the veranda into the cottage. Ramsey put aside the temptation to follow them. It was unseemly for him to participate in such a bourgeois domestic ritual. Instead he went to the small table at the end of the veranda where Adra had set out a jug of lime-juice and a bottle of Havana Club rum, indisputably the finest rum in the world.

Ramsey mixed himself a mojito and then selected a cigar from the box on the table. He smoked only when he was at home in Cuba and then only the premium cigars of Miguel Fernandez Roig, and Adra knew this. Like the Havana Club, they were the finest in the world. He took the tall sugared glass and the cigar back to his seat and watched the sunset turn the waters of the bay to bloodied gold.

From the bathroom, he heard the splashing and the happy cries of his son, and Adra's soft replies.

Ramsey was a warrior and a wanderer on the face of the earth. This was the closest he would ever come to a home of his own; perhaps the child had made it so for him.

Adra served a meal of chicken and Maros y Cristianos, or 'Moors and Christians', a mixture of black beans and white rice. Through the DGA, Ramsey had arranged a preferential ration-book for the little household. He wanted the boy to grow up strong and well nourished.

"Soon you are going on a journey with me,' he told Nicholas as they ate.

"Across the sea. Would you like that, Nicholas?" 'Will Adra come with us?" The question irritated Ramsey. He did not recognize his annoyance as jealousy. He answered shortly: 'Si." 'Then, I will like that,' Nicholas nodded. 'Where win we go?" 'To Spain,' Ramsey told him. 'To the land of your ancestors and the land of your birth." After dinner Nicholas was allowed to watch the television for one hour.

When his eyelids drooped, Adra took him to his bedroom.

When she returned to the small, starkly furnished living-room she asked Ramsey: 'Do you want me tonight?" Ramsey nodded. She was over forty years of age. However, her belly was flat, and her thighs were firm and powerful. She had never given birth, and she had extraordinary muscular control. At his request she often excited him with a little trick. He would hold one end of a lead pencil while she snapped it in half with a spasmodic constriction of her vaginal sphincter.

She was an adept, one of the most natural and intuitive lovers he had ever known - furthermore she was terrified of him, which enhanced both her pleasure and his.

In the dawn Ramsey swam down to the head of the bay and then made the hard two-mile return against the tide, ploughing in a crawl through the choppy water.

When he came up from the beach, Nicholas was ready for school and there was an army jeep and driver waiting at the back door of the cottage. Ramsey was dressed in plain brown paratrooper fatigues and soft cap. This was revolutionary uniform, so different from the flamboyant Russian braid and scarlet piping and tiers of medal ribbons. Nicholas sat proudly beside him in the jeep for the short ride until they dropped him off at the nursery school near the main gate.

The drive up to Havana took a little over two hours, for the sugar harvest was in progress. The sky over the hills was smudged with smoke from the cane fires, and the road was congested with behemoth trucks piled high with cargoes of cut cane enroute to the mills.

When they reached the city, the driver dropped Ramsey at the far end of the vast Plaza de la Revolucien, with its 350400t obelisk to the memory of Josd Marti, hero of the people, who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party way back in 1892.

The square was the scene of many of the moving rallies of the party, where a million and more of the Cuban people gathered to listen to Fidel Castro's speeches. The president's office was in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, of which El Jefe was the first secretary.

The office in which he welcomed Ramsey was as austere as the revolutionary principle dictated. Under the revolving ceiling-fan, the massive desk was piled with working documents and reports. However, the white walls were bare of all ornament, except for the portrait of Lenim on the wall behind his desk. Fidel Castro came to embrace Ramsey.

"Mi Zorro Dorado,' he chuckled with pleasure. 'My Golden Fox. It is good to see you. You have been away too long, old comrade. Much too long." "It is good to be back, El Jefe.' Ramsey truly meant it. Here was one man he respected and loved above all others. He was always startled by the size of the man he called the Leader. Castro towered over him, and smothered Ramsey in his embrace.. Then he held him at arm's length and studied his face.

"You look tired, comrade. You have been working hard." 'With excellent results,' Ramsey assured him.

"Come, sit down by the window,' Castro invited him. 'Tell me about it." He selected two Roig cigars from the box on the corner of his desk and gave one to Ramsey. He held the burning taper for him; then lit his own before he settled into the straight-backed chair and leant forward with the cigar stuck out of the corner of his mouth, puffing smoke around it.

"So tell me what is the news from Moscow. You saw Yudenich?

"I saw him, El jefe, and the meeting went well.

Ramsey launched into his report. It was typical of them that there was no small-talk, no preamble to serious discussions. Neither of them had to manoeuvre for position or advantage. Ramsey could speak with total honesty, without worrying about giving offence or trying to improve his own position.

His position was unassailable. They were brothers of the blood and of the soul.

Of course, Castro could be changeable. His affections could shift. It had been that way with Che Guevara, another of the eighty-two heroes who came ashore from Granma. Che had fallen from grace after he had disagreed with Castro's economic policies and he had been driven out to become a wandering knight of the revolution, a Walt Whitman with grenade and AK 47. Yes, it had happened to Che, but it could never happen to Ramsey.

"Yudenich has agreed to back our new export drive," Ramsey told him, and Castro chuckled. It was a little joke between them.

Castro was an inspired political genius with that rare gift of being able to communicate his passionate vision to the masses of the people. However, although he was an educated man, a qualified lawyer who had practised his profession before the revolution had swept him up, he was no economist.

His grasp of the whole arcane science of economics was weak. He could not bother himself with the balance of payments and employment and productivity. His vision was sweeping and transcended those petty aspects of the body politic. He liked the bold and the big. Ramsey had conceived the entire plan to appeal to El Jefe. It was bold and it was direct.

The problem was that Cuba's island wealth was based on three staples: sugar and tobacco and coffee. These were insufficient to provide the hard currency to fuel Castro's ambitious plans for urban renewal and social welfare, let alone to provide full employment for an exploding population.

Since the revolution the population had doubled. According to the forecasts it would double again in the next ten years. Ramsey's plan had been devised to counter these problems. It would provide hard cash, and go far to ending unemployment on the island.

The 'new export drive' was simply the export of men, of fighting men and women. They would be sent out in their tens of thousands as mercenaries to pursue the revolution at the ends of the earth. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand, nearly ten percent of the island's total work force, could be exported. At one stroke they would end unemployment and swell the public coffer with the fees of a mercenary army.

Castro had liked the plan from the first day that Ramsey had propounded it to him. It was the kind of economics that he could understand and applaud.

"Yudenich will recommend it to Brezhnev,' Ramsey assured him, and Castro stroked his beard as though it were a shaggy black cat.

"If Yudcnich recommends it, then we have no worries.' He leant forward with his hands on his knees. 'And we both know where you want them sent." 'I have meetings this afternoon, at the Tanzanian cmbassy," Ramsey said.

There were seventeen African embassies in Havana, all of them representatives of socialist governments newly liberated from colonial oppression.

Tanzania under Julius Nyerere was amongst the most Marxist of them all.

Already Nyerere had declared that any person who owned more than one acre of property was a 'capitalist and enemy of the people' and that they would be punished by having all their property confiscated by the State. The Tanzanians were active in their support for those others struggling for liberation in the colonial slave states in the rest of Africa. They provided shelter for the freedom fighters from Portuguese Angola and Mozam bique, from that racist pariah South Africa, and from the medieval serfdom of the ancient tyrant Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. In all those countries there would be work for the army of Cuban mercenaries.

"I am meeting officers of the Ethiopian army who are dedicated to the cause of Marxist socialism, and who are prepared to risk their lives to break the yoke of the oppressor." 'Yes,' Castro nodded. 'Ethiopia is ripe for us." Ramsey considered the ash of his cigar; it was firm and crisp, almost two inches long.

"We both know that destiny has dictated that you play a rele beyond the shores of this lovely island. Africa awaits you." Castro leant back with satisfaction and placed his huge powerful hands on his knees, as Ramsey went on: 'The Africans have a natural distrust of Mother Russia. The Russians in the Kremlin are all Caucasians - the word originates in that country. It is an unfortunate fact that despite all their other virtues most Russians are racists. We cannot escape that fact.

Many of the African leaders, especially the young ones, have studied in Russia. They have heard the name obezyana, "monkey", whispered as they pass in the corridors of Patrice Lumumba University. The Russians are white men and racists - deep in his heart the African does not trust them." Ramsey drew evenly on his cigar, and they were silent awhile. Castro broke the silence.

"Go on." 'On the other hand you, El Jefe, are a great-grandson of Africa...' but Castro shook his head.

"I am Spanish,' he contradicted.

Ramsey smiled and went on. 'If you were to claim that your forefathers were sold on the slave block in Havana -who would doubt it?' he suggested delicately. 'And how vast might your influence become in Africa?" Castro was silent, contemplating that vision, and Ramsey went on softly: 'We must arrange a tour for you. A triumphant cavalcade beginning in Egypt and going southwards through twenty nations in which you could declare your concern, your commitment to the African people. If you could demonstrate your Africanism to two hundred million Africans, how great might your influence become.' Ramsey leant forward and touched his wrist. 'No longer the president of a tiny beleaguered island. No longer the plaything of America, but a statesman of world influence and power." 'My Golden Fox,' Castro said softly. 'No wonder that I love you."

The Tanzanian embassy was temporarily accommodated in one of the Spanish colonial buildings in the old city.

There the Ethiopians were waiting for Ramsey. There were three of them, all young officers in the imperial army of Emperor Haile Selassie. Only one of the three interested Rarnen Machado. He had met Captain Getachew Abebe on several previous visits to Addis Ababa.

25e In Ethiopia ethnic lines cannot be distinguished. A thousand years of invasion and interbreeding between Caucasian tribes from across the Red Sea and those from the heartland of the African continent have resulted in a milange that cannot be separated. Definitions such as Galla and Amhara refer to linguistic and cultural groupings rather than to blood-lines.

However, in Captain Getachew Abebe the pure African ancestral influence dominated. He was very dark-skinned with full lips and pock-marked skin. He was a product of the University of Addis Ababa. Joe Cicero had succeeded in infiltrating astrong cadre of American and British Marxists into the university in the reles of professors and lecturers. As one of their star students, Getachew Abebe had been transformed into a dedicated Marxist Leninist.

Ramsey had studied and courted him over the years until now he judged that he was the right man. At the very least, he was intelligent, hard and ruthless - and totally committed to the cause. Although he was only in his middle thirties, he was Ramsey's provisional choice for the next leader of Ethiopia.

As they shook hands in the shuttered sitting-room at the back of the Tanzanian embassy, Ramsey cautioned him with a glance and a small gesture towards the collection of African tribal masks that covered the walls. Any one of these could conceal a microphone.

The conversation that followed was trivial and inconclusive and lasted less than half an hour. As they shook hands, Ramsey leant close to Abebe and whispered four words - a place and a time.

The two of them met again an hour later in the Bodeguita del Medio. It was the most famous bar in the old city. There was sawdust on the floor, and the tables and chairs were scarred and battered. The walls were pitted and scratched with the graffiti and signatures of the famous and the ordinary: from Hemingway to Spencer Tracy and Edward, Duke of Windsor, they had all drunk here. Their faded yellowed photographs were tacked into plain wooden frames that hung, fly-spotted and askew, upon the grubby walls. The long narrow room was thick with smoke. The cacophony of a portable radio blaring 'Bembe' folk music and the shouted tiddly conversation of the customers covered their own quiet discussion.

They sat in the furthest corner, with a mojito on the table in front of each of them. The condensation ran down the glasses and formed wet rings on the wood, but neither of them touched the drinks.

"Comrade, the time is almost ripe,' Ramsey said, and Abebe nodded.

"The lion of Amhara has grown old and toothless; his son is a weak indulgent idiot. The nation groans under his tyranny and hungers in the worst famine and drought for a hundred years. The time is ripe." 'There are two things we must avoid,'Ramsey cautioned. 'The first is an armed revolution. If the army rises and executes the emperor immediately, you will be passed over. You are still too junior in rank. One of the generals will seize power." 'Sof Abebe asked. 'What is the solution?" 'A creeping revolution,' Ramsey told him, and it was the first time Abebe had ever heard the term used, though he would not admit it.

"I see,' he murmured, and Ramsey went on to enlighten him.

"The Derg must call Haile Selassie to account and demand his abdication. As you say, the old lion has lost his teeth. He is isolated and out of touch.

He must comply. You will use all your influence in the Derg, and I will exert all of mine." The Derg was the Ethiopian parliament, an assembly of all the tribal and army chiefs, the heads of government departments and the religious elders.

The entire body. had been infiltrated by the Marxist products of the University of Addis Ababa. Most of them were under the direct influence of Ramsey's fourth directorate. All of them had accepted Getachew Abebe as their leader.

"Then we will put in place a provisional military-based junta and I will arrange to move in a considerable Cuban force. With this we will consolidate your position. When it is secure we will be ready for the next step." 'What will that be?' Abebe asked.

"The emperor must be eliminated,'Ramsey told him. 'To prevent a royalist backlash." 'Execution?" 'Executions are too public and too emotional." Ramsey shook his head. 'He is a sick old man. He will simply die, and then..." 'And then an election?' Abebe interjected, and Ramsey looked at him sharply.

Only when he saw the cynical smile on the Ethiopian's thick purple lips did he smile thinly.

"You startled me, comrade,' Ramsey admitted. 'For a moment I thought you were serious. The very last thing we want is an election before we have chosen the new president and the form of government. Nowhere have the masses ever been capable of governing themselves; even less have they been able to choose the persons who should govern them. It is our duty to make that choice for them. later, much later, after you are declared president of a Marxist socialist government, we will hold a controlled and orderly election to confirm our choice." 'I will need you in Addis, comrade,' Abebe told him. 'I will need your guidance and the strong right hand of Cuba to see the struggle through the dangerous and exciting days ahead." 'I will be there, comrade,' Ramsey promised him. "Together, you and I will show the world how a revolution should be conducted."

There were always risks, Ramsey thought, but they had to be weighed carefully against the possible rewards. Then all possible precautions must be taken to minimize those risks.

It was time for Red Rose to be given access to the child, just as she had been given time to make the initial bonding after Nicholas's birth. She had been allowed then to feel the child feeding at her breast, and to come to know every exquisite detail of the tiny body, but that had been three years ago, and the bond would be weakening. Ramsey had used the threat video, the photographs and the reports from clinic and nursery school to reinforce her maternal instincts. However, three years was a long time, and he sensed that his control over Red Rose was weakening.

She must be rewarded for delivering the authentic Siemens radar report, and taught that co-operation was the only possible avenue open to her. On the other hand, she must not be stimulated to attempt some wild endeavour. She was a strong and wilful personality. She possessed a dangerous spirit, a core ofstrength that Ramsey sensed would be difficult to shatter. She could be cowed, but could she ever be completely subjugated? He was not yet certain. She had to be played with extreme delicacy.

She must not be tempted to believe that this meeting with Nicholas was an indication of leniency. She must be taught that she was held in the trap by bands of steel.

Ramsey had considered all the possible adverse reactions that the visit might generate. The most likely was that Red Rose might conceive some foolhardy idea of escaping with the child or planning a rescue.

He had taken precautions against this. The hacienda was remote. It was the property of a member of the Spanish Communist Party who was on a visit to New York with all his family. Ramsey had moved a section of KGB staff in to cover the meeting.

There were twelve guards strategically placed in and around the hacienda.

All of them were armed. The weapons had come in the diplomatic bag to Madrid, along with the two-way radios and the drugs that might be needed if Red Rose became dangerously hysterical on seeing her son.

He had chosen Spain for the meeting for a good reason. Red Rose must never be allowed to know where Nicholas was being kept. Ramsey was fully aware of the power and 2eo influence of the Courtney family. If Red Rose went to her father, and they knew where the child was being held, then they might hire mercenaries or prevail upon the South African security services to mount some kind of kidnap attempt.

She must be led to believe that Nicholas was being held here in Spain.

It was quite logical, of course. Nicholas had been born here. She knew Ramsey was Spanish. The last time she had seen the boy was in Spain. She had no reason to think that he had been transferred to another country, especially not across the Atlantic Ocean.

They had come in on the Aeroflot flight from Havana to London and transferred to Iberian Airways from Heathrow. After the meeting, Adra and the child would return the same way with two KGB bodyguards, while Ramsey flew south to Ethiopia.

Ramsey stood at the shuttered window in the bell-tower of the hacienda.

Through the slats he looked down at the red-tiled roof that was mellowed and spotted with a century's accumulation of lichen and mosses. The building was of traditional design. Its thick white plastered walls were built around a central courtyard. In the centre of the lawned courtyard was a swimming-pool. An ornamental date palm stood at each corner of the pool.

Below the long graceful fronds of each palm hung bunches of ripening yellow fruit.

From his position in the tower Ramsey could survey not only the courtyard, but also the fields and vineyards surrounding the hacienda. However, he was concealed by the wooden shutters. There were vehicles concealed in the walled lanes that divided the vineyards. They were ready to react to his radio command and cut off any escape-route. Ramsey had placed eight guards around the estate and at windows overlooking the courtyard. One of these was armed with a sniper's rifle, and another with a dart-gun, but he did not really believe there would be a call for them.

What with air fares and the personnel involved, the entire operation had been extremely costly. However, he had been able to use guards and vehicles from the Russian embassy in Madrid, and the owner of the hacienda had not required any payment. Ramsey felt again that sour bum in his stomach when he thought of the parsimony of the finance section and the time that he had to spend filling in expense-sheets and justifying each item to one of the accountants.

How could an accountant ever understand the necessities and priorities of field-operations? How much more could be achieved without this continuous audit to which he was subjected? What price could they place on a nation brought into the fold of Soviet socialism?

The soft crackle of the radio interrupted these unpleasant speculations.

"Da? Yes?' He spoke Russian into the microphone.

"This is Number Three. The vehicle is visual.' That was the guard at the far end of the lane on the south side of the estate.

Ramsey crossed to the southern window in the tower. He could see the pale yellow dust of the approaching car spreading over the vineyards.

"Very well.' He went back to his original position, and nodded to the female signals clerk from the embassy. She sat at the electronic console, with the directional microphone trained down into the courtyard. Every word or sound uttered in the courtyard would be recorded, and the meeting would be filmed on videotape.

, There were, of course, voice-activated microphones and concealed cameras in every room of the hacienda that Red Rose might enter, including the toilets and bathroom. Ramsey had requisitioned this equipment from the embassy in Madrid. The voice-prints and up-to-date photographs would be a nice little spinoff from the main object of the operation.

The car came into view as it turned into the gates of the estate. It was a blue Cortina with diplomatic plates, and it drew up at the front door of the hacienda.

Isabella Courtney was the first to alight, followed by the female embassy guard who had escorted her from the airport. Isabella paused on the paved driveway and looked up at the shuttered windows of the tower, almost as though she sensed his gaze upon her. Ramsey picked up his binoculars and studied her upturned face.

She had changed quite dramatically in the years since he had last seen her.

There were few vestiges of the silly flighty girl remaining. She was a mature woman now. There was poise and determination in the way she carried herself. Her features seemed to have firmed. She was thin, too thin. There were dark smudges below her eyes. Even from this distance he could make out the first faint chiselling of life's hardship and care at the corners of her mouth, and a new hard line to her jaw. There was a tragic air about her, a sense of suffering that appealed to him. She was not as pretty, but considerably more attractive and interesting than he remembered her.

Quite unexpectedly the thought that this was Nicholas's mother occurred to him, and in the next instant he felt a stab of pity for her. The treachery of his emotion made him angry, and he crushed down the sense of pity. He could not remember ever having such a soft and enervating feeling towards a subject before, not even when they were in the interrogation-cells below the Lubyanka, or on the torture-racks in the Congo jungle. His anger turned upon himself, and then upon her. She was responsible for inducing that momentary weakness. He shielded his anger, the way he might cup his hands around a match-flame on a windy night.

Isabella thought she had gliuapsed an obscure movement beyond the shuttered window in the high tower, but it must have been her imagination.

The woman who had escorted her touched her arm and said in only slightly accented English: 'Come. We will go in." Isabella lowered her gaze from the bell-tower to the carved teak front door just as it swung open. There was another female waiting for them. Isabella buttoned the jacket of her grey business-suit as though it might protect her like a coat of mail. She drew back her shoulders and went in through the doorway.

The interior was gloomy and cool. There were worn sombre-coloured rugs on the flagged floor and dark heavy furniture. The doors were black oak studded with iron. The windows were shuttered and barred. The house had a brooding and forbidding atmosphere that made her pause in the entrance-hall.

"This way! The woman led her into a small antechamber off the main hall. Her escort followed her, carrying the single suitcase and the large parcel that Isabella had brought with her. She placed the suitcase and parcel on a heavy oak table then locked the door.

"Keys.' She held out her hand, and Isabella searched in her handbag and gave them to her.

Methodically the two women went through the contents of the suitcase. It was obvious that they had been trained for the task. They unfolded each item of clothing and examined the seams and linings. They opened each jar of cosmetics and probed the creams and ointments they contained with a knitting-needle. They palpated every tube and removed the batteries from the electric shaver which Isabella used on her under-arm hair. They tested the heels on her spare pair of shoes and the lining of the case. Then they turned their attention to the wrapped parcel. It contained the gift that she had brought for Nicholas. One of them reached for her handbag, and Isabella handed it over. They went through it with as much care.

"Please to remove clothes.' Isabella shrugged and began to undress. They took each item as she removed it and examined it minutely. They removed the shoulder-pads from her jacket and examined the lining of her bra.

When she was entirely naked one of the women ordered: 'Lift the arms." She obeyed, and then to her horror one of the women slipped a surgical rubber glove on to her right hand and dipped two fingers into a pot of Vaseline.

"Turn around,' she ordered.

"No.' Isabella shook her head.

"Do you want to see the boy?' the woman asked heavily, holding up her two gloved fingers glistening with Vaseline. 'Turn around." Isabella shivered and felt the goose-pimples rise on her arms.

"Please,' she whispered. 'I give you my word. I'm not hiding anything. This isn't necessary." 'Turn around.' The woman's voice did not change. Slowly Isabella turned her back.

"Bend over,' the woman said. 'Put your hands on the table." She leant forward and gripped the edge of the table hard.

"Move your feet apart." Isabella realized that she was being deliberately humiliated. She knew that it was all part of the process. She tried to close her mind to it, but she gasped as she felt the woman's fingers slide into her and she started to pull away.

"Stay still." She bit down on her lip, and closed her eyes. The examination was leisurely and thorough.

"All right.' The woman stepped back. 'Get dressed." Isabella found tears upon her cheeks. She took a Kleenex from the pocket of her jacket and wiped them away. They were tears of fury.

"Wait here.' The woman stripped the glove from her hand and threw it into the wastepaper-bin.

The two of them left the room and locked the door.

Isabella dressed quickly and sat down on the bench. Her hands were shaking.

She clenched them into fists and thrust them into the pockets of her jacket.

They kept her waiting for almost an hour.

Ramsey had watched the search and the physical examination on the small screen of the remote video-camera.

The camera had been carefully positioned to give him a full view of Isabella's face during the entire process. What he could see of her expression gave him cause for disquiet. He had hoped, but not truly expected, to cow her completely. Instead he saw that cold fury in her eyes, the stubborn reckless line of her clenched jaw. He studied her carefully, leaning closer to the screen. Was that fury murderous or suicidal? He could not be certain.

At that moment Isabella glanced up and looked directly at the lens of the concealed camera. She recognized the camera for what it was, and he saw her take control of herself A veil fell over those glittering dark blue eyes, and her expression smoothed into blank neutrality.

Ramsey straightened up. He sighed. As he had suspected all along, this subject could not be pushed beyond a certain point. He sensed that the poit was very close now. She was on the very edge of rebellion. It called for a change of tactics. Very well; he was prepared for that. A change was often good procedure; it confused and unsettled the subject. Ramsey was always flexible and versatile.

He turned away from the screen and called softly: 'Bring the child." Adra came through from the next room, leading Nicholas by the hand.

Ramsey studied him as carefully as he had the boy's mother. Adra had washed his hair for him that morning. His curls, shiny and springing, tumbled on to his forehead. She had dressed him in a plain short-sleeved shirt and short cotton trousers. His limbs were slim and smoothly tanned, his lips were a sensitive pink and his brows were darkly curved over his huge solemn eyes. He would break any mother's heart.

"Do you remember what I told you, Nicholas?" 'Sf, Padre." 'You will meet a very kind lady. She likes you very much. She has a present for you. You will be nice to her and you will call her "Mamma"." 'Is she going to take me away from Adra?' 2ee 'No, Nicholas. She has come only to talk to you for a while and give you a present. Then she will go away. Will you be nice to her? If you are, Adra will let you watch a Woody Woodpecker video this evening. Would you like that?" 'Yes, Padre.' Nicholas smiled happily at the promise.

"Off you go now." Ramsey turned back to the shuttered window and looked through the slats. In the courtyard below one of the KGB women was leading Isabella out into the sunlight. She pointed to the bench beside the swimming-pool, and her voice was amplified through the directional microphone that the signals clerk trained on her.

"Please to wait here. The child will come to you." The woman turned away, and Isabella went to the bench. She sat down, took a pair of sunglasses from her handbag and placed them over her eyes. From behind the dark lenses she studied her surroundings covertly.

Ramsey depressed the transmit button on his two-way radio. 'All stations, this is Number One. Full alert. The contact is in progress." Apart from the electronic surveillance equipment, Isabella now had a 7.e2-millimetre Dragunov sniper's rifle and a dart-gun aimed at her. The dart-gun was loaded with Tentanyl and would immobilize a human victim within two minutes. Ramsey had two io-milligram phials of Nalorphine on hand as an antidote. Even as a last resort, he did not want to risk losing such a potentially valuable operative as Red Rose.

Abruptly Isabella leapt to her feet and stared across the courtyard. Ramsey glanced down. Directly below the tower Adra and Nicholas had appeared. He could see the tops of their heads.

With a supreme effort Isabella prevented herself from rushing across the lawn and sweeping her son into her arms. She knew intuitively that such an action on her part would confuse and distress the child. He was at the age when any boy hated to be treated like a baby. Isabella had studied her copy of Dr. Spock until it was tired and dog-eared.

Slowly she removed her sunglasses and remained still. Nicholas hung on to Adra's hand and studied his mother with great interest.

Isabella had thought she was prepared for his physical appearance. The last photograph she had of him was only two months old, but it was nothing like the reality. It could not capture his colouring, nor the texture of his skin, nor those curls - and those eyes. Oh, those eyes!

"Oh God,' she whispered. 'He's the loveliest child. There could never be another like this. Please, God, help him to like me." Adra tugged gently at Nicholas's hand, urging him forward, and they skirted the swimming-pool and stopped in front of her.

"Buenos dias, Sehorita Bella,'Adra said softly in Spanish. 'Nicholas likes to swim. There is a costume for both you and Nicholas if you want to swim with him. They are in the cabafia.' She pointed to the shuttered door of the bath-house. 'You may change in there." Then she looked down at Nicholas. 'Greet the lady, your mother,' she instructed him gently, and released his hand. She turned and hurried from the courtyard leaving them alone together.

Nicholas had not smiled or taken his eyes from Isabella's face. Now he stepped forward dutifully and held out his right hand.

"Good day, Mamma, my name is Nicholas Machado and I am pleased to meet you." Isabella wanted to drop on her knees and hug him with all her strength. The word 'Mamma' had stabbed through her heart like a bayonet. Instead she took his hand and shook it carefully.

-'You are a fine young man, Nicholas. I hear that you are doing very well at nursery school." 'Yes,' Nicholas agreed. 'And next year I am to join the young pioneers." 'That will be nice for you,' Isabella nodded. 'Who arc the young pioneers, Nicholas?" 'Everybody knows.' He was obviously amused by her ignorance. 'They are the sons and daughters of the revolution." 'That's wonderful,' Isabella went on hastily. 'I have brought a present for you." 'Thank you, Mamma.' Uncontrollably Nicholas's eyes slid towards the package.

Isabella sat on the bench and handed him the gift, and Nicholas squatted in front of her and unwrapped it carefully. Then he was silent.

"Do you like it?' Isabella asked nervously.

"It's a soccer ball,' Nicholas pronounced.

"Yes. Do you like it?" 'It's the best gift anybody has ever given me," he said.

He looked up at her, and she saw in his eyes that despite his formal stilted speech he truly meant it. What a reserved self-possessed little old man he is, she thought. What terrible events and nightmares have made him like this?

"I have never played soccer,' Isabella told him. 'Will you teach me?" "You're a girl.' Nicholas looked doubtful.

"Still, I'd like to try." 'All right.' He stood up with the ball under one arm. 'But you'll have to take your shoes off." Within minutes all the child's reserves evaporated. He shrieked with excitement as he dribbled and darted after the ball. He was nimble as a field-mouse, and Isabella raced after him, laughing with him, obeying his instructions and allowing him to score five goals between the legs of the bench.

When at last they both collapsed on the lawn, Nicholas informed her between gasps: 'You are quite good - for a girl., They changed into swimming-costumes, and Nicholas gave her an exhibition of his prowess. First he swam a length dogpaddle, and her praises were so fulsome that he declared: 'I can do a width underwater. Watch me.' He almost made it across, and surfaced just short of the bar, blowing and huffing and red-faced.

Sitting waist-deep on the shallow-end steps, Isabella felt a moment of physical revulsion as she remembered the last time she had seen her son immersed, but she managed to smile and sound enthusiastic.

"Oh, well done, Nicholas." He came to her, still puffing for breath, and without warning climbed into her lap.

"You are pretty,' he said. 'I like you." Carefully, as though he might shatter like a precious crystal, she wrapped her arms around him and held him. Through the cool water his body was warm and slippery and she could feel her heart twist and tear within her.

"Nicholas,' she mumbled. 'Oh, my baby. How I love you. How I miss you." The afternoon passed like a flash of sheet-lightning in a summer sky and then Adra came to fetch him. 'It is time for Nicholas's dinner. Do you wish to eat with him, sefiorita?" They ate alfresco, at a table that Adra set for them in the courtyard. They shared a baked besugo, a sea-bream from the Atlantic, and salads. There was a glass of fresh orange juice for Nicholas and a sherry for her. Isabella shredded the flesh of the brearn to remove any bones, but Nicholas fed himself As Nicholas was finishing his ice-cream, Isabella's vision began to swim.

She heard a rushing in her ears and Nicholas's face seemed to expand and blur.

Adra caught her before she slipped from the chair, and Ramsey stepped into the courtyard from the doorway behind her. The two KGB women followed him.

"You have been a good boy, Nicholas,' Ramsey said. 'Now, go off to bed with Adra." 'What is wrong with the nice lady?" 'There is nothing wrong,' Ramsey told him. 'She is just very sleepy. You are sleepy, too, Nicholas."

"Yes, Padre.' At the suggestion he yawned and rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fists. Adra led him away, and Ramsey nodded at the waiting women.

"Take her to the room." While they lifted Isabella out of the chair, Ramsey picked up the empty sherry-glass from the dinner-table and wiped out the last traces of the drug with his handkerchief.

Isabella woke in a strange bedroom. She felt rested and at peace. The early sun streamed in through the slats of the shuttered window. She blinked drowsily and pulled the single sheet up around her naked shoulders. She wondered without any real urgency where she was, but her memory was fuzzy.

She was suddenly aware that she was totally nude under the sheet. She lifted her head. Her clothing was neatly folded on the chair beside the open bathroom door. Her suitcase was on the luggage-rack.

Then out of the comer of her eye she caught a movement and she stiffened and came fully awake. There was a man in the bedroom with her. She opened her mouth to scream, but he signalled her urgently to silence.

"Ram-' she started to say his name, but with two rapid paces he reached the bedside and laid his open hand on her Ups to keep her from speaking.

She stared at him, stunned and completely bemused. Ramsey! joy rose in her like a spring tide.

He left her and crossed quickly to the nearest wall of the bedroom. On it hung a dark oil painting in the style of Goya. Ramsey swivelled the painting to one side to reveal a hidden microphone the size of a silver dollar attached to the wall.

Once again, he made a gesture to silence her and came back. He lifted the shade off the lamp on the bedside table, and showed her the second microphone taped to the stand below the bulb.

Then he leant so close to her that his warm breath fanned her cheek.

"Come.' He touched her bare shoulder through the sheet. It had been so long that despite her happiness she felt strange and shy in his presence.

"I will explain - come.' His eyes were so full of pain and suffering that she felt her joy waver.

He took her hand that held the sheet to her chin and drew her, suddenly unresisting, from the bed. Still holding her hand, he led her, stark naked, to the bathroom. She was unaware of her nudity, and she staggered a little from the after-effects of the drug.

In the bathroom Ramsey flushed the toilet, opened the taps in the handbasin and in the bath, and switched on the shower in the glass-walled cabinet.

Then he came back to her. She drew away from him, afraid to touch him. Her naked back was pressed to the cold tiles.

"What is happening to us? Are you one of them, Ramsey? I am so confused.

Please tell me what is happening." His marvelous features contorted with agony. 'I am like you. I have to co-operate, for Nicky's sake. I can't explain now - forces greater than we are. We have been caught up, all three of us. Oh, my darling, how I have wanted to hold you and explain it all to you, but I have so little time." 'Ramsey, tell me you still love me,'she whispered timidly.

"Yes, my darling. More than I ever did. I know what hell you must have lived through. I have shared it with you, every moment of it. I know what you must have thought of me. One day you will understand that everything I have done has been for Nicky and for you." She wanted to believe him, desperately, wildly she wanted it to be true.

"Soon,'he whispered, taking her face between his cupped hands. 'Soon we'll be together, just the three of us - you and Nicky and me. You must trust me." 'Ramsey!' It came out as a choking sob, and she wound both arms around his neck and clung to him with all her strength. Against all reason or logic she believed him completely.

"We have only a few minutes together. We dare not risk more. It is so dangerous. You can never know what terrible danger Nicky is in." 'And you also,' her voice quavered.

"My life does not matter. It's Nicky.

"Both of you,' she denied it. 'You are both so precious." 'Promise me that you will do nothing to harm Nicky.' He kissed her mouth.

"Please do whatever they say. It will not be for much longer. I will get us free of this thing, if you will help me. But you must trust me." 'Oh, my love. Oh, my darling. I knew deep down. I knew there must be a reason. Of course, I trust you, my heart." 'Be strong for all of us." 'I swear it to you,' she nodded violently, her face smeared with tears. 'Oh God, how I love you. I have suppressed it so long." 'I know, my darling. I know." -'Please, please, make love to me, Ramsey. I've been without you for so long. I have been withering away. Make love to me before you have to go." He took her quickly, and yet it crashed over her like the winds of a hurricane and left her shattered.

When he was gone, breaking away with a last long lingering kiss, her legs could no longer support her. She sank slowly down the tiled wall, and sat on the floor with her legs sprawled jointlessly under her. The taps roared and billows of steam filled the room. She didn't understand it ill. She didn't have to and she didn't care any more. All that mattered was Nicky and Ramsey.

"Oh, thank God,' she whispered. 'It wasn't true. None of the horrors was true. Ramsey loves me still. We will be all right, the three of us. We'll come through this together. Somehow. Sometime." She dragged herself to her feet. 'Now I must pull myself together. They mustn't suspect. She staggered to the shower.

She was still in bra and panties when, without a knock, the door opened and the large heavy-featured woman who had escorted her from the airport and had conducted that dreadful body-search entered the room. She looked at Isabella's body in a way that made Isabella's flesh crawl and she stepped hurriedly into the skirt of her grey suit.

"What do you want?" 'You leave in twenty minutes to airport." 'Where is Nicky? Where is my son?" 'Child has gone." 'I want to see him, please." "Is not possible. Child has gone." Isabella felt the ebullient mood of hope, which her brief interlude with Ramsey had raised, begin to evaporate.

The nightmare begins again, she thought, and tried to steel herself against the creeping sense of despair.

must trust Ramsey. I must be strong." The woman sat beside Isabella in the back seat of the Cortina on the drive back to the airport. It was a hot morning, and the car was not air-conditioned. The woman's body odour was rank as a man's. Isabella felt she was going to be ill, and she opened the side-window and let the wind blow in her face.

The driver of the Cortina stopped outside the international departures terminal and, while he went to unlock the boot and lift out Isabella's suitcase, the woman spoke for the first time since leaving the hacienda.

"Is for you,' she said, and handed over a sealed unaddressed envelope.

Isabella opened her handbag and secreted the envelope. The woman was staring straight ahead through the windscreen. She offered no word of farewell. Isabella stepped out of the Cortina and picked up her suitcase.

The driver slammed the door and drove away.

Standing on the pavement, in the midst of the throng of package-tour travellers, Isabella felt alone, more alone and frightened than she had been before she had seen Nicky and Ramsey again.

"I must trust him,' she repeated to herself as a litany of faith, and went to the Iberian check-in desk.

In the first-class lounge, she went to the women's washroom and locked herself in one of the cubicles. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and tore open the envelope.

Red Rose, You will ascertain precisely what stage the development of a nuclear explosive device by Armscor and the nuclear research institute at Pelindaba has reached. You will report on the test site that has been selected and the date for the preliminary testing of the device.

On receipt of this data a further meeting with your son will be arranged.

The duration of this meeting will depend on the depth and scope of information that you deliver.

There was, as usual, no signature, and the message was typed on a sheet of plain paper. She stared at it sightlessly.

"Deeper and deeper,' she whispered. 'First the radar report.' That had not seemed so bad. Radar was a defensive weapon - but this? An atomic bomb?

Would there ever be an end to it?

She shook her head. 'I can't - I'll tell them, I can't." Her father had never even hinted at any interest in the Pelindaba Institute. She had never seen any file or even a single letter that addressed the subject of a nuclear explosive device. She had read in the press that the research at Pelindaba was directed towards refinement and processing of the country's huge uranium production, and towards the development of a reactor for industrial and urban electrical power. The prime minister had given repeated assurances that South Africa was not developing the bomb.

Despite that, her instructions were not to ascertain if production were in progress. That was taken as a fact. She had been ordered to find out where and when the first device would be tested.

She began to shred the message between nervous fingers.

"I can't,' she whispered. She stood up and raised the toilet-seat. She dropped each tiny scrap of paper into the bowl separately, and then flushed them away.

"I'll tell them I can't.' But already her mind was busy.

I'll have to work on Pater, she thought, and immediately began to plan it.

Isabella had been out of the country on her visit to Spain for only five days. Nevertheless, Nana was angry, and sniffed at her weak excuse for leaving in the middle of her election campaign. The Friday before polling day, the prime minister, John Vorster, addressed a meeting in the Sea Point town hall in support of the National Party candidate.

It had taken all Centaine Courtney-Malcomess's wiles and wit to get him to cancel two other important engagements to make the speech. The party machine realized that Sea Point was a safe opposition seat and that they were simply going through the motions. They were reluctant to wheel out their big gun; but Centaine prevailed, as she usually did. With the promise of hearing the prime minister speak, the town hall was jam-packed. The meeting began with the usual heckling from the body of the hall, but it was fly good-natured.

Isabella spoke first. She kept it short, ten minutes. It was her best speech of the entire campaign. She had gathered valuable experience and confidence over the preceding weeks, and her jaunt to Spain seemed to have revitalized her. Both Nana and Shasa had gone over the text with her, and she had rehearsed her delivery in front of them. These two shrewd old political warhorses had given her valuable tips and suggestions.

Standing on the platform in front of the crowded hall, Isabella cut a slim determined figure, and the heart of the audience seemed to go out to her youth and loveliness. They gave her a standing ovation at the end, while John 27e Vorster stood beside her, red-faced and benign, nodding and clapping his approval.

The following Wednesday evening Shasa and Nana were standing on either side of Isabella, wearing huge party rosettes and straw boaters with the party colours, when the results of the polling were read out.

There were no upsets. The Progressive Party regained the seat, but Isabella had cut their majority to a mere twelve hundred votes. Her supporters chaired her shoulder-high from the hall as though she were the victor and not the vanquished.

A week later John Vorster invited her to a meeting in his office in the parliament building. Isabella knew the building intimately. When her father had been a cabinet minister in Hendrik Verwoerd's government, his office had been on the same floor only a few doors down the corridor from the prime minister's office.

During his tenure Shasa had given her the run of his office, and she had used it as a club whenever she was in central Cape Town. It brought back so many memories to walk once again down the wide corridor. As a teenager she had not in any way appreciated the aura of history with which the magnificent old building was imbued.

Now, with political aspirations thrust upon her against her will, she was entranced by portraits of great men, both good and evil, which decorated the panelled walls.

The prime minister kept her waiting only a few minutes. When she went through into his office he came round his desk to greet her.

"It's so good of you to want to see me, Oom John,' Isabella said in flawless Afrikaans. It was naughty of her to use such familiar address without being invited to do so. However, the term 'Oom', or 'Uncle', was one of great respect and the gamble paid off. Vorster's blue eyes twinkled in acknowledgement of her nerve.

"I wanted to congratulate you on your showing at Sea Point, Bella," he replied, and she felt a thrill of acceptance. Use of her pet name was an unusual accolade.

"I'm having a coffee-break.' Vorster waved at the silver and porcelain service on a side-table. 'Will you pour a cup for both of us?

"Now, young lady,' he addressed her sternly over the rim of his cup. "What are you going to do with yourself? Since you aren't going to be an MP." 'Well, Oom John, I am working for my father-" 'Of course, I know that,' he interrupted her. 'But we can't let all that fresh young political talent go begging. Have you considered a seat in the Senate?" "The Senate?' Isabella gulped, and the coffee scalded her tongue. 'No, Prime Minister, I haven't. Nobody ever suggested-" 'Well, somebody is suggesting it now. Old Kleinhans is retiring next month.

I have to nominate somebody to take his seat. It will do until we can find a safe seat in the lower house for you." The Senate was the upper of the two legislative houses of the Republic of South Africa. Its duties were similar to those of the House of Lords, and it had the power to hold up dubious legislation and refer it back to the lower house. It had been considerably expanded back in the when the then prime minister, Malan, had set out to disfranchise those coloured voters who had the vote. He had packed the upper house with senators nominated by himself in order to force through the distasteful Act that stripped the coloureds of their vote. Some of the seats in the upper house were stiff in the prime minister's gift, and Vorstcr was offering her one of these.

Isabella set down her coffee-cup and stared speechlessly at him. Her mind was racing to keep up with this new development.

"Will you accept the nomination?' Vorster asked.

It was a marvelous short-cut, one that none of them -not Shasa nor even Nana - had dreamt of.

Hcndrik Vcrwocrd himself had started his political career in the Senate. At twenty-eight years of age, she would almost certainly be the youngest, brightest and certainly the most attractive senator in the upper house.

Appointments to various commissions and house committees would certainly follow her nomination. If she was only half as good as she knew she was, the National Party would turn her into their prime feminist political figure. Her entry to the innermost circles of power, to the innermost state secrets would come very swiftly.

"You do me great honour, Prime Minister.' Her voice was a whisper.

"I know that you will serve your country with even greater honour." Vorster held out his hand. 'Congratulations, Senator." As Isabella took his hand, she felt an icy finger of guilt trace down her spine, the chill of treason and treachery. She forced it back. The reaction followed swiftly - with a great surge of her spirits she realized that Red Rose was now invaluable to her masters. Soon she could set her own terms and demand her own rewards from them.

Nicky and Ramsey, she thought. Ramsey and Nicky - it will be soon now. Much sooner than we could ever have believed. We will be together again.

Isabella had come to love the austere grandeur of the Karoo.

Shasa had purchased the vast sheep-ranch while she was still a child. On her first visit she had hated the grim stony kopjes and forbidding plains that spread aimlessly to a distant horizon blurred by sun and dust until the juncture of earth and a milky luminous sky was obscured. Then as a teenager she had read Eve Palmer's The Plains of Camdeboo and she had begun to understand just what a wondrous world the Karoo really was.

With her father, she had hunted for fossils in the up-thrust sedimentary beds that had been a vast ante-

diluvian swamp in the age of the great reptiles, and she had stood amazed and filled with awe by their petrified bones and fangs.

The homestead was named Dragon's Fountain in memory of those terrible creatures, and for the spring of clear sweet water that gushed ceaselessly from a grotto at the base of one of the table-topped mountains. The sheer wall of red rock towered above the sprawling mansion with its green lawns and lush gardens nurtured by the spring. Vultures and eagles nested in the crags, and their droppings whitewashed the weathered precipice.

The sheep-ranch spread over sixty thousand acres of this fascinating wilderness. Mingled with the flocks of merino sheep were vast herds of springbok. These graceful little antelope danced upon the plains like puffs of wind-driven dust. Their delicate bodies were pale cinnamon slashed with bars. of chocolate and blazing white. Their lovely patterned heads and lyre-shaped horns made them Isabella's favourite amongst all the multitudinous lifeforms that inhabited the plains of Camdeboo. Both sheep and antelope flourished on the low wiry desert bush, and the diet flavoured their flesh with the taste of sage and wild herbs.

Each winter, at the commencement of the hunting season, Shasa invited a party to Dragon's Fountain to join the annual springbok cull. Anything over four inches of rainfall in the Karoo was considered a good year, and in such a season the springbok ewes lambed twice. The resulting explosion of the herds had to be controlled. In a year such as this it is necessary to cull a thousand head of springbok to protect the fragile desert growth from their ravages.

Garry brought a party of his friends and their families down from Johannesburg. The landing-strip at Dragon's Fountain had been extended and macadamized to accommodate the new Lear jet. Shasa brought the rest of the guests up from Cape Town in the twin-engined Queen Air.

Isabella had not been able to leave Cape Town until the 28o Senate went into recess. Then she drove up with Nana in the silver-grey Porsche that her father had given her on her twenty-ninth birthday to replace the aged Mini. She enjoyed having Nana as a passenger. The old lady's stories whiled away the hours of the long drive. Unlike Shasa, Nana did not watch the speedometer. At one stage on the arrow-straight stretch of road between Beaufort West and the ranch, Isabella had wound the Porsche up to almost xeo miles per hour without a word of protest from Nana.

It was mid-afternoon when they pulled into the kitchen yard at Dragon's Fountain. Servants and dogs came pouring from the kitchen and outbuildings to give them a riotous welcome. When at last Isabella escaped to her own room, Nanny was already running her bath and unpacking her three suitcases.

"God, I'm bushed, Nanny. I'm going to sleep for a week." 'Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,' Nanny warned her darkly.

"Don't come that with me, Nanny. You're a Muslim." 'We got the same rules,' Nanny sniffed haughtily.

"Where are all the men?' Isabella flopped on to the bed.

"Out hunting, of course." 'Are there any nice ones, Nanny?" 'Yes, but they are all married. You shoulda brought your own, Miss. Bella." Nanny paused. 'Come to think of it, there is a new one that got no wife." Then she shook her head. 'You won't like him." 'Why not?" 'He got no hair on his head,' Nanny cackled merrily. 'What you'd call an eggshell blond." Nanny was correct. He didn't tickle Isabella's fancy, although he had a kind and rather sensitive face and beautiful Jewish sloe eyes. His bald head was a damper. It was tanned and freckled like a plover's egg with a thick fringe of dark curls around the back in the style of Friar Tuck. He was talking to Garry on ' the wide front stoep.

Isabella felt good when she came down for pre-dinner cocktails. She had managed an hour's sleep after the hot bath. She was wearing a deceptively simple blue silk sheath with a risque dicolletage whose cunning cut and drape caught the eye of every man present, married or not.

She went to Garry immediately. She hadn't seen him for months. 'My big teddy bear.' She hugged him.

With his arm still around her waist, Garry introduced them. 'Bella, this is Professor Aaron Friedman. Aaron, this is my baby sister, Senator Doctor Isabella Courtney." 'Oh, come on, Garry!' she protested modestly at his use of all her titles, and took Aaron Friedman's hand. It was fine-boned but strong, the hand of a pianist or a surgeon.

"Aaron is on a sabbatical from the University of Jerusalem." 'Oh, I love Jerusalem,' Isabella told him politely. 'In fact, I love Israel. It's such an exciting vibrant country, so steeped in history and religion." She gave him another minute of her attention, then she moved down the veranda to find her father. He had three of the prettiest wives grouped around him, giggling at his wit.

"My beautiful daddy.' She kissed him, and then took her place beside him with her arm linked through his in a proprietorial fashion. She knew just how good they looked together. As usual the two of them swiftly became the centre of the elegant little gathering.

They sipped their champagne and laughed and chatted and flirted, while a flamboyant Karoo sunset lit the gaunt kopies with a ruddy glow and set the clouds on fire.

One of the men mentioned casually: 'I was listening to the radio while I dressed. It seems that the Ethiopians have forced Haile Selassie to abdicate." 'Damned fuzzy-wuzzies, bunch of bandits and Shufta,' said another. 'I was there with the Sixth Division during the war - we went the hard way, on foot, while Shasa was swanning around in his Hurricane." Shasa touched the black eye-patch. 'We called it Abyssinia then. We went to keep an eye on them, and dashed if I didn't leave one of mine behind."

They laughed, and somebody else remarked: 'Haile Selassie was a marvelous old fellow really. Wonder what will happen now." 'The same as the rest of black Africa - chaos and confusion and communism, murder and mayhem and Marxism." There was a general murmur of agreement, and they dismissed the subject and turned their attention to the splendour of the final moments of the sunset.

The night fell with the suddenness of a stage curtain, and immediately the evening chill struck through their light clothing. With perfect timing, the dinner-gong chimed. Centaine rose from her seat at the end of the veranda to lead the entire party through the french windows into the long dining-room, where candlelight glinted on silver and crystal, and polisheawalnut glowed with a precious antique lustre.

Isabella found her place-card and checked those on each side of her: Garry and Aaron Friedman.

Damn, she thought. She had noticed him mooning after her ever since Garry had introduced them. It was natural that Nana would pair her with the only single male in the company.

Aaron hurried across to hold her chair for her. As he seated her, she set herself the task of being pleasant. She soon discovered that he was a delightful conversationalist with a droll sense of humour that amused her.

She no longer noticed his bald head.

Garry had been occupied with his dinner partner but now he turned and leant forward to speak to Aaron across Isabella.

"By the way, Aaron, if you really have got to be back at Pelindaba by Monday afternoon, I'll fly you up in the Lear.) As the significance of the casual mention of that name struck her, Isabella felt her cheeks chill. The nuclear research institute was based at Pelindaba.

"Are you all right, Bella?' Garry was watching her with concern.

"Of course I am." 'For a moment you looked quite strange." "Nonsense, Garry. You are imagining things.' But she was thinking furiously as Garry and Aaron made their arrangements. By the time Garry turned his attention back to his own partner, she had gathered herself.

"I have neglected to ask you what discipline you teach, Professor." "Won't you call me Aaron, Doctor)' She smiled. 'Only if you call me Isabella, Professor." 'I am a physicist, Isabella, a nuclear physicist. Very boring, I'm afraid." 'That's not fair on yourself, Aaron.' She touched his wrist lightly. 'It's the science of the future, in war and in peace." Still touching him, she turned one shoulder and leant towards him so that the sheer silk of her dicolletage fell away from her bosom. She wore no bra. When his eyes changed their direction of gaze and opened very wide, she knew that he was staring at her nipple. She gave him two seconds more before she straightened up, ending the show, and she lifted her fingers from his wrist.

In those two seconds Aaron Friedman had undergone a profound change. He was now a man bewitched.

"Where is your wife, Aaron?' she asked.

"My wife and I were divorced almost five years ago." 'Oh, I'm so sorry." She lowered her voice to a husky murmur and let her sympathy show in her eyes, staring deeply into his.

Later that evening, while preparing for bed, Isabella sat in front of her dressing-table and regarded herself in the mirror as she creamed away the last traces of her makeup.

"Israel, Pelindaba, nuclear physics. she murmured. 'It just has to add up to one big bang." Not a month had passed during the past two years in which she had not been able to send some intelligence to her masters. Most of it was routine reports and minutes of meetings. But this could at last hasten her next meeting with Nicholas.

During dinner Aaron had professed a great love of horses and riding - but, then, he would probably have declared a fascination with polar exploration and munching razorblades if he thought that was what she wanted to hear.

She would soon see how well he sat a horse. They had a date to ride out at dawn tomorrow morning.

"How far will you go?' Isabella asked herself in the mirror. She thought about it carefully before she answered. 'Well, he is terribly amusing and quite sweet, and they do say that men with bald heads have a tremendous libido.' She pulled a face at herself in the mirror. 'You are a terrible little tart, aren't you? A regular Mata Hari." When she was fourteen years old her brother Sean had taught her a smutty rhyme about Mata Hari. How did it go? She cast her mind back.

"She learnt the location Of a very secret station On the point of emission In the twenty-third position."

When she had asked him what 'emission' meant, Sean had sniggered dirtily and darkly. She had been obliged to look it up in the dictionary, which didn't do much to clarify the issue. She smiled at her unintended pun.

"Would you actually go that far?'she demanded of herself and grinned again.

"Well, perhaps not as far as the twentythird. The second or third position should do the trick quite nicely.' Beneath the flippancy she knew she would do anything for Nicky and Ram. en.

Dawn was still only a pale promise in the east when she went down to the stables the following morning, but already Aaron was waiting for her. He wore jodhpurs and riding-boots. That he had his own riding-gear was encouraging.

The syce was already walking the saddled horses. The animals at Dragon's Fountain were seldom exercised sufficiently, and there were always fields full of lucerne and oats irrigated from the spring. They were usually full of pep. However, she had ordered the quietest old gelding in the stables for Aaron. She hoped he could manage him, and she watched uneasily as he approached his mount. She need not have worried. Aaron went up into the saddle, and she saw immediately that he had a good solid seat and gentle hands.

They skirted the kopie as the sun burst over the horizon. It was cool enough to make her grateful for the waxed cotton Barbour hacking-jacket she wore. The still air had that peculiar desert lambency that made her believe that she could see to the very ends of the earth.

The vultures left their shaggy nests m the rock-cliff above them and soared on wide graceful wings overhead. Out on the plain the springbok herds were still nervous and jittery from the previous day's hunting. In their alarm they erected the snowy plumes of mane from the pouches of skin along their spines and flashed them in the bright morning sunlight as they blew away, lightly as smoke, into the purple blossoming sage. The sweet clean air seemed to fizz like champagne in her head, and she felt gay and reckless.

Once the horses had warmed up, Isabella urged her mare into a gallop, and led them on a wildly exhilarating charge along the old dry riverbed and down to the dam. Huge flocks of Egyptian geese rose honking from the muddy brown water as they reined up on the bank.

Isabella slid from the saddle and dabbed in theatrical distress at her eye with the end of her silk scarf. Aaron tumbled from the saddle with gratifying concern.

"Are you all right, Isabella?" 'I seem to have something in my eye." "May I look?" She turned her face up to him. He cupped it gently in his hands and stared into her eye.

"I don't see anything." She blinked her long dark lashes, and the early sunlight 28e splintered into myriad pinpoints of pure sapphire in the depths of her iris.

"Arc you sure?' she asked. His breath was sweet, and his body odour was clean and manly. She stared back into his eyes. They were dark and shining as burnt wild honey.

He touched her lower lid, gently massaging the eyeball through the skin.

"How does that feel?' he asked, and she blinked again.

"You have a magic touch. That's much better, thank you.' And she kissed him with wet and open lips.

Aaron shuddered with shock, then recovered swiftly and seized her round the waist. She pressed her hips forward and let him explore the inside of her mouth with his tongue for a few seconds. Then the moment she felt the flare of his loins she broke away.

"I'll race you back to the stables.' She laughed her husky sexy laugh at him and went up into the saddle with a lithe bound. The gelding was no match for her chestnut mare and, besides, she had two hundred yards' start.

Over the next three days, she made Aaron Friedman's life an exquisite torment. She touched his thigh under the dinner-table. She let him have a good grope while they were playing water polo in the swimming-pool that was fed directly from the spring. Innocently she adjusted her bikini top in front of him while they lay on the lawn and he read Shelley to her. When he helped her up into the back of the hunting Land-rover she gave him a glimpse of the transparent Janet Reger panties that she had donned for the occasion. When they danced on the veranda, she rotated and oscillated her hips in lewd and lazy circles. Trapped between them was something that felt like the handle of a cricket bat.

On the night before he left Dragon's Fountain to fly back to the Transvaal with Garry, she allowed him to see her up to her room and say goodnight to her in the corridor outside the door of her suite. Without breaking the kiss he manoeuvred her until her back was pressed firmly against the wall and her skirt was up around her waist. Once he hit his stride he was really rather masterful.

Isabella liked that and soon found she was almost as breathless as he was.

She didn't really want him to stop. Her first impression had been intuitive; with those fingers he should have been a concert pianist, his touch was light and artistic. Unwittingly she found herself on the very threshold.

"Won't you leave your door unlocked tonightt he whispered into her ear.

With an effort she roused herself from a trance of lust and pushed him away.

"Are you crazy?' she whispered back, smoothing down her skirt with trembling fingers. 'The house is crawling with my family - my father, my brother, my grandmother, my nanny." 'Yes, I'm going crazy - you're driving me mad. I love you. I want you. It's torture, Bella. I can't go on like this." 'I know,' she said. 'Me, too. I'll come up to Johannesburg." 'When? Oh, tell me when, my darling." 'I'll telephone you. Leave me your number."

Isabella was serving on the Senate committee of inquiry into civil service pensions. She and the two other members of the committee were taking evidence in the Transvaal the following month. She drove up to Johannesburg mi the Porsche. She stayed with Garry and Holly in their lovely new home in Sandton and telephoned Aaron at the Pelindaba Institute the morning she arrived.

She drove out to fetch him, and they dined at a chic little restaurant.

Over the crayfish cocktails she sounded him out discreetly about his work at the nuclear research institute.

"Oh, it's all terribly boring really. Anti-particles and quarks.' He was genially evasive. 'Did you know that the name originated from a James Joyce quotation, "Three Quarks for Muster Mark", and should be pronounced "Quart" 'How fascinating.' She touched his thigh under the table, and he seized her hand. 'What you do must be very hard,' she said.

"Yes.' He moved her fingers a few inches higher. 'It is, rather." 'I see what you mean.' She widened her eyes. 'Do you really want to go dancing after dinner?" 'We could go back to my place for coffee." 'I'm not all that hungry. The crayfish was very filling. Let's skip the second course,' she suggested.

"Waiter. The bill, please." Aaron had a flat in the apartment-block in the residential compound of the institute. Although the security was not nearly so strict as in the main research and reactor area of the facility, Aaron was obliged to show his pass at the gate and Isabella had to go with him into the security office to sign the visitors' book and fill in all her particulars, including telephone number and residential address. The guard looked knowing and smug as he issued her a visitor's pass.

She had been much too long without love, and Aaron was an immensely satisfying lover. At first he was gentle and patient. Then as her passion mounted under his lips and cunning fingers, he became forceful and demanding. He pushed her to the edge half a dozen times and then held her back at the very brink until she screamed with exquisite frustration.

When at last she plunged over the top he went with her, and let her down softly on the other side. He held her and caressed her and murmured flatteries until she glowed with contentment and asked with a happy little sigh: 'What is your birth-sign?" 'Scorpio." 'Ah, yes - Scorpios are always wonderful lovers. What date?" 'November the seventh." In the morning they made breakfast together, scrambled eggs and laughter. When she saw him off to work at the door of the flat, she was dressed in one of his pyjama-tops with the sleeves rolled up and the shirt trailing to her knees.

"I'll sort things out with the guard at the main gate - you don't have to leave until you are ready.' He kissed her. 'In fact, if you were still here at lunchtime, I wouldn't mind a bit." 'No chance.' She shook her head. 'I've got work to do today." As soon as he was gone she double-latched the door. The safe was in his study. She had looked for it as soon as she entered the flat the previous evening. There had been no attempt to conceal it behind panelling. It stood four square beside his desk. It was a heavy expensive jeweller'squality Chubb with a six-numeral combination lock.

She sat cross-legged in front of it.

"November the seventh,' she mumbled, 'and he's about forty-three or forty-four years old. That makes it or 1932." She got it on the fourth try. Aaron hadn't even been as cunning as Shasa, who had at least inverted his birthdate.

"Why are so many truly brilliant men such nalve idiots?' she wondered.

Before she swung the thick steel door open, she ran her finger around the door-seal. There was a tiny scrap of Sellotape across one hinge. "Not such an idiot." Aaron obviously liked working at home. The safe was neatly packed with files, most of them the familiar Armscor green.

From the day that Red Rose had been given this assignment at Madrid Airport, Isabella had begun a study of nuclear weapons and their development.

She had stopped over for two extra days in London and spent them in the reading-room at the British Museum. She still had her card from her student days. She had requested and read every book that was listed under the subject in the library catalogue and filled two notebooks with her scribbles. For a lay person, she was now exceptionally well versed in the mysteries of the most dreadful process that man's infernal intelligence had yet devised.

The green Armscor file on top of the pile was stamped with the bighest security-clearance. The copies were limited to eight, of which this was number four. The eight names with clearance to the files were listed on the cover and included the Minister of Defence and the commanderin-chief of the defence forces, her father as chairman of Armscor, Professor A. Friedman and four others who, judging by their scientific qualifications, were all scientists.. One of the names she recognized as the head electrical engineer at Armscor who was often a guest at Weltevreden. No wonder her father had never allowed her to see one of these files.

The code-name on the green cover was'Project Skylight'. She lifted it out, careful not to disturb anything else in the safe. She opened the file and began to scan the contents. While she had been assembling material for her thesis, she had taught herself the technique of speed reading, and now she turned the pages at a steady tempo.

The vast bulk of the material was so technical as to be utterly meaningless to her, even with the benefit of all her study. But she understood sufficient of it to realize that this was a series of reports on the progress being made at Pelindaba in the process of massively enriching the common uranium isotope, Uranium 238, with the' highly fissionable Uranium 235. She knew that this was the basic step in the production of nuclear-fission weapons.

The reports were filed in chronological order, and before she reached the last page she realized that success had been achieved almost three years previously and that sufficient Uranium had already been manufactured for the production of approximately fissionable explosive devices with a yield of up to fifty kilotons. Much of this seemed to have been exported to Israel in return for technical assistance with the manufacture of the uranium. She blinked as she digested that information.

At twenty kilotons the Hiroshima bomb had been less than half as powerful as one of these weapons.

A* She laid the file aside and reached for the next. She was at pains to note the exact order and position of each file in the safe, so that she could replace them without arousing suspicion that they had been tampered with.

She read on. The main object of Project Skylight was the development of a series of tactical nuclear warheads of varying power and application, suitable for delivery not only by aircraft but also by ground artillery.

She knew that Armscor was already building a 155millimetre howitzer designated G5 which would be capable of firing a 47-kilo shell with an i i -kilo payload and a maximum sea-level range Of Hometres. This would, she realized, make an ideal delivery system for a nuclear warhead. The report gave high priority to developing a nuclear artillery round for the G5.

The basic principles of the nuclear weapon were common knowledge. They consisted of assembling two subcritical masses of fissionable enriched uranium. One was a female charge with a vaginal recess. The second, male, charge was propelled by a conventional explosive to implode into the female recess with such velocity as instantly to render the entire mass supercritical and set off the fission reaction.

However, there were many technical pitfalls and obstacles to the actual manufacture of a viable device, particularly in the making of a Aarhead that weighed less than eleven kilos and was able to be contained in the casing of a i55-millimetre artillery round.

Isabella raced through the series of reports and working papers with a sense of rising excitement. She felt a strange proprietorial pride in the ingenuity and dedication of the development team. A dozen times she recognized her father's touch and influence as she read how each pitfall had been circumvented and the whole massive project gathered momentum and rolled towards its climax.

The last report in the file was dated only five days previously. She read it quickly, and then read it again.

The first South African atomic bomb would be tested in a little less than two months from today.

"But where?' she whispered desperately, and the next file she opened gave her the answer to that question.

She replaced the files in their exact order and remembered to stick the scrap of Sellotape over the hinge and to reset the combination of the lock in the same sequence she had found it.

Two years' study and deliberation had gone into choosing the site for the test. The prime consideration had been that of contamination by radioactive fallout.

South Africa maintained a weather station at Gough Island in the Antarctic.

They had considered an Antarctic site, but had swiftly rejected that idea.

Not only would contamination be difficult to control, but also detection before or after the test would be a foregone conclusion. There were too many others, notably the Australians, who were interested in that bleak and beautiful continent at the foot of the world.

For security, then, the test must be conducted on national soil or within South African air-space. The idea of an aerial test was soon abandoned.

Again, detection would be a serious threat and the risk of contamination from fallout would be suicidal.

It had come down at the end to an underground test. The South African gold mines are the deepest underground workings in the world. For sixty years the South Africans have been the leaders in deep-mining techniques, and associated with the mines is the art and science of deep drilling.

Courtney Enterprises owned Orion Explorations, a specialist drilling company. The gnarled old magicians at Orion were able to sink a borehole two miles below the surface of the earth and bring up cores of rock from that depth. They could drive a straight hole or incline it at any angle they chose, or they could go straight down a mile and a half and then kick the bit off at an angle of forty-five degrees.

It was this incredible skill that filled Shasa Courtney with a sense of awe and deep respect as he stood at the test site in the middle of a bright sunlit day and looked around him at the gargantuan machines that between them comprised the drilling rig.

The entire rig was self-propelled. One truck the size of a modem fire-engine carried the power-plant. It was a diesel engine that could have driven an ocean liner. Another truck housed the control-room and electronic monitoring equipment. A third incorporated the actual drill and baseplate for the shot-hole. A fourth was the hydraulic lift and crane for the steel bore-rods.

The drill site was surrounded by a community of residential caravans and supply-trucks. The rods were piled in a storage area many acres in extent.

At night the entire area was lit by the brutal blue-white glare of the arc lamps, for the work continued around the clock. When completed, the hole would have cost almost three hundred thousand US dollars to sink.

Shasa lifted his hat and wiped his brow with his forearm.' It was hot.

This was the fringe of the Kalahari desert, which the little yellow Bushmen call 'The Great Dry Place'.

The low undulating red dunes rolled like the waves of a turbulent ocean into the monotonous distance. The desert grasses were sparse and silver dry. In the troughs between the dunes stood isolated desert camel-thorn trees. The foliage was dark green, and. the bark was rough as a crocodile's back. In the nearest tree a colony of social weavers had built their communal nest. Hundreds of pairs of the drab little brown birds had combined their labours. The result was a shapeless edifice the size of a haystack that dwarfed the tall thorn tree which supported it. Each pair of birds occupied a separate chamber in the nest and helped to keep the whole structure in good repair the year round. One nest near Upington on the Orange river had been continuously occupied by successive generations of weavers for over a hundred years.

This district was a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Courtney Mineral Exploration Company owned the i5o, ooo-acre concession on which the drilling rig now stood. The entire property was posted and fenced. There were guards at every access-point and gate. Nobody outside the company would ever see this encampment - and if they did... well, it was simply another mineral-exploration drill in progress.

Shasa glanced up at the sky. There was not a single cloud to sully the high, achingly blue bowl. This section of the Kalahari was a restricted military zone and overflight by either commercial or private aircraft was forbidden. It was often used for military exercises by the artillery and tank school based at Kimberley only a few hundred miles to the south.

Still Shasa worried. They were at D minus eight. The hole should be completed by the weekend. On Saturday evening the heavily guarded convoy would leave Pelindaba. to arrive on Sunday at noon. It would bring the team of scientists and the bomb.

The test bomb would be positioned in the hole by Monday evening. The Minister of Defence and General Malan would fly up from Cape Town on D minus one.

He shook his head. 'It's all going just beautifully,' he assured himself, and climbed the steel steps into the mobile control-room.

The chief drilling engineer had worked for Orion for twelve years. He rose from his seat and offered Shasa a broad callused hand.

"How is it going, Mick?" 'Bak gat, Mr. Courtney!' The driller used a coarse Afrikaans expression of ultimate approbation. 'We hit the three-thousand-metre mark at nine this morning." He indicated the plot on the display-screen. It graphically illustrated the dog-leg in the fine of the hole which would help to contain the blast.

"Don't let me bother you.' Shasa took the seat beside the engineer. 'Get on with it, man." Mick turned his full attention back to the controlconsole.

Shasa lit a cheroot and imagined that flexible steel worm gnawing its way down into the earth below where he sat, down to the edge of the earth's crust, far below the subterranean water-table, down to the very edge of the magma where the earth's temperature would approximate to that of a domestic oven.

A telephone rang in the control-room, but Shasa was wrapped up in his imagination. The junior technician who answered the phone had to call him twice.

"Mr. Courtney, it's for you." 'Ask who it is,' Shasa snapped irritably. "Take a message.) 'It's~ Mr. Vorster, sir." 'VVhich Mr. Vorster?" 'The prime minister, sir. In person." Shasa snatched the receiver out of his hand. He had a sudden sickening premonition of disaster.

"Ja, Oom John?' he asked.

"Shasa, within the last hour the ambassadors of Britain, America and France have all presented notes of protest from their respective governments." 'What about?" 'At nine o'clock this morning an American satellite photographed the drill site. Ons is in die kak - we are in deep shit. They have somehow tumbled to Skylight and they are demanding that we abandon the test immediately. How long will it take you to get back to Cape Town?" 'My jet is standing on the strip. I'll be in your office in four hours." 'I've called a full cabinet meeting. I want you to brief them." 'I'll be there." 29e Shasa had never seen John Vorster so worried and angry. As they shook hands he growled, 'Since I spoke to you the Russians have called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. They are threatening immediate mandatory sanctions if we proceed with the test." Shasa realized that they all had very good reason to be worried.

"The Americans and the Brits have warned that they won't use their veto to save us if we test." 'You haven't admitted anything, Prime Minister?" "Of course not,' Vorster snarled at him. 'But they want to inspect the drill site. They have aerial photographs -and they know the code-name Skylight." 'They have our code?' Shasa stared at him, and Vorster nodded heavily.

"Ja, man, they have the code-name." 'You know what that means, Prime Minister? We have a traitor - and at a very high level. At the very top."

In the United Nations the representatives of Third World and non-aligned nations rose one after the other in the General Assembly to castigate and condemn South Africa and her attempt to join the nuclear club. She was judged guilty as soon as the accusation was levelled. Both India and China had tested nuclear bombs in the previous year or two, but that was different. Despite assurances from the South African prime minister that no test had been conducted, the ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States insisted on a personal inspection of the site. They were flown up into the Kalahari in an air-force Puma helicopter. By the time they had arrived, the drilling rig and every other vehicle had been removed. There was only a borehole casing capped with fresh concrete left standing forlornly in an area of rutted and trampled earth.

"What was the purpose of the drilling?' the British ambassador asked Shasa, not for the first time. Sir Percy was an old friend who had dined at Weltevreden and hunted at Dragon's Fountain.

"Oil-prospecting,' Shasa answered him with a straight face, and the ambassador lifted an eyebrow and made no further comment. However, three days later Great Britain vetoed the sanctions proposed in the Security Council, and the storm began to blow over.

Aaron Friedman telephoned Isabella to tell her of his immediate departure for Israel. He wanted her to go with him. He didn't, however, mention to her that the United States had put enormous pressure on the Israeli government for his recall to Jerusalem.

"You are a darling, Aaron,' she told him, 'and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but you have your life and I have mine. Perhaps we'll meet again some day." 'I'll never forget you, Bella." The South African Bureau for State Security began a witch-hunt for the traitor that dragged on for months without any conclusive results. In the end it was accepted that one of the four Israeli scientists who had by that stage all left the country must have been responsible.

When Shasa read the secret report of the investigation he was embarrassed to learn that his darling daughter had signed into the Pelindaba residential compound and had apparently stayed overnight as a guest of the good professor.

"Well, you didn't think she was a virgin?'Centaine asked, when he mentioned it to her. 'Did you?" 'Hardly,' Shasa admitted. 'But, still, one doesn't like having one's nose rubbed in it, does one?" 'One has not had one's nose rubbed in it,' she corrected him. 'Bella seems to have been uncharacteristically discreet, for a change." 'Still, it's a good thing he's gone." 'He might have been quite a catch,' Centaine teased him, and he looked shocked.

"Good Lord, he was old enough to be her father." 'Bella is thirty,'Centaine pointed out. 'Almost an old maid." 'Is she that old?' Shasa looked startled. 'I often forget how the years go by." 'We must seriously do something about finding her a husband." 'There is no desperate hurry.' Shasa did not relish the prospect of losing her. He had become accustomed to things just the way they were.

Isabella's reward came swiftly. Within months she was promised a holiday with Nicky and instructed to make arrangements to be absent from the country for two weeks.

"Two weeks!' she exalted. 'With my baby! I can hardly believe it's happening at last." Her euphoria was enough to banish the crippling sense of guilt that she had lived with since the Skylight furore had made world headlines. She tried to appease her conscience by assuring herself that she had helped to avert an escalation of the nuclear menace and that her treachery would, in the long run, yield beneficial results for all mankind.

Naturally, she registered a patriotic sense of outrage when she discussed the subject with her family or with other senators in the halls of the parliament building, but the truth haunted her in the night. She was a traitor - and the penalty was death.

She told Nana and Shasa that she was meeting Harriet Beauchamp in Zurich.

They planned to hire a kombi and cruise around Switzerland for two weeks, going wherever the snow was good, eating fondue and trying all the most famous runs.

"Don't expect to hear from me until I get back,' she warned them.

"Have you got enough money, Bella?' Shasa wanted to know. , 'That's a silly question, Pater.' She kissed him. 'Wasn't it you who set up my trust fund - who gives me a ridiculous 2"

salary each month, twice as much as my pay from the Senate?" 'Welli I'll give you the name of somebody at Credit Suisse in Lausanne, just in case you run short." 'You are sweet, but I'm not sixteen any more." "Sometimes I wish you were, my love." Isabella caught the Swissair flight for Zurich, but left the aircraft at Nairobi. She checked in at the Norfolk Hotel and the following morning telephoned Weltevreden and spoke to Nana, pretending that she was calling from Zurich.

"Have fun and keep your eyes open for a nice millionaire,' Nana told her.

"For you or for me, Nana?" 'That's enough of your sauce, missy." As she had been instructed, Isabella caught the Air Kenya flight to Lusaka in Zambia and the airline bus from the airport to the Ridgeway Hotel. She found that a single room had been reserved for her. This was as far as her instructions took her.

Before dinner she sat on the swimming-pool terrace and ordered a gin and tonic. A few minutes later, a tall good-looking black man sitting at the bar sauntered across to her table.

"Red Rose,' he said.

"Sit down,' she nodded, her heart pounding and her palms damp.

"My name is Paul.' He refused the drink she offered him. 'I will not trouble you any longer than necessary. Will you please be ready at nine o'clock tomorrow morning? I will meet you with transport at the front entrance of the hotel." 'Where are you taking me?" 'I don't know,'he said as he stood up. 'And you shouldn't ask." She was waiting for him as he had instructed. He drove her back to the airport in a battered Volkswagen, but bypassed the commercial terminal and drove on to the gates of the restricted military area.

The remains of Zambia's squadron of Mig fighters stood on the apron in the sunlight. There had been four crashes in the last month alone. Not only had Zambian pilots been inadequately trained in East Germany, but also they had not adjusted well to the complexity of supersonic flight. In addition, the Migs had done almost twenty years of service in eastern Europe before being sold to Zambia. Zambia's copper-based economy had been sent reeling by the fall in the price of the metal, and by two decades of gross mismanagement.

Costs had been pruned in the maintenance of the fighter squadron, and they were familiarly known as 'The Flying Bombs'.

Beyond the fighters was parked an enormous unmarked aircraft with four turbo-fan engines and a tail-fin taller than a two-storey house. Although Isabella did not recognize it as such, it was an Ilyushin 11-7e with the NATO reporting name 'Candid'. It was the standard Russian military heavy freight-carrying transport.

Paul, her escort, spoke to the guards at the gate and showed them a document from his brief-case. The guard commander studied the paper and then went into his kiosk. He spoke on the telephone to a superior and then handed Paul back his papers, opened the gates and saluted as they drove through.

Two pilots in flying-overalls were supervising the refuelling of the huge Candid. Paul parked the Volkswagen alongside the main hangar and walked across to the aircraft. He spoke to one of the pilots and then beckoned to Isabella to follow. They watched her struggling with her suitcase, but none of them offered to help her.

"You will go with the aircraft,' Paul told her.

"What about my luggage?' she asked, and the chief pilot shrugged and answered in a heavy accent: 'Leave here. Me fix. Come." Isabella looked round, but Paul was already halfway back to the Volkswagen.

She followed the pilot up the loading-ramp of the Candid.

The hold was filled with cargo. It was packed on wooden pallets under heavy nylon netting. There were literally hundreds of wooden cases of various sizes. Most of them were stencilled in black paint with letters and numerals in Cyrillic script. The pilot led her down the side-aisle of the cavernous compartment and up the ladder to the flightdeck.

"Sit.' He pointed at one of the folding jump-seats in the rear bulkhead of the flight-deck.

There were no formalities when the Candid took off an hour later.

From her seat in the rear of the compartment Isabella had a clear view of the instrument-panel over the pilot's shoulder. The Candid levelled out into a cruise altitude of thirty thousand feet and settled on a course Of 3oo degrees magnetic.

Surreptitiously, she checked the time on her wristwatch. She wanted to know how long they would fly on this northwesterly heading. She conjured up a map of the continent in her mind. Although she had no idea of the aircraft's ground speed, the needle on the air-speed indicator quivered at around knots.

After an hour's flight she guessed that they had crossed from Zambia into Angola, and she shivered slightly. Angola was not her number-one choice for a holiday. She had recently been nominated to the African Affairs Committee of the Senate, and she had attended all the special briefings on the subject of Angola. She had also read the confidential reports assembled by military intelligence on that country.

She looked down at the mosaic of savannah and mountains and jungle that passed slowly beneath the Candid and tried to recall every detail that she had read about this troubled land.

Angola had long been the pearl of the Portuguese empire. After South Africa itself, Angola was the richest and most beautiful of all African countries.

This thousand-mile stretch of the West African Atlantic seaboard was rich with marine resources. Vast shoals of pelagic fish swarmed within easy reach of secure natural harbours. Offshore drilling by American companies had recently proved huge reserves of oil and natural gas. Inland lay rich and fertile plains and valleys, marvelous forests of hardwoods, pleasant well-watered highlands from which flowed numerous great rivers. In Africa water was a natural resource almost as precious as oil. Apart from her oil, Angola produced gold and diamonds and iron ore. Her climate was temperate and benign.

Despite all these blessings, Angola had for a decade been racked by a savage and bitter civil war. Her indigenous African peoples had been struggling to throw off the fivehundred-year colonial rule from Lisbon.

The liberation struggle had not been united. Many armies under all the usual flamboyant warlike names had fought not only the Portuguese but each other as well. There was the MPLA, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola; the FNLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola; and a rash of other private armies and guerrilla movements.

The Portuguese had held on grimly to their colony. Tens of thousands of young Portuguese conscripts had come out to Africa, many of them to bleed and die by bullet and mine and tropical disease far from their native land.

Then suddenly had come the left-wing coup ditat by, the military junta in Mother Portugal, and shortly thereafter the declaration that Portugal was to give Angola its independence and hold popular elections to select a new government and write a constitution.

Now, in the months leading up to the proposed elections, the country was in even greater turmoil than it had been during the civil war, as the various factions jockeyed for power, and the great powers and other African governments played their favourites, while the guerrilla leaders themselves indulged in an orgy of intrigue and torture and intimidation of a population already cowed by years of war. Reading between the lines of the intelligence reports, Isabella sensed that nobody really knew what was happening in Luanda, the capital, let alone in the remote jungles and mountains.

Admiral Rosa Coutinho, the Red Admiral, appointed as the governor-general by the armed-forces movement after the coup d'itat, seemed to favour Agostinho Neto and his 'purified' MPLA. The purification process consisted of torturing all other factions of the party to death. This was done by gradually tightening a wooden frame around their heads until the skull collapsed.

The American CIA, out of touch as always, appeared to be supporting the FNLA which was the weakest, most tribally based and corrupt of the three, slipping them niggardly amounts of financial aid which the United States Senate would not have approved, had it been aware of them. The Chinese were also betting on the FNLA, as were the North Koreans.

The motorcade of black Chaikas crossed the moat bridge and entered the fortress of the Kremlin through the gate below the Borovitskaya Tower.

The two Cuban generals rode in the leading limousine. Senen Casas Requerien was chief of staff of the Cuban army, and with him was his army logistics chief. Colonelgeneral Ramsey Machado was in the second vehicle with President Fidel Castro, acting as host and interpreter for the visiting head of state.

Ramsey's promotion had been announced within weeks of his return from Ethiopia where he had masterminded the abdication of the Emperor Haile Selassie, the abolition of the monarchy and the formal declaration by the Ethiopian Derg of a Marxist socialist state.

He was now the second-youngest general in the entire Russian military service, and by far the youngest in the KGB. His immediate senior in the secret service was fifty-three years of age. His predecessor Joe Cicero had only been elevated to general officer rank just before his retirement. The promotion was all the more extraordinary in that Ramsey was not a Russian national by birth. His naturalization papers had only been serviced eight years ago.

Ethiopia had been a triumph for him. He had steered the first stage of the revolution through without any visible Russian presence in the country and, more importantly, with the expenditure of a paltry few million roubles.

Following immediately had been his clandestine but equally successful visit to Luanda in Angola where Ramsey had met the Red Admiral, Rosa Coutinho.

Coutinho was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party. He had been appointed governor-general of Angola by the left-wing military-forces committee which now governed Portugal. He had been charged with organizing the popular elections to select an African government to bring the former Portuguese colony of Angola to independence. However, during his meeting with Ramsey he had proven to be a political soulmate.

"We must ensure that under no circumstances popular elections take place," he had told Ramsey. 'If we allow that to happen, then Jonas Savimbi will be the first president of Angola, if only because his Ovimbundu tribe is the largest in the country." 'We cannot allow it," Ramsey agreed. He did not have to elaborate. Jonas Savimbi was the boldest and most successful of all the Angolan guerrilla leaders.'His UNITA army had fought the Portuguese with skill and dogged determination for a decade. He was intelligent, educated and strong-willed.

Although he had never declared his political allegiances, he was certainly not a Marxist, probably not even a socialist, and they could not take a chance on him coming to power.

"The only possible solution,' Ramsey went on, 'is for you to declare that, owing to the state of chaos in the country, it will be impractical to hold elections. You should then declare that the solution is to recognize the MPLA as the only party capable of assuming the reins of government, and to persuade Lisbon to transfer power to Agostinho Neto and the MPLA as soon as possible." Neto was the Soviet choice. He was devious, weak, cruel and malleable. He could be controlled, whereas Savimbi could not.

"I agree,' Coutinho nodded. 'But can I count on full support from Russia and Cuba?" 'If I am able to promise you that support, will you be prepared to hand over to us strategic military bases and airfields to allow us to rush in troops and military supplies?' Ramsey countered.

"You have my hand on it.' The Red Admiral stretched across his desk, and Ramsey took his hand with a soaring sense of triumph.

He was about to deliver two nations into Soviet sovereignty. Surely no single man had achieved more in Africa.

"I am flying directly from here to Havana,' he assured Coutinho. 'I anticipate that within a matter of days talks between Cuba and Moscow will be under way at the highest possible level. I will have your answer for you by the end of the month." Coutinho rose to his feet. 'You are an extraordinary man, Comrade Colonel-General. Seldom have I been privileged to work with one who sees so clearly to the very heart of a problem, and who is prepared to deliver the bold expert cut of a surgeon to excise it." Now Ramsey sat in the rear seat of the Chaika with President Fidel Castro beside him as they entered the citadel of Soviet socialism. The cavalcade led by the motorcycle escort moved swiftly up the broad cobbled avenue.

They passed the famous armoury, the great treasure-house of imperial Russia which still housed a stunning wealth of ambassadorial gifts and Tsarist regalia, from the crown of Ivan the Terrible to the jewel-encrusted court robes of Catherine the Great.

A queue of foreign tourists at the doors to the museum Pe watched them pass, their expressions lighting with curiosity as they recognized the great bearded figure of Castro in the second car.

Swiftly they moved on, passing on their left the square around which were clustered the cathedrals of the Archangel, of the Annunciation and of the Assumption. The immense spires and towers and golden domes burnt in the pale spring sunshine. The peach and cherry trees in the gardens were in full blossom. They swung into the square, passed the palace of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet and drew up at the front entrance of the Council of Ministers building.

There was an honour guard paraded to welcome them and a dozen political and military dignitaries.

Deputy Minister Aleksei Yudenich stepped forward to embrace Castro and lead him into the Council of Ministers. In the Hall. of Mirrors, Castro began to speak from his seat at the head of the long table.

He spoke clearly, pausing at the end of each sentence to allow the Russian translator to catch up with him. Even Ramsey, as an old and intimate comrade-in-arms, was fascinated by his grasp of the African situation and his calculated assessment of the risks and options open to them. He had absorbed every word of Ramsey's briefing.

"The Western Europeans are divided and spineless. NATO depends militarily on America. They would never be able to muster any organized response to our determined entrance into the Angolan arena. We need not waste serious thought on them." 'What about America?' Yudenich asked soberly.

"America is still bleeding from the humiliation of Vietnam. Their Senate will never allow American troops to operate in Africa. The Americans have been whipped. They are still snivelling with their tails between their legs. The only threat they pose is that they might choose a surrogate army to fight for them." 'South Africa,' Yudenich forestalled him.

"Yes, South Africa has the most dangerous army in Africa. Kissinger may recruit them and send them across the Angolan border." 'Can we afford to fight the South Africans? Their lines of supply are shorter than ours by ten thousand miles, and their troops are reputed to be the finest bush fighters in Africa. If they are equipped and supplied by America..." 'We won't have to fight them,' Castro promised. 'As they cross the border, America and South Africa will be immediately defeated, not by Soviet or Cuban might, but by the practice of white minority government and the policy of apartheid." 'Explain this to us, Mr. President,' Yudenich invited.