Solaris Rising (23 page)

They stopped and he got out. The hands were stored in a glass jar filled with Formaldehyde.

“It would have been best if you’d kept the material fresh,” he said. But he took the jar when it was given him.

“This was not our work.”

The other one, he noticed, never spoke. Just watched him, like a hungry cat watching a rat he wasn’t allowed to eat. The doctor liked cats, generally. But he did not like this man.

They went inside the building. From outside it was camouflaged, painted a dark green – the colour of the forest – and looked abandoned. Inside, the doctor switched on the lights and fan blades began to move overhead, making the light flicker.

His machines, his notebooks lined up on a heavy oak bookshelf, his desk and his operating table and, underneath the ground, deep below the lab, the waiting vats...

“What do you want me to do?” he said, though he thought he already knew.

The bearded man merely smiled, and the doctor sighed, inwardly and, giving up the pretence as futile, said, “How many?”

4

Which had been the correct question to ask, as it turned out.

And so he got down to work.

The answer had been: “All of them.”

He had thirty-two vats, and five weren’t operational.

So the first batch was for twenty-seven.

Of which two didn’t last the first three months, and one clocked out at seven and a half.

But that still made twenty-four, that first time.

There were over two hundred by the time it was finished.

Part Two: Disco Years

“Why did they think that by killing him, he would cease to exist as a fighter?... Today he is in every place, wherever there is a just cause to defend.”

– Fidel Castro

1

By the time they were five they looked and acted ten. Accelerated growth had been a part of the doctor’s process. How he came to perfect it – how many had died for these to be born – the bearded man didn’t want to know, or ask.

By the time they were nine they had the bodies and minds of eighteen year old boys.

By the time the CIA had located the camp and sent a small army to investigate, helicopters swooping down with hardened Vietnam veterans manning the machines, they discovered nothing but a 10-mile radius of burned forest and a small crater where a building may once have stood.

In the centre of the crater they found a single corpse. It was burned beyond recognition. There were two bullet holes neatly drilled in the back of what was left of the skull.

Welcome to the seventies,
hombre
.

Party like it’s 1976.

The bar was small and there were Xs on the windows in brown tape and sand bags outside but there was cold beer, and a generator and a small turntable was cranking out Abba’s ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’. It was very hot outside. This was Angola and he’d been fighting on the MPLA side for many weeks, running a bloody guerrilla campaign against the UNITA forces.

The battle was bigger than him, he knew. Bigger than all of them. Cuba and Moscow supplied the MPLA. The CIA and South Africa supplied UNITA.

“Socialism will always win,” he said out loud, to no one in particular. He went and got himself a drink. “Even if the terms of the fight are unequal.”

They had liberated the bar only two hours before. The place came with an airstrip but there were no planes. MPLA soldiers were settling down outside, ready to protect the newly-acquired landing strip. He took a sip of beer.

It was hot and dusty and he had been on the go for a long time. He missed home, for just a moment. Then it passed.

He heard the drone of an aircraft in the distance, growing closer. Putting the beer down he ran outside.

“They are coming back, Che!”

“Take cover! Man the guns!”

It didn’t take much to bring down a plane, as he had found out. One well-placed bullet could do the trick, if the shooter was good enough and the plane low enough…

And then the sound of more engines filled the air, and suddenly the airfield was awash with flames, and the smell of burning, and blood, and a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen staggered and fell into his arms. It took him a moment to realise that the boy’s brain had been blasted out of his skull and now covered the front of his shirt. He lowered the boy gently to the ground.

“It was an ambush, Che!”

“If we die here today, others will take our place!”

His soldiers spoke little. Their perimeter of defence was already set up. They returned fire –

But now the planes were coming down low and they were dropping explosives. He heard a scream and dust blinded him momentarily. More explosions. And now there was confusion in the ranks.

“God damn it!” he said, and pulled out his gun, and fired into the air. He followed the sound of the engines, aimed. Going by sound.

The pilot of the Cessna Skyhawk 172, Willem Botha, had been trained in South Africa and volunteered when the Angola opportunity presented itself. They had to show those kaffirs what was what, he knew, and stop the nationalistic aspirations – let alone communist degeneracy – of their brethren outside South Africa, who were fermenting unrest in the Motherland. It was almost funny, watching them run, scared and confused – the landing strip had proven too much of a temptation for them and the trap worked brilliantly.

He was pleased with himself. In many ways he was a lucky man, dying – when the single bullet entered his head from underneath, through the jawbone, breaking his teeth and turning his brain into slush – with no concept of his death, and with a joy that had no time to turn into confusion.

Losing control of his bowels and the plane at the same instant, the corpse sat at the controls as the plane plunged to the ground –

Che, the plane, the war. Smoke rising in slow motion, cries drifting in lower-tone bass. Brain on his shirt. The smell of petrol and machine gun oil. He fired again, uselessly. Then the plane was on him and the world became a ball of searing flame. Then all was quiet.

2

It was quiet in the jungle, and he was waiting for the boys from Vietnam to show up.

“We are very concerned,” they told him, their first meeting. “
Very
concerned.”

They were patriots, heroes, revolutionaries. All of the above. They had beaten the Americans after years in the bush, and were just trying to run their country.

Which didn’t stop them watching over the border, and seeing what their brothers were doing. And getting concerned.

“Brother Number One,” they told him. “He is a threat to the revolution.”

“How so?”

“He is… unstable.”

His name was Saloth Sar but he called himself Pol Pot. He had been educated in Paris and was the leader of the communist movement in the Kingdom of Cambodia, the red Khmers, as they were called. He was a revolutionary and commanded respect.

The Vietnamese wanted to kill him.

Now he waited, at the agreed spot. Finally they came – there were three of them, in khakis and no insignias. They paused when they saw him. “Che.”

“Comrades.”

Pol Pot’s revolution had been successful. The year before he had become the prime minister of his country, which had been renamed Democratic Kampuchea. He had declared that year as Year Zero.

“He is killing his own people.” the most senior of the three Vietnamese said. “He must be stopped.”

“He is a hero of the revolution.”

Uncertain smiles. They did not know how to take him, this symbol of resistance who should not be here, had no business being alive. “He must be terminated… with extreme prejudice.”

The last was said in English. A strange expression, he thought… “You want him killed.”

“Yes.”

“Then say so!” he snapped.

“We want him dead and buried, and we believe you could do it.”

“What about your own people?” he said, already knowing the answer.

“We have sent several trained comrades,” the senior member told him. “None of them survived.”

“He is executing thousands, hundreds of thousands!”

“And Vietnam would like control of its less stable neighbour?”

“You are cynical.”

“A realist.”

The senior member shrugged. “Would you do it?”

He never got a chance to answer. Shadows moving in the jungle – movement caught his eyes. He dropped to the ground even as the men were hit. Three shots, no more. Professionals, and they had been waiting.

The Vietnamese must have had a mole, he thought. Someone was reporting back to Pol Pot.

The fourth shot hit him in the leg. They were firing low. Then they were on him. A face looked down, apologetically. “It is a sad day,” it said, in French, “for us all.”

“There will be others,” Che whispered. He held his leg in his hands. It was broken, and bleeding.

“And I shall be here,” the figure above him said. “And I shall be waiting.”

The man held a gun. He lowered it. The barrel pointed at the man on the ground.

The man with the gun pulled the trigger.

3

He was in bed with Christina when the knock on the door came. They had met in the hills around Londonderry, fighting the British. She was quick with a gun and with a knife and with a kiss. Her passion for the revolution equalled his own.

When the knock came they both tensed. Not speaking, they both grabbed hold of their guns. They were both semi-clothed, still, in preparation for just such a moment. They pulled on the clothes in silence, one-handed, listening, waiting.

But all was still.

Then the quiet was shattered by glass breaking – the window of the loft exploding into fragments – and a small metal oval shape came flying to land amidst the hay.

“Grenade!” Christina said.

Che picked it up and calmly threw it back out of the window. There was the sound of an explosion, curses in English, and then the gunfire started.

They both cowered on the floor while hay floated everywhere and bullet holes punctured the wooden walls. “Hold me,” she said. “Please…”

Her mouth was close to his ear. He could feel the warmth of her breath. “I didn’t tell you,” she said. “I’m –”

Then she was limp in his arms, and her blood was as warm as her breath.

He got up, still unharmed. “You will die,” he said. “Every single one of you, until Ireland is free. Until Christina is avenged. You will die for what you did today.”

The soldiers were startled almost into immobility when the bearded, half-naked figure came flying out from the second level of the loft, seemingly-impervious to the hail of bullets, and landed in their midst.

The man wore only socks on his feet and had a gun in each hand and he was firing, his face a mask of mute anger. Several men were down before the company began to take cover and fire back, but though he was hurt several times he just kept coming, like a demon or a ghost, never speaking, covered in blood. In the confusion several soldiers died of friendly fire and several others, crossing themselves, ran away into the night and were later declared deserters.

When his guns were empty he snatched a machine gun from the hands of a young, dead soldier and continued to fire, until at last it was a single soldier, Grant Stone who, wounded earlier, rose up, confused, his empty gun still in his hand, and buried the bayonet deep into the demon’s belly.

Later, he never spoke of that moment to anyone. The look in the demon’s eyes as he died was something Grant Stone never found words to describe. When at last he shuddered on the blade his eyes had remained open, gateways into a vast, great soul.

4

The protesters carried plaques that said:
Down
with Afrikaans
and
If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster must do Zulu
. They were young, and black, and rightfully angry. They were living under Apartheid, and the white government had just passed the Afrikaans Medium Decree, forcing all black schools to be taught in a mixture of Afrikaans and English. The protest was peaceful, thousands of young men and women marching from their schools towards Orlando Stadium.

There were few white people amongst them, and one young man in khaki and a beard who mostly seemed to blend into the crowd.

It was not clear what happened next.

Accounts agree that Colonel Kleingeld pulled out a handgun and fired a shot in the air.

Students panicked.

In the fear and confusion people began trying to escape. The police opened fire.