The Coup Read Online Free PDF Page A

the secret at hand had its inconsequential side. Three sets of MIRV-ED SS-9 ICBM'S in their subterranean sheaths pointed north to the Mediterranean, west toward similar U. s. installations in the lackey territory of Sahel, and east to the remote Red Sea ports of Zanj, which in certain permutations of nuclear holocaust might become strategically significant enough to vaporize. Our Kushite rockets were "third wave" weaponry; that is, by the time they were utilized the major industrial and population centers would be erased from the globe. Like the players of a chess contest reduced to a few rooks, pawns, and the emblematic kings, the major powers, yawning over their brandy, would be pursuing a desultory end game, to determine which style of freedom-freedom from disorder, freedom from inhibition-would suffuse the spherical desert that remained. That world, amusing to contemplate, would not only be Saharan in aspect but would be dominated by underdamaged Africa, in long-armed partnership with Polynesians, Eskimos, Himalayan Orientals, and the descendants of British convicts in Australia. More amusingly still, Michaelis Ezana, a nagging doubter of our Soviet allies, maintained that the rockets were in truth dummies, sacks of local sand where the warheads should be, set here by solemn treaty merely to excite the opposite superpower to install, at burdensome expense, authentic missiles in neighboring Sahel. Whatever the case, a slab of earth eight meters wide and two thick lifted at the prearranged signal from our headlights (dim, undim, out, dim), and the party of Russian soldiers below rejoiced, amid the furious electricity of their vast bunker, at this diversion. In preparation for our visit they had all become drunk. Mtesa and Opuku, blinking in amazement at this bubble of sun captured underground, were swamped with hairy embraces, Cyrillic barks, and splashing offers of vodka, which Opuku did not initially refuse. I informed them, in my loudest French, that "N'alcoolison pas, le Dieu de notre gens interdit cela" and upon many repetitions of this baffling negation won for myself and my small party the right to respond in chalky Balkan mineral water (fetched from the sub-cellar) to their interminable toasts and to observe with sobriety this foreign enclave. The Russians had been here since the secret SAND (soviet-Allied Nuclear Deterrants) talks of 1971 and in the two years since had amply furnished the bunker in the stuffy tsarist style of Soviet supercomfort, from the lamps with fringed shades and soapstone bases carved in the shape of tussling bears resting on runners of Ukrainian lace to the obligatory oil paintings of Lenin exhorting workers against a slanted sunset and Brezhnev charming with the luxuriance of his eyebrows a flowery crowd of Eurasiatic children. The linguist among them, a frail steel-bespectacled second lieutenant whose Arabic was smeared with an Iraqi accent and whose French sloshed in the galoshes of Russian zhushes, fell dead drunk in the midst of the banquet; we carried on with minimal toasts to the heroes of our respective races. "Lu- mumba," they would say, and I would answer, as their glasses were refilled, "A Stakhanov." "Nassar, da, Sadat, nyef was met, amid uproarious applause, with "Vive Sholokov, eerase Solzhenitsyn," to applause yet more tumultuous. My opposite number, Colonel Sirin, who in this single installation commanded perhaps the equivalent in expenditure of the entire annual military budget of Kush, discovered that I comprehended English and, no doubt more coarsely than he intended, proposed honor to "all good niggers." I responded with the seventy-seventh sura of the Koran ("Woe on that day to the disbelievers! Begone to that Hell which you deny!") as translated into my native tongue of Salu, whose glottal rhythms enchanted the Reds in their dizziness. Our store of reciprocal heroes exhausted, the briefing blackboard was dragged forth and we matched toasts to the letters of our