Vortex (10 page)

“Some of the things we are called upon to do would be distasteful, even reprehensible, in ordinary times. But these are not ordinary times.

”

He sighed and laid a hand on Muller’s shoulder.

“We are the servants of the Lord, Erik. And the Lord’s work is a heavy burden.” He straightened.

“But we should rejoice in that burden. It is an honor given to few men in any age.”

With difficulty, Muller hid his distaste. Why bring God into it? Power was justification enough for any deed. He forced a murmur of assent to satisfy Vorster’s sensibilities.

The two men turned away from the fire, two very different men driven toward the same means and the same end absolute control over the Republic of South Africa.

JUNE
18-IN
THE
HEX
RIVER
MOUNTAINS

Riaan Oost was aware first of the silence. An eerie, all encompassing silence spreading outward from the jagged, broken cliff face. No shrill animal cries or lyrical, lilting bird songs broke the odd stillness, and even the insects’ endless buzzing, whirring, and clicking seemed muffled and far away. The dust spun up by his pickup hung in the air, a hazy, golden cloud drifting north along the rutted trail.

He slid out from behind the truck’s steering wheel, careful to keep his hands in plain view. There were hidden watchers all around, armed men who feared treachery more than anything else. Oost moved slowly along the side of his pickup. His survival depended on his own caution and their continued trust. It had been that way ever since the guerrillas assigned to Broken

Covenant had begun arriving at his cottage.

He leaned into the back of the truck and hoisted a large wooden crate onto his shoulder. Beer and soda bottles clinked together, cushioned by loaves of his wife’s fresh-baked bread, packages of dried meat, and rounds of cheese. Supplies to keep men alive so they could kill other men.

Sweating under his load, Oost scrambled upslope toward the cliff face.

Broken shards of rock and soft, loose soil made it hard going, but no one came out of hiding to help him.

The cave entrances were almost completely invisible in the fading afternoon light, covered by fast-growing brush and lengthening shadows. Oost paused about ten feet away from the largest opening and stood waiting, panting and trying to catch his breath. The instructions he’d been given were clear.

The men inside the caves would initiate all contact. Any departure from normal procedure would be taken as a sign that he’d fallen into the hands of South Africa’s security forces. And that would mean death.

The bush in front of him rustled and then parted as a tall, gaunt black man cradling an AK-47 stepped out into the open. Oost’s eyes focused on the automatic rifle’s enormous muzzle as it swung slowly toward him.

“You are late, comrade.” The words were spoken in a soft, dry, almost academic tone, but Oost found them more frightening than an angry shout.

He stammered out a reply.

“I’m sorry, Comrade Kotane. The Boer who owns my vineyards made an unexpected visit this morning. I couldn’t leave earlier without arousing suspicion. ”

The other man stared hard at him for what seemed an eternity and then nodded his acceptance of Oost’s excuse. He lowered the AK-47. “Is there any news?”

Oost felt the excitement he’d suppressed earlier bubbling up again.

“Yes! They’ve announced it on the radio. Parliament will definitely adjourn on the twenty-seventh as planned! ”

A humorless smile surfaced and then vanished on the thin man’s face.

“So we are in business. Good. We’ve been waiting too long already. Are there any signs of increased police or Army activity?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the standard patrols.” Oost pulled a sheaf of paper out of his pocket.

“Marta and I have put together this list of their schedules and routes. You shouldn’t have any trouble avoiding them when the time comes. ”

The other man took the papers, stung his rifle over one shoulder, and bent down to pick up the crate filled with food. Then he turned and looked back at Oost.

“You’ve done well so far, Riaan. Keep it up and one day your grandchildren will hail your memory as a hero of the liberation.”

Oost said nothing as the man pushed back through the tangle of brush and vanished. Then he turned and stumbled back down the slope, eager to get back to his wife. A hero of the liberation. The praise would please her as it had him.

Broken Covenant had ten days left to run.

JUNE
25-
UMKHONTO
WE
SIZWE
HEADQUARTERS
,

LUSAKA
,
ZAMBIA

Col. Sese Luthuli was a deeply worried man.

Long silences from his agents inside South Africa weren’t unusual. Even the most urgent messages had to travel circuitously—through intricate networks of cutouts, drop points, and infrequently used special couriers. The ANC’s networks were deliberately designed that way to make life hard for South

Africa’s internal security apparatus. Convoluted, multi link message chains meant fewer suspicious longdistance calls for the police to trace.

Luthuli had always considered the necessary time lag a price well worth paying. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He halfheartedly scanned the newspaper clipping on his

desk again, already knowing that it didn’t contain the information he needed. Only the Sowetan had considered Dr. Nthato Mbeki’s death newsworthy, and then only as another example of the township’s urgent need for stricter traffic control and better street lighting. Even worse, the article hadn’t appeared until four days after Mbeki died. More days had gone by as copies of the paper made their way out of South Africa to

Zambia. And still more time had passed before Unikhonto’s Intelligence

Section cross-referenced Mbeki’s name with its list of active agents.

”

“Tragic Road Accident Takes Teacher’s Life,”

” Luthuli muttered, reading the headline aloud. Had it been a genuine accident? Probably. The

Sowetan said so, and its editors were usually quick to point the finger at suspected government dirty work.

More important was a question the article didn’t answer. When exactly had

Mbeki been killed? Had he passed the abort signal on down the line or not? So far, all efforts to check with the schoolteacher’s contact had proved fruitless. Shortly after Mbeki’s death, the man, a team leader for a highway construction firm, had been sent south into the Natal on an unexpected job. He was still gone, out of touch and effectively as far away as if he’d been sent to the moon.

Luthuli felt cold. What if Mbeki hadn’t passed the abort signal on? What if Broken Covenant was still operational?

He stabbed the intercom button on his desk.

“Tell Major Xuma that I want to see him here right away.”

Xuma, his chief of intelligence, arrived five minutes later.

Luthuli tapped the neatly cut newspaper article with a single finger.

“You’ve seen this?”

The major nodded, his eyes expressionless behind thick, wire-frame glasses.

“Then you realize the disaster we could be facing?”

Again Xuma simply nodded, knowing that his superior’s explosive temper could be triggered by too many meaningless words.

Luthuli’s lips thinned in anger.

“Well, then, what can we do about it?”

The intelligence chief swore silently to himself. He’d al-7

ways loathed being placed in impossible positions. And this was certainly one of the worst he’d ever been in. There simply wasn’t any right way to answer the colonel’s question.

He folded his hands in his lap, unaware that the gesture made him look as though he were praying.

“I’m very much afraid, Colonel, that there isn’t anything we can do-not at this stage.”

Luthuli’s voice was cold and precise.

“You had better explain what you mean by that, Major. I’m not accustomed to my officers openly admitting complete incompetence.” :

Xuma hurriedly shook his head.

“That’s not what I’m saying, sir.

“If—he stressed the word, emphasizing his uncertainty” if our abort signal didn’t get through, there just isn’t time now to send another. Not with the contact routines laid out in the Broken Covenant plan.”

Luthuli knew the younger man was right, though he hated to admit it.

Martin Cosate had been more interested in making sure that his master stroke succeeded than in making sure it could be called off. And Cosate had been especially concerned by the need for secure communications with his chosen strike group. As a result, the fifteen guerrillas who might now be assembled deep in the mountains would respond only to messages sent by specific and tortuously long routes. Any attempts at direct contact from Lusaka would undoubtedly fall on willfully deaf ears.

“Colonel?” The intelligence chief’s cultured voice interrupted Luthuli’s increasingly bleak thoughts. He looked up.

“Personally, sir, I believe it more likely that Mbeki passed our message on before his death. Our records show that he was a dedicated man. I don’t think he would have left his home that night without first completing his mission.”

Luthuli nodded slowly. Xurna’s reading of the situation was optimistic, but not outrageously so. The odds favored the major’s belief that Broken

Covenant had been aborted as ordered. He sat up straighter.

“I hope you’re right. But ask for confirmation anyway. And I want an answer back by the twenty-eighth. ”

Xuma eyed his superior carefully. Luthuli must know that

what he wanted done was impossible. That meant the colonel was already thinking about covering his tracks should something go wildly, incalculably wrong in South Africa’s Hex River Mountains over the next several days. If the abort signal hadn’t gone through, the colonel could truthfully say he’d given his chief of intelligence a direct order to send another message. The blame for any disaster would fall squarely on Xuma’s shoulders.

So be it.

The major saluted sharply, spun round, and left Luthuli’s office at a fast walk. The colonel was a clever bastard, but two could play the blame-shifting game. Xuma had never especially liked the captain in charge of Umkhonto’s clandestine-communications section anyway. The man would make an excellent scapegoat.

Besides, he told himself, the odds really were against anything going seriously wrong. Even if Mbeki hadn’t passed the signal on, South Africa’s security forces were still incredibly efficient and deadly. The men assigned to Broken Covenant weren’t likely to get within twenty kilometers of their target before being caught and killed.

He was wrong.

JUNE
27-
CAPE
TOWN
CENTRAL
RAILWAY
STATION

The seventeen-car Blue Train sat motionless at a special platform, surrounded by a cordon of fully armed paratroops and watchful plainclothes policemen. Within the security cordon, white-coated waiters, immaculately uniformed porters, and grease-stained railway workers scurried from task to task each engrossed in readying the train for its most important trip of the year.

One hundred yards away, Sam Knowles squinted through the lens of his

Minicam, panning slowly from the electric locomotive in front to the baggage car in back. He pursed his lips.

Ian Sheffield saw the worried look on his cameraman’s face.

“Something wrong?”

Knowles shook his head.

“Nothing I can’t fix on the Monster. ”

The Monster was Knowles’s nickname for their in-studio computerized videotape editing machine. It worked by digitizing the images contained on any videotape fed into it. With every blade of grass, face, or brick on the tape reduced to a series of numbers stored in the system’s memory banks, a skilled technician could literally alter the way things looked to a viewer simply by changing the numbers. These hightech imaging systems were ordinarily used for routine editing or to enhance existing pictures by eliminating blurring or distortion. But they could also be used to twist a recorded event beyond recognition. People who weren’t there when a scene was taped could be inserted after the fact. And people who had been there could be neatly removed, erased without a trace. Buildings, mountains, and trees could all be transformed and shifted about at the touch of a single set of computer keys.

Put simply, computer-imaging systems made the old truism that a picture was worth a thousand words as dead as the dinosaurs. Now only the honesty of each individual cameraman, reporter, and technician guaranteed that what people saw on their TV screens bore any resemblance to the truth.

Knowles lowered his camera.

“I’m getting the damnedest kind of yellowish glare off those sleeping-car windows.”

Ian tapped the South African Railways tourist brochure he held in his right hand.

“According to this, that’s the gleam of pure gold you’re getting,

Sam. Pure, unadulterated gold.

“I hope you’re pulling my leg.”

Ian shook his head.

“Not at all. Every one of those windows has a thin layer of gold tacked on to reduce heat and glare inside the train.”

“Jesus Christ.” Knowles didn’t bother hiding his half envious contempt.

“Is there anything they haven’t thrown into that track-traveling luxury liner?”

Ian ran a finger through the list of amenities that were standard items on

South Africa’s Blue Train. Air-conditioned cars. Elegant private baths and showers. Five-star gourmet meals. Ultramodern air springs and extra insulation to ensure

a quiet, smooth fide. Even free champagne before every departure. He smiled cynically. Whoever wrote the brochure must have been running out of superlatives near the end.

He folded the brochure and stuffed it into his jacket’s inside pocket.

“Cheer up, Sam. It gives us a good hook for tomorrow’s otherwise boring story.”

“Such as?”

Ian thought quickly.

“Okay, how’s this for a lead-in?

“With Parliament out of session, South Africa’s president and his top cabinet leaders left Cape