Vortex (83 page)

“And if some should die, so be it. We fight for the survival of our whole nation -not for a few individuals.”

He rose from his chair and stood facing de Wet, grim and utterly implacable.

“I give you three days, General, to select suitable targets for our remaining weapons. If you cannot find them in South Africa, then

I suggest you look elsewhere. If we cannot strike our enemies in the face, then we must cut them off at the knees. ” He moved closer to the situation map and pointed to the port at Maputo, Mozambique’s capital,

and the airfields around Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city.

The men seated around the table turned pale. Maputo’s piers were crowded with Soviet merchant shipping, and Soviet cargo aircraft jammed Bulawayo’s runways. Dropping an atomic bomb on either would mean killing hundreds of

Russians along with thousands or tens of thousands of blacks.

Vorster silenced them with a single stern look.

“We strike again on the thirtieth. Two weapons this time. And four more on the day after that.” He scowled.

“We will hammer these communists until they either flee outside our beloved fatherland or until they are reduced to mere grains of radioactive dust, scattered across our soil.”

NOVEMBER
27-
WDEAWAKE
AIRFIELD
,
ASCENSION
ISLAND

Prof. Esher Levi emerged blinking from the darkened interior of an American

C-141 Starlifter into bright sunshine. He stared for a moment at the barren, alien landscape in front of him before walking stiffly and awkwardly out onto the tarmac. His first impressions from the air had been accurate-Ascension Island was a thirty-four-square-mile piece of hell planted smack in the middle of the vast South Atlantic.

The whole island was a jagged assembly of black and gray, sharp-edged volcanic rock and mounded ash. The only touch of living color came from a small tropical rain forest atop a mountain above the airfield. A murmuring, muted roar echoed everywhere-the constant thunder of long, rolling, gray green South Atlantic waves breaking on a rugged shore.

Then a manmade roar drowned out the sound of the surf.

L.evi turned and watched as another C-141 lumbered in out of the sky, touched down in a puff of black wheel smoke, and rolled on past-all four engines screaming as it braked. The Starlifter turned ponderously off the runway and parked close by its nine companions.

Work crews, a mobile staircase, and fuel trucks were already on their way to meet the transport aircraft. Ascension Island’s sole military asset-Wideawake Airfield’s 11,000foot runway-had again proven its value. The island had served as a vital staging area for the British during their 1982 campaign to retake the Falklands. Now it would play the same role for U.S. Rangers preparing for a raid into South Africa.

”

“Scuse me, Prof. Hot stuff coming through.”

Levi moved aside as a file of heavily laden Rangers started thumping down the stairs onto the tarmac and then across to the hangar apparently selected as temporary quarters for the battalion. Under their distinctive black berets, the soldiers looked more like pack mules than men-each piled high with his personal weapons, extra rifle ammunition, grenades, spare ammo belts for machine guns, mortar and recoilless rifle rounds, canteens, medical supplies, and anything else the battalion quartermasters thought might be needed.

The Rangers, already tired from days and nights of backbreaking practice and drill, were exhausted-worn-out by a grueling ten-hour plane flight in cramped conditions. Looking at their weary faces, Levi began to understand

O’Connell’s and Carrerra’s absolute insistence that their battalions spend at least a full day on Ascension to rest, recuperate, and make final preparations.

The Israeli scientist’s own aching muscles and bruises were a constant reminder of the last two hectic days. The Ranger battalion’s jumpmasters had driven him hard, almost mercilessly, through an accelerated course of classroom instruction and drill-everything except a real parachute drop from a real plane. O’Connell had vetoed this final step because he did not want to risk Levi’s suffering a jump-related injury. Even a sprain would scratch him from the mission.

Levi shuddered. Jumping out of a perfectly sound airplane in broad daylight had sounded bad enough. Jumping out of one into pitch darkness, without any practice, seemed utterly insane.

His teachers hadn’t been the least bit sympathetic.

“You need to know this stuff cold, Mr. Levi,” one hard-bitten sergeant had said, ” ‘cause a nuclear expert who breaks his neck on landing ain’t much of an expert and he ain’t much use. ” Well, that was true enough, he thought wryly. At least the Americans wanted him alive long enough to identify the South African nuclear weapons and to prepare them for the airlift out.

He spotted O’Connell striding purposefully toward the airfield’s small terminal and control tower, keeping pace with the taller, older man beside him. Seemingly agreeing with something the other man said, the

American lieutenant colonel nodded once. His face was strangely blank, as though all his emotions and feelings were being held rigidly in check.

Levi suddenly realized that the taller Ranger officer must be this

Colonel Gener he’d heard so much about-the 75th Ranger’s fire-eating regimental commander.

He shook his head, understanding O’Connell’s apparent constraint.

Although the lieutenant colonel had spent the past week preparing his battalion for this raid, now that they were finally on the way, Gener had shown up with every apparent intention of exercising de facto command.

Levi frowned. The U.S. Army operated under a strange concept of command and control. In Israel, the conduct of an important operation was always left in the hands of the unit commander. It was the best guarantee of victory and efficiency amid the bloody confusion of combat. But it seemed as though some in the American military treated combat command as nothing more than a routine way station on a career path-as a simple itsumd box to be inked in or crossed off and promptly forgotten.

He shrugged halfheartedly. Israel’s armed forces undoubtedly had their own weak spots. Of course, those weren’t quite so likely to get him killed in the next few days. With that cheery thought to keep him company, Levi hoisted his own small bag and walked toward the hangar that would be his home for the next day or so. He had a feeling that steep would be difficult to come by-despite his mind-numbing fafigm.

A deeply tanned man in a lightweight tropical suit came out of the terminal building and moved to intercept him.

“Professor Levi?”

Levi stopped. The other man’s accented English identified him. He answered in Hebrew.

“That’s right.”

“My name’s Eisner. I’m attached to the Washington, D.C.” embassy. I have several routine messages from home to pass on to you. Can we speak privately?”

Routine messages? Levi didn’t buy that for a moment. He’d seen too many other hard-eyed men like this one to be fooled. Diplomats were never in such good shape or so obviously humorless. But what did the Mossad,

Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, want with him? Or perhaps more importantly, what did his country’s spy service expect him to do?

He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like whatever it was.

ABOARD
USS
C4RL
VINSON
, IN
THE
INDIAN
OCEAN

The normal buzz of good-natured banter and friendly insult died away completely as Rear Adm. Andrew Douglas Stewart entered the ready room.

Even aviators knew better than to ignore an admiral Stewart waved them back into their chairs and took his place behind a podium. He scanned the rows of suddenly tense young faces before him.

These men might pretend to be carefree and untroubled, but every one of them had to have a pretty good idea of what was in the wind.

The clues were all around. First, there was the fact that the Vinson and her escorts had been loitering a bare two hundred miles off the South

African coast for nearly two weeks. Second, the carrier’s air group had been run through a series of increasingly intense and realistic exercises over that same period. And finally, all communications with the outside world were being closely monitored and controlled. It all added up to a single inescapable conclusion: Washington was on the edge of committing the Vinson’s aircraft to a real shooting war. A war where one side had already dropped an atomic bomb without any show of regret or remorse.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Stewart focused his attention on the pilots and naval flight officers in the room with him, knowing that video cameras would relay his words and image to the other squadron ready rooms and briefing rooms scattered throughout the

Vinson’s vast hull and superstructure.

“I’ll make this short and sweet.

Your respective squadron commanders and ops officers will go over the details after I’m done.”

He nodded to his chief of staff. The lights began dimming.

“I’m here to brief you on our part in a strike against South Africa’s nuclear capability.”

The room filled with a buzz of conversation, and a waiting aide laid a map overlay on the ready room’s overhead projector. The map showed a series of red lines converging on Pretoria. Most emanated from a tiny dot marking the Vinson’s position, but one line slanted in across all of southern Africa-coming east out of the Atlantic. A tag identified it as the flight path of Air Force transports carrying the two Ranger battalions and elements of the 160th Aviation Regiment.

Brave Fortune was just thirty-four hours away.

HEADQUARTERS
BUNKER
, 61 ST
TRANSVAAL
RIFLES
,
PELINDABA
RESEARCH

COMPLEX

Col. Frans Peiper stood still for a moment, watching the rise and fall of hundreds of picks and shovels as his troops worked frantically to complete their fortifications.

Since its designation as a nuclear research center and weapons storage site, Pelindaba had been surrounded by a barbed wire fence and military guard posts Now it more closely resembled a fortress. Thirty meters inside the barbed wire, slit trenches now circled the entire compound, connecting an array of twenty-two concrete bunkers. Each bunker was large enough to shelter a reinforced rifle squad and sturdy enough to withstand heavy mortar fire. Minefields were being laid on the slopes outside the wire to channel attacking
ANC
guerrillas or Cuban commandos and armored vehicles into previously selected kill zones for the battalion’s recoilless rifles, machine guns, and mortars. Deadly looking armored

fighting vehicles prowled outside the wire-Rookiats of the Pretoria Light

Horse hunting for enemy infiltrators.

At the eastern end of the compound, more barbed wire surrounded a group of five camouflaged mounds-the nuclear weapons storage bunkers that were his main responsibility. A separate slit trench ran from north to south just west of the weapons bunkers, further isolating the storage site from the rest of the Pelindaba complex. Beyond the trench, firing pits for 120mm and 60mm mortars dotted a patch of open ground stretching west to the rock gardens, shade trees, and buildings of the research center.

Shoulder-high earth and sandbag walls provided some protection for the four Cactus
SAM
vehicles parked in and among the rock gardens.

“Our chemical protection gear is arriving, Colonel.”

Peiper turned. His adjutant, Captain van Daalen, pointed to a line of five-ton trucks pulling up to the peacetime battalion-headquarters building.

“Excellent, Captain. Have each company draw its gear as it comes off work detail. And inform all commanders that I plan to hold our first gas-attack drill early this evening.”

Van Daalen saluted and hurried away.

Peiper watched him go, knowing that the order wouldn’t be popular with his men. The gas mask, hood, gauntlets, suit, and boots needed to fully protect a man against attack by poison gas or nerve agents were cumbersome, clumsy, and confining. Even worse, they trapped body heat and quickly became unbearably hot even in cool weather-let alone on a warm spring evening.

He scowled. His soldiers’ complaints and comfort were completely unimportant. In fact, only one thing mattered: fending off the inevitable

Cuban attempt to destroy or seize South Africa’s nuclear stockpile.

Peiper turned on his heel and headed back toward the cool, dimly lit recesses of his command bunker. The Cuban attack could come at almost any time; certainly within days, possibly even within hours. But Castro’s minions were bound to unleash a choking, burning deluge of chemical weapons first weapons against which his troops were now protected.

The Afrikaner colonel smiled wolfishly. When the communists and their kaffir allies came charging in, expecting to find most of his men dead or disabled, they’d be met instead by a hail of small-arms and artillery fire. It would be an easy victory.

He trotted down the steps into his bunker with that cold, cruel smile still on his lips.

NOVEMBER
28-
WDEAWAKE
AIRFIELD
,
ASCENSION
ISLAND

Nearly one thousand men crowded around the low raised platform. Green camouflage paint robbed each man’s face of its individuality, but did nothing to cloak the air of grim expectation permeating the entire hangar.

Each Ranger stood waiting in absolute silence, together with his friends and comrades and yet strangely alone.

Up on the platform, Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell caught a glimpse of movement near the hangar doors. Gener was coming back from the communications center. O’Connell straightened up, feeling the first trickle of cold sweat under his arms. This was it.

“Ah-tench-hut!”

The Rangers snapped to rigid attention as their colonel threaded his way through them and bounded onto the platform.

Gener nodded once to O’Connell, his eyes alight with excitement. Then he turned to face the waiting battalions.