by Joe Buff
"They'll have roadblocks," Ilse said. "And they invented paranoia."
"You're right," Jeffrey said. "It's not about any of us escaping safely. The key is the enemy can't know we were ever here, so they'll believe this thing was internal sabotage."
"Guys," One said. "Cut it out. I'm dying, okay? I can deal with that. It comes with the job sometimes."
"We never leave a man behind," Jeffrey said. "Never."
"It'll be a cremation," SEAL One said. "Yeah, a cremation in place, a nuclear cremation."
Jeffrey looked at One, so young to die and yet so chipper. Tears came to Jeffrey's eyes. This static phase of the mission was turning into one big mood crash for him, hiding out and working on the bomb. Ilse seemed to use her rage, barely slaked, to deal with it. That, and the immediacy of helping treat SEAL One, seemed to keep her from the depression Jeffrey felt come on.
"I can do something useful," One said. "I can guard the bomb after you leave."
"That's true," Jeffrey said. He took One's hand. "It could make the difference … Hey, Shaj, can you rig up some kind of switch? You know, to set off the bomb right away, in case of enemy interference?"
"Not a problem," Clayton said.
"How much time you figure I got left?" One asked Two.
"You'll be alert for long enough."
"Just try not to sneeze or something," Jeffrey said, "and hit the switch by accident before we're out of range."
One laughed, despite the pain. "Bring the chief's body in here. He deserves decent burial too, and I don't want to die alone."
* * *
"Six, Nine," Ilse heard in her helmet. She knew SEAL Nine was the downhill perimeter security guard. "Nine, g'head," Clayton said.
"Trouble, boss. We got company."
"What is it?" Clayton said. Ilse reached for the butt of her pistol. The weapon was cooler than before. "A runner," SEAL Nine said, "some kind of messenger. Must have been sent up 'cause they lost contact in the village."
"Nine, Four," Jeffrey said, "does he have a radio?"
"Affirmative. I can hear it. He's turned it up to monitor the traffic."
Clayton turned to Jeffrey. "We better take him out."
"Let's hope he isn't wearing a life signs monitor alarm," Jeffrey said.
"Yeah," Clayton said. "None of the other soldiers were."
"Nine, Four," Jeffrey said, "take out the runner."
"Four, Nine, understood." There was silence on the circuit, then Ilse heard Nine say "Shit." There was heavy breathing on her headphones, grunting in two different voices, and the sounds of snapping branches.
"Crap," Jeffrey said. He took off out of the bunker with his fighting dagger in his hand and a frightening expression on his face — eagerness.
As Jeffrey topped the steps, Ilse heard a meaty thud over the radio, more grunting, then a gurgling moan. "Nine, Six," Clayton hissed. "Nine, Six, come in." No response.
"Nine, Six. Nine, Six."
Then Ilse heard a shuffling sound on the radio, more thuds and thumps and grunting, a tearing noise, then a drawn-out exhalation that ended in a rattling sigh.
"Four, Six," Clayton called. "Four, Six." Nothing. Ilse sat up anxiously.
"Six, Four," Jeffrey called. Jeffrey sounded winded. Ilse relaxed a little — he was okay.
"Four, Six, g'head," Clayton said.
"Six, Four, runner's been neutralized."
"What about Nine?" Clayton said.
"Nine bought it," Ilse heard Jeffrey say. "The runner slit his throat before I could get to him."
"Did the runner get off a warning?" Clayton said.
"No," Jeffrey said. "We'd have heard it through Nine's open mike."
"We need a plan," Clayton said.
"I'm bringing the runner's radio and paybook," Jeffrey said.
"Eight," Clayton said. "Help Commander Fuller bring in Nine's body and hide the runner, then you take downhill guard."
"What about the bomb?" Eight said. "It's a two-person job to rig it to the flux compression generator, to fire the krytrons."
"I know," Clayton said. "We're running low on manpower here."
"Could I help?" Ilse said.
Clayton looked at her. "I think you need to."
* * *
SEAL One started coughing uncontrollably, grimacing, then reached up for SEAL Two.
"More local. Please. Gimme another shot."
* * *
Ilse peered through the hatch at the foot-wide physics package sitting in the missile. By her own count, from the initiator at the very core to the wires attached to the krytrons, it had a dozen layers. She knew it wasn't really dangerous now, giving off sporadic alpha particles and weak neutrons and soft gamma rays from spontaneous fission — whatever got past the reflector and dense high explosive would be stopped by clothes and skin or was virtually harmless in short doses. Still, just looking at the thing gave her the creeps.
"It's essential we get each connection perfect," Clayton said. "If just one krytron misfires or goes off too soon or late, the implosion wave's distorted. We just scatter U-235 around the bunker, or worse, we crack open the archaea lab without the heat to sterilize it properly."
"What do you want me to do?" Ilse said.
"Watch this little oscilloscope screen. Make sure the peak of the curve hits right at the tick mark here, and its full wave form comes up above this threshold line. That'll mean we have a good solid connection."
"That's so all the signals get there at the same time?"
"Yeah," Clayton said. "And keep your eyes glued to this display window. We're looking for an inductance of one hundred nanohenries and a capacitance no more than one hundred microfarads total. We need a nice square firing pulse, with a rise time under two microseconds. If something's off, you tell me. I'll compensate at my end in the arming gear. That's what this little keyboard's for."
"We have to do this with ninety-two different krytrons?" Ilse said.
"SEAL Eight and I already did a few, but yeah … It'll go faster once we get in rhythm. Don't rush it, Ilse, please. A slipup here would be bad."
* * *
Jeffrey came back to the missile bunker after hiding the runner's body. He'd already cleaned his K-bar and now he wiped blood off the Boer walkie-talkie. "Somebody who speaks Afrikaans needs to monitor this. Here's the dead guy's paybook — you'll know his name and unit."
SEAL Two looked up. "I can do that, sir. Ilse and Lieutenant Clayton are kinda busy now."
"The radio has built-in encryption," Jeffrey said. "That's good — it garbles voices. Also, the atmospherics'll still be bad up here from the EMP box we set off. You, pretend to be the runner. Don't rush your answers. Whisper a translation to me, I'll tell you what to say"
SEAL Two flipped through the paybook. "Okay. I'll let you know as soon as I hear them call this guy. Meantime, I want you to do something for us. SEAL One's BP keeps dropping and he's slightly cyanotic. He needs whole blood. You're the only one here with his type, B positive."
"You want me to stand right here?" Jeffrey said.
"Yeah," the SEAL corpsman said. "Gravity feed should do it. I got two empty one-pint bottles I want to fill from you. Roll up your sleeve."
"These bottles aren't sterile," Jeffrey said.
"Like that really matters," SEAL One said.
"You hungry?" Jeffrey said, bending down to One. "Wanna candy bar?"
"Last meal?" SEAL One said. "Yeah. And more water." Jeffrey rolled down his sleeve just as the runner's unit called in from the village. SEAL Two translated.
Jeffrey put his lips to SEAL Two's ear. "Tell them you're at the Sharks Board and there was some kind of voltage surge. Say they thought they were struck by lightning but that wasn't it. Tell them the missile's fine, everything's fine, and they're cleaning up the mess."
SEAL Two passed that on. A different voice came from the walkie-talkie speaker. SEAL Two whispered, "It's the senior corporal. He says he'll report it to the power company, and they'll probably send a repair cr
ew from Durban in the morning. He says missile control keeps bugging him that we dropped off the line. He wants to talk to the sergeant." Jeffrey made the facial expression for "yikes," trying to think on his feet. He felt groggy from the blood donation. "Okay," he whispered, "tell him the sergeant's in the head, I mean the latrine, having a long slow one."
SEAL Two relayed, and Jeffrey heard the corporal laugh. Then the corporal asked for the lieutenant.
"Tell him to wait one," Jeffrey said. "Then don't hit talk." Jeffrey ran his hand over his face. He stared at the overhead but his mind was blank. Then he glanced at Ilse and got an idea. Jeffrey used his helmet mike. "Seven, Four … Seven, Four."
"G'head, Four."
"Seven, when you cleared the upper level, were there any female staffers?"
"Yeah, a couple."
"Good-looking or ugly?"
"One of each."
"Okay, thanks." Jeffrey turned to Two. "Tell the corporal the lieutenant's otherwise engaged, out in the truck with a lab technician."
Again the corporal laughed. Then he said more in Afrikaans. "He wants me back down there," SEAL Two said.
"Tell him they want you to stay put here, to help beef up the guard, because of the alert, with the voltage surge and everything."
SEAL Two passed that into the walkie-talkie, in fluent Afrikaans of his own. The corporal's answer was long.
"Big problem," Two whispered. "He says that's a good point, strengthening security, something bad could happen between now and dawn. He's rousing the rest of the platoon. They'll come on duty now instead of at daybreak."
"Urn, uh," Jeffrey said, "ask him when they'll get here." Jeffrey felt like he was shitting a brick while he waited for the answer. Just like the alleged sergeant, ha ha.
"They have to shave and eat," Two said, "then walk up for the exercise. Just about an hour, probably."
"Tell him understood."
SEAL Two said something else in Afrikaans and put down the walkie-talkie. "Done."
"Did he sound suspicious?" Jeffrey said.
"Not that I could tell," Two said, "but then, if he was smart, he wouldn't have let on, would he?"
Jeffrey turned to Clayton. "You hear all that, Shaj?"
"Unfortunately."
"We got a deadline," Jeffrey said. "Start the timer now and set it for fifty, repeat five zero, minutes. Then we need to finish up and get out of here." Clayton's eyes widened. "There's no way we'll be back in the minisub by then."
"I know," Jeffrey said. "Work fast. I have to run up to the roof of the Sharks Board, get precise wind speed and direction for the ROEs."
"What, you can't just stick a wet finger outside the bunker?" Jeffrey shook his head. He pulled a handheld anemometer from his pack, then peeled a couple of chocolate bars and wolfed them down. He drank a whole canteen. My last meal? he wondered.
* * *
The rain had almost stopped. The air outside the bunker was so fresh, Jeffrey realized now how much it stank in there. He trotted up the front steps of the Sharks Board. The place was a shambles.
His Kevlar moccasins crunched on the broken glass in the entrance lobby. Farther in was a mix of nasty smells. Tattered blackout curtains flapped and fluttered in the wind, but otherwise there was an eerie silence. The walls were peppered, no, shredded, with holes from bullets and grenade shrapnel and from the blast of satchel charges. Broken ceiling tiles, shattered fluorescent light bulbs, twisted aluminum struts lay everywhere. The concrete facing of structural columns was badly pocked, deep .50-caliber armor-piercing hits, shallow ones from hollow point, and smaller nicks from Boer 7.62 and 5.56 mm full-metal-jacket rounds. Jeffrey stepped on expended brass and stepped around discarded ammo clips.
His feet stuck to the drying blood where the SEAL team's chief had died. Inside the shattered strongpoint leading to the basement stairs, the enemy soldiers' broken bodies were growing cold. What surprised Jeffrey was how much paper was scattered there: orders and records blown from packs and pockets, torn photos and singed scraps of letters from loved ones back home.
Through his IR imagers Jeffrey saw warm spots in the debris. A flare-up now would be a disastrous attention-getter, embers fanned into a conflagration by the strong breeze coming through. Jeffrey decided to give the smoldering wreckage a quick once-over. Three big CO, extinguishers sat on the floor where Ilse had left them neatly in a line, but all were empty. Nearby lay a fire ax, its wooden handle splintered near the tip, probably by a bullet. Jeffrey found another extinguisher with some charge still in it, and he did a hasty overhaul.
He mounted the staircase to the second deck, itself badly pockmarked. Sprawled across the steps near the upper landing lay a body in a lab coat. The whole top of its head was gone. The deck two stairwell door was off its hinges. Jeffrey glanced away as he passed the landing. He'd experienced enough carnage tonight, enough to last a lifetime. He continued toward the roof.
Jeffrey reviewed the ROE standards in his head one final time. The setting was in fact ideal. The rising ground behind the Sharks Board would shield people inland from the flash pulse and the blast wave, while strengthening the effects in the immediate area of the lab. With a surface burst there'd be no Mach stem, that terrible shock front when an airburst merged with its own ground reflection. The Indian community of Phoenix and the black townships of Greater Inanda should be safe except for broken windows, and intel said almost everyone had taped theirs up to keep down flying glass — after all, there was a war on.
The biosafety level five containment was in the part of the basement closest to the missile bunker, and a quick radar scan had verified the intervening ground was soil, not bedrock. There were indeed no hostage encampments protecting the site, and as near as Jeffrey could tell from the team's approach march, SEAL Eight's scouting down the hill, and direction-finding of the signal traffic, Umhlanga Rocks itself was part of the militarized coast defense zone.
Jeffrey's one concern was flash blindness, which could happen even miles from ground zero. The general impairment of vision lasted only seconds or minutes. The insidious problem was focusing of thermal energy on the retina, for anyone looking directly at the early fireball. The image of the mushroom cloud was burned forever into one spot on the victim's field of view. Worse, the retina would be fused to the underlying sclera, creating mechanical stress in the eye. Over months or years the retina could tear and hemorrhage, needing invasive surgery to counter permanent total blindness. Then there were the cataracts. More reason, Jeffrey told himself, to end this damn war soon — minority populations weren't getting adequate health care under New Apartheid. At least with the storm and the strict curfew few civilians would be exposed. Jeffrey walked through one more shattered doorway and surveyed the roof. The feeder horns and pre-amp cans of the microwave dishes were scorched, and the coaxial leads of the whip antennas were melted. The four dead soldiers were gone Jeffrey saw their blood trails on the steps. The SEAL abseil-rope-climbing group had dragged them to the second floor, out of view from the air. Jeffrey felt glad not to see them; he was weary of the endless death and suffering. He pulled himself together.
A South African heavy machine gun on a tripod sat under a canvas tarp on the roof, overlooking the main entrance and the missile bunker. The SEAL chief had wisely left it there, held in reserve. Devastating to troops in the open, it was an extremely long and heavy weapon, stupefyingly noisy, and its cigar-sized rounds could go for miles. It must have been winched up to the parapet recently — it wasn't in any satphotos in the briefing notes. Jeffrey gave prayerful thanks it had stayed under wraps for the boat team's initial assault. The SEALs were almost out of ammo as it was, and against this monster the raiders would've been decimated.
Jeffrey walked to the other end of the roof. He held up his anemometer. The wind was slowing, definitely. It was high time to set off the bomb.
* * *
"Come on, let's go, let's go!" Clayton said.
"We got the Boer arming circuits and the guidance package," SEA
L Eight said.
"I have the captured walkie-talkie," SEAL Two said. "Someone take a sample of the missile fuel," Jeffrey said. "Just grab a chunk."
"I'm all set with the remnants of the lab notes," Ilse said. "And the videocassette."
"Let's get Ilse's friend onto the litter," Jeffrey said. "Put in an airway so he can't choke on his tongue, and hold it in with surgical tape. That'll double as a gag if he comes to." Two and Eight hefted Otto onto the collapsible stretcher. "Gripes," SEAL Eight said, " this guy needs a low-fat diet bad."
"Who is he?" Jeffrey said. "Tell everybody, Ilse. We might have more casualties, we still got a long way to go."
Ilse cleared her throat. "Herr Doktor Professor Baron Otto von Schleiffer and Schaffhausen, late of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Applied Neurobiology. Racist fanatic, sexist pig, Putsch insider. He was close to the South African oceanographic community. He and I didn't get along."
"We should leave the spare bomb detonator and EMP box here," Jeffrey said. "Lighten our load, we'll move faster. With SEAL One as bomb guard we don't have to worry about the stuff being spotted by Boers. It'll all be totally vaporized."
"You're right," Clayton said. "Everybody dump stuff you won't need." The team made a pile of odds and ends, forced-entry tools and voltmeters, climbing ropes and welding gauntlets.
"You're okay with the switch?" Jeffrey said to One.
SEAL One shifted slightly and bit down a grunt of pain. "I hear anybody coming, I flip up the plastic cover and push the big red button twice."
Jeffrey nodded. "That'll fire the flux compression generator that puts the voltage through the krytrons. Don't worry, you won't feel anything … And just in case, the whole setup has an antitamper mechanism. Some joker tries to monkey with it, boom."
"And don't worry about us," Clayton said. "You think you hear someone coming, blow the bomb."
"Hey, look," One said. "When you get back, I want some kind of memorial at Arlington. Maybe some of my atoms'll drift down there from the mushroom cloud and everything. Promise me."
"I promise," Jeffrey said, knowing that it wouldn't really happen. A 4-KT-sized warhead, especially one with characteristics of an underground explosion, created tropospheric fallout — it didn't rise into the stratosphere and hence did not get worldwide distribution. That didn't preclude a memorial stone, of course. Jeffrey put a hand on SEAL One's shoulder. "Is there anybody you want us to take a message to?"