Vortex

  Ian sat up straight in shock, scarcely able to believe that he’d heard

  Vorster right. But the other man’s next words hammered the point home.

  “Very well. I admit that extraordinary measures were used to resolve a dangerous political situation. The previous administration had embarked on a course that could only bring about South Africa’s ruin.”

  Vorster lifted his massive, calloused hand toward the ceiling-as though he were seeking heaven’s approval for his actions. My fellows and I acted as patriots to restore a stable, right-thinking government. Outside the normal constitution, yes. But within the bounds of national need.

  “Our efforts are not ended, and will not be ended, until we can guarantee a safe and prosperous society for every right-thinking citizen of South

  Africa. We will spare no effort to reach that goal.” Vorster glowered into the camera.

  “And if you are not with us, you are against us.”

  He lowered his voice.

  “And finally, to the United States and the other know-nothings who try to tell us what to do and what to think, you can get out of our affairs and stay out-until you accept us on our own terms. If we uttered a mere tenth of the lies and falsehoods about your countries that you’ve uttered about ours, your diplomats would scream in protest. Well, we do not scream, we act. Your ambassadors can all stay home until you are willing to speak reasonably and let us run our own affairs our own way.”

  Vorster’s smile grew smug, unpleasantly near a sneer.

  “Remember, you need us more than we need you. You need our gold, our diamonds, and all the precious metals that keep your industries alive. More than that, you need us to show you what no black has ever achieved-a stable and prosperous bulwark of civilization on the African continent.”

  The camera zeroed in on his stern, implacable face and held the image for what seemed an eternity. Then the picture faded to black before cutting back to the South African Broadcasting Company’s main studio. Even the government’s handpicked anchormen looked shaken by what they’d just heard.

  Ian reached out and snapped the set off. He needed peace and relative quiet to think this thing through. Vorster hadn’t even bothered to try denying his involvement in the Blue Train massacre. Instead, he’d practically thrown down a gauntlet-challenging anyone who dared to pick it up.

  The question was, would anyone dare?

  NOVEMBER 2-DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA

  From the air, Durban was now a city of strange contrasts natural beauty, bustling commerce, and bloody, merciless violence.

  To the northeast, the sun sparkled off the bright blue waters of the Indian

  Ocean stretching unimpeded toward the far horizon. To the northeast and southwest, long foam-flecked waves rolling in from the ocean broke on spires of jagged gray rock just offshore or raced hissing up wide sandy beaches. Closer to the city center, dozens of ships crowded Durban’s deepwater port, South Africa’s largest. Oil tankers, container ships, bulk ore carriers, and rusting tramp steamers-all waiting a turn alongside the harbor’s crane lined marine terminal.

  The violence was all ashore. Durban’s skyscrapers and streets were shrouded by a thick pall of oily black smoke

  hanging over the central city. Flames licked red around the edges of half-demolished buildings and roared high from the wrecked carcasses of bullet-riddled automobiles. Bodies littered the streets, singly in some places, heaped in grotesque piles in others. The flashes of repeated rifle and machinegun fire stabbed from windows and doorways where armed rioters still fought with the police and the Army.

  “Again.” Brig. Franz Diederichs tapped his pilot on the shoulder and made a circling motion with one finger. The tiny Alouette III helicopter banked sharply and began another orbit over a city now transformed into a battleground.

  Diederichs scowled at the smoke and flame below. He’d been taken by surprise and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. His networks of informers and spies had warned of increasing unrest among the city’s predominantly Indian population but nothing had prepared him for the sudden onset of outright rebellion and armed resistance.

  In the first half hour of the revolt, Durban’s palm tree lined City Hall, its massive, barricaded police headquarters, and the SADF’s fortified central armory had all been attacked by rifle-and pistol-armed groups of

  Zulus and Indians. That strange alliance was troubling in and of itself. In ordinary times, Natal’s Zulu and Indian populations feared and hated each other almost more than they did the ruling white minority. Diederichs grinned sourly. If nothing else, at least his bungling political masters had managed to unite all the separate factions opposed to them!

  The Alouette straightened out of its bank, bringing the burning city back into full view. The sight wiped Diederichs’s twisted grin off his narrow face. Most of the rebels had been driven off after a few minutes of fierce fighting, but not before both sides had suffered heavy losses. For several hours since, his men had struggled to regain control of a city seemingly gone mad.

  Unarmed women and children had thrown themselves in front of armored riot cars and APCs-blocking main roads and alleys alike until blasted out of the way. As troops on foot tried to bypass those human roadblocks, snipers hidden in office buildings, churches, and storefronts picked them off one by one, imposing delay and triggering panicked bursts of indiscriminate automatic weapons fire that only consumed needed ammunition and killed more civilians.

  Resistance was finally beginning to fade-broken by superior firepower, training, and Diederichs’s willingness to order the slaughter of all who got in his way. Still, even his most optimistic estimates showed that it would be several days before he had all of Durban’s districts and suburbs firmly in hand.

  Diederichs was thrown against his seat belt as the Alouette, caught in a sudden updraft of superheated air, bucked skyward and then fell toward the water like a rock before the pilot regained control. He glared left through the canopy to where sheets of orange-red flame more than a hundred meters high marked the site of one of the day’s worst human and economic disasters-the destruction of the Shell Oil refinery’s main tank farm.

  Early in the fighting, stray cannon shells and mortar rounds had slammed into several of the storage tanks-igniting a conflagration that had already consumed at least fifty lives and precious oil worth tens of millions of rands. Hours later, the fire still raged out of control, kept back from the refinery only by a series of massive earthen berms and the heroic efforts of virtually every surviving firefighter left in Durban.

  Diederichs stared at the manmade inferno roiling below, all too conscious of how narrowly he had escaped total disaster. The Shell facility alone supplied nearly 40 percent of South Africa’s refined petroleum products-fuel oil, petrol, and diesel. The oil destroyed in storage could be replaced in days. But the refinery itself was essentially irreplaceable.

  And no government-especially not one headed by Karl Vorster -would have looked with favor on anyone even remotely connected with its loss. This rebellion was bad enough.

  He shifted his gaze toward the city center. His best troops were down there, fighting their way from house to house through the heart of Durban’s

  Indian business district. He spotted more smoke rising from stores and shops either set aflame by the rebels or demolished by armored-car cannon fire.

  One enormous pillar of smoke stained the sky above a shattered pile of white stone.

  Diederichs’s lip curled in disgust. The Great Mosque of Grey Street was said to have been the largest Islamic religious site in southern Africa.

  The Moslems among South Africa’s Indian minority had built it with their own money and hard labor over long years. Well, he and his troops had shown the koefietjies-the little coolies-how quickly and how easily Afrikaner explosive shells could knock it down. Hundreds of dead or dying men, women, and children lay sprawled among the mosque’s shell-torn arched passageways and collapsed sanctuary.

  Brig. Franz Diederichs
nodded to himself, pleased by the sight of the carnage. Durban’s mongrel population of blacks and coolies had surprised him once. They would not do so again. He’d see to it that they were too busy counting their dead to trouble South Africa’s peace for a generation or more.

  Rifle and machinegun fire continued to rattle across Durban’s corpse-strewn streets all through the night.

  NOVEMBER 4-NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL MEETING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  A cold, driving rain soaked the capital’s parks and public buildings, puddling on oil-slick streets and knocking dead and dying leaves off the trees onto the pavement. One by one, the city’s streetlamps flickered on-triggered by simpleminded sensors that believed the dull-gray half-light must signal the approach of night.

  In the Situation Room, two stories below the White House grounds, a shift from pitchers of iced lemonade to hot coffee marked the only concession made to Washington’s worsening weather. There were differences, though. The

  Situation Room might remain untouched by the passing seasons, but it did reflect the changing world scene. On one wall, a map of sub Saharan Africa had replaced that of the Soviet Union. And the faces of the men and women seated around the room’s single table were as gloomy as the weather above.

  The sardonic amusement generated by listening to a replay of Vorster’s rabid speech had died quickly after the secretary of commerce’s terse reminder that South Africa’s president might well be as mad as a hatter, but his policies were still wreaking havoc on the economies of the world’s industrialized nations.

  The shadows and new lines on Hamilton Reid’s handsome face showed his fatigue and concern.

  “Strategic minerals prices are rising even faster than we expected.” He shook his head wearily.

  “Frankly, I think it’s likely we’ll see the cost of chromium, platinum, and the others tripling by the end of the month “

  Christ. Vice President James Malcolm Forrester forced himself to nod expressionlessly as others around the table showed their dismay. All of those minerals were essential to a wide range of industries, and the drastically higher prices being paid for them meant a surge in inflation and interest rates around the world. The fact that it had been predicted earlier was no comfort. It still spelled disaster for the nation’s economy.

  Edward Hurley leaned back, the Situation Room’s overhead lighting momentarily reflected in the thick lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses.

  “It’s only going to get worse, Mr. Vice President. We’ve all seen the latest intercepts and smuggled video footage. South Africa’s falling apart faster than anyone ever dreamed it possibly could.” He shrugged.

  “Vorster seems to be on the verge of losing all control over the country’s major ports. The equation’s pretty simple-no ports means no exports. And no minerals exports coming out of South Africa means panic-buying around the world as companies and countries scramble to make up the difference elsewhere. “

  Forrester nodded and looked toward the paunchy, whitehaired man sitting uneasily at the opposite end of the table.

  “Can you cast any further light on all of this, Chris?”

  Christopher Nicholson, director of the CIA, shook his head

  reluctantly-chagrined at being caught out in front of his peers. His subordinates were already taking bets about which of their colleagues’ heads would roll because of the fiasco.

  “I’m afraid all my data has been overtaken by events, Mr. Vice President. My people had been trying to confirm the Blue Train massacre story aired by this reporter, but Vorster told the whole world last week that he did it and he’s not sorry. “

  The CIA director paused briefly and then passed two documents down the table to Forrester.

  “Other than that, we have an updated list of arms shipments to both sides in the Namibian war, and a bio of Sheffield, the reporter who actually broke the story.” Nicholson’s embarrassed tone made it clear that he considered the information less than useful.

  Forrester sat back, idly scanning the papers, then half-threw them down.

  “Any further word on this Sheffield character?”

  Nicholson shook his head again.

  “I’m afraid not. We don’t think the South

  Africans have him in custody, because they’re still maintaining a round-the-clock surveillance on our embassy in Pretoria, Based on that, we think he’s still hiding out somewhere in Johannesburg. “

  “Any chance of helping him get out of the country?”

  Nicholson opened his mouth, but Hurley beat him to the punch.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mr. Vice President.” The short, bearded assistant secretary of state tapped his pen lightly against his glasses, thinking aloud.

  “Vorster’s security boys have our intelligence assets inside South Africa pretty closely watched. If they spot us making a move toward Sheffield, they’d be bound to use that to bolster some kind of claim that he’s nothing more than an American spy “

  “So you’re proposing that we just leave this guy dangling out there all alone?”

  Hurley nodded somberly.

  “I don’t see what else we can do, sir. We’re not likely to be able to help him, and even the attempt to find him could draw South African security forces to his real location.” He paused.

  “Wherever that is.”

  “Very well.” Forrester looked down at his hands, feeling suddenly tired and a lot older than his years. As usual, Hurley reasoning was impeccable, but that didn’t make the decision any more palatable.

  Well, so be it. Even though the buck ultimately stopped with the

  President, a lot of the spare change landed on his own desk. Making unpalatable decisions went with the territory. Forrester smiled inwardly, remembering his relatively carefree days in the U.S. Senate. Only congressmen had the luxury of speaking and acting out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

  In the meantime, the President expected concrete recommendations from this NSC session and he expected them soon. Forrester looked up, encompassing the entire group in one sweep of his eyes.

  “Okay. Let’s move on to the broader problem: just what the hell are we going to do about this mess?”

  He was answered by silence.

  The Vice President frowned. Perhaps it was time for a small prod.

  “Come on, folks. The American people aren’t paying us to sit around on our behinds.” He pointed toward the map.

  “Now we know what’s happening in

  South Africa is going to hurt us and hurt us badly. So what can we do about it? Ed?”

  Hurley fiddled with his glasses, polished them quickly, and then slipped them back on his nose-plainly stalling for time. Finally, he shrugged.

  “Our people at State could draft a statement for the President’s signature demanding that Vorster resign and schedule new elections under their constitution.”

  Forrester hid his disappointment. He’d expected something more direct and forceful from Hurley. Still, the suggestion was worth considering as a first step.

  “Vorster will simply ignore it,” Hamilton Reid interjected.

  “Of course he will!” Hurley shot back.

  “But we need to tell the world just where we stand before we go any further.”

  That was true, Forrester thought. A clearly worded call for Vorster’s resignation would also help take some of the political heat off the administration. Even more importantly, it would commit the U.S.

  government to finding some way to pressure Vorster out of power. He said as much to the group.

  Reid persisted, “Maybe so, but how much can we really

  do? Directly interfering in the internal affairs of a legitimate government…” The secretary of commerce paused, realization dawning on his face.

  “My God, they aren’t a legitimate government. They grabbed power illegally!”

  Nicholson continued the thought.

  “And Vorster was kind enough to tell everyone that on worldwide t
elevision.” He turned to Forrester.

  “Mr. Vice

  President, I move that we recommend that the President withdraw our recognition of South Africa’s government until voters there have elected new leaders according to their own somewhat lopsided constitution. “

  Forrester felt a little life returning to the group and smiled slightly.

  “We may reword the last bit of that, but I agree that we should explicitly label Vorster’s government illegal and break off our relations with it.”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “But let’s face hard facts. We all know that Vorster won’t capitulate or hand over power simply because we say he should. In fact, we may just be giving him more propaganda ammunition for the home folks. What the President needs to know is this exactly what can we do to push the son of a bitch out of office?”

  The secretary of commerce raised a hesitant hand.

  “I still think South

  Africa’s economy offers the best avenue for attacking him. If enough of his white supporters see their livelihoods and businesses going down the drain, they’ll try to pull the plug on Vorster themselves.” Reid grimaced.

  “But conventional sanctions take a long time to work. And anyway, I’m not sure we can do anything that would wreck South Africa’s economy faster than Vorster’s own Namibian war and crazy security crackdowns.”

  Forrester frowned.

  “What about using a wider range of measures?”

  “How wide?” asked Reid. Other heads around the table nodded, agreeing with the commerce secretary’s push for a clearer definition. Few people were willing to commit themselves to any concrete recommendation without some firmer indication of the President’s intentions.

  Fair enough. It was time to drop a small bombshell, Forrester thought.

  “The President has authorized us to consider anything short of open war.

  “

  A deep bass baritone from near the end of the table cut through the stunned silence.

  “Then it’s a blockade.”

  Forrester looked at the tall, lantern-jawed man in an Air Force uniform.