Vortex

by Larry Bond

  Fortune, and Carrerra, the 2/75this CO, was a veteran Ranger-someone

  Gener had worked with for years. So naturally, the colonel wanted to be where he was likely to be needed most.

  O’Connell frowned, irritated with himself for having wasted even a second of precious time worrying about something he couldn’t control. He looked up.

  “Round up the guys, Pete. I want to see all company commanders here at thirteen hundred hours. And tell Professor Levi I’d like to talk to him-now. “

  Prof. Esher Levi eyed the short, dark-haired American officer warily. In the two days since he’d arrived at Hunter, he’d met O’Connell only briefly-at meals and once after a rigorous session with the Rangers he was training to handle South Africa’s nuclear weapons. And each time, he’d sensed two conflicting emotions vying with each other inside the

  American officer: gratitude for Levi’s help and deep outrage at the fact that Israel’s cooperation with South Africa made it necessary for his men to risk their lives in the first place. It made for a somewhat complicated working relationship.

  “You wanted to see me, Colonel?”

  “Yeah. For two reasons.” O’Connell pushed an enhanced satellite photo across his desk and watched as Levi picked it up. The photo showed a squat, square building in the center of Pelindaba’s scientific complex.

  “Recognize that?”

  Levi nodded. He’d spent two years of his life in and around Pelindaba’s centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant-the key component of South Africa’s top-secret nuclear weapons program.

  Only slightly more than seven-tenths of one percent of raw uranium ore is actually U-235-the uranium isotope needed for bomb-making. The other ninety-nine-odd percent is U238, an almost identical isotope. Separating the two to produce enriched, weapons-grade uranium is an extraordinarily difficult, costly, and time-consuming process. And only the fact that

  U-235 weighs slightly less than U-238 makes it possible at all.

  In centrifuge enrichment, uranium hexafluoride-a gaseous combination of natural uranium and fluorine-is whirled round and round at high speed inside a tall, thin centrifuge. A small fraction of the slightly heavier

  U-238 is thrown to the outside of the centrifuge and can be removed, leaving behind gas with a slightly higher concentration of U-235. The process is repeated over and over and over again until more than ninety percent of the remaining uranium is U-235.

  Levi smiled to himself. In many ways, he thought, uranium enrichment closely resembled the fabled infinite series of monkeys pounding away on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of

  William Shakespeare. Obtaining usable quantities of bomb-grade material required a great many machines working at high speed for a very long time.

  He scanned the photo of Pelindaba’s enrichment plant again, marveling at the technical achievement the picture represented. Despite being taken by an American satellite orbiting several hundred miles above the earth’s atmosphere, it looked as though it had been snapped only a few feet off the ground. Details of the facility’s heavily guarded doorways and rooftop air-conditioning system were plainly visible. Nevertheless, the shot of the plant’s square, windowless exterior revealed nothing of its inner complexity.

  Like an iceberg, most of the South African uranium enrichment plant was below the surface-a design feature that made it easier to maintain a constant temperature inside. A central cascade hall housed more than twenty thousand centrifuges-each only thirty centimeters wide and seven meters high-an-anged and mounted in rows and connected to form ninety distinct enrichment stages. Tens of kilometers of small-bore piping ran through the plant-feeding in fresh uranium hexafluoride, carrying off

  U-238 waste, and moving batches of ever more enriched uranium from stage to stage.

  Levi passed the photo back to O’Connell.

  “You have sow question about the facility, Colonel?”

  “Not exactly.” The American frowned.

  “I need a quick, efficient way to destroy the damned place.”

  Levi wasn’t surprised. It was a logical step. Seizing South

  Africa’s nuclear stockpile without wrecking its uranium enrichment plant made little long-term sense. Why go to a lot of trouble to take a few bullets away while leaving the whole ammunition factory behind?

  Levi steepled long, graceful hands-hands his ex-wife had thought more appropriate for a surgeon than a nuclear physicist. It was an intriguing problem. What was the best way to wreck thoroughly Pelindaba’s enrichment plant? Placing conventional demolitions meant capturing the facility itself and then spending a fair amount of time wiring a large number of charges together. You’d need a lot of explosive power to destroy everything.

  Power. That might be it. Levi sat up straighter, a series of half-formed ideas and concepts floating through his brain. He looked across at

  O’Connell.

  “There could be a relatively simple way to do such a thing,

  Colonel.” His fingers beat a quick, distracted beat on the desk.

  “However,

  I will need a little time to work out all the details.”

  O’Connell nodded briskly.

  “Good. Because a little time is all we’ve got.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Which brings me to my second reason for wanting to see you. Can you get Lieutenant Vaughn’s special weapons team ready to go by the twenty-ninth?”

  “Impossible.” Levi shook his head decisively.

  “Your Rangers are good students, Colonel, but even they cannot learn everything they will need to know in anything less than a week.”

  “I see.” The American officer sounded disappointed, but not particularly surprised. He glanced down at a manila folder in front of him. Levi saw a small tag that bore his name.

  “I understand you’re an Israeli Defense Force reservist, Professor.

  “That’s correct. Just like any other adult male in my country.” Levi looked curiously at the folder. Had Jerusalem given the Americans his whole personnel record?

  “Paratrooper?”

  Levi smiled and shook his head.

  “Nothing so glamorous, Colonel. As a senior scientist, I now have an exemption from active duty, but I wasn’t quite so fortunate as a young student.

  Consequently, I spent several long months as a lowly infantryman. Why do you ask?”

  O’Connell slid a telex across the desk.

  “Because your government’s called you back to the colors, Professor. As of six hundred hours tomorrow, you’re to consider yourself attached to my battalion in a military capacity.”

  Levi stared at the message form for several seconds.

  “But why? I don’t understand.”

  Now it was O’Connell’s turn to smile.

  “It’s pretty simple, Private Levi.

  Washington’s changed the timetable. We’re jumping into Pelindaba on the twenty-ninth-a week ahead of schedule. And I need a special weapons team led by an expert. Unfortunately, you’ve just con finned that my troopers won’t be ready by then. So you’re going to be my expert.”

  Levi felt his mouth drop open and stay open.

  Visibly amused, the American officer nodded briskly and stuck out his hand.

  “Welcome to the Rangers, Professor.” His thin smile turned into a wide grin.

  “You’re just lucky that lea ming how to jump out of airplanes isn’t quite as complicated as lea ming how to assemble and disassemble Abombs. “

  NOVEMBER 26-STATE SECURITY COUNCIL CHAMBER, PRETORIA

  Karl Vorster glared at the ashen-faced South African Air Force officer standing at attention before him.

  “I am not interested in listening to your meaningless technical babble, General! I want to know when you can be ready to attack again! Nothing else, understand?”

  The officer drew a quick, shaky breath and tried to explain.

  “The planes and weapons themselves can be readied in a matter of hours,
Mr.

  President. But target selection isn’t so simple a matter.”

  Vorster’s eyes seemed to flash fire and he turned slowly red, working himself into a towering rage.

  Whitehaired Gen. Adriaan de Wet recognized the danger signs and interceded.

  “What General Roefs is trying to say,

  Mr. President, is that the Cubans are taking steps to make it impossible to use another nuclear weapon on them.”

  “What steps?” Vorster’s voice was dangerously calm.

  “The remaining fighting units are staying as close as possible to our own defending forces. And their support units stay just as close to captured towns filled with our own civilians. ” -SoT I

  De Wet took great care to control his own temper. Three of the several empty chairs in the council chamber had belonged to men who’d angered

  Vorster at the wrong moment.

  “As things are, Mr. President, we cannot strike the communists without killing hundreds or thousands of our own folk in the same instant. We can gain no military advantage under these conditions.”

  Vorster signaled his understanding with a curt nod and sat brooding at the end of the table. From time to time he glanced up at the situation maps hung at one end of the room, a sour frown fixed on his face.

  “Even if it were possible, we cannot use another such weapon!” Tiny, wasp-wasted Fredrik Pienaar, the minister of information, lifted a haunted face. He’d seen pictures showing the results of Cuba’s nerve-gas attack.

  “Castro would only retaliate… perhaps against our cities this time.

  “

  Propaganda and boastful proclamations of imminent victory were proving no match for hard reality.

  Vorster snorted.

  “What of it? Let the communists spray their poisons on cities full of kaffirs, coolies, and rooinek traitors! Our people are spread across the veld, made safe by distance and dispersion.” He shrugged.

  “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.