by Wilbur Smith
‘How does that feel?’ he asked, and she blinked again.
‘You have a magic touch. That’s much better, thank you.’ And she kissed him with wet and open lips.
Aaron shuddered with shock, then recovered swiftly and seized her round the waist. She pressed her hips forward and let him explore the inside of her mouth with his tongue for a few seconds. Then the moment she felt the flare of his loins she broke away.
‘I’ll race you back to the stables.’ She laughed her husky sexy laugh at him and went up into the saddle with a lithe bound. The gelding was no match for her chestnut mare and, besides, she had two hundred yards’ start.
Over the next three days, she made Aaron Friedman’s life an exquisite torment. She touched his thigh under the dinner-table. She let him have a good grope while they were playing water polo in the swimming-pool that was fed directly from the spring. Innocently she adjusted her bikini top in front of him while they lay on the lawn and he read Shelley to her. When he helped her up into the back of the hunting Land-rover she gave him a glimpse of the transparent Janet Reger panties that she had donned for the occasion. When they danced on the veranda, she rotated and oscillated her hips in lewd and lazy circles. Trapped between them was something that felt like the handle of a cricket bat.
On the night before he left Dragon’s Fountain to fly back to the Transvaal with Garry, she allowed him to see her up to her room and say goodnight to her in the corridor outside the door of her suite. Without breaking the kiss he manoeuvred her until her back was pressed firmly against the wall and her skirt was up around her waist. Once he hit his stride he was really rather masterful.
Isabella liked that and soon found she was almost as breathless as he was. She didn’t really want him to stop. Her first impression had been intuitive; with those fingers he should have been a concert pianist, his touch was light and artistic. Unwittingly she found herself on the very threshold.
‘Won’t you leave your door unlocked tonight?’ he whispered into her ear. With an effort she roused herself from a trance of lust and pushed him away.
‘Are you crazy?’ she whispered back, smoothing down her skirt with trembling fingers. ‘The house is crawling with my family – my father, my brother, my grandmother, my nanny.’
‘Yes, I’m going crazy – you’re driving me mad. I love you. I want you. It’s torture, Bella. I can’t go on like this.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Me, too. I’ll come up to Johannesburg.’
‘When? Oh, tell me when, my darling.’
‘I’ll telephone you. Leave me your number.’
Isabella was serving on the Senate committee of inquiry into civil service pensions. She and the two other members of the committee were taking evidence in the Transvaal the following month. She drove up to Johannesburg in the Porsche. She stayed with Garry and Holly in their lovely new home in Sandton and telephoned Aaron at the Pelindaba Institute the morning she arrived.
She drove out to fetch him, and they dined at a chic little restaurant. Over the crayfish cocktails she sounded him out discreetly about his work at the nuclear research institute.
‘Oh, it’s all terribly boring really. Anti-particles and quarks.’ He was genially evasive. ‘Did you know that the name originated from a James Joyce quotation, “Three Quarks for Muster Mark”, and should be pronounced “Quart”?’
‘How fascinating.’ She touched his thigh under the table, and he seized her hand. ‘What you do must be very hard,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ He moved her fingers a few inches higher. ‘It is, rather.’
‘I see what you mean.’ She widened her eyes. ‘Do you really want to go dancing after dinner?’
‘We could go back to my place for coffee.’
‘I’m not all that hungry. The crayfish was very filling. Let’s skip the second course,’ she suggested.
‘Waiter. The bill, please.’
Aaron had a flat in the apartment-block in the residential compound of the institute. Although the security was not nearly so strict as in the main research and reactor area of the facility, Aaron was obliged to show his pass at the gate and Isabella had to go with him into the security office to sign the visitor’s book and fill in all her particulars, including telephone number and residential address. The guard looked knowing and smug as he issued her a visitor’s pass.
She had been much too long without love, and Aaron was an immensely satisfying lover. At first he was gentle and patient. Then as her passion mounted under his lips and cunning fingers, he became forceful and demanding. He pushed her to the edge half a dozen times and then held her back at the very brink until she screamed with exquisite frustration.
When at last she plunged over the top he went with her, and let her down softly on the other side. He held her and caressed her and murmured flatteries until she glowed with contentment and asked with a happy little sigh: ‘What is your birth-sign?’
‘Scorpio.’
‘Ah, yes – Scorpios are always wonderful lovers. What date?’
‘November the seventh.’
In the morning they made breakfast together, scrambled eggs and laughter. When she saw him off to work at the door of the flat, she was dressed in one of his pyjama-tops with the sleeves rolled up and the shirt trailing to her knees.
‘I’ll sort things out with the guard at the main gate – you don’t have to leave until you are ready.’ He kissed her. ‘In fact, if you were still here at lunchtime, I wouldn’t mind a bit.’
‘No chance.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve got work to do today.’
As soon as he was gone she double-latched the door. The safe was in his study. She had looked for it as soon as she entered the flat the previous evening. There had been no attempt to conceal it behind panelling. It stood four square beside his desk. It was a heavy expensive jeweller’s-quality Chubb with a six-numeral combination lock.
She sat cross-legged in front of it.
‘November the seventh,’ she mumbled, ‘and he’s about forty-three or forty-four years old. That makes it 1931 or 1932.’
She got it on the fourth try. Aaron hadn’t even been as cunning as Shasa, who had at least inverted his birthdate.
‘Why are so many truly brilliant men such naïve idiots?’ she wondered. Before she swung the thick steel door open, she ran her finger around the door-seal. There was a tiny scrap of Sellotape across one hinge. ‘Not such an idiot.’
Aaron obviously liked working at home. The safe was neatly packed with files, most of them the familiar Armscor green.
From the day that Red Rose had been given this assignment at Madrid Airport, Isabella had begun a study of nuclear weapons and their development.
She had stopped over for two extra days in London and spent them in the reading room at the British Museum. She still had her card from her student days. She had requested and read every book that was listed under the subject in the library catalogue and filled two notebooks with her scribbles. For a lay person, she was now exceptionally well versed in the mysteries of the most dreadful process that man’s infernal intelligence had yet devised.
The green Armscor file on top of the pile was stamped with the highest security-clearance. The copies were limited to eight, of which this was number four. The eight names with clearance to the files were listed on the cover and included the Minister of Defence and the commander-in-chief of the defence forces, her father as chairman of Armscor, Professor A. Friedman and four others who, judging by their scientific qualifications, were all scientists. One of the names she recognized as the head electrical engineer at Armscor who was often a guest at Weltevreden. No wonder her father had never allowed her to see one of these files.
The code-name on the green cover was ‘Project Skylight’. She lifted it out, careful not to disturb anything else in the safe. She opened the file and began to scan the contents. While she had been assembling material for her thesis, she had taught herself the technique of speed reading, and now she turned the pages a
t a steady tempo.
The vast bulk of the material was so technical as to be utterly meaningless to her, even with the benefit of all her study. But she understood sufficient of it to realize that this was a series of reports on the progress being made at Pelindaba in the process of massively enriching the common uranium isotope, Uranium 238, with the highly fissionable Uranium 235. She knew that this was the basic step in the production of nuclear-fission weapons.
The reports were filed in chronological order, and before she reached the last page she realized that success had been achieved almost three years previously and that sufficient Uranium 235 had already been manufactured for the production of approximately 200 fissionable explosive devices with a yield of up to fifty kilotons. Much of this seemed to have been exported to Israel in return for technical assistance with the manufacture of the uranium. She blinked as she digested that information. At twenty kilotons the Hiroshima bomb had been less than half as powerful as one of these weapons.
She laid the file aside and reached for the next. She was at pains to note the exact order and position of each file in the safe, so that she could replace them without arousing suspicion that they had been tampered with. She read on. The main object of Project Skylight was the development of a series of tactical nuclear warheads of varying power and application, suitable for delivery not only by aircraft but also by ground artillery.
She knew that Armscor was already building a 155-millimetre howitzer designated G5 which would be capable of firing a 47-kilo shell with an 11-kilo payload and a maximum sea level range of 39 kilometres. This would, she realized, make an ideal delivery system for a nuclear warhead. The report gave high priority to developing a nuclear artillery round for the G5.
The basic principles of the nuclear weapon were common knowledge. They consisted of assembling two subcritical masses of fissionable enriched uranium. One was a female charge with a vaginal recess. The second, male, charge was propelled by a conventional explosive to implode into the female recess with such velocity as instantly to render the entire mass supercritical and set off the fission reaction.
However, there were many technical pitfalls and obstacles to the actual manufacture of a viable device, particularly in the making of a warhead that weighed less than eleven kilos and was able to be contained in the casing of a 155-millimetre artillery round.
Isabella raced through the series of reports and working papers with a sense of rising excitement. She felt a strange proprietorial pride in the ingenuity and dedication of the development team. A dozen times she recognized her father’s touch and influence as she read how each pitfall had been circumvented and the whole massive project gathered momentum and rolled towards its climax.
The last report in the file was dated only five days previously. She read it quickly, and then read it again.
The first South African atomic bomb would be tested in a little less than two months from today.
‘But where?’ she whispered desperately, and the next file she opened gave her the answer to that question.
She replaced the files in their exact order and remembered to stick the scrap of Sellotape over the hinge and to reset the combination of the lock in the same sequence she had found it.
Two years’ study and deliberation had gone into choosing the site for the test. The prime consideration had been that of contamination by radioactive fallout.
South Africa maintained a weather station at Gough Island in the Antarctic. They had considered an Antarctic site, but had swiftly rejected that idea. Not only would contamination be difficult to control, but also detection before or after the test would be a foregone conclusion. There were too many others, notably the Australians, who were interested in that bleak and beautiful continent at the foot of the world.
For security, then, the test must be conducted on national soil or within South African air-space. The idea of an aerial test was soon abandoned. Again, detection would be a serious threat and the risk of contamination from fallout would be suicidal.
It had come down at the end to an underground test. The South African gold mines are the deepest underground workings in the world. For sixty years the South Africans have been the leaders in deep-mining techniques, and associated with the mines is the art and science of deep drilling.
Courtney Enterprises owned Orion Explorations, a specialist drilling company. The gnarled old magicians at Orion were able to sink a borehole two miles below the surface of the earth and bring up cores of rock from that depth. They could drive a straight hole or incline it at any angle they chose, or they could go straight down a mile and a half and then kick the bit off at an angle of forty-five degrees.
It was this incredible skill that filled Shasa Courtney with a sense of awe and deep respect as he stood at the test site in the middle of a bright sunlit day and looked around him at the gargantuan machines that between them comprised the drilling rig.
The entire rig was self-propelled. One truck the size of a modern fire-engine carried the power plant. It was a diesel engine that could have driven an ocean liner. Another truck housed the control-room and electronic monitoring equipment. A third incorporated the actual drill and baseplate for the shot-hole. A fourth was the hydraulic lift and crane for the steel bore-rods.
The drill site was surrounded by a community of residential caravans and supply-trucks. The rods were piled in a storage area many acres in extent. At night the entire area was lit by the brutal blue-white glare of the arc lamps, for the work continued around the clock. When completed, the hole would have cost almost three hundred thousand US dollars to sink.
Shasa lifted his hat and wiped his brow with his forearm. It was hot.
This was the fringe of the Kalahari desert, which the little yellow Bushmen call ‘The Great Dry Place’.
The low undulating red dunes rolled like the waves of a turbulent ocean into the monotonous distance. The desert grasses were sparse and silver dry. In the troughs between the dunes stood isolated desert camel-thorn trees. The foliage was dark green, and the bark was rough as a crocodile’s back. In the nearest tree a colony of social weavers had built their communal nest. Hundreds of pairs of the drab little brown birds had combined their labours. The result was a shapeless edifice the size of a haystack that dwarfed the tall thorn tree which supported it. Each pair of birds occupied a separate chamber in the nest and helped to keep the whole structure in good repair the year round. One nest near Upington on the Orange river had been continuously occupied by successive generations of weavers for over a hundred years.
This district was a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Courtney Mineral Exploration Company owned the 150,000-acre concession on which the drilling rig now stood. The entire property was posted and fenced. There were guards at every access-point and gate. Nobody outside the company would ever see this encampment – and if they did . . . well, it was simply another mineral-exploration drill in progress.
Shasa glanced up at the sky. There was not a single cloud to sully the high, achingly blue bowl. This section of the Kalahari was a restricted military zone and overflight by either commercial or private aircraft was forbidden. It was often used for military exercises by the artillery and tank school based at Kimberley only a few hundred miles to the south.
Still Shasa worried. They were at D minus eight. The hole should be completed by the weekend. On Saturday evening the heavily guarded convoy would leave Pelindaba to arrive on Sunday at noon. It would bring the team of scientists and the bomb.
The test bomb would be positioned in the hole by Monday evening. The Minister of Defence and General Malan would fly up from Cape Town on D minus one.
He shook his head. ‘It’s all going just beautifully,’ he assured himself, and climbed the steel steps into the mobile control room.
The chief drilling engineer had worked for Orion for twelve years. He rose from his seat and offered Shasa a broad callused hand.
‘How is it going, Mick?’
‘Bak gat, Mr
Courtney!’ The driller used a coarse Afrikaans expression of ultimate approbation. ‘We hit the three-thousand-metre mark at nine this morning.’
He indicated the plot on the display-screen. It graphically illustrated the dog-leg in the line of the hole which would help to contain the blast.
‘Don’t let me bother you.’ Shasa took the seat beside the engineer. ‘Get on with it, man.’
Mick turned his full attention back to the control-console.
Shasa lit a cheroot and imagined that flexible steel worm gnawing its way down into the earth below where he sat, down to the edge of the earth’s crust, far below the subterranean water-table, down to the very edge of the magma where the earth’s temperature would approximate to that of a domestic oven.
A telephone rang in the control-room, but Shasa was wrapped up in his imagination. The junior technician who answered the phone had to call him twice.
‘Mr Courtney, it’s for you.’
‘Ask who it is,’ Shasa snapped irritably. ‘Take a message.’
‘It’s Mr Vorster, sir.’
‘Which Mr Vorster?’
‘The prime minister, sir. In person.’
Shasa snatched the receiver out of his hand. He had a sudden sickening premonition of disaster.
‘Ja, Oom John?’ he asked.
‘Shasa, within the last hour the ambassadors of Britain, America and France have all presented notes of protest from their respective governments.’
‘What about?’
‘At nine o’clock this morning an American satellite photographed the drill site. Ons is in die kak – we are in deep shit. They have somehow tumbled to Skylight and they are demanding that we abandon the test immediately. How long will it take you to get back to Cape Town?’
‘My jet is standing on the strip. I’ll be in your office in four hours.’
‘I’ve called a full cabinet meeting. I want you to brief them.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Shasa had never seen John Vorster so worried and angry. As they shook hands he growled, ‘Since I spoke to you the Russians have called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. They are threatening immediate mandatory sanctions if we proceed with the test.’