me, you’ll be impressed. And the third set of gauges and monitors is in many ways the most important, because they control the reactors’ emergency coolant systems.”
She turned to look at her group. “You’ve probably heard the term
“Has anything ever gone wrong?” one of the women in the group asked. She seemed nervous.
“Sure,” the guide said, smiling. “All the time, but that’s what the panels on the back wall take care of. If one of the reactors gets a little too frisky, a few control rods automatically drop into place.”
Another in the group started to speak, but the guide held him off.
“Nothing serious has ever happened in the more than thirty years we’ve been in business,” the guide said. “Let me put it this way. Back in 2003 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees our operations, extended our license on reactor one until 2036, and until 2043 for number two.” Her smile broadened. “Even I will be an old lady by then.”
A few of the guys chuckled, and DeCamp had to wonder if every American male thought through his dick, or was it just the men in this group?
In France it was different, subtler, but with an ever-present sexual tension that seemed to hang in the air. It was his world now, with Martine in their hillside home above Nice. Different than when he was growing up alone on the streets of Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town, places of stiff formalities among the whites and an almost feckless abandon among a lot of the blacks.
He was eight years old when a man shot his father to death in a waterfront bar over an argument about money. He could see his mother’s face after the cops had come to the door of their Durban apartment to tell her what had happened. She’d become instantly angry, not hysterical that her husband was dead, but mad that she was being stuck with the bills and the responsibility for raising her only child. She’d railed at the cops, who’d finally turned and walked away.
And DeCamp remembered the look on their faces as well; they’d been surprised at first, but that had changed to something else, that even an eight-year-old could clearly understand. It was disgust written in their eyes, on their mouths, and pity, too. Later, when he’d become streetwise enough to pick just the right mark to rob so that he could eat, he realized that the cops weren’t feeling any pity for his mother or for him, they had been feeling pity for the poor bastard of a husband who’d lived with a woman like that.
In the morning she was gone. No note, no money, just the furniture and dishes and a little food in the fridge and the cupboards. It took two days before the landlord realized what was happening, that the husband was dead and that the wife was gone, leaving an eight-year-old to fend for himself, and he called the authorities.
When DeCamp had spotted the cop car pulling up outside, he’d grabbed a jacket and ran out the back door into the alley and disappeared. His father had never trusted the coppers, and they were the ones who’d brought the news that he was dead, so he wasn’t going to let them take him to jail. They probably did things to little kids in those places.
The following months were a blur to him, though he had been raped by a gang of boys on his second night on the street, and he remembered being hungry all the time, and cold and afraid. But gradually he learned to take care of himself, to run if possible or to fight back if need be.
He was a street-hardened kid of eleven when he’d come to the attention of Jon Frazer, a retired SADF lieutenant colonel, whom he tried to rob at knifepoint early one evening. That had been in Cape Town, and before he knew what happened he was on the ground, his right arm dislocated at the shoulder, and the knife skittering away down the alley.
“Lad, before you go up against a bloke, the wise tactic would be to study him first,” the colonel told him.
“Fuck you,” DeCamp said.
“An interesting proposition,” Frazer, who as it turned out had been in charge of the school that trained special forces units, replied. “I’m in need of a batman, and you can have the job if you want it.”
DeCamp said nothing. He hadn’t known what a batman was, and lying there in the alley with the deceptively harmless old man who had disarmed him standing over him, he realized that there were a lot of other things he hadn’t learned. Living in one of the shantytowns for whites, and working the streets for his existence, left no time to do anything except survive.
“Either that or we’ll just pop round to the police barracks and let them take care of you.”
“What’s a batman?”
“What’s a batman,
The next eight years had not been without trouble, but DeCamp had learned to keep his mouth shut, his inner thoughts to himself, and he’d learned languages, history, mathematics, physics, and chemistry from a series of tutors, as well as the basic principles of weapons, explosives, combat, and hand-to-hand techniques from the old man. But he’d never forgotten the lessons he’d learned on the streets, mostly self-reliance, nor did he ever learn why the colonel had taken him in like that, except the old man had never been married and never had children and he liked to have sex once a month with his batman.
The last two things the colonel had done before he’d died of a massive coronary were to enroll DeCamp in the South African Military Academy at the University of Stellenbosch in the West Coast town of Saldanha, and ask some of his friends still in the SADF to watch out for the kid. “He’ll make a hell of a fighter. Ruthless and smart.”
DeCamp had graduated at the top of his class with a bachelor’s in military science in the field of natural science, which was the most prestigious of studies.
The colonel’s friends made good on their promises, and he was sent to a series of specialist schools in various combat styles, weapons, explosives, field tactics, infiltration and exfiltration, and HALO parachute jumps in which the fully kitted-out soldier jumped from an airplane at a very high altitude, to escape detection from someone on the ground, and stayed in freefall almost all the way down until making a low opening.
It wasn’t long after that he was assigned to the Buffalo Battalion, and his real life had begun. For the first time he had a purpose, and he’d reveled in it.
The tour guide stood flat-footed with her silly grin. “Now if there are no other questions, we’ll head downstairs the back way and go over to the turbine building.”
No one said a thing.
“No questions? Good, then if you’ll follow me.”
DeCamp stepped aside as if he wanted to take a last look at the control room as the blinds closed, allowing the tour guide and her flock to pass him. He casually reached in his pocket and pressed 000* on his cell phone, which temporarily froze the closed-circuit camera just above the window, before he turned and fell in behind the last people in the group.
The corridor branched to the left past several offices, most of the doors closed, accessible only by key cards, to the stairwell and they headed back down to the ground floor, where DeCamp again used his cell phone to shut down the camera mounted high near the ceiling.
“You’ll be issued earmuffs before we go into the main turbine hall,” the tour guide was saying at the exit door. “It’s the loudest place anywhere in our facility. Even louder than the cafeteria on a Bucs game day.”
She went outside first, and before the last of the group was out, and before the closed-circuit camera came back to life, a door to the left opened and bin Helbawi was there.
“Everything set?” DeCamp asked, keeping his eye on the outside door as it swung closed.
“Yes.”
DeCamp slipped inside, the security door shutting behind him.
