'November the seventh,' she mumbled, 'and he's about forty-three or forty-four years old. That makes it 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 nalve 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 bighest 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 commanderin-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 at 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 had already been manufactured for the production of approximately 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.
A* 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 155millimetre howitzer designated G5 which would be capable of firing a 47-kilo shell with an i i -kilo payload and a maximum sea-level range Of Hometres. 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 Aarhead that weighed less than eleven kilos and was able to be contained in the casing of a i55-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 modem 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 i5o, ooo-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
