Ilse told herself, the same year that the Franco-Prussian War was winding down. The same time as the diamond rush in Kimberley was booming, and the gold rush in Transvaal — ten years before the first of those two Anglo-Boer wars.
'While we're waiting for the others,' Jeffrey said, 'let's take a rest room break.'
'Thanks for letting me go first,' Ilse said after everyone got back. 'I don't mean to be an inconvenience.'
'We do have women riders now and then,' Jeffrey said. 'Contractor representatives, scientists, journalists… and congresswomen of course.'
'Crew members?'
'Maybe someday.' Jeffrey shrugged.
The navigator, Lieutenant Monaghan, arrived. COB showed up a moment later. COB had to lean against the sideboard — the bench seats around the wardroom table were completely full. The steward left and closed the door into the little pantry.
'Back to work,' Clayton said with relish. At the slightest movement of his fingers, Ilse noticed, muscles rippled on his arms.
'Where are all your men?' she said while Monaghan wired his laptop to the flat-screen wardroom monitor.
'Squashed in a compartment forward,' Clayton said. 'You'll meet them soon. Right now they're sharpening their combat knives, holding high-stakes one-arm pushup contests, and practicing garroting one another.'
'We can carry up to fifty SEALs,' Jeffrey said, 'in the torpedo room, but for that we need to off-load weapons.'
Clayton smiled ferally. 'One boat team's enough for what we have to do.' Then he added, 'Een boot groep is genoeg voor wat wij mooten doe,' which was the same in Afrikaans.
'You're fluent,' Ilse said, surprised but then delighted.
'I practice all the time,' Clayton said, switching back to English. 'I also speak six native tongues from that part of the world.'
'I missed something,' COB said. 'The CO told me we're hitting a bioweapons plant. Miss Reebeck, what's your role?'
'My job's to quickly spot the key lab notes and records, so we can bring them out, and to eyeball their progress and approach.'
'You're an expert in the subject?' COB said.
'That's how I got my Ph.D., peaceful archaea applications, industrial uses of their enzymes, hyperthermozymes, as catalysts for chemical reactions.'
'Are you grabbing any samples?' COB said.
'That's much too dangerous,' Wilson said.
'To find some way to fight it,' Ilse said, 'we need their recipe, the genetic code and how they engineered it. We want the data, not the bug.'
'Once weaponized,' Clayton said, 'there'd be no lower limit to this stuff's mass and bulk, unlike a briefcase atom bomb. No corresponding close-range gamma ray signature either, to be picked up at border crossings or shipping nodes. You could transport archaea dried — an aerosol can, a water-soluble lipstick, almost anything would do, and sniffer K-9s would be useless. Chemical weapons and biotoxins don't reproduce. Archaea does.'
'And with bio warfare,' Jeffrey said, 'in place of Axis H-bombs, say, our infrastructure's left intact across the battle space or continental U.S…Plunder, and Lebensraum — living room.'
Sessions raised his hand. 'I have a stupid question. Once it's been let loose, what stops this thing from wiping out the world? You know, including all the Germans and the Boers?'
'Archaea can multiply by budding like amoeba,' Ilse said, 'or sexually. We expect the killer strain's design builds in a generational life-span, after which the colony dies out. These days that's nothing special, from research on aging and recombinant DNA.'
'What about this A-bomb we'll be using?' Jeffrey said.
'We'll destroy the lab by setting off the warhead in an enemy missile,' Clayton said. ' There's one dug in right there next to the Sharks Board. It'll look just like an accident, or sabotage within. The blast itself will hide our tracks. Three kilotons, we think.'
'The zone of total sterilization,' Ilse said, 'the fireball and just beyond, would extend about a thousand feet across.'
Jeffrey inhaled deeply. 'Okay. And that's why you need a Boer bomb. A discrepant fallout isotope mix would show we'd brought in ours…But I thought they couldn't go off by mistake — the safety interlocks and codes.'
'We only need the physics package,' Clayton said. 'You're bringing detonator gear,' Jeffrey said. Ilse saw him start to grin as comprehension dawned.
'Cool, huh?' Clayton said. 'That's how we'll fire the krytron switches, bypass their arming hardware altogether. They use a lightweight uranium implosion design now, by the way, well beyond South Africa's crude gun bombs in the eighties. With new duallaser refinement methods, U-235's a lot easier to work with than plutonium… I'm an expert in nuclear demolitions.'
'If all this works,' Wilson said, 'there'll be a crucial bonus for us. The Boer regime will start a witch- hunt.'
'Another witch-hunt, Captain?' Jeffrey said.
'Public hangings get habit-forming,' Clayton said. 'We saw that with the Nazis toward the end.'
'The Joint Chiefs,' Wilson said, 'hope the Boers'll think someone on the inside set off the bomb long- distance, through their automated command and control net. They'll purge their senior systems staff, probably, even if they only think there might have been some treason.'
'Their systems group has been too tight,' Jeffrey said.
Wilson nodded. 'But we have moles, I've been informed, less senior people waiting in the wings. Freedom fighters like Ilse, ready to move up.'
'That might give us a way in, in the future,' Clayton said. 'Information warfare at its best.'
'A back door to a landing,' Jeffrey said, 'airborne and on the coast.'
'This raid's a big first step to that,' Wilson said. 'You all can see how critical this is. We absolutely have to get it right.'
'We're good to go,' Clayton said. 'Commander Fuller, we'll work up with you and Ilse while Challenger makes transit. We have a few new tricks since you were with the teams.'
'I can just imagine,' Jeffrey said.
Wilson turned to Monaghan. 'Last part of the briefing. Navigator, you're on.' Lieutenant Monaghan tapped some keys. A map of southern Africa came on the screen.
'I'll start with the basics for clarity. Durban's a major port, fronting the Indian Ocean. It can handle large oil tankers, up to eight hundred feet. Bigger ones moor outside and pump their cargo through a floating terminal southwest of the entrance channel.'
'The harbor's artificial, isn't it?' Jeffrey said.
'The Bay of Natal,' Monaghan said, 'nestled behind a bluff along a promontory, was dredged years ago. Now
the bluff, two hundred and fifty feet high, acts as a breakwater to south and east. Durban's a major city, an important commercial center.'
'And it's their leading submarine base,' Jeffrey said.
'That's correct,' Monaghan said. 'Back under the old Union, First Apartheid, their navy serviced diesel boats at piers on Salisbury Island, inside the port. That continued with the Republic, the post-racist democracy regime.'
'With all the troubles of the last few years,' Jeffrey said, 'like India and Pakistan, North Korea and Japan, they dug into the bluff, then reinforced it from below with layered composite armor, to stop ground-penetrator rounds.'
'That's where their subs go now,' Sessions said.
'Yup,' Jeffrey said. 'Good cover, even from tactical atomic weapons. A little Cheyenne Mountain.'
'The advantage of Durban to the South Africans,' Monaghan said, 'is the harbor mouth is very narrow, only
