people had offered to buy Van Gelder a drink. His naval uniform with gold submarine badge did the trick. But each time he politely refused. He needed to be alone. Several whores who worked the bar had approached him aggressively too. Again he refused, not because he didn't like girls. He was just in the wrong sort of mood. He'd been at sea too long. The changes around him were shocking.
The war was going so well, everyone said. Axis strength was increasing, the Allies a mere empty shell, right thinking had total control. Was this, then, why the nightly news on the one TV station still working — government- owned — always opened with more executions? Was this why even right-thinking Boers averted their eyes from the sky, wearing dark sunglasses outdoors even at night, afraid of an infernal nuclear flash? Was this why children were starving, white children, and people were eating their dogs?
Careful, Gunther, he told himself. This is dangerous talk, even alone in your mind. Van Gelder laughed, chiding himself at the irony, that he'd come here of all places for solitude. But a submariner made his own privacy wherever he went, internally. Duty, patriotism, glory, and honor. Disaffection, dissent, treason, and death. There was no middle ground anymore. Slavery, oppression, environmental destruction, all were common currency of this New Order that wanted to run half the world. It was becoming too much like the last New Order, the torchlight parades and the terror, the fearful or eager obedience, abdicating all moral standards, the marching bands and the slaughter. He could see it much too clearly now — how could everyone else be so blind?
Another woman approached him. She wasn't bad-looking, this one, nice clothes and subtle makeup — but then the resurgent Union of South Africa's brave fighting men deserved the best of the best. She fingered Van Gelder's qualification badge, the diesel boat over oak leaves and trident which he'd striven so hard to deserve. She couldn't possibly know what it stood for, the sacrifices, the risks. She offered to party for free. Van Gelder told her to leave him alone, and looked at his watch. He was due back on Voortrekker, inside the bluff, in barely a couple of hours, and he knew he was getting intoxicated. He had a responsibility, to his captain and ship and his crew. Van Gelder sighed. When push came to shove, there really was no escape. The navy was his life, his family, the underwater world was his home, the sea his most passionate mistress.
The hooker was very persistent. She told him he was cute and snuggled against him. She said she'd do whatever he wanted, and reached for his crotch.
Very well, Number One, he told himself, then laughed at his own little joke. There were other distractions than drinking, other forms of release and denial. He asked the young woman her name.
UMHLANGA ROCKS
To Jeffrey it seemed Ilse had gotten past some kind of hump, made some sort of decision. Her eyes and her jaw said no nonsense now, and her tone of voice backed it up. SEAL Two, their corpsman, treated the welt on her neck with an ointment. After more mines, another helo, and another enemy patrol, the team egressed the Hawaan Nature Reserve. They skirted a commercial nursery, closed and looking abandoned. Apparently they'd made it through the main defensive crust along the water's edge. They moved south, paralleling the beach, through forests and fields bordering a residential development, exclusive homes on big tracts. The houses were quiet, bare, completely blacked out. Jeffrey thought them evacuated.
The raiding party changed course to the west, inland again, and climbed more. They crested the ridge above Umhlanga Rocks, crossing the skyline in a clump of trees down on their bellies. This side of the crest there were no structures, no local roads. The ground in front of them dropped off steeply, and it was tricky to balance with their gear. Fully exposed to the weather, face-on to the wind and the rain, their progress was slowed to a stagger.
Somewhere below them, Jeffrey knew, lay the N2 Freeway, the major multilane artery that paralleled the coast— it was ten miles straight to downtown Durban. Jeffrey thought he heard heavy truck engines going north from the city, either troop movements or a supply column. They were too distant to see anything, no hope to get useful intel. Three miles beyond the N2, the briefing maps had shown, was a major railroad line, but no sign right now of a train. Beyond that, Jeffrey also knew, were the Durban defense district's mobile reserves, including main battle tanks. The group headed south again. They avoided a remotely operated antishipping/antiaircraft radar site ideally placed on the ridge. The team kept a safe distance from Autumn Drive, a dead-end road with a police station. Twice in natural clearings in the woods they found camouflaged heavy-machine-gun nests, stocked with lots of ammo and with perfect fields of fire — both emplacements were unoccupied, with no thermal signature, lying in wait for an Allied invasion.
They hauled ass farther on, paused to take five, and turned back toward the Indian Ocean, back over the ridge crest. Behind Jeffrey now, inland across the N2, was the sprawling Mount Edgecombe Country Club, presumably deserted this time of night. To Jeffrey's left, in the direction of the Ohlanga estuary from whence they'd come, was a ten-acre overgrown field.
Off to Jeffrey's right was a small airstrip, meant for microlights and gliders before the war. Past it lay more unused land, and in another mile came the tall concrete structures of the Tongaat-Hulett sugar refinery.
Now the local flying club was defunct, the short runway broken up, long steel rods driven in to skewer an airborne assault. The SEAL chief and two of his shooters found the place protected by several old men, retired cops or home guard militia. They died quickly, silently, to protect the rear, the bodies concealed where they'd later be blasted to pieces.
Jeffrey and Ilse and the SEALs were 3,500 yards south of the estuary, 1,400 yards in from the beach, at an elevation of four hundred feet. Before them, eastward, just down the hill on the way to the sea, were the empty outdoor amphitheater, caltrop-covered tourist parking lot, and two-story beige-brown concrete-andmasonry headquarters building of their target, the Natal Sharks Board.
Seeing the bodies hanged in the clearing had forced Ilse to make a decision. There was so much death all around, so many lives being snuffed, what difference was one more, her own? It was best to assume she would die so she could get on with her job. Fear was a useless distraction; concern for survival was dulling her edge. If the mission failed, her death was the least of anyone's worries.
Somehow — perversely, she knew — seeing it this way would help. It brought her a calm concentration, turned everything into a game — granted, a blood sport — an adventure with outcome unknowable, one she'd do her damnedest to win.
She gazed at their objective, vague shapes through her visor, strobed by frequent lightning. The heat signature of the installation told her the laboratory staff was going full bore. Inside that building, behind the blackout curtains, an abomination was taking shape, perverting fifty years of world-class research on marine biology and swimmer safety. By morning Ilse's life might be over, but tonight her task was direct: cauterize these people and what they were doing, send them straight to a hot man-made hell. Jeffrey crouched amid the chilly runoff in the erosion gully on the south flank of the Sharks Board. He peered into the dripping viewer scope, seeing through the fiber-optic cable — the image was constantly streaked by the heavy downpour. SEAL One panned the cable's other end around. Jeffrey knew One was at the very edge of the semitropical underbrush, wearing a lightweight gillie suit he'd pulled out of his backpack. The gillie suit was designed as sniper camouflage, with an insulated silver lining to suppress the point man's infrared.
'One, Four,' Jeffrey whispered. 'No guard dogs?'
'Four, One, no,' the point man said. 'Just foot patrols.'
'Pan right,' Jeffrey said. 'Show me the missile bunker.' The image shifted as ordered. ' Hold it.' Jeffrey zoomed in as lightning flickered again. He studied the emplacement, its rounded corners jutting from the slope. Its bulk was nestled in dead ground inside the asphalt crescent formed by the main entrance's big U-shaped driveway. More thunder rumbled.
'The bunker's thermal signature's diffuse even this close,' Jeffrey said. 'Looks like they put a resistor grid under the reinforced concrete.'
'Yeah,' Clayton said as he lay to Jeffrey's right. 'Just like with the lab in the basement.'
'We can't tell if it's occupied.'
'That's the idea.'
Something out of focus blocked Jeffrey's view, then passed. He realized it was a soldier.
'One, Four, what are they carrying?'
'Different stuff, Commander,' SEAL One whispered, sounding scratchy above the roar of the driving rain. 'I
