having a long slow one.'
SEAL Two relayed, and Jeffrey heard the corporal laugh. Then the corporal asked for the lieutenant.
'Tell him to wait one,' Jeffrey said. 'Then don't hit talk.' Jeffrey ran his hand over his face. He stared at the overhead but his mind was blank. Then he glanced at Ilse and got an idea. Jeffrey used his helmet mike. 'Seven, Four…Seven, Four.'
'G'head, Four.'
'Seven, when you cleared the upper level, were there any female staffers?'
'Yeah, a couple.'
'Good-looking or ugly?'
'One of each.'
'Okay, thanks.' Jeffrey turned to Two. 'Tell the corporal the lieutenant's otherwise engaged, out in the truck with a lab technician.'
Again the corporal laughed. Then he said more in Afrikaans. 'He wants me back down there,' SEAL Two said.
'Tell him they want you to stay put here, to help beef up the guard, because of the alert, with the voltage surge and everything.'
SEAL Two passed that into the walkie-talkie, in fluent Afrikaans of his own. The corporal's answer was long.
'Big problem,' Two whispered. 'He says that's a good point, strengthening security, something bad could happen between now and dawn. He's rousing the rest of the platoon. They'll come on duty now instead of at daybreak.'
'Urn, uh,' Jeffrey said, 'ask him when they'll get here.' Jeffrey felt like he was shitting a brick while he waited for the answer. Just like the alleged sergeant, ha ha.
'They have to shave and eat,' Two said, 'then walk up for the exercise. Just about an hour, probably.' 'Tell him understood.'
SEAL Two said something else in Afrikaans and put down the walkie-talkie. 'Done.'
'Did he sound suspicious?' Jeffrey said.
'Not that I could tell,' Two said, 'but then, if he was smart, he wouldn't have let on, would he?'
Jeffrey turned to Clayton. 'You hear all that, Shaj?' 'Unfortunately.'
'We got a deadline,' Jeffrey said. 'Start the timer now and set it for fifty, repeat five zero, minutes. Then we need to finish up and get out of here.' Clayton's eyes widened. 'There's no way we'll be back in the minisub by then.'
'I know,' Jeffrey said. 'Work fast. I have to run up to the roof of the Sharks Board, get precise wind speed and direction for the ROEs.'
'What, you can't just stick a wet finger outside the bunker?' Jeffrey shook his head. He pulled a handheld anemometer from his pack, then peeled a couple of chocolate bars and wolfed them down. He drank a whole canteen. My last meal? he wondered.
The rain had almost stopped. The air outside the bunker was so fresh, Jeffrey realized now how much it stank in there. He trotted up the front steps of the Sharks Board. The place was a shambles.
His Kevlar moccasins crunched on the broken glass in the entrance lobby. Farther in was a mix of nasty smells. Tattered blackout curtains flapped and fluttered in the wind, but otherwise there was an eerie silence. The walls were peppered, no, shredded, with holes from bullets and grenade shrapnel and from the blast of satchel charges. Broken ceiling tiles, shattered fluorescent light bulbs, twisted aluminum struts lay everywhere. The concrete facing of structural columns was badly pocked, deep.50-caliber armor-piercing hits, shallow ones from hollow point, and smaller nicks from Boer 7.62 and 5.56 mm full-metal-jacket rounds. Jeffrey stepped on expended brass and stepped around discarded ammo clips.
His feet stuck to the drying blood where the SEAL team's chief had died. Inside the shattered strongpoint leading to the basement stairs, the enemy soldiers' broken bodies were growing cold. What surprised Jeffrey was how much paper was scattered there: orders and records blown from packs and pockets, torn photos and singed scraps of letters from loved ones back home.
Through his IR imagers Jeffrey saw warm spots in the debris. A flare-up now would be a disastrous attention-getter, embers fanned into a conflagration by the strong breeze coming through. Jeffrey decided to give the smoldering wreckage a quick once-over. Three big CO, extinguishers sat on the floor where Ilse had left them neatly in a line, but all were empty. Nearby lay a fire ax, its wooden handle splintered near the tip, probably by a bullet. Jeffrey found another extinguisher with some charge still in it, and he did a hasty overhaul.
He mounted the staircase to the second deck, itself badly pockmarked. Sprawled across the steps near the upper landing lay a body in a lab coat. The whole top of its head was gone. The deck two stairwell door was off its hinges. Jeffrey glanced away as he passed the landing. He'd experienced enough carnage tonight, enough to last a lifetime. He continued toward the roof.
Jeffrey reviewed the ROE standards in his head one final time. The setting was in fact ideal. The rising ground behind the Sharks Board would shield people inland from the flash pulse and the blast wave, while strengthening the effects in the immediate area of the lab. With a surface burst there'd be no Mach stem, that terrible shock front when an airburst merged with its own ground reflection. The Indian community of Phoenix and the black townships of Greater Inanda should be safe except for broken windows, and intel said almost everyone had taped theirs up to keep down flying glass — after all, there was a war on.
The biosafety level five containment was in the part of the basement closest to the missile bunker, and a quick radar scan had verified the intervening ground was soil, not bedrock. There were indeed no hostage encampments protecting the site, and as near as Jeffrey could tell from the team's approach march, SEAL Eight's scouting down the hill, and direction-finding of the signal traffic, Umhlanga Rocks itself was part of the militarized coast defense zone.
Jeffrey's one concern was flash blindness, which could happen even miles from ground zero. The general impairment of vision lasted only seconds or minutes. The insidious problem was focusing of thermal energy on the retina, for anyone looking directly at the early fireball. The image of the mushroom cloud was burned forever into one spot on the victim's field of view. Worse, the retina would be fused to the underlying sclera, creating mechanical stress in the eye. Over months or years the retina could tear and hemorrhage, needing invasive surgery to counter permanent total blindness. Then there were the cataracts. More reason, Jeffrey told himself, to end this damn war soon — minority populations weren't getting adequate health care under New Apartheid. At least with the storm and the strict curfew few civilians would be exposed. Jeffrey walked through one more shattered doorway and surveyed the roof. The feeder horns and pre-amp cans of the microwave dishes were scorched, and the coaxial leads of the whip antennas were melted. The four dead soldiers were gone Jeffrey saw their blood trails on the steps. The SEAL abseil-rope-climbing group had dragged them to the second floor, out of view from the air. Jeffrey felt glad not to see them; he was weary of the endless death and suffering. He pulled himself together.
A South African heavy machine gun on a tripod sat under a canvas tarp on the roof, overlooking the main entrance and the missile bunker. The SEAL chief had wisely left it there, held in reserve. Devastating to troops in the open, it was an extremely long and heavy weapon, stupefyingly noisy, and its cigar-sized rounds could go for miles. It must have been winched up to the parapet recently — it wasn't in any satphotos in the briefing notes. Jeffrey gave prayerful thanks it had stayed under wraps for the boat team's initial assault. The SEALs were almost out of ammo as it was, and against this monster the raiders would've been decimated.
Jeffrey walked to the other end of the roof. He held up his anemometer. The wind was slowing, definitely. It was high time to set off the bomb.
'Come on, let's go, let's go!' Clayton said.
'We got the Boer arming circuits and the guidance package,' SEAL Eight said.
'I have the captured walkie-talkie,' SEAL Two said. 'Someone take a sample of the missile fuel,' Jeffrey said. 'Just grab a chunk.'
'I'm all set with the remnants of the lab notes,' Ilse said. 'And the videocassette.'
'Let's get Ilse's friend onto the litter,' Jeffrey said. 'Put in an airway so he can't choke on his tongue, and hold it in with surgical tape. That'll double as a gag if he comes to.' Two and Eight hefted Otto onto the collapsible stretcher. 'Gripes,' SEAL Eight said, ' this guy needs a low-fat diet bad.'
'Who is he?' Jeffrey said. 'Tell everybody, Ilse. We might have more casualties, we still got a long way to
