go.'
Ilse cleared her throat. 'Herr Doktor Professor Baron Otto von Schleiffer and Schaffhausen, late of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Applied Neurobiology. Racist fanatic, sexist pig, Putsch insider. He was close to the South African oceanographic community. He and I didn't get along.'
'We should leave the spare bomb detonator and EMP box here,' Jeffrey said. 'Lighten our load, we'll move faster. With SEAL One as bomb guard we don't have to worry about the stuff being spotted by Boers. It'll all be totally vaporized.'
'You're right,' Clayton said. 'Everybody dump stuff you won't need.' The team made a pile of odds and ends, forced-entry tools and voltmeters, climbing ropes and welding gauntlets.
'You're okay with the switch?' Jeffrey said to One.
SEAL One shifted slightly and bit down a grunt of pain. 'I hear anybody coming, I flip up the plastic cover and push the big red button twice.'
Jeffrey nodded. 'That'll fire the flux compression generator that puts the voltage through the krytrons. Don't worry, you won't feel anything…And just in case, the whole setup has an antitamper mechanism. Some joker tries to monkey with it, boom.'
'And don't worry about us,' Clayton said. 'You think you hear someone coming, blow the bomb.'
'Hey, look,' One said. 'When you get back, I want some kind of memorial at Arlington. Maybe some of my atoms'll drift down there from the mushroom cloud and everything. Promise me.'
'I promise,' Jeffrey said, knowing that it wouldn't really happen. A 4-KT-sized warhead, especially one with characteristics of an underground explosion, created tropospheric fallout — it didn't rise into the stratosphere and hence did not get worldwide distribution. That didn't preclude a memorial stone, of course. Jeffrey put a hand on SEAL One's shoulder. 'Is there anybody you want us to take a message to?'
'No.'
'No parents, fiancee, anything?'
'Nope.'
'Commander,' Clayton said, 'every one of us was picked because we don't have attachments. No kids, no spouses, or ex-spouses even, and we're all estranged from our families one way or another.'
'You didn't tell me that,' Jeffrey said.
'The powers-that-be put our chance of making it back at one in four.'
'I'm frankly glad you didn't tell me that part,' Jeffrey said. 'Let's prove them wrong…Speaking of which, I want to crank open the bunker's armored door, the launch port.'
'How come?' Clayton whispered. He'd started gazing down at One and was almost too choked up to talk.
'I want the gamma rays unhindered heading out to sea. That'll give a good strong EMP in this whole sector, give the ships and aircraft other things to worry about than us.' Clayton helped Jeffrey work the mechanism, and the heavy door came up. Jeffrey saw the grooves on which the launcher would roll out, after which the jet blast shield deployed. This one was a so-called zero-length rail launcher system. In an emergency it could be fired from right in the bunker, but tonight this missile wasn't going anywhere.
'Come on, LT,' SEAL One said as Clayton bent to kiss his forehead. 'I hate good-byes, get outta here already.'
Jeffrey looked at the timer. 'Thirty-eight minutes to go. Shaj, you take the point with the land mine sensor — they might have planted new ones. I'll bring up the rear, Ilse goes in front of me. Eight, Two, you guys grab the stretcher and we'll pick up Seven on the way. Same route we came in — not recommended practice, but for just that reason it might work. Now, at the gallop, move it!'
Gunther Van Gelder walked south along Prince Road, a block in from the beach, heading for the end of Addington Point. He heard the constant pounding of the surf, smelled it in the air, even felt it through the ground. He could see his way in the dark by the flashes of lightning and by the subdued blue glow from the covered headlights of occasional cars and trucks — the military blackout was very thorough. The curbs at each corner were painted Day-Glo white, to help prevent skinned knees and broken ankles. He glanced over his right shoulder, just as a distant lightning bolt backlit the clouds from over the horizon. Now that the weather was clearing, he could see well up the coast, even make out the silhouette of the darkened lighthouse at Umhlanga Rocks. He smiled to himself about his thrusting, panting labors of the past hour, then resumed course. Another sentry stopped him to check his papers. The soldier told him gruffly to put on his flash protectors. Van Gelder had a pair, a parting gift from the woman he'd just been with. She'd explained she could get a new pair in the morning — they were sold on the street by unemployed coloreds who made them by hand. The irony struck Van Gelder: if anthropologists were right about mankind evolving in Africa, then the native blacks, socalled Bantus, apartheid's lowest untouchables, had the only true pure blood in the world and everyone else was colored. The elation of his rutting, the savored sights and smells, the teasing and the giggles, the warm wet furry gripping, and his explosive flooding gift and release, all popped like a bubble.
Van Gelder sighed. He donned the protectors, a crude cardboard frame with Mylar lenses, like the things school kids used to watch a solar eclipse. The sentry said they weren't a joke; there was a stiff fine for civilians caught not wearing them. They were assembled with cheap glue, but the rain at last had stopped. Now with the damn things on his face, with their scratchy pinching earpieces, Van Gelder was almost blind. He had to brace them by hand — the wind was still doing a brisk Beaufort 6, some twenty-five knots, backing slightly now from out of the west to out of the west-southwest. Van Gelder made slow progress by looking down past the lenses at the sidewalk near his feet, and once in a while he'd cheat to see where he was.
He passed a small tank farm and then a heavily guarded prison. Rumor had it the jail was filled with interned American businessmen, with a separate cellblock facing downtown for senior VPs and up. Van Gelder finally reached the tip of the point. At the tug jetty he picked up the ferry across the harbor mouth.
The ride was short but rough — the incoming swell beyond the breakwater was nasty. The cross chop of the outgoing tide tossed the little launch, as big Natal Bay drained through the narrow entrance channel. By the time he stepped onto Bluff Quay, on the north side of the jutting Cape Natal peninsula, Van Gelder's uniform was damp from windblown spray.
The long quay paralleling the foot of the bluff was busy and loud, the air filled with machinery growling and clanking. Dock workers wearing night-vision goggles used forklifts to unload railroad cars, and there was steady traffic through the blast doors into the bluff. As lightning flashed yet again, Van Gelder spotted the prefabs of hostage camps along the seventy-five-meter-high summit of the bluff, alternating with big radomes, tall antenna masts, and hardened bunkers for missiles. Somewhere up there he thought he heard a baby cry.
He lifted his glasses a moment. At ground level a kilometer away, toward the foot of the peninsula, loomed more tank farms and storage silos, huge grain bins and coaling slips. Van Gelder could see the superstructures of bulk cargo vessels and tankers. In the foreground was Salisbury Island, part of the naval installation, really a Y- shaped appendage jutting from the cape. Tied up in berths 10 and 12 were two of the new Spanish-built Sitron- class strike corvettes, strengthening local antiaircraft defenses while they refueled. The wind carried a ceaseless cacophony from that part of the harbor, a throbbing of engines and pumps, a moaning and screeching of gears and hydraulics.
Van Gelder stepped aside as an Eland armored car rolled past, its 90mm high-velocity gun aimed straight ahead, its big tires splashing the puddles. He smelled its diesel exhaust, mixed with the odors of fuel oil and dead fish, pumped bilges and raw sewage and rotting trash. To him these were reassuring, his home port's waterfront at work, and the extra hubbub of the war effort lifted his mood.
Van Gelder had a few minutes before reporting. He decided to prolong his stroll, just to the beginning of Island-View Channel and back.
UIVIHLANGA ROCKS
The egress march was a mad dash of panting and peering, a downhill slalom speed record past a dozen-plus enemy mines, desperately scanning for Boer patrols the whole time. Twice Jeffrey and the others had to hit the deck and roll into the bushes, letting more soldiers go by, then it was back on their feet on the double. Loading the
