Vortex (115 page)

O’Connell frowned. Fuel trucks and ground crews were already rolling across the cratered tarmac-heading for the C-130. That was bad. The

Hercules looked fine from a distance. Up close might be a different story. He checked his watch. Three minutes had passed since they’d landed. So where were the F-15Es the Air Force had promised?

They were right on time.

Sirens started wailing, their eerie howling rising and falling all across the air base. In seconds the fuel trucks and ground crews were racing away, heading for cover. A lone South African Air Force officer pounded across the tarmac toward the C-130. “Air raid! Clear the field! Get off the ground! Go! ”

The aircraft’s still-spinning props bluffed as it lumbered down the runway, picking up speed fast. With plenty of runway left to spare, the

Hercules roared off the ground and into the air.

Coetzee turned around to see him smiling.

“Your idea, Colonel?”

“Yeah. ” O’Connell trotted ahead and glanced back.

“Keep moving,

Brigadier. Our flyboys won’t be too choosy about what they drop bombs on.”

The South African chuckled and waved him aboard the lead Land Rover. its driver shifted into gear and pulled out onto the airfield’s access road while O’Connell was still struggling into a seat.

As they drove, he felt a mixture of fear and satisfaction. Swartkop was a hive of confusion and activity as its occupants took shelter. He could sense their fear though, and some of it was communicated to him. They had to get off the base quickly.

The sentries at Swartkop’s main gate waved them through without even a cursory glance at their papers. Nobody bothered with formalities under air attack.

As the small column of five-ton trucks, jeeps, and Land Rovers turned north into the capital, explosions rumbled in the distance behind them.

Twin-tailed fighter-bombers flashed across the sky. Smoke and flame boiled up into the air. In all the confusion, Swartkop’s security forces completely forgot the small group of soldiers who’d landed only moments before.

O’Connell and his raiders were past South Africa’s first defenses.

OUTER
SECURITY
POST
,
THE
UNION
BUILDINGS
,
PRETORIA

They ran into trouble just a few hundred yards short of their objective.

A security checkpoint manned by Brandwag brownshirts blocked the treelined road winding uphill to Pretoria’s massive governmental complex-the Union Buildings.

“Show me your papers … Kaptein.” The cold-eyed Brandwag officer added the honorific only at the last minute and with obvious reluctance.

“Of course.” Henrik Kruger handed over the documents Coetzee had forged for them without any hesitation.

The South African kommandant had taken his apparent demotion in stride.

Now wearing the three stars of a captain,

he sat beside the Land Rover’s driver. O’Connell and a big Ranger sergeant named Nowak occupied the seat behind them, carefully eyeing the five sentries clustered around the guardhouse and barricade. Six canvas-sided trucks and two jeeps packed with Rangers,
SAS
troopers, and renegade Afrikaners sat idling behind the Land Rover,

One man was missing. They’d dropped Deneys Coetzee off at the Ministry of Defense before driving on to the Union Buildings. The South African brigadier still had work to do to make Quantum pay off.

“These appear to be in order.” The Brandwag lieutenant tapped the papers in his hand and then glanced suspiciously at the line of vehicles stretching down Church Street.

“But why wasn’t I notified of this troop movement? And why would General de Wet add so many men to our guard force here?”

Kruger shrugged.

“How should I know, Lieutenant? Perhaps he’s worried about a possible enemy attack. ” He smiled thinly. Then his smile disappeared.

“In any case, I do not question my orders. ”

The other man still looked worried, “I will have to confirm this with my superiors, Captain. ”

“Naturally.” Kruger waved him away nonchalantly.

As the Brandwag officer turned around, O’Connell frowned. He didn’t speak

Afrikaans but he could recognize danger when he saw it. He watched the man walk toward the guardhouse and its phone through narrowed eyes.

“Sergeant. ”

“Ready.” The big Ranger bent over, reaching for something on the Land

Rover’s floorboards.

“Now.” O’Connell’s silenced 9mm pistol “popped” three times,

The Brandwag officer staggered and then fell facedown on the pavement, hit in midstride. Bright red stains spread quickly across the back of his tunic.

In the same moment, Sergeant Nowak reared upright and opened fire on the rest of the startled guards. His silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun stuttered briefly and then stopped. Thirty rounds tore paint and wood off the barricade and slammed into the five Afrikaners. They toppled over, dead before they hit the street and sidewalk.

Kruger was already out of the Land Rover, sprinting forward to open the barricade. Other men jumped down out of the lead truck and began hauling bodies into the flower gardens surrounding the checkpoint. In seconds, only a few blood stains were left on the road-drying fast in the hot sun.

“Do we post any guards here?” The South African kommandant hopped back into the vehicle.

“No.” O’Connell pulled the partially used clip out of his pistol and snapped another home.

“They’d never make it out with the rest of us. We go in together.”

He leaned forward and tapped their driver on the shoulder.

“Okay, let’s get this done.”

They roared up the road toward the red-roofed Union Buildings.

None of their briefings or maps had done much to convey the sheer size of the complex. With its three-story-high, semicircular colonnade added in, the whole massive pile of rock and marble stretched more than seven hundred and fifty feet on its long side. Clearing the internal maze of offices and corridors would have required a full battalion of commandos-not just ninety men. Fortunately, the Allied raiding party had been given both a more limited objective and very detailed information.

O’Connell hopped out of the Land Rover while it was still slowing and ran up the steps leading to the building’s east wing entrance. Kruger and

Nowak followed, weapons out and ready. The rest of their troops were scrambling down out of their trucks and jeeps as they pulled up. From here on, speed was life.

Breathing heavily, O’Connell reached the top of the steps and kept on going-heading for a pair of wood-and-glass double doors behind a wide portico. He drew his pistol as he ran. Booted feet clattered up the steps behind him.

A Brandwag officer wearing major’s insignia and carrying a clipboard pushed through one of the doors, still talking to someone inside. He looked up in astonishment.

“What in God’sO’Connell shot him twice and jumped over the body. The door slammed shut in his face and he bounced off it with a sore shoulder. Sergeant Nowak reached the entrance in the next second and rammed into it with teeth-rattling force. The big man stepped back, shaking off the impact Three close-spaced shots fired from inside threw the Ranger noncom back in a spray of blood and shattered bone. Pieces of broken glass and splintered wood cascaded across O’Connell.

“Back!

He threw himself to one side as Kruger opened fire systematically emptying his assault rifle’s magazine in a long, tearing burst through both doors.

Agonized screams rose above the gunfire and then faded.

O’Connell, Kruger, and half a dozen Rangers and
SAS
troopers shoved the broken, bullet-riddled doors open and poured through into a marble-floored entrance hall. Several bodies sprawled in an untidy heap right behind the doorsBrandwag and Army guards who’d been caught by the

South African kommandant’s burst. More men flooded in from outside.

O’Connell caught a glimpse of movement down a side corridor and whirled around. One of the Brandwag sentries was still very much alive. The man was inside an antique telephone cabinet-the kind with wood-paneled walls and a light that came on whenever the soundproofed sliding door was closed. The light was on now, and O’Connell could see the Afrikaner yelling energetically into a phone.

Without time for conscious thought, the Ranger colonel brought his pistol up, aimed, and fired. The glass door shattered and the brown shirt fell against the wall-mounted telephone before sliding down to the floor. The receiver itself fell out of the dead man’s hand and swung back and forth in a slowly diminishing arc.

Damn. So much for surprise.

MAIN
GUARDROOM
,
OUTSIDE
THE
STATE
SECURITY
COUNCIL
CHAMBER

The Brandwag captain plucked the phone away from his ear. An expression of disgust warred with one of puzzled concern and won.

“Idiot.”

“Something wrong?” His closest subordinate looked up from the newspaper he was reading.

“I doubt it.” The captain shrugged.

“Well, maybe.” He chewed his lower lip for several seconds.

“One of the morons upstairs said there were intruders in the building. Then he hung up before I could ask him anything! And now they’re not even bothering to answer their blery phone.”

“Should we tell the President?”

The captain snorted.

“Are you crazy, man? Interrupt a war briefing just because some door guard might be spooked by the sight of a kaffir janitor?” He waved a hand at their magazines, water cooler, and upholstered furniture.

“Maybe you want to go fight Cubans, but I know a plush assignment when see one.

“I-et’s find out what is going on before we look like fools. Take Jaap and Dirk. It’ll do them some good to get off their fat behinds for a change. You go, too, and don’t take all day doing it.”

His subordinate chuckled and rose to his feet, buckling on a pistol holster over a slight paunch. He was getting a little bit heavyset. Maybe they’d take the stairs for a change….

QUANTUM
STRIKE
FORCE

Pryce! I I

O’Connell’s British XO stopped beside him.

“Here, Colonel. ”

“They know we’re coming. Put eight men on the door here. The rest with me!”

The
SAS
captain nodded and whirled away, shouting for two of his sergeants.

“Jenkins! McRae!”

O’Connell paused long enough to holster his silenced pistol and unsling the R4 dangling from his shoulder. Firepower was more important than stealth now. He ran down the hall, heading for the staircase marked on Coetzee’s hand-sketched map. Rangers and
SAS
men followed on the double.

Behind him, squads and fire teams peeled off as they ran past connecting corridors and other staircases-setting up blocking positions to bottle up the Afrikaner bureaucrats and security guards in this wing. By the time he reached the right set of stairs going down, he had twenty men left.

O’Connell skidded to a stop on the marble floor.

“Grenade. ”

Kruger passed him a fragmentation grenade from one of the
SAS
troopers.

Automatic rifle fire echoed down the hall from behind them. The

Afrikaners were starting to wake up.

He took a quick look down the stairs. Not good. About fifteen stairs down to a landing and a sharp bend to the right. Terrific. A blind corner.

O’Connell took a quick, deep breath, let it out, and started down the stairs slowly, moving one step at a time. He stayed close to the right wall. Two men dropped prone at the top of the staircase, ready to nail anybody coming around the bend.

Sweat trickled into his eyes despite the cooler air inside. Every sense he had seemed fine-tuned beyond normal human perception. He could hear every man behind him breathing heavily. He could see the tiniest strands of color running through the marble stairs ahead. He could even smell the coppery scent of the blood he’d tracked through back at the doors. Some inner core of dry humor and common sense told him that maybe he should have let one of the others go first.

Voices drifted up the stairwell from around the bend. Christ! O’Connell froze where he was and yanked the pin out of the grenade…. The Brandwag lieutenant stopped at the bottom of the stairs. What was that sound echoing down from upstairs. Gunfire? A prolonged rattling burst from somewhere above them transformed uncertainty to certainty. He turned to yell a warning back to the guardroom.

Something clattered and bounced down the stairs, rolling

right under his feet. The overweight Afrikaner looked down just as the grenade exploded.

“Go! Go! Go!” As the echoes faded, O’Connell took the stairs two at a time, charging through a fog of drifting, acrid smoke. Contorted shapes writhed on the floor-men who’d been scythed down by the fragments from his grenade. Rangers and
SAS
men passed him and burst out into the corridor leading to the State Security Council Chamber.

Assault rifles chattered from somewhere farther down the corridor. Stray rounds flashed and sparked off the walls and floor-whining down the hallway. Several Allied soldiers spun round and fell. Others advanced, firing back from the hip.

“Come on!” O’Connell ran forward toward the door just a few meters away.

He saw a wounded brown shirt fumbling for his weapon and shot him. None of the other Afrikaner guards heaped on the floor were still moving.

STATE
SECURITY
COUNCIL
CHAMBER

Trapped inside the soundproofed Council Chamber, Gen. Adriaan de Wet stood next to Karl Vorster, listening in appalled silence as the tall, grim-faced man gloated again over his plans to destroy his own nation’s wealth for centuries to come. This is not war, he thought, this is raw madness.

“Seventy percent… can you believe that, General? Seventy percent of our remaining resources are already prepared for demolition.” Vorster laughed harshly as he leaned over the map, tracing out the largest concentrations of mines and mining facilities.