Vortex (5 page)

That was when Ian had screwed up. Prompted by the moderator, he’d practically sunk his teeth in the anchor-citing case after case when the man’s own well-known political opinions had shown up in the way stories were reported. It had been an effective performance, one that earned him a rousing ovation from the studio audience and a withering glare from the anchor,

He hadn’t thought any more about it for weeks. Not until his promised promotion to Capitol Hill vanished, replaced by a sudden assignment as a foreign correspondent based in Cape Town.

That was when he realized just how badly he’d pissed off the network brass. South Africa was widely regarded as a graveyard for ambitious journalists. When the country was quiet, you didn’t have anything to report. And when things heated up, the South African security services often clamped down-making it almost impossible to get any dramatic footage out of the country. Even worse, the current government seemed to be following a policy of unusual restraint. That meant no pictures of police whipping anti apartheid demonstrators or firing shotguns at black labor-union activists. The result: practically zero airtime for reporters trying to work in South Africa. And airtime, the number of minutes or seconds you occupied on America’s television screens, was the scale on which TV reporters were judged.

Ian knew how far he’d slipped on that scale. Since arriving in Cape Town nearly six months ago, he’d filed dozens of stories over the satellite links to New York. And he’d shown up in America’s living rooms for a grand total of precisely four minutes and twenty-three seconds. That was oblivion, TV-style.

“Hey, Sheffield! You alive in there, boyo? You ready to go?”

Ian looked up, startled out of his depressing reverie by Knowles’s voice.

With pieces of camera gear and sound equipment strapped to his back or dangling from both hands, his technician looked more like a pack mule than a man.

“Ready and willing, though not very able, Sam.” Ian reached over and plucked a couple of carrying cases out of Knowles’s overloaded hands.

“Let me take those. I might need you without a hernia sometime.”

The two men started walking back to their car, a dented Ford station wagon. It had been another wasted trip on another wasted day. Ian moodily kicked a piece of loose gravel out of his path, sending it skittering down the avenue past the highly polished shoes of an unsmiling, gray-jacketed policeman.

“Oh, shit,” Knowles muttered under his breath.

The policeman stared coldly at the two Americans as they came closet and held out his left hand.

“Papers!”

Both Ian and his cameraman awkwardly set their gear down and fished through crowded pockets for passports and work permits. Then they stood waiting as the South African idly leafed through their documents, a sneer plastered across his narrow face.

At last he looked up at them.

“You are journalists’?”

Ian could hear the contempt in the man’s voice and felt his own temper rising. He kept his words clipped.

“That’s right. American journalists.

Is there some kind of problem?”

The policeman glared at him for several seconds.

“No, Meneer Sheffield, there is no problem. You are free to go. For the moment. But I suggest you show more respect in the future.”

Ian reached for their passports and permits and saw them flutter to the ground as the South African let them fall beyond his fingers. Months of petty slights and mounting frustration came to a boil in a single instant. For a split second he saw the policeman’s body as a succession of targets. First the solar plexus. Next that arrogant, perfectly shaped nose. Ian’s hands curled, ready to strike. He’d demonstrate what he’d learned in two years of self-defense classes back in the States.

Then he noticed a triumphant gleam in the other man’s eyes. Strange.

Why’d he look so happy? Rational thought returned, overriding anger. The bastard wanted to provoke a fight. And granting him his wish would mean trouble. Big trouble.

Instead, Ian knelt without a word and picked up their scattered papers.

Getting deported was not the way he wanted to leave this country.

As they unlocked the station wagon, Knowles risked a glance back over his shoulder.

“That son of a bitch is still watching us. ”

Without looking, Ian slid behind the Fiesta’s wheel.

“Penis envy, probably. ”

His cameraman laughed softly and shut the door.

“Cheer up, Ian. If the government ever lets thugs like Little Boy

Nazi there oft’ the leash again, you’ll have plenty of blood and gore to report on.”

As he pulled away from the curb, Ian studied the rigid, uniformed figure still staring after them. Knowles might just be right. For some reason that didn’t make him feel much better.

MAY
29-
THE
MINISTRY
OF
LAW
AND
ORDER
,
PRETORIA
,
SOUTH
AFRICA

Karl Vorster’s private office matched his personality. A scarred hardwood floor and plain white walls uncluttered by portraits or pictures enclosed a small room empty except for a desk and a single chair. The low background hum of a ventilating system marked Vorster’s sole apparent concession to the modern age.

It was a concession he made unwillingly, because, like many Afrikaners,

Karl Vorster preferred the past. A myth filled past of constant sacrifice, hardship, and heroic death that colored every part of his life.

Three hundred years before, his ancestors had braved the terrible dangers of the sea to settle on Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good

Hope-enticed from their native Holland with thousands of others by an offer of free farmland. Over the next decades, they’d conquered the local tribes while carving vast homesteads out of the arid wilderness. These cattle farmers, or Boers, saw themselves as direct spiritual descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs, leading their flocks and followers to better lands under God’s good guidance.

Nearly a century and a half later, the Vorster clan joined the Great Trek outward from the Cape. They drove their cattle and their servants first into Natal and then over the Drakensberg Mountains to the high open lands of the Transvaal, determined to escape both British colonial rule and interfering abolitionist missionaries.

God granted them victory over the warlike Zulus, but He did not shelter them from the British, always just a step behind. It wasn’t long before

London’s colonial administrators and soldiers cast their covetous eyes northward, toward the rich gold mines of the Afrikaner-ruled Transvaal.

When war broke out at the dawn of the twentieth century, Vorster’s grandfather fought as a member of the local commandos riding rings round the British troops occupying his conquer cd land. After leading a series of daring raids he’d finally been captured and executed. His wife, penned in a British “concentration camp,” died of typhoid fever and starvation, along with twenty-six thousand other Afrikaner women and children.

Vorster’s father, a dominie in the Dutch Reformed Church, never forgot or forgave the British. And when the Second World War broke out, the dominie joined the tens of thousands of Afrikaners who’d both prayed openly and acted secretly for a Nazi victory. Disappointed by Germany’s defeat, he’d gloried in the 1948 election victory that brought the

Afrikaner-dominated National Party to power and made apartheid the law of the land.

The dominie gave his only son three imperishable inheritances: an abiding contempt for the English and other Uitlanders, or foreigners; a firm conviction that God ordained the separation of the races; and an unyielding commitment to the preservation of Afrikaner power and purity.

Those were beliefs Karl Vorster had never abandoned in his own rise to power and position. And now he stood high within the ranks of South

Africa’s ruling elite.

The minister of law and order closed the file folder in front of him, nodded slowly in satisfaction, and let the trace of a smile appear on his harsh, square-jawed face.

“Good work, Muller. This little raid you dreamed up has put the fear of God into kaffirs across the continent. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for us.”

“Thank you, Minister.” Erik Muller relaxed slightly, though he kept his lean, wasp-wasted frame at attention. Vorster insisted that his subordinates show what he considered proper deferencc-something Muller never forgot.

“I had feared that the President might be somewhat unhappy with our actions. ”

Vorster snorted.

“Happy or unhappy, it doesn’t matter. Haymans doesn’t have the votes to touch me. Not in the cabinet and not among the

Broeders. What does matter is that we’ve scotched this foolish idea of talks with a bunch of lying blacks. That’s what counts.” He thumped his desk for emphasis.

“Yes, Minister.” Muller’s right foot brushed against the briefcase he’d brought into Vorster’s inner office. Sudden excitement at the thought of what it contained made him sound breathless.

“And of course we also obtained a fascinating piece of intelligence from the Gawamba safe house.”

Vorster looked more carefully at his director of military intelligence.

The Directorate of Military Intelligence, the
DMI
, was responsible for strategic intelligence-gathering including data on the black guerrilla movements warring on South Africa. A cabinet reshuffle had long since brought many of its day-to-day operations under Vorster’s authority, and in that time he’d come to trust Erik Muller’s calm, cold professionalism.

But now the expression on the man’s face reminded him of a cat come face-to-face with an extra large saucer of cream.

“Go on.”

“You’ve seen the list of documents Bekker’s team copied?”

Vorster nodded. When he’d read the
DMI
report, he’d simply skimmed the page-long compilation of
ANC
personnel rosters, equipment lists, code words, and the like. Nothing on it had struck him as being especially interesting or significant.

Muller laid his briefcase on the desk and unlocked it.

“Not everything they found went on that list, Minister. I kept a particular group of documents separate. ”

He handed Vorster a sheaf of papers.

“These refer to an upcoming special

ANC
operation. Something they’ve called Broken Covenant.”

He stood silently as Vorster thumbed through the papers, watching with interest as the older man’s face darkened with rage.

“God in heaven, Muller! These damned blacks are growing

too bold by far. ” Vorster’s calloused hands tightened, crumpling the documents he still held. He stared at his subordinate.

“Could such a monstrous thing really be done?”

Muller nodded slowly.

“I believe so, Minister. Especially without extraordinary security precautions on our part. It’s actually quite a workable plan.” He sounded almost admiring.

Vorster scowled.

“And what’s being done to kill this thing in its cradle?” He pointed to the papers in front of him.

“Nothing… as yet, Minister.”

Vorster’s scowl grew deeper.

“Explain yourself, Meneer Muller. Tell me why you’ve ignored such a serious threat to this government!”

Muller’s pale blue eyes stayed fixed on his superior.

“I’ve referred this matter to you, Minister, because it occurred to me that it might serve a number of political purposes. I thought you might want to personally inform the President of this plan’s existence. After all, nothing could more clearly demonstrate the foolishness of trying to negotiate with our enemies. ”

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Vorster’s scowl faded into another thin-lipped smile.

“I see. Yes, I do see.”

The younger man was absolutely right. A majority of his cabinet colleagues seemed blindly determined to quiet the current round of racial unrest with words. Words! What idiocy! Vorster knew that blacks respected only one thing power The power of the whip and the gun. That was the only real way for true Afrikaners to maintain their baasskap, their mastery, over the nonwhite races of South Africa. How else could 4.5 million whites avoid being submerged by the 24 million others they ruled? Too many in Pretoria and Cape Town had forgotten those numbers in this hateful rush toward “moderation. ”

As Muller said, it was time to remind them.

Vorster eyed his subordinate. The man’s instincts were good, but his arrogance was an irritation. The Scriptures were clear. Sinful pride opened a doorway for Satan’s whispers. Perhaps Muller needed a small taste of the lash himself. Not much. Just enough to keep his mind focused on his true master.

With short, powerful strokes he began smoothing the documents he’d crushed.

“Very clever, Muller. Not too clever for your own good, I hope?”

Muller stiffened.

“No, Minister. But I am loyal… loyal to you and to our cause!”

Vorster’s smile widened, though it never reached his eyes.

“Of course you are. I’ve never doubted it.” He folded the captured plans for Broken

Covenant and slid them into a drawer.

“Haymans has called a special cabinet meeting in Cape Town to discuss our current foreign policy. Maybe

I’ll use this little present you’ve brought to me to set the right tone for the discussion tomorrow.

“In the meantime, Muller, I want this matter held strictly between the two of us. Understood?”

Muller nodded.

“You have the only printed copy of the material, Minister.

And the negatives are locked in my safe.”

“Has anyone else seen this?”

“Just the technician who developed the film. I’ve already sworn him to secrecy.” Muller arched a single finely sculpted eyebrow. “in any event,

Minister, I’m certain he can be trusted. He is one of our ‘friends.”

”

Vorster knew exactly what Muller meant by “friends. ” He meant the

Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. The AWB existed to assure South Africa’s continued domination by an all-white and “pure” Afrikaner power structure. Its publicly known leaders organized mass political rallies of gun-toting fanatics and maintained a brown shirt paramilitary group known as the Brandwag, or Sentry. They preached a gospel combining both militant nationalism and virulent hatred for those they saw as dangerous “aliens” in South Africa-blacks, Indians, mixed-race coloreds, Jews, and even Englishdescended whites. And though the ruling National Party dismissed the AWB as a lunatic fringe group, its members~ ip continued to climb steadily. In fact, every gesture madu by the National Party toward political and racial moderation boosted the