Vortex (56 page)

A picture of a scowling Karl Vorster took shape over the anchor’s left shoulder.

“President Vorster is scheduled to address his nation at eleven

A.m. Eastern time tomorrow.
CNN
will, of course, carry that speech live,”

Vorster’s picture vanished, replaced by a drawing of a gold bar surmounted by an arrow rising at a steep angle.

“South

Africa’s worsening political, military, and economic crisis continues to send shivers through the world financial community. Gold closed today on the

New York exchange at near six hundred dollars an ounce, and the price is expected to continue rising tomorrow. The gold price rise parallels similar price increases affecting all other strategic minerals exported by South

Africa. We’ll have more details on what that could mean for the average consumer in Dollars and Sense, later in this half hour.

“In domestic news, police in San Francisco refused to speculate on whether a bomb found near the Federal Building there this morning had any connection with a recent series of attacks blamed on radical environmental groups .. ....

NOVEMBER I -JOHANNESBURG

Ian, Emily, and Matthew Sibena sat uncomfortably close together on a small sofa facing a black-and-white television set. Even with all the drapes drawn, the lateafternoon sun turned the tiny, one-bedroom apartment into a sweltering hotbox.

Ian wiped the sweat off his forehead and resisted the temptation to complain about the heat and the lack of working air-conditioning. He suspected that the same adage that applied to gift-horse dentures applied to borrowed apartments-especially for those on the run from the police.

They’d been lucky enough that Emily’s reporter friend and reluctant Army reservist, Brian Pakenham, had agreed to lend her a key to his flat without asking too many inconvenient questions.

Lucky indeed. Ian didn’t doubt that police guard posts now ringed his apartment, the network studios, and probably the American embassy in

Pretoria. And he was quite sure that his picture had been distributed to every roadblock and checkpoint on the roads leading out of Johannesburg. No

South African police commander was going to let the foreigner who’d so insulted his president escape his dragnet.

But after being cooped up for nearly ninety-six hours straight, Ian was almost ready to take his chances out on

Johannesburg’s crowded streets and empty highways. Almost anything seemed better than staying here in sticky, fearful ignorance. He shook his head wryly at the suicidal thought and tried to concentrate instead on the halting English translation of Karl Vorster’s harsh, grating Afrikaans phrases. Maybe he could piece together some idea of what was going on in the world outside South Africa.

“.. . I know that my words will reach not only my fellow South Africans, but many others throughout the world as well. I welcome this opportunity to speak to those outsiders, those foreigners, who have had so much to do with the crisis we face. ”

The camera pulled back from its close-up of Vorster’s strong, square-jawed face-backing away until it showed him standing proudly in front of a huge blue-, white-, and orange striped South African flag.

“Many of these small-minded outsiders have opposed our struggle to build a South Africa on our own terms. They have opposed our fight against the

Marxists and terrorists bent on pulling us down into shame and degradation. They do not understand the conditions we face here in South

Africa. Most have never even visited our land-our beautiful fatherland!

They ignore the chaos and corruption afflicting socalled Black Africa!

Instead they yammer and whine at us. At us! They preach at the people of the Covenant! At men and women who have fought and bled and died to hold this land for God and for civilization!” The camera zoomed in again, focusing on Vorster’s red, angry face and pounding fist.

Ian shivered. My God, the man was hypnotic! Even though he didn’t understand the language, he could feel the raw power of Vorster’s voice and rhetoric. He glanced at Emily sitting pale and tense by his side. Did she feel it, too? His eyes slid down to where her hands were clenched so tightly that all the blood seemed to have drained out of them. Yes, she fell it—the appeal to a common heritage of sacrifice and of suffering.

The instinctive response to form a laager-to circle the wagons-in the face of overwhelming and alien forces.

He looked back toward the television. Vorster was still

speaking. He spoke more softly now, picking and choosing his words in a calm, dispassionate tone that seemed strangely at odds with his violent and bloody message.

“Well, we have words of our own for them-for these small-minded foreigners.

No fight is ever desirable. And no fight is ever pretty. But this struggle of ours is necessary. We are fighting for the very survival of our society, of our people. And we will not submit. We will not give up. We will not surrender our sovereign power while a single enemy, a single communist, or a single rebellious black is alive to menace our wives and our children.”

Vorster paused and stared grimly straight into the camera for a moment.

“Many of you may have heard the foreign charges that my government came to power illegally.” He snorted contemptuously.

“Illegally! What does that mean? What could it possibly mean in the circumstances our beloved country faced when I took office?”

Ian sat up straight in shock, scarcely able to believe that he’d heard

Vorster right. But the other man’s next words hammered the point home.

“Very well. I admit that extraordinary measures were used to resolve a dangerous political situation. The previous administration had embarked on a course that could only bring about South Africa’s ruin.”

Vorster lifted his massive, calloused hand toward the ceiling-as though he were seeking heaven’s approval for his actions. My fellows and I acted as patriots to restore a stable, right-thinking government. Outside the normal constitution, yes. But within the bounds of national need.

“Our efforts are not ended, and will not be ended, until we can guarantee a safe and prosperous society for every right-thinking citizen of South

Africa. We will spare no effort to reach that goal.” Vorster glowered into the camera.

“And if you are not with us, you are against us.”

He lowered his voice.

“And finally, to the United States and the other know-nothings who try to tell us what to do and what to think, you can get out of our affairs and stay out-until you accept us on our own terms. If we uttered a mere tenth of the lies and falsehoods about your countries that you’ve uttered about ours, your diplomats would scream in protest. Well, we do not scream, we act. Your ambassadors can all stay home until you are willing to speak reasonably and let us run our own affairs our own way.”

Vorster’s smile grew smug, unpleasantly near a sneer.

“Remember, you need us more than we need you. You need our gold, our diamonds, and all the precious metals that keep your industries alive. More than that, you need us to show you what no black has ever achieved-a stable and prosperous bulwark of civilization on the African continent.”

The camera zeroed in on his stern, implacable face and held the image for what seemed an eternity. Then the picture faded to black before cutting back to the South African Broadcasting Company’s main studio. Even the government’s handpicked anchormen looked shaken by what they’d just heard.

Ian reached out and snapped the set off. He needed peace and relative quiet to think this thing through. Vorster hadn’t even bothered to try denying his involvement in the Blue Train massacre. Instead, he’d practically thrown down a gauntlet-challenging anyone who dared to pick it up.

The question was, would anyone dare?

NOVEMBER
2-
DURBAN
,
SOUTH
AFRICA

From the air, Durban was now a city of strange contrasts natural beauty, bustling commerce, and bloody, merciless violence.

To the northeast, the sun sparkled off the bright blue waters of the Indian

Ocean stretching unimpeded toward the far horizon. To the northeast and southwest, long foam-flecked waves rolling in from the ocean broke on spires of jagged gray rock just offshore or raced hissing up wide sandy beaches. Closer to the city center, dozens of ships crowded Durban’s deepwater port, South Africa’s largest. Oil tankers, container ships, bulk ore carriers, and rusting tramp steamers-all waiting a turn alongside the harbor’s crane lined marine terminal.

The violence was all ashore. Durban’s skyscrapers and streets were shrouded by a thick pall of oily black smoke

hanging over the central city. Flames licked red around the edges of half-demolished buildings and roared high from the wrecked carcasses of bullet-riddled automobiles. Bodies littered the streets, singly in some places, heaped in grotesque piles in others. The flashes of repeated rifle and machinegun fire stabbed from windows and doorways where armed rioters still fought with the police and the Army.

“Again.” Brig. Franz Diederichs tapped his pilot on the shoulder and made a circling motion with one finger. The tiny Alouette
III
helicopter banked sharply and began another orbit over a city now transformed into a battleground.

Diederichs scowled at the smoke and flame below. He’d been taken by surprise and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. His networks of informers and spies had warned of increasing unrest among the city’s predominantly Indian population but nothing had prepared him for the sudden onset of outright rebellion and armed resistance.

In the first half hour of the revolt, Durban’s palm tree lined City Hall, its massive, barricaded police headquarters, and the SADF’s fortified central armory had all been attacked by rifle-and pistol-armed groups of

Zulus and Indians. That strange alliance was troubling in and of itself. In ordinary times, Natal’s Zulu and Indian populations feared and hated each other almost more than they did the ruling white minority. Diederichs grinned sourly. If nothing else, at least his bungling political masters had managed to unite all the separate factions opposed to them!

The Alouette straightened out of its bank, bringing the burning city back into full view. The sight wiped Diederichs’s twisted grin off his narrow face. Most of the rebels had been driven off after a few minutes of fierce fighting, but not before both sides had suffered heavy losses. For several hours since, his men had struggled to regain control of a city seemingly gone mad.

Unarmed women and children had thrown themselves in front of armored riot cars and APCs-blocking main roads and alleys alike until blasted out of the way. As troops on foot tried to bypass those human roadblocks, snipers hidden in office buildings, churches, and storefronts picked them off one by one, imposing delay and triggering panicked bursts of indiscriminate automatic weapons fire that only consumed needed ammunition and killed more civilians.

Resistance was finally beginning to fade-broken by superior firepower, training, and Diederichs’s willingness to order the slaughter of all who got in his way. Still, even his most optimistic estimates showed that it would be several days before he had all of Durban’s districts and suburbs firmly in hand.

Diederichs was thrown against his seat belt as the Alouette, caught in a sudden updraft of superheated air, bucked skyward and then fell toward the water like a rock before the pilot regained control. He glared left through the canopy to where sheets of orange-red flame more than a hundred meters high marked the site of one of the day’s worst human and economic disasters-the destruction of the Shell Oil refinery’s main tank farm.

Early in the fighting, stray cannon shells and mortar rounds had slammed into several of the storage tanks-igniting a conflagration that had already consumed at least fifty lives and precious oil worth tens of millions of rands. Hours later, the fire still raged out of control, kept back from the refinery only by a series of massive earthen berms and the heroic efforts of virtually every surviving firefighter left in Durban.

Diederichs stared at the manmade inferno roiling below, all too conscious of how narrowly he had escaped total disaster. The Shell facility alone supplied nearly 40 percent of South Africa’s refined petroleum products-fuel oil, petrol, and diesel. The oil destroyed in storage could be replaced in days. But the refinery itself was essentially irreplaceable.

And no government-especially not one headed by Karl Vorster -would have looked with favor on anyone even remotely connected with its loss. This rebellion was bad enough.

He shifted his gaze toward the city center. His best troops were down there, fighting their way from house to house through the heart of Durban’s

Indian business district. He spotted more smoke rising from stores and shops either set aflame by the rebels or demolished by armored-car cannon fire.

One enormous pillar of smoke stained the sky above a shattered pile of white stone.

Diederichs’s lip curled in disgust. The Great Mosque of Grey Street was said to have been the largest Islamic religious site in southern Africa.

The Moslems among South Africa’s Indian minority had built it with their own money and hard labor over long years. Well, he and his troops had shown the koefietjies-the little coolies-how quickly and how easily Afrikaner explosive shells could knock it down. Hundreds of dead or dying men, women, and children lay sprawled among the mosque’s shell-torn arched passageways and collapsed sanctuary.

Brig. Franz Diederichs nodded to himself, pleased by the sight of the carnage. Durban’s mongrel population of blacks and coolies had surprised him once. They would not do so again. He’d see to it that they were too busy counting their dead to trouble South Africa’s peace for a generation or more.

Rifle and machinegun fire continued to rattle across Durban’s corpse-strewn streets all through the night.

NOVEMBER
4-
NATIONAL
SECURITY
COUNCIL
MEETING
,
WASHINGTON
, D.C.