Vortex (86 page)

Captain van Daalen, the battalion adjutant, felt more like a spaceman than a soldier in his chemical protection suit. The suit itself was hot and difficult to move in, and the gas mask limited both his vision and his hearing. He scowled. Going into combat while practically deaf and blind didn’t strike him as a particularly sane act, but the thought of nerve gas made him check the seals.

He crouched by an open window, trying to spot a reasonably safe route to the battalion command bunker. He wasn’t having much luck. The bunker lay more than two hundred and fifty meters away across a flat, open field.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to carry out his duties from the barracks, van Daalen thought. After all, there wasn’t much point in dying in a quixotic and suicidal dash through machinegun fire.

Movement outside caught his eye. Soldiers, silhouetted against a burning

SAM
launcher, were fanning out into a long line less than fifty meters away. As each man reached his place, he dropped prone facing the barracks.

Van Daalen rose. That was damned strange. It was almost as though those troops were planning to attack…

“Let the bastards have it! Fire! Fire! Fire!” The shout from outside echoed above the staccato rattle of gunfire and the crash of explosions all across Pelindaba.

Van Daalen froze in horror. That shout had been in English, not

Afrikaans. He started to turn…

Half a dozen rockets lanced out from the line of enemy troops, tore through thin wood walls, and exploded inside spraying fragments and wood splinters through the tightly packed South African soldiers. Machinegun and M16 fire scythed into the building right behind the rockets, punching through from end to end. Dead or wounded men were thrown

everywhere-tossed across bloodstained bunks or knocked into writhing heaps on top of one another.

Capt. Edouard van Daalen clutched at the jagged edges of what had once been a window frame in a vain effort to stay standing. Then his knees buckled and he slid slowly to the floor, pawing feebly at the row of ragged, wet holes torn in his chemical protection suit.

The Americans outside kept shooting.

HEADQUARTERS
COMPANY
, 1/75TH
RANGERS

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell listened with growing satisfaction to the reports flooding in from units around the compound. The enemy’s Cactus
SAM
battery permanently out of action. Barracks after barracks reported on fire or collapsed by salvos of light antitank rockets, HE rounds from recoilless rifles, and concentrated small-arms fire. A 120mm mortar position overrun at bayonet point by survivors from Bravo Company’s I st

Platoon. Brave Fortune was finally starting to go according to plan.

But the battalion’s casualties were heavy and growing heavier with every passing minute. Colonel Gener hadn’t been seen since the jump. Three of eight platoon leaders were down. He didn’t even want to guess how many noncoms and other Rangers lay dead in Pelindaba’s barbed wire, rock gardens, buildings, and open fields.

He ducked as a grenade burst close by, showering dirt and fragments across the open lip of the slit trench. A Ranger beside him screamed and fell back in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs. Blood spattered across

O’Connell’s face. Other soldiers were already up and shooting back-pumping rounds into the flame-lit darkness.

” Medic I ”

Rangers dragged the wounded man farther down the trench to where the 1/75this senior medic had set up an impromptu aid station for the headquarters company. It was already overflowing with badly wounded men.

O’Connell spat out the salty, coppery taste in his mouth and grabbed the handset from his radioman. They had to move. It was time to go after the first of Brave Fortune’s two key objectives.

“Bravo Two One and Charlie Two

One, this is Rover One One. Execute Thor and Erector Set.”

2ND
PLATOON
,
BRAVO
COMPANY
, 1/75TH
RANGERS
,
NEAR
THE
POWER
PLANT

Pelindaba’s small coal-fired steam plant had been built to a simple design that stressed function over pleasing form. Turning coal-heated boiler water to high-pressure steam-steam used to drive turbines generating electricity.

In turn, that electricity powered the uranium enrichment plant, science labs, and every other building inside the compound’s barbed wire fence.

One hundred yards south of the power plant, two Rangers lay flat in an open field. Their sergeant’s bullet-riddled body sprawled bloody and unmoving behind them.

Cpl. Mitch Wojcik squinted through the recoilless rifle’s nightvision sight. Piping of various thicknesses girded the outside of the plant, carrying feed water into its boiler, steam out to propel its spinning turbines, and steam cooling and condensing into water back again to the boiler. One tall stack carried away the smoke produced by burning high-sulfur soft coal.

Wojcik swung the Carl Gustav slightly to the right, seeking his target.

Bingo. Hours spent studying every available photo of the power plant paid off.

“Load
HEAT
.”

His loader slid a seven-pound high-explosive antitank round into the breech and slapped him lightly on the helmet.

“Up!”

Wojcik squeezed the trigger.

Whanng! The
HEAT
round slammed into a jumble of piping and exploded-peeling open thick, insulated pipes as though they were tinfoil. One was the conduit carrying feed water into the boiler. Superheated water and steam sprayed

out through the torn edges of a rapidly growing hole. With their lifeblood pouring out into the atmosphere, the power plant’s boiler and turbines ran dry in seconds.

Pelindaba’s primary electric power source went dead.

2ND
PLATOON
,
CHARLIE
COMPANY
, 1/75TH

RANGERS
,
NEAR
THE
PELINDABA
POWER
SUBSTATION

Steel transmission towers spaced three hundred meters apart carried thirteen-kilovolt power lines connecting the Northern Transvaal-Pretoria electric grid to Pelindaba. One of the thirty-meter-high towers stood just across a road running between the nuclear weapons storage bunkers and the rest of the complex. Rows of canvas-sided trucks and civilian automobiles filled a parking lot on the other side of the road. Several were already ablaze-set on fire by tracer rounds buzzing through the complex.

“Christ!” Second Lieutenant Frank Miller threw himself flat as another burst of machinegun fire cracked over his head and slammed into the steel tower. Sparks cascaded down onto his Kevlar helmet. He looked back over his shoulder toward what was left of his first rifle squad-five men, one carrying a squad automatic weapon. The rest were dead or dying, strewn across the drop zone and the road.

“Hernandez, gimme some covering fire, goddammit!”

The squad automatic weapon cut loose again, spewing steel-jacketed rounds into the darkness. M16-armed Rangers joined in, trying to pin down the

South African infantry occupying a bunker one hundred meters away. The odds of actually hitting any of the enemy troops were vanishingly small, but enough bullets spanging off the bunker’s concrete walls might make the South Africans flinch away from their firing slits. One of the

Rangers threw another smoke grenade upwind.

Miller got to his knees and looked at his handiwork. He needed one more demolition charge in just the right place. He held out his hand.

“More

C4, Steve.”

No response.

The Ranger officer frowned and turned around. Corporal Lewis lay flat on his back, with his arms thrown out wide and a gaping hole where his forehead used to be. Miller swallowed hard and pried the last charge of plastic explosive out of the dead man’s right hand.

Working fast now, almost in rhythm with the sound of the firing behind him, he molded the C4 onto one of the steel supports steadying the power pylon and stuck a line of detonator cord into it. Satisfied, he crawled away, unreeling detcord as he went.

A shallow drainage ditch running beside the road offered the only piece of real cover for more than a hundred meters. Miller calculated distances and angles and swore viciously. He was well inside the minimum safe distance for setting off the C4, but he didn’t have time to crawl farther. He glanced over the edge of the drainage ditch. Flashes showed where Hernandez and his men were still firing toward the South African bunker.

“First Squad! Break it off and reform here!”

Working quickly and carefully in the darkness, Miller attached a blasting cap, fuze, and fuze igniter to the end of the cord. As he worked, he tried to forget that det cord was itself an explosive. If he rushed the job, it would go off in his face.

Wire and electrical detonators were out of the question for this job.

There was too big a chance of their picking up stray voltage from the transmission tower.

One by one, the Rangers stopped firing and raced over to the drainage ditch. One screamed suddenly and flopped forward, clutching at a leg that had been shot out from under him. Two others hauled him upright and half-pulled, half carried him to the ditch.

Miller took one last look around. None of his men were still out in the open. He took a deep breath and pulled the pin out of the fuze igniter.

Throwing it back toward the tower, he yelled, “Fire in the hole!”

The Rangers went prone, facedown in the dirt. Nobody fucked around when explosives were about to go off. Miller buried his face in the ditch.

Whummmp. Whummmp. Whummmp. Three separate blasts sliced through the supports holding up the transmission tower. Tom pieces of metal whirled away overhead.

Slowly at first and then faster, the tower leaned drunkenly far over to one side. Bolts and struts popped and then snapped off under immense and increasing weights and pressures. Abruptly, everything gave way at once.

With a grating screech of tortured, twisting steel, the tower crashed to the ground. Downed power lines danced and sparked like ghostly flickering blue snakes.

Pelindaba’s backup power source had been knocked out of commission.

PELINDABA
CENTRIFUGE
URANIUM-ENRICHMENT

PLANT

Indifferent to the outside world, the South African technicians monitoring twenty thousand rapidly spinning centrifuges inside the enrichment plant’s central cascade hall moved through their own universe of high-pitched, howling noise. None of them could hear the alert sirens and nobody in the garrison had yet taken the time to warn them of the attack. Then the lights went out.

Disaster struck instantly.

The scientists and engineers who’d designed the enrichment plant had taken precautions against an accidental loss of one or the other of

Pelindaba’s two independent electric power sources. An automatic transfer system stood ready to shunt electricity from either the coal-fired steam plant or the thirteen-kv transmission line connected to the Pretoria grid. Unfortunately, the South African design team had never imagined the deliberate and simultaneous destruction of both. Esher Levi had found

Pelindaba’s Achilles’ heel.

Like any highly sophisticated and fragile machine, a uranium-enrichment centrifuge carries the seeds of its own destruction inside itself. To successfully and efficiently separate fissionable U-235 from non fissionable U-238, each centrifuge’s carbon-fiber rotor must spin at nearly thirty-five thou sand rpm-producing peripheral velocities of up to five hundred meters per second.

Reaching that kind of rotation isn’t easy. An enrichment centrifuge must be carefully balanced and precisely controlled as it spins faster and faster.

Several critical speeds-speeds where the rotor will begin to vibrate dangerously-must be negotiated before it can reach its operating rpm. End dampers can help reduce these vibrations, but they become uncontrollable if the machine contains a significant amount of uranium hexafluoride gas as it cycles through any of these critical speeds.

All of Pelindaba’s spinning centrifuges were full of uranium hexafluoride gas when the plant lost power.

In fractions of a second inertia and drag were at work. Rotors spun slower and slower. And as the machines decelerated, their carbon-fiber walls began to flex, wobbling about like wet noodles-distorted by the gas trapped inside.

Most of the twenty thousand uranium-enrichment centrifuges shattered simultaneously-hurling carbon fiber fragments spinning at more than a thousand miles an hour into the protective casings surrounding each machine. Each crashing centrifuge sounded exactly like a large-bore shotgun being fired just a few feet away.

Some of the casings ruptured, and other machines were thrown off their floor mountings, tearing violently away from the piping connecting each enrichment cascade. Immediately, yellow clouds of highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride gas began spewing out into the cascade hall-spraying from the mangled centrifuges themselves or from hundreds of ruptured feed, waste, and product pipes dangling overhead.

The gas started turning into a solid as soon as it hit room temperature and pressure, but not soon enough for some of the technicians unlucky enough to be trapped inside the darkened maze of broken piping. Several scientists and engineers ran screaming for the emergency exits clutching badly burned faces. Others died moaning, crushed beneath fallen equipment.

South Africa’s uranium-enrichment plant had been wrecked beyond repair for years.

HEADQUARTERS
, 2/75TH
RANGERS
,
NEAR
THE
SWARTKOP
MILITARY
AIRFIELD

CONTROL
TOWER

Scarcely a kilometer south of Pelindaba, Swartkop Military Airfield was also under attack.

Bullets had smashed every window in the Swartkop control tower, and grenades had ignited several fires that were slowly taking hold inside-filling rooms and corridors with thick, choking smoke. Bodies littered floors and stairwells. Most of the dead wore the dark blue uniform of the South African Air Force.