Vortex

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?”