Vortex

Today, he decided that he hated the cold, gray fortress walls, hated his job, and especially hated his new commanding officer, Col. Jurgen Reitz.

He stormed down the long hallway toward his own office, face tight with suppressed fury,

He’d just left Reitz’s office with a new set of orders even more absurd than the last.

Taylor was a compact, stocky man, slightly shorter than average height, with sandy-blond hair and a long-jawed face. Despite being a reservist and in his late forties, he was in good shape. Long years of labor in his family-owned vineyards and fruit-tree orchards had seen to that.

As he walked, he twisted his neck from side to side, trying to ease the pain from tension-knotted muscles. Calm down, he thought, don’t let the

Afrikaner bastard get to you.

Any meeting with Reitz was irritating. Taylor’s Citizen Force unit had been one of two mobilized last August and sent to Cape Town on security duty-allowing the Permanent Force battalion ordinarily stationed there to be sent north to Namibia.

It had been a hard job. The government’s idiotic policies had stirred up enough trouble in the city to make every reservist a veteran in less than a month. They’d put in day after day patrolling known trouble spots such as the University of Cape Town campus or suppressing full-fledged riots in the black townships. But the unrest had only grown worse, and Pretoria’s politicians had insisted on laying the blame on someone else’s shoulders.

The Ministry of Defense had picked the battalion’s old commanding officer, Colonel Ferguson, as its sacrificial lamb.

Taylor frowned at the memory. Ferguson had been replaced two weeks ago by this Afrikaner orifice, Reitz, who claimed that he had been assigned to the 16th because of “his special experience in security matters. “

Since then Reitz had been insufferable, more because of his attitude than his orders. He would speak only Afrikaans, though he understood

English-and most of the men in the 16th Infantry were of English descent.

He treated any order from Pretoria as gospel and ordered that it be executed “energetically,” as he put it. But what does a soldier do when the order reads “prevent disruptive assembly”? Ask for amplification from

Reitz and he’d bite your head off.

And the battalion’s officers and men desperately needed clarification of their orders. When they first arrived, they’d been needed to police the black and colored townships. But now they were being ordered into more and more white suburbs and city areas to cope with steadily escalating political protests, rock-throwing, and other incidents of anti state agitation-mostly small groups or individuals caught defacing government propaganda posters and the like. The troops didn’t like that at all. It was bad enough being asked to club unarmed blacks and coloreds, but using the same tactics against fellow whites left them feeling queasy.

The last few days had been especially tense. First the all too-believable reports of Vorster’s involvement in Frederick Haymans’s assassination.

Then the sudden wholesale arrest of the City Council-an act that placed

Cape Town under combined military and police rule overnight. Taylor had heard the increasingly discontented muttering from his men and

junior officers and he sympathized. If Karl Vorster had really seized power by allowing Haymans and the others to be killed, he had no constitutional authority. And the orders they’d been following were manifestly illegal. But what could they do about it?

Taylor shied away from the obvious answer.

Reitz refused even to discuss the question of Vorster’s legitimacy or the men’s concerns. That was troubling. Taylor hadn’t been especially close to his old colonel either, but it was important that the battalion’s executive officer understand his superior’s intentions. He remembered long talks with Ferguson, sharing opinions, discussing battalion matters-a professional relationship based on mutual respect.

Not with Reitz. The Afrikaner treated him either as an idiot child or as the enemy. It was a rare day when he said anything good about the battalion or the men in it. No, this was a matter beyond clashing command styles. This was a case of active and mutual contempt.

So Taylor stormed down the hall, inwardly raging at the idiocy of his commander, the government, and his latest orders. Dusk curfew for everyone? No exceptions for emergency crews? No assemblies at all? Two people walking down the street together couldn’t be made illegal. Such an edict was insane and utterly unenforceable.

He stopped short in the hall, drawing curious glances from the few other officers passing by. He could not work this way. He might be a reservist now, but he was still a professional, an officer with ten years of active service and an honorable record, and he would not let himself be intimidated by an overbearing…