Vortex

Israel and South Africa had been closely linked for decades. It was an alliance of convenience—not conviction. Israel had much of the essential scientific and engineering expertise, while South Africa had the vast expanses of unpopulated wasteland needed for weapons tests.

Peiper waved away the distinction as unimportant.

“I want their names, pictures, and dossiers delivered to Captain Witt as soon as possible.”

Schumann’s eyes widened.

“My God, you’re not planning to hold them as prisoners here, are you?”

“Of course.” Peiper grimaced.

“We can’t allow these Jews out to broadcast our plans to the world. They’ll be kept under close guard until Pretoria decides their fate.

“In the meantime, we have work to do. ” He leaned closer.

“A special Air

Force team will be here within the hour, and I expect your best technicians to be ready to offer them any necessary assistance. I trust that is perfectly clear?”

The older man nodded in a daze.

Peiper smiled scornfully at Schumann’s pudgy, quivering face.

“Cheer up,

Director. You and your colleagues have worked diligently for many years to make this moment possible. You should give thanks and be glad that you’ve lived to see such a day.”

He spun on his heel and left, amused at the old man’s sudden display of nerves. Academics! They lived so far outside the real world.

To Peiper, the equation was perfectly simple. Communists and rebels of all races threatened South Africa’s existence as a white-ruled nation.

But South Africa possessed a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

And weapons were meant to be used.

CHAPTER

-26

Safety Play

NOVEMBER 22-THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The White House Rose Garden looked dead in the dull gray light. Bare rose bushes and patches of brown, withered grass stretched beyond the covered walkway outside the Oval Office-a gloomy vista made more depressing by the dark, overcast day. Unsmiling pairs of White House policemen or Secret

Service agents trudged through the garden at irregular intervals, bundled up against the cold and damp of a late-fall morning.

“I quite agree, Mr. Prime Minister. Yes, it’s extremely unfortunate.

“

Vice President James Malcolm Forrester held his hand cupped over the extension’s mouthpiece and looked across the Oval Office. The President, a tall, lanky man, sat rigid behind his desk, fingers drumming angrily as he spoke. The President’s voice was a far cry from his usual mix of the clipped, nasal New England accent of his boyhood and the lazy drawl adopted later in life. Every word seemed to

“2

hang in midair, chosen coldly and precisely to convey an impression of tightly controlled wrath.

Forrester listened intently to the voice emerging from the phone-crystal clear despite being scrambled at one end, bounced halfway round the world via satellite, and then unscrambled at the other. Israel’s prime minister sounded embarrassed, unusually meek, and only too well aware that his news wouldn’t win any new friends for his country inside America’s highest policy-making circles.

“I see. Yes, yes, we’ll have people standing by to meet this scientist of yours.” The President stabbed an impatient finger at an aide listening in on the second extension. The man nodded hastily and punched to another phone line to begin making arrangements.

“No, I think that’s all we need discuss for the moment, Mr. Prime

Minister.” The President swiveled round in his chair, stared out the window at the bleak, barren view, and then spun round again.

“Yes, I’ll pass this information on to London as soon as possible. Goodbye, Mr.

Prime Minister.” He put the phone down with slightly more force than was necessary to cut the connection.

Forrester hung up at the same time and moved to a chair across the

President’s desk.

The President rubbed tired eyes.

“Well, what’d you think of our Israeli friend’s little bombshell?”

“That we’ve got even more trouble than we thought we did,” Forrester said evenly.

“CIA estimates have always said it was likely that South Africa had nuclear weapons stored at Pelindaba, so we’d been doing some contingency planning to eliminate them. But now we know for sure that the

South Africans have a real nuclear capability. And we know they’ve got ten twenty-kiloton devices-five or six more than we hoped. “

The President nodded.

“Hell, even one nuke going off would be too damned many.”

He stared grimly off into space for a moment, obviously remembering the pictures he’d seen of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So Karl

Vorster and the other madmen in Pretoria controlled ten weapons capable of causing

that kind of destruction. That was bad enough. The fact that a joint

Allied task force was already at sea, steaming toward Cape Town, made the situation even worse.

Forrester coughed lightly, catching his attention. “in a way, though, I’m more worried by Israel’s sudden inability to contact its people at

Pelindaba.”

“Yeah.” The President’s face looked as bleak as the lifeless garden outside his office.

“That kind of a communications blackout could mean .”