Vortex

“Sir, Captain Karel’s asking for instructions. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him to wait, goddammit!” Peiper looked up, angry at what sounded very much like a reproach. The sergeant manning the command bunker’s communications setup stared back at him without flinching.

Damn the man. His insubordination would have to be dealt with later.

Assuming, of course, there was going to be a later.

Peiper wiped the steam off his gas mask eyepieces and

scrawled a rough circle around the single bunker and stretch of trench apparently still held by Capt. Anton Karel and the remnants of A Company.

Karel’s troops covered the northwestern end of the compound, well away from either the main road or the nuclear weapons storage area. Too far away in fact to do any good.

Peiper threw his pencil down and moved to the bank of field telephones.

“Let me talk to him!”

The sergeant gave him the handset.

“Karel? This is Peiper.” The colonel frowned. Blast it, he could scarcely hear or talk inside this wretched suit.

“Listen carefully. I want you to counterattack-“

A yell from one of the soldiers manning the bunker’s southern firing slit interrupted him.

“Movement along the access road, Colonel! Trucks! Ten or twelve of them!”

Peiper threw the phone down and joined a general rush over to the narrow opening. He squinted toward the access road linking Pelindaba’s military and civilian sectors. Dim shapes rumbled slowly along the road, silhouetted against a row of burning buildings. He recognized the distinctive outlines of canvas-sided Samil trucks made only in South

Africa. Were these reinforcements from Voortrekker Heights? They must be.

With trembling fingers, he raised his binoculars and focused them carefully. The trucks and the men riding on them leapt into closer view.

That was odd. Their helmets were strangely shaped-almost exactly like the old-style coal-scut tie helmets worn by the German Wehrmacht during World

War II.

Despite the sauna-bath heat of the chemical protection suit he wore,

Peiper felt a cold shiver run down his spine. The soldiers aboard those trucks were the enemy-not a friendly relief force. Even worse, they were driving straight toward the special weapons bunkers.

The Fates were not kind to Col. Frans Peiper. He had just enough time to savor his utter and absolute failure before an American recoilless rifle round burst against the edge of the firing slit-just twenty centimeters in front of his horrified face.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS, AT THE WEAPONS STORAGE SITE

Prof. Esher Levi surveyed the frantic activity around the five weapons storage bunkers with increasing satisfaction. After what had seemed a most unpromising and bloody start, the Americans were finally getting Brave

Fortune back on track. Pelindaba’s uranium enrichment plant had been wrecked. His fellow countrymen had been rescued. Even more important, survivors from O’Connell’s headquarters and the other Ranger units were busy loading several of the South African trucks they’d hot-wired and “liberated” from the Pelindaba vehicle park. Sleek, metallic cylinders, each carried by ten men, were carefully being hoisted up and into their rear cargo compartments.

“We’ve got that last bunker open, Professor. The colonel’s waiting for you there.”

Levi turned. Smoke and sweat had stained Maj. Peter Klocek’s lean, tanned face.

“The weapons are there?”

Klocek nodded wearily.

“Yeah. The last two. But the colonel’d like you to make sure of that.”

“Of course.”

Levi hobbled after the much younger American officer through a maze of hurrying soldiers. The entrance to the last storage bunker lay down a set of steps. A thick door sagged to one side-blown off its hinges by small charges of plastic explosive.

The two men ducked down and into the bunker. Several unbroken, battery-powered emergency lights illuminated a single chamber measuring roughly twenty feet by fifty feet. Steel racks lined each concrete wall.

Four metal half cylinders-twin halves of two twenty-kiloton fission bombs-rested in separate sections of the racks, kept physically apart to preclude what technicians referred to as “premature weapon criticality.”

Levi smiled to himself, remembering his first appalled reaction to the techno babble term used to describe what might, in the worst case, be an uncontrolled chain reactiona runaway nightmare of hellish temperatures and deadly neutron radiation.

He moved to where O’Connell stood examining one of the four bomb halves.

The American lieutenant colonel looked just about out on his feet-bruised, bedraggled, and bloodstained. The Israeli scientist suddenly felt a wave of admiration for this brave man. It was an uncomfortable feeling, especially since the orders he’d received from his own government would soon force him to lie to the Ranger officer. Though not about these bombs themselves, thank God.

“Have we got them all, Professor?” O’Connell sounded as tired as he looked.

Levi nodded.