Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “It’s not very big for fifty million dollars.”

  Roux was aware that budget estimates had recently escalated. The processing plant alone had cost sixty million and a further fourteen million a year to operate. Projections indicated that the total expenditure to produce six weapons would be over three hundred million dollars.

  “What did you expect, Nick? We don’t have big heavy B-52s like the Americans. This has to be delivered with our small light bombers.” Lombard, repulsed by the weapon, was fascinated by the technical details. “This bomb might not look much but with fifty-five kilograms of uranium enriched to eighty per cent it should make a bang equivalent to over twelve thousand tons of TNT, a 12.65 kiloton yield to be exact.”

  “I expected a big, well… bomb.”

  “You can make a lot of energy by losing only a little mass if it is multiplied by the speed of light squared. It doesn’t need to be big.”

  “E=mc2?”

  “The most famous formula in physics, Nick.”

  Nick Roux had a morbid curiosity. So much effort had been spent on this over years of independent research – a model of South African perseverance, patience and technical competence.

  “How does it work?”

  Lombard stepped across the vault and pointed to the end with the copper-coloured coil around it.

  “The bullet will sit in here and weigh about forty kilograms. It is a sub-critical mass because of its hollow shape, like a doughnut.” He waved his finger at the coil. “This is a cordite charge that shoots the bullet down the barrel of the gun, this yellow pipe, to the fat end.”

  Roux wanted to touch it but pulled his hand away nervously.

  “In there will be the target, a uranium spike about half the weight of the bullet, that slots into the hole of the doughnut.”

  Roux was sweating slightly in the airless space.

  “Sounds easy.”

  “It is, in theory,” agreed Lombard. “Join the two lumps of uranium together to form a critical mass and, hey presto, fission.”

  “It’s a marvel to be proud of.”

  Lombard wasn’t sure. He didn’t like to disillusion Roux but the weapon was almost identical to the one dropped on Hiroshima. That put South African technology about forty years behind the Americans. But South Africa had done it alone, on a relatively low budget and with a weak knowledge base. He was proud of that.

  “We’ve developed all the internal ballistics and neutronic programmes,” Lombard acknowledged. “There’s a bit more to it of course. Fusing to make it go off when you want, protection devices so that it doesn’t by accident.”

  “Doesn’t what?”

  “Go off.”

  “When will it be ready?”

  “Three or four months; perhaps April.”

  “Will we test it?”

  They had dug test holes in preparation for a completed device, shafts hundreds of metres deep under the Kalahari Desert.

  “We could do a cold test at the Vastrap range, if required. A systems test using a depleted core. But not with this one. This will be our first deliverable weapon.”

  Lombard knew that it was taking a year to produce enough uranium for one bomb, the processing facility at Pelindaba currently enriching just one kilogram of weapons-grade material a week. He was fond of peevishly reminding colleagues at review meetings that even North Korea could make it quicker. In the circumstances, a hot test seemed a little wasteful. Anyway, he thought, an underground explosion, recognisable as a nuclear bomb to seismic observers around the world, was unnecessary. That would be a demonstration of intent, a warning. He hoped it would never get to that stage.

  “Our jets can deliver this to the target?”

  “Hopefully. If the poor old things can take off and not get shot down on the way.”

  A viable delivery system was on everybody’s mind.

  “We could always push it out the back of a cargo plane,” joked Roux.

  “Don’t laugh, Nick. It’s been discussed.”

  “Is it safe in here? Nobody can get their hands on it?”

  The weapon had only recently been moved from its place of conception at the Pelindaba enrichment plant, just fifteen kilometres away. The Circle, a new facility for its gestation, was in the middle of hilly vehicle-testing grounds, hidden and closed to the public. Everybody referred to the bomb as a living thing, developing in the womb of The Circle and waiting to be born.

  Lombard pointed to the main door.

  “It would take four people in agreement to get it out of this vault. Three ministers and the PM need to insert a separate section of the code.”

  Roux nodded. “And the Director General of the National Intelligence Service is one of them. You have part of the code,” he said.

  Roux thought Lombard looked tired. His academic background hadn’t prepared him for this. He should be lecturing, debating abstract ideas with tutor groups, drinking sherry in the senior common room.

  “They’ve given it a name,” Professor Lombard said sadly.

  “Will it work?”

  “Do you mean will it work, or is it convincing?”

  Both Lombard and Roux knew that what they were looking at, a glorified cannon, was the easy part. It was nothing without the unstable isotope U235, and a means to convey the weapon to the intended recipient.

  “It wouldn’t be fifty million well spent or much use as a deterrent if people didn’t believe it would work, Nick.”

  Lombard hoped they’d never find out if it worked. His personal belief was that using nuclear weapons would be akin to committing suicide.

  “Will it work?” Lombard asked himself, scratching his forehead. “It’s down to me and you, Nick, to keep the answer to that question a secret.”

  Securocrat Lombard and his deputy Roux dealt in secrets daily, like market traders. Secrets were the product they bought and sold, hopefully at a profit. But there was one secret not for sale, a secret that only a dozen people or less knew in its entirety.

  “Don’t forget what the Prime Minister said to us about the British and the Americans,” said Lombard. “Make them think we have the damn bomb. It’s the only way they’ll help us end apartheid on our terms.”

  Two

  Angel Rots met the man on a Sunday. From a farm near Hekpoort they wordlessly walked through grassland along cattle trails, the white blazes on the heads of blesbok flashing in the warm morning sun as they skipped away. They followed a dry riverbed, cooler under the trees, before rising past cairns of Boer fort ruins towards a crest of hills and an isolated slab of red sandstone rock, the wide highveld stretching away below.

  “Lovely,” the man with Angel said.

  He looked taller than Angel had expected, and wide, almost square, with a mass of hair and an untamed beard.

  The man leant against a giant boulder, ejected by the same violent geological event that had created the hills. Conveniently spaced hand and foot holds had been eroded into the rock face.

  “Let’s climb it.”

  At the top they stood side by side like nervous new lovers. Behind them the Magaliesberg mountain range formed a ridge, sharp as a creased sheet of paper, stretching north-west into Bophuthatswana and east past the dam at Hartbeespoort towards Pretoria.

  Angel looked around, grateful for the quiet emptiness.

  “No one to see us together here,” the man said. “All alone.”

  “Unless someone followed you,” Angel said.

  The man turned to Angel.

  “They are more likely to be following you. How long have you worked for NIS?”

  Angel couldn’t believe the time had passed so quickly.

  “Nearly two years.”

  The man touched his toes then stretched backwards, arms high.

  “What’s the name of this place?”

  “Sh
elter Rock. I like it. I feel the name is appropriate.”

  “Shelter from who?” the man asked.

  “You. The English.”

  “Surely you mean us,” the man said. “Our Mr Cameron talks of you fondly from school.”

  Angel’s surname had been anglicised for schooling, and he was sent to Sherborne, the tuition kindly paid for by the Swazis. They weren’t being kind. Angel had been an experiment before King Sobhuza’s heir Prince Makhosetive Dlamini travelled to Dorset in splendour to learn from the English how to become King Mswati III. At Sherborne, Angel excelled at languages and rugby, only the latter earning the respect of his peers.

  Angel kneeled and looked over the edge.

  “Boer women and children hid here to avoid your concentration camps.” He looked up at the man standing beside him. “You invented them.”

  The man sniffed and scratched at his face like a dog.

  “You’re right. We’re bastards.”

  “Only eighty years ago,” Angel replied. “There are a few of them still alive, of the few that survived. The people in control of South Africa today grew up sitting on their parents’ knees being lectured about the twenty-eight thousand civilians the English starved and left to die from disease.”

  “If you hate us, Angel, why do you want to help us?”

  “Lots of reasons.”

  Angel stood back from the edge of the rock.

  “Because I love South Africa despite the apartheid nonsense and I don’t believe it will always be as it is now. Because you’ve told me that we are close to having a deliverable nuclear weapon and I’m seriously afraid South Africa would use it if pushed into a corner. Because I believe the British can help to make sure it doesn’t happen, that you can apply pressure in the right places and we can avoid this country ending up covered in radioactive dust.”

  The man looked around.

  “So, where is it?” he asked briskly.

  “Pelindaba is over there, south of the dam,” Angel pointed east towards Harties, the green water of the reservoir shimmering thirty kilometres away, “and The Circle is ten kilometres the other side, closer to Pretoria.”

  Angel suspected that the man had driven past the entrance on a reconnaissance but would have been unable to see any buildings, The Circle hidden behind a large berm of earth and invisible from the road.

  “Let’s tick things off,” he said, like an efficient manager addressing a staff meeting. “You have the uranium, tons of it. Tick.” He pointed to the dam. “You have at Pelindaba, compliments of the ‘inventive’ English University of Birmingham, a new way to highly enrich it. Tick.” He looked the other way, as though he could see into the empty wastes of the Kalahari. “You have a device at The Circle, otherwise why would you dig deep test holes in the desert. Tick.”

  He stopped, head on one side.

  “Hang on, there’s something missing.” He put his hands in the air as in a eureka moment. “I’ve got it. How the hell are you going to get your nuclear weapon to the target?” He looked at Angel.

  “What you need, my old mate, is a viable delivery system.” He shook his head. “And don’t try and tell me you can just hang the bomb underneath some crappy old aeroplane.”

  Angel wanted to go home. The hike in the mountains that he’d been looking forward to all week had suddenly lost its appeal.

  “That’s why we are here,” said Angel. “I need to tell you about some developments in the Cape.”

  *

  The English boy walked out of Jan Smuts Airport, fresh off the flight from London, and stretched his young body in the African night. Immigration had been his first hurdle and he had been unprepared. Firstly, at the most inopportune moment, his onward air ticket out of the country had hidden itself within a book, a large Russian classic. He discovered the ticket only seconds away from having to provide a bond of six hundred dollars, aware he could have found only half of the amount requested. Then, embarrassingly, he hadn’t the full address of the cousin he would be staying with, and he’d dithered under questioning. The boy’s flight had been delayed during its fuel stop in Nairobi after an unapologetic Captain Carnegie had blown a wheel with a heavy landing. It had taken over four hours to find and fit a replacement, a setback that had made him unreasonable, jaded and stale. He had known that his cousin lived in a town in the Western Cape, but where? Somewhere called Worcester? Or perhaps Wellington?

  The Immigration Officer had looked at the boy and thought him too stupid to be a terrorist but had hesitated while considering the book. Dostoyevsky. Possibly Communist. He had contemplated him uncertainly, then with a blow like slamming a door closed slapped a large visa on a blank page of his passport.

  Outside the air terminal, Johannesburg seemed much like London, only warmer. He was dressed inappropriately for the South African climate in December, with a tie tight around his neck. Other passengers, met and greeted, looked guiltily at the lonely boy. He had left England full of trusting innocence and it hadn’t seemed necessary to make any plans other than to arrive, to get away from home, to travel. Now early evening, alone in a foreign land, he didn’t know what to do.

  The lights of an airport hotel glimmered enticingly across a busy motorway. Towing his suitcase, the boy climbed a barrier, slipped down an embankment, ran across the road in between cars and walked sweating into an expensive and expansive hotel lobby. The reception staff stared, a little surprised. They hadn’t expected anyone else to arrive that night. Guests from the Heathrow flight had caught the shuttle bus provided by the hotel and had already found the bar. The boy could hear them, talking too loud, and they made him more nervous than the thought of having nowhere to sleep on his first night in Africa.

  The receptionist watched him condescendingly and stroked his tie.

  “Yes, sir?”

  The boy shyly handed over his passport, to him a treasured possession. He’d memorised the words written on the inside front cover in a decorative italic script, the document important for what it authorised him to do: to leave the dull restrictions of a cold teenage life.

  The man rubbed the smooth flat cleft under his nose with one finger. He read the boy’s name as though he was being charged with an offence.

  “Mr Ralph Phillips.”

  The photo, taken on issue of the passport, showed Ralph aged thirteen. Other boys had grown, grown into men, but he felt he hadn’t changed that much in the last five years; his complexion, disappointingly, was still described as ‘fresh’.

  “And you’ve come from the airport? On foot? Prefer not to take the shuttle?”

  Ralph felt a fool. People at the bar started to look at him but he considered it too late to back out now. He felt trapped, and coloured from more than just the exertion of his hike from ‘Arrivals’ with a heavy case.

  “And how are you paying, sir?”

  The receptionist relieved him of a fifth of his carefully hoarded and frequently counted cash and smiled below his well-tended moustache.

  *

  The following day, still weary from the flight, Ralph had for a short while studied cut diamonds for sale in Johannesburg shop windows but then walked through a botanical garden and lay exhausted on a park bench. Ralph opened one eye and read a sign screwed to the wood. He had expected something of the sort, had prepared himself not to be shocked by the injustice. It seemed a little superfluous as, disappointingly, he had seen no black African people in central Johannesburg at all. He wanted to talk to someone about it but a pretty blonde girl with an ice cream scowled and quickly left when he talked to her in English, leaving him with a vague and inexpressible teenage feeling that it wasn’t fair.

  Confused and tired, he looked around for the poorest looking hotel he could find, anxious to recover his unbudgeted extravagance at the airport. At the drab and gloomy Station Inn an old unctuous overcast man in a greyed shirt took his money from behind lea
den bars. His head tapered from a point at the neck to the widest part around his eyes and with a flat crown on top, like a diamond below and above the girdle, all facets grey.

  “Where are you from?”

  “England,” said Ralph.

  He smiled at him.

  “You don’t say. One night?”

  “Yes, please. I’m on a train tomorrow.”

  “Room Ten. If any girls come around and you don’t want them just kick ’em out.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Where are you heading?”

  Ralph had checked and confirmed his destination to be Worcester in the Western Cape, north-east of Cape Town, his cousin’s house. Earlier at a central railway station, and still wearing a necktie, he had been mistaken for having money and directed to an air-conditioned reception for the Blue Train, a luxury option selling at a price the grandeur and service of bygone days. Luckily, journeys in the middle of December booked a year ahead. Ralph, relieved but puzzled, slowly realised the size and complexity of navigating the continent. Surprisingly, the train to Worcester, 1,300 kilometres away, took forty-eight hours. On the Blue Train that would have meant two days and nights of what? Ralph shuddered to think. Red-faced men and their prim wives talking about ‘The Old Country’ he imagined. An altogether more exciting and cheaper option, the Trans Karoo, left the following day. Ralph took the cheapest ticket available, a third-class non-sleeper, curious to find out what other third-class non-sleeping passengers would be like.

  At his dirty city lodgings, the room a plain box, the bed appeared too small for any complimentary girls. Ralph preferred it to the airport hotel. Drowsy at three o’clock in the afternoon he slept contentedly.

  *

  A man drinking rum from a bottle in a brown paper bag, and a soldier going on leave, had already settled on the Trans Karoo when Ralph boarded, taking up most of the cabin. Ralph squeezed nervously into a seat. He would have liked to have sat against the window. Too timid and reluctant to ask, he consoled himself that, at the very least, he might learn a new language. He didn’t fancy a dop from the brown paper bag but smiled when he found out that he had a rooinek and probably a poepol. Ralph concentrated on the words as he’d learnt that only ten per cent of the population spoke English as a first language, while fifteen per cent spoke Afrikaans. The soldier told him that it would make little difference. It would be unlikely that he’d have any need to talk to the other seventy-five per cent, so English speakers would make up forty per cent of those that he’d meet, probably more in the Cape. He’d seemed pleased with the success of his calculation.