by Bob Finley
They climbed the curving staircase carved into the dark gray stone and Marc fed the microwave. Holding a forkful of steaming Salsa di Vongole over noodles to his mouth, Marc mumbled, "What've you gotta do to make this...wha'd you call it?...‘transceiver’...work?"
Moving his lips as little as possible, and barely speaking above a whisper, Kim said, "Well, the small part stays with me. The other one has to be clamped over a co-ax feed."
Marc rolled the hot noodles carefully around in his mouth. The white clam sauce was even hotter than the noodles. Finally, he asked, "Where's the feed?"
"On the wall. Near the catwalk that goes into the computer access tunnel. Three feet below the ceiling."
Marc's fork stopped in mid-sweep. Without moving his head, his eyes came up and bored into Kim's.
"Who's gonna do it?" His words were barely audible.
Kim looked at his boss guiltily. "Janese."
Justin's eyes went wide. He laid his fork back on his plate and reached for the glass of tea. All the time, his eyes never left Kim's. He wiped his mouth slowly with his napkin.
"Why?" he finally asked.
"It...seems...she's the only one who's qualified."
"Qualified? Janese?"
Kim nodded and shifted in his chair. He folded one arm across his chest and propped the other one on it, masking his mouth with the knuckles of his right hand.
"She says she's a ‘class-five, free-solo’ rock climber, whatever that means."
Justin looked incredulous and gave a short, little bark. "Hah." He grinned slightly. "That means she's got more skill and more guts...and is a lot crazier...than anybody else here, you can bet on that. You don't think she's just blowin' smoke, do you?"
Kim pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. "Huh-uh. I got the feeling she was bragging."
"Well, as Granny used to say, ‘If you can prove it, sonny, you ain't braggin’."
"I didn't think you ever knew your 'Granny'."
"I didn't. But that's what she 'da said if I 'da had one."
"Riiight."
"When's she gonna do it?"
"She's gone to clean up and get dressed now. It's going to have to be soon. Sometime before the broadcast is over."
"Why?"
"'Cause I think that's when either Banner or Jambou will make his move. And, if they do and we're not ready, I think they'll pick us off one-by-one, as our usefulness disappears. Me first. I've made enemies."
Marc studied his protégé. "I hope you're wrong."
"Yeah, so do I, believe me. But we can't take the chance. Our only hope is to defeat Leo and try to hold out until we're rescued."
"You know something I don't?" Marc asked.
"About rescue?"
Marcus Justin nodded.
"No. Just extrapolating."
"You do, and you'll clean it up."
Kim smiled. His boss had a gift for keeping crises in perspective.
"Makes sense," Kim thought out loud. "By now the Navy knows where we were headed. They have resources. They'll find this undersea wart and, as soon as Jambou makes his announcement, they'll swarm in here like hornets. We get rescued...if we're still alive...and Jambou and his criminals get what they deserve. Oh! There is one thing I forgot to mention. Frank says this mountain is going to blow up."
Justin laughed derisively. "‘S'cuse me?" he said.
Kim shrugged. "That's what Frank says. Seemed pretty excited about it."
"Yeah, that's something I could get right excited about, myself. When's this s'posed to happen?"
"Sometime the next two days to two weeks, he says. What do you think?"
"I think I don't want to be here if he's right."
"He thinks we ought to tell Jambou to evacuate the place."
"Oh, yeah. Sure he will. After the time and money he's put into it so far? And being within a couple of hours of becoming God? Not likely. But I'll tell him, for what it's worth. By the way, speaking of money, let me tell you a ‘gem’ of a story."
Marc spent the next few minutes relating to Kim the remarkable events of the past couple of hours. The diamonds. The so-called ‘reasons’ Jambou used to justify his actions. The bomb. Especially The Bomb.
"You think it's real? Will he use it?" Kim prodded.
"Don't know. Never seen one. But it looked pretty real to me. And, of course, Wojecki thinks the electronics look convincing. I guess we have to assume it's what he claims it is. As to whether he'd use it or not...if he thought he'd lost, with absolutely no way out, yeah, I think he'd take as many with him as he could. But he's a survivor. So, as long as there's a chance he can win, I think he'll play the game."
They sat for a moment, each lost in thought.
"By the way, what do you mean, ‘she's got to clean up and get dressed’? What was she doing undressed? And with whom? And why wasn't I told?"
Kim looked at him blankly. Then he remembered and laughed.
"It's a long story and we're short on time. I'll have to tell you later." Kim got up and moved to leave. "She ought to be ready by now."
"Don't think you're gettin' away with anything," Justin warned him. "We will have this conversation later."
Kim smiled and then gave his boss a sober look. "Be careful up there."
Justin nodded. "You, too." He watched his brave, young friend walk away and shook his head. ‘Rescue’. "Well, there's always hope, isn't there?" he asked himself. Maybe Jambou was right when he said they were alike. He was a survivor, too. Against all odds. "Into the Valley of Death...". Well, they didn't exactly number ‘six hundred’, as Tennyson's Light Brigade had, nor had Justin ever been one ‘...not to reason why...but to do and die...’ But when it came to quitting, he was a pit bulldog...you'd have to kill him to stop him. And you'd have to catch him to kill him. He sensed that Kim was right. The next few hours would be critical. One way or another.
As he leaned a hand against the rough stone wall to drop his food container in the bin, an image of Janese Cramerton clinging precariously to a rock wall came to mind. He grinned and shook his head in admiration.
"A rock climber! Who'da thunk it?"
Chapter 43
The soot-streaked locomotive went unnoticed as it chuffed into the sprawling rail yard of downtown Johannesburg just before lunch. The thousands of commuters, already forced to spend three or four hours on trains every working day, had better things to think about than another train arrival. Like, what an unusually fine spring day this was for early November.
The 360 mile trip from the Indian Ocean port of Durban had taken her almost twenty-four hours and she panted wearily in great gasps of steam. She'd climbed the steep, winding roadbed up through the mountains to Pietermaritzburg, caught her breath, and then on northward through the Natalese stops of Ladysmith and Newcastle. Between Charlestown and Volkrust she'd crossed into the more rolling hills of the southeastern Transvaal, rumbled over the Klip River, and headed northwest through Standerton, Greylingstad, and then on past the spur line at Balfour that cut south and east over to Vereeniging. Finally, clearing Germiston on the southern outskirts of Johannesburg, she'd cut north across the teeming city of two million and queued up to be offloaded. Her next stop was to be diamond-rich Pretoria thirty-five miles north and on, finally, to the end of the line in Messina in the high Transvaal along the Rhodesian border.
Remarkably, she was on time. But her turn to be unloaded, and to take on freight for the final run, wouldn't come up until the next morning because she was just one of the many state-owned South African Railway trains crowding into this sprawling metropolis known as the ‘Golden City’. So, she was shunted onto a siding in the mile-long railyard to await her turn. A turn that would never come. Before the sun set this day, she would no longer exist. Nor would anything, nor anybody, within a three mile radius of her ever be the same again.
In the sixth car back, near the locked sliding door on the right side, was a crate with the words "MINING EQUIPMENT" stenciled in several places. It was one of many
such crates of all shapes and sizes, also covered with the same stenciled words, that had been unloaded from the hold of a Liberian freighter. The ship had made the run down the Mediterranean from Istanbul, through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, stopping first at Mombasa and then at the South African port of Durban.
A whole train load of such crates would have been invisible in this mining city. Hundreds of thousands of black contract miners, drawn from a half-dozen neighboring countries, wrestle twenty-five million ounces of gold out of South Africa's mines each year, much of it from the labyrinthine excavations tunneled beneath the roots of Jo'burg. Skeletal surface frameworks of mineshafts compete for space with modern, fifty-story skyscrapers. Weather-eroded slagheaps of mine tailings several stories high lie within sight of downtown. Half-a-mile beneath the city, amid the deafening roar of air hammers and the glare of nightmarish lighting, where air conditioning brings the temperature down to almost bearable, and rivulets of sweat cut canyons down dust-caked faces, being buried alive nibbles at the dim edges of consciousness like a pack of wild dogs out on the veldt. Better to think of the budding jacaranda trees in the spring sunshine above that will soon splash their mauve color across the countryside, or of going home when the contract's run out.
It was so easy, getting the bomb into the country. And having it unknowingly delivered to its target by the state's own official transportation was an especially delicious twist. After all, who would dare delay equipment destined for one of the most powerful companies in the country? Of the world, for that matter. A company that produced fully a tenth of the nation's entire wealth had many influential friends in the right places who could see to it that an underpaid customs inspector was appropriately encouraged to expedite critically needed equipment. The documents and the authorizations were forgeries, of course. But good ones. Now the crate lay in the semi-darkness of a boxcar waiting malevolently for its master's call.
A half-mile from the rail yard, at 44 Main Street, the quarterly gathering of a dozen of the most powerful men in the world were about to break for lunch, among them the sole remaining heirs of Sir Thomas Bund de Vries. The Board of Directors of Anglican de Vries Consolidated, some of whom had flown in the previous day from overseas offices as scattered as London, Toronto, New York, and Singapore were formulating strategies to combat a number of issues that threatened to drastically undermine the corporate financial structure. For almost twenty years now, apartheid’s replacement factions had eroded both gold and diamond profitability, and, to a lesser degree, had even affected corporate copper and uranium interests both within and outside the country. Unions were demanding, and getting, higher wages and benefits, with their perennial threats of strikes. It wasn't like the old days, when they'd have just shut down the mines and waited for the thankless bloated bellies to come crawling back, ready to work. It used to be that for every dollar a black mine worker earned, a white one earned five. But cheap labor, like white rule, was a thing of the past. If the corporate power base had eroded, then the financial base resembled one of the tortured slag heaps out at the edge of town. A billion dollars just wouldn't buy what it used to. And the new diamond fields in what used to be Russia and in the Arctic Circle of the Canadian Shield had degraded into logistical nightmares and were costing hundreds of millions to keep afloat.
The third largest city in South Africa due to a daily ebb and flow of the dark tide of urban blacks, Johannesburg is nevertheless not one of the country's three capital cities. It may well be the center of covert financial power, but Pretoria, less than an hour's drive north, wields the political power. Established by white Afrikaner Voortrekkers a half-century before gold transformed the rolling bush country south of there into the boom-town that grew into industrial Johannesburg, Pretoria is the only city in South Africa with more resident whites than blacks. That very white population, its interdependence on so many nearby diamond mines, its dense concentration of politicians, and its downwind proximity to Johannesburg just a few miles away sealed its fate. By this time tomorrow, what little was left of its southern neighbor would rain down on the statue of Paul Kruger and the Voortrekker Monument in the middle of Pretoria's Church Square from radioactive clouds that blotted out the sun. The gold mines below and around Johannesburg would be crushed by an unimaginable compression of the earth, entombed with thousands of mutilated bodies. Those in the mines who somehow survived the terrible blast would be baked by the firestorm that engulfed the surface. Pretoria's adjacent diamond mines would be so irradiated from fallout that, had there been anyone willing or available to work them, the stones would have been quarantined and refused at the border by the world community whose horror of radioactive gems would preclude any thoughts of profit.
In one instant, Jambou's revenge would be perfected. The descendants of the mine owners of over a century ago would be obliterated, even possibly those of the thugs who'd brought about his ancestor's death and ruin. The loss to the company of not only its corporate leadership elite but its denial as well of access to billions of dollars of gold and diamonds would effectively hamstring it and leave it, already weakened, to be brought down and devoured like a mortally wounded animal by the ever-present jackals of the business world.
In the meantime, it was a pleasant spring morning in downtown Johannesburg, and life and business went on as usual. The end of the world for three-quarters of a million souls was four hours away. They were the lucky ones.
Chapter 44
Bill, Janese and Frank were clustered just inside the tunnel at the head of the winding stone staircase when Kim joined them.
"Where's Cy?" he asked the collective group.
Bill Clayton furtively scanned for eavesdroppers. "He's gone to get the..." His voice trailed off and he gave Kim a meaningful look. Kim nodded almost imperceptibly.
"Have ya'll had a chance to look things over?" he glanced at each one in turn.
"A little," Frank replied in a worried voice. "Janese and I checked it out as much as we could without anyone getting suspicious, while Dr. Layton watched for us."
"What do you think?" Kim looked from Frank to Janese and then to Bill. Layton shrugged and deferred to the other two.
"I don't like it," Sheppard said quickly. "We're asking her to risk her life and we don't even know whether this thing works or not! I think she'd be crazy to do it!"
Kim looked to Janese, who reached out and tenderly laid a restraining hand on Frank's arm.
"It's okay, Frank. I've climbed a lot worse. And you didn’t ask me, I volunteered. But thanks for the thought." She smiled and Frank receded.
"Frank, you're absolutely right," Kim admitted. "We don't know whether it'll work. But between Cy and myself...we think it will. We hope so. It's the only thing that we've been able to think of that might work. And if it doesn't...well..."
"You're really convinced that after this is all over, this...this broadcast, Jambou's just going to...kill us off, just like that?" Frank's look was intense and it was obvious he was distraught.
Bill Layton cut Kim off before he could reply. "Frank, for what it's worth," he said in quiet empathy, "I have to agree with Kim's evaluation. And I also have to apologize to you all for getting you involved in this mess."
"What do you mean, apologize?" Frank looked at Layton in surprise. "Apologize for what?"
Bill smiled gently. He glanced down at his feet and then back up to Frank. "I'm afraid I was...the bait...that lured you all here." He held up a hand to cut off the objections. "This man Jambou who's taken us captive is interested in only one thing...himself. He's intelligent and he's planned well and long. Obviously, from what I hear, he has more wealth than he could ever spend. This ruse to force other countries to pay him a 'toll' is nothing more than an excuse to exercise power. You know as well as I that after a man has all the wealth he can use, the next level of attainment and challenge is power. Politicians are prime examples of wealthy men moving on to the next level of play. Poor people can’t afford to be politicians. He apparently le
arned of the strong friendship between myself and Marc and used it against us. I was the bait, and Marc was the fish. You...all of you...just happened to get in the way. And even Marc isn't the real prize."
They all looked at him in surprise.
"What do you mean?" Kim blurted. "If Marc wasn't what he was after, then...what was he after?"
Bill Layton smiled. He loved a good story and was a master at it. "Think about all the safeguards with which Jambou has surrounded himself. An isolated ‘fortress’ with no cover for an attacker to hide behind. State-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Satellite communications. A private mercenary army to cover whatever blind side he might have overlooked. Massive wealth that'll buy him anything he wants or needs. He's covered all the bases. Right?"
They all thought it over and nodded.
"So, what's he missing?" Bill asked them conspiratorially. One by one they gave up.
"An escape hatch," he finally said, "in case it all goes sour." He held up his hands like a magician. "Now you see him...now you don't." He smiled and waited for them to make the connection. Kim got there first.
"The VIKING!!" he almost hissed.
Layton bowed and spread his hands. The magician smiled at his audience.
"Son-of-a...he wants the ship!"
"Of course," Layton agreed. "And now, he has it. With it he can go to ground, disappear for as long as he chooses or needs to, go anywhere in the world he wants to, and at what..." he glanced at Kim for confirmation..."two hundred miles an hour?...no ship in the world can go deep enough or fast enough to touch him. A clean getaway."
"So all this...the MARS thing, the so-called terrorist attack, the trail of breadcrumbs to get us here, was just so that he could get his hands on a SHIP?!" Janese Cramerton's voice rose in pitch and volume as she got caught up in the realization.
