by Greg Iles
and the South Africans down a short corridor and into a huge, windowless
room. Several large crates were stacked in the middle of the floor. A
forklift had been parked in front of a door in the far wall.
Suddenly, from a hallway to Hauer's right, Stern and Ilse came running
into the room. Sensing danger, Hauer waved them back, but before he
could call out, two men wearing Wehrtnacht gray uniforms rose up from
behind the forklift and opened fire with automatic weapons,.
Stern dived to the floor, pulling Ilse down with him. Gadi returned
fire. As the bullets flew, Hans came pelting out of the corridor,
skidded, then backpedaled into the hall.
"Ilse!" he shouted. "Crawl back here!"
Ilse looked back, but Stern had thrown himself on top of her.
Hauer and General Steyn scrambled back into the hall behind them.
The South African CT troops reacted differently. The highly trained
commandos considered their
ia
Kevlar body armor an offensive weapon. While one soldier fired covering
bursts, the other loaded a tear-gas canister into his shotgun and fired
at the forklift. Stinging vapor fogged the far side of the room.
Without even waiting to hear a cough the South Africans charged, firing
as they ran.
"Clear! Clear!" came a shout in Afrikaans.
"That's it!" said General Steyn. "Let's go!"
At the forklift, Hauer hugged Hans and Ilse fiercely, but there was no
time to speak. At their feet lay the bodies of Smuts's men, cut to
pieces by the South African commandos. The CT troops had already
secured the stairwell beyond the door. The steel steps led both up and
down. Leaning out over the rail, Hauer looked up and counted six
flights of stairs that ended on a wide landing three floors above.
Below, the stairs disappeared into darkness.
"The bomb's downstairs," said Stern. "A hundred meters down.
That's our objective."
"But the enemy's up there," Hauer argued, pointing with his sniper
rifle.
"They don't matter," said Stern. "He doesn't matter."
"Who?" asked General Steyn. "Horn?"
Hauer cut his eyes at Stern. "If we don't neutralize that tower, we
won't be able to do a damned thing about your bomb even if we find it."
Stern laughed softly. "How long do you think those shields will hold
those Arabs back, Hauer? Five minutes?
Ten? Horn will probably lower them himself, so that the Arabs can kill
us for him."
"Scheisse! " Hauer cursed. "That's why the firing stopped!
They're already coming, Stern. We've got to get control of that turret
gun. You can do what you want, but I'm taking the South Africans with
me."
Without hesitation Stern and Gadi started down the stairs.
Hauer, General Steyn, and the South Africans started up, with Hans and
Ilse bringing up the rear. On the top-floor landing Hauer put his ear
against the green metal door and listened. He thought he heard voices
on the other side, but he couldn't be sure. Backing away, he saw the
South Africans preparing to blow down this door just as they had the one
in the courtyard. He signaled them to wait. Taking hold of the
aluminum knob, he applied a very slight circular pressure.
The knob turned.
He glanced back at the South Africans, nodded toward the door, held up a
fist, and shook his head. The CT trvups gut the message: no grenades.
Hauer licked his dry lips beneath his respirator. Then he raised his
leg and kicked open the door.
Five men-Hess, Smuts, and three of Smuts's security troops-looked up in
stunned surprise. After one frozen moment, Smuts's men made the mistake
of going for their guns.
General Steyn's troops instantly killed all three with shotgun blasts.
Smuts himself did not xesist. He stepped calmly away from the
observation window and set down his field glasses.
No one seemed to know what to say. General Steyn stepped from behind
Hauer and looked down at the wizened old man in the wheelchair.
"Thomas Horn," he said rather pompously, "in the name of the Republic of
South Africa, I place you under arrest."
Still wearing his black eyepatch, Hess looked up with contempt.
The general cleared his throat. "You are Thomas Horn?"
"I am not," Hess said with disdain. "I am Rudolf Hess.
And you, General, are a traitor to your nation and to your race."
General Steyn's mouth fell open. "You're who?"
"Ignore him, General," Hauer snapped. "He's mad as a sewer rat."
Hauer turned to Smuts. "Why aren't you firing on the Arabs?"
Smuts wiped his still-bleeding face on his sleeve and smirked.
"They'll kill you too," Hauer pointed out.
"Probably," Smuts conceded. "But they might not."
Hauer moved to the bullet-starred polycarbonate wall and looked out.
Half the Libyan commandos had already crossed the bowl, and more were
coming-black phantoms gliding across the moonlit earth. Hauer looked
back and studied the cage that controlled the Vulcan gun.
"General Steyn, can your men operate that gun?"
At a nod from the general, one of the black-suited South Africans pulled
off his gas mask, climbed into the cage, and opened fire. The noise was
shattering. The gunner knocked down a dozen Libyans in less than twenty
seconds. When Smuts's bunker gunners saw the Vulcan resume firing, they
assumed that their chief had gone back over to the offensive, and they
added their machine guns to the fray.
Pieter Smuts eased his hand toward the console that controlled the
shields on the ground floor.
"Touch that and you're dead," Hauer warned.
Smuts's hand lingered over the switch until Hauer backed him off with a
flick of his rifle. The Vulcan thundered on, vomiting shells and flame
into the darkness.
"Listen to me!" Hess said, struggling to make himself heard.
"You ..." He pointed to Hauer. "You're German. In the name of the
Fatherland, join me!" The old man looked around in sudden confusion.
"Where is Frau Apfel?"
As if on cue, Ilse stepped through the door. Hans had held her outside
until he was certain the skirmish in the turret had ended.
"She understands!" Hess wailed. "You should all join-" At that instant
the first shell from Major Karmni's howitzer struck the tower.
The explosion rocked the entire structure on its foundations.
"Everyone out!" Hauer shouted. "Move!"
Pieter Smuts darted across the room, lifted Hess out of his wheelchair,
and carried him bodily into the stairwell. Everyone else hurried after
them. Only the South African manning the Vulcan remained in the turret,
probing for the howitzer through the smoke below. The group had reached
the second-floor landing when the second howitzer shell tore through the
turret window and exploded, incinerating man and machinery in a blinding
fireball. Stunned by the explosion above, everyone looked to Hauer for
instructions.
"Follow him!" Hauer shouted, pointing down at Smuts.
Even with Hess clinging to his neck, the Afrikaner.had already managed
to reach the ground floor. General Steyn a
nd his men started after
them, but Hans and Ilse hung back.
Hans grabbed Hauer's arm. "Come with us!" he begged.
"You'll die here!"
Hauer pointed through a narrow slit-window on the second-floor landing.
With the Vulcan out of,action, a strong Libyan force had begun charging
toward the burning house.
And more dangerous, the big howitzer was actually being towed across the
bowl under human power. Its progress was slow but steady.
"Find Stern," Hauer told Hans. "There's nothing you can do here.
The basement is the only safe place now. I'll buy you all the, time I
can. Hurry!"
When Hans hesitated, Hauer shoved him down the stairs.
Hauer felt a startling surge of emotion when Ilse stood up on her toes,
threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. She drew
back and looked into his eyes.
"Thank you for coming for us," she said. "You are a good father."
She smiled once, squeezed Hauer's arm, then took Hans's hand and hurried
down the steel steps into the darkness.
Hauer smashed the narrow window with the butt of his sniper rifle and
thrust the long barrel through. He rolled his shoulders once, took a
deep, breath, and put his eye to the scope. The Libyan infantry were
the closest targets, but he ignored them. He had to slow down the
artillery piece. He lined up the reticle, laid his forefinger against
the Steyr's trigger, and squeezed.
He knocked down four men in eight seconds. Down on the ground, the big
howitzer slowed, then stopped as the men towing it scrambled for cover.
Hauer began searching out the infantry, hearing as he did a calm voice
in his head: Running target, fifty meters ... fire! Eject shell, close
bolt, fire! As he picked off the commandos one by one, he wondered how
long he had before the howitzer team pinpointed his muzzle flashes and
decided to redecorate the second level of the tower with a 105mm shell.
Alan Burton lay prone on the rim of the bowl, watching the Libyans cross
the killing zone. He had seen the howitzer destroy the rotating gun
turret, and he had almost decided to try to cross the bowl himself when
he saw the Libyans falling to Hauer's rifle. At least somebody up there
knows what he's doing, Burton thought with admiration. Clearly he would
have to find an alternate route into the house.
The renewed chatter of the bunker guns gave him the idea. He peered
through the darkness at the nearest one, a concrete pillbox dug into the
shallow slope forty meters to his right. All he could see was a narrow
horizontal slit with a flashing machine gun barrel protruding from it.
The bunkers serve the tower, he thought. They're permanent
installations. So how are they supplied? From the sur ce?...
.la No from the house. But how?
"Tunnels," he said aloud. "Bloody tunnels."
Crouching low, Burton crab-walked around the rim of the bowl until he
lay directly over the concrete bunker. Then he pulled three grenades
from his web belt and laid them on
-7
sporadically, searching out targets in the gloom. Pulling the pin on
the first grenade, Burton swung himself down, lobbed it through the
narrow firing slit, and rolled back up onto the lip of the bowl.
The explosion shook the ground beneath him. The machine gun fell
silent. Gray smoke poured from the firing slit.
Grabbing the other two grenades, Burton dropped down in front of the
bunker. One meter below the slit he noticed a padlocked steel handle
set in the bunker's grass-covered face. Escape hatch, he thought.
Arming another grenade, he jammed it against the lock and hopped back
onto the roof of the bunker.
The blast tore the hatch right off its hinges. Covering his nose and
mouth with his shirtfront, Burton disappeared through the smoking hatch
like a rabbit down its hole.
Hauer's lungs were on fire. He had just flung himself down the twenty
flights of stairs to the basement complex, thanking God with every step
that he had run out of ammunition before the howitzer gunners spotted
him. Now he worked his way through almost total darkness toward the
voices he heard at the far end of the dark laboratory. When he finally
reached open space, he saw eight people standing in front of a shining
silver wall with great doors set in its face. Someone was speaking
English very loudly, but Hauer didn't recognize the voice. When he was
only five meters from the group, he finally saw what held center stage.
Lying prone on a wheeled cart like truncated guided missiles were three
bulbous, metal-finned cylinders. Ominous and black, they seemed to hold
everyone away by some invisible repulsive force. No one had noticed
Hauer yet, so he hesitated, trying to gauge exactly what was happening.
Jonas Stern stood with his back to the glinting storage vault, speaking
in low, urgent tones to General Steyn, who faced him across the bomb
cart. Gadi stood on Stern's left, an assault rifle hanging loosely in
his right hand. The two surviving South African CT soldiers, still
masked and helmeted, stood directly behind General Steyn. Smuts had
propped Hess against a nearby wall, his wasted legs splayed out before
him. Hans and Ilse stood arm in arm beside Dr.
Sabri.
Hauer slung his empty rifle over his shoulder, strode 7656 GREG ILES
through the semicircle and interposed himself between Stern and General
Steyn.
"Captain Hauer!" said General Steyn. He jabbed a finger at Stern.
"Do you know what this madman wants to do?
He's talking about detonating one of these weapons!"
Hauer had already guessed as much. What he could not understand was why
Stern had told General Steyn about his plan at all. Perhaps the South
Africans had surprised the Israelis in the process of arming the bombs.
Hauer looked at Smuts and pointed to one of,the bombs.
"Exactly what are we looking at here?"
When Smuts did not respond, Dr. Sabri said, "You are looking at three
fully operational nuclear weapons, sir."
Hauer studied the bespectacled young Arab. "And you are ... ?"
"He's a Libyan physicist," Gadi said irritably. "We've established that
already."
"Hauer," Stern said evenly, "the situation is hopeless. You know that
as well as 1, and General Steyn knows it better than both of us.
There is no way out of this building. In a matter of minutes the
Libyans will break through. When they do, Israel is lost. Unless-"
"Unless you blow the northern half of South Africa to hell?" General
Steyn bellowed.
Ilse's voice rose above the others. "How much time do we have? I
haven't heard any explosions for a few minutes."
Hauer rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. "I think some of the
Arabs are already inside, but they won't be able to breach those shields
with light weapons. The main force is trying to drag their big gun
across that bowl. Three hundred meters. Plus, our armored car is
blocking the door to the house. I'd say we have fifteen to twenty
minutes before we have to fight."
"Thank you, Capta
in," said Stern. His voice softened as he spoke to
General Steyn. "Jaap, the, damage from these weapons might be far less
than you imagine. Dr. Sabri, what are these bombs capable of.?"
The young Libyan answered in a shaky voice. "I've only examined one of
the weapons closely. It's a forty-kiloton bomb. That's a fairly low
yield by today's standards, though it's twice the size of the Hiroshima
bomb. If it were detonated as it was designed to be-in an air burst-the
results would be catastrophic. But here ... I would guess we're about a
hundred meters underground. The walls look like inforced concrete,
that's good." He frowned. "Such ings are difficult to predict, but if
only the one bomb exploded, the result could be similar to a
medium-sized underground nuclear test. If, however, the other weapons
detonated with the first-and if they are of the same approximate
size-the explosion might blow upward and break through the surface.
Where we are standing would be the epicenter of a large crater.
As for the above-ground effects, estimating blast radius and such, my
rough guess would be ... perhaps five kilometers? The radiation is the
real problem. But if the wind is right, the whole cloud might drift
right out to sea."
"Or it might drift south and kill everyone in Pretoria and
Johannesburg!" General Steyn exploded.
Hans stepped tentatively forward. "You said you brought an armored car
with you. Is there some way we could sneak the bombs out of here?"
Hauer shook his head. "Even if we could fight our way up to the
vehicle, we'd never get the bombs up to it. God only knows how much
they weigh."
"Sixteen hundred and fifty kilograms each," Dr. Sabri volunteered.
"There it is," said Stern with a note of finality. "The bombs cannot be
gotten safely away. That leaves only one option."
"That's ridiculous!" roared General Steyn. "All we have to do is find
a way out of here ourselves! We can leave the bombs right where they
are. As soon as we reach a phone, I can call Durban airbase. The air
force can shoot these Arab pirates down before they even leave our
airspace!"
This suggestion found immediate favor in the group. But while General
Steyn expanded on his idea, Gadi Abrams eased slowly across the room to
where Hans and Ilse stood listening.
When the general finished speaking, Stern put his foot on the nearest
bomb, laid an elbow across his knee, and leaned toward the South
