Wilbur Smith - C08 Golden Fox

by C08 Golden Fox(Lit)

  The code-name on the green cover was'Project Skylight'. She lifted it out, careful not to disturb anything else in the safe. She opened the file and began to scan the contents. While she had been assembling material for her thesis, she had taught herself the technique of speed reading, and now she turned the pages at a steady tempo.

  The vast bulk of the material was so technical as to be utterly meaningless to her, even with the benefit of all her study. But she understood sufficient of it to realize that this was a series of reports on the progress being made at Pelindaba in the process of massively enriching the common uranium isotope, Uranium 238, with the' highly fissionable Uranium 235. She knew that this was the basic step in the production of nuclear-fission weapons.

  The reports were filed in chronological order, and before she reached the last page she realized that success had been achieved almost three years previously and that sufficient Uranium had already been manufactured for the production of approximately fissionable explosive devices with a yield of up to fifty kilotons. Much of this seemed to have been exported to Israel in return for technical assistance with the manufacture of the uranium. She blinked as she digested that information.

  At twenty kilotons the Hiroshima bomb had been less than half as powerful as one of these weapons.

  A* She laid the file aside and reached for the next. She was at pains to note the exact order and position of each file in the safe, so that she could replace them without arousing suspicion that they had been tampered with.

  She read on. The main object of Project Skylight was the development of a series of tactical nuclear warheads of varying power and application, suitable for delivery not only by aircraft but also by ground artillery.

  She knew that Armscor was already building a 155millimetre howitzer designated G5 which would be capable of firing a 47-kilo shell with an i i -kilo payload and a maximum sea-level range Of Hometres. This would, she realized, make an ideal delivery system for a nuclear warhead. The report gave high priority to developing a nuclear artillery round for the G5.

  The basic principles of the nuclear weapon were common knowledge. They consisted of assembling two subcritical masses of fissionable enriched uranium. One was a female charge with a vaginal recess. The second, male, charge was propelled by a conventional explosive to implode into the female recess with such velocity as instantly to render the entire mass supercritical and set off the fission reaction.

  However, there were many technical pitfalls and obstacles to the actual manufacture of a viable device, particularly in the making of a Aarhead that weighed less than eleven kilos and was able to be contained in the casing of a i55-millimetre artillery round.

  Isabella raced through the series of reports and working papers with a sense of rising excitement. She felt a strange proprietorial pride in the ingenuity and dedication of the development team. A dozen times she recognized her father's touch and influence as she read how each pitfall had been circumvented and the whole massive project gathered momentum and rolled towards its climax.

  The last report in the file was dated only five days previously. She read it quickly, and then read it again.

  The first South African atomic bomb would be tested in a little less than two months from today.

  "But where?' she whispered desperately, and the next file she opened gave her the answer to that question.

  She replaced the files in their exact order and remembered to stick the scrap of Sellotape over the hinge and to reset the combination of the lock in the same sequence she had found it.

  Two years' study and deliberation had gone into choosing the site for the test. The prime consideration had been that of contamination by radioactive fallout.

  South Africa maintained a weather station at Gough Island in the Antarctic.

  They had considered an Antarctic site, but had swiftly rejected that idea.

  Not only would contamination be difficult to control, but also detection before or after the test would be a foregone conclusion. There were too many others, notably the Australians, who were interested in that bleak and beautiful continent at the foot of the world.

  For security, then, the test must be conducted on national soil or within South African air-space. The idea of an aerial test was soon abandoned.

  Again, detection would be a serious threat and the risk of contamination from fallout would be suicidal.

  It had come down at the end to an underground test. The South African gold mines are the deepest underground workings in the world. For sixty years the South Africans have been the leaders in deep-mining techniques, and associated with the mines is the art and science of deep drilling.

  Courtney Enterprises owned Orion Explorations, a specialist drilling company. The gnarled old magicians at Orion were able to sink a borehole two miles below the surface of the earth and bring up cores of rock from that depth. They could drive a straight hole or incline it at any angle they chose, or they could go straight down a mile and a half and then kick the bit off at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  It was this incredible skill that filled Shasa Courtney with a sense of awe and deep respect as he stood at the test site in the middle of a bright sunlit day and looked around him at the gargantuan machines that between them comprised the drilling rig.

  The entire rig was self-propelled. One truck the size of a modem fire-engine carried the power-plant. It was a diesel engine that could have driven an ocean liner. Another truck housed the control-room and electronic monitoring equipment. A third incorporated the actual drill and baseplate for the shot-hole. A fourth was the hydraulic lift and crane for the steel bore-rods.

  The drill site was surrounded by a community of residential caravans and supply-trucks. The rods were piled in a storage area many acres in extent.

  At night the entire area was lit by the brutal blue-white glare of the arc lamps, for the work continued around the clock. When completed, the hole would have cost almost three hundred thousand US dollars to sink.

  Shasa lifted his hat and wiped his brow with his forearm.' It was hot.

  This was the fringe of the Kalahari desert, which the little yellow Bushmen call 'The Great Dry Place'.

  The low undulating red dunes rolled like the waves of a turbulent ocean into the monotonous distance. The desert grasses were sparse and silver dry. In the troughs between the dunes stood isolated desert camel-thorn trees. The foliage was dark green, and. the bark was rough as a crocodile's back. In the nearest tree a colony of social weavers had built their communal nest. Hundreds of pairs of the drab little brown birds had combined their labours. The result was a shapeless edifice the size of a haystack that dwarfed the tall thorn tree which supported it. Each pair of birds occupied a separate chamber in the nest and helped to keep the whole structure in good repair the year round. One nest near Upington on the Orange river had been continuously occupied by successive generations of weavers for over a hundred years.

  This district was a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Courtney Mineral Exploration Company owned the i5o, ooo-acre concession on which the drilling rig now stood. The entire property was posted and fenced. There were guards at every access-point and gate. Nobody outside the company would ever see this encampment - and if they did... well, it was simply another mineral-exploration drill in progress.

  Shasa glanced up at the sky. There was not a single cloud to sully the high, achingly blue bowl. This section of the Kalahari was a restricted military zone and overflight by either commercial or private aircraft was forbidden. It was often used for military exercises by the artillery and tank school based at Kimberley only a few hundred miles to the south.

  Still Shasa worried. They were at D minus eight. The hole should be completed by the weekend. On Saturday evening the heavily guarded convoy would leave Pelindaba. to arrive on Sunday at noon. It would bring the team of scientists and the bomb.

  The test bomb would be positioned in the hole by Monday evening. The Minister of Defence and General Malan woul
d fly up from Cape Town on D minus one.

  He shook his head. 'It's all going just beautifully,' he assured himself, and climbed the steel steps into the mobile control-room.

  The chief drilling engineer had worked for Orion for twelve years. He rose from his seat and offered Shasa a broad callused hand.

  "How is it going, Mick?" 'Bak gat, Mr. Courtney!' The driller used a coarse Afrikaans expression of ultimate approbation. 'We hit the three-thousand-metre mark at nine this morning." He indicated the plot on the display-screen. It graphically illustrated the dog-leg in the fine of the hole which would help to contain the blast.

  "Don't let me bother you.' Shasa took the seat beside the engineer. 'Get on with it, man." Mick turned his full attention back to the controlconsole.

  Shasa lit a cheroot and imagined that flexible steel worm gnawing its way down into the earth below where he sat, down to the edge of the earth's crust, far below the subterranean water-table, down to the very edge of the magma where the earth's temperature would approximate to that of a domestic oven.

  A telephone rang in the control-room, but Shasa was wrapped up in his imagination. The junior technician who answered the phone had to call him twice.

  "Mr. Courtney, it's for you." 'Ask who it is,' Shasa snapped irritably. "Take a message.) 'It's~ Mr. Vorster, sir." 'VVhich Mr. Vorster?" 'The prime minister, sir. In person." Shasa snatched the receiver out of his hand. He had a sudden sickening premonition of disaster.

  "Ja, Oom John?' he asked.

  "Shasa, within the last hour the ambassadors of Britain, America and France have all presented notes of protest from their respective governments." 'What about?" 'At nine o'clock this morning an American satellite photographed the drill site. Ons is in die kak - we are in deep shit. They have somehow tumbled to Skylight and they are demanding that we abandon the test immediately. How long will it take you to get back to Cape Town?" 'My jet is standing on the strip. I'll be in your office in four hours." 'I've called a full cabinet meeting. I want you to brief them." 'I'll be there." 29e Shasa had never seen John Vorster so worried and angry. As they shook hands he growled, 'Since I spoke to you the Russians have called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. They are threatening immediate mandatory sanctions if we proceed with the test." Shasa realized that they all had very good reason to be worried.

  "The Americans and the Brits have warned that they won't use their veto to save us if we test." 'You haven't admitted anything, Prime Minister?" "Of course not,' Vorster snarled at him. 'But they want to inspect the drill site. They have aerial photographs -and they know the code-name Skylight." 'They have our code?' Shasa stared at him, and Vorster nodded heavily.

  "Ja, man, they have the code-name." 'You know what that means, Prime Minister? We have a traitor - and at a very high level. At the very top."

  In the United Nations the representatives of Third World and non-aligned nations rose one after the other in the General Assembly to castigate and condemn South Africa and her attempt to join the nuclear club. She was judged guilty as soon as the accusation was levelled. Both India and China had tested nuclear bombs in the previous year or two, but that was different. Despite assurances from the South African prime minister that no test had been conducted, the ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States insisted on a personal inspection of the site. They were flown up into the Kalahari in an air-force Puma helicopter. By the time they had arrived, the drilling rig and every other vehicle had been removed. There was only a borehole casing capped with fresh concrete left standing forlornly in an area of rutted and trampled earth.

  "What was the purpose of the drilling?' the British ambassador asked Shasa, not for the first time. Sir Percy was an old friend who had dined at Weltevreden and hunted at Dragon's Fountain.

  "Oil-prospecting,' Shasa answered him with a straight face, and the ambassador lifted an eyebrow and made no further comment. However, three days later Great Britain vetoed the sanctions proposed in the Security Council, and the storm began to blow over.

  Aaron Friedman telephoned Isabella to tell her of his immediate departure for Israel. He wanted her to go with him. He didn't, however, mention to her that the United States had put enormous pressure on the Israeli government for his recall to Jerusalem.

  "You are a darling, Aaron,' she told him, 'and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but you have your life and I have mine. Perhaps we'll meet again some day." 'I'll never forget you, Bella." The South African Bureau for State Security began a witch-hunt for the traitor that dragged on for months without any conclusive results. In the end it was accepted that one of the four Israeli scientists who had by that stage all left the country must have been responsible.

  When Shasa read the secret report of the investigation he was embarrassed to learn that his darling daughter had signed into the Pelindaba residential compound and had apparently stayed overnight as a guest of the good professor.

  "Well, you didn't think she was a virgin?'Centaine asked, when he mentioned it to her. 'Did you?" 'Hardly,' Shasa admitted. 'But, still, one doesn't like having one's nose rubbed in it, does one?" 'One has not had one's nose rubbed in it,' she corrected him. 'Bella seems to have been uncharacteristically discreet, for a change." 'Still, it's a good thing he's gone." 'He might have been quite a catch,' Centaine teased him, and he looked shocked.

  "Good Lord, he was old enough to be her father." 'Bella is thirty,'Centaine pointed out. 'Almost an old maid." 'Is she that old?' Shasa looked startled. 'I often forget how the years go by." 'We must seriously do something about finding her a husband." 'There is no desperate hurry.' Shasa did not relish the prospect of losing her. He had become accustomed to things just the way they were.

  Isabella's reward came swiftly. Within months she was promised a holiday with Nicky and instructed to make arrangements to be absent from the country for two weeks.

  "Two weeks!' she exalted. 'With my baby! I can hardly believe it's happening at last." Her euphoria was enough to banish the crippling sense of guilt that she had lived with since the Skylight furore had made world headlines. She tried to appease her conscience by assuring herself that she had helped to avert an escalation of the nuclear menace and that her treachery would, in the long run, yield beneficial results for all mankind.

  Naturally, she registered a patriotic sense of outrage when she discussed the subject with her family or with other senators in the halls of the parliament building, but the truth haunted her in the night. She was a traitor - and the penalty was death.

  She told Nana and Shasa that she was meeting Harriet Beauchamp in Zurich.

  They planned to hire a kombi and cruise around Switzerland for two weeks, going wherever the snow was good, eating fondue and trying all the most famous runs.

  "Don't expect to hear from me until I get back,' she warned them.

  "Have you got enough money, Bella?' Shasa wanted to know. , 'That's a silly question, Pater.' She kissed him. 'Wasn't it you who set up my trust fund - who gives me a ridiculous 2"

  salary each month, twice as much as my pay from the Senate?" 'Welli I'll give you the name of somebody at Credit Suisse in Lausanne, just in case you run short." 'You are sweet, but I'm not sixteen any more." "Sometimes I wish you were, my love." Isabella caught the Swissair flight for Zurich, but left the aircraft at Nairobi. She checked in at the Norfolk Hotel and the following morning telephoned Weltevreden and spoke to Nana, pretending that she was calling from Zurich.

  "Have fun and keep your eyes open for a nice millionaire,' Nana told her.

  "For you or for me, Nana?" 'That's enough of your sauce, missy." As she had been instructed, Isabella caught the Air Kenya flight to Lusaka in Zambia and the airline bus from the airport to the Ridgeway Hotel. She found that a single room had been reserved for her. This was as far as her instructions took her.

  Before dinner she sat on the swimming-pool terrace and ordered a gin and tonic. A few minutes later, a tall good-looking black man sitting at the bar sauntered across to he
r table.

  "Red Rose,' he said.

  "Sit down,' she nodded, her heart pounding and her palms damp.

  "My name is Paul.' He refused the drink she offered him. 'I will not trouble you any longer than necessary. Will you please be ready at nine o'clock tomorrow morning? I will meet you with transport at the front entrance of the hotel." 'Where are you taking me?" 'I don't know,'he said as he stood up. 'And you shouldn't ask." She was waiting for him as he had instructed. He drove her back to the airport in a battered Volkswagen, but bypassed the commercial terminal and drove on to the gates of the restricted military area.

  The remains of Zambia's squadron of Mig fighters stood on the apron in the sunlight. There had been four crashes in the last month alone. Not only had Zambian pilots been inadequately trained in East Germany, but also they had not adjusted well to the complexity of supersonic flight. In addition, the Migs had done almost twenty years of service in eastern Europe before being sold to Zambia. Zambia's copper-based economy had been sent reeling by the fall in the price of the metal, and by two decades of gross mismanagement.