Larry Bond - Vortex

NOVEMBER 25-HEADQUARTERS, I ST BATTALION, 75TH RANGER REGIMENT, HUNTER ARMY AIRFIELD, GEORGIA

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell was on a secure line to Washington, listening grimly as his regimental commander, Col. Paul Gener, threw ten days’ worth of mission planning into the shit can The fact that it was a phone call he’d been half expecting since the news of Pretoria’s nuclear strike was no consolation.

A stray beam of pale, watery sunshine briefly brightened his office without brightening his mood. Just once, he wished that he could get a telephone call from the Pentagon containing good news. It seemed likely to be a wish that would never come true.

“No, sir, I understand. Yes, sir. This is one helluva way to run a railroad. We’ll see you here tomorrow. Goodbye. ” He bit back the urge to say more-a lot more. Instead, he replaced the red secure phone on its cradle and sat staring out the window.

“Trouble?”

O’Connell turned slightly and looked across his desk at the lean, tanned face of Maj. Peter Klocek, the battalion’s operations officer.

“You could say that, Pete. ” He nodded toward the phone.

“We just lost a week. This is now D minus four. Washington wants us to go in on the twenty-ninth not

December sixth. Plus, they’ve upped the target list. The Joint Chiefs want us to take out Pelindaba’s enrichment plant, too. They don’t want to give

South Africa the slightest chance of prepping a weapon before our Marines go ashore at Cape Town. “

“Jesus Christ!” The S-3 couldn’t hide his consternation. Attacking a week ahead of schedule would mean abandoning a series of full-scale rehearsals designed to test a complicated plan so far worked out only on paper and on computer. Even worse, the last-minute addition of a major target such as the uranium enrichment plant would spread the Ist Battalion’s already thinned-out resources even further.

“How the hell are we supposed to do all that?”

O’Connell shrugged.

“Any way we can. We stage to Ascension Island the day after tomorrow.”

“We’re screwed.” Klocek looked sick. Mounting an airborne operation required careful planning and thorough preparation. Skimping on either dramatically increased the odds against success and for bloody disaster.

“Yeah, maybe so. But doing this kind of stuff is what the taxpayers are paying us for.” O’Connell forced himself to sound confident.

Klocek nodded toward the secure phone.

“Is the colonel still planning to jump with us?”

“Uh-huh.” O’Connell said it flatly, not yet sure how he felt about the situation.

The 75th Ranger Regiment’s commander had made the decision to drop with the 1/75th several days before. In theory, he was going along to provide higher command and control for both Ranger units, but O’Connell didn’t have any illusions about how the colonel’s presence would affect his battalion’s chain of command. In practice, Gener would wind up running the whole show, and he’d be relegated to the sidelines.

Despite that, he couldn’t really fault the colonel’s decision.

O’Connell’s 1/75th had the toughest and most critical assignment in Brave

Fortune, and Carrerra, the 2/75this CO, was a veteran Ranger-someone

Gener had worked with for years. So naturally, the colonel wanted to be where he was likely to be needed most.

O’Connell frowned, irritated with himself for having wasted even a second of precious time worrying about something he couldn’t control. He looked up.

“Round up the guys, Pete. I want to see all company commanders here at thirteen hundred hours. And tell Professor Levi I’d like to talk to him-now. “

Prof. Esher Levi eyed the short, dark-haired American officer warily. In the two days since he’d arrived at Hunter, he’d met O’Connell only briefly-at meals and once after a rigorous session with the Rangers he was training to handle South Africa’s nuclear weapons. And each time, he’d sensed two conflicting emotions vying with each other inside the

American officer: gratitude for Levi’s help and deep outrage at the fact that Israel’s cooperation with South Africa made it necessary for his men to risk their lives in the first place. It made for a somewhat complicated working relationship.

“You wanted to see me, Colonel?”

“Yeah. For two reasons.” O’Connell pushed an enhanced satellite photo across his desk and watched as Levi picked it up. The photo showed a squat, square building in the center of Pelindaba’s scientific complex.

“Recognize that?”

Levi nodded. He’d spent two years of his life in and around Pelindaba’s centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant-the key component of South Africa’s top-secret nuclear weapons program.

Only slightly more than seven-tenths of one percent of raw uranium ore is actually U-235-the uranium isotope needed for bomb-making. The other ninety-nine-odd percent is U238, an almost identical isotope. Separating the two to produce enriched, weapons-grade uranium is an extraordinarily difficult, costly, and time-consuming process. And only the fact that

U-235 weighs slightly less than U-238 makes it possible at all.

In centrifuge enrichment, uranium hexafluoride-a gaseous combination of natural uranium and fluorine-is whirled round and round at high speed inside a tall, thin centrifuge. A small fraction of the slightly heavier

U-238 is thrown to the outside of the centrifuge and can be removed, leaving behind gas with a slightly higher concentration of U-235. The process is repeated over and over and over again until more than ninety percent of the remaining uranium is U-235.

Levi smiled to himself. In many ways, he thought, uranium enrichment closely resembled the fabled infinite series of monkeys pounding away on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of

William Shakespeare. Obtaining usable quantities of bomb-grade material required a great many machines working at high speed for a very long time.

He scanned the photo of Pelindaba’s enrichment plant again, marveling at the technical achievement the picture represented. Despite being taken by an American satellite orbiting several hundred miles above the earth’s atmosphere, it looked as though it had been snapped only a few feet off the ground. Details of the facility’s heavily guarded doorways and rooftop air-conditioning system were plainly visible. Nevertheless, the shot of the plant’s square, windowless exterior revealed nothing of its inner complexity.

Like an iceberg, most of the South African uranium enrichment plant was below the surface-a design feature that made it easier to maintain a constant temperature inside. A central cascade hall housed more than twenty thousand centrifuges-each only thirty centimeters wide and seven meters high-an-anged and mounted in rows and connected to form ninety distinct enrichment stages. Tens of kilometers of small-bore piping ran through the plant-feeding in fresh uranium hexafluoride, carrying off

U-238 waste, and moving batches of ever more enriched uranium from stage to stage.

Levi passed the photo back to O’Connell.

“You have sow question about the facility, Colonel?”

“Not exactly.” The American frowned.

“I need a quick, efficient way to destroy the damned place.”

Levi wasn’t surprised. It was a logical step. Seizing South

Africa’s nuclear stockpile without wrecking its uranium enrichment plant made little long-term sense. Why go to a lot of trouble to take a few bullets away while leaving the whole ammunition factory behind?

Levi steepled long, graceful hands-hands his ex-wife had thought more appropriate for a surgeon than a nuclear physicist. It was an intriguing problem. What was the best way to wreck thoroughly Pelindaba’s enrichment plant? Placing conventional demolitions meant capturing the facility itself and then spending a fair amount of time wiring a large number of charges together. You’d need a lot of explosive power to destroy everything.