Larry Bond - Vortex

Luthuli’s lips thinned in anger.

“Well, then, what can we do about it?”

The intelligence chief swore silently to himself. He’d al-7

ways loathed being placed in impossible positions. And this was certainly one of the worst he’d ever been in. There simply wasn’t any right way to answer the colonel’s question.

He folded his hands in his lap, unaware that the gesture made him look as though he were praying.

“I’m very much afraid, Colonel, that there isn’t anything we can do-not at this stage.”

Luthuli’s voice was cold and precise.

“You had better explain what you mean by that, Major. I’m not accustomed to my officers openly admitting complete incompetence.” :

Xuma hurriedly shook his head.

“That’s not what I’m saying, sir.

“If—he stressed the word, emphasizing his uncertainty” if our abort signal didn’t get through, there just isn’t time now to send another. Not with the contact routines laid out in the Broken Covenant plan.”

Luthuli knew the younger man was right, though he hated to admit it.

Martin Cosate had been more interested in making sure that his master stroke succeeded than in making sure it could be called off. And Cosate had been especially concerned by the need for secure communications with his chosen strike group. As a result, the fifteen guerrillas who might now be assembled deep in the mountains would respond only to messages sent by specific and tortuously long routes. Any attempts at direct contact from Lusaka would undoubtedly fall on willfully deaf ears.

“Colonel?” The intelligence chief’s cultured voice interrupted Luthuli’s increasingly bleak thoughts. He looked up.

“Personally, sir, I believe it more likely that Mbeki passed our message on before his death. Our records show that he was a dedicated man. I don’t think he would have left his home that night without first completing his mission.”

Luthuli nodded slowly. Xurna’s reading of the situation was optimistic, but not outrageously so. The odds favored the major’s belief that Broken

Covenant had been aborted as ordered. He sat up straighter.

“I hope you’re right. But ask for confirmation anyway. And I want an answer back by the twenty-eighth. “

Xuma eyed his superior carefully. Luthuli must know that

what he wanted done was impossible. That meant the colonel was already thinking about covering his tracks should something go wildly, incalculably wrong in South Africa’s Hex River Mountains over the next several days. If the abort signal hadn’t gone through, the colonel could truthfully say he’d given his chief of intelligence a direct order to send another message. The blame for any disaster would fall squarely on Xuma’s shoulders.

So be it.

The major saluted sharply, spun round, and left Luthuli’s office at a fast walk. The colonel was a clever bastard, but two could play the blame-shifting game. Xuma had never especially liked the captain in charge of Umkhonto’s clandestine-communications section anyway. The man would make an excellent scapegoat.

Besides, he told himself, the odds really were against anything going seriously wrong. Even if Mbeki hadn’t passed the signal on, South Africa’s security forces were still incredibly efficient and deadly. The men assigned to Broken Covenant weren’t likely to get within twenty kilometers of their target before being caught and killed.

He was wrong.

JUNE 27-CAPE TOWN CENTRAL RAILWAY STATION

The seventeen-car Blue Train sat motionless at a special platform, surrounded by a cordon of fully armed paratroops and watchful plainclothes policemen. Within the security cordon, white-coated waiters, immaculately uniformed porters, and grease-stained railway workers scurried from task to task each engrossed in readying the train for its most important trip of the year.

One hundred yards away, Sam Knowles squinted through the lens of his

Minicam, panning slowly from the electric locomotive in front to the baggage car in back. He pursed his lips.

Ian Sheffield saw the worried look on his cameraman’s face.

“Something wrong?”

Knowles shook his head.

“Nothing I can’t fix on the Monster. “

The Monster was Knowles’s nickname for their in-studio computerized videotape editing machine. It worked by digitizing the images contained on any videotape fed into it. With every blade of grass, face, or brick on the tape reduced to a series of numbers stored in the system’s memory banks, a skilled technician could literally alter the way things looked to a viewer simply by changing the numbers. These hightech imaging systems were ordinarily used for routine editing or to enhance existing pictures by eliminating blurring or distortion. But they could also be used to twist a recorded event beyond recognition. People who weren’t there when a scene was taped could be inserted after the fact. And people who had been there could be neatly removed, erased without a trace. Buildings, mountains, and trees could all be transformed and shifted about at the touch of a single set of computer keys.

Put simply, computer-imaging systems made the old truism that a picture was worth a thousand words as dead as the dinosaurs. Now only the honesty of each individual cameraman, reporter, and technician guaranteed that what people saw on their TV screens bore any resemblance to the truth.

Knowles lowered his camera.

“I’m getting the damnedest kind of yellowish glare off those sleeping-car windows.”

Ian tapped the South African Railways tourist brochure he held in his right hand.

“According to this, that’s the gleam of pure gold you’re getting,

Sam. Pure, unadulterated gold.

“I hope you’re pulling my leg.”

Ian shook his head.

“Not at all. Every one of those windows has a thin layer of gold tacked on to reduce heat and glare inside the train.”

“Jesus Christ.” Knowles didn’t bother hiding his half envious contempt.

“Is there anything they haven’t thrown into that track-traveling luxury liner?”

Ian ran a finger through the list of amenities that were standard items on

South Africa’s Blue Train. Air-conditioned cars. Elegant private baths and showers. Five-star gourmet meals. Ultramodern air springs and extra insulation to ensure

a quiet, smooth fide. Even free champagne before every departure. He smiled cynically. Whoever wrote the brochure must have been running out of superlatives near the end.

He folded the brochure and stuffed it into his jacket’s inside pocket.

“Cheer up, Sam. It gives us a good hook for tomorrow’s otherwise boring story.”

“Such as?”

Ian thought quickly.

“Okay, how’s this for a lead-in?

“With Parliament out of session, South Africa’s president and his top cabinet leaders left Cape

Town today aboard the famous Blue Train-taking their traditional fide back to Pretoria in comfort through a country still filled with millions of impoverished and disenfranchised blacks. “

Knowles grinned.

“Not bad. Probably a little too rabble rousing to suit New

York, but not bad at all.”

“It doesn’t really fit the facts, though, so I can’t use it. I’ve got to admit that Haymans and his people seem genuinely willing to change the way things work in this country.”

“Maybe so.” Knowles sounded unconvinced.

“You gonna let a little thing like that stand in the way of a good intro line?”

“I know guys who wouldn’t.” Ian smiled ruefully.

“But I probably couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I started pulling stuff like that.”

Ian heard the sanctimonious tone he’d just used and secretly wondered just how well his scruples would stand up to another few months of virtual exile in South Africa. Damn it! He needed a big story to break back onto the charts in the States. And he needed it soon.