Vortex

hanging over the central city. Flames licked red around the edges of half-demolished buildings and roared high from the wrecked carcasses of bullet-riddled automobiles. Bodies littered the streets, singly in some places, heaped in grotesque piles in others. The flashes of repeated rifle and machinegun fire stabbed from windows and doorways where armed rioters still fought with the police and the Army.

“Again.” Brig. Franz Diederichs tapped his pilot on the shoulder and made a circling motion with one finger. The tiny Alouette III helicopter banked sharply and began another orbit over a city now transformed into a battleground.

Diederichs scowled at the smoke and flame below. He’d been taken by surprise and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. His networks of informers and spies had warned of increasing unrest among the city’s predominantly Indian population but nothing had prepared him for the sudden onset of outright rebellion and armed resistance.

In the first half hour of the revolt, Durban’s palm tree lined City Hall, its massive, barricaded police headquarters, and the SADF’s fortified central armory had all been attacked by rifle-and pistol-armed groups of

Zulus and Indians. That strange alliance was troubling in and of itself. In ordinary times, Natal’s Zulu and Indian populations feared and hated each other almost more than they did the ruling white minority. Diederichs grinned sourly. If nothing else, at least his bungling political masters had managed to unite all the separate factions opposed to them!

The Alouette straightened out of its bank, bringing the burning city back into full view. The sight wiped Diederichs’s twisted grin off his narrow face. Most of the rebels had been driven off after a few minutes of fierce fighting, but not before both sides had suffered heavy losses. For several hours since, his men had struggled to regain control of a city seemingly gone mad.

Unarmed women and children had thrown themselves in front of armored riot cars and APCs-blocking main roads and alleys alike until blasted out of the way. As troops on foot tried to bypass those human roadblocks, snipers hidden in office buildings, churches, and storefronts picked them off one by one, imposing delay and triggering panicked bursts of indiscriminate automatic weapons fire that only consumed needed ammunition and killed more civilians.

Resistance was finally beginning to fade-broken by superior firepower, training, and Diederichs’s willingness to order the slaughter of all who got in his way. Still, even his most optimistic estimates showed that it would be several days before he had all of Durban’s districts and suburbs firmly in hand.

Diederichs was thrown against his seat belt as the Alouette, caught in a sudden updraft of superheated air, bucked skyward and then fell toward the water like a rock before the pilot regained control. He glared left through the canopy to where sheets of orange-red flame more than a hundred meters high marked the site of one of the day’s worst human and economic disasters-the destruction of the Shell Oil refinery’s main tank farm.

Early in the fighting, stray cannon shells and mortar rounds had slammed into several of the storage tanks-igniting a conflagration that had already consumed at least fifty lives and precious oil worth tens of millions of rands. Hours later, the fire still raged out of control, kept back from the refinery only by a series of massive earthen berms and the heroic efforts of virtually every surviving firefighter left in Durban.

Diederichs stared at the manmade inferno roiling below, all too conscious of how narrowly he had escaped total disaster. The Shell facility alone supplied nearly 40 percent of South Africa’s refined petroleum products-fuel oil, petrol, and diesel. The oil destroyed in storage could be replaced in days. But the refinery itself was essentially irreplaceable.

And no government-especially not one headed by Karl Vorster -would have looked with favor on anyone even remotely connected with its loss. This rebellion was bad enough.

He shifted his gaze toward the city center. His best troops were down there, fighting their way from house to house through the heart of Durban’s

Indian business district. He spotted more smoke rising from stores and shops either set aflame by the rebels or demolished by armored-car cannon fire.

One enormous pillar of smoke stained the sky above a shattered pile of white stone.

Diederichs’s lip curled in disgust. The Great Mosque of Grey Street was said to have been the largest Islamic religious site in southern Africa.

The Moslems among South Africa’s Indian minority had built it with their own money and hard labor over long years. Well, he and his troops had shown the koefietjies-the little coolies-how quickly and how easily Afrikaner explosive shells could knock it down. Hundreds of dead or dying men, women, and children lay sprawled among the mosque’s shell-torn arched passageways and collapsed sanctuary.