Vortex

S-3 Viking swooped low now and again to monitor the line of passive sonobuoys it had dropped ahead of the oncoming carrier group.

Aboard the carrier itself, video monitors brought the sights and sounds of the busy flight deck to the Carl Vinson’s soundproofed flag plot. Radios muttered near control consoles, relaying conversations between the Vinson’s air wing commander, the CAG, his assistants, and pilots already in the air, landing, or awaiting takeoff. Glowing computer displays updated the position and status of every unit in the formation.

Rear Adm. Andrew Douglas Stewart ignored the constant hum of activity all around as he scanned the message flimsy that had just arrived. As he read, he rocked back and forth slowly on the balls of his feet-still as compact and trim as he’d been when he earned his living as an attack pilot over

North Vietnam.

The creases around Stewart’s cold gray eyes tightened as he skimmed through the various addresses that showed this order had originated with the Joint

Chiefs of Staff-and presumably somewhere inside the White House before that. The real meat came in the second short paragraph.

“.. . Proceed at best speed to… ” The admiral eyeballed a nearby electronic chart. The latitude and longitude contained in the message marked a point approximately four hundred nautical miles east of Durban.

“You will prepare for contingency operations off the South African coast on arrival. “

It still read the same way the second time through. Contingency operations off South Africa. He whistled once and then swore under his breath.

“Son of a big, bad bitch!”

“Trouble, Admiral?” His chief of staff hovered on the other side of the plot table.

Stewart handed him the message and watched his surprise.

The younger man unconsciously scratched at his balding scalp and shook his head.

“I don’t get it. What kind of ops are we supposed to prepare for?”

“Damned if I know exactly, Tom.” Stewart shrugged. He’d read about the

South African military situation in the daily intelligence summaries, and they were about as helpful as the out-of-date magazines the COD planes delivered. Certainly nothing he’d read seemed to warrant direct U.S. involvement. He smiled slightly to himself.

Could it be that the Joint Chiefs and the political bigwigs were actually thinking and planning ahead for once? It was doubtful, but he’d seen stranger things in his thirty-odd years in the military.

He shook himself out of his reverie. They had a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in. Even with all the latest in instantaneous communications and computer navigation, a carrier battle group couldn’t turn on a dime.

“Get your boys busy, Tom. I want to be ready to alter course in half an hour, after this ops cycle. Check the training schedule, and make sure it allows enough aircraft for air and sea surveillance missions. ” Stewart glanced at a row of clocks set to show local times at various points around the globe.

“In the meantime, I’ll be on the secure net back to D.C.” He glanced down at the message still held in his chief of staff’s hand.

“I’d like to have somebody back there tell me just what the hell is going on.”

The younger officer nodded once and hurried away in search of his staff-already pondering the most efficient way to continue the training cycle while the Carl Vinson and her escorts moved toward Durban.

For the first time ever, major elements of U.S. military power were being focused on South Africa.

CHAPTER

Civil War

NOVEMBER 9-STATE SECURITY COUNCIL CHAMBER, PRETORIA

Karl Vorster and his cabinet met in their windowless chamber for the tenth time in as many days. Caught between the twin pressures of a bloody, stalemated war in Namibia and escalating political chaos at home, the cabinet was starting to crack. Several chairs were empty, abandoned by men who’d resigned-men either unable to stomach Vorster’s actions or who feared being held responsible for them by a new government.

Marius van der Heijden blinked rapidly, his eyes watering in the thick haze of tobacco smoke choking the small room. More evidence that sinful addiction could overcome the best intentions of weak-willed men, he thought irritably. Weaklings like Erik Muller, though on a smaller scale.

Muller’s pale, agonized face rose in his mind, and he shied away from the memory. The security chief’s pain-filled death had been richly deserved, but not pretty.

He drove Muller’s image away by concentrating on the situation maps tacked up on the chamber’s otherwise bare walls. Clusters of multicolored pins dotting the map showed only the vaguest outlines of the disaster spreading with wildfire rapidity across the whole country. An open revolt crushed in Durban, but untamed elsewhere in the Natal. Secessionist movements springing up among the former Afrikaner faithful in the Orange

Free State and the Transvaal. The entire elected city council of Cape

Town under arrest for suspected treason. And so it went-each succeeding piece of news worse than the last.