Vortex

He suddenly felt dizzy, and his skin was instantly covered by a thick sheen of sweat. He felt sick to his stomach. His hands were already growing heavier as he struggled with the roll of tape. Then they took on a life of their own, and he fell, legs and arms twitching, onto the floor. His lungs were bursting. He had to breathe. He needed air. Clean air. The South African brigadier vomited onto the floor.

Random bursts of pain surged through him as his synapses fired uncontrollably, mixing with sensations of heat, cold, and motion. Every sensor his body had was going wild.

Piet Boerson had just enough coordination left to roll over. With one last desperate gesture, he grabbed for the tape he’d dropped, but then the sarin reached his brain cells. He flickered mercifully into unconsciousness. A few seconds later his brain stopped telling his heart to beat. From beginning to end, he had taken less than thirty seconds to die.

PEOPLE’S GUARD MOTOR RIFLE BATTALION

Col. Hassan Mahmoud stood high in the commander’s hatch of his armored personnel carrier-calculating the distance separating his battalion from the outer South African defenses. One thousand meters, perhaps. It was time to deploy.

He lifted his radio mike.

“All units. Form line. Continue the advance.

“

Jubilant acknowledgements flooded into his earphones. Mahmoud scowled.

Young idiots. They were acting as though this were some kind of peacetime joyride.

Luckily, there wasn’t much left out there to oppose them. The defending fire had been light, very light. These peasants might actually be able to execute the maneuver, he thought.

The gas appeared to be working. In this heat it would only be effective for another ten minutes. After that, it would begin breaking down-decomposing into harmless compounds.

Other nerve gases, such as Soman, or GD, would have lasted for days-true “persistent” agents. Vega had chosen sarin precisely because it was “nonpersistent.” With proper care, Mahmoud’s battalion ought to be able to seize its objectives without suffering any self-inflicted losses.

The Libyan colonel was optimistic. The Afrikaners appeared to have been taken completely by surprise. Even the wind favored them, a light breeze from behind and to his left that should push the poisonous mist completely clear of his men.

POTGIETERSRUS

The wind blew from the northeast, moving at between ten and fifteen kilometers an hour. In the fifteen minutes that the nerve gas remained effective, it drifted a little over three kilometers-mixing and fanning out over Potgietersrus in a deadly cloud.

Most of the city’s remaining white population had taken refuge in improvised bomb shelters when they heard the Cuban barrage echoing down the mountain. A sizable fraction did not bother, however. Three days of living within earshot of constant fighting had made war seem almost routine.

People outside-especially those working or breathing hard-were immediately affected. And the residents of the black township, living in windowless shacks, might just as well have been outside. There were no bomb shelters for them.

The gas was starting to break down, though, so it was

somewhat less lethal. The very young and very old were vulnerable, as was anyone with respiratory trouble-a common ailment among miners. And even when weakened, sarin can still paralyze and blind its victims. Once destroyed, nerve tissue does not heal.

Six-year-old Alice Naxula lived in a one-room hut with her mother, grandmother, and uncle. A typical black child in the townships, she was about to go out, to play and to forage for food. Wartime chaos had emptied store shelves, so she and her mother had to split up and hunt in the city, while her uncle worked in the mine and her grandmother sat quietly in the shack’s one chair, remembering.

Her uncle was already awake, ready to catch the six-o’clock bus to the mine. They all rose early to see him off each day, sharing the leftover porridge from last night’s dinner. In the darkness, none of them saw the gas seeping in through their tattered, rusting walls and a blanket-draped doorway. Even in the daylight, it was spread so thin as to be invisible, but still lethal.

The first sign of trouble came when her grandmother started coughing uncontrollably. She had bronchitis, common among the old, brought on from scores of winters spent living in unheated shacks. Suddenly, the old woman howled once in agony and threw herself out of the chair. She landed on the dirt floor in a writhing, twitching heap.

Alice’s own eyes were stinging. Her mother started to scream something, pointing at her grandmother. With an instinct born from years of police sweeps, the little girl dove under a pile of bedding in one corner and froze, lying motionless. Her mother had taught her this years ago, so that the adults could flee from the township police when they made one of their sporadic sweeps. Alice looked on the pile of patched bedding as a place of refuge.