Vortex

“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.