Vortex

He pulled his collar closer and started walking toward the primary school, picking his way carefully through piles of trash left lying in the street.

A hundred yards down the road, two young black men sat

impatiently in a small, battered Fiat. They’d been waiting for more than an hour, fidgeting in the growing cold.

The two men were “pets,” a term used by South Africa’s security services to describe the petty thieves, collaborators, and outright thugs used for dirty work inside the all-black townships. They were convenient, obedient, and best of all, virtually untraceable. Crimes they committed could easily be blamed on the violent gangs who already roamed township streets.

The driver turned to his younger, shorter companion.

“Well? Is that the bastard?”

The other man slowly lowered the starlight scope he’d been using to scan

Mbeki’s house.

“That’s the schoolteacher. No doubt about it.”

“About time .” The driver started the car and pulled smoothly away from the curb. His foot shoved down hard on the accelerator. Within seconds, the

Fiat was moving at sixty miles an hour, racing down the darkened street without headlights.

Mbeki didn’t even have time to turn before the car slammed into him and crushed his skull beneath its spinning tires. By the time his neighbors poured out of their houses, Dr. Nthato Mbeki, one of Soweto’s most promising teachers, lay sprawled on Bila Street’s dirt surface, bloody and unmoving.

Without any eyewitnesses to question, Soweto’s harried police force could only list his death as another unsolved hit and-run accident.

The signal to abort Broken Covenant died with him.

CHAPTER

Broken Covenant

JUNE 14-NEAR PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA

Karl Vorster’s modest country home lay at the center of a sprawling estate containing cattle pens, grazing lands, and furrowed, already-harvested wheat fields. His field hands and servants lived in rows of tiny bungalows and larger, concrete block barracks dotting a hillside below the main house. The house itself was small and plain, with thick plaster walls and narrow windows that kept it cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Twenty men crowded Vorster’s study. Most were dressed casually, though a few who’d come straight from their offices wore dark-colored suits and ties. Two were in military uniform. A few held drinks, but none showed any signs that they’d taken more than an occasional, cautious sip. All twenty stood quietly waiting, their serious, sober faces turned toward their leader.

Despite the soft country-western music playing in the background and the smells wafting in from a barbecue pit just outside, no one there

could possibly have mistaken the gathering for any kind of social event. An air of grim purpose filled the room, emanating from the tall, flint-eyed man standing near the fireplace.

Vorster studied the men clustered around him with some satisfaction. Each man was a member of his secret inner circle. Each man could claim a “pure” and unblemished Afrikaner heritage. Each shared his determination to save South Africa from failing into a nightmare era of black rule and endless tribal warfare. And each held an important post in the Republic’s government.

Vorster held his silence for a moment longer, watching as the tension built. It served his purpose to have these men on edge. Their own inner alarm would lend extra importance to his words. Then he glanced at

Muller, who stood rigidly waiting for his signal. The younger man nodded back and pulled the study door shut with an audible click. They were ready to begin.

“I’ll come straight to the point, my friends.” Vorster kept his words clipped, signaling both his anger and his determination.

“Our beloved land stands on the very brink of disaster.”

Heads bobbed around the room in agreement.

“Haymans and his pack of traitorous curs have shown themselves ready to sell out to the communists, to the blacks, and to the Uitlanders. We have all seen their rush to surrender. No one can deny it. No one can doubt that the talks they propose with the ANC would be the first step toward oblivion for our people.”

More heads nodded, Muller’s among them-though he hid a cynical smile as he heard Vorster’s rhetoric ride roughshod over reality. He doubted that

Haymans had ever seriously contemplated the complete abdication of all white authority. Still, the exaggeration had its uses. Even the faint chance of a total surrender had already roused a fire storm of anger and hatred among South Africa’s militant right-a fire storm that Vorster would use to cleanse the Republic when the time came. And Muller knew that time was coming soon. Very soon. He turned his attention back to his leader’s impassioned diatribe.

“We must be ready to save our people when they cry out for our aid. As they will! True Afrikaners will not long be deceived by the web of false promises of peace Haymans and his cronies are spinning. Soon the bestial nature of our enemies shall stand revealed in the clear light of day.”