His feet stuck to the drying blood where the SEAL team's chief had died. Inside the shattered strongpoint leading to the basement stairs, the enemy soldiers' broken bodies were growing cold. What surprised Jeffrey was how much paper was scattered there: orders and records blown from packs and pockets, torn photos and singed scraps of letters from loved ones back home.
Through his IR imagers Jeffrey saw warm spots in the debris. A flare-up now would be a disastrous attention-getter, embers fanned into a conflagration by the strong breeze coming through. Jeffrey decided to give the smoldering wreckage a quick once-over. Three big CO, extinguishers sat on the floor where Ilse had left them neatly in a line, but all were empty. Nearby lay a fire ax, its wooden handle splintered near the tip, probably by a bullet. Jeffrey found another extinguisher with some charge still in it, and he did a hasty overhaul.
He mounted the staircase to the second deck, itself badly pockmarked. Sprawled across the steps near the upper landing lay a body in a lab coat. The whole top of its head was gone. The deck two stairwell door was off its hinges. Jeffrey glanced away as he passed the landing. He'd experienced enough carnage tonight, enough to last a lifetime. He continued toward the roof.
Jeffrey reviewed the ROE standards in his head one final time. The setting was in fact ideal. The rising ground behind the Sharks Board would shield people inland from the flash pulse and the blast wave, while strengthening the effects in the immediate area of the lab. With a surface burst there'd be no Mach stem, that terrible shock front when an airburst merged with its own ground reflection. The Indian community of Phoenix and the black townships of Greater Inanda should be safe except for broken windows, and intel said almost everyone had taped theirs up to keep down flying glass — after all, there was a war on.
The biosafety level five containment was in the part of the basement closest to the missile bunker, and a quick radar scan had verified the intervening ground was soil, not bedrock. There were indeed no hostage encampments protecting the site, and as near as Jeffrey could tell from the team's approach march, SEAL Eight's scouting down the hill, and direction-finding of the signal traffic, Umhlanga Rocks itself was part of the militarized coast defense zone.
Jeffrey's one concern was flash blindness, which could happen even miles from ground zero. The general impairment of vision lasted only seconds or minutes. The insidious problem was focusing of thermal energy on the retina, for anyone looking directly at the early fireball. The image of the mushroom cloud was burned forever into one spot on the victim's field of view. Worse, the retina would be fused to the underlying sclera, creating mechanical stress in the eye. Over months or years the retina could tear and hemorrhage, needing invasive surgery to counter permanent total blindness. Then there were the cataracts. More reason, Jeffrey told himself, to end this damn war soon — minority populations weren't getting adequate health care under New Apartheid. At least with the storm and the strict curfew few civilians would be exposed. Jeffrey walked through one more shattered doorway and surveyed the roof. The feeder horns and pre-amp cans of the microwave dishes were scorched, and the coaxial leads of the whip antennas were melted. The four dead soldiers were gone Jeffrey saw their blood trails on the steps. The SEAL abseil-rope-climbing group had dragged them to the second floor, out of view from the air. Jeffrey felt glad not to see them; he was weary of the endless death and suffering. He pulled himself together.
A South African heavy machine gun on a tripod sat under a canvas tarp on the roof, overlooking the main entrance and the missile bunker. The SEAL chief had wisely left it there, held in reserve. Devastating to troops in the open, it was an extremely long and heavy weapon, stupefyingly noisy, and its cigar-sized rounds could go for miles. It must have been winched up to the parapet recently — it wasn't in any satphotos in the briefing notes. Jeffrey gave prayerful thanks it had stayed under wraps for the boat team's initial assault. The SEALs were almost out of ammo as it was, and against this monster the raiders would've been decimated.
Jeffrey walked to the other end of the roof. He held up his anemometer. The wind was slowing, definitely. It was high time to set off the bomb.
"Come on, let's go, let's go!" Clayton said.
"We got the Boer arming circuits and the guidance package," SEAL Eight said.
"I have the captured walkie-talkie," SEAL Two said. "Someone take a sample of the missile fuel," Jeffrey said. "Just grab a chunk."
"I'm all set with the remnants of the lab notes," Ilse said. "And the videocassette."
"Let's get Ilse's friend onto the litter," Jeffrey said. "Put in an airway so he can't choke on his tongue, and hold it in with surgical tape. That'll double as a gag if he comes to." Two and Eight hefted Otto onto the collapsible stretcher. "Gripes," SEAL Eight said, " this guy needs a low-fat diet bad."
"Who is he?" Jeffrey said. "Tell everybody, Ilse. We might have more casualties, we still got a long way to go."
Ilse cleared her throat. "Herr Doktor Professor Baron Otto von Schleiffer and Schaffhausen, late of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Applied Neurobiology. Racist fanatic, sexist pig, Putsch insider. He was close to the South African oceanographic community. He and I didn't get along."
"We should leave the spare bomb detonator and EMP box here," Jeffrey said. "Lighten our load, we'll move faster. With SEAL One as bomb guard we don't have to worry about the stuff being spotted by Boers. It'll all be totally vaporized."
"You're right," Clayton said. "Everybody dump stuff you won't need." The team made a pile of odds and ends, forced-entry tools and voltmeters, climbing ropes and welding gauntlets.
"You're okay with the switch?" Jeffrey said to One.
SEAL One shifted slightly and bit down a grunt of pain. "I hear anybody coming, I flip up the plastic cover and push the big red button twice."
Jeffrey nodded. "That'll fire the flux compression generator that puts the voltage through the krytrons. Don't worry, you won't feel anything … And just in case, the whole setup has an antitamper mechanism. Some joker tries to monkey with it, boom."
"And don't worry about us," Clayton said. "You think you hear someone coming, blow the bomb."
"Hey, look," One said. "When you get back, I want some kind of memorial at Arlington. Maybe some of my atoms'll drift down there from the mushroom cloud and everything. Promise me."
"I promise," Jeffrey said, knowing that it wouldn't really happen. A 4-KT-sized warhead, especially one with characteristics of an underground explosion, created tropospheric fallout — it didn't rise into the stratosphere and hence did not get worldwide distribution. That didn't preclude a memorial stone, of course. Jeffrey put a hand on SEAL One's shoulder. "Is there anybody you want us to take a message to?"
"No."
"No parents, fiancée, anything?"
"Nope."
"Commander," Clayton said, "every one of us was picked because we don't have attachments. No kids, no spouses, or ex-spouses even, and we're all estranged from our families one way or another."
"You didn't tell me that," Jeffrey said.
"The powers-that-be put our chance of making it back at one in four."
"I'm frankly glad you didn't tell me that part," Jeffrey said. "Let's prove them wrong … Speaking of which, I want to crank open the bunker's armored door, the launch port."
"How come?" Clayton whispered. He'd started gazing down at One and was almost too choked up to talk.
"I want the gamma rays unhindered heading out to sea. That'll give a good strong EMP in this whole sector, give the ships and aircraft other things to worry about than us." Clayton helped Jeffrey work the mechanism, and the heavy door came up. Jeffrey saw the grooves on which the launcher would roll out, after which the jet blast shield deployed. This one was a so-called zero-length rail launcher system. In an emergency it could be fired from right in the bunker, but tonight this missile wasn't going anywhere.