Azwe was standing on the ramp that circled three-quarters of concrete bay three. It was located beside the centermost of the six silos in this section. As the truck backed in, Azwe held up his big hands so the driver could see. He was not supposed to allow anything to be off-loaded without first checking the bill of lading. The young man jogged over to the driver and jumped from the ramp to the driveway. He did not put his hand on the ramp lest the oil in his skin pick up sugar. The glaze was like glue, extremely difficult to wash away.
Azwe was a tall man. He put a hand on the side view mirror and dipped his head into the open window.
“May I see your documents?” he said. His voice had a clucking quality that was native to the region centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.
The driver, a young man who looked Madagascan, turned to another man who was sitting in the passenger’s seat. The second man handed the driver a clipboard. He gave it to Azwe.
“Thank you,” Azwe said as he looked at the document. He frowned deeply as he flipped through sheet after sheet. They were pages torn from the South African edition of Time magazine. “What is this?” Azwe demanded as he looked back into the cab of the truck.
The young Durban did not have time to react before a silenced Beretta that had been concealed beneath the clipboard put a raw, red hole in his forehead. He gasped softly as he dropped to the ground between the front wheel of the truck and the side of the bay. He was twitching at the wrists and hips as blood spat from the wound in the front of his skull. Azwe’s eyes were open, blinking incongruously as red drops fell on them. After a few moments, they shut.
The man in the driver’s seat jumped out. He stepped over the oddly angled body of the bay foreman and hurried to the back of the truck. The passenger also got out. He went to the elevator control box, which hung from a thick cable at the rear of the bay. As he pressed the blue button that opened the elevator door, the driver went to the back of the dump truck. He reached under the flap and removed a cooler. He popped the lid. The plastic container was packed with C-4. He pulled a detonator from his jacket pocket, set it for four minutes, and jabbed it into one of the explosive bricks. Then he took the open cooler and put it on the elevator as it rose from the floor.
He and the other man quickly removed four other coolers from the back and opened them. They contained a half-dozen bricks of C-4 each. He set the timers to blow five seconds after the initial blast.
When the explosives had been off-loaded, the elevator was sent back into the silo. It would travel under the ramp, then up an external chute before being dumped into the top of the silo.
The two men hurried back to the truck. They had watched the silos for several days from a motorboat and from the nearby Victoria Street Indian Market. The entire process would take three minutes. That would give them enough time to get away. When the blast occurred, it would not just impact the silos, it would destroy the security cameras and the shack where the videotapes were recorded. Nothing would be left to attach them to this action. All investigators would find was the abandoned truck, the Beretta with its serial numbers filed off, and a torn copy of Time magazine.
One hundred seconds after the truck drove from the bay, the men were outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the silos. Moments after that, the C-4 exploded. The blast blew out the top of the silo as if it were a party favor. Steel and ceramic tile were flung outward, along with huge pieces of fused sugar. The jagged sheets caught the late afternoon sunlight and flung it in all directions — up, down, and around. The explosion sent the other coolers tumbling along the covered bridges on either side. They detonated as they reached the other silos, blasting out the sides and driving chunks of debris into the silos that were facing them along the northern side. Multiple booms echoed through the harbor. They were joined by sharp cracks as massive pieces of shrapnel ripped into the second row of towers, ripping off the tops and sending them into the water as powdery rain. Cracks appeared in the sides of all six silos, some hairline, some like vast geologic fissures. The three most heavily damaged silos on the south surrendered first, dumping sugar and pieces of themselves onto the ground and against the adjoining structures. The impact caused the smaller fractures in the northern towers to expand, bringing them down within seconds.
In less than a minute, the familiar Maydon Wharf landmarks were six distinct mounds of rubble beneath a cloud of smoke that smelled like roasting marshmallows. Though there were only a few small fires in the wreckage, firefighters rushed to the site to search for survivors. The KwaZulu-Natal Metro Police also arrived to search for clues. The silos were not heavily protected locations, because no one benefited from their destruction.
Until now.
SEVEN
Nothing ticked off a career intelligence officer more than not having intelligence. And right now, Op-Center’s intelligence director was extremely ticked off.
The people who glided past Bob Herbert’s open office door would not have known anything was wrong with the forty-eight-year-old officer. Their quick, questioning glances and hushed conversation suggested they knew there was something amiss at Op-Center, though no one knew exactly what that was. They may have heard rumors from Bugs Benet or seen the new arrival when she strode through the hall. But no one knew what it meant.
Including Herbert.
The intelligence chief sat quietly behind his desk in his new, state-of-the-art wheelchair. His expression was neutral. He appeared to be a man very much in control. But physical peace was a hair-trigger condition that rested, like crustal plates, on a molten sea of emotion. And Herbert’s emotions were bubbling.
Herbert had come to work a half hour before, after spending a long night overseeing the software setup of Op-Center’s lean but crackerjack intelligence division. He had arrived expecting to experience an exciting start-up with his colleagues, the culmination of six months of team effort, Sunrise at Campobello. Instead, Herbert found something much different.
A few minutes after Herbert had passed the upstairs guard — who logged him as present, information that went to the computers of all the division directors — Bugs Benet called to inform him that there was someone in Paul Hood’s office, a three-star general. A woman. She obviously had the creds to get downstairs, she had an ID card that gave her access to Hood’s office when she swiped it through the lock, and she told Benet to call a meeting of the senior staff for ten A.M. in the Tank, the conference room at Op-Center. Then she shut the office door.
“That was the last I saw or heard of her,” Benet told Herbert. “I’m calling you first.”
“Where is Paul?” Herbert asked.
“At the White House,” Benet said.
“Oh?” That did not sound good. Washington had a singular way of removing an individual from power and assuring a continuity of command. This was it. “Did you try calling him?”
“No. That will go on the phone log.” Benet lowered his voice. “If Paul has been dismissed, his security status may have changed. I don’t want to be accused of passing operational data to an outsider.”
It was a valid point. Paranoid, but valid. Herbert asked to be put through to the general.
The woman took the call. She introduced herself as General Morgan Carrie, the new director of Op-Center, and said she would brief Herbert and his colleagues at the staff meeting. When Herbert asked what that meant for Paul Hood, she told him she did not have that information and would see him in forty-five minutes.