all, the Tower of Babel – man’s attempt to build his way to Heaven – came up in Genesis. God found this attempt presumptuous; he became indignant and scattered the people all over the world and created language confusion as punishment.
Different people, different languages. It was God’s intention to keep people separate. It was a green light from on high to divide people up according to colour.
The big crocodile also felt that it was God’s help that let him climb in his career. Soon he was the minister of defence in his predecessor Vorster’s cabinet. From this position, he commanded air raids on the terrorists who were hiding in Angola, the incident that the stupid rest of the world called a slaughter of innocents. ‘We have photographic evidence!’ said the world. ‘It’s what you can’t see that’s important,’ said the crocodile, but the only person he convinced with this was his mother.
Anyway, Engineer Westhuizen’s current problem was that P. W. Botha’s father had been the commanding officer in the Second Boer War and that Botha himself had military strategies and issues in his blood. Therefore he also had some knowledge of all that technical stuff for which Engineer Westhuizen was the nuclear weapons programme’s top representative. Botha had no reason to suspect that the engineer was the fraud he was. He had asked his question out of conversational curiosity.
* * *
Engineer Westhuizen hadn’t spoken for ten seconds, and the situation was about to become awkward for him – and downright dangerous for Nombeko, who thought that if the idiot didn’t answer the world’s simplest question soon, he would be toast. She was tired of having to save him time and again, but all the same she fished the plain brown spare bottle of Klipdrift from her pocket, stepped up to the engineer, and said she had noticed that Mr Westhuizen was having trouble with his asthma again.
‘Here, take a big gulp and you’ll soon regain the ability to talk so that you can tell Mr Prime Minister that the short half-life of tritium isn’t a problem because it is unrelated to the bomb’s explosive effect.’
The engineer drained the entire medicine bottle and immediately felt better. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Botha looked wide-eyed at the servant.
‘You know about the tritium problem?’
‘Goodness, no.’ Nombeko laughed. ‘You see, I clean this room every day and the engineer spends almost all his time rattling off formulas and other strange things to himself. And apparently some of it got stuck even in my little brain. Would you like a refill, Mr Prime Minister?’
Prime Minister Botha accepted more sparkling wine and gave Nombeko a long look as she returned to her wallpaper. Meanwhile the engineer cleared his throat and apologized for the asthma attack and for the servant’s impudence in opening her mouth.
‘The fact is, the half-life of tritium is not relevant to the bomb’s explosive effect,’ said the engineer.
‘Yes, I just heard that from the waitress,’ the prime minister said acidly.
Botha didn’t ask any difficult follow-up questions; he was soon in a good mood again thanks to Nombeko’s eager refills of bubbly. Engineer Westhuizen had made it through another crisis. And so had his cleaning woman.
When the first bomb was ready, the next phase of production went as follows: two independent, high-quality work teams each built a bomb, using the first one as a model. The teams were instructed to be extremely accurate when it came to accounting for the steps they took. In this way, the production of bombs two and three could be compared in detail – first compared to each other and then compared to number one. It was the engineer himself, and no one else (except a certain woman who didn’t count), who was in charge of the comparison.
If the bombs were identical, then they would also be correct. It was highly unlikely that two independent teams could make identical mistakes at that high level. According to whatshername, the statistical likelihood of that was .0054 per cent.
* * *
Nombeko continued to search for something that would give her hope. The three Chinese girls knew some things, like that the Egyptian pyramids were in Egypt, how to poison dogs, and what to watch out for when stealing a wallet from the inner pocket of a jacket. Things like that.
The engineer frequently mumbled about progress in South Africa and the world, but the information from that source had to be filtered and interpreted, since for the most part all the politicians on earth were idiots or Communists, and all of their decisions were either idiotic or Communistic. And when they were Communistic, they were also idiotic.
When the people chose a former Hollywood actor to be the new American president, the engineer condemned not only the president elect but also all of his people. However, Ronald Reagan avoided being labelled a Communist. Instead the engineer focused on the president’s presumed sexual orientation, based on the hypothesis that all men who stood for anything different from what the engineer stood for were homosexuals.
All due deference to the Chinese girls and the engineer, but as sources of news they couldn’t compete with the TV in the waiting room outside the engineer’s office. On the sly Nombeko would often turn it on and follow the news and debate programmes while she pretended to scrub the floor. That corridor was by far the cleanest in the research facility.
‘Are you here scrubbing again?’ the irritated engineer once said as he came strolling in to work at ten thirty in the morning, fifteen minutes earlier than Nombeko had counted on. ‘And who turned on the TV?’
This could have ended poorly from an information-gathering perspective, but Nombeko knew her engineer. Instead of answering the question, she changed the subject.
‘I saw a half-empty bottle of Klipdrift on your desk when I was in there cleaning, Engineer. I thought it might be old and I should pour it out. But I wasn’t sure; I wanted to check with you first, Engineer.’
‘Poured out? Are you nuts?’ said the engineer, rushing into his office to make sure that those life-giving drops were still there. To make sure that whatshername wouldn’t get any other dumb ideas, he immediately transferred them from the bottle to his bloodstream. And he soon forgot the TV, the floor and the servant.
* * *
Then one day it finally showed up.
The opportunity.
If Nombeko played all her cards right, and also got to borrow a little of the engineer’s luck, she would soon be a free woman. Free and wanted, but still. The opportunity – unbeknown to Nombeko – had its origins on the other side of the globe.
The de facto leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, had early on displayed a talent for outmanoeuvring out his competition – before the senile Mao Tse-tung even had time to die, in fact. Perhaps the most spectacular rumour was that he hadn’t let Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, be treated when he got cancer. Being a cancer patient with no cancer treatment seldom leads to a positive outcome. Depending on how you look at it, of course. In any case, Zhou Enlai died twenty years after the CIA failed to blow him to smithereens.
After that, the Gang of Four were about to intervene, with Mao’s last wife at the forefront. But as soon as the old man finally drew his last breath, the four were arrested and locked up, whereupon Deng purposely forgot where he’d put the key.
On the foreign-affairs front, he was deeply irritated by that dullard Brezhnev in Moscow. Who was succeeded by that dullard Andropov. Who was succeeded by Chernenko, the biggest dullard of them all. But luckily, Chernenko didn’t have time to do more than take office before he stepped down permanently. The rumour was that Ronald Reagan had scared him to death with his Star Wars. Now some fellow called Gorbachev had taken over, and . . . well, from dullards to whippersnappers. The new man certainly had a lot to prove.
Among many other things, China’s position in Africa was a constant concern. For several decades, the Soviets had been poking around in various African liberation movements. The Russians’ current engagement in Angola was a prime example. The MPLA received Soviet weapons in exchange for getting results in the right ideological