Chapter 9

Durban, Union of South Africa

South African Air flight 1317 landed at Victoria Airport from Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town – late as usual. The arrival time didn’t matter at all to Muhammad Bin Salaam. He’d been in the air almost continuously for thirty hours. Well in the air or in an airport transit lounge. Algiers to Madrid to Lagos to Cape Town to Bloemfontein to Pretoria to Victoria. All to arrive in Durban before the shipment of nuclear material from Bandar Abbas in two days.

The men from the Team of the Prophet would be arriving tomorrow.

Bin Salaam took a taxi to Durban, dressed like any other businessman – he even carried a briefcase, filled with the shipping papers. He checked in to the Albany Hotel, in the center of Durban’s busy downtown. He retrieved a suitcase that had been left for him yesterday by a delivery van registered to a shell company in Shalcross, a small town some twelve kilometers to the west.

In the suitcase were clothes that would turn Bin Salaam from a terrorist masquerading as a Middle-Eastern businessman into a South African worker fronting for a merchant. He scanned the internet directory for truck rentals and selected one that “sounded” Jewish: Abrams & Sons Transport. After all, if the detonation due to take place in a few days were to be linked to Israel, it should be with as many Jews as he could find. A phone call to Abrams reserved a lorry that would be big enough to haul the fissile material.

He changed clothes and slipped out a side entry to the Albany Hotel, took public transport to the Abrams & Sons site and soon drove away with the lorry. He drove down to the wharves, looking for a “space for let” sign in the warehouse district, near Maydon Wharf Street – the street that ran along the primary docking facility in Durban’s busy port.

Sometime in the next 48 – 72 hours, the Star of Kish would dock, unload a boring consignment of primarily medical kit and a single container housing a pair of lead-lined crates with shaped uranium-235 pieces. The Star was almost a tramp freighter usually serving the Kish Island – Bandar e Carak – Lavan Island route off the southern coast of Iran. It could be spared for a mission that the Imams of Iran felt would probably not work.

Each of the two pieces of U-235, in and of itself, was not particularly dangerous. Like the first atomic weapon, nick-named “Little Boy” – dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945, these were crude devices. This bomb was intentionally made to be crude. The scientists in Iran had the secret to making a more sophisticated, higher yielding bomb, but this bomb was designed to look like a first-time, dirty device. A first-time, dirty device would be something that South Africa might put together – with the aid of Israel.

The rest of the device – the explosives that would propel part one of the U-235 toward part two of U-235, until they exploded in a violent burst of atomic particles – would be coming in via the Alexandria to Cape Town route. That shipment would be handled by the Team of The Rivers. The Rivers team scored slightly lower than The Prophet’s Team in the trials in the desert of southern Algeria.

Muhammad Bin Salaam parked the rented lorry at his rented warehouse space, took a bus to the nearest car rental place, and drove his newly rented Toyota Corolla back to the Albany. On getting back to his room, he undressed, flopped onto his bed, stretched, placed his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He sighed in pleasure.

Yes ... the plan was coming to a head. He’d be a hero.