Shaka II Read Online Free PDF Page A

contemptuously. “It is clearly not more intelligent.” He looked around the room. “Can no one else see the way?”
        Silence.
        “I wonder why I pay you at all,” he muttered.
        The food arrived and we moved to an imported mahogany table that four soldiers carried into the office and set up for us.
        “Let me do the honors,” said Robert. He took a pitcher of cold water in his hand, and we passed him our glasses. A tiny smile played around the corners of his mouth, and he slowly poured the contents of the pitcher onto the plush carpet. “Now does anyone see the way?”
        We were all silent.
        “Fools!” he snapped. “Botswana is a desert. It is fed only by three rivers - the Limpopo, the Okavango, and the Chobe. The Okavango and the Chobe originate in Namibia, which we now own, and the Limpopo originates very near Pretoria and flows into it from South Africa.”
        “You are going to cut off their water?” asked an advisor.
        “We will begin diverting or damming all three rivers tomorrow. They cannot mine for diamonds without massive amounts of water. Given a choice, they will save the water for their people. Hopefully the mercenaries will see that their source of income is literally drying up, and will go where the money is and fight in some other war.”
        “And if not?”
        “If not, they will be so weakened from thirst by the time we confront them again that they will prove very easy to subdue.”
        “How long will you wait?” I asked.
        “As long as it takes. At least a year. The Okavango Delta will not dry up before then. And we’ll see if their government wants to keep paying a mercenary army when it is not under attack.”
        “And the tens of thousands of women and children who will die of thirst?” I asked angrily.
        “They would have died of something sooner or later,” he said with no show of concern. “And those who do not die will be so thrilled to have the rivers unblocked again that they will strew flowers in our path.”
        I thought it was cruel beyond belief. These weren’t soldiers or mercenaries we were talking about, but citizens whom he would coldly condemn to a terrible death. The problem was that I couldn’t see any way it could fail.
        Within a week work had begun on all three rivers, and within two months they had been dammed or diverted. Robert was prepared to wait two years, perhaps three, to bring Botswana to its knees-
        -But Botswana wasn’t willing to wait. They had a mercenary army, they couldn’t afford to keep them (or supply them with water) indefinitely, and they decided not to wait. News of the first incursion over our northern border reached us on a Sunday. By Tuesday, before Robert could mobilize our near-dormant air force, Colonel McBride’s men had progressed as far as Pilanesburg, and citizens in both the political capital of Pretoria and the economic capital of Johannesburg were getting nervous.
        Three members of the Parliament called for Robert’s resignation. They did not show up the next day, or ever again, but there was still serious unrest in the government.
        It began to look like McBride might reach Pretoria in another seven to ten days. Then a small private plane crashed very near the main body of McBride’s troops, and within a day almost seventy percent of them were dead.
        “What the hell happened?” asked an advisor when Robert summoned us to tell us that the war was as good as over and that we had won.
        “If I were to guess,” said Robert, “I would guess that a plane loaded with a particularly virulent form of mutated visceral leishmaniasis lost control and crashed in the middle of Colonel McBride’s forces.”
        “Are you crazy?” demanded the advisor. “Germ warfare has been outlawed for centuries!”
        “I was defending my country,” said Robert calmly. “How will