Shaka II Read Online Free Page B

envelope to the President of Mozambique exactly one week later. He opened it, read it, frowned, and asked me if the President was serious, or if this was a bad joke. I assured him that Robert ole Buthelezi was in deadly earnest, and urged him to relinquish the land rather than enter a war he couldn’t possibly win.
        He was a proud man, and he tore the demand up, put it back in the envelope, and told me to deliver it to the President.
        Three weeks later the South African third, fifth and eighth divisions marched across the Kruger Park and into Mozambique. The Mozambique army fought bravely, but they were outnumbered, outgunned, and overmatched. Within ten days every one of them was dead or a prisoner of war, and Robert announced to his people that South Africa’s territory had just increased by more than sixty thousand square miles.
        It would not be the last such announcement that he would make.
        

7.
        
        Five months later, when Robert threatened to go to war with Namibia over water rights, they surrendered without a shot being fired. He politely suggested that they might like to become a protectorate, or better still, a province, and they agreed.
        Botswana saw what was happening, and they knew that they were the treasure of Southern Africa, because they sat on the largest diamond pipes, larger and more productive than South Africa in its heyday. They were the only African nation besides our own that could truly be said to have a thriving economy.
        And they knew how to use that economy. I was in the Presidential Palace when the first word came through: our crack sixth division had been turned back at the Botswana border, with better than fifty percent casualties.
        We knew it couldn’t be the Botswana army, because Botswana didn’t have an army. It was eighty percent Kalahari Desert, and another ten percent Okavango Swamp. Even in the 25th Century the population hadn’t reached three million. Almost all of them lived along the Limpopo River, and they had not gone to war with anyone in their entire history.
        It didn’t take long to find out what had happened. The rest of the continent-indeed, the world-was not unaware of what was happening down at the southern tip of Africa, and Botswana had used some of its wealth to hire an army of mercenaries, led by an American veteran of the Battle of Io, a Colonel McBride. They had the latest weapons, the latest technology, and an employer that was willing to supply them with whatever they needed to preserve its territorial integrity.
        Robert, who usually dined at the finest restaurants in Pretoria, chose to have dinner in his expansive office. He invited three of us-two political advisors, whose advice he never listened to, and myself-to join him in the huge, carpeted room that was dominated by two paintings of Robert himself, one staring down at his desk, the other looking out over the balcony at the extensive, exquisitely-manicured grounds.
        “You look troubled,” I said when I entered the office, the last to arrive.
        “They are fucking up my timetable!” he growled.
        “Perhaps we should just leave them be,” said an advisor. “After all, they are a useful trading partner.”
        “And back down in the eyes of the world?” snapped Robert. “Never!” He turned to me. “You are my brother. My blood runs in your veins. What would you do?”
        I stared at him blankly. “Send more troops?” I said at last.
        “Then they will buy more mercenaries, and our soldiers will kill their mercenaries and their mercenaries will kill our soldiers. We will win in the long run, because our population is larger than their diamond mines, but I do not want Botswana if it is impoverished and destroyed by the war. So what would you do?”
        I shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
        “Blood may be thicker than water,” he said