World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

This is why they enlisted the aid of Mister Redeker to revise the government’s ultrasecret “Plan
Orange.” “Orange” had been in existence since the apartheid government first came to power in
1948. It was the doomsday scenario for the country’s white minority, the plan to deal with an
all-out uprising of its indigenous African population. Over the years it had been updated with the
changing strategic outlook of the region. Every decade that situation grew more and more grim.
With multiplying independence of her neighbor states, and multiplying voices for freedom from the
majority of her own people, those in Pretoria realized that a full-blown confrontation might not just
mean the end for the Afrikaner government, but the Afrikaners themselves.
This is where Redeker stepped in. His revised Plan Orange, appropriately completed in 1984,
was the ultimate survival strategy for the Afrikaner people. No variable was ignored. Population
figures, terrain, resources, logistics…Redeker not only updated the plan to include both Cuba’s
chemical weapons and his own country’s nuclear option, but also, and this is what made “Orange
Eighty-Four” so historic, the determination of which Afrikaners would be saved and which had to be
sacrificed.
Sacrificed?
Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government’s resources to the
breaking point, thus dooming the entire population. He compared it to survivors from a sinking
ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have room for them all. Redeker had even gone so far
as to calculate who should be “brought aboard.” He included income, IQ, fertility, an entire
checklist of “desirable qualities,” including the subject’s location to a potential crisis zone. “The
first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality” was the closing statement for his
proposal, “for its survival will mean our destruction.”
Orange Eighty-Four was a brilliant plan. It was clear, logical, efficient, and it made Paul Redeker
one of the most hated men in South Africa. His first enemies were some of the more radical,
fundamentalist Afrikaners, the racial ideologues and the ultrareligious. Later, after the fall of
apartheid, his name began circulating among the general population. Of course he was invited to
appear before the “Truth and Reconciliation” hearings, and, of course, he refused. “I won’t pretend
to have a heart simply to save my skin,” he stated publicly, adding, “No matter what I do, I’m sure
they will come for me anyway.”
And they did, although it probably was not in the manner Redeker could have expected. It was
during our Great Panic, which began several weeks before yours. Redeker was holed up in the
Drakensberg cabin he had bought with the accumulated profits of a business consultant. He liked
business, you know. “One goal, no soul,” he used to say. He wasn’t surprised when the door blew
off its hinges and agents of the National Intelligence Agency rushed in. They confirmed his name,
his identity, his past actions. They asked him point-blank if he had been the author of Orange
Eighty-Four. He answered without emotion, naturally. He suspected, and accepted, this intrusion as
a last-minute revenge killing; the world was going to hell anyway, why not take a few “apartheid
devils” down first. What he could have never predicted was the sudden lowering of their firearms,
and the removal of the gas masks of the NIA agents. They were of all colors: black, Asian, colored,
and even a white man, a tall Afrikaner who stepped forward, and without giving his name or rank,
asked abruptly…“You’ve got a plan for this, man. Don’t you?”
Redeker had, indeed, been working on his own solution to the undead epidemic. What else could
he do in this isolated hideaway? It had been an intellectual exercise; he never believed anyone
would be left to read it. It had no name, as explained later “because names only exist to distinguish