Lion Resurgent (6 page)
It was a good question, van Huis had been waiting for one of his men to ask that and he had had a private bet with himself that Randlehoff would be the one. “Why do you think, Staff?”
“Because it’s a bloedig trap that’s why!” Randlehoff spoke emphatically, the Afrikaans curse spat out like a bullet. “They want us to come straight down here and charge in. They know we’re running against the clock and it’s the fastest way.”
His finger tapped a strip of clear ground between the two great patches of oerwoud that flanked their target. It looked as if a flood at some time had washed the trees and ground cover away, leaving what looked like a roadway through the heavy terrain. “Does anybody want to bet that’s soft silt and full of mines?”
The assembled troops nodded. It was common knowledge that Randlehoff was up for promotion to officer and generally agreed that the platoon would be the worse off without him. They could see for themselves that the tanks would bog down in the soft silt and get blown apart by mines and RPG fire.
“And that’s why we’re not going that way broers. We’ll swing north, cross the border five miles north of here where there’s hard, clear ground. We’ll get the guns to pound on Kawimba. That’s another five miles north and with luck the stams will think we’re heading there. We’ve got two platoons of moddervoete with us. One of them will make a feint north to keep the stams thinking we’re heading that way. The other will come with us when we swing south and hit the stamkamp from the north. There’s a road we can use so we can move fast. Their Ratels can go first; we’ll follow as fast we can.
“Once we’re in, the stamkamp is pretty simple.” He pushed some pictures out over the maps. “Two semi-circular kamps, each with eighteen huts. Cupped between them, three kraals and eleven other huts. That’s the civilian area. We try and keep clear of them. Shooting comes from there, we shoot back, but otherwise we leave them alone. Poor bastards suffer more from the militias than any of ours do. Now, see this big one here?” His finger tapped a single large hut a little separated from the rest. “That’s where any surviving missionaries will be. If there are any surviving. Now, important thing. East of the main kamp. See this arrowhead? There’s seven huts along the main shaft, and there’s five on each diagonal. This is where whatever militia is over there live. Way they’re laid out, looks like any serious firepower will be in there. So we take them out fast; no need to leave them breathing. Then swing in to grab the rest. Any questions?”
“How many missionaries, Bassie?”
“There were seven; five men, two women. How many left now, we’ll find out when we get there. Mount up, broers; we have some hard driving to do.”
The meeting broke up, the men going back to their tanks. Sitting in the turret of number one tank, van Huis pulled out the last letter he had received from his wife. It had been a chatty letter, full of news about their family and the rest of their clan. She’d told him how much she’d missed him, how much she wanted him back. Through it all, she’d stressed that she and the family were safe and well, that everything was ready for him when he returned and he shouldn’t worry about them She was fine, the children were fine, so he should just look after himself so he could come back to them. It was a perfect letter from a soldier’s wife; both loving and reassuring, a letter that raised morale. Bastiaan van Huis knew he was a very lucky man. He kissed the paper, folded it carefully away, then got on the radio to arrange artillery support.
Lankneus Artillery Battery, Transvaal Rifles, West of Tshinsenda
Nobody could ever say that Australian Defense Industries sales division didn’t have a sense of humor. The Kunchi 7.5 inch self-propelled gun was a case in point. The weapon had been developed, marketed, introduced into service and sold to several export customers long before anybody had looked up the meaning of its name. It had just been dismissed as another of those strange aboriginal names the Australians liked to use for their weapons. Even when the joke had finally been discovered and the embarrassed laughter had died down, the gunners had to admit it was an apt choice. A 7.5 inch artillery piece with a 60-caliber barrel made for a lot of gun.
It had started life as a version of the 7.5-inch 50-caliber gun used by the Indian coastal artillery. The Indian and Australian armies had been looking for a heavy gun to replace their American M2 155mm Long Tom guns and M115 203mm howitzers. Both armies had wanted the world of course. The specification was for a gun that could throw a heavy shell a long way with pinpoint accuracy on a self-propelled chassis. The Americans had nothing like it. The Russian guns were mostly 122mm and 130mm and fired too small a shell for the artillerists. Then, the Australian Navy had started looking for a new heavy gun as well and eyes had fixed on the 7.5-inch. There was a problem of course, there were only four of the old 7.5-inch guns left and that was few enough for experimentation. While the gunners had played with the old guns, the designers had got to work with modern design concepts and materials and produced a new version of the weapon. They’d stretched the barrel to 60 calibers and designed a new tracked chassis to carry the weapon.
The 7.5-inch shell itself was impressive. It weighed 200 pounds; twice the weight of the 155mm and - remarkably - the same weight as the shell from the M115. The designers began to realize something. The 7.5 inch was a sweet-spot in gun calibers; one of the places where all the lines converged to give an optimum result. They had been about to start producing new batches of the old shell when a young Canadian engineer had literally hammered on their door. His message had been quite simple. “You’re all nuts,” had been his first words. It had been an interesting debate as to whether the designers should listen to him or take him into the car park and give him a thorough beasting. At that point, somebody asked his name. It turned out he was Doctor Gerald Bull. That meant two things made them listen. One was he was the youngest man ever to hold a PhD in ballistics and the other was he’d just resigned from the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment after they’d cut his development budget.
His point had been quite simple. Artillery shells were atrociously badly designed. The basic layout dated from the First World War and hadn’t changed much in the meantime. They were an aerodynamic nightmare. Bull had described them as ‘a flying airbrake’. He produced drawings of a new shell, one that was longer than the conventional design and beautifully profiled with extended strakes down the side to stabilize the shell in the gun’s barrel. It even had a gas generator; a small burning charge at the base, to fill in the void left by the shell as it passed through the air. The Australian Army had hit a winning combination with its 3.7-inch Nulla long-range self-propelled gun. That had given them a taste for far-reaching artillery, but this new shell looked like something out of science fiction. In a wind tunnel, a conventional shell was almost invisible behind the mass of turbulence it generated. Bull’s new extended range full bore shell slipped through the air with barely a ripple.
The ordnance laboratories had made a test batch of 155mm shells to the new design and the results had been stunning. The M2 155mm could throw a 100 pound shell 22,000 yards. The same gun fired the new shell 32,000 yards, equal to the much-vaunted Nulla, and that was with a gun not optimized for the new shell and the ammunition itself that had been hand-made. By the time the new 7.5-inch gun was ready, the design of the shells had been refined and an initial production batch was available for trials. That led to a problem. The instrumented range wasn’t big enough for the new gun threw the new 200 pound Extended Range Full Bore Base Bleed shell an astounding 55,000 yards. It wasn’t that easy of course. There were development problems with gun, shell and carriage but they’d been straightened out in time. When the new gun was finally unveiled, the Kunchi was the best artillery piece in the world by a large margin. It had been selling as fast as ADI could move them off the production lines ever since.
Staff Sergeant Arend Quarshie looked up at the 40-foot long barrel towering over his head and reflected on how apt the Australian name had been. In the South African Army, the gun was called the Lankneus, the long-nosed one. That meant more or less the same thing. Army humor was pretty much the same around the world. There were eight guns in this battery position. It was one of the three heavy batteries deployed by the Transvaal Rifles. With their unprecedented range, the guns could cover a huge length of the border - or alternatively throw their shells far into stam country the other side.
“You have the fire plan, Staff?” Major Kieran Neumetzger had appeared out of the darkness to make a final check on his battery’s readiness. Technically, each of these guns was commanded by a Lieutenant, with a Captain in charge of each two-gun section. There was a reason for the high proportion of officers. These guns could also fire nuclear rounds if needed. However, Lieutenant Kleyn was sick and Quarshie was in command of his gun for the night’s work.
“Entered into fire control, Sir. Ready to go when we get the order.”
“Very good, Staff. Make sure the men have their hearing protection in place.” Neumetzger vanished into the darkness again.
Quarshie picked up the order. “You heard our Major. Get your headsets on. The bosses back in The World don’t like deaf employees.” He picked up his own headset. It had the radio earphones built into it so the orders and fire direction commands could be transmitted to him and from him to his gunners.
He didn’t have to wait long. The word came through on the battery net, “Gun One. Ranging shot.” A string of numbers followed. Quarshie repeated them to the gun crew. Behind him, men rolled the long, slender shell from the magazine on the eight-by-eight parked near the gun and slid it forward. He checked the markings on the shell. Black body, white band around the nose. High explosive, common. Quarshie had a repeated nightmare in which he somehow failed to notice the white shell body with fluorescent orange and red bands and the sinister black trefoil, but he never failed to notice the boiling red and black mushroom cloud that marked the full horror of the error. So he checked the shell and checked it again as it was rammed into the breech with the propellant behind it. Six bags, just like the orders said. Then the clang as the breech closed and the whine as the gun elevated and traversed into position and he raised his hand high over his head.
The word came over the radio. Quarshie repeated it, dropping his hand sharply. The gunner pressed the fire button. No lanyards to be jerked here, the shells were fired electrically. The great gun crashed. The sound of its firing shook the ground as the tracked carriage leapt backwards to dig its spade deep into the ground. The barrel recoiled back, the violence of the shot hurled it against the hydraulic recoil buffers that returned it to the firing position. He heard the sound of the shell going out. It was not a shrill, piercing whine like the old guns with their awkward shells, but a soft moan that reminded Quarshie of the times he had spent with a lady of negotiable affection. He even convinced himself he could see the faint red dot from the base-bleed system as the shell went downrange.
This shell wasn’t intended to go all the way to its target. It was being tracked by a radar set mounted on the fire control vehicle and its trajectory being compared with the one the fire control men had calculated. From that, they worked out how far from its target that shell would have been and what corrections were necessary to allow for the changes. Then, one of the men in the vehicle blew the shell up in mid-air.
Quarshie’s radio beeped again. A new set of numbers came over the link to him. Each gun was getting its own set; only a fool kept his artillery pieces too close together. The barrel moved slightly; a minute fraction to one side, a touch less elevation. Then another shell rolled out of the magazine. The four loaders moved it forward to the loading tray and into the breech. Black body, white ring around the nose.
“Fire for effect!”
Once again, Quarshie dropped his hand. Once again the gun hurled its shell downrange, towards its target deep in stam country. He didn’t know where the shell was going, he didn’t know why it was going there and, the truth was, he really didn’t care too much. It was his job to send the shells downrange with the pinpoint accuracy that everybody expected from a Lankneus battery and that was what he intended to do. The drill was laid down; six shots in the first three minutes, then one shot every two minutes after that. A slow rate of fire compared with the smaller field guns, but they had their job and Lankneus had its.
Free of the barrel of the guns, the shells arced through the air towards their target just south of Kawimba. Photographs had shown a militia kamp just outside the town. The shells were targeted on that. Those who made the decisions hadn’t wanted to waste the 7.5-inch shells so they’d decided to devastate the militia huts. Perhaps give the poor stams who lived in the town a few days of peace before another gang turned up to victimize them. For all that, this was a diversion, not the main point of tonight’s shoot.
Descending on their target, the 200-pound shells plowed into the kamp. They blew the huts apart, sending steel shards tearing through the mud and concrete blocks that made their walls. The roar of the explosions could be heard miles away, especially at the kamp at Tshinsenda. There, the militia thugs looked at the brilliant flashes, saw the rolling explosions and heard the moan of the shells overhead and made their plans. They knew the Army from over the border would be following up the bombardment. The rival group now under those shells would not survive the night. That meant they could go to the town they had once terrorized to loot, rape and kill. Tomorrow, they could spread fear as they asserted their domination over Kawimba and all who lived there. Tonight, they would watch the destruction of their rivals.
Ratel Infantry Platoon, Transvaal Rifles, South African Border
Second Platoon swung north as they hit the road, heading up towards Kawimba. Their commander had strict orders. This was a feint, a demonstration; it wasn’t worth the life of a single South African soldier. He was to take no chances, not do anything other than to make a lot of noise and fire off a lot of ammunition. As it had been explained to him, Lieutenant ‘Geldsakke’ in the Oliphant platoon was running short on his allowance this month. They had to blast off lots of ammunition so his vader could make some more. Van Huis in the tank platoon was the butt of a lot of jokes about his family’s part in the great family of businesses that supplied so much of South Africa’s armaments, but there was quiet respect for the fact that he hadn’t ducked serving his time or sought out a soft option.