Vortex (101 page)

Lee’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t seen what he’d expected to see. The target was obvious, an already-bombed building in the exact center of the box. It was in ruins, no more than a pile of dirty brick and twisted steel. With an error of less than one foot, he couldn’t argue with the coordinates. That was the target.

During his one split second overhead, he saw people pointing up at his aircraft, running for cover. He had a momentary image of sandbags in front of the building next door, and men among them, and then he was past.

Lee checked his wingman. Panther Lewis was still in position. He waved a gloved hand as he spotted Lee looking him over.

“What’s the plan, boss?”

“Proceed as ordered, I guess.”

Panther’s voice revealed his doubts.

“There’s not much left to hit.”

” I know, but we don’t know the story, so we stick to plan A.”

By this time the two aircraft had “extended” away from the target-gaining enough distance to turn and line up on their programmed target again. Lee clicked his radio switch again.

“Reverse course, turn left in place. Now.”

Both Hornets dropped their left wingtips and neatly pivoted one hundred eighty degrees. Lee lined up on Lewis, the new leader, and pushed the throttle forward as his wingman said, “Accelerating.”

A four-fifty-knot stroll looking over the target was one thing, but they’d make the real attack run at full speed. Flying faster would make their bomb drop more accurate, increase their separation from the explosions, and make them harder targets for the now-alerted defenders.

The rooftops flashed by below them, and Lee followed his partner in.

MAIN
TELEPHONE
EXCHANGE
, ON
WEST
STREET

The soldiers guarding the phone exchange watched the American planes scream past. They had a fleeting impression of sharp noses and gray, square-cut wings, combined with a roar that filled their heads.

The enemy planes were dangerous, but seemingly random in their destruction.

Less than two hours before, they had bombed the office building across the street into oblivion, while leaving the telephone building unscathed.

One soldier had suggested that there must have been secret military work going on in there, and that was why the Americans had bombed it. Among the laughter, the consensus had been that they were just poor shots. They had been lucky. That was something soldiers could understand.

NAVAHO
FLIGHT

Rebel divided his attention between the rooftops, the cues on the
HUD
, and his wingman, now a mile in front of him. At six hundred knots, that distance became a six-second separation, barely enough time for the fragments from

Panther’s bombs to clear. The idea was to do this in one quick pass, in and out before the enemy recovered enough to shoot back.

Rebel’s
HUD
was filled with lines and numbers. Altitude, airspeed, weapons settings, steering, and aiming cues covered the angled glass in a confused jumble. Compared to air-to ground attacks, dogfighting was simple. His target box was still centered on the ruined building, but the target itself was obscured by the surrounding buildings.

Panther’s Hornet bobbed, and Rebel worried that something was making him break off the run. In the time it took him to think that, though, the plane in front of him steadied and then dove sharply, its nose pointing at the ground for a few short seconds.

He saw bombs fall from the wings, and in the same moment, tracers flew up from the ground, narrowly missing Panther’s aircraft. It was hard to tell, but they seemed to be coming from the building he had noted earlier. It was impossible to tell the exact type of weapon. It was probably just a machine gun, but it was the first flak they had seen.

A split second later, the bombs hit, and as Rebel closed on the target, he gauged Panther’s pattern to be a direct hit.

Fuck it, Rebel thought. The rubble’s been bounced and someone in that building shot at my wingman. Mentally, he reclassed his mission from “strike” to post attack flak suppression ”

He lowered his nose.

MAIN
TELEPHONE
EXCHANGE

The soldiers were congratulating themselves. Once again, the American planes were bombing the other building, not them. Crouched behind their sandbag barriers, they smiled at their continued good fortune.

Their luck was running low.

A second screaming roar filled their ears as something big and gray streaked low overhead. Dark objects came off its wings, and eight five-hundred-pound bombs exploded in the street and on the building.

Those who were not killed by the fragments or the blast were finished when the telephone center collapsed on top of them.

LOUIS
BOTHA
INTERNATIONAL
AIRPORT

The artillery fire slackened momentarily, and Sgt. Jim Cooper looked out across the aAeld. Most of his squad crouched nearby-taking shelter inside a hangar near the LZ, hiding from the relentless Afrikaner barrage. But four of his men,

the slower ones, lay out on the tarmac, wounded or dead. He couldn’t tell which-not from this distance.

Cooper faced a serious dilemma. If he ran out to recover them, he might attract unwelcome attention to the hangar and the rest of his men.

Aluminum sheeting offered concealment-not protection.

But he couldn’t leave the guys lying out there, maybe bleeding to death.

He couldn’t.

Cooper slipped off his pack and laid his M16 down. If he moved fast enough, he might be able to get any survivors under cover while the unseen enemy gunners were shifting targets.

The barrage stopped.

Cooper sprinted out, gut-twisting fear pushing him the dozens of meters in record time. He skidded to a stop by the nearest man-
PFC
Olivera. He gagged. Ollie was gone, a hole in his neck the size of a fist. The next two he checked were dead, too. But the last Marine, Ford, was still alive.

The sergeant scooped his squad mate up in one clean motion and slung him over his shoulder like a side of beef. Then he started jogging and trotting back toward the hangar-expecting the first deadly shell burst at any moment.

It finally came, screaming in far off to the left-on top of a cluster of earlier craters. What the hell? Whatever or whoever had been there earlier was long gone to ground.

Cooper didn’t know why the Afrikaner artillerymen were wasting their rounds tearing up an empty piece of real estate, but he didn’t need to be told what to do next.

He made it back to the hangar, and as eager hands lifted Ford gently off his shoulders, he said, “You people waiting for an engraved invite? Stand to while I find the LT. We got work to do.”

USS
MOUNT
W*
TNEY

General Skiles’s tone was filled with suppressed excitement.

“Sir, Colonel

Hayes reports that artillery fire in the LZ is landing off target. And it isn’t being adjusted. ”

Craig grinned and stood up.

“Looks like the air strikes did the trick.

Land the second wave before those damned gunners figure out what’s going on. We’re back in business.”

Minutes passed-minutes filled with increasingly optimistic reports from the landing area.

“Second wave is ashore, General. No casualties.”

Craig nodded. With their telephone net scrambled, the Afrikaner guns were in a world of hurt. His people had been waiting on their secondary radio frequencies when the perplexed gunners came on line. And now direction-finding and jamming would make short work of the South African artillery.

Meanwhile, his first LVTP-7s and landing craft were heading for the beach, and on-scene commanders reported that the airfield would be cleared in half an hour. Some units were already moving inland on foot-securing strategic hilltops overlooking the assault beaches and the roads leading into the city itself.

Craig stared at the constantly updated computer displays in sober satisfaction. His Marines were winning. True, they hadn’t won yet. He still expected some hard fighting for the city over the next day or two.

Urban combat was never easy and always bloody.

Nevertheless, he was confident of final victory in the battle for Durban.

He planned to hammer the Afrikaner defenders with overwhelming force, and he knew they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other.

Craig let himself relax a little. He and his troops had their second foothold in South Africa.

DECEMBER
20-
FORWARD
HEADQUARTERS
,
CUBAN

EXPEDITIONARY
FORCE
,
NEAR
POTGIETERSRUS
,
SOUTH
AFRICA

Dozens of Soviet-made T-72 tanks,
BTR
and
BMP
armored personnel carriers, and 152mm self-propelled guns sat motionless beneath a blue, cloudless sky. Dust stirred up by passing trucks hung suspended in midair, blown east by a fitful breeze. Weary, bedraggled soldiers moved slowly under the summer sun-fixing broken equipment, cleaning weapons-or were simply catching up on much-needed sleep. Worn down by weeks of constant combat and operating at the end of an increasingly vulnerable supply line, Cuba’s

First Tactical Group had ground to a halt along a high ridge just south of the mining town of Potgietersrus.

Gen. Antonio Vega stood off by himself, scanning the lowlands to the south through a pair of field glasses. Vasquez and his other aides waited nervously near a small convoy of BTR-60 command vehicles and GAZ-69 jeeps. He heard their worried mutterings, and smiled. What they saw as their general pigheaded insistence on seeing things for himself never ceased to trouble them. Fears that he might be killed by a South African sniper while touring the front had already caused several ulcers among his staff.

But Vega liked to visit the front lines. His troops needed the lift they got from seeing their general sharing the same difficulties and dangers.

He, in turn, needed firsthand knowledge of how his troops and tanks were standing up to the rigors of the campaign-not abstract reports filed by self serving unit commanders.

What he saw so far was reassuring. Despite heavy losses and growing fatigue, his men were still confident, still sure they were nearing a final victory over an increasingly desperate Afrikaner foe. Few had the time or information needed to worry about the West’s imperialist intervention in the conflict. Fewer still worried about the fading support for Cuba’s “liberation” force among South Africa’s black population. With Pretoria scarcely more than two hundred kilometers away, they were ready to attack again.

Vega adjusted the focus on his binoculars, sweeping his gaze southward across a landscape of sparse, scattered trees, open grazing lands, and green tobacco fields. The savannah looked empty, as though it had been utterly abandoned by its human inhabitants. That was almost literally true, he knew -Cuban reconnaissance units had been probing ahead for the past several days. Except for a few small artillery observation posts,

Vorster’s northern field commanders had pulled their troops back to defend the vital road junction at Naboomspruit -a prosperous farming and mining community fifty kilometers south of Potgietersrus.

He lifted his binoculars, seeking the far horizon. There it was-Naboomspruit. A purplish smudge at the very limits of his vision. By any reasonable military standard, the town was the last easily defended choke point on the road to Pretoria, Johannesburg, and the almost unimaginable mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand.

Vega frowned. Naboomspruit would be a tough nut to crack.

A drowned morass of swamps and bogs ran just east of

the highway all the way south from Potgietersrus to the Afrikaner-held town. The swamps blocked any possible flank attack to the cast by his tanks and armored vehicles.

If anything, the terrain north and west of Naboomspruit offered even fewer alternatives for bold maneuver. The Waterberg Mountains rose sharply there-climbing high in a sweeping panorama of vertical cliffs and rugged pillars of rock. That was bad enough. Worse yet, Boer infantry companies and artillery batteries were reported dug in on Naboomspruit

Mountain, only a few kilometers west of troops entrenched in the town itself. Together, they served as interlocking parts of a much stronger defense.

It all added up to another bloody and bruising head-on assault against prepared Afrikaner defenses. To take Naboomspruit, Vega’s tank and infantry units would have to come down off their own high ground, cross the open savannah, and then charge straight down the highway.

He shook his head. Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa’s political, economic, and industrial centers, were within his grasp. But many more of his soldiers were sure to die before he could close his fist around them.

“Comrade General!”

Vega turned to face Vasquez.

“What is it?”

The colonel held out a notepad.

“Radio intercepts confirm that the

Americans have landed! At Durban, as we expected! ”

Vega fought to control two conflicting emotions. While they were busy trying to pacify Cape Town, the capitalists hadn’t represented any immediate threat to his plans. Allied troops on the Natal coast were another matter entirely They would be fighting toward the same objectives-fighting for prizes only one side could win.

On the other hand, the threat of another Allied amphibious invasion had already forced Vorster’s generals to shift battalions to Natal-troops, tanks, and guns that would otherwise have been facing his two surviving

Tactical Groups. Now the Afrikaners would have to redeploy even more forces in an effort to contain the American and British Marines pouring ashore at Durban.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, one corner of Vega’s mouth lifted in a thin smile. He’d spent the past two weeks preparing for just such an opportunity. With South Africa’s intelligence services and remaining reconnaissance aircraft focused almost entirely on the approaching invasion fleet, he’d quietly stripped his Second Tactical