Vortex (88 page)

California.

The word
RELEASE
blinked into existence in the lower left hand corner of his
HUD
. Aggressive instincts and years of training paid off as he stabbed the release button twice and yanked the Hornet up into a forty-degree climb. Two separate shudders rippled through the plane as a string of Durandals tumbled out from under its wings-falling nose-down toward the runway below.

Grunting against g forces that quadrupled his effective weight, Garrard pulled the climbing F/A-18 into a tight turn and craned his head all the way around to stare at the scene now behind and to his right. He wanted to see what happened when his bombs went off.

Small drogue parachutes snapped open behind each bomb. At a preset altitude above the runway, rocket motors inside the Durandals fired. All six weapons accelerated straight down, smashing into the earth below before exploding. Six flowers of flame, smoke, and spinning chunks of shattered concrete blossomed in a ragged line, angled across Waterkloof’s primary strip. Two actually struck the narrow runway, heaving and buckling the thick concrete for eight or ten meters, in addition to a five-meter crater.

One of the two South African fighters racing down the runway ran into a smoking, jagged crater at more than one

hundred miles an hour. The jet slammed nose first into the concrete in a fiery shower of sparks, broke in half, and blew up. Garrard whooped into his oxygen mask. Scratch one Mirage! One down and one to go.

But the other South African interceptor emerged from the wall of smoke and tumbling debris apparently unscathed. Afterburner blazing, the Mirage F.
ICZ
soared off the runway-clawing frantically for altitude.

Garrard clicked his mike button.

“Tiger Lead, one hostile airborne.

Engaging. ”

He shoved his throttle forward and pulled the Hornet into a rolling, vertical climb, groaning involuntarily as the Hornet’s g force meter flickered past seven. At the same time, he switched his
HUD
to air-to-air mode. Two concentric circles leapt into view in the middle of the display.

The circles identified cones of vulnerability-areas of the sky in front of his plane where his heat-seekers had the best odds of scoring a hit.

The sky and ground seemed to spin around, changing places, as Garrard pulled his F/A-18 inverted. Just a little more. Almost…

The climbing Mirage came into view in his HUD’s upper left corner. A target designation box appeared around the South African jet’s dim, wavering shape. Garrard rolled his plane back upright and accelerated. The Homer streaked after its opponent.

As the F/A-18 closed, the box surrounding the enemy plane moved slowly down and across its HUD-sliding toward the center. Garrard’s finger poised over the fire button on his stick. Come on, you bastards, lock on! It might not make much sense to swear at the simpleminded circuits inside the two

AIM-9L Sidewinders his plane carried, but somehow it did make him feel better.

One of the missiles growled suddenly in his earphones letting him know that its IR seeker had finally locked on. A flashing diamond appeared over the

South African jet now barely a mile ahead and starting to turn.

Garrard squeezed his fire button and felt a small shudder as the Sidewinder mounted on his plane’s starboard wingtip dropped off and ignited. A streak of orange flame arced across the sky. The heat-seeker flashed across the gap between Tiger Four and its prey in less than five seconds. It exploded just yards behind the F. I’s brightly glowing tailpipe.

The South African Mirage seemed to disintegrate in midair-tearing itself apart as fuel, ammunition, and missile propellant all went up in a thousandth of a second. Burning bits and pieces of torn metal and plastic fell earthward beneath an ugly, drifting cloud of oily black smoke.

Garrard doubted that the enemy pilot had even known he was under direct attack. Nothing unusual in that. Most ai rto-air kills were scored on planes that never saw their attackers. And getting bounced just seconds after takeoff was every fighter pilot’s nightmare.

He keyed his mike again.

“Tiger Lead, this is Tiger Four. Splash one hostile. Runway is out of action.”

The strike commander’s laconic voice carried well over radio.

“Roger,

Four. Nice work. What’s your fuel state?”

Garrard took a quick look at his fuel display.

“Approaching Bingo.” The

Hornet was a shit-hot fighter and attack plane -much better than either the F-4 Phantom or the A-7 Corsair, the two aircraft it had replaced. But the F/A-18 was short on legs. Pretoria, three hundred and fifty miles inland, was near the limit of its un refueled combat radius.

“Okay, Four. Head for Gascan flight at Point Tango.”

Garrard clicked his mike twice to acknowledge and turned southeast, flying back toward a rendezvous with KA-61) tankers topped full of aviation fuel.

Behind him, the rest of the Vinson’s aircraft went to work with a vengeance.

VOORTREKKER
HEIGHTS
MILITARY
CAMP
,
NEAR
PRETORIA

A stick of four 500-pound bombs landed just two hundred yards away from

the small officer’s cottage assigned to Commandant Henrik Kruger. They exploded in a thunderous, thumping blast that instantly shattered every window, toppled bookcases, and threw pictures off rippling walls.

Ian Sheffield dived for cover behind a sofa as flying glass sleeted across the living room. He lay flat until the floor stopped rocking and then looked up.

Dust knocked off the walls and ceiling swirled in the air. Razor-edged pieces of glass littered the floor, mixed in with fragments of loose plaster and with splintered pieces of wood that had once been slats for the cottage’s venetian blinds. Several deadly looking shards of glass were actually embedded in the far wall itself. He shivered suddenly, realizing that those bomb-made daggers must have passed within an inch or less of his unprotected head.

The building swayed again-rocked this time by bombs landing farther off.

Ian scrambled to his feet, driven by an intense desire to get outside and into a bunker or trench. He’d stayed inside when the air raid sirens had gone off, more afraid of being recognized as a fugitive on the run from

South African “justice” than of missing out on what he’d thought was only another drill. But it was beginning to look as though his calculations of relative risk were greatly in error.

More bomb blasts shook the cottage.

Ian bolted out the front door and into a scene that might have been lifted straight out of the most frightening parts of Dante’s Inferno. A thick cloud of smoke and dust from burning buildings and repeated explosions hung low over the base, making it almost as difficult to see as it was to breathe. What he could see was terrifying.

One bomb had slammed into a nearby barracks and blown it apart-leaving only a ragged, smoking skeleton of roofless walls and heaped rubble.

Other bombs had rained down all over the South African camp. Armories, maintenance sheds, and guard rooms alike were either in ruins or in flames. An eighteen-ton Ratel armored personnel carrier lay on its side in the middle of a parade ground-torn and twisted as though it had been first squeezed and then hurled there by a careless giant’s hand.

As he scuttled across the road in front of Kruger’s quarters, Ian was surprised to find that part of his trained reporter’s mind was still busy jotting down details and impression seven though the rest of him just wanted to dive into some nice safe hole. Christ, he must be going mad.

This wasn’t the right time to contemplate winning a prize for war reporting. But his brain wouldn’t turn off.

Despite all the destruction, he couldn’t see many bodies. The ten-minute delay between the time the first air raid sirens sounded and the first bombs cascaded down must have given everyone a chance to find cover.

Everyone but him, that is. He dodged a blazing five-ton truck still rolling down the road with its driver slumped behind the wheel.

Another stick of bombs rained down on the barracks row just across the parade ground-exploding one after the other in rippling series of blinding white flashes. Shock waves slapped him in the face and punched the air out of his lungs. Ian ran faster, heading for the shelter Kruger said had been dug in front of his quarters.

There! A dark hole seemed to rise up out of the parade ground’s flattened grass and tamped-down dirt. Without slowing, Ian threw himself through the entrance and tumbled head over heels down into a low-roofed bomb shelter. He lay still for a moment, facedown on the dugout’s earthen floor and very glad to be there. Three other people were there ahead of him-Kruger, Matthew Siberia, and Emily van der Heijden.

As he rose to his knees and spat out a mouthful of dirt, Emily’s worried face brightened.

“Ian!”

She rushed over and he felt a pair of wonderfully warm arms tighten around him. She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t have to. He could feel her shaking.

Ian buried his face in her sweet-smelling, auburn hair. When he looked up, he found Henrik Kruger’s sardonic gaze fixed on him.

“A rough night, Meneer Sheffield?”

A near-miss rocked the bunker. Dust sifted down through gaps in the timber roof. Kruger’s expression didn’t change.

This guy was a damned cool customer, Ian thought, deciding to reply in kind. He nodded abruptly.

“Perhaps a bit loud, Kommandant.”

Surprisingly, Kruger smiled.

“That is the trouble with war, my friend.

It’s very hard on your hearing.”

Emily and Sibena stared at the two of them, half-convinced that both of them were beginning to slide over the edge into total insanity.

In the air above them, jets roared back and forth, strafing or bombing any target still visible through pillars of rising smoke. And two battalions of crack South African infantry cowered in bomb shelters and foxholes-pinned down by American air power.

Pelindaba’s garrison was on its own.

HEADQUARTERS
COMPANY
, 1/75TH
RANGERS
,
NEAR
THE
WEAPONS
STORAGE
SITE
,

PELINDABA

“Jesus!” Lt, Col. Robert O’Connell yanked his head back below the trench parapet as a sudden burst of machinegun fire ripped past. The goddamned

South Africans were on their frigging toes. Still, he’d seen enough-more than enough.

The enemy had a heavy-caliber Vickers machine gun ensconced in a reinforced concrete bunker barely thirty meters north of the nuclear weapons storage area-covering every possible approach from the western side of the Pelindaba compound. Other bunkers guarded the eastern approaches. Bravo Company’s Third Platoon had found that out the hard way.

Dead Rangers were strewn across the ground between the trench and the barbed wire fence surrounding the storage site. Most lay within a few feet of the trench-mowed down only seconds after they’d climbed out of cover. Some were draped over the wire, butchered as they tried to cut their way through. Several bodies still tangled in bloodsoaked parachutes lay crumpled inside the weapons storage area.

O’Connell felt sick. Many of his best Rangers lay dead out there. A few of Bravo Three’s forty-two men were probably still alive, huddled behind scraps of cover or playing possum in the middle of that murderous field, but the platoon itself had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force.

He gritted his teeth and motioned his officers and senior noncoms over for a quick conference. Regrets could come later. Right now, he and his thirty or so headquarters troops had to find a way to knock that damned machine gun out. Until they did, nobody was going to be able to get inside that storage site, and more importantly, nobody was going to be able to haul the nukes themselves out.

“Well, anybody got any brilliant ideas?” O’Connell looked from face to worried face.

His executive officer, Maj. Peter Klocek, pursed his lips and tilted his helmet back a few inches so he could wipe his sweat-streaked forehead.

“Can we get a Gustav here?”

“No time. ” O’Connell shook his head regretfully. The battalion’s recoilless rifle teams were scattered over a wide area-busy knocking out other enemy bunkers and strong points The Carl Gustav team attached to

Bravo Three had disappeared. They were probably among the dead piled up in the field just beyond the trench.

“What about Navy air? Why not let a couple A-6s pound the shit out of those SOBs?

O’Connell considered that for a second. It was tempting -too tempting.

And too likely to cause them more problems. He shook his head again.

“That bunker’s too close to the storage area. One near miss and we’d have to try digging those nukes out with our bare hands.”

“Then I guess we gotta take our lumps and do it the hard way, Colonel.”

Sergeant Johnson growled, hefting his M 16 in one massive paw. The assault rifle looked small in comparison.

O’Connell’s fingers drummed a brief tattoo on the plastic butt of his own

M 16. Johnson had never been known for either his tact or his fancy tactical footwork. He had both the physique and mental attitude of a bare-knuckle brawler. But basically the sergeant was right. They’d have to throw subtlety out the window.

He grimaced. This was another of the decision points

dreaded by any sane combat commander-the moment when you came face-to-face with an awful and unavoidable truth about battle. Sound tactics and sufficient firepower were vital, but there would always be a time when all options narrowed down to one horrible choice-the decision to put men into a position in which a lot of them were sure to be killed.

O’Connell slid down to squat on his haunches. His officers and NCOs followed suit.

“All right, people, listen up. Here’s how were gonna play this thing.” He quickly traced movements in the dirt, outlining the only plan open to them.

Two minutes later, O’Connell and four of his Rangers crouched below the edge of the slit trench. Two more soldiers stood ready to boost them up and into the killing ground. Another group of six led by Sergeant Johnson waited one hundred meters south along the same trench. The rest of his headquarters troops-thirteen officers and men-were spaced at five-meter intervals between the two assault groups.