Vortex (91 page)

“Sir! Trucks moving south on the highway. Many of them.” Meitjens sounded as surprised as van Vuuren felt. What kind of idiot would try to run a truck convoy down a multi lane highway in the middle of an enemy air attack?

He motioned the corporal aside and pressed his own face against the thermal-image sight. Bright green shapes moved into view, hot against cold hillsides and an even colder night sky. By God, they were trucks!

Van Vuuren found himself counting aloud.

“Ten, eleven, twelve…

eighteen, nineteen… ” He shut his mouth abruptly. More than two dozen vehicles were out there, rolling past his position at twenty kilometers an hour. A sizable convoy even under ordinary circumstances.

And the circumstances were scarcely ordinary. He couldn’t understand it.

Why weren’t those trucks being blown to pieces by enemy air attack?

A nagging fear suddenly crystallized into certainty. The aircraft weren’t attacking those trucks because they were all on the same side. He couldn’t figure out how the Cubans could possibly have moved their troops so close to Pretoria so fast, but that would have to wait. All that mattered now was that he had what must be a communist truck column under his Rookiat’s 76mm gun.

“Target! Five hundred meters! Load HE!” Van Vuuren kept his eyes glued to the night sight. By rights he should sit back and allow Meitjens to man the gun, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to do it himself. In the past thirty or so minutes, he’d been bombed and strafed and generally terrified half out of his mind. Now he wanted the pleasure of personally killing some of the Uitlanders whose airborne comrades had been responsible for all of that.

Besides, this was going to be easy-what an American would call a “turkey shoot.” Two or three shots to the front and two or three more to the back would trap this tightly bunched truck convoy on a ready-made killing ground. Hundreds of enemy infantrymen would meet death on a wide, empty expanse of asphalt and concrete.

Van Vuuren gripped the gun controls and traversed the turret to the tight in one smooth, whirring movement. Bright yellow cross hairs centered on the green image of the lead truck. He tapped the laser range-finder control with his thumb and numerals appeared on the screen-382 meters.

Practically point-blank. He ignored Meitjens’s resentful muttering behind his back. His gunner would just have to learn that rank had its privileges and this was one of them.

I “Up! 11

“On the way!” Van Vuuren squeezed the trigger.

Klaanng! A bright white flash erupted out of the Rookiat’s main gun. The whole vehicle rocked back as it recoiled. Dust swirled through the air, kicked up by the 76mm cannon’s muzzle blast.

The South African captain pressed his face into the night sight, swearing softly as he waited for the dust to settle. Come on. Come on. Clear. Let me see, blast it!

Vision returned. Shit! Van Vuuren snarled at the view his screen showed.

The truck he’d fired at was still moving, and a glowing hot spot two hundred meters farther up the opposite hillside showed where his shot had landed. He’d either missed entirely or the HE round had passed right through the enemy

vehicle without slamming into anything solid enough to set off its warhead.

“Up!” Rookiat Two One’s loader was still on the job.

Van Vuuren traversed right again, bringing the truck back under his cross hairs. This time you die, he promised. He reached for the laser range-finder button…. The night sight went blank. Cross hairs, glowing green images, and digital readouts all faded out and disappeared.

Van Vuuren stared at his darkened screen in dismay. Both the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and its thermal-imaging system were down. One part of his panicked mind remained calm enough to guess that the vehicle’s delicate electronics had taken shock damage in the same bomb blast that had scarred its turret armor.

“Meitiens!” He scrambled out of the other man’s seat in frantic haste.

Only the gunner had the technical know-how needed to get their ballistic computer up and running again. He collided head-on with the corporal in a confused tangle of arms and legs and curses.

Van Vuuren’s attempt to do everything himself cost Rookiat Two One precious time it did not have.

NIGHT
STALKER
LEAD
, 160TH
AVIATION
REGIMENT
,

OVER
PELINDABA

One hundred and fifty feet above the highway, the MH-8 helicopter gunship, known as Night Stalker Lead, spiraled downward in a tight turn to the right. Ghostly images of trucks, hillsides, and patches of brush spun past at dizzying speed.

While the AVS-6 nightvision goggles worn by the gunship’s two crewmen made them look a bit like pop-eyed insects, the goggles also turned night into lime-green-tinted day inside a narrow forty-degree arc. Pilots and gunners using NVGs could pick out tremendous detail-the difference between thin, harmless tree branches and thick tree trunks for example.

That and years of intensive training gave the crews of the 160th Aviation Regiment a combat symbolized by their motto: “Death waits in the dark.”

The 160this gunships had proven themselves invaluable in combat over Panama and the Persian Gulf. Now they were proving it again in the darkness over

South Africa.

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot, a U.S. Army major, leveled out of his turn at fifty feet.

“You see where that shot came from, Dan?”

“Looking.” His gunner, a middle-aged warrant officer going prematurely gray, stared straight ahead-scanning the eerie, cartoonlike world visible through his goggles. A low hill rising steeply ahead. Hard-to-see clumps of scrub brush and scraggly trees. Painfully bright fires raging just over the horizon. There!

“Target! One o’clock! AFV!

Now the pilot saw it-the solid box-shape of an armored vehicle parked in a copse of trees overlooking the highway. He pulled back on his controls, decelerating to give his gunner a better shot.

“Nail him!”

“Doing it! “The gunner swiveled his fire control to the right. Cross hairs settled over the enemy
AFV
and stayed there.

“Locked on!”

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot dropped the gunship’s nose.

“Firing. 11

The helicopter’s last remaining
TOW
antitank missile leapt from its right stores pylon and raced through the sky trailing fire and an ultrathin control wire. It crossed the six hundred meters separating the gunship from its target and exploded against the South African AFV’s turret. The

Rookiat’s top armor had been designed to stop 23mm cannon rounds-not heavy weight antitank missiles.

Fuel and ammunition went up in a rolling blast that threw torn and twisted pieces of Rookiat Two One more than fifty feet into the air. Oily black smoke boiled out of the vehicle’s shattered hulk, spreading slowly across a barren hillside now dotted with small fragments of flaming wreckage.

Night Stalker Lead’s missile had annihilated South Africa’s last organized opposition to Brave Fortune. The 1/75th Rangers had a clear road to

Swartkop.

SWARTKOP
MILITARY
AIRFIELD

Swartkop Airfield’s vast stretches of oil-stained concrete were deserted-almost entirely abandoned to the dead and the dying. Fires guttered low in burnt-out hangars and workshops. Smoke and flame rose from the wreckage of the two MH-8 “Little Birds.” As part of the plan, they’d been abandoned and blown up by their own crews rather than let the South

Africans capture them intact. The only signs of life were concentrated near one end of the flight line where Rangers hurriedly unloaded wounded men from captured trucks and carried them into the huge cargo bay of the last waiting C141. More soldiers lay prone in a rough semicircle around the aircraft, ready to provide coveting fire if any South African troops appeared. Two weary officers stood watching off to one side of the

Starlifter’s cargo ramp.

Jet engines howled from the other side of the tarmac where the other C141 s taxied toward takeoff. Abruptly, one swung through a sharp 180-degree turn, came to a brief stop on the runway’s centerline, and then accelerated-rolling past with a thundering, rumbling roar.

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell watched his battalion’s lead transport lumber heavily into the air with a profound sense of relief. Three nuclear weapons were safely off South African soil and bound for

American-garrisoned Diego Garcia -die first stage on a long flight back to the United States. Another C-141 followed a minute later, lifting off just as the third Starlifter flashed past down the runway. One after another, the huge transports took off.

“Rob, we’re done! Now I suggest we get the hell out of here! ”

O’Connell turned toward the hoarse shout. Lt. Col. Mike Carrerra pointed toward a collection of empty trucks. The wounded they’d carried were all inside the C-14 1. O’Connell nodded vigorously.

“Amen to that, Mike. Get your people aboard! ”

“Right.” Carreffa whirled round and yelled through cupped hands, “Let’s go, Alpha Two!”

Moving fire team by fire team, the Rangers of the 2/75this

Alpha Company scrambled upright and ran for the open cargo bay. As the last man’s combat boots thudded onto the steel ramp, Carrerra signaled the

Air Force crew chief waiting eagerly by the door controls.

“Close and seal!”

He turned back to O’Connell with a wide, punch-drunk grin plastered across his face.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit, Colonel. I gotta admit

I never thought we’d pull this fucking thing off. Congratulations. ”

O’Connell smiled wanly and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the

C-141’s crowded cargo bay. Dozens of men lay motionless on either side of the central aisle, swathed in bloodstained bandages. Others, apparently uninjured, sat silently along the Starlifter’s metal walls, clutching M16s and light machine guns in hands that shook uncontrollably.

Carrerra’s battalion had taken heavy losses while seizing and holding the

South African airfield. His own unit’s casualties were even higher.

Preliminary casualty reports showed the ln5this losses running at more than 50 percent. His Ranger battalion had been wrecked while accomplishing its mission.

He looked up at Carrerra’s tired face.

“Yeah. We did it. I just hope to

God it was worth the price.”

Carreffa eyed the pillars of smoke and flame rising in a great arc from the west to the north.

“Well, one thing’s for goddamned certain. These bastards will sure as hell know we’ve been here!”

O’Connell found himself nodding in agreement as the cargo ramp whined shut, blocking their view of South Africa. The huge C-141 was already in motion, turning rapidly onto the runway leading home.

Karl Vorster’s government had just lost its nuclear option.

DECEMBER
7-
SIMONS
TOWN
NAVAL
BASE
,
CAPE
TOWN

“There’s the helicopter. ” Brig. Chris Taylor, commander of the

Independent Cape Province Defense Forces, pointed out over the water. At first, the shape was visible more by the starlight it blocked than as a concrete form-visible just as a small patch of blackness racing low across white-capped water. But the whupping sound of rotor blades made it real.

The helicopter was headed for a pier at the Simonstown Naval Base, an area controlled by his troops, but still in range of the guns on Table

Mountain. In fact, all of Cape Town was in range of those guns, and that was a problem. Vorster’s troops, holed up in the mountain, had made the liberation of Cape Town a hollow victory, because any movement, any sign of organized activity, quickly ended in a storm of shellfire.

For more than three weeks, the whole city had taken a terrible beating.

Its citizens now moved only at night, without lights, and as much as possible, without noise. All those who

“a could had fled to the countryside-something that wasn’t an option for Cape

Town’s black population.

The black and colored population lived in Alexandra township, south of the city, and they depended on the normal commerce of the city for their income. Servants, cleaners, and laborers, they’d been hit the hardest when the daytime shelling started.

Now bands of blacks roved the city, looking for food, money, or anything of value. Transportation was rigidly controlled, and Taylor’s forces were once more employed in trying to preserve order. Those that weren’t busy chasing looters escorted food convoys or formed ai perimeter around Table

Mountain-guarding against a sortie by the besieged forces.

Vorster’s troops were deeply entrenched in a network of improved caves and tunnels bored into solid rock. With little more than a single infantry battalion plus artillery, they’d stood off two determined attacks by Taylor’s much larger forces. Those assaults had claimed so many of his men that he’d given up trying to take the place by storm.

Unfortunately, a conventional siege was certain to be both costly and protracted. He wasn’t completely familiar with the defenses, but it was common knowledge in the Army that the mountain held food and ammunition for several months. Ammunition in abundance, including plenty of shells for their heavy G-5 howitzers. The G-5s, massive 155mm artillery pieces with a forty-kilometer range, were the centerpiece of the holdouts’ defenses.

Well, he thought, with luck and some tact, they could end the siege with

American help. Taylor, his secondin command, Adriaan Spier, and Deputy

Governor Fraser were all going out to meet the American invasion fleet steaming toward the Cape Town coast.

Making sure that his hooded light was pointed out to sea, one of the soldiers escorting Taylor’s party shone a beam toward the advancing aircraft. As if making sure that was the proper recognition signal, the helicopter paused about fifty meters away, hovering over the water.