A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  "Between two and two and a half thousand," the air force photographic reconnaissance squadron leader had told the briefing. "They have been there for approximately six months, so training is almost complete. They are probably just waiting for the rains to break before beginning a major offensive."

  A simultaneous incursion by two thousand trained terrorists would have strained the Rhodesian security forces" capabilities to breaking point.

  "Preemptive strike," General Peter Walls, the Rhodesian commander in chief, had ordered. "I want a battle plan prepared within twenty-four hours." The code name chosen for the attack was "Popeye."

  Rivalry between the Selous Scouts and the Ballantyne Scouts was fierce, and Sean had been jubilant when he had been given the ground attack role of "Popeye" in preference to the Selous lads.

  They had gone in with the slow, ancient Dakotas, crowded on the benches along the fuselage, fifty men and their equipment to an aircraft, sitting on their parachutes. There were almost equal numbers of black and white troopers, but they were homogeneous in their camouflage paint. They had jumped from three hundred feet, just high enough for the parachutes to flare before they hit the ground. When they jumped from that height, they jokingly referred to themselves as "meat bombs."

  The jump area was twelve miles from the guerrilla training camp, ninety-six miles inside the Mozambican border. They were on the ground an hour before sunset. All three hundred Scouts were assembled and ready to move out by nightfall.

  They had made the approach march by moonlight, each man carrying a pack that weighed almost a hundred pounds, most of that weight made up of ammunition for the RPD machine guns.

  They had reached the fork of the river after midnight and prepared their ambush position along the south bank, overlooking the dry river-bed and its shallow green pools and facing the training camp on the far bank.

  With Job beside him, Sean crept along the bank, checking every position personally, speaking to his men in whispers, calling them by name. They had lain for the rest of the night behind their machine guns, and small sounds and smells of the wood smoke and cooking food had drifted across to them on the night breeze.

  At dawn a bugle had sounded reveille in the dark forest that hid the camps, and they had seen the obscure movement of many persons in the gloom beneath the trees.

  Twenty minutes later, Precisely at the moment of good shooting light, the Vampires had come whistling in from the west and dropped their napalm cansters. Towering bans of orange flame shot through with evil black smoke had erupted into the sky, palling the sunrise; the heat and the chemical stink of the napalm came rolling down to where the scouts lay in ambush. The VamPires had deliberately dropped their loads of napalm along the northern perimeter of the camp, sealing off that escape route with a wall of fire. The Canberra bombers came in twenty seconds behind the Vampires, and their bomb loads were fragmentation and high explosive. They fell into the camp with jarring crumping detonations, sending up fountains of dirt and debris, and the trainee guerrillas who survived came out of the forest, screaming and howling in a panic-stricken mob.

  The napalm had cut them off from the north, and they poured into the river-bed and came running directly at the waiting machine guns. Sean let them come, studying them with a detached interest.

  There were almost as many women as men, but it was difficult to differentiate between the sexes. They wore no uniform; some were in khaki shorts and T-shirts with portraits of guerrilla leaders or Political slogans printed on the chests. Others wore blue denim or bush jackets, and some were bare-chested and in their underwear.

  Nearly all of them were young, in their middle or late teens, all of them terrified and running blindly to escape the conflagration of napalm and high explosive.

  They splashed into the pools and the sand held their feet, slowing them. As they ran, they looked back over their shoulders at the flames and dust of the pomp, so none of them saw the gunners waiting for them on the south bank.

  The river-bed was filled with struggling humanity, like a pit full of rats, and as the first of them reached the bank on which Sean lay and began to clamber up the steep earthen side, he blew a piercing blast on his whistle. The last note of the whistle was drowned out by gunfire, three hundred automatic weapons opening up together.

  Sean had been hardened by years of brutal warfare, but even he found the carnage stunning. At close range, the volleys of machine-gun fire tore one human body to shreds, then went on to destroy the next rank and the next. Shots boiled the white sand of the river-bed so it rose in a waist-high fog turning the running figures to ghostly silhouettes in the dust, then hid them as they collapsed or were flung carelessly aside by point-blank bursts of fire.

  The din lasted for four minutes. Then there were no more targets and the guns fell silent. They had fired fifty thousand bullets into the river-bed. The barrels of the guns were so hot that, like the plate of a stove, they ticked and pink led as they cooled. Though their ears were dulled and numbed by the roar of gunfire, they could hear the moans and cries of those who still lived in the river-bed.

  Sean blew another blast on his whistle and they leaped down the bank and went forward in a skirmishing line.

  Sean's orders were that the only prisoners to be taken were to be officers or political commissars. As they crossed the river, they shot those who showed any signs of life, holding the muzzles against their heads, a single bullet for each, making certain they would never recover from their Wounds to attack another Rhodesian farmhouse or hack the arms and legs off the black villagers who refused to supply them with food and women. They left nobody alive in the river-bed. Then they went on to sweep through the camp, tossing grenades into the dugouts and searching the huts for survivors and, more important, for maps and documents. Like all good Marxists, the guerrillas were obsessed with record keeping.

  The capture of the camp archives was one of the major priorities of "Popeye. Racing at the head of his men, Sean was the first to reach headquarters hut in the center of the camp. He recognized it by the gaudy flag drooping on its flagpole in front.

  The doorway was dangerous. He fired a burst through the grass wall and then dived in headfirst through the window. There was a tall black man in the front office. He was dressed in blue denim, and he was scooping armfuls of documents out of the paraffin boxes that served as filing cabinets and dumping them in the center of the floor. Clearly he was going to attempt to burn them, but now he dropped his armful of paper and reached for the pistol in the holster on his belt.

  Sean kicked his legs out from under him and, as he dropped, slammed the butt of his weapon into the side of his neck just below the ear. As Sean rolled to his feet, Matatu appeared beside him like a grinning gnome and stooped to slit the unconscious guerrilla's throat with his skinning knife.

  "No!" Sean stopped him. "We want that one." Job was seconds behind him, bursting into the room with the heavy RPD machine gun held ready across his hip.

  "Okay, Captain," Sean ordered him, "get a detail to recover all this burnt." He glanced at his watch. "The choppers will be here in twenty minutes."

  The Rhodesian Air Force was desperately short of helicopters.

  Rhodesia was under sanction by every nation in the world except South Africa, and a British warship was blockading the Mozambique Channel to deny those ports to them.

  They could risk only two helicopters for this operation. One of those was loaded with captured documents, almost five tons of them: lists of the trainees and their organization, target priorities and supply sheets, equipment dossiers, training manuals, field evaluations of Rhodesian countermeasures, communist propaganda, maps of the attack routes and safe corridors, the entire order of battle of the guerrilla army. It was a treasure trove, its aquisition a greater blow to the enemy than the hundreds of bodies lying in the river-bed, but it filled one of the precious helicopters.

  The second Alouette helicopter Sean used for casevac" and for ferrying out the prisoners. However, the Scouts
had taken more casualties than he had anticipated: three troopers had been injured in the parachute drop, torn cartilage and sprained ligaments, and five others had been wounded by the desultory and quickly suppressed counterfire of the more plucky of the guerrillas. Then one of the guerrillas had feigned dead in the river-bed and thrown a grenade when the Scouts came forward, killing a black trooper and wounding two others. The Scouts always took their dead out for decent burial and the trooper's corpse was already in its green plastic body bag.

  In addition to his own casualties, Sean's men had captured eight suspected officers and commissars. The guerrilla leaders wore no insignia of rank but could usually be identified by the superior quality of their clothing, by their sunglasses, wristwatches, and the rows of ball-point pens in their breast pockets.

  They had too many passengers for the helicopters, and Sean was forced to keep some of his prisoners with him for the outward march. He picked those who looked fit enough to survive a forced march with the Scouts. One of these was the man they had captured in the command hut.

  Forty-five minutes after the attack had begun, the last helicopter took off and the Scouts were ready to move out. They could expect the Frelimo counterattack to be dilatory and unenthusiastic, but Sean was taking no chances. He was on the riverbank surveying the carnage of the killing ground. They couldn't afford the time to make a body count, but the air force would run another reconnaissance later this morning and they would get a fair estimate from the photographs.

  "Must be at least fifteen hundred" Sean decided. They were lying in heaps and windrows like newly cut wheat, and already the flies were hanging over them in a gray mist.

  Sean turned away from the scene. "All right," he called. "Move them out!"

  The first section of fifty men set off at a trot. The troop trucks would race across the border and come in as far as they could to meet them, but the men would still have to run thirty miles or more before they could ride, a full marathon under arms. But most of their ammunition had been shot away and their packs were almost empty.

  Job hurried across to where Sean stood on the bank. "The prisoner you took, Colonel. I have recognized him. It's Comrade China himself."

  "Are you sure?" Sean did not wait for Job to reply. "Damn, if I had known I would have sent him out on the chopper."

  Comrade China was high on the wanted list of the Rhodesians.

  He was the area commander of the entire northeastern sector, the equivalent of a major general and one of their most successful commanders, a man with a lot of interesting stories to tell to military intelligence.

  "Make sure he gets out safely, Captain," Sean ordered brusquely. "Treat him like your new wife."

  "China refuses to march," Job said. "We can't shoot him, and we can't carry him. He knows that."

  under guard, Sean strode across to where the prisoner was held squatting sullenly with his hands behind his head.

  "On your feet and march," Sean ordered. Comrade China spat on Sean's boots. Sean unbuckled his holster and drew the.357 Magnum revolver. He laid it against the side of the man's head.

  "On your feet," he repeated. "Your last chance."

  "You won't shoot," the man sneered. "You daren't shoot." And Sean fired, The muzzle was aimed over Comrade China's shoulder, but the barrel was pressed hard against his ear.

  Comrade China screamed and clutched at his ear with both hands. A thin trickle of blood from his ruptured eardrum ran out between his fingers. "On your feet!" Sean said and still holding his damaged ear, Comrade China spat at him again. Sean laid the revolver barrel against his other ear. "After your ears, we will take out your eyes, with a sharp stick." Comrade China stood up.

  At the double, move out." Job took over. He placed his hand between China's shoulder blades and sent him tottering down the riverbank.

  Sean took one more look around the battlefield. it had been done swiftly and thoroughly, what the Scouts called "a good kill."

  "All right, Matatu," Sean said softly. "Let's go home." And the little Ndorobo ran ahead of him.

  When Comrade China faltered and his knees went rubbery and he collapsed from the agony of his burst eardrum, Sean gave him a subcutaneous shot of morphine from a disposable syringe and a drink from his water bottle.

  "For a soldier of the revolution who shoots babies and chops the feet off old women, this is a stroll in the park," Sean told him.

  Brace up, China, or I'll blow your other ear out." And he took one of China's elbows and Job the other. Between them they hoisted him to his feet and half carried him until the morphine had a chance to work, but they kept up the pace of the running column of Scouts through the forest and over the rolling rocky hills.

  "You may have killed some of our people today." After a mile or so the morphine was working and China became loquacious.

  "Today you have won a single little battle, Colonel Courtney, but tomorrow we will have won the war." China's voice was harsh with bitter self-righteousness.

  "How do you know my name?" Sean asked with amusement.

  "You are famous, Colonel, or should I say infamous. Under you, this pack of killer dogs is even more dangerous than when the murderous Ballantyne himself was leading it."

  "Thank you for the pretty compliment, my old China, but aren't you claiming victory a little prematurely?"

  "The side which controls the countryside by night wins the war.

  "Mao Tse-tung." Sean smiled. "A most appropriate quotation for one of your kind."

  "We control the Countryside at last, we have you bottled up in your villages and towns. Your white farmers are losing heart, their women are sick of war. The black peasants are openly sympathetic to our cause. Britain and the world are against you. Even South Africa, your only ally, is growing disenchanted with the struggle.

  Soon, very soon..

  They argued as they ran, and despite himself Sean could not suppress a grudging admiration for his prisoner. He was quick witted his command of English impressive and his grasp of politics and military tactics even more so. He was physically strong and fit.

  Sean could feel the wiry muscle in his arm as he supported him, and few other men with a burst eardrum could have sustained the pace of the march.

  "He would make a superb Scout," Sean thought. "If we could turn him" Many of his most valuable men were former guerrillas, captured and skillfully turned by Rhodesian intelligence.

  So as they ran on he studied Comrade China with renewed interest. He was probably a few years younger than Sean. He had refined Nilotic features, more Ethiopian than Shana, a narrow high-bridged nose and chiseled lips rather than the broadly negroid. Even the morphine could not dim the intelligence of his large dark eyes. He was a handsome man, and of course he would be tough and utterly ruthless. He would not have reached his rank were he not.

  "I want him," Sean decided. "My God, he would be worth another full regiment to us." And he tightened his grip on the man's arm, a proprietorial gesture. "This little darling is going to get the full treatment."

  The vanguard ran into a Frelimo patrol in the middle of the morning and brushed them aside, hardly slackening their pace to do so. The corpses in their blotched Frelimo camouflage lay beside the track as they trotted past.

  They came up with the troop convoy a little after midday. The trucks were guarded by Eland armored cars, and they had cans of ice-cold Castle beer in the cool boxes. The Scouts had covered forty-two miles in just over seven hours, and the beer tasted like nectar.

  Sean gave a can to Comrade China. "Sorry about your ear," he told him, and saluted him with the beer can.

  "I would have done the same to you." China smiled, but his eyes were inscrutable. "To our next meeting?" he suggested the toast.