A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  "There is a round hill, shaped like the head of a bald man," he began. "On one side of the hill passes the insimbi, the railway, and on the other side the road."

  Sean propped himself on one elbow to listen. With his other arm he encircled Claudia's naked waist and held her close. She snuggled against him, listening to Matatu's piping pixie voice in the darkness.

  "There are many ask ari around the hill with big banduki hidden in holes in the ground." Sean formed a vivid mental picture of the heavily garrisoned hilltop as Matatu described it to him. Beyond the outer defensive lines the gunships were laagered in separate sandbagged emplacements. Like battle tanks in hull-down fortifications, they would be impregnable, yet they had only to rise and hover a few feet above ground level to bring into action their devastating Gatling cannons and rocket pods.

  "Inside the circle of roosting hen shaw there are many gharries parked and white men in green clothes who climb on the hen shaw and look inside them all the time." Matatu described the mobile workshops and fuel tankers and the squads of Russian mechanics and technicians needed to keep the helicopters flying. The training manuals had pointed up the Hind's excessive requirements of service and maintenance, and those big Isotov turbo engines would guzzle avgas.

  "Matatu, did you see railway gharries on the line near the hill?"

  Sean asked.

  "I saw them," Matatu confirmed. "Those big round gharries full of beer-the men who ride in the hen shaw must be very thirsty."

  Once many years ago, on one of his infrequent visits to the city with Sean, Matatu had seen a beer tanker disgorging its load at the main Harare beer hall. He had been so impressed that since that day he had been utterly convinced that all tankers of whatever size or type contained only beer. Sean could not change his mind on this; Matatu would never accept that some of them actually carried less noble fluids such as gasoline, and he always stared wistfully after any tanker they posed on the road.

  Now, in the darkness, Sean smiled at the little man's fixation.

  Fuel for the gunships' was obviously being railed from Harare in bulk tankers and transshipped into smaller road tankers. It was ironic that the fuel was almost certainly being originally supplied by the South Africans. However, if the helicopter squadron was storing its fuel within the laager itself, they were taking a grave risk. It was something to bear in mind.

  Matatu remained at the bedside for almost an hour while Sean patiently drew from him every possible detail he could of the gunship laager. He was certain that there were eleven helicopters in the emplacements, which tallied with Sean's own estimate. Of the original twelve, one had been destroyed in the collision with the Hercules. He was equally certain that only nine of the gunships were actually flying. Hidden on a nearby kopJe, he had watched the helicopters sortie from their laager at dawn, return for refueling during the day, and at nightfall come in to roost. Sean knew that Matatu could count accurately to twenty, but after that he became vague and any greater number was described progressively as "many" or "a great deal" and finally as "like grass on the Serengeti plains."

  So Sean was now fairly certain that two of the gunships had broken down and were probably awaiting spares, and he accepted Matatu's figure of nine operational gunships, still a formidable force, quite sufficient to turn the tide of the looming battle against Renamo unless they could swiftly be put out of action.

  When at last Matatu had finished his recitation he asked simply, "Now, my Bwana, what do you want me to do?"

  Sean considered in silence. There was really no reason why he should not bring Matatu in from wherever he was hiding up in the bush, and allow him openly to join the force of Shangane under his command as a tracker. However, he sensed there might be some future advantage in keeping Matatu hidden from China's cold reptilian gaze.

  "You are my wild card, Matatu," he said in English. Then in Swahili, he said, "I want you to keep out of sight. Do not let any of the men here see you, except Job and me."

  "I bear you, my Bwana."

  "Come to me each night as you have tonight. I will have food for you, and I will tell you what to do. In the meantime, watch and tell me all you see."

  Matatu went so silently that they heard only the faint rustle of the netting at the entrance as he passed through.

  "Will he be all right?" Claudia asked softly. "I worry about him.

  He's so cute."

  "Of all of us, he is probably the most likely to survive." In the dark, Sean smiled fondly after the little man.

  "I'm not sleepy anymore." Claudia snuggled against him like a cat. Much later she whispered, "I'm so glad Matatu woke us UP... it was still dark when Sean turned Job out of his blanket the next morning. "We've got work to do," he told him. While Job laced on his boots, Sean described his meeting with General China' You mean we are now instructors." Job laughed softly. "All we know about those Stingers is what we have read in the manuals."

  "That will have to change," Sean told him. "The sooner we get the Shanganes into action, the sooner we are going to get the hell out of here."

  "Is that what China told you?" Job raised an eyebrow at Sean.

  "Let's get Ferdinand and his boys cracking," Sean said brusquely to cover his own misgivings. well sort them into teams of two men, one to serve the launcher and the other to carry the extra missiles. Of course, the number two must be able to take over if the leader is put down."

  Sean pulled out his notebook and drew the candle stump closer, writing in its guttering yellow light.

  o get here?" Job stuffed his "When do you expect Alphonso t shirt into the top of his tiger-striped pants.

  sometime today, if at all," Sean replied.

  "He's the best of the Wnch," Job grunted.

  "Ferdinand is not b ad," Sean pointed out, placing their names at the head of the pagE as his section leaders. "Okay, we need thirty names for our number ones, give me some."

  It was like the old days working together this way, and Sean found he was beginning to enjoy himself.

  As soon as it was light enough, they paraded the men who had returned in the Hercules from the Grand Reef raid. With the two casualties missing, there remained eighteen men under Ferdinand Sean immediately gave Ferdinand a field promotion to full sergeant and was rewarded with a huge grin and a flourishing salute that almost swept Ferdinand off his feet with his own vigor.

  Sean had to find something to occupy them and keep them out of the way while he and Job gave themselves a crash course on the Stinger missile system.

  "Sergeant." Sean addressed Ferdinand by his rank for the first time. "Do you see that hill over there?" It was just visible through the trees, shaded blue with distance. "Take your men for a run around it and get them back here in two hours. Weapons and full field packs."

  As they watched the column of men doubling away, Sean said, "If Alphonso and his lads don't arrive by this evening, we'll have to recruit replacements. That's no problem, however. China will be keen to let us have his very best men. At the moment, we are right at the top of his list of favorite flavors."

  "In the meantime let's hit those manuals," Job suggested. "I haven't swatted since varsity days. I'm not looking forward to it."

  Claudia joined them in the dugout, helping them sort through the thick red plastic-covered looseleaf manuals, picking out the information relevant to their situation and discarding the vast body of technical data they had no need of, as well as the operational reports and instructions that did not apply to deployment in this altitude and terrain. After two hours" work they had reduced the mass of information to one manageable slim volume.

  "All right." Sean stood up. "Let's go find a training ground."

  They picked out a spot a few hundred meters downriver from the dugout where the side of a low kopJe formed a natural lecture theater. The tall riverine mahogany trees spread their branches overhead to provide cover from a surprise raid by the Hind gunships. When Ferdinand and his men returned bathed in sweat from their little outing, Sean put them to
work clearing the amphitheater of thorn and scrub and digging shell scrapes conveniently close at hand for use when air raids interrupted classes.

  "Right," Sean told Job and Claudia. "Now we can uncrate the trainer set and one of the launchers. From now on it's "look and learn,"

  "show and tell" time."

  When they opened the first crate, Sean discovered that the battery power pack was discharged. However, each crate contained a small charger set with appropriate connections and transformers.

  Under Job's supervision Ferdinand and his men carried the power packs up to the headquarters communications center, and at General China's order they were given priority use of the portable 220-volt, 15-kilowatt generator. Sean connected up the power packs in batches of five, but it would take twenty-four hours before they had power available for all the missile launchers.

  With the batteries on charge they laid out the trainer set and one of the launchers on the makeshift table Ferdinand had built on the floor of the open-air theater under the trees. While Claudia read aloud from the instruction manual, Sean and Job stripped and reassembled the equipment until they were thoroughly familiar with all of it.

  Sean was relieved and pleased to discover that with the exception of the IFF, the operation of the equipment was not a great deal more complicated than the conventional RPG-7 rocket launchers. The RPG-7 was so much a part of the guerrilla arsenal that, as Job remarked, every single man in China's division could load and lock it on a pitch dark night in a thunderstorm.

  "Anyway, we don't need the IFF," Sean pointed out. "Everything that flies in these skies, apart from the dicky birds, is a foe."

  The IFF, "Identification Friend or Foe," was a system that inter rooted the target, determining from the aircraft's on-board transponder whether it was hostile or friendly and preventing missile launches against friendly aircraft.

  Claudia found the section on the manual dealing with the IFF, and under her tutelage they disarmed the system, converting the Stinger into a free-fire weapon that would attack any aircraft at which it was aimed. straight Without IFF fit, the attack sequence for the missile is forward. The target is picked up in the small screen of the aiming sight, and the safety device above the pistol grip is disengaged with the right thumb. The actuator is engaged by depressing the button built into the reverse of the pistol grip. This starts the run up of the navigational gyro and releases a flow of freon gas to cool the infrared seekers as they become active. With the sights held on the target, all incoming infrared radiation is magnified and focused on the detector cell of the missile head. As soon as this radiation is of sufficient concentration to allow the mi ssi e to track to its source, the gyro stabilizer un cages and the missile emits a high-pitched tone.

  To fire the mi ssi the operator depresses the trigger in the pistol grip with his Torefinger, which starts the electric ejector motor. The missile discharges from the launch tube through the frangible front seal and ejects to a safe distance, approximately eight meters from the operator, to protect him from rocket backblast. At this point the solid-fuel rocket engine fires, the blast of exhaust gas flares out the retractable tail fins, and the missile accelerates to four times the speed of sound. When an inertial force of twenty-eight times gravity is attained, the fuse shutout is thrown open and the missile is armed. It tracks the target on a fire-and-forget trajectory, guided not by the operator but by its own proportional navigational system.

  With the specialized "Hind" attack cassette inserted in the launcher's RMP-re programmable microprocessor-the system automatically switches into "two-color" mode when it is a hundred meters from the infrared source. At this point it abandons the infrared radiations emitted by the engine exhaust suppressors and instead focuses on the much weaker ultraviolet emanations from the engine intakes. On tins target the high-explosive warhead hits to kill.

  "Even a Shangane could learn how to fire one of these," Job said.

  Sean grinned. "Tut-tut, your Matabele tribal racism is showing again.

  It's like this-when you are genetically superior, there is simply no point in trying to conceal the fact."

  They both glanced expectantly at Claudia, but she did not even look up from the manual as she drawled, "You're wasting your time, you two bigots. You aren't going to get a rise out of me this time."

  "Bigot." Job savored the word. "It's the first time anybody has ever called me that. I love it."

  "That's enough fooling around." Sean broke it up. "Let's take a look at the trainer."

  After they had connected one of the freshly charged battery packs and assembled the trainer equipment, Sean gave his opinion: "With this stuff, we can have the lads ready to go into action within days, not weeks."

  Once a microcassette was inserted into the training monitor, the launcher screen simulated the image of a Hind, which the instructor was able to manipulate in various flight patterns, climbing, descending, sideslipping, or hovering. While he did so, he was able to watch the trainee's reactions as he attempted to acquire the ghost ship on his own screen and attack it with a phantom missile.

  Sean and Job played with the trainer like a pair of teenagers, flying the image in complicated maneuvers. "It's just like a PacMan game," Job enthused. "But what we need is a durn-durn, a pseudo-Shangane to act as a trainee for us."

  Once again both the men looked at Claudia, who was still sitting cross-legged on the table, studying the manual.

  She looked up as she felt their eyes on her. "A durn-durn?" she demanded. "I'll show you durn-durn. Give me the launcher."

  She stood in the center of the amphitheater floor with the launcher balanced on her shoulder and stared into the sighting screw. The bulky equipment seemed to dwarf her. She had reversed her camouflage cap so the peak stuck out behind her head, and it gave her the ga mine air of a Little League baseball player.

  "ReadyT" Sean asked.

  "Pull!" she said, concentrating ferociously on the screen. Sean and Job exchanged smug supercilious i grins.

  "Incoming!" Sean called sharply. "Twelve o'clock high. Lock and load." He brought the ghost Hind in on a head-on attack at 150 knots.

  "Locked and loaded," Claudia affirmed, and in their screen they watched the duplicate sight ring of her missile launcher swing up smoothly and center on the approaching Hind.

  "Actuator on," she said calmly, and a second later, they heard the launcher sob and growl in her grip, then settle into a steady insect whine, like an infuriated mosquito.

  "Target acquired," Claudia murmured. The Hind was six hundred meters out but coming in fast, swelling dramatically in the sights.

  "Fire!" she said. They saw the red light blink and then change to green, signaling that the rocket engine of the fictitious missile was running. Almost instantaneously the image of the Hind disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the flashing legend: TARGET

  DESTROYED! TARGET I)ESTROYM!

  A profound silence followed. Job cleared his throat nervously.

  "Flukes happen," said Sean. "Shall we try it again?"

  "Pull!" said Claudia, and concentrated on her aiming Screen' Incoming Sean called. "Six o'clock high. Lock and load." He brought the next Hind in from behind her at treetop level, attack speed. She had three seconds to react.

  "Locked and loaded." Claudia pirouetted like a ballerina and picked up the Hind in the sight ring. "Actuator on." As she said it, Sean flung the Hind into a climbing sideslip, giving her deflection in three planes. it wQAd be like trying to hit a high bird in a gale of crosswind.

  in their screen the watched with disbelief as Claudia swung smoothly, keeping the image in the exact center of her aiming ring and the missile sobbed and then settled into its high-pitched tone.

  "Target acquired. Fire!"

  TARGET DEsTROy mi TARGET DEsTRoYED! The screen blinked at them, and they fidgeted uncomfortably.