by Wilbur Smith
They reached the dense copse of trees that was their attack position and crept in among them. Claudia helped Job set up the Stinger ready for firing, then found herself a comfortable perch at the base of one of the trees to wait out the night.
Job left her there with just the Shangane number two loader for company and disappeared into the darkness like a hunting leopard. She was unhappy to see him go, but not long ago she would have been panic-stricken. She realized how much self-reliance and to learn in these last few weeks.
fortitude she had been forced "Papa will be proud of me," she smiled to herself, using the future tense as though her father still existed. "Of course he does," she assured herself. "He's still out there somewhere, looking out for me. How else would I have made it this far9l" His memory was a comfort, and as she thought about him he became confused in her mind with Sean, so that they seemed to merge into a single entity as though her father had somehow achieved a new existence in her lover. It was a good feeling that alleviated her loneliness, until suddenly Job returned as silently and abruptly as he had left.
"All the other sections are in position," he whispered, settling down beside her. "But it's going to be a long night. Try and get some sleep."
"I'll never be able to sleep," she answered, keeping her voice so low he had to lean close to her to catch the words. "Tell me about Sean Courtney. I want to know everything you know about him."
has' Sometimes he's a hero, and sometimes he's a complete tard." Job thought about it. "But most of the time he's something in between."
"Then why have you stayed with him so lone."
"He's my friend," Job answered simply. Then, slowly and haltingly, he began to tell her about Sean, and they talked the night away.
Claudia listened avidly, encouraging him with quiet questions.
"He was married, wasn't he, Job?"
"Why did he leave his home?
I have heard that his family is enormously wealthy. Why did he choose this life?"
So the night passed, and in those hours they became friends. He was the first true friend she had found in Africa, and in the end he autiful deep African voice, "I shall miss him said to her in that be I can tell."
more than the two of you are parting, and that isn't
"You speak as thoMgh so. It will be the same."
"No," Job denied. "It will never be the same. He will go with you now. Our time together has ended. Yours is begkming."
"Don't hate me for it, Job." She reached out to touch his arm in appeal. good together," he said. "I think your journey
"You two will be with him win be as good as mine has been. My thoughts will go with you, and I wish you both great joy in each other."
"Thank you, Job," she whispered. "You will always our friend."
Job lifted his arm and with fingers spread held his open hand against the dawn.
"The time of the horns," he murmured softly. "Soon now." And as he said it, a flower of bright crimson fire burst open in the sky above the hill.
As the signal flare burst in the dawn sky, the battle was born. Sean always thought of it as the birth of a living thing, a monster that he could only try to direct but that had a life and a will of its own, a terrible thing that swept them all up and carried them along willy-nilly.
He had placed the RPG-7 rocket launchers in the hands of his two best remaining gunners, but the expert marksmen had all gone to man the Stingers. The first rocket flew low, striking the earth twenty feet in front of the nearest fuel tanker; it burst in a vivid yellow flash, and Sean saw one of the Frefirno sentries cartwheel into the air. The second rocket was high, missing the tanker by six feet, reaching the top of its trajectory five hundred yards out, then dropping into the forest beyond, its detonation screened by trees and scrub.
"Aim, you Shangane oxen!" Sean bellowed at them. He was up and running as he realized his mistake in not taking the first, crucial shot himself.
The Frelimo sentries were screaming and scattering around the fuel tankers, and from the perimeter of the laager a 12.7-men cannon opened up, sluicing gaudy strings of fiery tracer across the sky.
The rocketeer war fumbling to reload the RPG-7, but he was panicky and unsure in the dark. Sean snatched the launcher off his shoulder and with two deft movements removed the protecting nose cap of the missile and cleared the safety pin. He swung the launcher over his shoulder and dropped on one knee, aiming at the nearest tanker.
"All the time in the world," he reminded himself, and waited for the puff of the morning breeze on his cheek to abate. The RPG-7 was wildly inaccurate in a crosswind, for the push of the wind on its tail fins would turn its nose into the wind.
The breeze dropped, and Sean centered the sights on the fuel tanker. The range was just on three hundred meters, the limit of the rocket's accuracy, and he fired. The missile sped true, and the side of the tanker erupted in a tall sheet of volatile avgas. The sky filled with flames.
Sean snarled at the rocketeer beside him, and the man fumbled another missile out of his pack, the cardboard propellant tube already attached to it.
Burning avgas illuminated the southern slope of the hill like noonday. Sean was kneeling in the open, and the gunner on the 12.7-men swung his aim onto him.
The earth around Sean dissolved into billowing clouds of dust and flying clods, and the rocketeer ducked.
"Come on, you yellow bastard!" Sean completed the loading sequence unaided, making no effort to avoid the aim of the 12.7men gunner.
He lifted the launcher onto his shoulder and aimed at the second fuel tanker. It was fit up by the flames as though it were a stage effect, but as he was on the point of firing, the tanker was obscured by a dancing curtain of yellow dust and the volley of cannon fire passed so close to Sean's head that his eardrums creaked and popped as though he were in a decompression chamber.
He held his fire for three seconds. Then as the curtains of dust blew open, he fired through them. The second tanker burst, blown clear of the railway lines by the explosion of its lethal cargo.
Burning avgas flowed down the slope like the lava of a miniature Vesuvius, and Sean threw the launcher at the rocketeer's chest.
"Hit them on the head with the bloody thing!" he yelled at him.
"That's the only damage you are going to do with it!"
The mortar men were doing better. Sean had sighted their weapons for them, and they bobbed and weaved over the short mortar tubes as they dropped the finned projectiles into the open mouths.
A steady stream of bombs lobbed high into the dawn sky and rained down into the hilltop laager.
Sean watched the effect of the bursts with a dispassionate, professional eye. "Good," he murmured. "Good." But they had only been capable of carrying thirty bombs for each of the mortars; they he'd almost two kilos each, and they would be expended in a weig few short minutes. They must rush the perimeter while the exploding bombs distracted the Frelimo gunners. He hefted the AKM rifle and slipped the safety catch.
"Go!" Sean yelled, and blew a short series of blasts on his whistle, "Go!"
The Shanganes came to their feet in a single cohesive movement and swept down the hill, but there were only twenty of them, a puny line of running men brightly lit by the flames. The 12.7-men gunners on the hill fastened on them, and tracer flew in clouds about them, thick as a locust plague.
"Shit!" Sean laughed aloud in terror. "What a way to gal 99 One of the Frelimo gunners had picked Sean out of the sweep line and was concentrating his fire on him, but Sean was M
downhill with long, flying strides and the gunner was s;11;9 1; and a little behind. Shot flashed past Sean so close he could feel the wind of it tugging at his tunic. Impossibly, he lengthened his stride, and beside him Matatu giggled shrilly, keeping pace with him down the hill.
"What's so goddamned funny, you silly little bugger?" Sean yelled at him furiously, and they hit the level ground beside the burning fuel tankers. The Frehmo gunner's field of fire was blanketed by the rolling screen of b
lack smoke, and in the respite Sean marshaled his sweep line of racing Shanganes, pivoting them on the center and directing them at the perimeter of the laager, pump to urge them on. They used the smoke ing his right fist overhead to cover themselves for the next two hundred meters of their charge. The dawn breeze was spreading it, sooty black, dense, and low along the ground.
A Frefimo sentry staggered out of the smoke ahead of Sean. He ubby tennis shoes, he had wore faded, tattered denim jeans and gr lost his weapon, and a rocket splinter must have hit him in the eye.
The eye was dislodged from its socket and hung out on his cheek like a huge wet grape, dangling and bouncing on the thick cord of the optic nerve as the man jerked his head.
Without breaking his stride, Sean hit him in the belly with a tap of three from the AKM, firing from the hip. He jumped over the body as it hit the ground.
They came out of the smoke, still in sweep line. Sean glanced along the line and reaW incredulously that they had not yet taken a single casualty; the twenty Shanganes were spread out and going hard, offering 5my fleeting targets through the smoke and flame to the disoriented Frelimo machine guns.
At that moment he saw the single strand of wire and the line of round metal discs on short steel droppers only a dozen paces ahead of him. Each disc was emblazoned with a stylized skull and crossbones in scarlet that caught the ruddy glow of the flames, and almost before he realized it they were into the mine field that guarded the perimeter of the laager.
Two seconds later, the Shangane running on Sean's right-hand side triggered an antipersonnel mine. From the waist down his body was obscured by the dust and flash of the explosion and he dropped to the earth with both of his legs blown to bloody stumps below the knees.
"Keep going!" Sean screamed. "We are nearly through!" Now his fear was a grotesque black beast upon his back that weighed him down and choked his breathing. To be maimed was a terror far beyond that of death, and the ground beneath his feet was sown with the steel capsules of terrible mutilation.
Matatu ducked in front of Sean, forcing him to check his stride.
"Follow me, my Bwana!" he piped in Swahili. "Tread where I have trodden." And Sean obeyed, shortening his stride to that of the little manikin.
So Matatu ran him through the last fifty paces of the mine field, and Sean knew he had never witnessed such a display of raw courage and devotion of one human being to another. Two more Shanganes went down before they were through, their legs blown away beneath them. They left them lying in puddles of their own blood and minced flesh and jumped over the single strand of wire that marked the far side of the mine field.
Even in the terror and exhilaration of the moment, Sean felt his eyelids scalding with the strength of his gratitude and love for the little Ndorobo. He wanted to pick him up like a child's toy and hug him. Instead he gasped at him, "You're so damned skinny it wouldn't have gone off even if you had stepped on one." Matatu twinkled with delight and ran at Sean's side as he charged the 12.7-men machine gun in the sandbagged emplacement that lay dead ahead of them.
Sean was firing the AKM from the hip, short, raking bursts, and he could see the head of the Frefirno gunner in the embrasure of the parapet of sandbags.
The gunner swiveled the barrel of the heavy machine gun onto him, aiming for his belly. He was so close Sean could see his eyes reflecting the red light of the fires as he sighted over it. The instant before he fired, Sean hurled himself forward, dropping under the shot like a runner sliding for the base plate; bullets whipped over his head and the muzzle blast beat in his eardrums, but he rolled forward and came up hard against the parapet, flattening himself against it, so close that he could have reached out and touched the muzzle of the machine gun.
Sean unhooked the fragmentation grenade from his belt, drew the pin, and popped it into the embrasure beside him as though he were posting a letter.
He smiled ashe heard the Frelimo gunner scream something unintelligible in Portuguese.
"Happy birthday!" he said, and the grenade exploded, blowing out through the opening in an exhalation of flame and fumes.
Sean jumped up and rolled over the top of the parapet. There were two men in the emplacement, writhing and wriggling on the floor, and half a dozen others had abandoned the position and were sprinting away up the hill, unarmed and screaming with panic.
Sean left Matatu to finish off the two wounded men on the floor with his skinning knife, while he seized the abandoned 12.7-men machine gun and manhandled it to the rear wall of the emplacement. He aimed it up the hill at the fleeing Frelimo and fired a long, traversing burst. Two of the runners dropped in their tracks. Grinning happily, crooning to himself with the fun of it, Matatu dragged a steel box of spare ammunition belts across the bloody floor and helped Sean reload.
With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean made a sweep with the heavy machine gun. His fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of running Frelimo and scatter them
Ing It seemed to Sean as though more than half the Shanganes had survived the mine field and the bloody charge and assault. Roaring wildly with triumph, they were pursuing and harrying the routed defenders.
The barrel of the heavy machine gun was so hot it crackled like a horseshoe fresh from the blacksmith's forge.
"Come on!" Sean abandoned it and jumped onto the rear parapet, ready to follow his Shanganes deeper into the laager and to begin wrecking the Russian service installations.
As he stood poised on the parapet, backlit by the burning fuel tankers, a monstrous apparition appeared in the dawn sky ahead of him. Rising on its glittering rotor, turbos shrieking, a Hind gunship lifted out of its,-4nd bagged emplacement not two hundred meters from where Sein stood. It looked like some prehistoric behemoth. SupernAral and otherworldly it rotated ponderously until the mirrored eyes of the canopy si@5 at Sean and the multiple cannon barrel in the turret below its nose pointed at him like an accuser's finger.
Sean reached down, seized Matatu by the scruff of his neck, hurled him to the floor of the emplacement, then threw himself full length on top of him, knocking the breath out of the little man, just as a gale of cannon fire dissolved the parapet wall and turned it to clouds of driving dust and gravel.
The suddenness of it all was what shocked Claudia most. One moment there was the stillness and tranquil darkness of dawn and the next the glare and cacophony of battle, the sky lit by the brilliance of leaping flame and glittering floods of tracers, her ears pounded by bursting mortars, shells and grenades and the blasts of machine gun fire.
it took long moments to adjust her eyes to the intensity of light orient herself to the swift kaleidoscope of the battle. Job and to had pointed out to her the point on the perimeter of the laager through which Sean would lead the assault, and she searched it anxiously. The tiny figures of running men on the exposed slope of the hill were lit by the flames of burning avgas, which cast dark spiderlike shadows that scampered ahead of each man. There were so many of them, little black ants scurrying about, and with a jolt of them fall and lie very still in the of horror she watched some sound.
confusion of movement and light and 4: "Where is Sean?" she whispered anxiously. "Can you see him?"
411N the left, at the edge of the smoke," Job told her, and she an ahead of him like a picked him out by the tiny figure that r hunting dog.
"I see him and Matatu."
Just in front of the pair the earth seemed suddenly to bloom with dust and flame, and they were gone.
"Oh, God. No!" she cried aloud, but as the dust blew aside on the morning breeze she saw the two of them running On, tracer bullets flickering about them like hellish fireflies.