Vortex

by Larry Bond

  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.

  A tight-lipped Peter Klocek worked his way up the narrow trench to within whispering distance.

  “We’re set, Rob.”

  O’Connell nodded. He knew Klocek thought he was crazy to lead this attack himself, but he’d grown tired of sending other men into danger. For too long on this op, he’d been forced to lead like the faith-filled New

  Testament Roman centurion, saying to one man, “Go,” and to another,

  “Come.” Well, no more.

  This suicidal bunker hunt was make or break for Brave Fortune. And that meant his battalion had a right to expect to see him out in front, yelling the infantry-school motto, “Follow me!”

  Enough pissing around, he told himself. Every second counted. He took a deep breath and then let it out in a bull voiced roar.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Rifles and machine guns chattered all along the length of the

  American-held trench, pouring bullets toward the distant, half-seen shape of the South African bunker. M16-mounted M203 grenade launchers thumped once, twice, and then a third time-lobbing 40mm grenades onto the open area right in front of the bunker.

  Bright orange flashes stabbed out of the rising smoke. The South Africans were shooting back, trying to lay down a curtain of steel-jacketed slugs across ground they could no longer see.

  O’Connell’s hands closed tight around his M16. “Let’s go! “

  Two of the six Rangers in his assault group stooped and locked their hands together to form a makeshift stirrup. Without hesitating, O’Connell stepped forward and up into their interlocked hands and immediately felt himself being tossed upward-literally being hurled out of the trench. He landed in the grassy field outside, rolled over, and scrambled to his feet already running. Rifle in hand, he moved north, angling away from the heavy machinegun fire now pouring out of the South African-held bunker. Four Rangers hurtled up and out of the trench after him.

  All five men sprinted forward, dispersing on the move spreading out in the hope that a single enemy burst wouldn’t hit them all. This gauntlet could only be run alone.

  Burning buildings and vehicles added an eerie orange glow to the black night sky and sent strange shadows wavering ahead of them across the corpse-strewn, half-fit ground. 0”Con nell kept going, speeding past crumpled bodies, scattered gear, and torn, bullet-riddled parachutes. In an odd way, he felt almost superhuman, with every sense and every nerve ending magnified and set afire. He squinted through sweat toward the smoke-shrouded enemy bunker. Two hundred meters to go.

  Movement flickered at the edge of his vision, far off to the right.

  Sergeant Johnson and his five Rangers were there, making their own headlong dash for the bunker. He lengthened his own stride.

  One hundred and fifty meters. One hundred. O’Connell felt his pulse accelerating, racing in time with his pounding feet. My God, he thought exultantly, we might really pull this crazy stunt off after all!

  Suddenly, the ground seemed to explode out from under him. Dirt sprayed high in the air as a machinegun burst hammered the area. One slug moving at supersonic speeds

  tore the M 16 right out of his hands and sent it whirling away into the darkness. Another bullet ripped through a fold of cloth over his right shoulder, leaving behind a raw, bleeding line of torn skin.

  O’Connell threw himself prone, scarcely able to believe that he’d escaped without more serious injury.

  Agonized screams rising above the crashing, crackling sounds of gunfire and grenade explosions told him that the rest of his men weren’t being so lucky. He swiveled to look to the rear.

  The four Rangers who’d been following him had vanished-cloaked behind a curtain of smoke and dust. As it settled, another burst of South African machinegun fire stitched across the open ground-sweeping back and forth across the bodies of men who’d already been hit several times. No one moved or cried out in pain.

  He was alone.

  O’Connell clenched his teeth and tried to bury himself in the earth as more rounds whip cracked low overhead. Pebbles, sand, and torn bits of grass pattered off his helmet and neck. He lay motionless as the machinegun fire traversed right. The South Africans, firing blind, had gone back to working over corpses heaped in front of the American-held slit trench.

  He started crawling toward his rifle, careful to stay flat on his stomach. It took him nearly half a minute to reach it.

  Hell and damnation. O’Connell stared at the useless lump of plastic and metal lying on the grass before him. The same bullet that had torn the

  M 16 out of his grasp had smashed its firing mechanism. He fumbled for the pouch clipped to his combat webbing and relaxed momentarily as his fingers encountered the small plastic V-shape of his only real remaining weapon. He still carried a couple of grenades, a knife, and a holstered 9mm Beretta, but they wouldn’t be much use against a concrete-walled bunker. No, clearing that out was going to take something considerably more powerful.

  He snapped the pouch flap shut and started crawling forward again, worming his way toward the enemy machinegun position.

  It seemed to take forever to cross the roughly one hundred meters still separating him from the South African bunker. Long periods of lying frozen as bullets slapped through the air right over his helmet were interspersed with frantic flurries of motion as he wriggled closer. By the time O’Connell got within five meters of the bunker’s north side, his battle dress was soaked in sweat and coated with groundin dirt and loose blades of sun-dried grass.

  He lay panting quietly for a moment, studying what little he could see of his target. The Rangers left behind to provide covering fire had long since stopped shooting-afraid that they might hit any of their own men who’d survived that last death-or-glory charge. Several of the Americans were still lobbing smoke grenades, though. A thick pall of gray-white smoke hung over the immediate area, blinding the South African machinegun crew and their lookouts.

  The bunker itself was
a squat, square slab sticking less than three feet above ground level. Its reinforced concrete walls and roof offered complete protection against small-arms fire. In fact, they were designed to withstand all but a direct hit by heavy mortar or artillery shells.

  Narrow slits cut through each of the four walls gave the troops inside close to a 360degree field of observation and fire.

  The South African machine gun chattered again, pouring a steady stream of bullets out the firing slit facing west. O’Connell nerved himself to move. It was time.

  He eased the pistol out of his holster and thumbed its safety catch off.

  Slowly, almost infinitely slowly, he raised his head to get a better view of the northern firing slit. There wasn’t anything there. Just an empty black gap in the gray concrete wall. No R4 assault rifles aimed at his face. The South Africans inside were busy shooting in the wrong direction.

  Go! O’Connell jumped to his feet, lunged forward, and scrambled onto the bunker’s flat roof. Nobody took a shot at him. Seconds passed

  while he waited for some kind of reaction from inside the enemy gun position. Nothing happened.

  By God, he’d actually done it! Now any enemy soldier who wanted to clear him off the bunker would have to come out in the open to try it. And the odds were that the South Africans didn’t even know he was up there.

  He laid his 9mm pistol to one side and started making his final preparations. One hand scrabbled inside the pouch hooked to his combat webbing while the other reached inside his shirt pocket for the wires and detonator he’d stowed there. He ignored the two fragmentation grenades he still carried. The bunker was bound to have a grenade sump-a small, sandbagged hole designed to smother a blast and deflect fragments-somewhere inside. If he simply tossed a grenade in through the firing slit, all the South African soldiers had to do was kick the grenade into the sump and duck. Sure, one or two of them might be wounded, but they’d know they had trouble on their roof.

  O’Connell smiled grimly. He had something more assuredly fatal in mind for the enemy machinegun crew.

  He pulled the small, curved Claymore out of his pouch and unscrewed the shipping plug from the fuse well. Inserting a blasting cap in the recess, he connected it to the leads from an electrical detonator. His hands relaxed. All set.

  The machine gun rattled again, firing out of the bunker beneath him.

  Defiant yells in Afrikaans echoed above the gunfire. Bastards. One .. two … three … O’Connell leaned out over the edge of the bunker, jammed the Claymore into its northern firing slit, and rolled away back onto the roof. Now!

  He pressed his face into the cool concrete and squeezed the detonator.

  Whammm! The Claymore exploded with an ear-shattering roar. Driven by a powerful charge of C4 plastic explosive, hundreds of tiny steel ball bearings sleeted through the narrow opening-killing everyone in their path as they ricocheted and rebounded off solid walls. No one inside the bunker even got the chance to scream.

  As O’Connell sat upright, still stunned by the force of the blast he’d unleashed, wispy coils of acrid, yellow smoke and the awful smell of burnt flesh eddied out through the bunker’s firing slits. The last outpost guarding Pelindaba’s Nuclear Weapons Storage Site had fallen.

  COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES

  Col. Frans Peiper stared helplessly at the map showing his battalion’s few surviving fighting positions. Bunker after bunker and barracks after barracks had been hurriedly crossed out as they were reported overrun or destroyed. Although events were unfolding too fast for him to keep pace, one thing was increasingly clear: the 61st Transvaal Rifles was being gutted.

  Peiper breathed out heavily through his gas mask and swore as his clear plastic eyepieces fogged over for the tenth time. These damned chemical-protection suits made even the simplest actions difficult! He grabbed at a grease pencil near the map and cursed again as it slipped between his thickly gloved fingers. A young lieutenant standing at his side handed the pencil back.

  For an instant longer the colonel stood still, his eyes fixed on the map.

  Now what? Well, for a start, he had to take charge. He had to find a way to reorganize the broken fragments of his battalion into some semblance of a fighting force. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to go about doing that. Enemy units now occupied key positions all across the compound. The situation seemed hopeless.

  “Sir, Captain Karel’s asking for instructions. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him to wait, goddammit!” Peiper looked up, angry at what sounded very much like a reproach. The sergeant manning the command bunker’s communications setup stared back at him without flinching.

  Damn the man. His insubordination would have to be dealt with later.

  Assuming, of course, there was going to be a later.

  Peiper wiped the steam off his gas mask eyepieces and

  scrawled a rough circle around the single bunker and stretch of trench apparently still held by Capt. Anton Karel and the remnants of A Company.

  Karel’s troops covered the northwestern end of the compound, well away from either the main road or the nuclear weapons storage area. Too far away in fact to do any good.

  Peiper threw his pencil down and moved to the bank of field telephones.

  “Let me talk to him!”

  The sergeant gave him the handset.

  “Karel? This is Peiper.” The colonel frowned. Blast it, he could scarcely hear or talk inside this wretched suit.

  “Listen carefully. I want you to counterattack-“

  A yell from one of the soldiers manning the bunker’s southern firing slit interrupted him.

  “Movement along the access road, Colonel! Trucks! Ten or twelve of them!”

  Peiper threw the phone down and joined a general rush over to the narrow opening. He squinted toward the access road linking Pelindaba’s military and civilian sectors. Dim shapes rumbled slowly along the road, silhouetted against a row of burning buildings. He recognized the distinctive outlines of canvas-sided Samil trucks made only in South

  Africa. Were these reinforcements from Voortrekker Heights? They must be.

  With trembling fingers, he raised his binoculars and focused them carefully. The trucks and the men riding on them leapt into closer view.

  That was odd. Their helmets were strangely shaped-almost exactly like the old-style coal-scut tie helmets worn by the German Wehrmacht during World

  War II.

  Despite the sauna-bath heat of the chemical protection suit he wore,

  Peiper felt a cold shiver run down his spine. The soldiers aboard those trucks were the enemy-not a friendly relief force. Even worse, they were driving straight toward the special weapons bunkers.

  The Fates were not kind to Col. Frans Peiper. He had just enough time to savor his utter and absolute failure before an American recoilless rifle round burst against the edge of the firing slit-just twenty centimeters in front of his horrified face.

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

  Prof. Esher Levi surveyed the frantic activity around the five weapons storage bunkers with increasing satisfaction. After what had seemed a most unpromising and bloody start, the Americans were finally getting Brave

  Fortune back on track. Pelindaba’s uranium enrichment plant had been wrecked. His fellow countrymen had been rescued. Even more important, survivors from O’Connell’s headquarters and the other Ranger units were busy loading several of the South African trucks they’d hot-wired and “liberated” from the Pelindaba vehicle park. Sleek, metallic cylinders, each carried by ten men, were carefully being hoisted up and into their rear cargo compartments.

  “We’ve got that last bunker open, Professor. The colonel’s waiting for you there.”

  Levi turned. Smoke and sweat had stained Maj. Peter Klocek’s lean, tanned face.

  “The weapons are there?”

  Klocek nodded wearily.

  “Yeah. The last two. But the colo
nel’d like you to make sure of that.”

  “Of course.”

  Levi hobbled after the much younger American officer through a maze of hurrying soldiers. The entrance to the last storage bunker lay down a set of steps. A thick door sagged to one side-blown off its hinges by small charges of plastic explosive.

  The two men ducked down and into the bunker. Several unbroken, battery-powered emergency lights illuminated a single chamber measuring roughly twenty feet by fifty feet. Steel racks lined each concrete wall.

  Four metal half cylinders-twin halves of two twenty-kiloton fission bombs-rested in separate sections of the racks, kept physically apart to preclude what technicians referred to as “premature weapon criticality.”

  Levi smiled to himself, remembering his first appalled reaction to the techno babble term used to describe what might, in the worst case, be an uncontrolled chain reactiona runaway nightmare of hellish temperatures and deadly neutron radiation.

  He moved to where O’Connell stood examining one of the four bomb halves.

  The American lieutenant colonel looked just about out on his feet-bruised, bedraggled, and bloodstained. The Israeli scientist suddenly felt a wave of admiration for this brave man. It was an uncomfortable feeling, especially since the orders he’d received from his own government would soon force him to lie to the Ranger officer. Though not about these bombs themselves, thank God.

  “Have we got them all, Professor?” O’Connell sounded as tired as he looked.

  Levi nodded.

  “These two weapons make a total of nine. Every fission bomb the Afrikaners had left.” He leaned past the American officer and examined a printed manifest taped to the rear half of one weapon.

  “It would appear that your attack came just in time.”

  “Oh?”

  Levi pointed to the manifest.

  “Those codes indicate that this weapon has been thoroughly checked, certified ready for detonation, and prepped for movement within the next twenty-four hours.”