Vortex

by Larry Bond

  “Keep your heads down, Three. Let them pass.”

  “Roger your last, Rover One. They’re rolling by now. Out. “

  Bekker felt himself start to sweat. The next few minutes were critical.

  He was gambling that Kruger’s recce units wouldn’t spot his carefully prepared ambush. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have risked it. An alert scout commander would be too likely to send a team up the hill for a look-see.

  But Kruger’s men had been on the run for more than two weeks now-traveling for hours on end each day through empty deserts and desolate mountains. And Rolf Bekker was willing to bet that they’d lost some of their edge.

  COMMAND RATEL, 20TH CAPE RIFLES, NORTH OF SKERPIONENPUNT

  Even with the hatches closed and the air-conditioning going full blast, the Ratel’s crowded interior was still almost unbearably hot. Ian

  Sheffield sat across a narrow fold-down map board watching Commandant

  Henrik Kruger methodically charting their course. The South African’s calm, cool

  appearance made Ian even more conscious of the sweat stains under his own arms and across his back.

  The Ratel bucked suddenly, and he grabbed a strap with one hand, hanging on tightly as the APC lurched over a bump in the rock-strewn track the

  South Africans called a secondary road. The sight of Kruger’s grease pencil skittering randomly across the plastic map overlay made him feel a little better. Even Emily van der Heijden’s old fiancd could lose his grip from time to time.

  Ian’s eyes roved around the crowded Ratel. Emily and Matthew Siberia sat wedged in one corner, next to wall clips holding assault rifles and mesh bags full of canteens and spare rations. He met her eyes and nodded ruefully toward the table. She just smiled slightly and shrugged as though to indicate her exclusion didn’t really matter.

  But he knew it did matter-especially to her. By rights, he thought, Emily should be up here with them talking over their next move. But it had become clear that Kruger felt uncomfortable when she tried to take an active part in their conferences.

  His gaze moved on around the Ratel, studying his fellow passengers. Three young staff officers occupied the folding seats on their commander’s side of the vehicle. One stood beside a machine gunner in the turret, holding a radio headset pressed to one ear-monitoring reports from the scouts probing ahead of the column. All of them looked tired. Sunlight streamed in through eight small firing ports-four on each side.

  Kruger finished his work and sat back. He raised his voice to be heard over the APC’s powerful engine.

  “We’re making good time today. ” He tapped a spot on the map.

  “We should be across the Oranje by noon.”

  Ian nodded.

  “What then?”

  “Depending on what’s up ahead, we push on to Kenhardt and Brandvlei.

  After that?” Kruger shrugged.

  “That we must talk about, Ian. “

  The South African put his pencil on the tiny town labeled Brandvlei. Ian mentally measured the distance from there to

  Cape Town-less than five hundred kilometers. Maybe a two day drive at their present speed.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Your country has aircraft based at Cape Town, true?”

  Ian nodded. They’d caught bits and pieces of Voice of America news broadcasts en route. Enough to follow major developments in the war. Both the U.S. and Great Britain were still staging troops and air units through the Cape Town area.

  Then he realized what was worrying Kruger. What would any red-blooded

  U.S. pilot do if he spotted a battalion-sized column of trucks and APCs rolling south toward the city? He’d strafe or bomb the hell out of it, that’s what. Ian looked up.

  “Are you saying we run a risk of becoming jet bait?”

  “Jet bait?” Kruger hesitated briefly, obviously puzzled. Then his face cleared up as he mentally translated the slang phrase.

  “Yes, exactly. We cannot move beyond Brandvlei until we’ve made firm contact with either your nation’s forces or those of the provisional government.

  “Well, what’s so hard about-“

  The lieutenant manning their radio interrupted.

  “Excuse me, sir, but the recce troop reports they have the Oranje in sight! No enemy contacts.”

  REACTION FORCE

  Maj. Rolf Bekker held his breath as the long column of canvas-sided trucks and wheeled APCs drove straight down the road into his killing zone. De

  Vries’s manpack radio lay beside him, with its whip antenna poking above the foxhole’s camouflage awning.

  Bekker keyed the mike.

  “All units, this is Rover Foxtrot One. Stand by.

  Hold fire. Wait for my order.”

  The lead Ratel rolled past a cracked and weathered boulder in line with

  Bekker’s foxhole. Fifty or so vehicles were strung out behind it at twenty-meter intervals. They were in range.

  “Now! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Two explosions rocked the desert floor-both within meters of the road. Hit by shrapnel, a five-ton truck slewed out of control, slammed into a boulder, and rolled over. Dazed survivors staggered out of the wreck and toppled over, hit repeatedly by rifle and machinegun fire.

  Near the tail end of the column, a Buffel APC blew up in a spectacular rolling ball of flame, hit broadside by a single Carl Gustav round. Human torches, men on fire, threw themselves screaming over the sides and then crumpled as the paratroopers put them out of their misery.

  Bekker’s men had spent most of the preceding day zeroing in their weapons. Now their hard work was paying off.

  “Papa Charlie One, this is

  Rover One. On target! Fire for effect!”

  In seconds, eight more mortar bombs burst near the road -spraying fragments up and down the line of trucks and personnel carriers. Several vehicles were on fire, some while still moving. Other lay canted at odd angles, their drivers dead or disabled.

  Bekker showed his teeth in a quick, wolfish smile. Kruger’s traitorous battalion was being cut to pieces by his textbook perfect ambush.

  COMMAND RATEL

  A nearby explosion rocked the Ratel, sending maps, pencils, and loose gear flying. Fragments rattled off its side armor.

  “Christ!” Henrik Kruger staggered forward through the confusion and grabbed the radio headset from the pale, frightened lieutenant. Panicked, garbled voices poured over the airwaves.

  “Taking fire from the hill … Arrie’s hit! My God, I’m hit! .. . Got to get out …. Estimate four, maybe five guns…

  Another shell slammed into the road just ahead of them. Kruger heard his driver swearing as he swerved off onto the shoulder to avoid ramming a truck stopped dead and on fire. As they roared by the blazing vehicle, a single sheet of furnace-hot fl arne washed over the turret and commander’s cupola. Then they were past.

  He swung round in a quick circle, trying to see what was happening to his battalion through his cupola’s narrow vision slits. Burning vehicles and sprawled corpses littered the barren landscape in every direction. They were being massacred.

  Kruger squeezed the transmit button.

  “This is Kruger. Wheel left and pop smoke! Pop smoke!”

  The Ratel slewed over in a hard left turn. As it spun around to face the enemy-held hill, the machine gunner beside him triggered the APC’s four turret-mounted smoke dischargers. They coughed in sequence, firing four smoke grenades out through a fifty-meter-wide arc.

  Other Ratels were doing the same thing, creating an instant smoke screen to hide themselves from the heavy weapons on the hill above them. Sand and dirt sprayed high near the APC’s right flank as another shell ploughed into the ground.

  Kruger grimaced. The smoke gave them a temporary respite from direct fire, but those damned mortars didn’t need to see their targets to hit them. They only had to pour bombs onto preregistered firing points to be sure of killing something.

  Conscious of precious seconds sli
pping by, he scanned the terrain behind them. Nothing. No cover at all. Just flat, bare rock, packed dirt, and tufts of dead grass. They’d have to break this ambush the hard way. He clicked his mike again.

  “All units. Attack! Attack immediately! Our objective is the hill!

  “

  As the Ratel bounced forward, accelerating through its own smoke screen, acknowledgments flowed in from his surviving company and platoon leaders.

  The men and vehicles of the 20th Cape Rifles surged ahead, charging uphill toward their enemies.

  REACTION FORCE

  Bekker scowled at the puffs of dense white smoke dotting the ground below the hill. His Carl Gustav teams were having trouble finding targets in all that muck. Another mortar bomb salvo landed-bright flashes rippling through the thickening

  haze of smoke and dust. Directed by forward observers, his gunners were walking their fire back and forth along the road, pounding the enemy’s stalled vehicles and dismounted infantry.

  “Major!” De Vries grabbed his shoulder and pointed downhill. Shapes were emerging from the smoke. Turreted Ratels, open-topped Buffels, and even trucks were advancing on his positions at high speed.

  For a second, Bekker’s confidence slipped. Kruger was doing exactly what he himself would have done under the same circumstances. And he was doing it fast.

  Clang. Hit by a Carl Gustav round, one of the oncoming APCs shuddered once and stopped moving. Flames spewed out of the gigantic hole punched through its thin front armor. Nobody got through its buckled hatches.

  But the recoilless rifle’s backblast hovered over its firing position like a billboard advertising its existence. Bekker caught a last glimpse of the Carl Gustav’s two-man crew hurriedly reloading before two Ratel turrets whined round and fired repeatedly-pumping 20mm cannon shells into the foxhole until it vanished in a spray of sand and dirt.

  More vehicles were hit and burning, but the rest were still coming on-their guns chattering wildly, traversing right and left to lay down a curtain of suppressive fire across the hilltop.

  Bekker dove for the bottom of his hole as a machinegun burst tore through the air all around him. Corporal de Vries wasn’t fast enough. A 12.7mm bullet caught him at the base of the throat and ripped his head off. The radioman’s decapitated corpse fell backward against the lip of the foxhole, still spouting bright-red arterial blood.

  The major grabbed his R4 and snapped its safety off. Damn it. Where were his gunships? The helicopters were his ace in the hole.

  PUMA GUNSHIP LEAD

  Capt. Harry Kersten brought his helicopter up out of the Oranje River basin and then dropped its nose to gain speed for forward flight. Rotors clattering, the Puma surged ahead-closing on the battlefield at eighty knots. He squinted through the haze, looking for targets.

  Pillars of black smoke curled skyward above burning trucks and armored personnel carriers. Others lay tilted over, evidently abandoned. All the signs of a successful and bloody ambush. Then he saw boxy shapes moving up the side of the hill and frowned. The renegade battalion’s vehicles were almost right on top of Bekker’s infantry. Target selection was going to be a bitch.

  Kersten spoke over the intercom.

  “You with me back there, Roef?”

  “Sure, Captain.” His door gunner had to shout over the noise of the slipstream howling in through his open door.

  “Good. Now listen up. We’re going in now-nice and low so you can see who you’re shooting, right? And you only shoot the vehicles, okay?”

  “Understood.”

  “Great.” Kersten half-turned his head to catch a glimpse of the other Puma pacing them just off the desert floor.

  “You copy that, Hennie?”

  His wingman acknowledged.

  Kersten took a quick breath and brought the helicopter around in a gentle, curving arc. They’d cross the battle area at an angle to bring their door-mounted 30mm cannons to bear. He came out of the turn and dropped the

  Puma’s nose again. Airspeed crept up slowly-climbing from eighty knots to one hundred and twenty. The other gunship settled into formation behind him.

  Now they were hurtling straight for the hill, two helicopters flashing past isolated clumps of brush and jagged boulders, one right after the other.

  The battlefield seemed to leap closer in seconds. Distant specks expanded suddenly into individual vehicles. Ratels with their distinctive turrets.

  Open-topped Buffels crammed with white faces staring up at him from under helmets. Land Rovers weaving over the ground at fantastic speed. Even a few trucks, which seemed sadly out of place among the fighting vehicles.

  The Puma’s 30mm gun opened up with a rattling, jackhammer roar.

  Kersten pulled the gunship’s nose up sharply, following the rising terrain. He and his crew were blind for an instant as the Puma clattered through the thick, oily smoke billowing from a burning vehicle, and it shuddered violently-caught in a sudden upsurge of superheated air. Then they were through and on the other side of the hill, howling away at high speed.

  “Two of them! I got two of the bastards!” his door gunner shouted over the intercom, caught up in a wild mix of ecstasy and relief.

  “They fire balled I got them, Captain.”

  “Great, Roef. ” Kersten yanked the Puma around in a tight, spiraling turn. ” Look sharp now. We’re going in again.”

  The two South African gunships flew south and west in an arc that would bring them back over the hilltop battlefield.

  RATEL ONE SIX

  LCpI. Mike Villiers ducked as a mortar round exploded several dozen meters behind his APC. Spent fragments and pieces of dirt pattered down over its deck armor and off his helmet. He raised his head and gripped his ring-mounted light machine gun even tighter. Christ. He hated riding facing backward like this, and he hated standing in an open hatch with half his body exposed outside the Ratel’s armor. Still, somebody had to do it. Kruger’s decimated battalion needed whatever antiaircraft defenses it could muster.

  The three burning vehicles to his left were proof of that. They’d been shredded from end to end by 30mm cannon shells-gutted like fish.

  Smoldering corpses hung half in and half out of hatches. Villiers had no desire to end up dead like those poor sods, so he watched the sky with renewed intensity.

  A fastmoving blur near the horizon caught his eye.

  “Here they come!

  Three o’clock low!”

  He squeezed the trigger convulsively, feeling the machine gun kick back against his upper arm and watching his glowing tracers reaching out for the incoming blur. Other tracer streams were rising from nearby Ratels, all aimed at the lead helicopter flying barely a hundred feet off the ground.

  Trying to hit a target moving at more than one hundred miles an hour while riding a bucking, lurching platform moving at nearly twenty miles an hour itself would ordinarily seem an almost impossible task. Even a machine gun’s ability to fire hundreds of rounds per minute merely lowers the odds against success from the astronomical to the wildly improbable. But sometimes you get lucky.

  LCpI. Mike Villiers got lucky.

  PUMA GUNSHIP LEAD

  Four 7.62mm rounds hit the Puma. Three simply tore inconsequential holes in its fuselage and hurtled onward, tumbling through empty air. The fourth did catastrophic damage.

  It ripped into the Puma’s starboard engine at an angle that took it straight through a fuel line and into the turbine blades. One blade shattered instantly-spewing white-hot fragments in every direction. The turbine engine seized up, died, and then erupted in flame.

  Capt. Harry Kersten barely had time to notice the glowing red fire-warning light before his helicopter lost power, dipped too low, and slammed nose first into the hill. The Puma flipped end over end twice and then exploded-spraying burning fuel and sharp-edged fragments over hundreds of meters.

  The second gunship veered wildly away from the rising fireball and vanished over the hill. It reappeared moments later, flying southeast-away f
rom the battle. With Kersten dead and their potential targets already in among the defending strong points the second Puma’s crew saw little reason to stay and fight.

  Maj. Rolf Bekker had just lost his ace in the hole.

  REACTION FORCE

  The 44th Parachute Brigade’s paratroopers were dying hard. They were taking their enemies with them, but they were dying. Rifles and machine guns were no match for armored personnel carriers mounting 20mm cannon and coaxial machine guns. A well-placed Carl Gustav round could turn any APC into a shattered wreck, but most of their recoilless rifle teams were only getting off one or two shots before being spotted and knocked out.

  Burning APCs and trucks dotted the hillside, but enough made it through unscathed to overrun Bekker’s platoon strength strong points And once

  Kruger’s men were inside each defensive ring, the paratroops were wiped out foxhole by foxhole-killed by soldiers firing from inside their Ratels, by point-blank cannon shots, or by dismounted infantry charging forward behind a barrage of grenades and automatic weapons fire.

  COMMAND RATEL

  Ian Sheffield hung to his seat strap for dear life as the Ratel canted upward, grinding uphill at more than twenty miles an hour. His ears were numb-deafened by the constant chatter of the APC’s heavy machine gun and by bullets spanging off its armor. Smoking, spent shell casings rolled back down the metal floor toward the rear.

  Kruger’s staff officers crouched behind the vehicle’s firing ports, ready to open fire with their R4 assault rifles the moment they had targets.

  Emily and Sibena were still in their seats, though only just barely. They both looked almost as scared as he felt.

  The front end of the Ratel dropped downward as it roared over the crest.

  And then the world blew up.

  At first Ian was only aware of the blinding white flash that started outside the driver’s compartment and then rippled backward down the length of the Ratel. Then a shock wave punched the air out of his lungs and threw him out of his seat. The sound came last-a tremendous clanging, discordant thunderclap that tore conscious, coherent thought to shreds. As he blacked out, he felt the Ratel being lifted upward, twisting sideways in midair.