by Stuart Slade
One man seemed to be surviving. He was standing in the shadows, waving his weapon from side to side as if he was spraying bullets yet there was no muzzle flash from his weapon. Geldenhuys grabbed the machine gun mounted in the small turret on his command vehicle and fired a short burst at the man. He stumbled with the impacts and then collapsed in a heap. Before Geldenhuys could compliment himself, another man ran forward, his chest a bright orange. For a moment Geldenhuys thought the man was on fire, but the color was wrong. The man was firing his rifle, wildly, hopelessly inaccurately, but still firing it. Before Geldenhuys could draw a bead on the man and cut him down, two or more of his riflemen did it for him.
Under his feet, the Ratel lurched and started to edge forward. The riflemen around them moving forward with the armored vehicle. Gunfire from the first group of buildings faded away. The militia had either been killed or run away. That left the shaft of the arrow still to crush before the job was even half done. The infantry had to keep up the pressure on the militia kamp, to divert attention away from the third Ratel and its crew. They were the critical part of the whole mission.
A hundred yards or so southwest of where Geldenhuys and most of his platoon were pinning down the militia in their kamp, the third Ratel, its crew of four and the seven infantrymen it carried, were approaching the large rectangular building that had been designated the holding point for the missionaries. Compared with the wild explosion of light, sound and fire from the main gun battle, theirs was a stealthy approach without fanfare or flourish. The Ratel pulled up a few yards short of the building, its gunners ready to pour fire into it if there was any hostile movement. There wasn’t. The building was quiet; weirdly, worryingly silent.
Staff Sergeant Lennan de Wilzem braced himself for the sight that he was sure lay in wait for him behind the door. Every instinct that he had was telling him there was nothing alive inside the structure. By every law of logic that meant any people inside were dead. It would be too much to hope for that they would simply have been shot. Instead he knew what he was about to see. Bodies butchered and mutilated beyond any form of human recognition; at least they would be dead. All too often, some were still alive. Trying to keep the contents of his stomach under control, he fired a shot from his rifle, blowing open any semblance of a lock on the double doors, then pushed his way inside. As he did so, de Wilzem rolled to one side and shone a flashlight across the darkened building. It was empty.
Almost sighing with relief, de Wilzem joined his men in quickly searching what was obviously a barn. They pushed through collections of straw, sorted through dark corners, threw open three internal doors. Once they flattened themselves to one side as a mole viper slithered out from a hole in the wall and vanished into the darkness. Human and snake were all too pleased to leave each other strictly alone.
“Building is empty Lenny.”
“Up here too Staff.”
De Wilzem acknowledged. His reply was drowned out by a roar. The building shook, bringing dust, dirt and insects down from the roof. He was slightly thankful. Shaking a roof like that could bring much deadlier inhabitants down on one’s head. Not all snakes were as accommodating as the mole viper.
“It’s the tanks.” One of the younger men started to move towards the door.
“Bystand waar u is!” de Wilzem yelled at the top of his voice. The soldier froze in his tracks. “If the tankies see you come from a building they will think you are a stam and shoot you down.”
That was all too true, not that de Wilzem blamed the tankies. The heavy armor made the Olifants almost immune to shots from the front but the sides and rear were another matter. Not to mention the fact that everybody was edgy in situations like this. The building shook again as the tanks started firing on the buildings ahead of them
They took long enough. The thought ran through Geldenhuys’s head as he saw the five Olifants push through the kraals and open fire on the buildings that made up the other arrow-side. The 100mm rounds shredded the wooden structures, sending clouds of fragments billowing into the air. The sudden appearance of the tanks and the vicious crossfore of machine guns from the Ratels and tanks had the desired effect. The firing from the militia kraal started to fade away. De Wilzem knew what was happening, the militia was fading away into the jungle. They’d run and would not come back for hours, perhaps days. That suited him fine. With the militia gone, the skirmish was over.
Tshinsenda, South African Border
“So what happened, Lieutenant?” Geldenhuys was inquisitive rather than condemnatory. He had his own navigational error to temper any rebuke he might have had in mind.
“We missed the turning, as simple as that, Captain. We missed it, Lord alone knows how, and we only realized when we saw the glow of the burning huts behind us. So we turned around and came back.”
“You drove to the sound of the guns. Nobody will criticize that.” Geldenhuys and van Huis walked through the blasted ruin of the militia kraal while the infantry checked the rains of the buildings. No sign of the missionaries, but some of the buildings were so badly burned out that nobody would ever know who had been inside. They came across a body, one surrounded by white whispy flakes of some sort of padding covered in orange fabric.
“That’s a life jacket; a seaman’s life jacket.” Van Huis was amazed. “Why on earth was he wearing that?”
“Perhaps it was a fashion statement?” Geldenhuys shook his head. Then an idea came to him. He walked over to where the man he had shot lay. A quick inspection showed why he had never fired his weapon. The bottom plate of his magazine had dropped out and the magazine spring was trailing out on the ground, surrounded by the glittering brass from the magazine. He shook his head. Nothing really surprised him anymore.
“Look here Captain. A double barreled blaster.” Two of the infantrymen were laughing. They’d found a body carrying a weird construction, a stockless Arisaka rifle taped to the side of what looked like an RPG rocket launcher.
“Do you think this one had enough magazines taped together?” The figure stretched out on the ground had six of the Arisaka magazines taped together in what the moddervoete called the 69 position.
Geldenhuys looked at the body carefully. “Perhaps he should have used some of the tape to close his flies, hey boys?” The observation got him a roar of laughter.
“Sir, over here.” This voice wasn’t laughing. Geldenhuys looked across the center of the kamp. The villagers were beginning to come out of their huts. Some women carrying babies were at the front; everybody was moving slowly and carefully, keeping their hands well in view. Sensible of them. Staff Sergeant de Wilzem was moving over to speak with them, or try to at any rate. There was a patois, a mixture of Portuguese, Afrikaans and English, that served for most purposes. Geldenhuys hoped it would here.
De Wilzem spoke for a moment then gestured to some of his men. They ran over to a kraal, one whose stink spoke of the pigs that lived there. The village headman was pointing at the enclosed sty that formed the back wall as Geldenhuys and van Huis joined them. Two of de Wilzem’s men and some of the villagers started clearing the dung-and urine-soaked straw away, moving carefully in case of anything venomous hiding in the mess. It wasn’t just snakes that could give a man a bite that would put his life in danger. This time, there wasn’t anything threatening other than the stink and filth. Before long, the digging had exposed a small wooden patch in the back wall of the kraal. It was cunningly concealed. The tiny hiding hole and pit were lost within the structure of the kraal and the smell meant that nobody would look too closely. The moddervoete ripped the boards away and shone flashlights into the pit. Crouched in the bottom, so closely jammed in that they couldn’t move, were the missing missionaries. Cheers rose from the South Africans as all seven were dragged out from the foul pit. They were suffering from spider bites and scorpion stings, but they were alive.
“They hid us. The villagers hid us.” The head of the missionary group, a man called Houghan, was speaking to Geldenhuys, shakily, still
unable to believe that he was alive and safe.
“You think you are a brave man because you are a soldier, jongmens?” Lehmkuhl spoke quietly to Dippenaar who was watching the scene with horrified fascination. “With your uniform and your tank around you? With your comrades to cover your onderkant? Well, jongmens, look at what real bravery is. Those poor bastaards there have nothing to fight with. Perhaps some farm tools, if they are lucky and if the militias haven’t stolen them. If the militias found they had hidden those people, the entire village would have been wiped out and their deaths would not have been pretty. Yet hide them they did because they thought it was the right thing to do. And then they lived with it, for who knows how long, afraid every day that something would give them away or one of the other villagers would try to buy his life by revealing the secret. Those people have more guts than you or I ever will. And don’t forget they saved those people, not us. We screwed up. The officers won’t admit it but we did. Our clever plan all went wrong and it was those villagers who pulled our nuts out of the fire as well. So remember this next time some siviele tells you that the stams up here aren’t worth anything.”
The missionaries were being pushed, none too gently, into the back of one Ratel. It was a tight fit, but it was just possible and it was a whole world better than the hiding place they had just left. Around them, the villagers just stared at the armored vehicles. The faces of the men were stoic. Some of the women, especially those with the babies, cried quietly.
“Captain, the militia we drove out, they must be watching. You know what will happen here when we leave.”
“Of course, van Huis. But what can we do?”
“Take them with us?”
“That is forbidden. You know that. There will be hell to pay if we bring an entire village over.”
“It will be worse than hell if we leave them here.”
“Respectfully Sirs.” Staff Sergeant Randlehoff spoke quietly, “the men believe it is the right thing to do. The only thing to do. They saved our people, we should save them.”
“On nine armored vehicles? How many are there?” No officer worth his salt ever ignored a warning from his sergeant that the men had strong feelings on something. Geldenhuys spoke quickly to the chieftain through de Wilzem. “He says there are about a hundred including the babies. There were more, but that was before the militia came.”
“Tell him that all those who want to leave can come with us. We can put some inside your Ratels. More can ride on top and on my tanks. The rest can walk with us. We’ll put three of my tanks in front. The other two can bring up the rear. Your Ratels in the middle. That way the lead tanks will explode any mines buried out there. We can get out to the south of this place, there is good ground there to the border. And the border is open. We should know that it is for us to hold it closed.”
Geldenhuys nodded slowly. “Very well. De Wilzem, tell the chief we will take the women who have babies inside the Ratels. Order the boys to squeeze up. If there is not enough room, they can walk. Our new jongmens could use the exercise. The old and the very young can ride on the tanks and Ratels. The rest walk between the vehicles. Tell them to step only in the tracks made by the tanks and Ratels.”
De Wilzem spoke to the chief who relayed the words to his villagers. As the word that they were going to escape from this militia-plagued hell spread, there was first disbelief and then incredulity. The Afrikaaners were going to take them to something that approximated safety. The Ratels filled up and then overflowed with the crowd of people mounting up. The younger men and women started bringing out what was left of the village’s livestock, some pigs, a few scrawny, half-starved cows. The women held chickens under their arms. Geldenhuys looked at the display with something approaching awe. This was an exercise he’d never learned at staff college.
“Sir, the headman asks, can we set the huts on fire? The way we did with the militia kraal. They don’t want to leave the thugs anything.”
Geldenhuys could understand that feeling. He gave the order. The 23mm cannon on the Ratels snapped out bursts of incendiaries. The burning huts provided a weird, flickering orange backlight as the strange convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, civilians and livestock moved out. He shook his head sadly to himself. “If there is an ark waiting in the river when we get there, I will know this all just a bad dream.”
“Not a bad dream Sir.” De Wilzem also spoke quietly. “We have done good work here tonight.”
Six hours later, the sun was rising. The villagers had already started to build themselves a kraal close to the infantry company’s base. Geldenhuys had received an ominous message saying the brigade commander wanted ‘reasons in writing’ by 0900. And van Huis had re-read his wife’s letter, then settled down to send her a reply.
“Things are pretty quiet here on the border,” he started.
CHAPTER THREE PLANS AND INTENTIONS
Briefing Theater, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida
“Settle down. A team from Hughes Electro-optics is here to introduce you to some new equipment we will be testing in the near future.” That caused the room to quiet quickly. “Doctor Kailie, if you would like to start?”
“Thank you General. Gentlemen, I’m here today to discuss the topic that has been of concern to us all ever since the B-70 first entered service. I refer, of course, to bombing accuracy.” A ripple of hostility ran around the room. The B-70 crews were well aware that their average bombing error from the Valkyries was substantially greater than that from the old B-52s. In fact, the surviving BUFF groups still won the bombing accuracy contests at Red Sun, year after year. Doctor Kailie seemed oblivious to the reaction. “Of course, this is quite understandable. The Valkyrie flies at three times the speed of the B-52 and twice the altitude so a degradation of accuracy when using gravity bombs is only to be expected. We note that in the bombing of the Caliphate biological warfare facilities a decade ago, some of the bombs dropped missed their targets by between three and five miles.”
Doctor Kailie looked at his audience, blissfully unaware that he was being measured for a lynching. “That’s worse than an ICBM, you know.”
This time the hostile growl was unmistakable and couldn’t be easily ignored. Kailie suddenly realized he was trampling all over very tender corns. “Since then we have managed to correct the situation to a great extent. The new generation of gravity bombs have an inertial stabilization system that detects deviations from the planned ballistic arc and corrects for them. This eliminates errors from varying cross-winds and other atmospheric disturbances. However, this does not change the degree of error built in by the use of higher speeds and altitudes.”
“Then give us bigger bombs!” A voice called out from the increasingly restive audience. In a dimension humans know nothing of, deceased General Thomas Power smiled affectionately.
“That is only a temporary solution, and in any case there are many cases where the use of larger nuclear devices would be inappropriate. In fact, it would be of great benefit if, in some cases, we could replace nuclear devices with extremely accurate conventional weapons.”
“We’re not going to ask the ladies to haul trash!” A different voice, but equally hostile. The audience was beginning to surge forward in reaction to Kailie’s remarks.
“The ladies?” Kailie was confused.
“The B-70s. Most of them are female.” General Carson looked at his assembled crews severely. “Settle down, right now! We have a problem here and, while it might have been addressed more tactfully,” now Kailie got the severe look, “it is, nevertheless a serious problem that we have to face. So hear Doctor Kailie out.”
Kailie wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “As I was saying, the problem is a combination of speed, altitude and the reaction time of the bombing system. These are fixed constraints and, as you gentlemen have shown, even the finest training and most highly developed skills in the world cannot compensate for them.” He took a chance and looked at his audience. They seemed a little more moll
ified that they had a few minutes earlier. He heaved a quiet sigh of relief.
“Since the source of error at the drop end is beyond the control of either the crews or the - ahem - ladies, then the answer is obvious, we have to find a way of changing the course of the bomb on its way down so that any errors at the drop point can be corrected as the weapon descends. It is to achieve this end that we at Hughes have been working for the last few years.
“Attaining this end is of ever-increasing importance. Faced with the threat of our bombers, those who would challenge world peace have undertaken to make your tasks as hard as possible. They have hardened installations, buried them deep underground, made the vulnerable areas of them as small as possible. This is why just using devices of ever-increasing yield is no longer a viable approach. If the area of the target is halved in each of its dimensions and the same amount of material is used to build it, then that target will be four times harder. If the amount of material used to build it is doubled also, then that target will be 16 times harder to destroy, meaning the destructive force exerted upon it must be increased by the same proportion. Assuming that accuracy remains unchanged, that means the explosive power of our devices must be increased by a factor of more than four thousand. That means we would require devices that generate destructive power in the gigaton range. Obviously, this is not possible or desirable.”
There was a certain level of disagreement about the last word. Kailie chose to ignore it. “If, however, we can ensure that our devices can hit these much smaller targets directly, then the problem goes away. No known structure can survive a direct hit from a 550 kiloton weapon. Who knows? One day we may even be able to drop such a device down a mineshaft or into an air conditioning duct on a building. That would give the occupants food for thought, would it not?”
For the first time Kailie was actually connecting with his audience. “So how do we do it?” It was one of the voices that had been barracking him earlier.