He turned his back on his advisors to hide his disappointment in the night’s raid, and walked to his desk.
“Once Captain Kohl’s HINDs attack Marsh tomorrow morning, then General Conreid’s ground forces can begin to advance. We’ll wipe out the strike force, down to the last man.”
Walz spoke to the pilots. “Move away from the stone city at low altitude. Come back to Pretoria, and you can live to fight another day.”
There was no answer. Nothing but static filled the underground bunker.
Walz scowled. “Answer me, damn you! Come in, anyone.”
As silence continued, interspersed with bursts of meaningless static, Bruno shook his head and started toward his private chambers.
He spoke over his shoulder. “I shall see you gentlemen in the morning, after breakfast, when you can apprise me of the results of Captain Kohl’s attack.”
He stopped just before leaving the room. “And gentlemen, you had better have something positive to say to me.”
TWENTY-NINE
Corrie called out, “Boss, I’ve finally managed to bump Colonel Marsh. He’s on the line now waiting to talk to you.”
“Great,” Ben said as he reached for the mike. “Raines here. How goes it?”
“It goes as well as can be expected in this god-dammed hothouse the Africans call a jungle.”
“We’ve been trying to reach you for the past twenty-four hours. Trouble with your radio?”
He heard a low chuckle over the airwaves. “Yeah. A friggin’ lizard had crawled into our long-range radio transceiver and shorted out a couple of resistors. Once our radio tech found the problem, it was relatively easy to fix.”
“Good. We wanted to warn you that our Scouts had seen some aircraft headed your way. Did you make contact yet?”
“Yes, sir. And we survived more through luck than skill. They were carrying napalm, and if we’d been in the jungle instead of in the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, we’d have had our gooses cooked by now.”
“Lots of great military minds have said luck plays a greater part in the outcome of war than military planning. Guess they were right, huh?”
“Yes, sir. Speaking of luck, we apprehended a prisoner who gave us some good information. It seems there are quite a few Minsk tanks up ahead of your position, waiting to ambush your battalion.”
Ben pursed his lips, a puzzled expression on his face. “That’s strange. Our scout planes haven’t picked up any signs of tanks ahead. Are you sure of your source?”
“Yes, sir. He says the tanks are dug into bunkers and camouflaged very well to blend into the desert sand. I’ll give you the exact coordinates and let your men check it out again.”
“OK, that’ll be a big help. I’ll send Captain Holland and his PUFFs to take a look. How about you? Do you need anything?”
“Just about everything you can imagine, General. We’re down to less than two days fuel supplies, low on ammunition, and our Apaches have about enough fuel for one more mission. We need anything you can send.”
“I’ll radio supply and have a couple of C130s airdrop you everything you need within four or five hours. That good enough?”
“Excellent, General. I’ll give you those coordinates now, and also give you ours for the airdrop. Good luck with those tanks.”
“Thanks, Marsh. What’s your next move?”
“We also found out about some anti-aircraft batteries and cannons up ahead of us. We’re gonna send out a little sortie with the Apaches and see if we can’t draw those good ole boys back here into a little surprise I’ve got cooked up for ’em.”
Once Ben had the coordinates he needed, he had Corrie radio supply headquarters and tell them to get the supplies Marsh needed to him, soonest. Then he called a meeting with Colonel Holland to discuss Marsh’s information concerning tanks up ahead of his 501.
While Ben was meeting with Colonel Holland, Marsh sent the leader of his air support team, Captain Sparks, on his night mission.
Captain Dana Sparks kept his Apache flying at less than three hundred feet above the ground. Two more Apaches flanked him on the right, and one on the left.
Reading his instruments, checking for the coordinates the prisoner had given them, he realized they were very close to the cannon batteries. He expected to see New World choppers on his scope any second now. The thumping of the Apaches’ rotors would quickly alert the enemy to their approach, even if they had managed to stay low enough to avoid their radar. At times, even the most modern mechanized warfare came down to basics, the quickest eye, the keenest ear.
With four rocket tubes mounted on each Apache, Dana and his men could deliver one hell of a damaging blow to New World gun emplacements before they were finished with this mission. And then things would start to get hot in the night skies over southern Zimbabwe.
Dana knew they could count on determined pursuit by a fleet of HINDs, which was exactly what Colonel Marsh wanted—to draw as many enemy helicopter gun-ships toward their anti-aircraft batteries as possible.
“Target on my HUD, Red Leader” a voice said into Dana’s helmet earphones. “Somebody’s coming up. At least six blips. Now I have two more.”
“Go!” Dana ordered, twisting more forward thrust out of the Apache’s stick-mounted throttle. Every man in the squadron had been assigned specific targets.
The hammering of rotors grew louder. Dana put the nose of the ship down, flying as low as he dared at his speed. Now he had a target on his HUD. He primed the rocket launch tubes and tried for a fix. A bleeping noise came faster, until a single electronic tone announced a target fix. He fired one rocket tube and watched its vapor trail shoot away from the ship. The rocket guidance system, built into the nose cone, would do the rest.
More rockets left the gunships to Dana’s right and left, a flash of crimson followed by a trail of white marking the passage of each deadly Spider across dark terrain below.
A brilliant burst of fire and smoke lit up the night in front of Dana’s Apache, followed by the thunder of a terrific explosion.
“Bingo!” Dana cried into the radio. “A direct hit on some sort of munitions stores.”
Another blast erupted from the ground, fingers of flame shooting skyward, turning the undergrowth into a wall of fire and smoke.
“Gotcha!” a pilot’s voice crackled into Dana’s headset. “I don’t know what the hell I hit, but it sure does make one real pretty blaze!”
The patter of distant machine gun fire with tracers leading through the darkness came straight for Dana’s helicopter squadron from the forest.
“Go down!” Dana said. “We’re still too damn high.”
But as he said this he saw the tracers pass high over the cockpit of his chopper. The enemy gunners were shooting at shadows.
A volcano of flame shot upward from another spot in the jungle where the rain forest ended abruptly near a dried up lake, the start of the desert. Dana saw and heard one of the Spiders score a hit, in a place he hadn’t expected to find the enemy.
“Nice shootin’!” he exclaimed. “Whoever fired that baby gets a gold star by his name.”
More tracer bullets and machine gun fire sizzled over the tops of the low-flying Apaches. Dana, as squad leader, decided it was time to empty all tubes and get the hell out of there before a ship went down. They had damn few to waste.
“Fire all rockets!” he shouted. “Let the heat sensors pick a target for us. We’re gettin’ the hell outta here. Those shots are gettin’ closer and closer.”
Spider rockets whooshed away from the Apaches almost in unison. Dana felt his airship sway when the ignited rocket fuel pushed them out of the launchers.
Following a precision drill his team had practiced since he’d formed the squad, the Apaches peeled off one at a time at very low altitude, swinging back toward battalion headquarters.
“Looks like we all made it,” a voice said over the radio. “Don’t know what the hell we hit, but it sure made a big bang.”
“We’v
e got gunships behind us,” another pilot warned. “We can’t count on this picnic being over ’til we get back to camp and set down.”
Dana wasn’t all that worried about the enemy aircraft. They were low to the ground, hard to detect on older targeting mechanisms like those found in the HINDs.
His main worry was fuel. His gauge showed barely enough to get back to base and safety, and flying this low used fuel at a prodigious rate.
He tapped on the gauge, hoping the needle would move. When it didn’t, he silently crossed his fingers and began to whistle a tune to make the time pass faster.
He prayed he and his squad had enough gas left to lead the New World pilots over the hidden gun batteries Colonel Marsh had positioned for a crossfire.
He couldn’t wait to see the HINDs come falling out of the sky like so many raindrops.
Marsh is one hell of a commander, he thought. He was born with a military mind.
THIRTY
Captain Tristan Kohl had four blips on his radar screen, all flying very low over tropical forest, heading north back toward where that infamous Colonel Marsh was reported to be camped—where his boyhood friend and flight training companion, Helmut Gruber, had been reported lost earlier that day during the napalm attack. God only knew what had happened to him and the others on that mission. None of the planes had made it back to camp to report on the sortie.
Flying at the front of the formation, he spoke into his radio as he gripped the M24’s stick with the throttle wide open.
“Beta Leader Five. I have them on my screen. Four airships. Choppers, probably Apaches. Activate rocket ignition when you can confirm a hit.”
“They are too low, Beta Five!” a voice replied from another M24 HIND flying outer wing in their V-shaped formation. “I have no fix. Repeat. I have no fix.”
In this tropical country the heat from the ground, even at night, was often enough to throw off the heat-seekers of their rockets if the target aircraft were low to the ground, and these crazy Americans were flying so low their landing wheels must be hitting treetops.
Kohl knew the Apaches were capable of quick maneuvers and dangerously low flight, if their pilots knew what they were doing. It was hard to bring one down from the air with the older Soviet rockets they had on board the M24s—small missiles with an out of date guidance system relying solely on heat which often misfired at a vapor trail or followed the wash of a turbine engine instead of the flying ship itself, allowing smart pilots to make sharp turns to avoid their rockets.
While the Soviet-made rockets were excellent for ATG—air-to-ground firing—they stacked up poorly against the more advanced Rebel rockets with their computerized guidance systems.
Most frustrating of all, the Apaches somehow made false echoes on The New World’s best screens, causing rockets or cannon fire to go wide.
“Let them have a taste of machine gun fire,” Kohl commanded, flipping switches on his twin-mount M60 machine guns. These big guns required visual targeting, a difficult task while flying an M24 in hot pursuit, and the Russian brand M60s frequently jammed due to rust in this humid tropical climate.
Colonel Walz knew about the problems aboard the HINDs, and still he ordered them into battle with the Apaches as if pilots under his command and their HINDs were expendable. And as the war lengthened it seemed no one in the high command cared about New World army disadvantages, or about badly needed repairs to planes and helicopters.
Many of the air wars they fought now were like suicide missions. Too many good pilots had been killed since the Rebel armies came to Africa, and too many of Tristan Kohl’s friends would never see Germany again because of Walz and his lack of maintenance protocols.
The chatter of machine gun fire came from a ship to Kohl’s left as they sped over the dark forest below. Kohl’s altimeter read less than a thousand feet, and the Apaches appeared to be hundreds of feet lower, making them far more difficult targets for machine guns, cannons, or rockets.
He admired the nerve of the Rebel pilots for flying so low, and at night. He knew, as good a flyer as he was, he would never have the courage to attempt maneuvers such as the Rebels performed routinely.
But with twelve gunships in his squadron, Kohl felt the sheer weight of numbers would give them the advantage tonight. Silently, he prayed he wouldn’t be one of the M24s shot down during this engagement, yet he had to stay out in front of the formation to show his men he had courage in battle. He could not lag behind . . . his pride would not allow it.
“One of the blips has turned around!” It was Kruger’s voice over the radio. “It is coming back toward us. . . .”
“I don’t see it!” another pilot yelled. “Give me a mark! I can’t pick it up on my screen!”
Kohl recognized the terror in Gustav Cline’s voice despite heavy static through his headset, a common failing of HINDs when the humidity was high which caused all manner of electrical quirks in the guidance systems and in their radios.
“Something has been fired! I can see its burn trace. Go down!” Kohl said, feeling his palms grow wet with sweat on the controls.
“It’s a rocket!”
“Evade, evade now!”
Several members of the squad sent their M24s down to low altitudes to escape the Rebel missile. Kohl took a quick glance at an M24 when it nose-dived out of formation, swooping down toward the jungle.
“I’m getting something on my warning system—” Lieutenant Kruger scarcely got the words out of his mouth before his chopper exploded, sending an aftershock across the rest of the flight formation.
Kohl watched Kruger’s helicopter gunship go down in a ball of flames, coming apart as it spiraled toward the earth, leaving a plume of smoke and flames in its wake.
“Fire! Fire! I’ve got a target!”
Cline fired one of his rockets. A finger of orange flame marked its passage away from his chopper.
Kohl watched the rocket shoot away from Cline’s gun-ship with his heart in his throat. David Kruger was already among the dead from this helicopter engagement, and the fight had only begun. He wondered how many more of his comrades would die.
“I’m hit!” a crackling voice shouted. “One of my rotor blades is—” His cry ended with a terrific explosion off to Kohl’s right.
A HIND burst into flames, flipping nose-over-tail amid an inferno. Oddly, the helicopter’s machine guns were firing as it went crashing into the treetops below. Then one of its unlaunched rockets detonated, blasting trees out of the ground in a rapidly spreading circle.
Kohl took a deep breath. He saw an Apache making straight for his squad’s formation—a suicidal move for a helicopter pilot at this altitude.
Kohl fixed his targeting sights on the Apache and pulled a trigger on a rocket. The swish of exploding, burning rocket fuel made a faint sound above the staccato of his rotor. A fiery vapor trail left one launching tube. Then the Apache gunship suddenly disappeared on his screen. It was not possible, and yet he had seen the blip vanish himself.
“Where is it?” he cried just as the rocket he launched went sailing into a black hole in the rain forest.
“It is gone! I don’t see it!” someone exclaimed. “A big chopper cannot simply vanish like that.”
Kohl’s rocket ignited a stand of trees, brightening the night sky briefly. He had missed the Apache completely and it did not make any sense—how could an airship be there at one moment, and then disappear entirely in a matter of seconds?
It was not logical, he thought. Did these Rebels have some kind of new weapon, making their aircraft invisible? Or were their pilots simply that good at the controls?
“I’m hit!” a slurred voice screamed from Kohl’s headset as one of the choppers to his left disintegrated in flames, twisting out of the sky in looping arcs. The HIND went out of sight, exploding upon impact, setting more trees aflame.
A split second later Kohl saw a flash of light off to his right. A HIND was struck by a rocket and it went down like a flaming ball of heavy metal,
dropping straight down into the forest with a bang.
I am going to die tonight, Kohl thought. How is this possible, against only four enemy helicopters?
“Beta Leader!” a voice said. “We are flying over batteries of anti-aircraft guns. They are shooting rockets up at us, and cannons are spitting lead all over the jungle below.”
Kohl looked beneath his gunship. The trees were alive with flashing lights, a twinkling, staccato pattern of death, and the distant boom of cannons could be heard above the whine of his turbines and the hammering of his rotors through the air.
Tracer bullets illuminated the pathways of cannon and machine gun shells, lighting up the night sky like the fireworks displays during Oktoberfest back home.
“I am hit. Going down!”
Kohl did not recognize the pilot’s voice. His squad was taking a terrible beating . . . it was almost as if they had been lured into a nest of ground-to-air rocket launchers and anti-aircraft gun batteries.
Something struck the underbelly of his chopper, and a pain began in his left foot so intense that Kohl unconsciously let out a yell, leaving him gasping for air. His boot went flying past his face, slamming against the roof of his gunship cabin.
The chopper tilted crazily, driven out of control by the impact from a cannon round.
Blood sprayed the cockpit, and Kohl noticed in the dim lights behind the control panel that his entire left foot was missing, blown off just above his ankle by a Rebel cannon. He seemed strangely detached from his circumstances, almost as if it were all happening in a dream.
Perhaps it is a dream, he thought dazedly, hoping against hope this wasn’t really happening to him.
Air pressure fell in the cabin and a map, clipped to a visor above his head, was sucked out of a hole in the M24’s steel-plated floor. An involuntary scream came from his throat.
He closed his eyes, gritting his teeth, fighting back the pain racing up his leg. And now he had no foot with which to control the rudder or the speed of the tail rotor.
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