Fever
Page 35
If they ever did get through, Amanzi was in great peril.
Sofia Bergman
It’s just about impossible to describe what it’s like to be in a battle. I think that’s why most people can’t talk about it. It feels as though everything were distorted. Time – what feels like hours, is only minutes. What feels like minutes, could be hours. Space is distorted, your sense of near and far and up and down and left and right, everything blurs into one and everything feels like a thousand broken pieces. And your senses, your decision-making, memory, the snatches you can remember, everything topsy-turvy. It’s the most awful of all terrors that does that, the fear that you might die. And the adrenalin and the survival urge and a kind of rage inside you, a rage at the Enemy – how dare they try to kill you? It’s what they call the ‘red mist of battle’, that rage.
Nobody can be truly objective when they describe a battle. It’s a patchy memory. A partially imagined memory.
I was fast asleep at 03.30. It was the urgency of the voices on the two-way radios that woke me. Anxious voices calling, there’s activity in Sector 3, there’s engine noise, lots of engines, vehicles racing, it sounds like they are coming across the plains beside the dam. Dad’s Army in the trenches of the ravine wanted to know if the guards at the main gate and Petrusville could also hear it.
No, no one else could hear it.
Minister Xaba’s voice crackled over the radio, evident that he had just been woken, but he took charge immediately. He asked each of the four lookout posts in Sector 3 to confirm the noise independently.
They did that one after the other.
‘We see sparks or something,’ said one of them. ‘Like a glow. It might be from exhausts.’
‘It’s a loud noise,’ another added. ‘Lots of engines.’ Voices freighted with tension and fear.
Sarge X asked the other posts again, ‘Is there any activity?’ Again Petrusville, the main gate and the gate at the Havenga Bridge confirmed: no, the night was dead quiet.
‘They’re coming through Sector 3,’ said Sarge X. ‘Stand by for action. If you have a target, fire.’
We waited.
Over the radio: ‘Coming closer. Noise now louder. We think . . . There are hundreds . . .’
A voice, shrill with fear: ‘Send more people. Send more . . .’ Shots ringing out.
Sarge X remained calm, to his eternal credit. He gave orders to the radio room to let Domingo know: the big assault is here. Bring Alpha and Bravo, hurry back to Amanzi.
Domingo and company were more than two hours away. It was too far to make a difference. This was going to be over soon.
Minister Xaba took his radio, climbed into his police vehicle and drove to the gate of the reserve, and then to the front.
The Enemy were cunning. They sent four armour-plated pick-ups up the valley first. Each of the four had a twenty-millimetre cannon bolted to the load bed, with two men loading and firing. Behind the pick-ups raced the first of scores of motorcycles.
Dad’s Army was not equipped to stop these armoured vehicles. They had only R4 rifles.
The pick-ups raced through. Sparks showered where the bullets hit them. Our defence force personnel screamed over the radios to warn Team Delta and Amanzi. I listened and I jumped up, I wanted to do something, wanted to help Team Delta, as we were useless here, we would not be able to withstand a superior force here, we had to stop them before the gate.
Sarge X’s voice stayed calm. ‘Keep firing. Hold your positions.’
Our defenders told us through the chaos that they had hit some of the bikers. I remember one’s jubilant yells, over and over: ‘I got him, I got him!’
But most of the first fifty vehicles got through. They didn’t want to attack our line in Sector 3. They wanted to breach it, right through to the town. They just raced, shooting wildly, past our lines, over the plateau on top of the mountain, on the way to where Delta lay in wait, now wide awake and ready behind their stone barriers.
And then, the first setback for the Enemy. Dad’s Army got lucky. They shot two bikers almost simultaneously – just a hundred metres from the crest of the valley. Both fell in the Jeep track. The next two motorcycles were following too closely. They crashed into the two on the ground and tumbled down as well. The next two just managed to stop in time, but our defenders shot them. A pick-up came next. The driver ploughed over a fallen motorcycle, swerved to avoid the next wreck and his bumper slammed into the rocks beside the track. A plug in the bottleneck ravine. The Enemy’s motorcycles and pick-ups dammed up behind them. They couldn’t go forward, and they couldn’t go back. They were exposed, with no shelter.
Our defence forces yelled and cheered and fired, ensuring no one could clear the pile-up.
But they shot too eagerly, because they were Dad’s Army. Their ammunition would not last.
The Enemy’s first fifty came across the flats towards Team Delta. Through the rock field.
We heard the voices of Team Delta’s two sergeants over the radio. They were former members of Alpha, good leaders, experienced and cool-headed. ‘We see them. Five hundred metres. Four hundred. Three hundred . . .’
Team Delta’s sergeants gave the order to shoot.
And then, the Enemy’s moment of madness. Perhaps due to the unexpected and accurate fire from Delta. Perhaps from bravado, or just sheer adrenalin. The rock field was generally flat; in the dark it seemed easily negotiable, seemed possible to run off the Jeep track and race beside your comrades. They raced at frightening speed, trying to reach the town before we could respond in an organised fashion. A pick-up with a mounted cannon on the back, and an over-enthusiastic driver, swerved off the road to drive beside the one in front of him, or trying to overtake him. Due to a combination of speed, rocks, darkness and poor skills, the driver lost control, just two hundred metres from Delta. The pick-up rolled and then somersaulted, sparks showering the night as it crashed down across the track. A following pick-up smashed into it with a resounding crash. The leading vehicle burst into flames, lighting up the veld and the Enemy. And blocking the track. The racing convoy came to a complete standstill.
Some of the motorcycles bypassed the fire through the veld, struggling, bumping, slow. Team Delta picked them off one by one.
The rest sought shelter behind the pick-ups. Some of the vehicles swerved out of the road and tried to drive through the rock field. At snail’s pace, brightly lit by the fire. Team Delta focused their blanket fire on the cabs. They hit the drivers, the passengers, the gun operators. The pick-ups halted. Further back the remainder of the fifty vehicles jammed. The Enemy’s soldiers jumped down and out, running for shelter behind rocks and bushes. And began to return fire.
Delta shot as freely as they wanted, because just behind them was one of Domingo’s weapons caches. There was plenty of ammunition.
Suddenly it was trench warfare.
Suddenly it was a game of chess.
Chapter 84
February: III
We hunkered down in Disa Street listening to the radios. Impotent. We could hear Sector 3 and Minister Xaba and Team Delta’s sergeants. We formed a mental picture of what was happening up there, and eventually also the impasse on each front: in the valley our defenders were holding the majority of the Enemy’s force back at the bottleneck, but their ammunition was depleted. At the rock field Delta had an enormous reserve of ammunition, but they were pinned down.
We had halted the invasion temporarily. As long as the plug in the ravine held. As long as Dad’s Army and their reservist brothers had bullets to shoot and pin down the Enemy.
The minutes ticked by to the scattered voices on the radio, distant shots; it was like something happening in another world. On the other side of the mountain, very far from the quiet, calm town where we lay. It was almost impossible to sit still, to accept that this waiting was the best use of our experience and talents.
Bad news came from Sector 3: ‘We’re running out of ammo.’
If only we could help
them. If we . . .
I thought back to my days as a shepherd. I thought about the alternative route that Jacob Mahlangu and I once discovered, when it had snowed so heavily that the road into the reserve was an impassable mud bath. We rode it a few times with that forgotten quadbike, an ancient sheep and game path that the animals had tramped out to and from the watering points.
Maybe I could . . . There was a way to get ammunition to Sector 3. I stood up. Sat down again. I dared not disobey orders.
But I couldn’t stand it any more. I jumped to my feet. Ran to where Aram, my closest Charlie sergeant, was lying.
‘What are you doing, Storm?’ Angry, because I was abandoning my post in stressful circumstances.
‘I know a way to get ammunition to Sector 3.’
‘How?’
‘I used to be a shepherd up there. For over two years. There’s a footpath leading from the old township here. It might be overgrown, it’s difficult, steep, but it’s a shortcut. If we take horses . . .’
He looked at me, thinking. ‘In the dark?’
I nodded. ‘I often rode that route.’
He hesitated a moment. He jumped up. ‘Come on,’ he said. We ran to Taljaard, the other sergeant.
Taljaard called the minister on the radio and requested permission to supplement ammunition to Sector 3. Just that, as we suspected the Enemy were listening to our radios. Taljaard didn’t say who was going to do it or how. Sarge X was quiet for more than a minute. ‘Can you do it?’
Taljaard looked at me. I nodded, more certainly than I felt.
‘Roger. We can.’
‘Do it,’ came the reply, and I took half of Team Charlie to the stables while the other half began carrying ammunition out of the police station and stacking it on the pavement.
We saddled thirty horses – fourteen for the riders and sixteen for ammunition – and we raced to the police station while listening to the radio. The battle continued. Sector 3 were only shooting single shots, their ammunition almost exhausted.
We loaded the boxes on to the horses. I led the group, we rode as fast as we could. It was nearly five kilometres, first to the old township, now fully occupied by Amanzi people, then along the winding path that had been trampled out by animals over many years. It was difficult terrain, the gradient very steep. The horses were heavily laden and we progressed slowly in the dark. Over the radio we heard the anxious voices of our defence force: ‘They’re coming, they’re coming, help us!’ The Enemy had launched an attack on foot when they realised return fire was diminishing. We heard the shots. We heard the cries of fear from our men in their last moments before death.
We came around the last bend of the mountain. Into the smell of cordite and burning rubber and petrol, the clatter of shots, at full gallop. Aram called them on the radio: Team Charlie on horseback from the west, don’t shoot. But there were none of our men left to shoot, only the Enemy.
We jumped off the horses, sought shelter against the ridge. I had my R4 DM, scanned the scene through my scope – to the right, the Jeep track coming up the canyon. Another four motorcycles blocking the track and ten or twelve men working hard to clear the road, now that no one was shooting at them. Behind them, as far as I could make out in the dark, to the bottom, the long line of the Enemy’s vehicles, and people who wanted to kill us.
I swung the scope to the left. I saw the lines and the trenches of our Sector 3. The Enemy’s soldiers running up and down with torches, pistols and rifles, shooting the good people of Dad’s Army who lay on the ground, making sure they were dead.
The Jeep track was our first priority. We had to keep the road blocked. I started there. I breathed in, aimed, fired. One shot after the other. This caught them by surprise, they thought our forces were wiped out. I was calm, controlled. I didn’t waste a single shot. Seven of them down. The rest bolted behind the nearest pick-up and hid there.
They shot back, tentatively at first, then with more focus, from the left and the right. Wildly, all together, a curtain of lead, whining over us, smacking between us. Aram, Taljaard and I had experience. We had been trained by Domingo. We kept Team Charlie calm. Aram deployed us, directing half of our firepower to the left, the others to the right. ‘Choose your own targets,’ he said to me.
I shot at their front line, then again into the canyon. Until their lines were clear and silent. And the Enemy fire from the valley track also died down.
We didn’t celebrate when we won the mini-battle. Because just beyond us, barely two hundred metres away, a hundred of our people were shot dead. People we knew well, likeable, good people, our amateur soldiers, who had given their lives tonight for Amanzi.
Aram let Sarge X know we had halted them for now. It was however just a question of time before they abandoned the trucks-in-the-kloof-plug completely and came for us on foot. There must still be a hundred and fifty of them left.
Sarge X was quiet again for a long time. Then: ‘You’ll have to hold your position, Charlie. Delta is pinned down for now. But the cavalry is coming.’
That meant Domingo. And Alpha and Bravo. Still at least an hour away, according to my calculations. What difference would they make, twenty-nine people, against this overwhelming force?
Sofia Bergman
One of the things I discovered on that night of 9 February is that I made a huge mistake becoming a Spotter. Becoming a soldier. It was when Killian . . .
I don’t really want to talk about it, I don’t want to remember it. The simple fact that you were lying there with your people, people with whom you had a strong bond, a Special Ops bond of mutual hardship and so many other things, you love these people, and there on the other side are people who want to kill you and your friends. Who were shooting at you. Who wanted to come and take everything you and your people worked so hard for. I . . .
Killian, he . . . He was hit by a twenty-millimetre shell.
Right beside me.
But I already knew by then that I wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. Not because I was scared – we were all terrified – but because I knew the things that I saw and experienced that night were going to . . . They were going to change me. For ever. In a way that I didn’t want to be changed.
By then of course it was too late.
Half an hour before sunrise the first wave of the Enemy came. They came on foot, they came from the east, from our eastern flank. We had expected them there, because on our right flank we had the advantage of height. And they couldn’t come up the Jeep track; I took out every one of them who poked his head out from behind the vehicles.
In the dark we saw the attack very late. But Aram and Taljaard had made us dig in, as well as we could. And they kept us disciplined; we shot single shots, controlled shots. Despite their numbers – that first infantry assault was nearly sixty men – they didn’t get closer than seventy metres. Then they fell back.
We only lost one member of Charlie.
And then it was quiet again.
We knew Domingo was coming. We knew daybreak was coming.
We just didn’t know if they would come in time.
Chapter 85
February: IV
It wasn’t Alpha and Bravo led by Domingo, or daylight, that determined the outcome of the battle. It was the air force of Amanzi.
The second wave of infantry that attacked us on the crest beside Sector 3 was larger and more disciplined. They used the cover and charge tactic, which suppressed our return fire so they could advance faster. And come ever increasingly closer.
We suffered more losses. In the first ten minutes of the skirmish they shot dead three members of Charlie. One of them was our Sergeant Aram, as he ran fearlessly between us encouraging us and keeping us calm. Aram, the legendary Namibian, whose records for the Special Ops marathons of thirty and sixty kilometres have never been broken.
But the eastern horizon lightened and we could see them better, and we inflicted losses on them too. Still they approached, each wave of fire closer than the last.
And then the Cessna came. Out of the north, behind us, from Amanzi’s side. Just before the sun rose over the horizon.
Later I would try counting the number of times in my life that I have been surprised and happy to see the belly of a Hennie Fly aeroplane. But that morning must have surely been the best. Hennie Fly and Peace Pedi flew so low and fast over us that I ducked. It was, they later explained, so that the Enemy’s reaction time would not be fast enough to shoot the plane.
They roared over us, and then came the explosions down the valley, one after the other. Our Cessna had become a bomber; the bombs were hand grenades that Domingo had found in the Defence Force arsenal at De Aar. He and Hennie had never mentioned this strategy. Hennie and Peace practised in secret. Not even the Cabinet knew about it, because Domingo firmly believed there was a spy in our midst.
The accuracy of this bombing run left much to be desired, but the Enemy were stunned for the moment, and that gave us a chance to lift our heads again, to drive the foot soldiers back with concentrated fire.
The Cessna banked sharply to the right and disappeared again behind Amanzi’s mountains towards town.
And then it came again. Just as low. The grenades fell more accurately, Hennie and Peace had now spotted where the fighters were holed up. The Enemy shot wildly at the aeroplane. We fired at them, with deadly accuracy. The foot soldiers began to fall back.
The Cessna turned.
They came again, a third time. Hand grenades exploded, stones and shrapnel and the screams of the dying.
And then the cavalry arrived. Literally.