"All right." Sean stood up. "Let's go find a training ground."
They picked out a spot a few hundred meters downriver from the dugout where the side of a low kopJe formed a natural lecture theater. The tall riverine mahogany trees spread their branches overhead to provide cover from a surprise raid by the Hind gunships. When Ferdinand and his men returned bathed in sweat from their little outing, Sean put them to work clearing the amphitheater of thorn and scrub and digging shell scrapes conveniently close at hand for use when air raids interrupted classes.
"Right," Sean told Job and Claudia. "Now we can uncrate the trainer set and one of the launchers. From now on it's "look and learn,"
"show and tell" time."
When they opened the first crate, Sean discovered that the battery power pack was discharged. However, each crate contained a small charger set with appropriate connections and transformers.
Under Job's supervision Ferdinand and his men carried the power packs up to the headquarters communications center, and at General China's order they were given priority use of the portable 220-volt, 15-kilowatt generator. Sean connected up the power packs in batches of five, but it would take twenty-four hours before they had power available for all the missile launchers.
With the batteries on charge they laid out the trainer set and one of the launchers on the makeshift table Ferdinand had built on the floor of the open-air theater under the trees. While Claudia read aloud from the instruction manual, Sean and Job stripped and reassembled the equipment until they were thoroughly familiar with all of it.
Sean was relieved and pleased to discover that with the exception of the IFF, the operation of the equipment was not a great deal more complicated than the conventional RPG-7 rocket launchers. The RPG-7 was so much a part of the guerrilla arsenal that, as Job remarked, every single man in China's division could load and lock it on a pitch dark night in a thunderstorm.
"Anyway, we don't need the IFF," Sean pointed out. "Everything that flies in these skies, apart from the dicky birds, is a foe."
The IFF, "Identification Friend or Foe," was a system that inter rooted the target, determining from the aircraft's on-board transponder whether it was hostile or friendly and preventing missile launches against friendly aircraft.
Claudia found the section on the manual dealing with the IFF, and under her tutelage they disarmed the system, converting the Stinger into a free-fire weapon that would attack any aircraft at which it was aimed. straight Without IFF fit, the attack sequence for the missile is forward. The target is picked up in the small screen of the aiming sight, and the safety device above the pistol grip is disengaged with the right thumb. The actuator is engaged by depressing the button built into the reverse of the pistol grip. This starts the run up of the navigational gyro and releases a flow of freon gas to cool the infrared seekers as they become active. With the sights held on the target, all incoming infrared radiation is magnified and focused on the detector cell of the missile head. As soon as this radiation is of sufficient concentration to allow the mi ssi e to track to its source, the gyro stabilizer un cages and the missile emits a high-pitched tone.
To fire the mi ssi the operator depresses the trigger in the pistol grip with his Torefinger, which starts the electric ejector motor. The missile discharges from the launch tube through the frangible front seal and ejects to a safe distance, approximately eight meters from the operator, to protect him from rocket backblast. At this point the solid-fuel rocket engine fires, the blast of exhaust gas flares out the retractable tail fins, and the missile accelerates to four times the speed of sound. When an inertial force of twenty-eight times gravity is attained, the fuse shutout is thrown open and the missile is armed. It tracks the target on a fire-and-forget trajectory, guided not by the operator but by its own proportional navigational system.
With the specialized "Hind" attack cassette inserted in the launcher's RMP-re programmable microprocessor-the system automatically switches into "two-color" mode when it is a hundred meters from the infrared source. At this point it abandons the infrared radiations emitted by the engine exhaust suppressors and instead focuses on the much weaker ultraviolet emanations from the engine intakes. On tins target the high-explosive warhead hits to kill.
"Even a Shangane could learn how to fire one of these," Job said.
Sean grinned. "Tut-tut, your Matabele tribal racism is showing again.
It's like this-when you are genetically superior, there is simply no point in trying to conceal the fact."
They both glanced expectantly at Claudia, but she did not even look up from the manual as she drawled, "You're wasting your time, you two bigots. You aren't going to get a rise out of me this time."
"Bigot." Job savored the word. "It's the first time anybody has ever called me that. I love it."
"That's enough fooling around." Sean broke it up. "Let's take a look at the trainer."
After they had connected one of the freshly charged battery packs and assembled the trainer equipment, Sean gave his opinion: "With this stuff, we can have the lads ready to go into action within days, not weeks."
Once a microcassette was inserted into the training monitor, the launcher screen simulated the image of a Hind, which the instructor was able to manipulate in various flight patterns, climbing, descending, sideslipping, or hovering. While he did so, he was able to watch the trainee's reactions as he attempted to acquire the ghost ship on his own screen and attack it with a phantom missile.
Sean and Job played with the trainer like a pair of teenagers, flying the image in complicated maneuvers. "It's just like a PacMan game," Job enthused. "But what we need is a durn-durn, a pseudo-Shangane to act as a trainee for us."
Once again both the men looked at Claudia, who was still sitting cross-legged on the table, studying the manual.
She looked up as she felt their eyes on her. "A durn-durn?" she demanded. "I'll show you durn-durn. Give me the launcher."
She stood in the center of the amphitheater floor with the launcher balanced on her shoulder and stared into the sighting screw. The bulky equipment seemed to dwarf her. She had reversed her camouflage cap so the peak stuck out behind her head, and it gave her the ga mine air of a Little League baseball player.
"ReadyT" Sean asked.
"Pull!" she said, concentrating ferociously on the screen. Sean and Job exchanged smug supercilious i grins.
"Incoming!" Sean called sharply. "Twelve o'clock high. Lock and load." He brought the ghost Hind in on a head-on attack at 150 knots.
"Locked and loaded," Claudia affirmed, and in their screen they watched the duplicate sight ring of her missile launcher swing up smoothly and center on the approaching Hind.
"Actuator on," she said calmly, and a second later, they heard the launcher sob and growl in her grip, then settle into a steady insect whine, like an infuriated mosquito.
"Target acquired," Claudia murmured. The Hind was six hundred meters out but coming in fast, swelling dramatically in the sights.
"Fire!" she said. They saw the red light blink and then change to green, signaling that the rocket engine of the fictitious missile was running. Almost instantaneously the image of the Hind disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the flashing legend: TARGET