He held his fire for three seconds. Then as the curtains of dust blew open, he fired through them. The second tanker burst, blown clear of the railway lines by the explosion of its lethal cargo.
Burning avgas flowed down the slope like the lava of a miniature Vesuvius, and Sean threw the launcher at the rocketeer's chest.
"Hit them on the head with the bloody thing!" he yelled at him.
"That's the only damage you are going to do with it!"
The mortar men were doing better. Sean had sighted their weapons for them, and they bobbed and weaved over the short mortar tubes as they dropped the finned projectiles into the open mouths.
A steady stream of bombs lobbed high into the dawn sky and rained down into the hilltop laager.
Sean watched the effect of the bursts with a dispassionate, professional eye. "Good," he murmured. "Good." But they had only been capable of carrying thirty bombs for each of the mortars; they he'd almost two kilos each, and they would be expended in a weig few short minutes. They must rush the perimeter while the exploding bombs distracted the Frelimo gunners. He hefted the AKM rifle and slipped the safety catch.
"Go!" Sean yelled, and blew a short series of blasts on his whistle, "Go!"
The Shanganes came to their feet in a single cohesive movement and swept down the hill, but there were only twenty of them, a puny line of running men brightly lit by the flames. The 12.7-men gunners on the hill fastened on them, and tracer flew in clouds about them, thick as a locust plague.
"Shit!" Sean laughed aloud in terror. "What a way to gal 99 One of the Frelimo gunners had picked Sean out of the sweep line and was concentrating his fire on him, but Sean was M
downhill with long, flying strides and the gunner was s;11;9 1; and a little behind. Shot flashed past Sean so close he could feel the wind of it tugging at his tunic. Impossibly, he lengthened his stride, and beside him Matatu giggled shrilly, keeping pace with him down the hill.
"What's so goddamned funny, you silly little bugger?" Sean yelled at him furiously, and they hit the level ground beside the burning fuel tankers. The Frehmo gunner's field of fire was blanketed by the rolling screen of black smoke, and in the respite Sean marshaled his sweep line of racing Shanganes, pivoting them on the center and directing them at the perimeter of the laager, pump to urge them on. They used the smoke ing his right fist overhead to cover themselves for the next two hundred meters of their charge. The dawn breeze was spreading it, sooty black, dense, and low along the ground.
A Frefimo sentry staggered out of the smoke ahead of Sean. He ubby tennis shoes, he had wore faded, tattered denim jeans and gr lost his weapon, and a rocket splinter must have hit him in the eye.
The eye was dislodged from its socket and hung out on his cheek like a huge wet grape, dangling and bouncing on the thick cord of the optic nerve as the man jerked his head.
Without breaking his stride, Sean hit him in the belly with a tap of three from the AKM, firing from the hip. He jumped over the body as it hit the ground.
They came out of the smoke, still in sweep line. Sean glanced along the line and reaW incredulously that they had not yet taken a single casualty; the twenty Shanganes were spread out and going hard, offering 5my fleeting targets through the smoke and flame to the disoriented Frelimo machine guns.
At that moment he saw the single strand of wire and the line of round metal discs on short steel droppers only a dozen paces ahead of him. Each disc was emblazoned with a stylized skull and crossbones in scarlet that caught the ruddy glow of the flames, and almost before he realized it they were into the mine field that guarded the perimeter of the laager.
Two seconds later, the Shangane running on Sean's right-hand side triggered an antipersonnel mine. From the waist down his body was obscured by the dust and flash of the explosion and he dropped to the earth with both of his legs blown to bloody stumps below the knees.
"Keep going!" Sean screamed. "We are nearly through!" Now his fear was a grotesque black beast upon his back that weighed him down and choked his breathing. To be maimed was a terror far beyond that of death, and the ground beneath his feet was sown with the steel capsules of terrible mutilation.
Matatu ducked in front of Sean, forcing him to check his stride.
"Follow me, my Bwana!" he piped in Swahili. "Tread where I have trodden." And Sean obeyed, shortening his stride to that of the little manikin.
So Matatu ran him through the last fifty paces of the mine field, and Sean knew he had never witnessed such a display of raw courage and devotion of one human being to another. Two more Shanganes went down before they were through, their legs blown away beneath them. They left them lying in puddles of their own blood and minced flesh and jumped over the single strand of wire that marked the far side of the mine field.
Even in the terror and exhilaration of the moment, Sean felt his eyelids scalding with the strength of his gratitude and love for the little Ndorobo. He wanted to pick him up like a child's toy and hug him. Instead he gasped at him, "You're so damned skinny it wouldn't have gone off even if you had stepped on one." Matatu twinkled with delight and ran at Sean's side as he charged the 12.7-men machine gun in the sandbagged emplacement that lay dead ahead of them.
Sean was firing the AKM from the hip, short, raking bursts, and he could see the head of the Frefirno gunner in the embrasure of the parapet of sandbags.
The gunner swiveled the barrel of the heavy machine gun onto him, aiming for his belly. He was so close Sean could see his eyes reflecting the red light of the fires as he sighted over it. The instant before he fired, Sean hurled himself forward, dropping under the shot like a runner sliding for the base plate; bullets whipped over his head and the muzzle blast beat in his eardrums, but he rolled forward and came up hard against the parapet, flattening himself against it, so close that he could have reached out and touched the muzzle of the machine gun.
Sean unhooked the fragmentation grenade from his belt, drew the pin, and popped it into the embrasure beside him as though he were posting a letter.
He smiled ashe heard the Frelimo gunner scream something unintelligible in Portuguese.
"Happy birthday!" he said, and the grenade exploded, blowing out through the opening in an exhalation of flame and fumes.
Sean jumped up and rolled over the top of the parapet. There were two men in the emplacement, writhing and wriggling on the floor, and half a dozen others had abandoned the position and were sprinting away up the hill, unarmed and screaming with panic.
Sean left Matatu to finish off the two wounded men on the floor with his skinning knife, while he seized the abandoned 12.7-men machine gun and manhandled it to the rear wall of the emplacement. He aimed it up the hill at the fleeing Frelimo and fired a long, traversing burst. Two of the runners dropped in their tracks. Grinning happily, crooning to himself with the fun of it, Matatu dragged a steel box of spare ammunition belts across the bloody floor and helped Sean reload.
With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean made a sweep with the heavy machine gun. His fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of running Frelimo and scatter them