Refugees, tens of thousands of them, began to stream across the border into South Africa. Terrified, starving, riddled with disease, they told their harrowing stories. The South Africans realized to their horror that they had been nourishing a monster in Renanio.
At the same time, the more moderate Joaquim Chissano, who had replaced Samara Machel as president of the government of Mozambique and Frelimo, began making placatory overtures to South Africa. The two presidents met, and the Nkomati Accord was hurriedly revived, this time with honest intent. Overnight the flow of South African aid to Renarno was cut off.
This had all taken place only months before, and General China and his fellow Renamo commanders were angry, desperate men, their stores of food and weapons dwindling rapidly without prospect of resupply. Soon they would be reduced to surviving on plunder and loot, foraging and scavenging from a countryside already ravaged by twelve years of guerrilla warfare. It was inevitable that they would turn their fury on what remained of the civilian population and on any foreigner they could capture. The world was against them, and they were against the world.
Sitting up in the high seat of the Hind, General China let an this run through his mind. From here he seemed to have an overview of the chaos and confusion. The entire country was in a state of flux, and as always in a situation such as this, there was opportunity for the cunning and the ruthless to seize upon.
Of the Renanio field commanders, General China had proved himself over the years to be the most resourceful. With each victory and success he had established his power more firmly. His army was the most powerful of the three Renamo divisions. The external central committee was nominally the high command of the resistance movement, but paradoxically General China's pres J1i tige and influence were becoming progressively greater with each setback the movement suffered. More and more the central committee acceded to his wishes. The alacrity with which they had reacted to his request for a Portuguese pilot and engineers demonstrated. this most aptly. Of course, the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind had enormously inflated his prestige and importance, while possession of the extraordinary vehicle in which he now soared over the wilderness placed him in a unique position of power.
General China smiled contentedly and spoke into the microphone of his hard helmet. "Pilot, can you see the village yet?"
"Not yet, General. I estimate four minutes" more flying time."
The Portuguese pilot was in his early thirties, young enough still to have dash and fire but old enough to have accumulated experience and discretion. He was handsome in a swarthy olive-skinned fashion, with a drooping gunslinger mustache and the dark, bright eyes of a predatory bird. From the first he had handled the controls of the Hind with precision and confidence, and his skill had increased with each hour flown as he came to terms with every nuance of the Hind's flying characteristics.
The two Portuguese engineers had taken command of the Russian ground crew and supervised every move they made. One of the Hind's principal advantages was that it could be serviced and maintained in all conditions without the need for sophisticated equipment, and the chief engineer assured General China that the spares and tools he had captured at the laager were sufficient to keep the Hind airborne indefinitely The only shortages were of missiles for the Swatter system and assault rockets, but this was amply compensated for by almost a million rounds of 12.7-mm cannon shells they had captured in the laager.
It had taken 150 porters to carry the munitions away, while another 500 porters had each carried a twenty-five-liter drum of avgas.
Renamo used mainly women porters, trained since girlhood to carry weights on their cads That quantity of avgas was sufficient to keep the Hind flying for almost two hundred hours, and by then there would be a good chance of capturing a Frelimo fuel tanker, either on the railway line or on one of the roads nearer the coast that were still open to traffic.
However, General China's main concern at that moment was to keep the rendezvous he had arranged by radio with General Tippoo Tip, the commander of Renamo's southern division-General, I have spotted the village," the pilot said in China's headphones.
"All, yes, I see it," China answered. "Turn toward it, please."
As the Hind approached, Sean shifted his perch, creeping behind a densely leafed bough and flattening himself against the branch. Although he knew it was dangerous to turn his face toward the sky, he relied on the bush Of his beard and his deep tan to prevent the sun reflecting off his face, and he watched the helicopter avidly.
He realized that their ultimate survival depended on being able to elude this monster, and he studied its shape to estimate the view the pilot and his gunner commanded from behind their canopies.
It might be vital for Sean to know the blind spots of the flight engineer and the field of fire of his weapons.
He saw the cannon in the remote turret below the nose abruptly traverse left and right, almost as though the gunner were demonstrating them for him. Sean could not know that General China was merely gloating over his own power and playing with the weapon controls, but the movement illustrated the Gatling cannon s restricted field of fire.
The barrel could swing through an arc Of Only thirty degrees from lock to lock; beyond that the pilot was obliged to swivel the entire aircraft on its axis in order to bring the cannon to bear.
The Hind was very close now. Sean could make out every minute detail of the hull, from the crimson "Excellent Crew" arrow on the nose to the rows of rivet heads that stitched the titanium armor sheets. He looked for some weakness, some flaw in the massive armor, but in the few seconds before she was overhead, he saw she was impregnable, except for the air intakes to the turbo engines, like a pair of hooded eyes above the upper pilot's canopy. The intakes were screened by debris suppressors, bossed light metal discs that inhibited the dust and debris thrown up by the downdraft of the rotors when the helicopter hovered close to the ground from being sucked into the turbines. However, the debris suppressors were not so substantial as to prevent the Stinger missiles flying clearly into the intakes, and Sean saw that there was a gap around the edge of the metal boss wide enough for a man to stick his head through. At the correct angle and from very close range an expert marksman might just be able to aim a burst of machine-gun fire through that gap so as to damage the turbine vanes. Sean knew that even a chip from one of those vanes would unbalance the turbine and set up such vibrations in the engine that it would fly to pieces within seconds.
"A hell of a shot, and a hell of a lot of luck," Sean muttered, L staring upward through slitted eyes. Suddenly the ugh t reflected from the armored glass canopy altered so that he could see into the interior of the cockpit.
He recognized General China, despite the hard plastic flying helmet and the mirrored aviator glasses shielding his eyes, and hatred flushed fiercely through his guts. Here was the man on whom he could firmly set the blame for Job's death and all their other woes and hardships.
"I want you," Sean muttered. "God, how badly I want you."
China seemed to sense the force of his hatred, for he turned his head slightly and looked down directly at Sean's perch, staring at him evenly through the mirrored lens of his sunglasses. Sean shrank down upon the branch.