Elevation would give them a good field of fire from which to launch. However, the RPG was not an infrared seeker and had very limited surface-to-air capability.
The Renamo were so preoccupied that not one of them even glanced at Sean's white face as they scurried to take up their positions. Now the whistle of approaching rotors was punctuated by the crackle and rap of ground fire.
Sean did not even look around. Ahead he saw the glint of barbed wire. The women's stockade was also well camouflaged under brush and netting, and it too seemed deserted by the female wardens.
"Claudia!" he shouted as he came up to the fence and gripped the wire.
"Where are you?"
"Here, Sean, here!" she yelled back. There were two buts inside the stockade wire. The doors were locked and there were no windows. Claudia's voice came from the nearest building, almost drowned out by the thunder of engines, the shriek of rotors, and the roar of ground fire.
"Give me a boost, "jean ordered, and backed away from the wire. The fence was seven feet high, he judged. Job and Dedan ran forward and crouched below it. Sean sprinted straight at them and, as he leaped up, he drove his feet into the cupped hands they had formed for him with interlocking fingers. In unison they bobbed up and flung their arms high, flipping Sean forward and over. He cleared the wire easily, somersaulted in the air, and landed on his feet. He cushioned the shock, tumbling like a paratrooper, and rolled smoothly back onto his feet, using his momentum to hurl himself forward.
"Clear the door!" he yelled at Claudia as he built up speed and crashed into the crude hand-hewn panel. It was too solid and heavy to shatter under the drive of his shoulder, but the hinges ripped clean out of the daubed wall and crashed inward in a cloud of dust and flying fragments of dried mud.
Claudia was crouched against the far wall, but as he burst into the hut behind the falling door panel, she rushed forward to meet him. He caught her in his arms, but when she tried to kiss him he whirled her around by one arm and ran with her to the door.
"What's happenings" she gasped.
"We are making a break." As they ran out into the sunlight again he saw that Job and Dedan had a hold on the bottom strand of the fence.
With all the strength of their arms and legs, they were dragging it upward, opening a narrow gap between the wire and the sun-baked earth. Sean stooped to the same strand from the inside, settling his grip between the clusters of spikes, and heaved upward. Under the combined strength of the three of them the ground at the foot of the nearest fence pole cracked and gave, the pole was lifted a few inches out of the hole in which it was planted, and the strand of wire came up in their hands.
"Down on your belly!" Sean grunted at Claudia. "Get under it!"
She was lean and nimble as a ferret, and the barbs cleared her back with inches to spare as she wriggled through.
"Hold it!" Sean barked at Job, and they strained up, black muscles knotting, faces contorted with the effort.
Sean dropped flat and pushed himself under the wire. Halfway through he felt one of the steel spikes snag in his flesh and stop him dead. "Pull me through," he ordered, and while Dedan continued to hold up the wire, Job stooped and they linked hands in a fireman's grip.
"Pull!" Sean ordered, and Job heaved. Sean felt his flesh tear and the blood spurt down his back, then he was free.
As he rolled to his feet, Claudia gasped, "Your back!" But he seized her arm again and demanded of Job, "Which way?" He knew Job would have studied the camp during the days he had been imprisoned here. He could rely on his judgment.
"The river," Job responded immediately. "If we can float down clear of the camp."
"TAad the way," Sean ordered. He had to shout to make himself heard. All around them rose the stutter of automatic small-arms fire. There was the deeper clatter of heavy machine guns, sounding like a stick drawn sharply across a sheet of corrupted iron, and then even that din was drowned out by a thunder like Victoria Falls in flood. Sean knew exactly what it was, although he had never heard it before-the sound of the Gatling-type, multi barreled cannon mounted in the nose of a Hind helicopter, firing 12.7-men bullets like the jet of a fire hose.
He felt Claudia falter beside him at the gut-melting terror of that sound, and he jerked her arm. "Come on!" he snarled at her.
"Run!" She was still limping slightly from her injured knee ligament as they followed Job and Dedan down toward the river.
Though they were still under the spread branches of the forest, just ahead of them was open ground.
A small -party of Renamo were doubling across this opening, coming up the track toward them, eight or nine men in Indian file.
Each of them carried an RPG mobile rocket launcher. As they ran, their faces were turned up toward the sky, seeking a target for their rockets.
The detachment of racketeers was still two hundred meters from them when suddenly the earth around them erupted. Sean had never in all his war experience seen anything like it. The ground dissolved, seemed to turn to a liquid that boiled into a fog of dust under the jet of 12.7-men cannon shells.
Along a wide swathe of cannon fire all was destroyed. Even the trees disappeared in a whirlwind of wood fragments and shredded leaves; only the shattered stumps still stood as the storm of fire passed on. The ground was left like the furrows of a freshly plowed field, and on it was scattered the remains of the party of RPG rocket men. They were hacked and minced as though they had been fed through the cogs of some fearsome machinery.
Sean still had a grip on Claudia's arm, and he pulled her down into the grass beside the track just as a shadow swept over them.
However, the canopy of branches overhead must have screened them from the eyes of the gunner in the helicopter. Job and Dedan had also dived for cover in the grass verge beside the path and avoided detection.
The Hind cruised overhead, barely fifty feet above the tops of the trees, and abruptly they had a full view of the machine as it crossed over the open ground where the torn corpses of the rocket men lay scattered. Sean felt a physical shock at the sight of it. He had not expected it to be so large and so grotesquely ugly.
It was fifty feet long. The Russians themselves called it "Sturmovich," the humpback. It was a deformed monster: aberrant and ungainly, the green and brown splotches of tropical camouflage giving it the appearance of disease and leprous decay. The bulging double canopies of armored glass looked like malevolent eyes, and so fierce was their gaze that Sean instinctively flattened himself in the grass and flung a protective arm over Claudia's back.
Below the gross body of the gunship hung an assembly of rocket s, and as they stared at it in awe the machine hovered and PM rotated on its own axis, lowered its blunt unlovely nose, and fired a spread of rockets. They launched with fiery sibilance on plumes of white smoke, streaking across the river and bursting on the ant's nests of sandbagged bunkers in fountains of flame and smoke and dust. The noise was deafening, and the shrill whine of the gunship's rotors was like an awl screwing into their eardrums.