“Put me through to Number Three
Squadron!”
ABOARD SIERRA ONE ZERO, OVER PELINDABA
Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell took a deep breath, held it for a second, and let it out-trying to shake off a case of last minute jitters. Literally last minute, too, he thought. They couldn’t be much more flying time than that from the drop zone.
The drop zone was one of his concerns. Their need for total surprise had ruled out the use of pathfinders to mark the DZ. As a result, the aircraft carrying the Rangers were relying entirely on navigational data supplied by Navstar GPS Global Positioning System-satellites. The GPS program managers claimed their system was accurate to within a few feet, and O’Connell hoped like hell that they were right.
He staggered slightly and braced himself as the MC-141 began a steep climb, popping up to five hundred feet for its run over the Pelindaba complex. Any second now.
Without stopping to think much about it, O’Connell found himself muttering a prayer from his childhood.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”
As the MC-141 leveled out, its two side doors whined open and twin blast shields deployed to provide pockets of calm air outside the doors. Cold night air and howling engine noise swept through the crowded troop compartment. O’Connell watched as the plane’s jumpmaster leaned out through the open door, checked the shield and jump step, and made sure they were approaching the drop zone.
The jump light over the open cargo door flickered and went green.
“Go!
Go! GO!”
Conscious thought faded and thousands of hours of training and preparation took over. Rank by rank and row by row, the Rangers shuffled rapidly to the open side doors and threw themselves into empty air.
Five C-141s swept low over Pelindaba spewing out hundreds of Rangers and their equipment.
COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES, PELINDABA
Col. Frans Peiper spilled his mug of hot coffee onto the bunker’s concrete floor as his phone buzzed. He grabbed the phone on its second buzz. “
Pelindaba CO.”
He didn’t recognize the panic-stricken voice on the other end.
“Air raid warning! This is an air raid warning!”
“What?”
The roar of large aircraft passing directly overhead drowned out any reply.
Peiper dropped the phone and ran to one of the bunker’s firing slits, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of these attacking planes. Nothing.
Nothing. There! Something huge and black-more a shadow than a discernible shape-flashed past and disappeared beyond the eastern end of the compound. They were under attack!
He whirled and slammed a shaking hand down on the alert button.
Sirens screamed across the complex in a rising and falling wail designed to wake the dead, or in this case, the two thirds of Pelindaba’s garrison who were off duty and fast asleep in their barracks. At the same time, arc lights around the perimeter began winking out to deny incoming enemy bombers easy aiming points.
1/75TH RANGERS
More than five hundred men of the 1/75this three companies and its headquarters came drifting down out of the niSjIt sky into the Pelindaba atomic research and weapons storage complex. Some never made it farther than that.
Three Rangers, the first men out of the lead plane, landed too far to the west-outside the barbed wire and inside a minefield. One hit the ground and rolled right onto the pressure plate of an antipersonnel mine. A white-orange blast tore him in half and spewed fragments that scythed the other two paratroopers to the ground, bleeding and unconscious.
More Americans came down hard in the middle of Pelindaba’s ornamental rock gardens-breaking legs or arms or fracturing collarbones. Near the power substation, a Charlie Company sergeant slammed face first into a steel pylon at more than twenty miles an hour. The impact broke his neck and left his corpse draped across a steel girder forty feet off the ground.
Two groups of Rangers had the worst luck of all.
Six men landed in a tangle of billowing parachutes and loose gear on open ground-less than thirty feet away from mortar pits occupied by South
African troops who’d been on duty. The Americans were still struggling out of their chutes when a fusillade of automatic weapons fire mowed them down.
Four others came down right in the middle of a South African infantry squad patrolling inside the compound. Flames stabbed through the darkness as R4 rifles and M16s were fired at point-blank range. Seconds later, all four Americans and three of the South Africans lay dead. One of the
Rangers wore the silver eagle insignia of a full colonel over his chest pocket. Paul Gener, commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, had made his last combat jump.
HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS
Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell hit the ground with his legs bent and rolled-his hands already fumbling with the release catch for his parachute harness. A light wind tugged at his chute, threatening to drag him along through the open grassland between the research center and the weapons storage bunkers.
Done! The catch snapped open and he shrugged out of his harness. He got to his knees to get a better view of what was going on.
Most of the compound was in darkness, but enough light remained to make out the pitch-black outlines of a slit trench only twenty yards away. Good. The trench was ready-made cover if he could get to it without being shot. It also ran from north to south, separating the nuclear weapons storage area from the rest of Pelindaba.
More men were coming down all around him-slamming into the ground with teeth-rattling force. Automatic weapons fire rattled from somewhere close by, kicking up a spray of bullet-torn grass and dirt. Two Rangers who’d just scrambled out of their chutes screamed and folded in on themselves.
O’Connell threw himself flat. Too many of the damned South Africans were wide awake and ready for a fight. His troops needed protection-any kind of protection-or they were going to be slaughtered while still landing.
He yanked a smoke grenade off his combat webbing, pulled the pin, and lobbed it toward a half-seen bunker. Others around him were doing the same thing. Wargames played during the planning for Brave Fortune had shown that the immediate use of smoke might save a few lives. That was why every
Ranger in the assault force had been briefed to throw a smoke grenade as soon as possible after landing. The more smoke in the air, the more confusion. And the more confusion, the better.
White tendrils of smoke started to swirl and billow, spreading in the wind to form a light haze that grew thicker as more and more grenades were thrown. South African machine guns and assault rifles chattered from bunkers around the perimeter, stabbing through the haphazard smoke screen. More Rangers were hit and thrown back-dead or badly wounded.
“Goddamnit!” O’Connell unslung his M16 and started belly-crawling toward the South African slit trench. The soldiers who’d landed near him followed, some dragging injured comrades. From all appearances, his battalion was being cut to pieces before it could even get organized.
COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES
Peiper stared through the narrow firing slits of his headquarters bunker, trying to piece together some idea of just what the devil was going on.
If this was an air raid, where were the bombs? And if it wasn’t, what were his troops firing at?
Then he saw the first wisps of white and gray smoke rising from the open ground beyond Pelindaba’s science labs and uranium enrichment plant.
Peiper expected to be attacked by the Cubans. He expected the Cubans to use chemical weapons as part of that attack. And now he saw what could only be the first nightmarish tendrils of nerve gas drifting toward his bunker.
He staggered back and grabbed a young lieutenant who still looked half-asleep.