Van Vuuren stared at his darkened screen in dismay. Both the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and its thermal-imaging system were down. One part of his panicked mind remained calm enough to guess that the vehicle’s delicate electronics had taken shock damage in the same bomb blast that had scarred its turret armor.
“Meitiens!” He scrambled out of the other man’s seat in frantic haste.
Only the gunner had the technical know-how needed to get their ballistic computer up and running again. He collided head-on with the corporal in a confused tangle of arms and legs and curses.
Van Vuuren’s attempt to do everything himself cost Rookiat Two One precious time it did not have.
NIGHT STALKER LEAD, 160TH AVIATION REGIMENT,
OVER PELINDABA
One hundred and fifty feet above the highway, the MH-8 helicopter gunship, known as Night Stalker Lead, spiraled downward in a tight turn to the right. Ghostly images of trucks, hillsides, and patches of brush spun past at dizzying speed.
While the AVS-6 nightvision goggles worn by the gunship’s two crewmen made them look a bit like pop-eyed insects, the goggles also turned night into lime-green-tinted day inside a narrow forty-degree arc. Pilots and gunners using NVGs could pick out tremendous detail-the difference between thin, harmless tree branches and thick tree trunks for example.
That and years of intensive training gave the crews of the 160th Aviation Regiment a combat symbolized by their motto: “Death waits in the dark.”
The 160this gunships had proven themselves invaluable in combat over Panama and the Persian Gulf. Now they were proving it again in the darkness over
South Africa.
Night Stalker Lead’s pilot, a U.S. Army major, leveled out of his turn at fifty feet.
“You see where that shot came from, Dan?”
“Looking.” His gunner, a middle-aged warrant officer going prematurely gray, stared straight ahead-scanning the eerie, cartoonlike world visible through his goggles. A low hill rising steeply ahead. Hard-to-see clumps of scrub brush and scraggly trees. Painfully bright fires raging just over the horizon. There!
“Target! One o’clock! AFV!
Now the pilot saw it-the solid box-shape of an armored vehicle parked in a copse of trees overlooking the highway. He pulled back on his controls, decelerating to give his gunner a better shot.
“Nail him!”
“Doing it! “The gunner swiveled his fire control to the right. Cross hairs settled over the enemy AFV and stayed there.
“Locked on!”
Night Stalker Lead’s pilot dropped the gunship’s nose.
“Firing. 11
The helicopter’s last remaining TOW antitank missile leapt from its right stores pylon and raced through the sky trailing fire and an ultrathin control wire. It crossed the six hundred meters separating the gunship from its target and exploded against the South African AFV’s turret. The
Rookiat’s top armor had been designed to stop 23mm cannon rounds-not heavy weight antitank missiles.
Fuel and ammunition went up in a rolling blast that threw torn and twisted pieces of Rookiat Two One more than fifty feet into the air. Oily black smoke boiled out of the vehicle’s shattered hulk, spreading slowly across a barren hillside now dotted with small fragments of flaming wreckage.
Night Stalker Lead’s missile had annihilated South Africa’s last organized opposition to Brave Fortune. The 1/75th Rangers had a clear road to
Swartkop.
SWARTKOP MILITARY AIRFIELD
Swartkop Airfield’s vast stretches of oil-stained concrete were deserted-almost entirely abandoned to the dead and the dying. Fires guttered low in burnt-out hangars and workshops. Smoke and flame rose from the wreckage of the two MH-8 “Little Birds.” As part of the plan, they’d been abandoned and blown up by their own crews rather than let the South
Africans capture them intact. The only signs of life were concentrated near one end of the flight line where Rangers hurriedly unloaded wounded men from captured trucks and carried them into the huge cargo bay of the last waiting C141. More soldiers lay prone in a rough semicircle around the aircraft, ready to provide coveting fire if any South African troops appeared. Two weary officers stood watching off to one side of the
Starlifter’s cargo ramp.
Jet engines howled from the other side of the tarmac where the other C141 s taxied toward takeoff. Abruptly, one swung through a sharp 180-degree turn, came to a brief stop on the runway’s centerline, and then accelerated-rolling past with a thundering, rumbling roar.
Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell watched his battalion’s lead transport lumber heavily into the air with a profound sense of relief. Three nuclear weapons were safely off South African soil and bound for
American-garrisoned Diego Garcia -die first stage on a long flight back to the United States. Another C-141 followed a minute later, lifting off just as the third Starlifter flashed past down the runway. One after another, the huge transports took off.
“Rob, we’re done! Now I suggest we get the hell out of here! “
O’Connell turned toward the hoarse shout. Lt. Col. Mike Carrerra pointed toward a collection of empty trucks. The wounded they’d carried were all inside the C-14 1. O’Connell nodded vigorously.
“Amen to that, Mike. Get your people aboard! “
“Right.” Carreffa whirled round and yelled through cupped hands, “Let’s go, Alpha Two!”
Moving fire team by fire team, the Rangers of the 2/75this
Alpha Company scrambled upright and ran for the open cargo bay. As the last man’s combat boots thudded onto the steel ramp, Carrerra signaled the
Air Force crew chief waiting eagerly by the door controls.
“Close and seal!”
He turned back to O’Connell with a wide, punch-drunk grin plastered across his face.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit, Colonel. I gotta admit
I never thought we’d pull this fucking thing off. Congratulations. “
O’Connell smiled wanly and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the
C-141’s crowded cargo bay. Dozens of men lay motionless on either side of the central aisle, swathed in bloodstained bandages. Others, apparently uninjured, sat silently along the Starlifter’s metal walls, clutching M16s and light machine guns in hands that shook uncontrollably.
Carrerra’s battalion had taken heavy losses while seizing and holding the
South African airfield. His own unit’s casualties were even higher.
Preliminary casualty reports showed the ln5this losses running at more than 50 percent. His Ranger battalion had been wrecked while accomplishing its mission.
He looked up at Carrerra’s tired face.
“Yeah. We did it. I just hope to
God it was worth the price.”
Carreffa eyed the pillars of smoke and flame rising in a great arc from the west to the north.
“Well, one thing’s for goddamned certain. These bastards will sure as hell know we’ve been here!”
O’Connell found himself nodding in agreement as the cargo ramp whined shut, blocking their view of South Africa. The huge C-141 was already in motion, turning rapidly onto the runway leading home.
Karl Vorster’s government had just lost its nuclear option.
CHAPTER 31
Foothold
DECEMBER 7-SIMONS TOWN NAVAL BASE, CAPE TOWN
“There’s the helicopter. ” Brig. Chris Taylor, commander of the
Independent Cape Province Defense Forces, pointed out over the water. At first, the shape was visible more by the starlight it blocked than as a concrete form-visible just as a small patch of blackness racing low across white-capped water. But the whupping sound of rotor blades made it real.
The helicopter was headed for a pier at the Simonstown Naval Base, an area controlled by his troops, but still in range of the guns on Table