Parachutes fluttered in the breeze, abandoned wherever his men had landed. Collapsed mounds of torn, smoking sandbags showed where the
Rangers had overrun South African positions in bitter, hand-to-hand combat.
Carrerra frowned. The Citizen Force company assigned to defend Swartkop had put up one hell of a fight. Bright white flashes and the harsh rattle of machinegun fire near the airfield’s huge, aluminum-sided hangars reminded him that his assessment was somewhat premature. South Africa’s reservists were still putting up a hell of a fight.
“Colonel, Sierra One Zero’s on the horn.” His radioman ducked as a mortar round burst on the tarmac ahead of them.
He took the offered mike.
“Go ahead, Sierra One Zero.”
“Do you have that runway clear yet?” Carreffa recognized the clipped
Northeastern accents of the colonel flying the lead MC-141. The ten
American jet transports were circling in a tight pattern over Pretoria and its adjoining airfield, waiting for confirmation that it was safe to land.
“Negative, One Zero. Estimate five minutes before we can bring you in.
Will advise. Out.”
Karrumph. Another mortar round tore up dirt and gravel one hundred meters to the left. Carrerra took his thumb off the transmit button and motioned his senior sergeant over.
“Ike, get on the platoon net and tell Sammy I want those goddamned mortar pits cleared pronto. We’ve got some birds up there anxious to get down on the ground. Got it?”
Carrerra led his headquarters troops across the tarmac toward the fighting raging near Swartkop’s aircraft maintenance hangars. He’d brought five hundred men into this battle. He had a lot fewer left now, and the 2/75th needed every rifle it could bring to bear.
CACTUS SAM LAUNCHER, SWARTKOP MILITARY AIRFIELD
The last surviving SAM launcher assigned to defend Swartkop from air attack sat motionless on a low bluff overlooking the airfield. Brown, tan, and black camouflage netting softened the four-wheeled vehicle’s rectangular, boxy shape-making it look more like a boulder or a clump of dried brush than a missile carrier.
Three men crowded the launcher’s tiny red-lit control compartment.
“Well?”
The short, tight-lipped South African Air Force warrant officer manning the vehicle’s target acquisition and firing board flicked one last switch and shook his head.
“Nothing, Lieutenant. I’m not getting any data from
Cactus Four. Either they’re dead or the cable’s been cut.”
“Damn it!” His taller, younger commander pounded the darkened instrument panel in frustration. Then he took refuge in standard procedure.
“Switch to optical tracking, Doorne. “
“Yes, sir. ” Warrant Officer Doorne’s nimble fingers danced across his control console. A TV monitor slaved to a camera mounted atop the vehicle lit up, showing a wide angle view of the star-studded night sky outside.
Something moved ponderously across the sky, blotting out stars in its path. Doome tapped a key and and focused his
TV camera on the airborne intruder. A big, four-engined jet was already turning away for another orbit over the city.
“Target locked in,
Lieutenant!”
His commander stared at the image on his screen. South Africa didn’t have any planes that looked like that. The bogey must be an enemy.
“Fire!”
The vehicle shuddered and rocked back as one of its missiles roared aloft on a pillar of glowing white flame, accelerating rapidly toward its maximum speed of Mach 2.3. The missile arced toward its target, guided by Warrant Officer Doome’s joystick.
Optical tracking permitted South Africa’s Cactus SAM launchers to attack enemy aircraft even if their fire control radars were out of action or being jammed. The system worked very much like a child’s video game. An onboard digital computer translated a human controller’s joystick movements into flight commands and radioed them on to the missile. All he had to do was hold the cross hairs of his TV sight on the target and the computer would steer the SAM directly into its target. Best of all, optically guided missiles couldn’t be jammed or spoofed away by flares and showers of chaff.
The system wasn’t much use against fastmoving attack aircraft or fighters coming in head-on or crossing at a sharp angle. Human reflexes simply hadn’t evolved to cope with closing speeds measured at nearly two thousand miles an hour. But the C-141 known as Sierra One Four was a huge, lumbering target flying in a wide circle at just four hundred knots.
Two hundred meters downslope, a Ranger fire team leader saw the missile launch and dropped the data cable he and his men had been following uphill.
“Incoming!”
The American soldiers dove for the ground as the SAM flashed past not far overhead-trailing smoke and fire. Spitting out dirt, the fire team leader reared up onto his knees. Get the bastards!”
One of his men nodded grimly and squeezed the trigger on his LAW. The 66mm antitank rocket ripped through the South African SAM vehicle’s camouflage netting and punched through its hull before exploding in an orange-red ball of fire and molten steel.
Warrant Officer Doorne and the others inside were killed instantly. But it was too late to save Sierra One Four.
SIERRA ONE FOUR, OVER PRETORIA
The South African missile detonated just fifty meters behind the
C-141.
Fragments lanced through the plane’s port wing, puncturing fuel and hydraulic lines. Flames billowed out of its inner port engine, streamering away into the darkness.
“Jesus!” Sierra One Four’s pilot fought to bring his crippled aircraft under control. Warning lights glowed red all around the cockpit. The
Starlifter was dying. He wrestled with the controls, trying desperately to keep the plane in some semblance of level flight and headed away from the city below.
With its port wing engulfed in flame, the C-141 fell out of position in the formation. For a second, it staggered onward through the air, seemingly determined to fly on despite all the damage it had sustained.
Then the huge plane tipped over and plowed into the ground at four hundred miles an hour.
“Be Starlifter’s tumbling, burning, and rolling wreckage tore a swath of total destruction through Pretoria’s southern suburbs. Houses vanished-reduced to piles of smoldering rubble and shattered wood.
Century-old oak and jacaranda trees were uprooted and splintered in the same instant, and automobiles were ground under and crushed-mangled into heat-warped abstract sculptures of metal, fiberglass, and molten rubber.
More than one hundred South African civilians lay dead or dying beneath the debris.
Burning jet fuel set a quarter-mile stretch of Pretoria on fire and lit the night with an eerie, orange glow.
2n5TH RANGERS, SWARTKOP
Lt. Col. Mike Carrerra crouched beside his radioman, watching as the nine remaining C-141s touched down and taxied off Swartkop’s main runway. One by one, the planes turned around and came to a stop with their noses pointed back down the runway-ready for instant takeoff.
The rear cargo ramp of the last C-141 whined open, settling slowly onto the tarmac. In less than a minute, Air Force crewmen emerged from the plane’s dimly lit interior, pushing two small helicopters ahead of them- McDonnell Douglas MH-8 gunships belonging to the Army’s 160th
Aviation Regiment. Aviators called them “Little Birds” with good reason.
Even carrying a full combat load-four TOW antitank missiles and a GE 7.62mm Minigun-each weighed just
