over a ton and a half. Technicians were already swarming around the two choppers, frantically prepping them for flight. Special blade-folding and stowage techniques developed by the 160th were supposed to allow both gunships to be assembled, loaded, and in the air within seven minutes.
Carrerra hoped those estimates were accurate. O’Connell and the nearly four hundred Rangers still fighting at Pelindaba would need those helicopters overhead by then, covering their withdrawal to Swartkop. He clicked the talk button on his radio mike.
“Rover One One, this is Tango
One One. Icarus. I say again, Icarus.”
Swartkop Airfield had been captured. He and his troops were holding the way home open-at least for the moment.
HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS
O’Connell snapped a full magazine into his M16 and eyed his closest subordinates.
“Right. You heard Carrerra. We’ve got Swartkop. Now we need those goddamned nukes.” He looked at his radioman.
“No word from Bravo
Three?”
Weisman shook his head. The radioman had a droopy, sad eyed face made mournful by nature. He looked gloomy even at the best of times. Right now he looked heartsick.
O’Connell made several quick decisions. The Rangers of Bravo Company’s
Third Platoon were supposed to have dropped right on top of the weapons storage complex and its guard bunkers. It was beginning to look as though they’d been wiped out. Either that or all their radios were on the fritz.
Sure. In any case, he’d have to go find out what had happened. South
Africa’s nukes were Brave Fortune’s prize-its only prize. Without them, this whole operation was nothing more than one big bloody disaster.
He started issuing orders.
“Fitz, you and Brady stay here with Doc and the wounded. Keep an eye peeled for anybody using that to come down on our backs.” He pointed north along the trench. Several of the bunkers along
Pelindaba’s northern perimeter were still in South African hands, and the slit trench would offer cover and concealment for any counterattacking force.
Sergeant Fitzsimmons, a linebacker-sized Ranger from Colorado, nodded once and moved down the narrow trench with his M 16 out and ready. Brady, a smaller black man who delighted in a thick, almost impenetrable Southern drawl, followed him, cradling an M60 light machine gun. He looked eager to try his weapon out on the first available Afrikaner.
O’Connell watched them go and turned to the rest of his able-bodied headquarters troops. There weren’t many. Maybe half of those who’d jumped.
He made a quick count. Seven officers and roughly twenty enlisted
Rangers-and with only two M60s for support. He shook his head, impatient with his own pessimism. He’d have to make do.
“Okay, let’s mosey on down this trench and see what the hell’s holding up Bravo Three. “
He caught Esher Levi’s anxious eye.
“Can you make it with that bum ankle of yours, Professor?” Jump injuries were always painful, and the Israeli scientist’s injury had probably already had time to swell inside his boot.
Surprisingly, Levi smiled-a brief flash of white teeth. He leaned on an M 16 he’d taken from one of the seriously wounded. ” I have a crutch,
Colonel. And I suspect that I can hobble with the best of you.”
O’Connell decided that he liked the man. Levi was a lot
tougher than he looked. Having a sense of humor was vital when all you really felt like doing was screaming. He nodded briefly and turned to
Weisman.
“Spread the word that we’re going after the nukes.”
He checked his watch. It felt like an eternity, but they’d only been on the ground for eight minutes. Those Navy flyboys ought to be joining the party at any moment now.
“All set, Colonel.” Weisman looked as unhappy as ever.
O’Connell tapped the assault rifle slung from the radioman’s shoulder.
“Cheer up, Dave. Who knows, you may even get a chance to use that thing.”
Weisman looked just the tiniest bit happier.
O’Connell gripped his own M16 and stepped out into the middle of the trench. Rifle and machinegun fire crackled nearby, punctuated by muffled grenade blasts. Alpha and Charlie Company platoons were busy wreaking havoc on South African barracks and silencing enemy-held bunkers one by one. The sky to the west and north seemed brighter, lit by the fires of burning buildings and vehicles.
He glanced over his shoulder. Tense, camouflage-painted faces stared back at him from beneath Kevlar helmets.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
The Rangers trotted south down the trench, with a determined Prof. Esher
Levi limping in their midst. As they moved, a sound like ragged, rolling thunder rumbled overhead. The Vinson’s carrier-based planes were winging into action.
TIGER FOUR, OVER WATER KLOOF MILITARY AIRFIELD, NEAR PRETORIA
The F/A-18 Hornet came in low from the southeast, roaring two thousand feet above Pretoria’s suburbs at almost five hundred knots. Lights appeared ahead of the speeding American plane-a string of widely spaced lights running east to west for more than a mile.
The Hornet’s pilot, Lt. Comdr. Pete “Pouncer” Garrard, keyed his mike.
“Tiger Lead, the runway is lit.”
“Roger that.”
Garrard concentrated on his flying, lining up for what he fervently hoped would be a perfect attack run. Tonight’s show wasn’t just for some inter squadron trophy. This was for real. Six Durandal anti runway weapons hung beneath Tiger Four’s wings, ready for use on one of South Africa’s biggest military airfields. The F/A-18 angled left half a degree, edging onto the imaginary flight path its computer calculated would produce the best results.
Garrard spotted movement on the runway off to his right. Two winged, single-tailed shapes were rolling down the tarmac, still on the ground but picking up speed fast. The South Africans were trying to get fighters in the air. Too late, mi amigos, he thought, using fragments of the street “Spanglish” he’d picked up during a boyhood spent in southern
California.
The word RELEASE blinked into existence in the lower left hand corner of his HUD. Aggressive instincts and years of training paid off as he stabbed the release button twice and yanked the Hornet up into a forty-degree climb. Two separate shudders rippled through the plane as a string of Durandals tumbled out from under its wings- falling nose-down toward the runway below.
Grunting against g forces that quadrupled his effective weight, Garrard pulled the climbing F/A-18 into a tight turn and craned his head all the way around to stare at the scene now behind and to his right. He wanted to see what happened when his bombs went off.
Small drogue parachutes snapped open behind each bomb. At a preset altitude above the runway, rocket motors inside the Durandals fired. All six weapons accelerated straight down, smashing into the earth below before exploding. Six flowers of flame, smoke, and spinning chunks of shattered concrete blossomed in a ragged line, angled across Waterkloof’s primary strip. Two actually struck the narrow runway, heaving and buckling the thick concrete for eight or ten meters, in addition to a five-meter crater.
One of the two South African fighters racing down the runway ran into a smoking, jagged crater at more than one
hundred miles an hour. The jet slammed nose first into the concrete in a fiery shower of sparks, broke in half,
