and blew up. Garrard whooped into his oxygen mask. Scratch one Mirage! One down and one to go.
But the other South African interceptor emerged from the wall of smoke and tumbling debris apparently unscathed. Afterburner blazing, the Mirage F. ICZ soared off the runway-clawing frantically for altitude.
Garrard clicked his mike button.
“Tiger Lead, one hostile airborne.
Engaging. “
He shoved his throttle forward and pulled the Hornet into a rolling, vertical climb, groaning involuntarily as the Hornet’s g force meter flickered past seven. At the same time, he switched his HUD to air-to-air mode. Two concentric circles leapt into view in the middle of the display.
The circles identified cones of vulnerability-areas of the sky in front of his plane where his heat-seekers had the best odds of scoring a hit.
The sky and ground seemed to spin around, changing places, as Garrard pulled his F/A-18 inverted. Just a little more. Almost…
The climbing Mirage came into view in his HUD’s upper left corner. A target designation box appeared around the South African jet’s dim, wavering shape. Garrard rolled his plane back upright and accelerated. The Homer streaked after its opponent.
As the F/A-18 closed, the box surrounding the enemy plane moved slowly down and across its HUD-sliding toward the center. Garrard’s finger poised over the fire button on his stick. Come on, you bastards, lock on! It might not make much sense to swear at the simpleminded circuits inside the two
AIM-9L Sidewinders his plane carried, but somehow it did make him feel better.
One of the missiles growled suddenly in his earphones letting him know that its IR seeker had finally locked on. A flashing diamond appeared over the
South African jet now barely a mile ahead and starting to turn.
Garrard squeezed his fire button and felt a small shudder as the Sidewinder mounted on his plane’s starboard wingtip dropped off and ignited. A streak of orange flame arced across the sky. The heat-seeker flashed across the gap between Tiger Four and its prey in less than five seconds. It exploded just yards behind the F. I’s brightly glowing tailpipe.
The South African Mirage seemed to disintegrate in midair-tearing itself apart as fuel, ammunition, and missile propellant all went up in a thousandth of a second. Burning bits and pieces of torn metal and plastic fell earthward beneath an ugly, drifting cloud of oily black smoke.
Garrard doubted that the enemy pilot had even known he was under direct attack. Nothing unusual in that. Most ai rto-air kills were scored on planes that never saw their attackers. And getting bounced just seconds after takeoff was every fighter pilot’s nightmare.
He keyed his mike again.
“Tiger Lead, this is Tiger Four. Splash one hostile. Runway is out of action.”
The strike commander’s laconic voice carried well over radio.
“Roger,
Four. Nice work. What’s your fuel state?”
Garrard took a quick look at his fuel display.
“Approaching Bingo.” The
Hornet was a shit-hot fighter and attack plane -much better than either the F-4 Phantom or the A-7 Corsair, the two aircraft it had replaced. But the F/A-18 was short on legs. Pretoria, three hundred and fifty miles inland, was near the limit of its un refueled combat radius.
“Okay, Four. Head for Gascan flight at Point Tango.”
Garrard clicked his mike twice to acknowledge and turned southeast, flying back toward a rendezvous with KA-61) tankers topped full of aviation fuel.
Behind him, the rest of the Vinson’s aircraft went to work with a vengeance.
VOORTREKKER HEIGHTS MILITARY CAMP, NEAR PRETORIA
A stick of four 500-pound bombs landed just two hundred yards away from
the small officer’s cottage assigned to Commandant Henrik Kruger. They exploded in a thunderous, thumping blast that instantly shattered every window, toppled bookcases, and threw pictures off rippling walls.
Ian Sheffield dived for cover behind a sofa as flying glass sleeted across the living room. He lay flat until the floor stopped rocking and then looked up.
Dust knocked off the walls and ceiling swirled in the air. Razor-edged pieces of glass littered the floor, mixed in with fragments of loose plaster and with splintered pieces of wood that had once been slats for the cottage’s venetian blinds. Several deadly looking shards of glass were actually embedded in the far wall itself. He shivered suddenly, realizing that those bomb-made daggers must have passed within an inch or less of his unprotected head.
The building swayed again-rocked this time by bombs landing farther off.
Ian scrambled to his feet, driven by an intense desire to get outside and into a bunker or trench. He’d stayed inside when the air raid sirens had gone off, more afraid of being recognized as a fugitive on the run from
South African “justice” than of missing out on what he’d thought was only another drill. But it was beginning to look as though his calculations of relative risk were greatly in error.
More bomb blasts shook the cottage.
Ian bolted out the front door and into a scene that might have been lifted straight out of the most frightening parts of Dante’s Inferno. A thick cloud of smoke and dust from burning buildings and repeated explosions hung low over the base, making it almost as difficult to see as it was to breathe. What he could see was terrifying.
One bomb had slammed into a nearby barracks and blown it apart-leaving only a ragged, smoking skeleton of roofless walls and heaped rubble.
Other bombs had rained down all over the South African camp. Armories, maintenance sheds, and guard rooms alike were either in ruins or in flames. An eighteen-ton Ratel armored personnel carrier lay on its side in the middle of a parade ground-torn and twisted as though it had been first squeezed and then hurled there by a careless giant’s hand.
As he scuttled across the road in front of Kruger’s quarters, Ian was surprised to find that part of his trained reporter’s mind was still busy jotting down details and impression seven though the rest of him just wanted to dive into some nice safe hole. Christ, he must be going mad.
This wasn’t the right time to contemplate winning a prize for war reporting. But his brain wouldn’t turn off.
Despite all the destruction, he couldn’t see many bodies. The ten-minute delay between the time the first air raid sirens sounded and the first bombs cascaded down must have given everyone a chance to find cover.
Everyone but him, that is. He dodged a blazing five-ton truck still rolling down the road with its driver slumped behind the wheel.
Another stick of bombs rained down on the barracks row just across the parade ground-exploding one after the other in rippling series of blinding white flashes. Shock waves slapped him in the face and punched the air out of his lungs. Ian ran faster, heading for the shelter Kruger said had been dug in front of his quarters.
There! A dark hole seemed to rise up out of the parade ground’s flattened grass and tamped-down dirt. Without slowing, Ian threw himself through the entrance and tumbled head over heels down into a low-roofed bomb shelter. He lay still for a moment, facedown on the dugout’s earthen floor and very glad to be there. Three other people were there ahead of him-Kruger, Matthew Siberia, and Emily van der Heijden.
As he rose to his knees and spat out a mouthful of dirt, Emily’s worried face brightened.
“Ian!”
She rushed over and he felt a pair of wonderfully warm arms tighten around him. She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t have to. He could feel her shaking.
Ian buried his face in her sweet-smelling, auburn hair. When he looked up, he found Henrik Kruger’s sardonic gaze fixed on him.
“A rough night, Meneer Sheffield?”
A near-miss rocked the bunker. Dust sifted down through gaps in the timber roof. Kruger’s expression didn’t change.
This guy was a damned cool customer, Ian thought, deciding to reply in kind. He nodded abruptly.
