up, shredded into a blazing fireball by cannon shells from a strafing enemy plane. The other had simply vanished, lost somewhere in what had quickly become a confused, harrowing race through a deadly gauntlet of smoke and flame.
Fresh scars on Rookiat Two One’s turret, souvenirs of steel splinters sprayed by a near miss, showed how close a race that had been. Van
Vuuren’s fingers lightly brushed a bruise spreading across his left check. He winced, remembering the tremendous, ringing impact that had thrown him face first into the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and laser range- finder readout. The enemy bomb couldn’t have landed more than thirty or forty meters away.
He shuddered. That had been too damned close. For the moment, he was content to wait here-safely hidden and out of the line of fire. A muffled cough from below reminded him to check his crew.
He lowered himself into the vehicle’s crowded, red-lit turret. Anxious faces stared up at him.
“Now what do we do?” The pressure lines left on Corporal Meitjens’s face by his gunsight made him look something like a raccoon.
“We wait.” Van Vuuren’s own uncertainty added a bite to his tone.
“And you keep your damned eyes glued to that night sight!”
Meitjens hurriedly obeyed.
Minutes passed, dragging by one by one. Van Vuuren had left his hatch open for comfort. Even when sitting idle, a four-man crew generated a lot of heat inside the Rookiat’s turret. And the cool night air pouring in through the open hatch provided a bit of welcome relief.
Sound also poured in through the hatch, and the South African captain sat with his eyes closed, listening to the noise of a one-sided battle. Bombs echoed in the distance-dull, thumping explosions that seemed to shake the very air itself. Jet engines roared past from time to time as enemy planes came in on strafing runs against some poor sod stupid enough to show himself. But the bombing seemed to be tapering off.
The bastards up there must be running out of targets, van Vuuren thought sourly. The steady crackle of heavy small arms fire rose from off to the north-audible now over the diminishing noise of the air bombardment.
The Rookiat’s commander opened his eyes and sat up straight. Small-arms fire? Were soldiers in the Pelindaba garrison actually trying to shoot down jets with rifles and machine guns? If so, they were braver than they were wise.
“Sir! Trucks moving south on the highway. Many of them.” Meitjens sounded as surprised as van Vuuren felt. What kind of idiot would try to run a truck convoy down a multi lane highway in the middle of an enemy air attack?
He motioned the corporal aside and pressed his own face against the thermal-image sight. Bright green shapes moved into view, hot against cold hillsides and an even colder night sky. By God, they were trucks!
Van Vuuren found himself counting aloud.
“Ten, eleven, twelve…
eighteen, nineteen… ” He shut his mouth abruptly. More than two dozen vehicles were out there, rolling past his position at twenty kilometers an hour. A sizable convoy even under ordinary circumstances.
And the circumstances were scarcely ordinary. He couldn’t understand it.
Why weren’t those trucks being blown to pieces by enemy air attack?
A nagging fear suddenly crystallized into certainty. The aircraft weren’t attacking those trucks because they were all on the same side. He couldn’t figure out how the Cubans could possibly have moved their troops so close to Pretoria so fast, but that would have to wait. All that mattered now was that he had what must be a communist truck column under his Rookiat’s 76mm gun.
“Target! Five hundred meters! Load HE!” Van Vuuren kept his eyes glued to the night sight. By rights he should sit back and allow Meitjens to man the gun, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to do it himself. In the past thirty or so minutes, he’d been bombed and strafed and generally terrified half out of his mind. Now he wanted the pleasure of personally killing some of the Uitlanders whose airborne comrades had been responsible for all of that.
Besides, this was going to be easy-what an American would call a “turkey shoot.” Two or three shots to the front and two or three more to the back would trap this tightly bunched truck convoy on a ready-made killing ground. Hundreds of enemy infantrymen would meet death on a wide, empty expanse of asphalt and concrete.
Van Vuuren gripped the gun controls and traversed the turret to the tight in one smooth, whirring movement. Bright yellow cross hairs centered on the green image of the lead truck. He tapped the laser range-finder control with his thumb and numerals appeared on the screen-382 meters.
Practically point-blank. He ignored Meitjens’s resentful muttering behind his back. His gunner would just have to learn that rank had its privileges and this was one of them.
I “Up! 11
“On the way!” Van Vuuren squeezed the trigger.
Klaanng! A bright white flash erupted out of the Rookiat’s main gun. The whole vehicle rocked back as it recoiled. Dust swirled through the air, kicked up by the 76mm cannon’s muzzle blast.
The South African captain pressed his face into the night sight, swearing softly as he waited for the dust to settle. Come on. Come on. Clear. Let me see, blast it!
Vision returned. Shit! Van Vuuren snarled at the view his screen showed.
The truck he’d fired at was still moving, and a glowing hot spot two hundred meters farther up the opposite hillside showed where his shot had landed. He’d either missed entirely or the HE round had passed right through the enemy
vehicle without slamming into anything solid enough to set off its warhead.
“Up!” Rookiat Two One’s loader was still on the job.
Van Vuuren traversed right again, bringing the truck back under his cross hairs. This time you die, he promised. He reached for the laser range-finder button…. The night sight went blank. Cross hairs, glowing green images, and digital readouts all faded out and disappeared.
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!
