it out. Another quick, shallow breath. His cross hairs settled over the man’s uniformed chest and steadied.
He pulled the trigger.
The Enfield cracked once, sounding very loud in the darkness, and the
Cuban looked up just as Jaime’s shot struck him. He fell forward, folding inward as though the bullet had let all the air out of him. His coffee cup dropped out of his hand and rolled onto the ground.
Through the scope, Jaime saw stunned men looking at their fallen leader.
Most seemed frozen in place.
A sudden chorus of other shots rang out, and Jimmy knew his brother,
Johann, and his other friends were also in action. Sentries and other soldiers all around the laager began failing-cut down by well-aimed rifle fire.
Goetke had placed Jaime and the other snipers all around the encampment.
They were supposed to force the Cubans to go to ground, to hunker down inside their defensive circle.
Jaime squinted through his sight at the fire-lit scene of confusion, remembering Commandant Goetke’s strict orders: “Do not shoot unless you will kill your target. I don’t want a lot of fire. I want deadly fire.”
The commando leader’s tactic was working. With only a few shots coming in from many directions, the Cubans weren’t shooting back, reluctant to expose themselves to an unseen enemy.
Most of the Cubans were behind cover now, and with a
hunter’s instinct, he swung the rifle left-scanning for an armored vehicle he’d noticed parked on his side of the laager. It hadn’t moved for hours.
If its crew were still outside, he knew they’d want to get back inside their nice, safe, armored box.
He didn’t have to wait more than a few seconds. First, a head slowly peeked up over the BTR-60’s hull, and then hands slid along the fender.
Someone was trying to get in through the open driver’s hatch.
Jaime let the Cuban expose most of his body and then shot him through the heart. The man crumpled against the hull, his outstretched arms just short of the hatch. Jaime looked for other soldiers to kill.
A shout from the left rang out. He turned his head in time to see a ball of flame envelop “his” BTR. Bright light and a tremendous roar surged through the night air. More blasts followed in rapid succession, all centered on vehicles or among groups of Cuban soldiers lying prone in the open. Agonized screams echoed above the explosions as men turned into blazing human torches.
He gasped in relief. The commandant, his father, and the other commandos were attacking. The older men had crept stealthily to within fifty meters of the Cuban laager. Then, while Jaime and his friends suppressed the sentries, they’d moved in to lob their “Thunderbolts.”
Thunderbolt was an accurate term for the homemade bombs, he thought, watching in awe as they set the Cuban camp afire. He’d helped make them, though he had been threatened with dire consequences if he ever made one on his own. The recipe was simple: glass and plastic containers filled with a mixture of gasoline and soap flakes-a combination that quickly turned into a smelly, half-liquid concoction. His father had told him the mixture was similar to napalm. That hadn’t meant much to him-not until now.
Each Thunderbolt had one of the commando’s precious grenades securely taped to the outside as an igniter. Goetke had assured his men that their gasoline bombs would incinerate any vehicle, no matter how thick its armor. As always, Jaime thought, the commandant had been right.
He watched the battle rage through his rifle scope-wanting to join in, to rush forward and help the commando, or at least to snipe at the Cubans as they fled. His father had been strict, though, and had ordered him not to fire a shot once the gasoline bombs went off. After that, the men of the commando would be inside their enemy’s camp, doing God’s work.
Shouts, screams, and bursts of automatic weapons fire rose above the sound of roaring flames. From time to time, the ammunition or fuel stored in a burning vehicle would explode-spraying white and yellow streaks of fire high into the dark sky. In less than a minute, smoke rolled across the scene, hiding everything in an oily black mist.
Slowly, the sounds of firing died down and the shouting faded away. Soon, all Jaime could hear were flames crackling as Cuban trucks and armored cars burned. He waited, following his orders, and kept watch through his field glasses.
A hand on his shoulder startled him, and he whipped around, reaching for a rifle he suddenly realized was too far away. His father’s voice stilled his panic, though, and the warmth and praise he heard filled him with pride.
“You did well, Jaime. We were watching as you dropped that officer. You killed a captain.”
“You are all right, Father?” Jaime could see that he looked healthy, but he wanted to hear it with his own ears.
“I’m fine.” His father held out one arm, a little reddened, with the hair singed.
“I got a little too close to one of the commandant’s Thunderbolts, but otherwise I’m in good shape. “
His smile disappeared.
“We lost two men, though, and three others are hurt.” He saw sorrow cross Jaime’s face and quickly added, “It’s the price of our struggle, son. Those who live must remember them and carry on.”
The elder Steers’s face grew grim.
“And the enemy paid, son. We got them all.” He jerked a thumb at the smoke shrouded laager ahead of them.
“Every vehicle there burns. No Cubans have escaped. No Cubans survived, and we took no Cuban prisoners. They are all in Hell.”
Jaime Steers’s eyes followed his father’s pointing finger
toward the burning encampment. Rumor said that the Cubans had sworn to conquer South Africa or turn it into a depopulated wasteland. Well, he thought, with a newly adult grimness that matched his father’s tight-lipped expression, the communists were finding out there was more than one kind of scorched earth.
DECEMBER 22-20TH CAPE RIFLES, NEAR GENYESA,
INSIDE BOPHUTHATSWANA
The sun rose fast over the barren lands of the Kalahari Basin-a fiery red ball that turned night into day in one blinding instant. Shadows fled westward across a desolate, sandy plain stretching north toward the vast
Kalahari Desert itself and south to the rugged, treeless peaks of the
Langberg and the Asbestos mountains. Sunlight glinted off the tin roofs of several dozen one-room shacks clustered around the junction of two roads-one tarred, the other little more than a dirt track. Small herds of scrawny cattle and sheep were already on the move, ambling outward in what would be a long search for sparse grass to graze on. Dogs barked and a lone rooster crowed, signaling the start of what seemed like just another day for the people of Genyesa.
But things were different.
Genyesa’s population had more than doubled overnight. Camouflage netting strung between clumps of twisted scrub covered an array of nearly forty trucks, jeeps, and armored personnel carriers. Armed sentries in khaki
South African battle dress stood guard along each road entering the town.
Others lounged beside the central, flat-roofed stone building that served as Genyesa’s post office, telephone center, and police station.
Henrik Kruger and his 20th Cape Rifles now controlled the tiny black town.
With his back propped against a tire, Ian Sheffield sat cross legged in the shadow cast by a large, five-ton truck. From time to time, he glanced up from the notebook he held open in his lap, gazing skyward without seeing anything at all as he searched for the words or phrases he wanted. Whenever he moved, he moved carefully, determined not to wake Emily van der Heijden as she slept curled up on an old Army blanket by his side.
Matthew Siberia and their driver, a young Afrikaner sergeant, lay back to back beneath the truck itself, snoring peaceably in counterpoint.
Everywhere Ian looked he could see men sleeping or trying to sleep-snatching every moment of rest they could while the battalion laagered for the day. Flies droned through the artificial gloom created by their camouflage netting.
He forced his eyes open and yawned hugely, fighting to stay awake at least long enough to finish scribbling a few quick notes describing last night’s trek. Keeping a daily record of their long flight westward from
