“Yes, exactly. We cannot move beyond Brandvlei until we’ve made firm contact with either your nation’s forces or those of the provisional government.
“Well, what’s so hard about-“
The lieutenant manning their radio interrupted.
“Excuse me, sir, but the recce troop reports they have the Oranje in sight! No enemy contacts.”
REACTION FORCE
Maj. Rolf Bekker held his breath as the long column of canvas-sided trucks and wheeled APCs drove straight down the road into his killing zone. De
Vries’s manpack radio lay beside him, with its whip antenna poking above the foxhole’s camouflage awning.
Bekker keyed the mike.
“All units, this is Rover Foxtrot One. Stand by.
Hold fire. Wait for my order.”
The lead Ratel rolled past a cracked and weathered boulder in line with
Bekker’s foxhole. Fifty or so vehicles were strung out behind it at twenty-meter intervals. They were in range.
“Now! Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Two explosions rocked the desert floor-both within meters of the road. Hit by shrapnel, a five-ton truck slewed out of control, slammed into a boulder, and rolled over. Dazed survivors staggered out of the wreck and toppled over, hit repeatedly by rifle and machinegun fire.
Near the tail end of the column, a Buffel APC blew up in a spectacular rolling ball of flame, hit broadside by a single Carl Gustav round. Human torches, men on fire, threw themselves screaming over the sides and then crumpled as the paratroopers put them out of their misery.
Bekker’s men had spent most of the preceding day zeroing in their weapons. Now their hard work was paying off.
“Papa Charlie One, this is
Rover One. On target! Fire for effect!”
In seconds, eight more mortar bombs burst near the road -spraying fragments up and down the line of trucks and personnel carriers. Several vehicles were on fire, some while still moving. Other lay canted at odd angles, their drivers dead or disabled.
Bekker showed his teeth in a quick, wolfish smile. Kruger’s traitorous battalion was being cut to pieces by his textbook perfect ambush.
COMMAND RATEL
A nearby explosion rocked the Ratel, sending maps, pencils, and loose gear flying. Fragments rattled off its side armor.
“Christ!” Henrik Kruger staggered forward through the confusion and grabbed the radio headset from the pale, frightened lieutenant. Panicked, garbled voices poured over the airwaves.
“Taking fire from the hill … Arrie’s hit! My God, I’m hit! .. . Got to get out …. Estimate four, maybe five guns…
Another shell slammed into the road just ahead of them. Kruger heard his driver swearing as he swerved off onto the shoulder to avoid ramming a truck stopped dead and on fire. As they roared by the blazing vehicle, a single sheet of furnace-hot fl arne washed over the turret and commander’s cupola. Then they were past.
He swung round in a quick circle, trying to see what was happening to his battalion through his cupola’s narrow vision slits. Burning vehicles and sprawled corpses littered the barren landscape in every direction. They were being massacred.
Kruger squeezed the transmit button.
“This is Kruger. Wheel left and pop smoke! Pop smoke!”
The Ratel slewed over in a hard left turn. As it spun around to face the enemy-held hill, the machine gunner beside him triggered the APC’s four turret-mounted smoke dischargers. They coughed in sequence, firing four smoke grenades out through a fifty-meter-wide arc.
Other Ratels were doing the same thing, creating an instant smoke screen to hide themselves from the heavy weapons on the hill above them. Sand and dirt sprayed high near the APC’s right flank as another shell ploughed into the ground.
Kruger grimaced. The smoke gave them a temporary respite from direct fire, but those damned mortars didn’t need to see their targets to hit them. They only had to pour bombs onto preregistered firing points to be sure of killing something.
Conscious of precious seconds slipping by, he scanned the terrain behind them. Nothing. No cover at all. Just flat, bare rock, packed dirt, and tufts of dead grass. They’d have to break this ambush the hard way. He clicked his mike again.
“All units. Attack! Attack immediately! Our objective is the hill!
“
As the Ratel bounced forward, accelerating through its own smoke screen, acknowledgments flowed in from his surviving company and platoon leaders.
The men and vehicles of the 20th Cape Rifles surged ahead, charging uphill toward their enemies.
REACTION FORCE
Bekker scowled at the puffs of dense white smoke dotting the ground below the hill. His Carl Gustav teams were having trouble finding targets in all that muck. Another mortar bomb salvo landed-bright flashes rippling through the thickening
haze of smoke and dust. Directed by forward observers, his gunners were walking their fire back and forth along the road, pounding the enemy’s stalled vehicles and dismounted infantry.
“Major!” De Vries grabbed his shoulder and pointed downhill. Shapes were emerging from the smoke. Turreted Ratels, open-topped Buffels, and even trucks were advancing on his positions at high speed.
For a second, Bekker’s confidence slipped. Kruger was doing exactly what he himself would have done under the same circumstances. And he was doing it fast.
Clang. Hit by a Carl Gustav round, one of the oncoming APCs shuddered once and stopped moving. Flames spewed out of the gigantic hole punched through its thin front armor. Nobody got through its buckled hatches.
But the recoilless rifle’s backblast hovered over its firing position like a billboard advertising its existence. Bekker caught a last glimpse of the Carl Gustav’s two-man crew hurriedly reloading before two Ratel turrets whined round and fired repeatedly-pumping 20mm cannon shells into the foxhole until it vanished in a spray of sand and dirt.
More vehicles were hit and burning, but the rest were still coming on-their guns chattering wildly, traversing right and left to lay down a curtain of suppressive fire across the hilltop.
Bekker dove for the bottom of his hole as a machinegun burst tore through the air all around him. Corporal de Vries wasn’t fast enough. A 12.7mm bullet caught him at the base of the throat and ripped his head off. The radioman’s decapitated corpse fell backward against the lip of the foxhole, still spouting bright-red arterial blood.
The major grabbed his R4 and snapped its safety off. Damn it. Where were his gunships? The helicopters were his ace in the hole.
PUMA GUNSHIP LEAD
Capt. Harry Kersten brought his helicopter up out of the Oranje River basin and then dropped its nose to gain speed for forward flight. Rotors clattering, the Puma surged ahead-closing on the battlefield at eighty knots. He squinted through the haze, looking for targets.
Pillars of black smoke curled skyward above burning trucks and armored personnel carriers. Others lay tilted over, evidently abandoned. All the signs of a successful and bloody ambush. Then he saw boxy shapes moving up the side of the hill and frowned. The renegade battalion’s vehicles were almost right on top of Bekker’s infantry. Target selection was going to be a bitch.
Kersten spoke over the intercom.
