cloud. The Cubans couldn’t be farther than five kilometers away. Come on, you bastards. Keep coming.
With so little fuel left and only its basic load of ammunition available, his battalion had only one viable option-a devastating short-range attack aimed at the Cuban flank. Hit them hard enough with a surprise attack and those Latin bastards will samba their way back to Luanda, he thought.
And the attack should damn well be a surprise. Two volunteers had stayed behind in Hougaard’s abandoned command Ratel, They were continuing to transmit status reports and requests for aid. His own force had maintained radio silence while speeding westward through the night to minimize the chance of being spotted by enemy air reconnaissance.
Not even the defenders in Walvis Bay knew they were here. He had considered sending in a runner, but two kilometers of open terrain separated his nearest positions from the town. Too far. Whomever he sent would almost certainly be captured or killed.
Von Brandis grinned mirthlessly. The reservists holding Walvis Bay must be feeling a lot like the British soldiers who’d defended Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus a century before-outnumbered and all alone. They will be a happy bunch when we show ourselves, he thought.
The Walvis Bay garrison didn’t really need to know that the 5th Mechanized was here anyway. The tactical setup was simple. The Cubans could only advance down one road to attack the town. Von Brandis had deployed his men about eight hundred meters east of that road, ready to shoot only after the garrison opened fire. With luck, the Cubans wouldn’t realize they were being shot at from more than one direction until after his Elands and antitank missiles had slammed in a few unanswered volleys. Another slight edge, von Brandis thought, and I’ll need every advantage I can get.
He planned to open fire only when the Cubans were at close range, under a thousand meters. To make sure surprise was maintained, only one man in each of his companies was allowed to observe the enemy and report. The rest of his infantry stayed hidden below the railroad embankment. All vehicle engines were also off. Normally kept running to provide electrical power to the guns, the engines were shut down both to save fuel and to reduce noise.
They would only be turned over at the last minute.
The Cubans were still closing, now just about three thousand meters away.
They were leading with their tanks, clanking, big-gunned monsters spread out in line abreast. Wave after wave of BTR armored personnel carriers followed the tanks.
The tanks were tough customers, but the BTRs were just big wheeled boxes with light armor at most. They were vulnerable to cannon, antitank missiles, even heavy machine guns. Von Brandis sighed. There were a hell of a lot of them, though.
Smaller armored cars prowled round the flanks of the Cuban formation, accompanied by a couple of mobile antiaircraft guns, ZSU-23-4s with their radar antennas deployed and ready.
Suddenly, von Brandis heard a cross between a scream and a roar coming from the north, coming closer fast. Jets! He swiveled his binoculars up and beyond the oncoming Cuban formation.
There they were. Four winged, arrowhead shapes emerged from the dust cloud-flying straight down the road toward Walvis Bay in two pairs. As the
MiGs flashed over the town’s low, flat-roofed houses and warehouses, small cannisters fell from their wings and tumbled end over end toward the ground.
Afterburners roaring, the MiGs accelerated and turned right, thundering out over the ocean. Thousands of frightened birds burst into frenzied motion, blackening the sky over Walvis Bay’s lagoon.
Behind the accelerating jets, the cannisters, cluster bombs, broke apart into falling clouds of tiny black dots. Walvis Bay disappeared-cloaked by smoke and dust as hundreds of bomblets went off almost at once. Tiny flashes of orange and red winked through the smoke, accompanied by a loud, crackling series of explosions that reminded von Brandis of the noise made by the firecrackers tossed at
Chinese New Year’s parades.
Each bomblet carried enough explosive to wreck an aircraft or a vehicle, and each blast sent dozens of highspeed fragments sleeting through the air and any walls or roofs in the way. Von Brandis hoped that Walvis
Bay’s defenders had dug deep trenches.
The sound of the MiGs faded.
He switched his attention back to the advancing Cuban formation, now a few hundred meters closer. The tanks were near enough for him to make out the shape of their turrets, and he could see a large bore evacuator halfway up the gun barrel. T-62s. Bloody great big, thick-armored T-62s.
Wonderful.
He heard the jets again and swiveled to look over the town. The MiGs must have turned again out over the water, because this time they were coming head-on from the west-flying just above the wavetops.
The four aircraft suddenly pulled up, quickly gaining attitude, then dove. Each jet’s nose disappeared in a stuttering, winking blaze of light-cannon hammering the garrison crouching in its foxholes and slit trenches. Flames and oily, black smoke rose from burning cars and buildings. Von Brandis couldn’t see any tracers rising from defending antiaircraft guns. They’d either been knocked out or abandoned by frightened crews.
Again, the MiGs broke off their attack, but this time they didn’t turn over the town. Instead, they flew on, straight toward him! Von Brandis shouted, “Down!” and scrambled down off the small rise he occupied, knowing already it was futile. His battalion was concealed from the road, but not from aerial observation. The Namib’s barren terrain simply offered nowhere to hide.
He looked up as the jets screamed overhead a hundred meters up. The sound deafened him. He was close enough to see the red and blue Cuban insignia, the shoulder-mounted
delta wings, the triangular tail, the square inlets. Cuban MiG23 Floggers.
The MiGs flashed by and he heard a few of the machine guns in his battalion firing as they pulled away. Fine. There wasn’t any point in trying to hide now, and the machine gunners might even hit something.
One of the jets pulled up, turning tighter than the rest. For a moment, von
Brandis thought it had been hit, but instead the MiG-23 gracefully turned and rolled and came back over his battalion. It made no move to attack, but he heard the jet’s howl as it made a single highspeed pass down the length of his defensive line.
Shit. So much for surprise.
Von Brandis scrambled back up the hill, yelling for his radioman to follow.
Both men flopped belly-down at the crest. The Cuban tanks and APCs were roughly two thousand meters away-still well outside effective range.
The South African colonel shook his head in resignation. It was just too damned bad that nothing in war ever went as planned.
“Tell all commanders to open fire. Aim for the APCs. “
FORWARD HEADQUARTERS, CUBAN EXPEDITIONARY
FORCE
The air officer spun round in shock, one hand clapped to his earphones.
“Comrade General, one of our aircraft reports men and vehicles east of the road, near the railroad embankment! “
What? Vega sat bolt upright.
“Find out how many!”
He jumped up from his desk for a closer look at the map. That damned railroad embankment! He should have insisted that Pellervo’s recon units scout the area more thoroughly.
He was still moving when another radioman whirled in his direction.
“Colonel Pellervo reports he is taking fire from the east! “
Vega took the last few steps to the map at a run. No doubt about it. They’d been ambushed. Some South African was playing it pretty smart. But how smart? He snapped a question toward the air officer.
“How large is the enemy force?”
“The pilot says he can see over a dozen vehicles.”
That’s it, then, Vega thought. At least a company and probably more. He slammed a clenched fist into his cupped palm. He should have known better than to believe the radio intercepts they’d picked up from out in the
