Vortex (105 page)

Ziss shook his head in frustration. They needed counter battery radar to pinpoint the enemy artillery-and all of the MAF’s target acquisition units were still tied down providing protection for the Louis Botha

Airport.

That left the Marines with just one unpalatable option: they’d have to scour every inch of Pietermaritzburg and its surrounding hills in what was very likely to be a vain search for the enemy observation team calling down the artillery. Until then, South Africa’s big guns could sweep the N3 and block any significant advance toward Pretoria. Heavily armored main battle tanks might be able to roll right through a barrage, but fuel tankers and troop trucks would be sitting ducks.

He staggered upright, trying to get a better look at the terrain ahead.

Once past this small spur of residential development and the racetrack, the ground sloped down toward a small stream before rising again into the city proper. Church spires and the tower of a Moslem mosque were sharply outlined against the treelined escarpment.

Terrific. A single rifle company couldn’t even begin to cover that much territory.

“We’re going to need some help on this, One Two.”

“Understood.” Another brief pause while the battalion CO evidently tried to unscramble what had suddenly become a very confused situation.

“Alpha and

Charlie companies are closing on your position now. Plus Brigade has released another platoon of LAVs and some M60s for support. I’m shifting the HQ forward now, so hold up until we get there. ”

“Will do.” Ziss saw a medic go by at the run, medkit and bandages in hand.

Oh, Christ. He’d almost forgotten about his wounded.

“I need a dust-off here, One Two. I’ve got several wounded for immediate evac. ”

“Roger that. Dust-off is already en route.
ETA
is five minutes. ” His commander’s businesslike tone shifted, becoming more concerned.

“Hang on,

Jon. We’re coming. Out. ”

Ziss acknowledged and signed off, not sure which of the two emotions warring within him was stronger-relief now that help was on the way, or irritation at being treated a little like a panic-stricken teenager. He handed the mike back to his radioman and moved off in search of his platoon leaders. They had some planning to do.

“Captain!” He hadn’t taken more than five or six steps when Pitts caught up with him.

“Rover Three One reports hostile movement on the western slopes of Signal Hill.” Rover Three One was the call sign for one of the recon teams scouting the ground in front of Bravo Company.

Signal Hill? Now just where the hell was that? He flipped open a tattered topographical map. There it was. A nine hundred-foot high, wooded hill just west of the city. He almost smiled. The Afrikaners were starting to show themselves. Fine. Time for an air strike. He grabbed the handset again.

“Mike One Two, this is BravoA sudden loud popping sound made him look up just as a

window in a nearby house shattered. And for the second time in only a few minutes, Ziss threw himself prone.

“Sniper! Hit the dirt! ”

He wriggled back to the line of rose bushes as M16s opened up from houses all around-punching rounds in the general direction of Pietermaritzburg.

The company’s M60 machinegun teams were next, indiscriminately hosing down buildings and treetops that might conceal Afrikaner troops. Parked cars hit by gunfire started going up in flames.

Capt. Jon Ziss gritted his teeth and checked the clip in his own rifle.

This was going to be one bitch of a day.

DECEMBER
27-
FORWARD
HEADQUARTERS
,
ALLIED
EXPEDITIONARY
FORCE
,
TOWN

HILL
,
NORTH
OF
PIETERMARITZBURG

Town Hill rose nearly nine hundred feet above the Natal lowlands, and more than three hundred feet above Pietermaritzburg’s central business district. For years, the city’s wealthiest families had been building their homes on its slopes, drawn by its spectacular views and easy access to the Durban-Johannesburg highway. And now the same factors made Town

Hill the perfect site for the forward headquarters of the Allied expeditionary force.

In the middle of a street once reserved for Mercedes and other luxury automobiles, four camouflaged command vehicles sat parked back-to-back in a rough circle. Tarpaulins covered the open spaces between them, essentially creating a single large headquarters tent. Staff officers from two countries and all four branches of the armed forces crowded the tent-receiving reports from fighting units scattered all across South

Africa, planning the next day’s operations, and generally getting in each other’s way.

Lt. Gen. Jerry Craig stood outside, ignoring the controlled chaos of his forward HQ. His binoculars were focused on the N3 Motor Route as it wound northwest through a narrow valley. He frowned. Right now the road looked more like a serpentine parking lot than a superhighway.

Long columns of trucks, APCs, and other vehicles were backed up all the way south through the city-evidently brought to a dead stop by more fighting somewhere up ahead. An ambush? More harassing fire from South African heavy guns? A roadblock? Craig shrugged. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was that Vorster’s troops were slowing his advance to a nightmarish crawl.

Just securing Pietermaritzburg had taken a full day, three infantry battalions, air strikes, artillery bombardments, and dozens of casualties.

Since then, his men had been forced to fight for every kilometer they gained on the only main road from Natal to Pretoria.

The pattern was always the same. Units moving along the highway would take sudden fire from enemy troops hidden on a hill, behind a ridge, or in a side canyon. In response, they had to deploy off the road, call in air or artillery to pound suspected Afrikaner positions, and then peel off platoons or companies to drive any survivors back into the mountains.

Craig lowered his binoculars and shook his head in frustration. There were enough trails and dirt roads running through the Drakensberg to support small Afrikaner units operating against his flanks-but not enough to sustain his own, larger force. Getting to Johannesburg and Pretoria with a powerful mechanized army meant driving straight up the

N3.

Two AV-8B Harrier jump jets suddenly howled past at low altitude, heading for a battlefield somewhere farther along the highway. Bombs bulked large beneath their stubby wings.

Craig silently urged the Harrier pilots on. C’mon, boys, give the bastards hell, but give it to them fast.

Time, as always, was an enemy. His intelligence officers claimed that the

Cubans weren’t advancing any faster. But the Cubans were just 160 kilometers away from South Africa’s capita) and its richest minerals complex. His own troops were still more than 500 kilometers away. You didn’t have to be a mathematical genius to realize that was a prescription for a losing race.

The sound of squealing brakes drew his attention away

from his strategic problems. He turned around. A U.S. Army Hummvee had just pulled up in front of his improvised command tent.

The Hummvee’s sole passenger, a dapper, bantamweight general whose gray, crew-cut hair still showed flecks of black, climbed out and headed straight for him. The man’s lean, suntanned face showed signs of intense anger and irritation.

Craig stood his ground, preparing himself to exercise a little-used virtue-patience. Holding a unified command sometimes meant having to coddle and cajole fractious subordinates from all the service branches.

He returned the other man’s rigid salute.

“Sam.”

“General. ”

Uh-oh. Formality between near-equals almost always spelled trouble.

“What can I do for you?”

Maj. Gen. Samuel Weber, commander of the 24th Mechanized Infantry

Division, tried valiantly to keep the anger out of his voice. He failed.

“I’d like to know why the ships with my tanks are still sitting off the goddamned port. I’ve got a hundred and fifty MI tanks out there-all set to come ashore and blow the shit out of these frigging Boers. And I’ve got the crews to man ‘em, but they’re just sitting on their butts at Cape

Town waiting to fly in to the airport here. So what gives?”

Craig bit back the first words that came to mind. Treating a two-star

Army general like an unruly Marine second lieutenant probably wouldn’t be the best way to foster interservice cooperation. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“The engineers have only been able to clear enough room to dock one ship at a time, Sam. And right now I need that space to off-load mote essential material.”

“More essential?” Weber nodded toward the stalled columns crowding the highway below.

“Christ, Jerry, you need some heavy armor to break this thing loose and gain some running room. Otherwise we’re still gonna be slogging to Pretoria come the Fourth of July.”

Craig shook his head forcefully.

“Your MIs couldn’t do much for us right now, Sam.” He motioned toward the panorama of rugged, broken ridges and patches of forest spreading west, north, and northeast from Pietermaritzburg.

“We have to push through another hundred klicks like that before we’ll reach anything resembling good tank country.”

“Hell.” Weber scuffed at the pavement with one highly polished combat boot. He looked up.

“I’ll tell you what, Jerry. You and I both know the

Boers don’t have much that can even scratch the paint on one of my tanks.

So bring my MIs ashore, and I’ll go tearing up this goddamned highway so fast we’ll be in Jo’burg before Vorster takes his morning dump.”

Craig chuckled, pleased by the Army general’s aggressive instincts. For a second, he was half-tempted to let the man try his proposed hightech cavalry charge. Then reality stomped back in bearing a few ugly and unfortunate facts.

Weber was only half right. His tanks could probably break past Vorster’s blocking force without much trouble or many losses. But just running the

Afrikaner gauntlet of ambushes and artillery fire with an armored column wouldn’t accomplish much of anything. Tanks had to have infantry support to hold any ground they gained, and they had to have gas to keep moving.

And neither the infantry’s APCs nor convoys of highly flammable fuel trucks could advance until his lead brigades finished doing what they were already doing-securing every hill and ridge overlooking the N3, meter by bloody meter.

Craig shrugged, unable at the moment to see any practical alternative to a prolonged slugging match through the mountains. And given that, the

Allied expeditionary force needed fuel, ammo, artillery, and infantry replacements even more than it needed the 24this main battle tanks.

Weber’s M-Is would only come into their own once his American and British troops broke out onto the flat, open grasslands of the veld.

The sound of distant thunder-heavy artillery-echoed down the highway.

Both officers turned and hurried into the command tent, their argument forgotten and unimportant in the face of yet another Afrikaner attack.

DECEMBER
29-A
COMPANY
, 3RD
BATTALION
,
THE
PARACHUTE
REGIMENT
,
EAST
OF

ROSETTA
,
SOUTH
AFRICA

Though the lateafternoon sun seemed to set the far-off slopes of the

Drakensberg Mountains aflame, it left northern Natal’s narrow valleys and treelined hollows cloaked in growing shadow. Ten kilometers south of the

Mooi River, real fires glowed orange in the gathering darkness. Soldiers wearing red berets and green, brown, and tan woodland-pattern camouflage uniforms clustered around the fires sipping scalding hot heavily sugared tea. Men born and reared in London’s crowded East End, the isolated West

Country, the rusting, industrialized north, or southern England’s rich farmlands and suburbs stood chatting together-their mingled voices and different accents rising and failing beneath overhanging mo pane and acacia trees. After a hard day’s march north along National Route Three, 3 Para’s

A Company was having a last “brew-up” before digging in for the night.

The muted roar of diesel engines drifted up the road as convoys of overworked trucks ferried supplies inland from the Durban beachhead, now nearly ninety kilometers behind them. The Paras could also hear the muffled thump of mortar rounds landing somewhere back along the road, audible proof that some of their “follow-on” forces were again catching hell from stay-behind Boer commandos.

Most paid little attention to the noise. A weeks’ worth of combat in the

Drakensberg’s rugged foothills had taught them how to ignore the sound of gunfire not aimed in their direction.

Maj. John Farwell, A Company’s tall, hook-nosed commander, moved from campfire to campfire collecting his officers and senior NCOs. His two signalers followed close behind, made easy to spot by the thin radio antennas rocking back and forth over their heads. Soldiers who saw them go past muttered uneasily to one another and began checking their weapons out of long habit. As a general rule, the major disliked formal meetings and avoided holding them whenever possible. So an orders group such as the one they saw forming probably meant action was imminent.

The Paras’s instincts were on target. New information had generated new orders. The six hundred soldiers of 3 Para were being committed to a night attack.

Five minutes later, Farwell had his platoon leaders and sergeants assembled in a small clearing by the side of the road. He looked up into a semicircle of fire-lit faces. Some of the men seemed surprisingly eager, almost elated by the prospect of a real “set-piece” battle.

Others, more imaginative, wiser, or simply more experienced, looked grimly determined instead. All seemed horribly young to their thirty five-year-old company commander.

He unfolded a map and spread it out in the light thrown by the campfire.