Vortex (87 page)

Lt. Col. Mike Carreffa ran out the control tower door with one hand holding his helmet on and the other clutching his M 16. His radioman and headquarters troops were right behind him.

Swartkop Airfield was a mess. Three turboprop transport planes and a fuel truck sat ablaze at the far end of the flight line. Closer in, wrecked cars and trucks dotted the base’s parking lot and access roads.

Parachutes fluttered in the breeze, abandoned wherever his men had landed. Collapsed mounds of torn, smoking sandbags showed where the

Rangers had overrun South African positions in bitter, hand-to-hand combat.

Carrerra frowned. The Citizen Force company assigned to defend Swartkop had put up one hell of a fight. Bright white flashes and the harsh rattle of machinegun fire near the airfield’s huge, aluminum-sided hangars reminded him that his assessment was somewhat premature. South Africa’s reservists were still putting up a hell of a fight.

“Colonel, Sierra One Zero’s on the horn.” His radioman ducked as a mortar round burst on the tarmac ahead of them.

He took the offered mike.

“Go ahead, Sierra One Zero.”

“Do you have that runway clear yet?” Carreffa recognized the clipped

Northeastern accents of the colonel flying the lead MC-141. The ten

American jet transports were circling in a tight pattern over Pretoria and its adjoining airfield, waiting for confirmation that it was safe to land.

“Negative, One Zero. Estimate five minutes before we can bring you in.

Will advise. Out.”

Karrumph. Another mortar round tore up dirt and gravel one hundred meters to the left. Carrerra took his thumb off the transmit button and motioned his senior sergeant over.

“Ike, get on the platoon net and tell Sammy I want those goddamned mortar pits cleared pronto. We’ve got some birds up there anxious to get down on the ground. Got it?”

Carrerra led his headquarters troops across the tarmac toward the fighting raging near Swartkop’s aircraft maintenance hangars. He’d brought five hundred men into this battle. He had a lot fewer left now, and the 2/75th needed every rifle it could bring to bear.

CACTUS
SAM
LAUNCHER
,
SWARTKOP
MILITARY
AIRFIELD

The last surviving
SAM
launcher assigned to defend Swartkop from air attack sat motionless on a low bluff overlooking the airfield. Brown, tan, and black camouflage netting softened the four-wheeled vehicle’s rectangular, boxy shape-making it look more like a boulder or a clump of dried brush than a missile carrier.

Three men crowded the launcher’s tiny red-lit control compartment.

“Well?”

The short, tight-lipped South African Air Force warrant officer manning the vehicle’s target acquisition and firing board flicked one last switch and shook his head.

“Nothing, Lieutenant. I’m not getting any data from

Cactus Four. Either they’re dead or the cable’s been cut.”

“Damn it!” His taller, younger commander pounded the darkened instrument panel in frustration. Then he took refuge in standard procedure.

“Switch to optical tracking, Doorne. ”

“Yes, sir. ” Warrant Officer Doorne’s nimble fingers danced across his control console. A TV monitor slaved to a camera mounted atop the vehicle lit up, showing a wide angle view of the star-studded night sky outside.

Something moved ponderously across the sky, blotting out stars in its path. Doome tapped a key and and focused his

TV camera on the airborne intruder. A big, four-engined jet was already turning away for another orbit over the city.

“Target locked in,

Lieutenant!”

His commander stared at the image on his screen. South Africa didn’t have any planes that looked like that. The bogey must be an enemy.

“Fire!”

The vehicle shuddered and rocked back as one of its missiles roared aloft on a pillar of glowing white flame, accelerating rapidly toward its maximum speed of Mach 2.3. The missile arced toward its target, guided by Warrant Officer Doome’s joystick.

Optical tracking permitted South Africa’s Cactus
SAM
launchers to attack enemy aircraft even if their fire control radars were out of action or being jammed. The system worked very much like a child’s video game. An onboard digital computer translated a human controller’s joystick movements into flight commands and radioed them on to the missile. All he had to do was hold the cross hairs of his TV sight on the target and the computer would steer the
SAM
directly into its target. Best of all, optically guided missiles couldn’t be jammed or spoofed away by flares and showers of chaff.

The system wasn’t much use against fastmoving attack aircraft or fighters coming in head-on or crossing at a sharp angle. Human reflexes simply hadn’t evolved to cope with closing speeds measured at nearly two thousand miles an hour. But the C-141 known as Sierra One Four was a huge, lumbering target flying in a wide circle at just four hundred knots.

Two hundred meters downslope, a Ranger fire team leader saw the missile launch and dropped the data cable he and his men had been following uphill.

“Incoming!”

The American soldiers dove for the ground as the
SAM
flashed past not far overhead-trailing smoke and fire. Spitting out dirt, the fire team leader reared up onto his knees. Get the bastards!”

One of his men nodded grimly and squeezed the trigger on his
LAW
. The 66mm antitank rocket ripped through the South African
SAM
vehicle’s camouflage netting and punched through its hull before exploding in an orange-red ball of fire and molten steel.

Warrant Officer Doorne and the others inside were killed instantly. But it was too late to save Sierra One Four.

SIERRA
ONE
FOUR
,
OVER
PRETORIA

The South African missile detonated just fifty meters behind the

C-141.

Fragments lanced through the plane’s port wing, puncturing fuel and hydraulic lines. Flames billowed out of its inner port engine, streamering away into the darkness.

“Jesus!” Sierra One Four’s pilot fought to bring his crippled aircraft under control. Warning lights glowed red all around the cockpit. The

Starlifter was dying. He wrestled with the controls, trying desperately to keep the plane in some semblance of level flight and headed away from the city below.

With its port wing engulfed in flame, the C-141 fell out of position in the formation. For a second, it staggered onward through the air, seemingly determined to fly on despite all the damage it had sustained.

Then the huge plane tipped over and plowed into the ground at four hundred miles an hour.

“Be Starlifter’s tumbling, burning, and rolling wreckage tore a swath of total destruction through Pretoria’s southern suburbs. Houses vanished-reduced to piles of smoldering rubble and shattered wood.

Century-old oak and jacaranda trees were uprooted and splintered in the same instant, and automobiles were ground under and crushed-mangled into heat-warped abstract sculptures of metal, fiberglass, and molten rubber.

More than one hundred South African civilians lay dead or dying beneath the debris.

Burning jet fuel set a quarter-mile stretch of Pretoria on fire and lit the night with an eerie, orange glow.

2n5TH
RANGERS
,
SWARTKOP

Lt. Col. Mike Carrerra crouched beside his radioman, watching as the nine remaining C-141s touched down and taxied off Swartkop’s main runway. One by one, the planes turned around and came to a stop with their noses pointed back down the runway-ready for instant takeoff.

The rear cargo ramp of the last C-141 whined open, settling slowly onto the tarmac. In less than a minute, Air Force crewmen emerged from the plane’s dimly lit interior, pushing two small helicopters ahead of them-McDonnell Douglas MH-8 gunships belonging to the Army’s 160th

Aviation Regiment. Aviators called them “Little Birds” with good reason.

Even carrying a full combat load-four
TOW
antitank missiles and a GE 7.62mm Minigun-each weighed just over a ton and a half. Technicians were already swarming around the two choppers, frantically prepping them for flight. Special blade-folding and stowage techniques developed by the 160th were supposed to allow both gunships to be assembled, loaded, and in the air within seven minutes.

Carrerra hoped those estimates were accurate. O’Connell and the nearly four hundred Rangers still fighting at Pelindaba would need those helicopters overhead by then, covering their withdrawal to Swartkop. He clicked the talk button on his radio mike.

“Rover One One, this is Tango

One One. Icarus. I say again, Icarus.”

Swartkop Airfield had been captured. He and his troops were holding the way home open-at least for the moment.

HEADQUARTERS
COMPANY
, 1/75TH
RANGERS

O’Connell snapped a full magazine into his M16 and eyed his closest subordinates.

“Right. You heard Carrerra. We’ve got Swartkop. Now we need those goddamned nukes.” He looked at his radioman.

“No word from Bravo

Three?”

Weisman shook his head. The radioman had a droopy, sad eyed face made mournful by nature. He looked gloomy even at the best of times. Right now he looked heartsick.

O’Connell made several quick decisions. The Rangers of Bravo Company’s

Third Platoon were supposed to have dropped right on top of the weapons storage complex and its guard bunkers. It was beginning to look as though they’d been wiped out. Either that or all their radios were on the fritz.

Sure. In any case, he’d have to go find out what had happened. South

Africa’s nukes were Brave Fortune’s prize-its only prize. Without them, this whole operation was nothing more than one big bloody disaster.

He started issuing orders.

“Fitz, you and Brady stay here with Doc and the wounded. Keep an eye peeled for anybody using that to come down on our backs.” He pointed north along the trench. Several of the bunkers along

Pelindaba’s northern perimeter were still in South African hands, and the slit trench would offer cover and concealment for any counterattacking force.

Sergeant Fitzsimmons, a linebacker-sized Ranger from Colorado, nodded once and moved down the narrow trench with his M 16 out and ready. Brady, a smaller black man who delighted in a thick, almost impenetrable Southern drawl, followed him, cradling an M60 light machine gun. He looked eager to try his weapon out on the first available Afrikaner.

O’Connell watched them go and turned to the rest of his able-bodied headquarters troops. There weren’t many. Maybe half of those who’d jumped.

He made a quick count. Seven officers and roughly twenty enlisted

Rangers-and with only two M60s for support. He shook his head, impatient with his own pessimism. He’d have to make do.

“Okay, let’s mosey on down this trench and see what the hell’s holding up Bravo Three. ”

He caught Esher Levi’s anxious eye.

“Can you make it with that bum ankle of yours, Professor?” Jump injuries were always painful, and the Israeli scientist’s injury had probably already had time to swell inside his boot.

Surprisingly, Levi smiled-a brief flash of white teeth. He leaned on an M 16 he’d taken from one of the seriously wounded. ” I have a crutch,

Colonel. And I suspect that I can hobble with the best of you.”

O’Connell decided that he liked the man. Levi was a lot

tougher than he looked. Having a sense of humor was vital when all you really felt like doing was screaming. He nodded briefly and turned to

Weisman.

“Spread the word that we’re going after the nukes.”

He checked his watch. It felt like an eternity, but they’d only been on the ground for eight minutes. Those Navy flyboys ought to be joining the party at any moment now.

“All set, Colonel.” Weisman looked as unhappy as ever.

O’Connell tapped the assault rifle slung from the radioman’s shoulder.

“Cheer up, Dave. Who knows, you may even get a chance to use that thing.”

Weisman looked just the tiniest bit happier.

O’Connell gripped his own M16 and stepped out into the middle of the trench. Rifle and machinegun fire crackled nearby, punctuated by muffled grenade blasts. Alpha and Charlie Company platoons were busy wreaking havoc on South African barracks and silencing enemy-held bunkers one by one. The sky to the west and north seemed brighter, lit by the fires of burning buildings and vehicles.

He glanced over his shoulder. Tense, camouflage-painted faces stared back at him from beneath Kevlar helmets.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

The Rangers trotted south down the trench, with a determined Prof. Esher

Levi limping in their midst. As they moved, a sound like ragged, rolling thunder rumbled overhead. The Vinson’s carrier-based planes were winging into action.

TIGER
FOUR
,
OVER
WATER
KLOOF
MILITARY
AIRFIELD
,
NEAR
PRETORIA

The F/A-18 Hornet came in low from the southeast, roaring two thousand feet above Pretoria’s suburbs at almost five hundred knots. Lights appeared ahead of the speeding American plane-a string of widely spaced lights running east to west for more than a mile.

The Hornet’s pilot, Lt. Comdr. Pete “Pouncer” Garrard, keyed his mike.

“Tiger Lead, the runway is lit.”

“Roger that.”

Garrard concentrated on his flying, lining up for what he fervently hoped would be a perfect attack run. Tonight’s show wasn’t just for some inter squadron trophy. This was for real. Six Durandal anti runway weapons hung beneath Tiger Four’s wings, ready for use on one of South Africa’s biggest military airfields. The F/A-18 angled left half a degree, edging onto the imaginary flight path its computer calculated would produce the best results.

Garrard spotted movement on the runway off to his right. Two winged, single-tailed shapes were rolling down the tarmac, still on the ground but picking up speed fast. The South Africans were trying to get fighters in the air. Too late, mi amigos, he thought, using fragments of the street “Spanglish” he’d picked up during a boyhood spent in southern