Larry Bond - Vortex

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.