Larry Bond - Vortex

Shouts, screams, and bursts of automatic weapons fire rose above the sound of roaring flames. From time to time, the ammunition or fuel stored in a burning vehicle would explode-spraying white and yellow streaks of fire high into the dark sky. In less than a minute, smoke rolled across the scene, hiding everything in an oily black mist.

Slowly, the sounds of firing died down and the shouting faded away. Soon, all Jaime could hear were flames crackling as Cuban trucks and armored cars burned. He waited, following his orders, and kept watch through his field glasses.

A hand on his shoulder startled him, and he whipped around, reaching for a rifle he suddenly realized was too far away. His father’s voice stilled his panic, though, and the warmth and praise he heard filled him with pride.

“You did well, Jaime. We were watching as you dropped that officer. You killed a captain.”

“You are all right, Father?” Jaime could see that he looked healthy, but he wanted to hear it with his own ears.

“I’m fine.” His father held out one arm, a little reddened, with the hair singed.

“I got a little too close to one of the commandant’s Thunderbolts, but otherwise I’m in good shape. “

His smile disappeared.

“We lost two men, though, and three others are hurt.” He saw sorrow cross Jaime’s face and quickly added, “It’s the price of our struggle, son. Those who live must remember them and carry on.”

The elder Steers’s face grew grim.

“And the enemy paid, son. We got them all.” He jerked a thumb at the smoke shrouded laager ahead of them.

“Every vehicle there burns. No Cubans have escaped. No Cubans survived, and we took no Cuban prisoners. They are all in Hell.”

Jaime Steers’s eyes followed his father’s pointing finger

toward the burning encampment. Rumor said that the Cubans had sworn to conquer South Africa or turn it into a depopulated wasteland. Well, he thought, with a newly adult grimness that matched his father’s tight-lipped expression, the communists were finding out there was more than one kind of scorched earth.

DECEMBER 22-20TH CAPE RIFLES, NEAR GENYESA,

INSIDE BOPHUTHATSWANA

The sun rose fast over the barren lands of the Kalahari Basin-a fiery red ball that turned night into day in one blinding instant. Shadows fled westward across a desolate, sandy plain stretching north toward the vast

Kalahari Desert itself and south to the rugged, treeless peaks of the

Langberg and the Asbestos mountains. Sunlight glinted off the tin roofs of several dozen one-room shacks clustered around the junction of two roads-one tarred, the other little more than a dirt track. Small herds of scrawny cattle and sheep were already on the move, ambling outward in what would be a long search for sparse grass to graze on. Dogs barked and a lone rooster crowed, signaling the start of what seemed like just another day for the people of Genyesa.

But things were different.

Genyesa’s population had more than doubled overnight. Camouflage netting strung between clumps of twisted scrub covered an array of nearly forty trucks, jeeps, and armored personnel carriers. Armed sentries in khaki

South African battle dress stood guard along each road entering the town.

Others lounged beside the central, flat-roofed stone building that served as Genyesa’s post office, telephone center, and police station.

Henrik Kruger and his 20th Cape Rifles now controlled the tiny black town.

With his back propped against a tire, Ian Sheffield sat cross legged in the shadow cast by a large, five-ton truck. From time to time, he glanced up from the notebook he held open in his lap, gazing skyward without seeing anything at all as he searched for the words or phrases he wanted. Whenever he moved, he moved carefully, determined not to wake Emily van der Heijden as she slept curled up on an old Army blanket by his side.

Matthew Siberia and their driver, a young Afrikaner sergeant, lay back to back beneath the truck itself, snoring peaceably in counterpoint.

Everywhere Ian looked he could see men sleeping or trying to sleep-snatching every moment of rest they could while the battalion laagered for the day. Flies droned through the artificial gloom created by their camouflage netting.

He forced his eyes open and yawned hugely, fighting to stay awake at least long enough to finish scribbling a few quick notes describing last night’s trek. Keeping a daily record of their long flight westward from

Pretoria to the Cape Province had been Emily’s suggestion. A damned good one, he thought wryly.

Assuming they lived long enough to tell somebody about it, the details of Kruger’s rebellion against his government would make an exciting story-a kind of modern-day anabasis with the 20th Cape Rifles standing in for Xenophon and The Ten Thousand, Vorster’s troops playing the vengeful, pursuing Persians, and with assorted independent Boer commandos in the roles originally held by wild Anatolian tribesmen.

At any rate, Ian felt sure the classical analogy would amuse Kruger himself. God knows, they all needed something to laugh about.

The Afrikaner soldier had pushed his men hard over the past several days, evidently determined to put as much distance as possible between Pretoria and his battalion. They’d driven only at night, taking side roads and back-country lanes to avoid towns that might harbor informers or AWB loyalists. Vehicles that broke down were ruthlessly stripped of all useful spare parts and supplies and then abandoned. Where ffic battalion’s quartermasters couldn’t buy or beg enough gasoline or diesel fuel, they’d stolen it. One constant, unchanging set of orders governed every action and every decision: move and keep moving. Don’t stop. Don’t give Vorster’s hunters

an immobile target. And don’t blunder into unnecessary combat.

Last night’s march had been by far the worst of all. Warned by scouts of a sizable government force garrisoning the road junction at Vryburg, they’d been forced west and north over a rugged chain of hills and ridges separating the Cape Plateau from the Kalahari Basin. And stretches that could have been covered in minutes on a freeway took hours to traverse on the narrow, unpaved tracks available to them.

So far, though, Kruger’s insistence on speed and discretion had paid off.

They’d come more than four hundred kilometers without stumbling into any government roadblock or time wasting firefight. Not bad, Ian thought. Then he remembered the maps he’d seen. They were still at least seven hundred kilometers from the nearest American or Cape Province outposts. Plenty of time yet for disaster to strike.

Beside him, Emily suddenly muttered something in her sleep and rolled over onto her stomach. He put down his pen for a moment and softly stroked her hair. She sighed once, moving closer.

Suddenly, and with surprising intensity, he found himself praying, please, God, no matter what happens to me, protect her. Surprising, because he’d never been especially religious. His ambitions had already gotten Sam Knowles killed. He didn’t want them to cost Emily her life or her freedom.

A polite cough warned Ian that someone else was near. He looked up from

Emily’s auburn hair and saw Commandant Henrik Kruger standing outlined against the rising sun-his pale gray eyes and weather-beaten face a mask of unreadable shadow.

“I hope I am not interrupting, meneer?” Kruger kept his own voice low, as though he, too, wanted to avoid breaking into Emily’s rest. But Ian could hear the carefully controlled bitterness in his words.

My God, the man’s still hopelessly in love with her, he realized.

Suddenly embarrassed, he took his hand away from Emily’s hair. There wasn’t much point in ramming the loss down Kruger’s throat-especially not after he’d already risked so much to save their lives. Ian shook his head and gestured to the ground.