Larry Bond - Vortex

In seconds, eight more mortar bombs burst near the road -spraying fragments up and down the line of trucks and personnel carriers. Several vehicles were on fire, some while still moving. Other lay canted at odd angles, their drivers dead or disabled.

Bekker showed his teeth in a quick, wolfish smile. Kruger’s traitorous battalion was being cut to pieces by his textbook perfect ambush.

COMMAND RATEL

A nearby explosion rocked the Ratel, sending maps, pencils, and loose gear flying. Fragments rattled off its side armor.

“Christ!” Henrik Kruger staggered forward through the confusion and grabbed the radio headset from the pale, frightened lieutenant. Panicked, garbled voices poured over the airwaves.

“Taking fire from the hill … Arrie’s hit! My God, I’m hit! .. . Got to get out …. Estimate four, maybe five guns…

Another shell slammed into the road just ahead of them. Kruger heard his driver swearing as he swerved off onto the shoulder to avoid ramming a truck stopped dead and on fire. As they roared by the blazing vehicle, a single sheet of furnace-hot fl arne washed over the turret and commander’s cupola. Then they were past.

He swung round in a quick circle, trying to see what was happening to his battalion through his cupola’s narrow vision slits. Burning vehicles and sprawled corpses littered the barren landscape in every direction. They were being massacred.

Kruger squeezed the transmit button.

“This is Kruger. Wheel left and pop smoke! Pop smoke!”

The Ratel slewed over in a hard left turn. As it spun around to face the enemy-held hill, the machine gunner beside him triggered the APC’s four turret-mounted smoke dischargers. They coughed in sequence, firing four smoke grenades out through a fifty-meter-wide arc.

Other Ratels were doing the same thing, creating an instant smoke screen to hide themselves from the heavy weapons on the hill above them. Sand and dirt sprayed high near the APC’s right flank as another shell ploughed into the ground.

Kruger grimaced. The smoke gave them a temporary respite from direct fire, but those damned mortars didn’t need to see their targets to hit them. They only had to pour bombs onto preregistered firing points to be sure of killing something.

Conscious of precious seconds slipping by, he scanned the terrain behind them. Nothing. No cover at all. Just flat, bare rock, packed dirt, and tufts of dead grass. They’d have to break this ambush the hard way. He clicked his mike again.

“All units. Attack! Attack immediately! Our objective is the hill!

“

As the Ratel bounced forward, accelerating through its own smoke screen, acknowledgments flowed in from his surviving company and platoon leaders.

The men and vehicles of the 20th Cape Rifles surged ahead, charging uphill toward their enemies.

REACTION FORCE

Bekker scowled at the puffs of dense white smoke dotting the ground below the hill. His Carl Gustav teams were having trouble finding targets in all that muck. Another mortar bomb salvo landed-bright flashes rippling through the thickening

haze of smoke and dust. Directed by forward observers, his gunners were walking their fire back and forth along the road, pounding the enemy’s stalled vehicles and dismounted infantry.

“Major!” De Vries grabbed his shoulder and pointed downhill. Shapes were emerging from the smoke. Turreted Ratels, open-topped Buffels, and even trucks were advancing on his positions at high speed.

For a second, Bekker’s confidence slipped. Kruger was doing exactly what he himself would have done under the same circumstances. And he was doing it fast.

Clang. Hit by a Carl Gustav round, one of the oncoming APCs shuddered once and stopped moving. Flames spewed out of the gigantic hole punched through its thin front armor. Nobody got through its buckled hatches.

But the recoilless rifle’s backblast hovered over its firing position like a billboard advertising its existence. Bekker caught a last glimpse of the Carl Gustav’s two-man crew hurriedly reloading before two Ratel turrets whined round and fired repeatedly-pumping 20mm cannon shells into the foxhole until it vanished in a spray of sand and dirt.

More vehicles were hit and burning, but the rest were still coming on-their guns chattering wildly, traversing right and left to lay down a curtain of suppressive fire across the hilltop.

Bekker dove for the bottom of his hole as a machinegun burst tore through the air all around him. Corporal de Vries wasn’t fast enough. A 12.7mm bullet caught him at the base of the throat and ripped his head off. The radioman’s decapitated corpse fell backward against the lip of the foxhole, still spouting bright-red arterial blood.

The major grabbed his R4 and snapped its safety off. Damn it. Where were his gunships? The helicopters were his ace in the hole.

PUMA GUNSHIP LEAD

Capt. Harry Kersten brought his helicopter up out of the Oranje River basin and then dropped its nose to gain speed for forward flight. Rotors clattering, the Puma surged ahead-closing on the battlefield at eighty knots. He squinted through the haze, looking for targets.

Pillars of black smoke curled skyward above burning trucks and armored personnel carriers. Others lay tilted over, evidently abandoned. All the signs of a successful and bloody ambush. Then he saw boxy shapes moving up the side of the hill and frowned. The renegade battalion’s vehicles were almost right on top of Bekker’s infantry. Target selection was going to be a bitch.

Kersten spoke over the intercom.

“You with me back there, Roef?”

“Sure, Captain.” His door gunner had to shout over the noise of the slipstream howling in through his open door.

“Good. Now listen up. We’re going in now-nice and low so you can see who you’re shooting, right? And you only shoot the vehicles, okay?”

“Understood.”

“Great.” Kersten half-turned his head to catch a glimpse of the other Puma pacing them just off the desert floor.

“You copy that, Hennie?”

His wingman acknowledged.

Kersten took a quick breath and brought the helicopter around in a gentle, curving arc. They’d cross the battle area at an angle to bring their door-mounted 30mm cannons to bear. He came out of the turn and dropped the

Puma’s nose again. Airspeed crept up slowly-climbing from eighty knots to one hundred and twenty. The other gunship settled into formation behind him.

Now they were hurtling straight for the hill, two helicopters flashing past isolated clumps of brush and jagged boulders, one right after the other.

The battlefield seemed to leap closer in seconds. Distant specks expanded suddenly into individual vehicles. Ratels with their distinctive turrets.

Open-topped Buffels crammed with white faces staring up at him from under helmets. Land Rovers weaving over the ground at fantastic speed. Even a few trucks, which seemed sadly out of place among the fighting vehicles.

The Puma’s 30mm gun opened up with a rattling, jackhammer roar.

Kersten pulled the gunship’s nose up sharply, following the rising terrain. He and his crew were blind for an instant as the Puma clattered through the thick, oily smoke billowing from a burning vehicle, and it shuddered violently-caught in a sudden upsurge of superheated air. Then they were through and on the other side of the hill, howling away at high speed.

“Two of them! I got two of the bastards!” his door gunner shouted over the intercom, caught up in a wild mix of ecstasy and relief.

“They fire balled I got them, Captain.”

“Great, Roef. ” Kersten yanked the Puma around in a tight, spiraling turn. ” Look sharp now. We’re going in again.”

The two South African gunships flew south and west in an arc that would bring them back over the hilltop battlefield.