Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  The Shanganes came to their feet in a single cohesive movement and swept down the hill, but there were only twenty of them, a puny line of running men brightly lit by the flames. The 12.7-men gunners on the hill fastened on them, and tracer flew in clouds about them, thick as a locust plague.

  "Shit!" Sean laughed aloud in terror. "What a way to gal 99 One of the Frelimo gunners had picked Sean out of the sweep line and was concentrating his fire on him, but Sean was M

  downhill with long, flying strides and the gunner was s;11;9 1; and a little behind. Shot flashed past Sean so close he could feel the wind of it tugging at his tunic. Impossibly, he lengthened his stride, and beside him Matatu giggled shrilly, keeping pace with him down the hill.

  "What's so goddamned funny, you silly little bugger?" Sean yelled at him furiously, and they hit the level ground beside the burning fuel tankers. The Frehmo gunner's field of fire was blanketed by the rolling screen of black smoke, and in the respite Sean marshaled his sweep line of racing Shanganes, pivoting them on the center and directing them at the perimeter of the laager, pump to urge them on. They used the smoke ing his right fist overhead to cover themselves for the next two hundred meters of their charge. The dawn breeze was spreading it, sooty black, dense, and low along the ground.

  A Frefimo sentry staggered out of the smoke ahead of Sean. He ubby tennis shoes, he had wore faded, tattered denim jeans and gr lost his weapon, and a rocket splinter must have hit him in the eye.

  The eye was dislodged from its socket and hung out on his cheek like a huge wet grape, dangling and bouncing on the thick cord of the optic nerve as the man jerked his head.

  Without breaking his stride, Sean hit him in the belly with a tap of three from the AKM, firing from the hip. He jumped over the body as it hit the ground.

  They came out of the smoke, still in sweep line. Sean glanced along the line and reaW incredulously that they had not yet taken a single casualty; the twenty Shanganes were spread out and going hard, offering 5my fleeting targets through the smoke and flame to the disoriented Frelimo machine guns.

  At that moment he saw the single strand of wire and the line of round metal discs on short steel droppers only a dozen paces ahead of him. Each disc was emblazoned with a stylized skull and crossbones in scarlet that caught the ruddy glow of the flames, and almost before he realized it they were into the mine field that guarded the perimeter of the laager.

  Two seconds later, the Shangane running on Sean's right-hand side triggered an antipersonnel mine. From the waist down his body was obscured by the dust and flash of the explosion and he dropped to the earth with both of his legs blown to bloody stumps below the knees.

  "Keep going!" Sean screamed. "We are nearly through!" Now his fear was a grotesque black beast upon his back that weighed him down and choked his breathing. To be maimed was a terror far beyond that of death, and the ground beneath his feet was sown with the steel capsules of terrible mutilation.

  Matatu ducked in front of Sean, forcing him to check his stride.

  "Follow me, my Bwana!" he piped in Swahili. "Tread where I have trodden." And Sean obeyed, shortening his stride to that of the little manikin.

  So Matatu ran him through the last fifty paces of the mine field, and Sean knew he had never witnessed such a display of raw courage and devotion of one human being to another. Two more Shanganes went down before they were through, their legs blown away beneath them. They left them lying in puddles of their own blood and minced flesh and jumped over the single strand of wire that marked the far side of the mine field.

  Even in the terror and exhilaration of the moment, Sean felt his eyelids scalding with the strength of his gratitude and love for the little Ndorobo. He wanted to pick him up like a child's toy and hug him. Instead he gasped at him, "You're so damned skinny it wouldn't have gone off even if you had stepped on one." Matatu twinkled with delight and ran at Sean's side as he charged the 12.7-men machine gun in the sandbagged emplacement that lay dead ahead of them.

  Sean was firing the AKM from the hip, short, raking bursts, and he could see the head of the Frefirno gunner in the embrasure of the parapet of sandbags.

  The gunner swiveled the barrel of the heavy machine gun onto him, aiming for his belly. He was so close Sean could see his eyes reflecting the red light of the fires as he sighted over it. The instant before he fired, Sean hurled himself forward, dropping under the shot like a runner sliding for the base plate; bullets whipped over his head and the muzzle blast beat in his eardrums, but he rolled forward and came up hard against the parapet, flattening himself against it, so close that he could have reached out and touched the muzzle of the machine gun.

  Sean unhooked the fragmentation grenade from his belt, drew the pin, and popped it into the embrasure beside him as though he were posting a letter.

  He smiled ashe heard the Frelimo gunner scream something unintelligible in Portuguese.

  "Happy birthday!" he said, and the grenade exploded, blowing out through the opening in an exhalation of flame and fumes.

  Sean jumped up and rolled over the top of the parapet. There were two men in the emplacement, writhing and wriggling on the floor, and half a dozen others had abandoned the position and were sprinting away up the hill, unarmed and screaming with panic.

  Sean left Matatu to finish off the two wounded men on the floor with his skinning knife, while he seized the abandoned 12.7-men machine gun and manhandled it to the rear wall of the emplacement. He aimed it up the hill at the fleeing Frelimo and fired a long, traversing burst. Two of the runners dropped in their tracks. Grinning happily, crooning to himself with the fun of it, Matatu dragged a steel box of spare ammunition belts across the bloody floor and helped Sean reload.

  With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean made a sweep with the heavy machine gun. His fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of running Frelimo and scatter them

  Ing It seemed to Sean as though more than half the Shanganes had survived the mine field and the bloody charge and assault. Roaring wildly with triumph, they were pursuing and harrying the routed defenders.

  The barrel of the heavy machine gun was so hot it crackled like a horseshoe fresh from the blacksmith's forge.

  "Come on!" Sean abandoned it and jumped onto the rear parapet, ready to follow his Shanganes deeper into the laager and to begin wrecking the Russian service installations.

  As he stood poised on the parapet, backlit by the burning fuel tankers, a monstrous apparition appeared in the dawn sky ahead of him. Rising on its glittering rotor, turbos shrieking, a Hind gunship lifted out of its,-4nd bagged emplacement not two hundred meters from where Sein stood. It looked like some prehistoric behemoth. SupernAral and otherworldly it rotated ponderously until the mirrored eyes of the canopy si@5 at Sean and the multiple cannon barrel in the turret below its nose pointed at him like an accuser's finger.

  Sean reached down, seized Matatu by the scruff of his neck, hurled him to the floor of the emplacement, then threw himself full length on top of him, knocking the breath out of the little man, just as a gale of cannon fire dissolved the parapet wall and turned it to clouds of driving dust and gravel.

  The suddenness of it all was what shocked Claudia most. One moment there was the stillness and tranquil darkness of dawn and the next the glare and cacophony of battle, the sky lit by the brilliance of leaping flame and glittering floods of tracers, her ears pounded by bursting mortars, shells and grenades and the blasts of machine gun fire.

  it took long moments to adjust her eyes to the intensity of light orient herself to the swift kaleidoscope of the battle. Job and to had pointed out to her the point on the perimeter of the laager through which Sean would lead the assault, and she searched it anxiously. The tiny figures of running men on the exposed slope of the hill were lit by the flames of burning avgas, which cast dark spiderlike shadows that scampered ahead of each man. There were so many of them, little black ants scurrying about, and with a jolt of them fall and lie very
still in the of horror she watched some sound.

  confusion of movement and light and 4: "Where is Sean?" she whispered anxiously. "Can you see him?"

  411N the left, at the edge of the smoke," Job told her, and she an ahead of him like a picked him out by the tiny figure that r hunting dog.

  "I see him and Matatu."

  Just in front of the pair the earth seemed suddenly to bloom with dust and flame, and they were gone.

  "Oh, God. No!" she cried aloud, but as the dust blew aside on the morning breeze she saw the two of them running On, tracer bullets flickering about them like hellish fireflies.

  "Please, please protect him," she breathed, and lost sight of him as he reached the first emplacement.

  "Where is he?" She found she had seized Job's arm and was it wildly. "Where is he, can you see him?"

  shaking Suddenly Sean was there again, and even at that distance he appeared a heroic figure, balancing easily on the sandbagged parapet in the ruddy glow of the flames. She cried aloud with relief.

  Then she saw him cower, and from out of the very earth, only of a Hind a short distance ahead of him, the monstrous shape gunship reared into the air and swung its monstrous head toward him, lowering like a charging bull. She heard the roar of its cannon, and leaping fountains of dust and flying earth obscured Sean's distant figure as cannon shell raked across the hillside.

  "Job!" she screamed. "They have killed him!" She reached out for him again, but Job shook off her hand.

  He was down on one knee, the launch tube of the Stinger across his right shoulder, his face in the reflected firelight fixed in a mask of concentration as he stared into the sight screen.

  "Quickly!" Claudia whispered. "Shoot quickly!"

  The missile leaped from its long tube, and hot air and stinging Particles Of dust and dead grass were blown back into Claudia's face as the rocket motor ignited. She slitted her eyes and held her breath as she watched it dart away on its tail of smoke and flame, leaving a trail of dazzling smoke behind it as it flew toward the crest of the hill where the Hind hovered against the dark sky.

  She saw the slight kick in its trajectory as the missile changed to the ultraviolet seeker and lifted its nose fractionally, aiming no longer at the armored exhaust ports but at the open mouth of the turbo intakes, just below the humped gearbox of the rotor.

  She thought she saw the missile fly squarely into the intake, but the resulting explosion was deceptively mild, contained within the shell of titanium armor plate so that none of its fury was dissipated. The Hind reeled wildly, throwing its nose high, falling backward so its tail rotor caught the rocky hillside and flipped it over sideways. It tumbled and bounced down the slope, rolling end over end, flames billowing from the throat of the air intake, its huge main rotor thrashing the earth and tearing itself to pieces, fragments hurtling into the night sky.

  Claudia sought desperately for Sean and gasped as she recognized him through the dust and smoke, leaping back onto the parapet and then plunging on up the hillside with Matatu close behind him.

  "Reload!" Job snapped at her. With a guilty start she reached for the spare missile tube beside her and helped him clip it into the launcher.

  The moment the Stinger was reloaded she glanced back at the laager. Sean was gone, but three more of the Hind gunships were airborne, soaring across the dawn, backlit by the flames. They were firing their cannon, some of them seeking targets within the laager, where the attackers were in desperate hand-to-hand combat with the Frehmo garrison, others flailing the dark forest beyond the perimeter with their gales of tracer, trying to extinguish the hail of missiles that flew at them from out of the darkness.

  Another Hind "was hit and fell on its back, bursting into violent flame as it crashed into the rocky crest of the hill, and then another staggered in flight and curved down, mortally wounded, to hit the treetops and cartwheel through them to the earth.

  As fast as they fell, others rose from their hidden emplacements with cannons blazing, sweeping down on the attackers. Job leaped to his feet as a gunship tried to break away, climbing steeply over their heads. He arched his back, pointing the missile almost vertically upward, like a gun taking on a high-driven pheasant.

  The Hind was a thousand feet up and climbing away. It seemed to be safely beyond the Stinger's effective range, presenting a difficult angle and impossible trajectory, but the missile darted up, overhauling it effortlessly, and the great machine seemed to wince and tremble to the shot, for a moment standing stationary in the air, before it fell back with its damaged turbos screaming in mortal agony and dived into the valley, hitting in a storm of breaking trunks.

  branches and torn tree "Reload." Job did not even watch the Hind's death agony, and Claudia leaped to help him fit another missile tube to the launcher.

  She tapped his shoulder as she finished.

  "Go!" she said.

  Another Hind came out of the forest directly in front of them.

  The Russian pilot was flying so low he seemed to be earthbound.

  He was dodging and ducking the huge machine behind the scattered trees, weaving like a boxer, the downdraft of the rotor flatw feet below the Hind's belly.

  tening the tall elephant grass only a fe Job turned to face the oncoming machine, standing out in the open and lit by the flames. He braced himself, Picking up the image of the Hind in the sight screen.

  The Hind seemed to steady itself for an instant, and the blast of like a hurricane wind.

  its Gatling cannon swept around them her feet by the force Standing beside Job, Claudia was blown off with the supersonic shock of passing of it, and her ears buzzed cannon shells.

  e wind from Job was thrown on top of her, his weight driving th her lungs, but they had fallen between two round boulders that deflected the rest of the volley of cannon fire. The Hind passed over them, only feet above where they lay, and the blast of its rotors slashed at them, whipping Claudia's hair into her face so it stung her eyes like a scourge.

  sing tiger shark. Claudia was Then the Hind slid away like a crui suffocating with Job's weight on top of her and half-blinded by to free herself and was dust and her own hair. She struggled wet and that hot liquid was suddenly aware that her hands were spilling over her and soaking her shirt "Job!" she blurted. "Get up! Get off me!" Only when he neither replied nor moved but lay on her with a heavy, loose weight did she realize that the wetness that was dousing her was Job's blood. That knowledge gave her wild strength, and she rolled his body aside and dragged herself out from under him She crawled to her knees and looked down at him. A cannon shell had hit him high in the upper body, and the damage was though he had been savaged and mauled by horrific. It looked as some ferocious beast; his right arm was almost torn from the shoulder and was thrown above his head in a ghastly parody of surrender.

  She stared at him numbly and tried to say his name. No sound came from her throat. She reached out and caressed his face, not daring to touch that terribly mutilated body. She felt a terrible sense of loss and opened her mouth again to give vent to her grief with a wail of despair. It came out in a wild shriek of rage. The force of her rage stunned her and seemed to impel her out of her own body so that she watched herself from afar, amazed by the actions of this savage stranger who had usurped her body and who now lunged for the missile launcher where it lay beside Job's body.

  She found herself on her feet with the missile launcher on her right shoulder, searching the sky for the Hind gunship. It was four hundred meters away, cruising the foot of the hill, sweeping over the forest, picking out its targets from among the trees and destroying them with short but terrible blasts of its forward cannon.

  As she turned to face it, standing fully upright in the daylight glare of the fires, the pilot must have spotted her, for he swiveled the gunship on its axis, bringing the cannon in the pod below his cockpit to bear upon her.

  "Locked and loaded," she said, and the voice was strange in her ears as she repeated the litany of death.

 
; "Actuator on." She saw the image of the Hind appear in the tiny screen before her eyes, and she centered it in the cross hair on the amung ring. The missile sobbed, then steadied into its high-pitched electronic tone.

  "Target acquired," she whispered, feeling no fear as the silhouette of the Hind altered in her sight screen. Now it was facing her head-on, its cannon almost bearing, the gunner traversing fractionally to pick up her tiny figure in his own sights.

  "Fire!" she said quie4ly, and squeezed the pistol grip. The shoulder pad "olted her 4s the Stinger launched, and she slitted her eyes i V

  against the backblast of the missile as it sped away at four times the speed of sound, running straight and true at , the hovering machine.

  The cannon in the Hind's nose blazed, but Claudia felt only the disrupted air of shot passing close over her head before the missile jerked almost imperceptibly and arrowed unerringly into the open throat of the machine's turbo intakes. The Hind had only a few feet to drop before it hit the earth and rolled over onto its side. In the moments before it was totally engulfed by burning fuel from the punctured belly tank, Claudia saw the panicky contortions of the pilot trapped under the armored canopy.