by Larry Bond
” Medic I “
Rangers dragged the wounded man farther down the trench to where the 1/75this senior medic had set up an impromptu aid station for the headquarters company. It was already overflowing with badly wounded men.
O’Connell spat out the salty, coppery taste in his mouth and grabbed the handset from his radioman. They had to move. It was time to go after the first of Brave Fortune’s two key objectives.
“Bravo Two One and Charlie Two
One, this is Rover One One. Execute Thor and Erector Set.”
2ND PLATOON, BRAVO COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS, NEAR THE POWER PLANT
Pelindaba’s small coal-fired steam plant had been built to a simple design that stressed function over pleasing form. Turning coal-heated boiler water to high-pressure steam-steam used to drive turbines generating electricity.
In turn, that electricity powered the uranium enrichment plant, science labs, and every other building inside the compound’s barbed wire fence.
One hundred yards south of the power plant, two Rangers lay flat in an open field. Their sergeant’s bullet-riddled body sprawled bloody and unmoving behind them.
Cpl. Mitch Wojcik squinted through the recoilless rifle’s nightvision sight. Piping of various thicknesses girded the outside of the plant, carrying feed water into its boiler, steam out to propel its spinning turbines, and steam cooling and condensing into water back again to the boiler. One tall stack carried away the smoke produced by burning high-sulfur soft coal.
Wojcik swung the Carl Gustav slightly to the right, seeking his target.
Bingo. Hours spent studying every available photo of the power plant paid off.
“Load HEAT.”
His loader slid a seven-pound high-explosive antitank round into the breech and slapped him lightly on the helmet.
“Up!”
Wojcik squeezed the trigger.
Whanng! The HEAT round slammed into a jumble of piping and exploded-peeling open thick, insulated pipes as though they were tinfoil. One was the conduit carrying feed water into the boiler. Superheated water and steam sprayed
out through the torn edges of a rapidly growing hole. With their lifeblood pouring out into the atmosphere, the power plant’s boiler and turbines ran dry in seconds.
Pelindaba’s primary electric power source went dead.
2ND PLATOON, CHARLIE COMPANY, 1/75TH
RANGERS, NEAR THE PELINDABA POWER SUBSTATION
Steel transmission towers spaced three hundred meters apart carried thirteen-kilovolt power lines connecting the Northern Transvaal-Pretoria electric grid to Pelindaba. One of the thirty-meter-high towers stood just across a road running between the nuclear weapons storage bunkers and the rest of the complex. Rows of canvas-sided trucks and civilian automobiles filled a parking lot on the other side of the road. Several were already ablaze-set on fire by tracer rounds buzzing through the complex.
“Christ!” Second Lieutenant Frank Miller threw himself flat as another burst of machinegun fire cracked over his head and slammed into the steel tower. Sparks cascaded down onto his Kevlar helmet. He looked back over his shoulder toward what was left of his first rifle squad-five men, one carrying a squad automatic weapon. The rest were dead or dying, strewn across the drop zone and the road.
“Hernandez, gimme some covering fire, goddammit!”
The squad automatic weapon cut loose again, spewing steel-jacketed rounds into the darkness. M16-armed Rangers joined in, trying to pin down the
South African infantry occupying a bunker one hundred meters away. The odds of actually hitting any of the enemy troops were vanishingly small, but enough bullets spanging off the bunker’s concrete walls might make the South Africans flinch away from their firing slits. One of the
Rangers threw another smoke grenade upwind.
Miller got to his knees and looked at his handiwork. He needed one more demolition charge in just the right place. He held out his hand.
“More
C4, Steve.”
No response.
The Ranger officer frowned and turned around. Corporal Lewis lay flat on his back, with his arms thrown out wide and a gaping hole where his forehead used to be. Miller swallowed hard and pried the last charge of plastic explosive out of the dead man’s right hand.
Working fast now, almost in rhythm with the sound of the firing behind him, he molded the C4 onto one of the steel supports steadying the power pylon and stuck a line of detonator cord into it. Satisfied, he crawled away, unreeling detcord as he went.
A shallow drainage ditch running beside the road offered the only piece of real cover for more than a hundred meters. Miller calculated distances and angles and swore viciously. He was well inside the minimum safe distance for setting off the C4, but he didn’t have time to crawl farther. He glanced over the edge of the drainage ditch. Flashes showed where Hernandez and his men were still firing toward the South African bunker.
“First Squad! Break it off and reform here!”
Working quickly and carefully in the darkness, Miller attached a blasting cap, fuze, and fuze igniter to the end of the cord. As he worked, he tried to forget that det cord was itself an explosive. If he rushed the job, it would go off in his face.
Wire and electrical detonators were out of the question for this job.
There was too big a chance of their picking up stray voltage from the transmission tower.
One by one, the Rangers stopped firing and raced over to the drainage ditch. One screamed suddenly and flopped forward, clutching at a leg that had been shot out from under him. Two others hauled him upright and half-pulled, half carried him to the ditch.
Miller took one last look around. None of his men were still out in the open. He took a deep breath and pulled the pin out of the fuze igniter.
Throwing it back toward the tower, he yelled, “Fire in the hole!”
The Rangers went prone, facedown in the dirt. Nobody fucked around when explosives were about to go off. Miller buried his face in the ditch.
Whummmp. Whummmp. Whummmp. Three separate blasts sliced through the supports holding up the transmission tower. Tom pieces of metal whirled away overhead.
Slowly at first and then faster, the tower leaned drunkenly far over to one side. Bolts and struts popped and then snapped off under immense and increasing weights and pressures. Abruptly, everything gave way at once.
With a grating screech of tortured, twisting steel, the tower crashed to the ground. Downed power lines danced and sparked like ghostly flickering blue snakes.
Pelindaba’s backup power source had been knocked out of commission.
PELINDABA CENTRIFUGE URANIUM-ENRICHMENT
PLANT
Indifferent to the outside world, the South African technicians monitoring twenty thousand rapidly spinning centrifuges inside the enrichment plant’s central cascade hall moved through their own universe of high-pitched, howling noise. None of them could hear the alert sirens and nobody in the garrison had yet taken the time to warn them of the attack. Then the lights went out.
Disaster struck instantly.
The scientists and engineers who’d designed the enrichment plant had taken precautions against an accidental loss of one or the other of
Pelindaba’s two independent electric power sources. An automatic transfer system stood ready to shunt electricity from either the coal-fired steam plant or the thirteen-kv transmission line connected to the Pretoria grid. Unfortunately, the South African design team had never imagined the deliberate and simultaneous destruction of both. Esher Levi had found
Pelindaba’s Achilles’ heel.
Like any highly sophisticated and fragile machine, a uranium-enrichment centrifuge carries the seeds of its own destruction inside itself. To successfully and efficiently separate fissionable U-235 from non fissionable U-238, each centrifuge’s carbon-fiber rotor must spin at nearly thirty-five thou sand rpm-producing peripheral velocities of up to five hundred meters per second.
Reaching tha
t kind of rotation isn’t easy. An enrichment centrifuge must be carefully balanced and precisely controlled as it spins faster and faster.
Several critical speeds-speeds where the rotor will begin to vibrate dangerously-must be negotiated before it can reach its operating rpm. End dampers can help reduce these vibrations, but they become uncontrollable if the machine contains a significant amount of uranium hexafluoride gas as it cycles through any of these critical speeds.
All of Pelindaba’s spinning centrifuges were full of uranium hexafluoride gas when the plant lost power.
In fractions of a second inertia and drag were at work. Rotors spun slower and slower. And as the machines decelerated, their carbon-fiber walls began to flex, wobbling about like wet noodles-distorted by the gas trapped inside.
Most of the twenty thousand uranium-enrichment centrifuges shattered simultaneously-hurling carbon fiber fragments spinning at more than a thousand miles an hour into the protective casings surrounding each machine. Each crashing centrifuge sounded exactly like a large-bore shotgun being fired just a few feet away.
Some of the casings ruptured, and other machines were thrown off their floor mountings, tearing violently away from the piping connecting each enrichment cascade. Immediately, yellow clouds of highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride gas began spewing out into the cascade hall-spraying from the mangled centrifuges themselves or from hundreds of ruptured feed, waste, and product pipes dangling overhead.
The gas started turning into a solid as soon as it hit room temperature and pressure, but not soon enough for some of the technicians unlucky enough to be trapped inside the darkened maze of broken piping. Several scientists and engineers ran screaming for the emergency exits clutching badly burned faces. Others died moaning, crushed beneath fallen equipment.
South Africa’s uranium-enrichment plant had been wrecked beyond repair for years.
HEADQUARTERS, 2/75TH RANGERS, NEAR THE SWARTKOP MILITARY AIRFIELD
CONTROL TOWER
Scarcely a kilometer south of Pelindaba, Swartkop Military Airfield was also under attack.
Bullets had smashed every window in the Swartkop control tower, and grenades had ignited several fires that were slowly taking hold inside-filling rooms and corridors with thick, choking smoke. Bodies littered floors and stairwells. Most of the dead wore the dark blue uniform of the South African Air Force.
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 kil
led 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.
