Vortex

CHAPTER 30 Brave Fortune

NOVEMBER 28-ABOARD SIERRA ONE ZERO, OVER THE SOUTH ATLANTIC OFF THE COAST OF ANGOLA

The MC-141 Starlifter known as Sierra One Zero flew east toward Africa at thirty thousand feet, surrounded by a manmade constellation of winking navigation lights. Those ahead and slightly higher belonged to four huge

SAC KC10 tankers. The lights behind and to either side belonged to

Sierra One Zero’s four companions.

“All right, disconnect.” Sierra One Zero’s pilot, a full Air Force colonel, glanced across the darkened cockpit at his copilot.

“Roger, ” the aerial tanker’s boom operator responded over the intercom.

“Pumping stopped. Good luck and give them hell.” They were operating under conditions of strict radio silence, but the boom connecting them to the KC-10 also allowed them to talk to the tanker directly.

“Released.”

The refueling boom snapped up and away from the Starlifter in a white puff of jet-fuel vapor.

The colonel eased back very gently on the throttles, watching carefully as the huge tanker pulled farther out in front. Satisfied that he now had enough room to avoid a midair collision, the colonel banked the MC-141 gently to the right and slid back into place at the head of his formation.

Sierra One Zero’s pilot watched the tankers slide past his side window and disappear from sight. Then he pushed his throttles forward again, listening as the roar from Starlifter’s four engines grew louder. An indicator showed the plane picking up airspeed, accelerating from the 330 knots used for in-flight refueling toward its normal cruising speed of 550 knots.

The five jet transports carrying the 1/75th now flew in a tight arrowhead, with one Special Operations MC-141 out in front and four standard

Starlifters behind and to either side. The 2/75this C-141s, anotherMC-141, and more tankers were several miles behind the formation.

“The MC-141s, designed for long-range penetration missions deep in enemy territory, carried just about every piece of special electronic gear known to man-terrain-following radar for low-level flight, infrared TV, and jamming systems to boggle hostile radars if they were detected.

With luck, they’d be able to lead the less capable C-141s all the way in to

Pretoria.

The SAC tankers altered course and began pulling away fast, heading back for their own refueling stop at Ascension Island nearly sixteen hundred miles to the west.

He toggled his intercom switch.

“Bob?”

“Yes, Colonel?” Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell answered immediately from his position in the crowded troop compartment below and behind the cockpit. His regimental commander, Colonel Gener, was in Sierra One Three-flying in a separate aircraft to make sure that no single crash or mishap would leave the 1/75th leaderless.

“We’re gassed up and heading in. Estimate we’ll cross the coast in twenty minutes. “

The Air Force colonel could hear the tension in the Ranger battalion commander’s voice.

“Thanks, I’ll pass the word.”

The five C-141s continued east, flying high above an unbroken layer of cloud and beneath a sky full of bright, un winking stars.

ABOARD USS CARL VINSON, IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

Rear Adm. Andrew Douglas Stewart stood watching from the Vinson’s bridge as her four steam catapults threw plane after plane into the night air.

F-14 Tomcats, A-6 Intruders, F/A-18 Hornets, and EA-613 Prowlers screamed aloft, tailpipes glowing orange in the darkness. Others, engines idling, waited their turn to taxi onto the catapults. Navigation lights blinked in the sky, aircraft orbiting slowly around the task force while waiting for the whole strike to form up.

“Admiral?”

Stewart turned toward a waiting lieutenant.

“Yes.”

“Washington’s on the secure phone, sir.”

Stewart brushed past him into the darkened enclosed bridge. Enlisted men and officers alike bent over their work, with only the nearest ones acknowledging his presence with deferential nods. He moved immediately to the red secure phone and took the handset from his portly communications officer.

“Stewart here.”

There was no apparent delay, even though a computer scrambled his words, converted them into a radio signal, beamed them twenty-four thousand miles straight up to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and then down to the Pentagon. Then the process was repeated in reverse and Gen. Walter

Hickman’s gentle Oklahoma twang sounded in his ear. The chairman of the

Joint Chiefs was brief and to the point.

“Sierra Force has reached Point

Yankee. Execute Phase Two.”

Stewart was equally brief.

“Acknowledged. Out.” He replaced the red phone.

His imagination reached out toward Sierra Force-the C-141s carrying the

Rangers and their attached Army Aviation units. Point Yankee was a computer-designated spot over the barren Kalahari Desert where the Air Force transports would begin a planned steep descent out of the now-normal African-airspace traffic pattern of Soviet cargo planes and civilian airliners. At less than five hundred feet, well below the coverage of South Africa’s remaining ground radar stations, the C-141s would turn sharply southeast toward Pretoria and the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Complex.

The admiral picked up a plain black ship’s phone.

“CAG? This is Stewart.

Execute Pindown.” Through the receiver, he heard the Vinson’s air wing commander relaying his order to the strike leader already orbiting overhead.

They were committed.

NOVEMBER 29-ABOARD SIERRA ONE ZERO, NORTH OF RUSTENBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

Sierra One Zxro’s pilot kept his eyes moving in a regular pattern-shifting from his terrain-following radar display to the flight instruments to the low hills and flat grasslands flashing past the MC14 I’s cockpit and then back again. His hands were poised on the controls, ready to take instant evasive action should it prove necessary. Sweat trickled down his forehead despite the cockpit air-conditioning. Flying the large, four-engined transport barely three hundred feet off the ground required intense concentration. A second’s inattention could all too easily prove fatal for the more than one hundred men aboard.

“Point Zulu.” His copilot looked up from the computer generated map.

“Roger.” The colonel reduced his throttle settings, hoping the four planes following close behind were paying careful heed to their spacing.

“Inform out passengers.”

Sierra One Zero’s copilot pushed a well-worn button.

A red light came on over the Starlifter’s large rear door.

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell was already rising from his seat

as the plane’s jumpmaster bellowed, “Six minutes! Outboard personnel hook up!”

Rangers seated along the C-141’s fuselage clambered to their feet.

“Inboard personnel stand up!”

The troops seated in two rows facing outward scrambled upright.

“Hook up!”

The Rangers hooked their parachute harnesses on to the static lines running the length of the MC-141’s troop compartment. A very pate Prof.

Esher Levi imitated them.

Outside the compartment, the droning roar of the Starlifter’s engines began fading as the big plane slowed to jump speed.

HEADQUARTERS, NORTHERN AIR DEFENSE SECTOR, DEVON, EAST OF

JOHANNESBURG

The South African Air Force flight sergeant yawned once, and then again, wishing he could slip outside for a quick cup of coffee and a smoke. Night radar-watch duty was invariably boring. Lately, neither the Cubans nor his own air force had shown much willingness to risk precious aircraft in combat operations after dark. Both sides had already lost too many planes in raids against strategic and tactical targets.

He leaned forward to study the glowing screen again, his face green in the light emanating from the radar repeater. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Just blips at the far edge of his coverage showing a steady stream of Soviet air transports and cargo planes ferrying men and materiel into Zimbabwe and Mozambique. A smaller number of blips closer in represented South African transports moving units out of Namibia.

The sergeant shrugged, deciding that he was lucky to be able to see that much. South Africa’s radar net, already inadequate before the war, was in even worse shape now. Mafikeng, the site of one of its three permanent stations, had already been overrun by the Cubans. And Ellisras, the northernmost station, was expected to fall any day now.

A large blip appeared suddenly on his screen-close to the center, near

Pretoria-and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. What the devil?

Was that a scheduled flight he’d forgotten about, or was his equipment acting up? The sergeant fumbled through his logbook while keeping one eye on the glowing radar screen.

More blips appeared-coming from the southeast this time and moving fast. He stared hard, trying frantically to get an accurate count. Five. Ten. More than twenty planes racing in from out of nowhere! He spun round in his chair, his eyes wide in alarm.

“Lieutenant!”

PROWLER LEAD, SOUTHEAST OF JOHANNESBURG

Ten miles behind the A-6 and F/A-18 attack squadrons, the EA-613 Prowler electronic warfare aircraft bounced and shook as it ploughed through choppy air. Rolling ridges and valleys emerged out of the darkness ahead and then blurred past and aft. Flying low at five hundred knots left little time for sightseeing.

One of the two officers seated side by side behind the pilot and navigator listened to a series of tones sounding in his earphones and watched as a signal intensity indicator climbed higher. He spoke into the intercom.

“SA

radar’s got us, Curt. “

“Right.” The pilot broke radio silence on the strike frequency.

“Tiger flights, this is Prowler Lead. They know we’re here. We’re lighting off.”

He clicked back to the intercom.

“Okay, guys, let’s do it. Radiate and blind those bastards.”

The two backseaters flipped a series of switches, activating the Prow)er’s

ALQ-99 jamming system. Current started flowing from windmill turbo generators on the three jamming pods slung beneath the EA-613’s fuselage. In seconds, the Prowler was punching kilowatts of power into the same frequencies used by South Africa’s air-search radars.

NORTHERN AIR DEFENSE HQ

“Shit! ” The blips on the flight sergeant’s radarscope vanished in a coruscating swirl of bright green blotches and a solid strobe line. He switched frequencies frantically and ineffectively. The jamming followed him across the wavelengthseffortlessly matching every shift.

After several failed tries, he stopped frequency-hopping and tried turning down the radar’s gain instead. It worked after a fashion. By trading range for visibility, he was able to break through the jamming . and see nothing.

The flight sergeant swore again. The bogies were outside his radar’s reduced range. He knew there were enemy aircraft over South Africa, but he couldn’t tell how many, where they were, or most important of all, where they were headed.

The Air Force lieutenant watching over his shoulder turned pale and grabbed a red phone by the radar console.

“Put me through to Number Three

Squadron!”

ABOARD SIERRA ONE ZERO, OVER PELINDABA

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell took a deep breath, held it for a second, and let it out-trying to shake off a case of last minute jitters. Literally last minute, too, he thought. They couldn’t be much more flying time than that from the drop zone.

The drop zone was one of his concerns. Their need for total surprise had ruled out the use of pathfinders to mark the DZ. As a result, the aircraft carrying the Rangers were relying entirely on navigational data supplied by Navstar GPS Global Positioning System-satellites. The GPS program managers claimed their system was accurate to within a few feet, and O’Connell hoped like hell that they were right.

He staggered slightly and braced himself as the MC-141 began a steep climb, popping up to five hundred feet for its run over the Pelindaba complex. Any second now.

Without stopping to think much about it, O’Connell found himself muttering a prayer from his childhood.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

As the MC-141 leveled out, its two side doors whined open and twin blast shields deployed to provide pockets of calm air outside the doors. Cold night air and howling engine noise swept through the crowded troop compartment. O’Connell watched as the plane’s jumpmaster leaned out through the open door, checked the shield and jump step, and made sure they were approaching the drop zone.

The jump light over the open cargo door flickered and went green.

“Go!

Go! GO!”

Conscious thought faded and thousands of hours of training and preparation took over. Rank by rank and row by row, the Rangers shuffled rapidly to the open side doors and threw themselves into empty air.

Five C-141s swept low over Pelindaba spewing out hundreds of Rangers and their equipment.

COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES, PELINDABA

Col. Frans Peiper spilled his mug of hot coffee onto the bunker’s concrete floor as his phone buzzed. He grabbed the phone on its second buzz. “

Pelindaba CO.”

He didn’t recognize the panic-stricken voice on the other end.

“Air raid warning! This is an air raid warning!”

“What?”

The roar of large aircraft passing directly overhead drowned out any reply.

Peiper dropped the phone and ran to one of the bunker’s firing slits, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of these attacking planes. Nothing.

Nothing. There! Something huge and black-more a shadow than a discernible shape-flashed past and disappeared beyond the eastern end of the compound. They were under attack!

He whirled and slammed a shaking hand down on the alert button.

Sirens screamed across the complex in a rising and falling wail designed to wake the dead, or in this case, the two thirds of Pelindaba’s garrison who were off duty and fast asleep in their barracks. At the same time, arc lights around the perimeter began winking out to deny incoming enemy bombers easy aiming points.

1/75TH RANGERS

More than five hundred men of the 1/75this three companies and its headquarters came drifting down out of the niSjIt sky into the Pelindaba atomic research and weapons storage complex. Some never made it farther than that.

Three Rangers, the first men out of the lead plane, landed too far to the west-outside the barbed wire and inside a minefield. One hit the ground and rolled right onto the pressure plate of an antipersonnel mine. A white-orange blast tore him in half and spewed fragments that scythed the other two paratroopers to the ground, bleeding and unconscious.

More Americans came down hard in the middle of Pelindaba’s ornamental rock gardens-breaking legs or arms or fracturing collarbones. Near the power substation, a Charlie Company sergeant slammed face first into a steel pylon at more than twenty miles an hour. The impact broke his neck and left his corpse draped across a steel girder forty feet off the ground.

Two groups of Rangers had the worst luck of all.

Six men landed in a tangle of billowing parachutes and loose gear on open ground-less than thirty feet away from mortar pits occupied by South

African troops who’d been on duty. The Americans were still struggling out of their chutes when a fusillade of automatic weapons fire mowed them down.

Four others came down right in the middle of a South African infantry squad patrolling inside the compound. Flames stabbed through the darkness as R4 rifles and M16s were fired at point-blank range. Seconds later, all four Americans and three of the South Africans lay dead. One of the

Rangers wore the silver eagle insignia of a full colonel over his chest pocket. Paul Gener, commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, had made his last combat jump.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell hit the ground with his legs bent and rolled-his hands already fumbling with the release catch for his parachute harness. A light wind tugged at his chute, threatening to drag him along through the open grassland between the research center and the weapons storage bunkers.

Done! The catch snapped open and he shrugged out of his harness. He got to his knees to get a better view of what was going on.

Most of the compound was in darkness, but enough light remained to make out the pitch-black outlines of a slit trench only twenty yards away. Good. The trench was ready-made cover if he could get to it without being shot. It also ran from north to south, separating the nuclear weapons storage area from the rest of Pelindaba.

More men were coming down all around him-slamming into the ground with teeth-rattling force. Automatic weapons fire rattled from somewhere close by, kicking up a spray of bullet-torn grass and dirt. Two Rangers who’d just scrambled out of their chutes screamed and folded in on themselves.

O’Connell threw himself flat. Too many of the damned South Africans were wide awake and ready for a fight. His troops needed protection-any kind of protection-or they were going to be slaughtered while still landing.

He yanked a smoke grenade off his combat webbing, pulled the pin, and lobbed it toward a half-seen bunker. Others around him were doing the same thing. Wargames played during the planning for Brave Fortune had shown that the immediate use of smoke might save a few lives. That was why every

Ranger in the assault force had been briefed to throw a smoke grenade as soon as possible after landing. The more smoke in the air, the more confusion. And the more confusion, the better.

White tendrils of smoke started to swirl and billow, spreading in the wind to form a light haze that grew thicker as more and more grenades were thrown. South African machine guns and assault rifles chattered from bunkers around the perimeter, stabbing through the haphazard smoke screen. More Rangers were hit and thrown back-dead or badly wounded.

“Goddamnit!” O’Connell unslung his M16 and started belly-crawling toward the South African slit trench. The soldiers who’d landed near him followed, some dragging injured comrades. From all appearances, his battalion was being cut to pieces before it could even get organized.

COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES

Peiper stared through the narrow firing slits of his headquarters bunker, trying to piece together some idea of just what the devil was going on.

If this was an air raid, where were the bombs? And if it wasn’t, what were his troops firing at?

Then he saw the first wisps of white and gray smoke rising from the open ground beyond Pelindaba’s science labs and uranium enrichment plant.

Peiper expected to be attacked by the Cubans. He expected the Cubans to use chemical weapons as part of that attack. And now he saw what could only be the first nightmarish tendrils of nerve gas drifting toward his bunker.

He staggered back and grabbed a young lieutenant who still looked half-asleep.

“Sound the gas alarm!”

“Colonel?”

Peiper shoved the officer aside and ran for the alarm control panel himself. He chopped down at the right button and then whirled to find his own chemical gear.

The wailing rise and fall of Pelindaba’s air raid sirens faded-replaced instantly by the high-pitched warbling of its poison gas alert.

In wooden barracks buildings all around the compound, several hundred newly wakened South African soldiers who’d been grabbing rifles and helmets dropped them and started fumbling for gas masks, gauntlets, and chemical protection suits instead. Two or three extra minutes would pass before they could hope to join the bloody battle now raging throughout the camp perimeter.

Col. Frans Peiper had just given the U. S . Rangers the time they so desperately needed.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS

O’Connell crouched just below the lip of the slit trench and stared at the wide-eyed, panting men clustered around him. More of his headquarters troops and officers had survived the landing then he’d first thought possible. Even Professor Levi had come through unwounded, although the

Israeli scientist now sat huddled on the trench floor, nursing an ankle he’d sprained on impact.

“Weisman!”

His radioman pushed through the crowd. O’Connell took the handset he offered.

“Sierra One Zero, this is Rover One One. Atlas. I say again,

Atlas.” The MC-141 still orbiting somewhere overhead would relay the news that the Rangers were on the ground and attacking. And men waiting in the

Pentagon and the White House could push new pins in their maps.

He passed the handset back and stood listening to the noise of the battle. M 16s, M60 machine guns, and squad automatic weapons were being fired in greater numbers, their distinctive crackle and chatter beginning to blend with the heavier sounds made by South African rifles and machine guns. The Rangers were starting to fight back.

RADAR CONTROL VEHICLE, CACTUS SAM BATTERY, PELINDABA

Panicked by the gas alert siren, the lone corporal manning the Cactus battery’s jammed and useless fire-control radar tore his headphones off and scrambled out of his chair. He’d left his chemical suit back in the barracks. He moved toward the vehicle’s rear hatch.

It clanged open before he got there, and the South African stared in surprise at the figure outlined against the night sky. Odd, that didn’t look like any uniform he’d ever seen before….

Three M16 rounds threw the radar operator back against his equipment in a spray of blood and torn flesh.

Outside the hatch, the Ranger sergeant lowered his rifle and pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade. He tossed the grenade in on top of the dead man and then slammed the hatch shut.

Whummp! The Cactus battery command vehicle rocked slightly and then sat silent-its delicate electronics smashed by bullets and grenade fragments.

The radar dish on top stopped spinning.

Bent low, the sergeant sprinted across a stretch of open lawn near

Pelindaba’s main science lab. Rifle rounds whip cracked over his head-fired at long range from a bunker on the compound’s northern perimeter. He dove for cover behind a row of young saplings planted as shade trees. Leaves clipped off by stray bullets drifted down on the five men waiting there for him. Two carried a Carl Gustav M3 84mm recoilless rifle.

“You get ‘em?”

” Yep. ” The Carl Gustav gunner patted his weapon affectionately.

“Hammered ‘em real good.”

The sergeant lifted his head an inch or two, risking a quick look. The three Cactus SAM launch vehicles were cloaked in flame and smoke. As he watched, one of the burning launchers blew up in a blinding flash of orange light. Must’ve been a missile cook-off, the sergeant thought.

Time to report in. He squirmed around and found his radioman.

“Rover One

One, this is Bravo Two Four. Diablo One, Two, Three, and Diablo Dish are history.”

Pelindaba’s air defenses were down.

B COMPANY BARRACKS, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES

The red, flickering glow of burning buildings and vehicles dimly lit a scene of mass confusion inside the barracks building Half-dressed South African soldiers scrambled frantically to put on protective gear they’d only been issued the day before. Others, faster or better trained, were already suited up and trying to ready their weapons with clumsy, gloved hands. Lieutenants and sergeants roved through the crowd, trying to sort their squads and platoons into some sort of order before leading them outside and into battle.

Captain van Daalen, the battalion adjutant, felt more like a spaceman than a soldier in his chemical protection suit. The suit itself was hot and difficult to move in, and the gas mask limited both his vision and his hearing. He scowled. Going into combat while practically deaf and blind didn’t strike him as a particularly sane act, but the thought of nerve gas made him check the seals.

He crouched by an open window, trying to spot a reasonably safe route to the battalion command bunker. He wasn’t having much luck. The bunker lay more than two hundred and fifty meters away across a flat, open field.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to carry out his duties from the barracks, van Daalen thought. After all, there wasn’t much point in dying in a quixotic and suicidal dash through machinegun fire.

Movement outside caught his eye. Soldiers, silhouetted against a burning

SAM launcher, were fanning out into a long line less than fifty meters away. As each man reached his place, he dropped prone facing the barracks.

Van Daalen rose. That was damned strange. It was almost as though those troops were planning to attack…

“Let the bastards have it! Fire! Fire! Fire!” The shout from outside echoed above the staccato rattle of gunfire and the crash of explosions all across Pelindaba.

Van Daalen froze in horror. That shout had been in English, not

Afrikaans. He started to turn…

Half a dozen rockets lanced out from the line of enemy troops, tore through thin wood walls, and exploded inside spraying fragments and wood splinters through the tightly packed South African soldiers. Machinegun and M16 fire scythed into the building right behind the rockets, punching through from end to end. Dead or wounded men were thrown

everywhere-tossed across bloodstained bunks or knocked into writhing heaps on top of one another.

Capt. Edouard van Daalen clutched at the jagged edges of what had once been a window frame in a vain effort to stay standing. Then his knees buckled and he slid slowly to the floor, pawing feebly at the row of ragged, wet holes torn in his chemical protection suit.

The Americans outside kept shooting.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell listened with growing satisfaction to the reports flooding in from units around the compound. The enemy’s Cactus SAM battery permanently out of action. Barracks after barracks reported on fire or collapsed by salvos of light antitank rockets, HE rounds from recoilless rifles, and concentrated small-arms fire. A 120mm mortar position overrun at bayonet point by survivors from Bravo Company’s I st

Platoon. Brave Fortune was finally starting to go according to plan.

But the battalion’s casualties were heavy and growing heavier with every passing minute. Colonel Gener hadn’t been seen since the jump. Three of eight platoon leaders were down. He didn’t even want to guess how many noncoms and other Rangers lay dead in Pelindaba’s barbed wire, rock gardens, buildings, and open fields.

He ducked as a grenade burst close by, showering dirt and fragments across the open lip of the slit trench. A Ranger beside him screamed and fell back in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs. Blood spattered across

O’Connell’s face. Other soldiers were already up and shooting back-pumping rounds into the flame-lit darkness.

” 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 that 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 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.

O’Connell watched them go and turned to the rest of his able-bodied headquarters troops. There weren’t many. Maybe half of those who’d jumped.

He made a quick count. Seven officers and roughly twenty enlisted

Rangers-and with only two M60s for support. He shook his head, impatient with his own pessimism. He’d have to make do.

“Okay, let’s mosey on down this trench and see what the hell’s holding up Bravo Three. “

He caught Esher Levi’s anxious eye.

“Can you make it with that bum ankle of yours, Professor?” Jump injuries were always painful, and the Israeli scientist’s injury had probably already had time to swell inside his boot.

Surprisingly, Levi smiled-a brief flash of white teeth. He leaned on an M 16 he’d taken from one of the seriously wounded. ” I have a crutch,

Colonel. And I suspect that I can hobble with the best of you.”

O’Connell decided that he liked the man. Levi was a lot

tougher than he looked. Having a sense of humor was vital when all you really felt like doing was screaming. He nodded briefly and turned to

Weisman.

“Spread the word that we’re going after the nukes.”

He checked his watch. It felt like an eternity, but they’d only been on the ground for eight minutes. Those Navy flyboys ought to be joining the party at any moment now.

“All set, Colonel.” Weisman looked as unhappy as ever.

O’Connell tapped the assault rifle slung from the radioman’s shoulder.

“Cheer up, Dave. Who knows, you may even get a chance to use that thing.”

Weisman looked just the tiniest bit happier.

O’Connell gripped his own M16 and stepped out into the middle of the trench. Rifle and machinegun fire crackled nearby, punctuated by muffled grenade blasts. Alpha and Charlie Company platoons were busy wreaking havoc on South African barracks and silencing enemy-held bunkers one by one. The sky to the west and north seemed brighter, lit by the fires of burning buildings and vehicles.

He glanced over his shoulder. Tense, camouflage-painted faces stared back at him from beneath Kevlar helmets.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

The Rangers trotted south down the trench, with a determined Prof. Esher

Levi limping in their midst. As they moved, a sound like ragged, rolling thunder rumbled overhead. The Vinson’s carrier-based planes were winging into action.

TIGER FOUR, OVER WATER KLOOF MILITARY AIRFIELD, NEAR PRETORIA

The F/A-18 Hornet came in low from the southeast, roaring two thousand feet above Pretoria’s suburbs at almost five hundred knots. Lights appeared ahead of the speeding American plane-a string of widely spaced lights running east to west for more than a mile.

The Hornet’s pilot, Lt. Comdr. Pete “Pouncer” Garrard, keyed his mike.

“Tiger Lead, the runway is lit.”

“Roger that.”

Garrard concentrated on his flying, lining up for what he fervently hoped would be a perfect attack run. Tonight’s show wasn’t just for some inter squadron trophy. This was for real. Six Durandal anti runway weapons hung beneath Tiger Four’s wings, ready for use on one of South Africa’s biggest military airfields. The F/A-18 angled left half a degree, edging onto the imaginary flight path its computer calculated would produce the best results.

Garrard spotted movement on the runway off to his right. Two winged, single-tailed shapes were rolling down the tarmac, still on the ground but picking up speed fast. The South Africans were trying to get fighters in the air. Too late, mi amigos, he thought, using fragments of the street “Spanglish” he’d picked up during a boyhood spent in southern

California.

The word RELEASE blinked into existence in the lower left hand corner of his HUD. Aggressive instincts and years of training paid off as he stabbed the release button twice and yanked the Hornet up into a forty-degree climb. Two separate shudders rippled through the plane as a string of Durandals tumbled out from under its wings-falling nose-down toward the runway below.

Grunting against g forces that quadrupled his effective weight, Garrard pulled the climbing F/A-18 into a tight turn and craned his head all the way around to stare at the scene now behind and to his right. He wanted to see what happened when his bombs went off.

Small drogue parachutes snapped open behind each bomb. At a preset altitude above the runway, rocket motors inside the Durandals fired. All six weapons accelerated straight down, smashing into the earth below before exploding. Six flowers of flame, smoke, and spinning chunks of shattered concrete blossomed in a ragged line, angled across Waterkloof’s primary strip. Two actually struck the narrow runway, heaving and buckling the thick concrete for eight or ten meters, in addition to a five-meter crater.

One of the two South African fighters racing down the runway ran into a smoking, jagged crater at more than one

hundred miles an hour. The jet slammed nose first into the concrete in a fiery shower of sparks, broke in half, and blew up. Garrard whooped into his oxygen mask. Scratch one Mirage! One down and one to go.

But the other South African interceptor emerged from the wall of smoke and tumbling debris apparently unscathed. Afterburner blazing, the Mirage F. ICZ soared off the runway-clawing frantically for altitude.

Garrard clicked his mike button.

“Tiger Lead, one hostile airborne.

Engaging. “

He shoved his throttle forward and pulled the Hornet into a rolling, vertical climb, groaning involuntarily as the Hornet’s g force meter flickered past seven. At the same time, he switched his HUD to air-to-air mode. Two concentric circles leapt into view in the middle of the display.

The circles identified cones of vulnerability-areas of the sky in front of his plane where his heat-seekers had the best odds of scoring a hit.

The sky and ground seemed to spin around, changing places, as Garrard pulled his F/A-18 inverted. Just a little more. Almost…

The climbing Mirage came into view in his HUD’s upper left corner. A target designation box appeared around the South African jet’s dim, wavering shape. Garrard rolled his plane back upright and accelerated. The Homer streaked after its opponent.

As the F/A-18 closed, the box surrounding the enemy plane moved slowly down and across its HUD-sliding toward the center. Garrard’s finger poised over the fire button on his stick. Come on, you bastards, lock on! It might not make much sense to swear at the simpleminded circuits inside the two

AIM-9L Sidewinders his plane carried, but somehow it did make him feel better.

One of the missiles growled suddenly in his earphones letting him know that its IR seeker had finally locked on. A flashing diamond appeared over the

South African jet now barely a mile ahead and starting to turn.

Garrard squeezed his fire button and felt a small shudder as the Sidewinder mounted on his plane’s starboard wingtip dropped off and ignited. A streak of orange flame arced across the sky. The heat-seeker flashed across the gap between Tiger Four and its prey in less than five seconds. It exploded just yards behind the F. I’s brightly glowing tailpipe.

The South African Mirage seemed to disintegrate in midair-tearing itself apart as fuel, ammunition, and missile propellant all went up in a thousandth of a second. Burning bits and pieces of torn metal and plastic fell earthward beneath an ugly, drifting cloud of oily black smoke.

Garrard doubted that the enemy pilot had even known he was under direct attack. Nothing unusual in that. Most ai rto-air kills were scored on planes that never saw their attackers. And getting bounced just seconds after takeoff was every fighter pilot’s nightmare.

He keyed his mike again.

“Tiger Lead, this is Tiger Four. Splash one hostile. Runway is out of action.”

The strike commander’s laconic voice carried well over radio.

“Roger,

Four. Nice work. What’s your fuel state?”

Garrard took a quick look at his fuel display.

“Approaching Bingo.” The

Hornet was a shit-hot fighter and attack plane -much better than either the F-4 Phantom or the A-7 Corsair, the two aircraft it had replaced. But the F/A-18 was short on legs. Pretoria, three hundred and fifty miles inland, was near the limit of its un refueled combat radius.

“Okay, Four. Head for Gascan flight at Point Tango.”

Garrard clicked his mike twice to acknowledge and turned southeast, flying back toward a rendezvous with KA-61) tankers topped full of aviation fuel.

Behind him, the rest of the Vinson’s aircraft went to work with a vengeance.

VOORTREKKER HEIGHTS MILITARY CAMP, NEAR PRETORIA

A stick of four 500-pound bombs landed just two hundred yards away from

the small officer’s cottage assigned to Commandant Henrik Kruger. They exploded in a thunderous, thumping blast that instantly shattered every window, toppled bookcases, and threw pictures off rippling walls.

Ian Sheffield dived for cover behind a sofa as flying glass sleeted across the living room. He lay flat until the floor stopped rocking and then looked up.

Dust knocked off the walls and ceiling swirled in the air. Razor-edged pieces of glass littered the floor, mixed in with fragments of loose plaster and with splintered pieces of wood that had once been slats for the cottage’s venetian blinds. Several deadly looking shards of glass were actually embedded in the far wall itself. He shivered suddenly, realizing that those bomb-made daggers must have passed within an inch or less of his unprotected head.

The building swayed again-rocked this time by bombs landing farther off.

Ian scrambled to his feet, driven by an intense desire to get outside and into a bunker or trench. He’d stayed inside when the air raid sirens had gone off, more afraid of being recognized as a fugitive on the run from

South African “justice” than of missing out on what he’d thought was only another drill. But it was beginning to look as though his calculations of relative risk were greatly in error.

More bomb blasts shook the cottage.

Ian bolted out the front door and into a scene that might have been lifted straight out of the most frightening parts of Dante’s Inferno. A thick cloud of smoke and dust from burning buildings and repeated explosions hung low over the base, making it almost as difficult to see as it was to breathe. What he could see was terrifying.

One bomb had slammed into a nearby barracks and blown it apart-leaving only a ragged, smoking skeleton of roofless walls and heaped rubble.

Other bombs had rained down all over the South African camp. Armories, maintenance sheds, and guard rooms alike were either in ruins or in flames. An eighteen-ton Ratel armored personnel carrier lay on its side in the middle of a parade ground-torn and twisted as though it had been first squeezed and then hurled there by a careless giant’s hand.

As he scuttled across the road in front of Kruger’s quarters, Ian was surprised to find that part of his trained reporter’s mind was still busy jotting down details and impression seven though the rest of him just wanted to dive into some nice safe hole. Christ, he must be going mad.

This wasn’t the right time to contemplate winning a prize for war reporting. But his brain wouldn’t turn off.

Despite all the destruction, he couldn’t see many bodies. The ten-minute delay between the time the first air raid sirens sounded and the first bombs cascaded down must have given everyone a chance to find cover.

Everyone but him, that is. He dodged a blazing five-ton truck still rolling down the road with its driver slumped behind the wheel.

Another stick of bombs rained down on the barracks row just across the parade ground-exploding one after the other in rippling series of blinding white flashes. Shock waves slapped him in the face and punched the air out of his lungs. Ian ran faster, heading for the shelter Kruger said had been dug in front of his quarters.

There! A dark hole seemed to rise up out of the parade ground’s flattened grass and tamped-down dirt. Without slowing, Ian threw himself through the entrance and tumbled head over heels down into a low-roofed bomb shelter. He lay still for a moment, facedown on the dugout’s earthen floor and very glad to be there. Three other people were there ahead of him-Kruger, Matthew Siberia, and Emily van der Heijden.

As he rose to his knees and spat out a mouthful of dirt, Emily’s worried face brightened.

“Ian!”

She rushed over and he felt a pair of wonderfully warm arms tighten around him. She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t have to. He could feel her shaking.

Ian buried his face in her sweet-smelling, auburn hair. When he looked up, he found Henrik Kruger’s sardonic gaze fixed on him.

“A rough night, Meneer Sheffield?”

A near-miss rocked the bunker. Dust sifted down through gaps in the timber roof. Kruger’s expression didn’t change.

This guy was a damned cool customer, Ian thought, deciding to reply in kind. He nodded abruptly.

“Perhaps a bit loud, Kommandant.”

Surprisingly, Kruger smiled.

“That is the trouble with war, my friend.

It’s very hard on your hearing.”

Emily and Sibena stared at the two of them, half-convinced that both of them were beginning to slide over the edge into total insanity.

In the air above them, jets roared back and forth, strafing or bombing any target still visible through pillars of rising smoke. And two battalions of crack South African infantry cowered in bomb shelters and foxholes-pinned down by American air power.

Pelindaba’s garrison was on its own.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS, NEAR THE WEAPONS STORAGE SITE,

PELINDABA

“Jesus!” Lt, Col. Robert O’Connell yanked his head back below the trench parapet as a sudden burst of machinegun fire ripped past. The goddamned

South Africans were on their frigging toes. Still, he’d seen enough-more than enough.

The enemy had a heavy-caliber Vickers machine gun ensconced in a reinforced concrete bunker barely thirty meters north of the nuclear weapons storage area-covering every possible approach from the western side of the Pelindaba compound. Other bunkers guarded the eastern approaches. Bravo Company’s Third Platoon had found that out the hard way.

Dead Rangers were strewn across the ground between the trench and the barbed wire fence surrounding the storage site. Most lay within a few feet of the trench-mowed down only seconds after they’d climbed out of cover. Some were draped over the wire, butchered as they tried to cut their way through. Several bodies still tangled in bloodsoaked parachutes lay crumpled inside the weapons storage area.

O’Connell felt sick. Many of his best Rangers lay dead out there. A few of Bravo Three’s forty-two men were probably still alive, huddled behind scraps of cover or playing possum in the middle of that murderous field, but the platoon itself had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force.

He gritted his teeth and motioned his officers and senior noncoms over for a quick conference. Regrets could come later. Right now, he and his thirty or so headquarters troops had to find a way to knock that damned machine gun out. Until they did, nobody was going to be able to get inside that storage site, and more importantly, nobody was going to be able to haul the nukes themselves out.

“Well, anybody got any brilliant ideas?” O’Connell looked from face to worried face.

His executive officer, Maj. Peter Klocek, pursed his lips and tilted his helmet back a few inches so he could wipe his sweat-streaked forehead.

“Can we get a Gustav here?”

“No time. ” O’Connell shook his head regretfully. The battalion’s recoilless rifle teams were scattered over a wide area-busy knocking out other enemy bunkers and strong points The Carl Gustav team attached to

Bravo Three had disappeared. They were probably among the dead piled up in the field just beyond the trench.

“What about Navy air? Why not let a couple A-6s pound the shit out of those SOBs?

O’Connell considered that for a second. It was tempting -too tempting.

And too likely to cause them more problems. He shook his head again.

“That bunker’s too close to the storage area. One near miss and we’d have to try digging those nukes out with our bare hands.”

“Then I guess we gotta take our lumps and do it the hard way, Colonel.”

Sergeant Johnson growled, hefting his M 16 in one massive paw. The assault rifle looked small in comparison.

O’Connell’s fingers drummed a brief tattoo on the plastic butt of his own

M 16. Johnson had never been known for either his tact or his fancy tactical footwork. He had both the physique and mental attitude of a bare-knuckle brawler. But basically the sergeant was right. They’d have to throw subtlety out the window.

He grimaced. This was another of the decision points

dreaded by any sane combat commander-the moment when you came face-to-face with an awful and unavoidable truth about battle. Sound tactics and sufficient firepower were vital, but there would always be a time when all options narrowed down to one horrible choice-the decision to put men into a position in which a lot of them were sure to be killed.

O’Connell slid down to squat on his haunches. His officers and NCOs followed suit.

“All right, people, listen up. Here’s how were gonna play this thing.” He quickly traced movements in the dirt, outlining the only plan open to them.

Two minutes later, O’Connell and four of his Rangers crouched below the edge of the slit trench. Two more soldiers stood ready to boost them up and into the killing ground. Another group of six led by Sergeant Johnson waited one hundred meters south along the same trench. The rest of his headquarters troops-thirteen officers and men-were spaced at five-meter intervals between the two assault groups.

A tight-lipped Peter Klocek worked his way up the narrow trench to within whispering distance.

“We’re set, Rob.”

O’Connell nodded. He knew Klocek thought he was crazy to lead this attack himself, but he’d grown tired of sending other men into danger. For too long on this op, he’d been forced to lead like the faith-filled New

Testament Roman centurion, saying to one man, “Go,” and to another,

“Come.” Well, no more.

This suicidal bunker hunt was make or break for Brave Fortune. And that meant his battalion had a right to expect to see him out in front, yelling the infantry-school motto, “Follow me!”

Enough pissing around, he told himself. Every second counted. He took a deep breath and then let it out in a bull voiced roar.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Rifles and machine guns chattered all along the length of the

American-held trench, pouring bullets toward the distant, half-seen shape of the South African bunker. M16-mounted M203 grenade launchers thumped once, twice, and then a third time-lobbing 40mm grenades onto the open area right in front of the bunker.

Bright orange flashes stabbed out of the rising smoke. The South Africans were shooting back, trying to lay down a curtain of steel-jacketed slugs across ground they could no longer see.

O’Connell’s hands closed tight around his M16. “Let’s go! “

Two of the six Rangers in his assault group stooped and locked their hands together to form a makeshift stirrup. Without hesitating, O’Connell stepped forward and up into their interlocked hands and immediately felt himself being tossed upward-literally being hurled out of the trench. He landed in the grassy field outside, rolled over, and scrambled to his feet already running. Rifle in hand, he moved north, angling away from the heavy machinegun fire now pouring out of the South African-held bunker. Four Rangers hurtled up and out of the trench after him.

All five men sprinted forward, dispersing on the move spreading out in the hope that a single enemy burst wouldn’t hit them all. This gauntlet could only be run alone.

Burning buildings and vehicles added an eerie orange glow to the black night sky and sent strange shadows wavering ahead of them across the corpse-strewn, half-fit ground. 0”Con nell kept going, speeding past crumpled bodies, scattered gear, and torn, bullet-riddled parachutes. In an odd way, he felt almost superhuman, with every sense and every nerve ending magnified and set afire. He squinted through sweat toward the smoke-shrouded enemy bunker. Two hundred meters to go.

Movement flickered at the edge of his vision, far off to the right.

Sergeant Johnson and his five Rangers were there, making their own headlong dash for the bunker. He lengthened his own stride.

One hundred and fifty meters. One hundred. O’Connell felt his pulse accelerating, racing in time with his pounding feet. My God, he thought exultantly, we might really pull this crazy stunt off after all!

Suddenly, the ground seemed to explode out from under him. Dirt sprayed high in the air as a machinegun burst hammered the area. One slug moving at supersonic speeds

tore the M 16 right out of his hands and sent it whirling away into the darkness. Another bullet ripped through a fold of cloth over his right shoulder, leaving behind a raw, bleeding line of torn skin.

O’Connell threw himself prone, scarcely able to believe that he’d escaped without more serious injury.

Agonized screams rising above the crashing, crackling sounds of gunfire and grenade explosions told him that the rest of his men weren’t being so lucky. He swiveled to look to the rear.

The four Rangers who’d been following him had vanished-cloaked behind a curtain of smoke and dust. As it settled, another burst of South African machinegun fire stitched across the open ground-sweeping back and forth across the bodies of men who’d already been hit several times. No one moved or cried out in pain.

He was alone.

O’Connell clenched his teeth and tried to bury himself in the earth as more rounds whip cracked low overhead. Pebbles, sand, and torn bits of grass pattered off his helmet and neck. He lay motionless as the machinegun fire traversed right. The South Africans, firing blind, had gone back to working over corpses heaped in front of the American-held slit trench.

He started crawling toward his rifle, careful to stay flat on his stomach. It took him nearly half a minute to reach it.

Hell and damnation. O’Connell stared at the useless lump of plastic and metal lying on the grass before him. The same bullet that had torn the

M 16 out of his grasp had smashed its firing mechanism. He fumbled for the pouch clipped to his combat webbing and relaxed momentarily as his fingers encountered the small plastic V-shape of his only real remaining weapon. He still carried a couple of grenades, a knife, and a holstered 9mm Beretta, but they wouldn’t be much use against a concrete-walled bunker. No, clearing that out was going to take something considerably more powerful.

He snapped the pouch flap shut and started crawling forward again, worming his way toward the enemy machinegun position.

It seemed to take forever to cross the roughly one hundred meters still separating him from the South African bunker. Long periods of lying frozen as bullets slapped through the air right over his helmet were interspersed with frantic flurries of motion as he wriggled closer. By the time O’Connell got within five meters of the bunker’s north side, his battle dress was soaked in sweat and coated with groundin dirt and loose blades of sun-dried grass.

He lay panting quietly for a moment, studying what little he could see of his target. The Rangers left behind to provide covering fire had long since stopped shooting-afraid that they might hit any of their own men who’d survived that last death-or-glory charge. Several of the Americans were still lobbing smoke grenades, though. A thick pall of gray-white smoke hung over the immediate area, blinding the South African machinegun crew and their lookouts.

The bunker itself was a squat, square slab sticking less than three feet above ground level. Its reinforced concrete walls and roof offered complete protection against small-arms fire. In fact, they were designed to withstand all but a direct hit by heavy mortar or artillery shells.

Narrow slits cut through each of the four walls gave the troops inside close to a 360degree field of observation and fire.

The South African machine gun chattered again, pouring a steady stream of bullets out the firing slit facing west. O’Connell nerved himself to move. It was time.

He eased the pistol out of his holster and thumbed its safety catch off.

Slowly, almost infinitely slowly, he raised his head to get a better view of the northern firing slit. There wasn’t anything there. Just an empty black gap in the gray concrete wall. No R4 assault rifles aimed at his face. The South Africans inside were busy shooting in the wrong direction.

Go! O’Connell jumped to his feet, lunged forward, and scrambled onto the bunker’s flat roof. Nobody took a shot at him. Seconds passed

while he waited for some kind of reaction from inside the enemy gun position. Nothing happened.

By God, he’d actually done it! Now any enemy soldier who wanted to clear him off the bunker would have to come out in the open to try it. And the odds were that the South Africans didn’t even know he was up there.

He laid his 9mm pistol to one side and started making his final preparations. One hand scrabbled inside the pouch hooked to his combat webbing while the other reached inside his shirt pocket for the wires and detonator he’d stowed there. He ignored the two fragmentation grenades he still carried. The bunker was bound to have a grenade sump-a small, sandbagged hole designed to smother a blast and deflect fragments-somewhere inside. If he simply tossed a grenade in through the firing slit, all the South African soldiers had to do was kick the grenade into the sump and duck. Sure, one or two of them might be wounded, but they’d know they had trouble on their roof.

O’Connell smiled grimly. He had something more assuredly fatal in mind for the enemy machinegun crew.

He pulled the small, curved Claymore out of his pouch and unscrewed the shipping plug from the fuse well. Inserting a blasting cap in the recess, he connected it to the leads from an electrical detonator. His hands relaxed. All set.

The machine gun rattled again, firing out of the bunker beneath him.

Defiant yells in Afrikaans echoed above the gunfire. Bastards. One .. two … three … O’Connell leaned out over the edge of the bunker, jammed the Claymore into its northern firing slit, and rolled away back onto the roof. Now!

He pressed his face into the cool concrete and squeezed the detonator.

Whammm! The Claymore exploded with an ear-shattering roar. Driven by a powerful charge of C4 plastic explosive, hundreds of tiny steel ball bearings sleeted through the narrow opening-killing everyone in their path as they ricocheted and rebounded off solid walls. No one inside the bunker even got the chance to scream.

As O’Connell sat upright, still stunned by the force of the blast he’d unleashed, wispy coils of acrid, yellow smoke and the awful smell of burnt flesh eddied out through the bunker’s firing slits. The last outpost guarding Pelindaba’s Nuclear Weapons Storage Site had fallen.

COMMAND BUNKER, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES

Col. Frans Peiper stared helplessly at the map showing his battalion’s few surviving fighting positions. Bunker after bunker and barracks after barracks had been hurriedly crossed out as they were reported overrun or destroyed. Although events were unfolding too fast for him to keep pace, one thing was increasingly clear: the 61st Transvaal Rifles was being gutted.

Peiper breathed out heavily through his gas mask and swore as his clear plastic eyepieces fogged over for the tenth time. These damned chemical-protection suits made even the simplest actions difficult! He grabbed at a grease pencil near the map and cursed again as it slipped between his thickly gloved fingers. A young lieutenant standing at his side handed the pencil back.

For an instant longer the colonel stood still, his eyes fixed on the map.

Now what? Well, for a start, he had to take charge. He had to find a way to reorganize the broken fragments of his battalion into some semblance of a fighting force. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to go about doing that. Enemy units now occupied key positions all across the compound. The situation seemed hopeless.

“Sir, Captain Karel’s asking for instructions. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him to wait, goddammit!” Peiper looked up, angry at what sounded very much like a reproach. The sergeant manning the command bunker’s communications setup stared back at him without flinching.

Damn the man. His insubordination would have to be dealt with later.

Assuming, of course, there was going to be a later.

Peiper wiped the steam off his gas mask eyepieces and

scrawled a rough circle around the single bunker and stretch of trench apparently still held by Capt. Anton Karel and the remnants of A Company.

Karel’s troops covered the northwestern end of the compound, well away from either the main road or the nuclear weapons storage area. Too far away in fact to do any good.

Peiper threw his pencil down and moved to the bank of field telephones.

“Let me talk to him!”

The sergeant gave him the handset.

“Karel? This is Peiper.” The colonel frowned. Blast it, he could scarcely hear or talk inside this wretched suit.

“Listen carefully. I want you to counterattack-“

A yell from one of the soldiers manning the bunker’s southern firing slit interrupted him.

“Movement along the access road, Colonel! Trucks! Ten or twelve of them!”

Peiper threw the phone down and joined a general rush over to the narrow opening. He squinted toward the access road linking Pelindaba’s military and civilian sectors. Dim shapes rumbled slowly along the road, silhouetted against a row of burning buildings. He recognized the distinctive outlines of canvas-sided Samil trucks made only in South

Africa. Were these reinforcements from Voortrekker Heights? They must be.

With trembling fingers, he raised his binoculars and focused them carefully. The trucks and the men riding on them leapt into closer view.

That was odd. Their helmets were strangely shaped-almost exactly like the old-style coal-scut tie helmets worn by the German Wehrmacht during World

War II.

Despite the sauna-bath heat of the chemical protection suit he wore,

Peiper felt a cold shiver run down his spine. The soldiers aboard those trucks were the enemy-not a friendly relief force. Even worse, they were driving straight toward the special weapons bunkers.

The Fates were not kind to Col. Frans Peiper. He had just enough time to savor his utter and absolute failure before an American recoilless rifle round burst against the edge of the firing slit-just twenty centimeters in front of his horrified face.

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS, AT THE WEAPONS STORAGE SITE

Prof. Esher Levi surveyed the frantic activity around the five weapons storage bunkers with increasing satisfaction. After what had seemed a most unpromising and bloody start, the Americans were finally getting Brave

Fortune back on track. Pelindaba’s uranium enrichment plant had been wrecked. His fellow countrymen had been rescued. Even more important, survivors from O’Connell’s headquarters and the other Ranger units were busy loading several of the South African trucks they’d hot-wired and “liberated” from the Pelindaba vehicle park. Sleek, metallic cylinders, each carried by ten men, were carefully being hoisted up and into their rear cargo compartments.

“We’ve got that last bunker open, Professor. The colonel’s waiting for you there.”

Levi turned. Smoke and sweat had stained Maj. Peter Klocek’s lean, tanned face.

“The weapons are there?”

Klocek nodded wearily.

“Yeah. The last two. But the colonel’d like you to make sure of that.”

“Of course.”

Levi hobbled after the much younger American officer through a maze of hurrying soldiers. The entrance to the last storage bunker lay down a set of steps. A thick door sagged to one side-blown off its hinges by small charges of plastic explosive.

The two men ducked down and into the bunker. Several unbroken, battery-powered emergency lights illuminated a single chamber measuring roughly twenty feet by fifty feet. Steel racks lined each concrete wall.

Four metal half cylinders-twin halves of two twenty-kiloton fission bombs-rested in separate sections of the racks, kept physically apart to preclude what technicians referred to as “premature weapon criticality.”

Levi smiled to himself, remembering his first appalled reaction to the techno babble term used to describe what might, in the worst case, be an uncontrolled chain reactiona runaway nightmare of hellish temperatures and deadly neutron radiation.

He moved to where O’Connell stood examining one of the four bomb halves.

The American lieutenant colonel looked just about out on his feet-bruised, bedraggled, and bloodstained. The Israeli scientist suddenly felt a wave of admiration for this brave man. It was an uncomfortable feeling, especially since the orders he’d received from his own government would soon force him to lie to the Ranger officer. Though not about these bombs themselves, thank God.

“Have we got them all, Professor?” O’Connell sounded as tired as he looked.

Levi nodded.

“These two weapons make a total of nine. Every fission bomb the Afrikaners had left.” He leaned past the American officer and examined a printed manifest taped to the rear half of one weapon.

“It would appear that your attack came just in time.”

“Oh?”

Levi pointed to the manifest.

“Those codes indicate that this weapon has been thoroughly checked, certified ready for detonation, and prepped for movement within the next twenty-four hours.”

O’Connell looked grim.

“So those bastards were going to drop another nuke?

This one?”

Levi nodded again and tapped the bomb’s exposed corea smooth piece of dark metal about half the size of a small grapefruit.

“It seems hard to believe that this little lump and its twin over there could kill thousands or even tens of thousands, doesn’t it? But believe me, this is really all one needs-a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium. That and the proper arrangement of a few more kilos of high explosive. “

O’Connell took an involuntary step backward.

“Christ! That stuff’s U-235?”

Levi nodded a third time, inwardly amused. Like many laymen, O’Connell obviously had some serious misconceptions about nuclear materials. He’d also been too busy planning the operation itself to attend Levi’s technical training sessions. The temptation to lecture, just a bit, was simply too strong to resist.

The Israeli scientist laid his palm flat on the bomb’s metallic core.

“As a solid metal, U-235 is not dangerously radioactive, Major. It’s mainly an alpha emitter, and even your skin can stop alpha particles.” He stroked the smooth black surface.

“You could even hold this in your lap for a month or more without suffering any significant ill effects.”

O’Connell took the unsolicited science lesson with good grace. He grinned suddenly, appearing years younger for a brief instant.

“Hell, Professor,

I’d curl up to sleep with every one of these damned things for a year if it meant getting ‘em safely out of this frigging country. “

Ten Rangers led by the leader of the battalion’s Support Platoon trotted down the steps and crowded into the bunker.

“Okay to take these now,

Colonel?”

“You bet. Carry on, Harry.” O’Connell moved toward the entrance with Levi in tow.

The Israeli scientist risked a quick glance at his watch. So far so good.

He’d helped the Rangers find and capture South Africa’s nuclear arsenal.

Now he had to try completing the most difficult part of his mission-the part he’d kept secret from the Americans. He cleared his throat.

“Your troops hold most of the compound, don’t they?”

“Yeah.” Small elements of Pelindaba’s garrison still fought from sections of trench along its northern perimeter, but almost all the rest of the

South African soldiers had been killed or wounded. O’Connell paused just outside the bunker doorway and looked down at him.

“Why do you ask, Professor?”

Levi swallowed hard. Now for the lie.

“Because I’d like your permission to search the Administration Center for certain scientific documents of interest to both our governments. Records of nuclear experiments and weapons design blueprints, among others.” He scanned the men hurrying to and fro outside the storage complex-carrying wounded, collecting weapons, and checking corpses. Bomb blasts echoed off in the distance as carrier-based planes kept pounding away at other South African military installations and air bases.

“All I need are a few minutes. Five at most.”

O’Connell walked away without answering, his face hard and remote.

Levi limped after him.

“Please, Colonel, it’s important.” The American stopped and turned around.

“I agree, Professor. But your personal search isn’t necessary. Captain Kelly already has a team going through the Admin building. They know what to look for. We need you here with the weapons.

“

Levi choked. The Americans were ahead of him? He tried again.

“But my technical expertise could be invaluable. I should be there-“

“So you can destroy any records showing the size and composition of your own country’s nuclear stockpile? I don’t think so, Professor. “

Levi felt his jaw drop open in shock.

O’Connell smiled wryly.

“You and your compatriots should have known better, Esher. Americans are sometimes naive, but we’re not stupid.

Naturally, we’re grateful for your country’s help with this operation, but that doesn’t make us blind or deaf.” He shook his head slowly.

“I’m afraid Jerusalem’s just going to have to live with the knowledge that some of its best-kept secrets aren’t so secret anymore.”

Levi stood openmouthed for a moment longer and then shrugged, accepting his defeat with good grace. So much for the Mossad’s rather Byzantine plot. Washington would soon know exactly how much weapons-grade uranium

Israel had received from the Pelindaba enrichment plant. And that, in turn, would allow the United States to calculate exactly how many nuclear bombs his country had manufactured for its own deterrent force.

Well, he hadn’t been that keen on deceiving the Americans anyway.

“In that case, Colonel, what else can I do to help you? Your men will soon have the bombs loaded, but you still have wounded to be collected. My conscript service included rudimentary first aid courses… perhaps

I can assist your medics?”

O’Connell’s weary eyes lit up with approval.

“Thank you. My men and I would appreciate it.” He broke off abruptly as several of his noncoms moved past, checking dog tags on bodies scattered around the storage site.

The Ranger watched them for a moment before shaking his head sadly.

“I expected losses, but I never thought it would be this bad.”

Levi tried to offer some comfort.

“But you’ve won, Colonel. And your battalion’s sacrifices have saved many thousands of lives.”

O’Connell shook his head again.

“We haven’t won yet. We’ve still got to get these damned bombs down the road and out through Swartkop.

The Israeli stared at a horizon lit red and orange by dozens of fires raging out of control. Jets thundered low overhead, crisscrossing

Pretoria in search of new targets. He spread his hands in confusion.

“But what kind of fighting force can the South Africans possibly have left to throw against us?”

“I don’t know, Esher, and what I don’t know could still kill us all.” He raised his voice.

“Weisman!”

The sad-eyed little radioman came trotting up.

“Colonel?”

“Inform all commanders that we’re pulling out in five minutes. I want every truck or car they can lay their hands on at the main gate ASAP.

We’ve got a lot of wounded to move. And tell Carrerra we’re on our way.

Got it?”

Weisman nodded vigorously, obviously already mentally running over the list of code phrases needed to transmit 0”Con nell instructions.

“Good. After you’ve done that, put me in touch with Night Stalker Lead and Tiger Lead. I want solid air cover over us all the way to Swartkop!”

Levi moved away, looking for a medic to whom he could offer his services.

O’Connell’s depression had vanished for the time being, washed away in a flood of work still to be done.

Galvanized by their commander’s radioed orders, small groups of Rangers moved into high gear all across the Pelindaba complex. Some helped wounded comrades into stolen trucks. Others carried boxes of captured documents down the Administration Center’s bullet-riddled stairwells, past bodies sprawled in the building’s central hallway, and out through a set of double doors blown open by recoilless rifle rounds.

To the north, other American soldiers kept up a withering

fire, trying to pin down those few South Africans who’d survived the initial assault. But slowly, one by one, men slipped away from the firing line, joining skeletal squads and platoons assembling by the compound’s main gate. The Rangers were getting ready to leave Pelindaba’s corpse-strewn lawns and wrecked, burning buildings behind.

ROOKIAT TWO ONE, A TROOP, I ST SQUADRON, PRETORIA LIGHT HORSE, ALONG

THE

BEN SCHOEMAN HIGHWAY, NEAR PELINDABA

South of Pelindaba, a lone diesel engine growled softly as an eight-wheeled South African armored car ground its way into cover.

Dried twigs and branches rustled and snapped as the Rookiat’s long 76mm gun poked slowly through the clump of dense brush and low scrub trees.

Riding with his commander’s hatch open, Capt. Martin van Vuuren leaned far forward over the AFV’s turret, sighting down the length of the main gun barrel, trying to judge the exact moment at which its muzzle would clear the surrounding vegetation.

The Rookiat lurched upward over a tiny shelf of rock and then dropped level again. At the same moment, its gun tore through the last fringe of brush and emerged into open air.

” Halt! “

Van Vuuren’s whispered order brought immediate results. The muted roar of the Rookiat’s diesel engine died as it came to a complete stop. He swiveled through a complete circle, carefully scanning the terrain around his vehicle. A thin, humorless smile creased the South African captain’s lips. Perfect.

The Rookiat lay hidden inside a small, thick patch of woods overlooking the Ben Schoeman Highway-the expressway connecting Pretoria with

Johannesburg. It was also the main road between the Pelindaba Nuclear

Research Center and Swartkop Military Airfield. More importantly, the dense canopy of brush and tree branches would conceal his vehicle from what he was sure were Cuban ground attack aircraft roaming the night sky over Pretoria.

It seemed an ideal position, even though van Vuuren still wasn’t sure of just what the hell was going on. His A Troop had been on routine patrol when the enemy air strikes began-moving slowly along a wide circuit outside the perimeters of both Pelindaba and the Voortrekker Heights Military Camp. Now his radios were out-jammed across every possible frequency. And the two other Rookiats under his command were gone. He’d seen one blow up, shredded into a blazing fireball by cannon shells from a strafing enemy plane. The other had simply vanished, lost somewhere in what had quickly become a confused, harrowing race through a deadly gauntlet of smoke and flame.

Fresh scars on Rookiat Two One’s turret, souvenirs of steel splinters sprayed by a near miss, showed how close a race that had been. Van

Vuuren’s fingers lightly brushed a bruise spreading across his left check. He winced, remembering the tremendous, ringing impact that had thrown him face first into the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and laser range-finder readout. The enemy bomb couldn’t have landed more than thirty or forty meters away.

He shuddered. That had been too damned close. For the moment, he was content to wait here-safely hidden and out of the line of fire. A muffled cough from below reminded him to check his crew.

He lowered himself into the vehicle’s crowded, red-lit turret. Anxious faces stared up at him.

“Now what do we do?” The pressure lines left on Corporal Meitjens’s face by his gunsight made him look something like a raccoon.

“We wait.” Van Vuuren’s own uncertainty added a bite to his tone.

“And you keep your damned eyes glued to that night sight!”

Meitjens hurriedly obeyed.

Minutes passed, dragging by one by one. Van Vuuren had left his hatch open for comfort. Even when sitting idle, a four-man crew generated a lot of heat inside the Rookiat’s turret. And the cool night air pouring in through the open hatch provided a bit of welcome relief.

Sound also poured in through the hatch, and the South African captain sat with his eyes closed, listening to the noise of a one-sided battle. Bombs echoed in the distance-dull, thumping explosions that seemed to shake the very air itself. Jet engines roared past from time to time as enemy planes came in on strafing runs against some poor sod stupid enough to show himself. But the bombing seemed to be tapering off.

The bastards up there must be running out of targets, van Vuuren thought sourly. The steady crackle of heavy small arms fire rose from off to the north-audible now over the diminishing noise of the air bombardment.

The Rookiat’s commander opened his eyes and sat up straight. Small-arms fire? Were soldiers in the Pelindaba garrison actually trying to shoot down jets with rifles and machine guns? If so, they were braver than they were wise.

“Sir! Trucks moving south on the highway. Many of them.” Meitjens sounded as surprised as van Vuuren felt. What kind of idiot would try to run a truck convoy down a multi lane highway in the middle of an enemy air attack?

He motioned the corporal aside and pressed his own face against the thermal-image sight. Bright green shapes moved into view, hot against cold hillsides and an even colder night sky. By God, they were trucks!

Van Vuuren found himself counting aloud.

“Ten, eleven, twelve…

eighteen, nineteen… ” He shut his mouth abruptly. More than two dozen vehicles were out there, rolling past his position at twenty kilometers an hour. A sizable convoy even under ordinary circumstances.

And the circumstances were scarcely ordinary. He couldn’t understand it.

Why weren’t those trucks being blown to pieces by enemy air attack?

A nagging fear suddenly crystallized into certainty. The aircraft weren’t attacking those trucks because they were all on the same side. He couldn’t figure out how the Cubans could possibly have moved their troops so close to Pretoria so fast, but that would have to wait. All that mattered now was that he had what must be a communist truck column under his Rookiat’s 76mm gun.

“Target! Five hundred meters! Load HE!” Van Vuuren kept his eyes glued to the night sight. By rights he should sit back and allow Meitjens to man the gun, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to do it himself. In the past thirty or so minutes, he’d been bombed and strafed and generally terrified half out of his mind. Now he wanted the pleasure of personally killing some of the Uitlanders whose airborne comrades had been responsible for all of that.

Besides, this was going to be easy-what an American would call a “turkey shoot.” Two or three shots to the front and two or three more to the back would trap this tightly bunched truck convoy on a ready-made killing ground. Hundreds of enemy infantrymen would meet death on a wide, empty expanse of asphalt and concrete.

Van Vuuren gripped the gun controls and traversed the turret to the tight in one smooth, whirring movement. Bright yellow cross hairs centered on the green image of the lead truck. He tapped the laser range-finder control with his thumb and numerals appeared on the screen-382 meters.

Practically point-blank. He ignored Meitjens’s resentful muttering behind his back. His gunner would just have to learn that rank had its privileges and this was one of them.

I “Up! 11

“On the way!” Van Vuuren squeezed the trigger.

Klaanng! A bright white flash erupted out of the Rookiat’s main gun. The whole vehicle rocked back as it recoiled. Dust swirled through the air, kicked up by the 76mm cannon’s muzzle blast.

The South African captain pressed his face into the night sight, swearing softly as he waited for the dust to settle. Come on. Come on. Clear. Let me see, blast it!

Vision returned. Shit! Van Vuuren snarled at the view his screen showed.

The truck he’d fired at was still moving, and a glowing hot spot two hundred meters farther up the opposite hillside showed where his shot had landed. He’d either missed entirely or the HE round had passed right through the enemy

vehicle without slamming into anything solid enough to set off its warhead.

“Up!” Rookiat Two One’s loader was still on the job.

Van Vuuren traversed right again, bringing the truck back under his cross hairs. This time you die, he promised. He reached for the laser range-finder button…. The night sight went blank. Cross hairs, glowing green images, and digital readouts all faded out and disappeared.

Van Vuuren stared at his darkened screen in dismay. Both the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and its thermal-imaging system were down. One part of his panicked mind remained calm enough to guess that the vehicle’s delicate electronics had taken shock damage in the same bomb blast that had scarred its turret armor.

“Meitiens!” He scrambled out of the other man’s seat in frantic haste.

Only the gunner had the technical know-how needed to get their ballistic computer up and running again. He collided head-on with the corporal in a confused tangle of arms and legs and curses.

Van Vuuren’s attempt to do everything himself cost Rookiat Two One precious time it did not have.

NIGHT STALKER LEAD, 160TH AVIATION REGIMENT,

OVER PELINDABA

One hundred and fifty feet above the highway, the MH-8 helicopter gunship, known as Night Stalker Lead, spiraled downward in a tight turn to the right. Ghostly images of trucks, hillsides, and patches of brush spun past at dizzying speed.

While the AVS-6 nightvision goggles worn by the gunship’s two crewmen made them look a bit like pop-eyed insects, the goggles also turned night into lime-green-tinted day inside a narrow forty-degree arc. Pilots and gunners using NVGs could pick out tremendous detail-the difference between thin, harmless tree branches and thick tree trunks for example.

That and years of intensive training gave the crews of the 160th Aviation Regiment a combat symbolized by their motto: “Death waits in the dark.”

The 160this gunships had proven themselves invaluable in combat over Panama and the Persian Gulf. Now they were proving it again in the darkness over

South Africa.

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot, a U.S. Army major, leveled out of his turn at fifty feet.

“You see where that shot came from, Dan?”

“Looking.” His gunner, a middle-aged warrant officer going prematurely gray, stared straight ahead-scanning the eerie, cartoonlike world visible through his goggles. A low hill rising steeply ahead. Hard-to-see clumps of scrub brush and scraggly trees. Painfully bright fires raging just over the horizon. There!

“Target! One o’clock! AFV!

Now the pilot saw it-the solid box-shape of an armored vehicle parked in a copse of trees overlooking the highway. He pulled back on his controls, decelerating to give his gunner a better shot.

“Nail him!”

“Doing it! “The gunner swiveled his fire control to the right. Cross hairs settled over the enemy AFV and stayed there.

“Locked on!”

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot dropped the gunship’s nose.

“Firing. 11

The helicopter’s last remaining TOW antitank missile leapt from its right stores pylon and raced through the sky trailing fire and an ultrathin control wire. It crossed the six hundred meters separating the gunship from its target and exploded against the South African AFV’s turret. The

Rookiat’s top armor had been designed to stop 23mm cannon rounds-not heavy weight antitank missiles.

Fuel and ammunition went up in a rolling blast that threw torn and twisted pieces of Rookiat Two One more than fifty feet into the air. Oily black smoke boiled out of the vehicle’s shattered hulk, spreading slowly across a barren hillside now dotted with small fragments of flaming wreckage.

Night Stalker Lead’s missile had annihilated South Africa’s last organized opposition to Brave Fortune. The 1/75th Rangers had a clear road to

Swartkop.

SWARTKOP MILITARY AIRFIELD

Swartkop Airfield’s vast stretches of oil-stained concrete were deserted-almost entirely abandoned to the dead and the dying. Fires guttered low in burnt-out hangars and workshops. Smoke and flame rose from the wreckage of the two MH-8 “Little Birds.” As part of the plan, they’d been abandoned and blown up by their own crews rather than let the South

Africans capture them intact. The only signs of life were concentrated near one end of the flight line where Rangers hurriedly unloaded wounded men from captured trucks and carried them into the huge cargo bay of the last waiting C141. More soldiers lay prone in a rough semicircle around the aircraft, ready to provide coveting fire if any South African troops appeared. Two weary officers stood watching off to one side of the

Starlifter’s cargo ramp.

Jet engines howled from the other side of the tarmac where the other C141 s taxied toward takeoff. Abruptly, one swung through a sharp 180-degree turn, came to a brief stop on the runway’s centerline, and then accelerated-rolling past with a thundering, rumbling roar.

Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell watched his battalion’s lead transport lumber heavily into the air with a profound sense of relief. Three nuclear weapons were safely off South African soil and bound for

American-garrisoned Diego Garcia -die first stage on a long flight back to the United States. Another C-141 followed a minute later, lifting off just as the third Starlifter flashed past down the runway. One after another, the huge transports took off.

“Rob, we’re done! Now I suggest we get the hell out of here! “

O’Connell turned toward the hoarse shout. Lt. Col. Mike Carrerra pointed toward a collection of empty trucks. The wounded they’d carried were all inside the C-14 1. O’Connell nodded vigorously.

“Amen to that, Mike. Get your people aboard! “

“Right.” Carreffa whirled round and yelled through cupped hands, “Let’s go, Alpha Two!”

Moving fire team by fire team, the Rangers of the 2/75this

Alpha Company scrambled upright and ran for the open cargo bay. As the last man’s combat boots thudded onto the steel ramp, Carrerra signaled the

Air Force crew chief waiting eagerly by the door controls.

“Close and seal!”

He turned back to O’Connell with a wide, punch-drunk grin plastered across his face.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit, Colonel. I gotta admit

I never thought we’d pull this fucking thing off. Congratulations. “

O’Connell smiled wanly and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the

C-141’s crowded cargo bay. Dozens of men lay motionless on either side of the central aisle, swathed in bloodstained bandages. Others, apparently uninjured, sat silently along the Starlifter’s metal walls, clutching M16s and light machine guns in hands that shook uncontrollably.

Carrerra’s battalion had taken heavy losses while seizing and holding the

South African airfield. His own unit’s casualties were even higher.

Preliminary casualty reports showed the ln5this losses running at more than 50 percent. His Ranger battalion had been wrecked while accomplishing its mission.

He looked up at Carrerra’s tired face.

“Yeah. We did it. I just hope to

God it was worth the price.”

Carreffa eyed the pillars of smoke and flame rising in a great arc from the west to the north.

“Well, one thing’s for goddamned certain. These bastards will sure as hell know we’ve been here!”

O’Connell found himself nodding in agreement as the cargo ramp whined shut, blocking their view of South Africa. The huge C-141 was already in motion, turning rapidly onto the runway leading home.

Karl Vorster’s government had just lost its nuclear option.