A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 148

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"Aim, you Shangane oxen!" Sean bellowed at them. He was up and running as he realized his mistake in not taking the first, crucial shot himself.

The Frelimo sentries were screaming and scattering around the fuel tankers, and from the perimeter of the laager a 12.7-men cannon opened up, sluicing gaudy strings of fiery tracer across the sky.

The rocketeer war fumbling to reload the RPG-7, but he was panicky and unsure in the dark. Sean snatched the launcher off his shoulder and with two deft movements removed the protecting nose cap of the missile and cleared the safety pin. He swung the launcher over his shoulder and dropped on one knee, aiming at the nearest tanker.

"All the time in the world," he reminded himself, and waited for the puff of the morning breeze on his cheek to abate. The RPG-7 was wildly inaccurate in a crosswind, for the push of the wind on its tail fins would turn its nose into the wind.

The breeze dropped, and Sean centered the sights on the fuel tanker. The range was just on three hundred meters, the limit of the rocket's accuracy, and he fired. The missile sped true, and the side of the tanker erupted in a tall sheet of volatile avgas. The sky filled with flames.

Sean snarled at the rocketeer beside him, and the man fumbled another missile out of his pack, the cardboard propellant tube already attached to it.

Burning avgas illuminated the southern slope of the hill like noonday. Sean was kneeling in the open, and the gunner on the 12.7-men swung his aim onto him.

The earth around Sean dissolved into billowing clouds of dust and flying clods, and the rocketeer ducked.

"Come on, you yellow bastard!" Sean completed the loading sequence unaided, making no effort to avoid the aim of the 12.7men gunner.

He lifted the launcher onto his shoulder and aimed at the second fuel tanker. It was fit up by the flames as though it were a stage effect, but as he was on the point of firing, the tanker was obscured by a dancing curtain of yellow dust and the volley of cannon fire passed so close to Sean's head that his eardrums creaked and popped as though he were in a decompression chamber.

He held his fire for three seconds. Then as the curtains of dust blew open, he fired through them. The second tanker burst, blown clear of the railway lines by the explosion of its lethal cargo.

Burning avgas flowed down the slope like the lava of a miniature Vesuvius, and Sean threw the launcher at the rocketeer's chest.

"Hit them on the head with the bloody thing!" he yelled at him.

"That's the only damage you are going to do with it!"

The mortar men were doing better. Sean had sighted their weapons for them, and they bobbed and weaved over the short mortar tubes as they dropped the finned projectiles into the open mouths.

A steady stream of bombs lobbed high into the dawn sky and rained down into the hilltop laager.

Sean watched the effect of the bursts with a dispassionate, professional eye. "Good," he murmured. "Good." But they had only been capable of carrying thirty bombs for each of the mortars; they he'd almost two kilos each, and they would be expended in a weig few short minutes. They must rush the perimeter while the exploding bombs distracted the Frelimo gunners. He hefted the AKM rifle and slipped the safety catch.

"Go!" Sean yelled, and blew a short series of blasts on his whistle, "Go!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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