A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 37

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Sean intersected the road running between Vila de Monica and Cabora Bossa and flew along it for ten miles. He was so low he could see the ruts and potholes in the surface and weeds growing in the wheel tracks. No vehicle had used it for months, perhaps years. The culverts and bridges had been destroyed by explosives and the bodies of mined vehicles, burned out and rusted, littered the verges.

He turned back toward the west and the border now, searching for a place that all three of them remembered so well. As they came up ahead, Sean recognized the symmetrical hillocks they called Inhlozane, "The Maiden's Breasts," and south of them the confluence of two minor rivers, now reduced to strings of green pools in wide sand beds.

Job pointed ahead. "There it is." In the back seat, Matatu forgot his fear and discomfort to cackle with laughter and clutch Sean's shoulder.

"Inhlozane. Do you remember, Bwana?"

Sean banked steeply over the junction of the two rivers, circling them, all three of them peering down. They could make out no trace of the old guerrilla camp. The last time they had been here was in the spring of"1976 and they had come as scouts--Ballantyne's Scouts.

Under interrogation, a prisoner had revealed the existence of a major guerrilla training camp in this area, and the Rhodesian high command had sent one of the Vampire jets over on a high photographic run. The camp had been cunningly concealed and every artifice of camouflage employed. However, the Rhodesian evaluators were highly skilled, most of them ex-R.A.F personnel. It is possible to camouflage the dugouts and hutments used by hundreds of men and women, but the pathways between them are the telltales. Thousands of feet moving daily between barracks and lecture huts, between mess halls and latrines, going out to forage for firewood or carrying water from the river, beat pathways that from the air look like the veins in a dead leaf.

"Between two and two and a half thousand," the air force photographic reconnaissance squadron leader had told the briefing. "They have been there for approximately six months, so training is almost complete. They are probably just waiting for the rains to break before beginning a major offensive."

A simultaneous incursion by two thousand trained terrorists would have strained the Rhodesian security forces" capabilities to breaking point.

"Preemptive strike," General Peter Walls, the Rhodesian commander in chief, had ordered. "I want a battle plan prepared within twenty-four hours." The code name chosen for the attack was "Popeye."

Rivalry between the Selous Scouts and the Ballantyne Scouts was fierce, and Sean had been jubilant when he had been given the ground attack role of "Popeye" in preference to the Selous lads.

They had gone in with the slow, ancient Dakotas, crowded on the benches along the fuselage, fifty men and their equipment to an aircraft, sitting on their parachutes. There were almost equal numbers of black and white troopers, but they were homogeneous in their camouflage paint. They had jumped from three hundred feet, just high enough for the parachutes to flare before they hit the ground. When they jumped from that height, they jokingly referred to themselves as "meat bombs."

The jump area was twelve miles from the guerrilla training camp, ninety-six miles inside the Mozambican border. They were on the ground an hour before sunset. All three hundred Scouts were assembled and ready to move out by nightfall.

They had made the approach march by moonlight, each man carrying a pack that weighed almost a hundred pounds, most of that weight made up of ammunition for the RPD machine guns.

They had reached the fork of the river after midnight and prepared their ambush position along the south bank, overlooking the dry river-bed and its shallow green pools and facing the training camp on the far bank.

With Job beside him, Sean crept along the bank, checking every position personally, speaking to his men in whispers, calling them by name. They had lain for the rest of the night behind their machine guns, and small sounds and smells of the wood smoke and cooking food had drifted across to them on the night breeze.

At dawn a bugle had sounded reveille in the dark forest that hid the camps, and they had seen the obscure movement of many persons in the gloom beneath the trees.

Twenty minutes later, Precisely at the moment of good shooting light, the Vampires had come whistling in from the west and dropped their napalm cansters. Towering bans of orange flame shot through with evil black smoke had erupted into the sky, palling the sunrise; the heat and the chemical stink of the napalm came rolling down to where the scouts lay in ambush. The VamPires had deliberately dropped their loads of napalm along the northern perimeter of the camp, sealing off that escape route with a wall of fire. The Canberra bombers came in twenty seconds behind the Vampires, and their bomb loads were fragmentation and high explosive. They fell into the camp with jarring crumping detonations, sending up fountains of dirt and debris, and the trainee guerrillas who survived came out of the forest, screaming and howling in a panic-stricken mob.

The napalm had cut them off from the north, and they poured into the river-bed and came running directly at the waiting machine guns. Sean let them come, studying them with a detached interest.

There were almost as many women as men, but it was difficult to differentiate between the sexes. They wore no uniform; some were in khaki shorts and T-shirts with portraits of guerrilla leaders or Political slogans printed on the chests. Others wore blue denim or bush jackets, and some were bare-chested and in their underwear.

Nearly all of them were young, in their middle or late teens, all of them terrified and running blindly to escape the conflagration of napalm and high explosive.

They splashed into the pools and the sand held their feet, slowing them. As they ran, they looked back over their shoulders at the flames and dust of the pomp, so none of them saw the gunners waiting for them on the south bank.

The river-bed was filled with struggling humanity, like a pit full of rats, and as the first of them reached the bank on which Sean lay and began to clamber up the steep earthen side, he blew a piercing blast on his whistle. The last note of the whistle was drowned out by gunfire, three hundred automatic weapons opening up together.

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