A Time to Die, page 48
‘Where is Sean?’ she whispered anxiously. ‘Can you see him?’
‘On the left, at the edge of the smoke,’ Job told her, and she picked him out by the tiny figure that ran ahead of him like a hunting dog.
‘I see him, and Matatu.’
Just in front of the pair the earth seemed suddenly to bloom with dust and flame, and they were gone.
‘Oh God. No!’ she cried aloud, but as the dust blew aside on the morning breeze, she saw the two of them running on, tracer bullets flickering about them like hellish fireflies.
‘Please, please protect him,’ she breathed, and lost sight of him as he reached the first emplacement.
‘Where is he?’ She found that she had seized Job’s arm and was shaking it wildly. ‘Where is he, can you see him?’
Then suddenly Sean was there again, even at that distance he appeared an heroic figure balancing easily on the sandbagged parapet in the ruddy glow of the flames, and she cried aloud with relief.
Then she saw him cower and from out of the very earth, only a short distance ahead of him, the monstrous shape of a Hind gunship reared into the air and swung its monstrous head towards him, lowering it like a charging bull. She heard the roar of its cannon, and leaping fountains of dust and flying earth obscured Sean’s distant figure as cannon shell raked across the hillside.
‘Job!’ she screamed. ‘They have killed him!’ She reached out for him again, but Job shook off her hand.
He was down on one knee, the launch tube of the Stinger across his right shoulder, his face in the reflected firelight fixed in a mask of concentration as he stared into the sight screen.
‘Quickly!’ Claudia whispered. ‘Shoot quickly!’
The missile leapt from its long tube, and hot air and stinging particles of dust and dead grass were blown back into Claudia’s face as the rocket motor ignited. She slitted her eyes and held her breath as she watched it dart away on its tail of smoke and flame leaving a trail of dazzling smoke behind it as it flew towards the crest of the hill where the Hind hovered against the dark sky.
She saw the slight kick in its trajectory, as the missile changed to the ultra-violet seeker, and lifted its nose fractionally, no longer aiming at the armoured exhaust ports but at the open mouth of the turbo intakes just below the humped gearbox of the rotor.
She thought she saw the missile actually fly squarely into the intake, but the resulting explosion was deceptively mild, contained within the shell of titanium armour plate, so that none of its fury was dissipated. The Hind reeled wildly to the shot, throwing its nose high, falling backwards so that its tail rotor caught the rocky hillside and flipped it over sideways. It tumbled and bounced down the slope, rolling end over end, flames billowing from the throat of the air intake, its huge main rotor thrashing the earth and tearing itself to pieces, fragments hurtling into the night sky.
Claudia sought desperately for Sean, and gasped as she recognized him through the dust and the smoke, leaping back on to the parapet and then plunging on up the hillside with Matatu close behind him.
‘Reload!’ Job snapped at her, and with a guilty start she reached for the spare missile tube beside her and helped him clip it into the launcher.
The moment the Stinger was reloaded she glanced back at the laager. Sean was gone, but three more of the Hind gunships were airborne, soaring across the dawn, backlit by the flames. They were firing their cannon, some of them seeking targets within the laager where the attackers were in desperate hand-to-hand combat with the Frelimo garrison, others flailing the dark forest beyond the perimeter with their gales of tracer, trying to extinguish the hail of missiles that flew at them from out of the darkness.
Another Hind was hit and fell on its back, bursting into violent flame as it crashed into the rocky crest of the hill, and then another staggered in flight and curved down, mortally wounded, to hit the tree-tops and cartwheel through them to the earth.
As fast as they fell, others rose from their hidden emplacements with cannons blazing, sweeping down upon the attackers. Job leapt to his feet as a gunship tried to break away, climbing steeply up over their heads. He arched his back, pointing the missile almost vertically upwards, like a gun taking on a high-driven pheasant.
The Hind was a thousand feet up, climbing away, seeming to be safely beyond the Stinger’s effective range, presenting a difficult angle and impossible trajectory, but the missile darted up, overhauling it effortlessly, and the great machine seemed to wince and tremble to the shot, standing for a moment stationary in the air, before it fell back with its damaged turbos screaming in mortal agony and dived into the valley, striking in a storm of breaking branches and torn tree-trunks.
‘Reload.’ Job did not even watch the Hind’s death agony, and Claudia leaped to help him fit another missile tube to the launcher. She tapped his shoulder as she finished.
‘Go!’ she said.
Another Hind came out of the forest directly in front of them. The Russian pilot was flying so low that he seemed to be earth bound. He was dodging and ducking the huge machine behind the scattered trees, weaving like a boxer, the down-draught of the rotor flattening the tall elephant grass only a few feet below the Hind’s belly.
Job turned to face the oncoming machine, standing out in the open, lit by the flames, and he braced himself, picking up the image of the Hind in the sight screen.
The Hind seemed to steady itself for an instant, and the blast of its Gatling-cannon swept around them like a hurricane wind. Standing beside Job, Claudia was blown off her feet by the force of it, and her ears buzzed with the supersonic shock of passing cannon shells.
Job was thrown on top of her, his weight driving the wind from her lungs, but they had fallen between two round boulders which deflected the rest of the volley of cannon fire, and the Hind passed over them, only feet above where they lay. The blast of its rotors slashed at them, whipping Claudia’s hair into her face so that it stung her eyes like a scourge.
Then the Hind slid away like a cruising tiger shark, and Claudia was suffocating by Job’s weight on top of her and half-blinded with dust and her own hair. She struggled to free herself and was suddenly aware that her hands were wet, and that hot liquid was spilling over her and soaking her shirt.
‘Job!’ she blurted. ‘Get up! Get off me!’ Only when he neither replied nor moved, but lay on her with a heavy loose weight, did she realize that the wetness that was dousing her was Job’s blood. That knowledge gave her wild strength and she rolled his body aside, and dragged herself out from under him.
She crawled to her knees and looked down at him. A cannon shell had hit him high in the upper body, and the damage was horrific. It looked as though he had been savaged and mauled by some ferocious beast; his right arm was almost torn from the shoulder and was thrown above his head in a ghastly parody of surrender.
She stared at him numbly and tried to say his name. No sound came from her throat. She reached out and caressed his face, not daring to touch that terribly mutilated body. She felt a terrible sense of loss and opened her mouth again to give vent to her grief with a wail of despair. It came out in a wild shriek of rage. The force of her rage stunned her, and seemed to impel her out of her own body so that she watched herself from afar, amazed by the actions of this savage stranger who had usurped her body and who now lunged for the missile-launcher where it lay beside Job’s body.
Then she found herself on her feet with the missile-launcher on her right shoulder, searching the sky for the Hind gunship. It was four hundred metres away, cruising the foot of the hill, sweeping over the forest, picking out its targets from amongst the trees and destroying them with short but terrible blasts of its forward cannon.
As she turned to face it, standing fully upright in the daylight glare of the fires, the pilot must have spotted her, for he swivelled the gunship on its own axis, bringing the cannon in the pod below his cockpit to bear upon her.
‘Locked and loaded,’ she said, and the voice was strange in her ears as she repeated the litany of death.
‘Actuator on.’ She saw the image of the Hind appear in the tiny screen before her eyes, and she centred it in the cross hair on the aiming ring and the missile sobbed and then steadied into its high-pitched electronic tone.
‘Target acquired,’ she whispered, and felt no fear as the silhouette of the Hind altered in her sight screen. Now it was facing her head-on, its cannon almost bearing, the gunner traversing fractionally to pick up her tiny figure in his own sights.
‘Fire!’ she said quietly, and squeezed the pistol grip. The shoulder pad jolted her as the Stinger launched, and she slitted her eyes against the back blast of the missile as it sped away at four times the speed of sound, running straight and true at the hovering machine.
The cannon in the Hind’s nose blazed, but Claudia felt only the disrupted air of shot passing close over her head before the missile jerked almost imperceptibly and arrowed unerringly into the open throat of the machine’s turbo intakes. The Hind had only a few feet to drop before it hit the earth and rolled over on to its side. In the moments before it was totally engulfed by burning fuel from the punctured belly tank, Claudia saw the panicky contortions of the pilot trapped under the armoured canopy and then even that was obliterated in a wall of flame.
‘That was a human being,’ she thought. ‘A living and breathing person, and I destroyed him.’ She expected a rush of guilt and remorse. How much a part of her was the belief that all life, especially human life, was sacred. The guilt did not come, instead she was borne aloft on a wave of savage triumph, the same berserk fury that had overtaken her so unexpectedly.
She looked around her swiftly, searching the sky for another target, something else to destroy, anything on which to wreak her vengeance. The dawn sky was empty. The burning carcasses of the Hind gunships lay strewn upon the slopes of the hill and amongst the trees of the valley forest.
‘They are all down,’ she thought. ‘We got them all.’
From the forest, the Shanganes of the Stinger sections were swarming up the hill, breaking into the laager to support Sean’s assault. She saw the Frelimo defenders throwing down their weapons, and cowering in their dugouts with hands raised pathetically, attempting to surrender, and watched dispassionately as the yelling Shanganes bayoneted and clubbed them like slaughtered chickens.
At her feet Job groaned, and instantly her rage was gone. She flung the empty missile-launcher aside and dropped down on her knees beside him.
‘I thought you were dead!’ she whispered, as she unwound the scarf from around her own neck with fingers which only now began to tremble. ‘Don’t die, Job. Please don’t die.’ The scarf was stained with sweat and dust, and its seams were unravelled and torn but she balled it up and stuffed it into the terrible wound, pressing down on it with her full weight to try and staunch the flood of his life’s blood.
‘Sean will be here soon,’ she told him. ‘Don’t die, Job. Fight, please fight. I’ll help you.’
Sean and Matatu crouched below the parapet, ducking lower as the storm of cannon fire flew only inches over their heads and filled their eyes and nostrils with dust from the ripped sandbags.
The instant the firing ceased, Sean bobbed up, just in time to see the stricken Hind fall tail-first against the rocky hillside and tear itself to pieces as it rolled down the slope. ‘Well, blow me down, those damned Stingers actually work!’ he laughed, still flying high on his own fear, and beside him Matatu giggled and clapped his hands.
‘Like shooting sand grouse with the .577 banduki!’ he cried in Swahili, and then leapt to his feet to follow Sean over the parapet.
Three Frelimo troopers bolted out of their dugout as they saw them coming and Sean fired the AKM from the hip, a short tap that caught one of them low in the back and flung him face down. The other two threw down their rifles and fell to their knees, gibbering with terror, hands held high over their heads. Sean ran on past them and they collapsed with relief as he ignored them.
Sean was through the outer defences and into the laager proper with its service areas and hardened helicopter emplacements. The workshops and fuel dumps were heavily sandbagged and covered with camouflage netting. Stray mortar shells were still falling amongst them, kicking up geysers of dust and gusts of whistling shrapnel. One of the Hinds had fallen near the far perimeter of the laager and was burning fiercely, oily black smoke billowing back over the workshops.
In the confusion, human figures scurried about without apparent purpose, unarmed technicians in baggy grey overalls who flung up their arms when they saw Sean, most of them dropping onto their knees to emphasize their surrender. In full camouflage paint and with the blood lust and elation of battle contorting his features, Sean cut a ferocious and terrifying figure.
‘Down!’ Sean gestured at them with the barrel of the AKM and with transparent relief they fell face down in the dust and clasped their hands behind their heads.
Just ahead he made out the long drooping rotors of a Hind protruding above the sandbagged wall of its emplacement.
‘One didn’t even get up,’ he thought as he raced towards it, and at that moment the rotors began to revolve slowly, building up speed swiftly. Somebody was attempting to start the machine.
Sean darted through the narrow entrance, and into the deep circular emplacement. He checked his charge for a moment to survey the interior.
The Hind in its blotched camouflage towered over him, its rotors whirling over his head as they built up to start speed on the Isotov turbo engine. Three Russian ground crew were crowded around the front of the machine, and incongruously Sean noticed the crimson arrow emblem painted on the Hind’s nose which designated them an ‘Excellent Crew’. One of the cherished performance awards of the Soviet air force.
The ground crew turned their white faces towards Sean and gaped at him. He jerked the muzzle of the AKM at them and they fell back.
The canopy of the weapons cockpit of the helicopter was still open, and one of the flight crew was clambering up into it. Only his plump backside in grey flying overalls protruded. Sean reached up between his legs and seized a handful of the man’s genitals. The Russian squealed shrilly as Sean used them as a handle to drag him backwards and threw him against the sandbagged side wall of the emplacement.
The spinning rotors whistled shrilly as the turbo engine caught, and Sean jumped up onto the boarding step of the helicopter. The pilot’s canopy was also open, and Sean thrust his AKM forward.
The pilot at the controls was young and thin with pale blond hair cut very short. In his haste to get the Hind away he had not even donned his flying helmet. He turned his head to look at Sean. His complexion was marred by angry purple and red acne and his eyes were very pale blue. They widened dramatically as Sean touched the tip of his acne-scarred nose with the muzzle of the AKM and said, ‘Party is over, Ivan. Let’s go home.’
It was apparent that this helicopter had not been scheduled for the dawn sortie that morning and the pilot and his crew had only begun their attempt to get the machine airborne once the attack had begun. It was less than ten minutes since the first mortar shells had fallen into the laager, not sufficient time, although they had almost made it.
‘Kill the engine,’ Sean told the pilot, and enforced the order by jamming the muzzle of the AKM into his nose with sufficient force to bring a smear of blood from one nostril and tears from both his pale eyes.
Reluctantly the pilot pushed the fuel mixture control to fully lean and cut both master switches. The whistle of the turbo died away.
‘Out!’ said Sean, and the pilot understood the gesture and tone, if not the word. He unclasped his safety-belt and climbed down into the laager.
Sean lined up the pilot, the flight engineer and the three members of the ground crew against the sandbagged wall.
‘Welcome to the capitalist world, comrades,’ he greeted them, and then looked back at the helicopter.
‘Jackpot!’ he grinned, still euphoric with the adrenalin in his blood. ‘We’ve got ourselves a real live, working Hind, Matatu!’
Matatu was having a grand time. ‘Let’s kill them now,’ he suggested merrily. ‘Give me the banduki. Let me shoot them for you.’
Sean had only seen Matatu fire one shot in his entire life, when as a joke Sean had let him fire the double .577. It had lifted Matatu clear off his feet and deposited him ten feet away.
‘You couldn’t hit one of them, even at this range, you bloodthirsty little bugger.’ Sean grinned down at him, and then once more concentrated all his attention on the Hind. The magnitude of the prize he had taken began to dawn upon him.
The Hind would be a magnificent escape vehicle. He and Claudia, Job and Matatu could get out of here with first-class tickets, and then with a drop of spirits, reality overtook him.
Sean had never flown a helicopter, did not even have the vaguest notion of how to do so. All he knew was that it required a delicate and expert touch on the controls and was entirely different from piloting a fixed-wing aircraft.
He looked back at the Russian pilot calculatingly. Despite the acne and his unprepossessing appearance, he thought he detected a stubborn and proud streak in the man’s pale eyes and he knew that the air-force officers were amongst the elite of the Soviet armed forces. The Russian was almost certainly a fanatical patriot.
‘Not much chance of getting you to act as ferry pilot,’ he guessed, and then spoke aloud. ‘All right, gentlemen, let’s get out of here.’ He indicated the exit from the emplacement, and under the barrel of the AKM, they trooped towards it obediently. As the Russian pilot passed, Sean stopped him and lifted the Tokarev pistol from the holster at his hip.
