Vortex

There! Howling, yelling, defiant shapes raced out of the concealing smoke, lunging forward with fixed bayonets. He saw one man coming straight for him-all glittering eyes and a hate-filled, blackened face beneath a steel helmet.

God. He shot and shot and shot again. The Englishman stumbled, folded in on himself, and fell facedown in the dirt.

Meer’s panic vanished in that same instant. He laughed aloud in exultation and rose to his knees, swinging from side to side-looking for more foreigners to kill.

Another small, round shape sailed out of the smoke and landed behind him.

Whummp. The blast threw him forward against the lip of his foxhole and left him lying there for a split second, bleeding and dazed. Some instinct told him to stay down, to accept defeat.

No! It would not be! Meer spat pieces of gravel and sand out of his torn mouth and pushed himself to his knees again. Vague shapes wavered in front of his watering eyes. He fumbled for his rifle.

He never really saw the British paratrooper who came screaming out of the mist and swirling dust. He was conscious only of a sudden, sharp, tearing pain as the man’s bayonet slammed into his chest, reaching for his heart.

Gerrit Meer fell backward into his half-dug foxhole. He didn’t feel the point-blank shot the Para fired to extract his bayonet. The Afrikaner sergeant was already dead, staring up at the smoke-shrouded night sky with sightless eyes. The ridge guarding the Mooi River valley had fallen.

CHAPTER

- 36

End Run

DECEMBER 31IN NATAL

Special Forces duty always surprised him. Capt. Jeff Hawkins knew that “unconventional warfare” was much more common and covered a lot more combat than “conventional warfare,” but the longer he fought, the fewer rules there seemed to be.

Hawkins was dressed in U.S. Army battle dress, festooned with equipment, especially extra cans of water. Tall and slender, he was better suited to the heat than the massive Sergeant Griffith. Still, nobody wanted to risk dehydration. He carried the load easily, with a wiry strength that matched his thinness. His face was thin and angled. Even his fingers were skinny.

Captain Hawkins was the leader of a U.S. Army Special Forces “A” Team.

Along with his eleven other comrades, he had landed in the Durban area with the invading forces and was now operating “behind the lines,” assisting the black resistance.

Jeff’s skin was only a shade lighter than the Africans he

?”

walked with. He had always considered himself an American black, but in this color-conscious country, he would actually be classed as “colored,” since he had both black and white ancestors. Looking at the Sotho and Zulu tribesmen walking with him, he decided the term Afro-American was a good way of describing himself.

Special Forces teams supported the local resistance with specialized skills, gathered intelligence, and coordinated operations with “conventional” U.S. forces. Except for Lieutenant Dworski and himself, all the men on the team were sergeants, noncoms with years of training and experience. It was a touchy matter, working with a different culture, advising and assisting without giving orders. And there were always complications.

They were on their way back from a two-day patrol. Jeff had led Lieutenant

Dworski and Sergeants Griffith and Lamas on an engineering reconnaissance of the Tugela River bridge. It was a potential choke point on the Allied route of advance, and they had received orders to see if it could be seized and held in advance of the attacking Allied forces. This was only one of the missions his team was performing.

The answer was an exhausting and definite no. Jeff had learned enough to know when to walk away from a posthumous medal, and this was the time. Well defended, with a screen of patrols and scouts for twenty kilometers around, it had been an adventure just getting a look at the bridge.

No, headquarters would have to find some other way out of the Drakensberg.

Those rugged mountains were coming to symbolize the South African defenders and the difficulty of the advance.

Hawkins’s feeling of disappointment was mixed with his frustration with the

African soldiers he was supposed to be training and leading. These people were supposed to be allies. He seemed to remember something about allies being people who didn’t shoot at each other, but did shoot at the same enemy. In history, this had resulted in some strange alliances, but as long as the wars had lasted, so had the alliances.

Not here. Not at first, anyway. Hawkins and the other three

Americans had shown up at a nighttime rendezvous with local resistance forces, mostly ex-ANC guerrillas now fighting with the Allied side.

Any meeting at night, deep in enemy territory, was risky, and even after almost two weeks of operations in Africa, Jeff was keyed up. They had approached the site, an isolated grove of trees, in single file, with

Ephraim Betalizu, their best scout, in front by fifty meters.