Vortex

Now they were hurtling straight for the hill, two helicopters flashing past isolated clumps of brush and jagged boulders, one right after the other.

The battlefield seemed to leap closer in seconds. Distant specks expanded suddenly into individual vehicles. Ratels with their distinctive turrets.

Open-topped Buffels crammed with white faces staring up at him from under helmets. Land Rovers weaving over the ground at fantastic speed. Even a few trucks, which seemed sadly out of place among the fighting vehicles.

The Puma’s 30mm gun opened up with a rattling, jackhammer roar.

Kersten pulled the gunship’s nose up sharply, following the rising terrain. He and his crew were blind for an instant as the Puma clattered through the thick, oily smoke billowing from a burning vehicle, and it shuddered violently-caught in a sudden upsurge of superheated air. Then they were through and on the other side of the hill, howling away at high speed.

“Two of them! I got two of the bastards!” his door gunner shouted over the intercom, caught up in a wild mix of ecstasy and relief.

“They fire balled I got them, Captain.”

“Great, Roef. ” Kersten yanked the Puma around in a tight, spiraling turn. ” Look sharp now. We’re going in again.”

The two South African gunships flew south and west in an arc that would bring them back over the hilltop battlefield.

RATEL ONE SIX

LCpI. Mike Villiers ducked as a mortar round exploded several dozen meters behind his APC. Spent fragments and pieces of dirt pattered down over its deck armor and off his helmet. He raised his head and gripped his ring-mounted light machine gun even tighter. Christ. He hated riding facing backward like this, and he hated standing in an open hatch with half his body exposed outside the Ratel’s armor. Still, somebody had to do it. Kruger’s decimated battalion needed whatever antiaircraft defenses it could muster.

The three burning vehicles to his left were proof of that. They’d been shredded from end to end by 30mm cannon shells-gutted like fish.

Smoldering corpses hung half in and half out of hatches. Villiers had no desire to end up dead like those poor sods, so he watched the sky with renewed intensity.

A fastmoving blur near the horizon caught his eye.

“Here they come!

Three o’clock low!”

He squeezed the trigger convulsively, feeling the machine gun kick back against his upper arm and watching his glowing tracers reaching out for the incoming blur. Other tracer streams were rising from nearby Ratels, all aimed at the lead helicopter flying barely a hundred feet off the ground.

Trying to hit a target moving at more than one hundred miles an hour while riding a bucking, lurching platform moving at nearly twenty miles an hour itself would ordinarily seem an almost impossible task. Even a machine gun’s ability to fire hundreds of rounds per minute merely lowers the odds against success from the astronomical to the wildly improbable. But sometimes you get lucky.

LCpI. Mike Villiers got lucky.

PUMA GUNSHIP LEAD

Four 7.62mm rounds hit the Puma. Three simply tore inconsequential holes in its fuselage and hurtled onward, tumbling through empty air. The fourth did catastrophic damage.

It ripped into the Puma’s starboard engine at an angle that took it straight through a fuel line and into the turbine blades. One blade shattered instantly-spewing white-hot fragments in every direction. The turbine engine seized up, died, and then erupted in flame.

Capt. Harry Kersten barely had time to notice the glowing red fire-warning light before his helicopter lost power, dipped too low, and slammed nose first into the hill. The Puma flipped end over end twice and then exploded-spraying burning fuel and sharp-edged fragments over hundreds of meters.

The second gunship veered wildly away from the rising fireball and vanished over the hill. It reappeared moments later, flying southeast-away from the battle. With Kersten dead and their potential targets already in among the defending strong points the second Puma’s crew saw little reason to stay and fight.

Maj. Rolf Bekker had just lost his ace in the hole.

REACTION FORCE

The 44th Parachute Brigade’s paratroopers were dying hard. They were taking their enemies with them, but they were dying. Rifles and machine guns were no match for armored personnel carriers mounting 20mm cannon and coaxial machine guns. A well-placed Carl Gustav round could turn any APC into a shattered wreck, but most of their recoilless rifle teams were only getting off one or two shots before being spotted and knocked out.

Burning APCs and trucks dotted the hillside, but enough made it through unscathed to overrun Bekker’s platoon strength strong points And once

Kruger’s men were inside each defensive ring, the paratroops were wiped out foxhole by foxhole-killed by soldiers firing from inside their Ratels, by point-blank cannon shots, or by dismounted infantry charging forward behind a barrage of grenades and automatic weapons fire.

COMMAND RATEL