Vortex

American-held trench, pouring bullets toward the distant, half-seen shape of the South African bunker. M16-mounted M203 grenade launchers thumped once, twice, and then a third time-lobbing 40mm grenades onto the open area right in front of the bunker.

Bright orange flashes stabbed out of the rising smoke. The South Africans were shooting back, trying to lay down a curtain of steel-jacketed slugs across ground they could no longer see.

O’Connell’s hands closed tight around his M16. “Let’s go! “

Two of the six Rangers in his assault group stooped and locked their hands together to form a makeshift stirrup. Without hesitating, O’Connell stepped forward and up into their interlocked hands and immediately felt himself being tossed upward-literally being hurled out of the trench. He landed in the grassy field outside, rolled over, and scrambled to his feet already running. Rifle in hand, he moved north, angling away from the heavy machinegun fire now pouring out of the South African-held bunker. Four Rangers hurtled up and out of the trench after him.

All five men sprinted forward, dispersing on the move spreading out in the hope that a single enemy burst wouldn’t hit them all. This gauntlet could only be run alone.

Burning buildings and vehicles added an eerie orange glow to the black night sky and sent strange shadows wavering ahead of them across the corpse-strewn, half-fit ground. 0”Con nell kept going, speeding past crumpled bodies, scattered gear, and torn, bullet-riddled parachutes. In an odd way, he felt almost superhuman, with every sense and every nerve ending magnified and set afire. He squinted through sweat toward the smoke-shrouded enemy bunker. Two hundred meters to go.

Movement flickered at the edge of his vision, far off to the right.

Sergeant Johnson and his five Rangers were there, making their own headlong dash for the bunker. He lengthened his own stride.

One hundred and fifty meters. One hundred. O’Connell felt his pulse accelerating, racing in time with his pounding feet. My God, he thought exultantly, we might really pull this crazy stunt off after all!

Suddenly, the ground seemed to explode out from under him. Dirt sprayed high in the air as a machinegun burst hammered the area. One slug moving at supersonic speeds

tore the M 16 right out of his hands and sent it whirling away into the darkness. Another bullet ripped through a fold of cloth over his right shoulder, leaving behind a raw, bleeding line of torn skin.

O’Connell threw himself prone, scarcely able to believe that he’d escaped without more serious injury.

Agonized screams rising above the crashing, crackling sounds of gunfire and grenade explosions told him that the rest of his men weren’t being so lucky. He swiveled to look to the rear.

The four Rangers who’d been following him had vanished-cloaked behind a curtain of smoke and dust. As it settled, another burst of South African machinegun fire stitched across the open ground-sweeping back and forth across the bodies of men who’d already been hit several times. No one moved or cried out in pain.

He was alone.

O’Connell clenched his teeth and tried to bury himself in the earth as more rounds whip cracked low overhead. Pebbles, sand, and torn bits of grass pattered off his helmet and neck. He lay motionless as the machinegun fire traversed right. The South Africans, firing blind, had gone back to working over corpses heaped in front of the American-held slit trench.

He started crawling toward his rifle, careful to stay flat on his stomach. It took him nearly half a minute to reach it.

Hell and damnation. O’Connell stared at the useless lump of plastic and metal lying on the grass before him. The same bullet that had torn the

M 16 out of his grasp had smashed its firing mechanism. He fumbled for the pouch clipped to his combat webbing and relaxed momentarily as his fingers encountered the small plastic V-shape of his only real remaining weapon. He still carried a couple of grenades, a knife, and a holstered 9mm Beretta, but they wouldn’t be much use against a concrete-walled bunker. No, clearing that out was going to take something considerably more powerful.

He snapped the pouch flap shut and started crawling forward again, worming his way toward the enemy machinegun position.

It seemed to take forever to cross the roughly one hundred meters still separating him from the South African bunker. Long periods of lying frozen as bullets slapped through the air right over his helmet were interspersed with frantic flurries of motion as he wriggled closer. By the time O’Connell got within five meters of the bunker’s north side, his battle dress was soaked in sweat and coated with groundin dirt and loose blades of sun-dried grass.