Vortex

Vision returned. Shit! Van Vuuren snarled at the view his screen showed.

The truck he’d fired at was still moving, and a glowing hot spot two hundred meters farther up the opposite hillside showed where his shot had landed. He’d either missed entirely or the HE round had passed right through the enemy

vehicle without slamming into anything solid enough to set off its warhead.

“Up!” Rookiat Two One’s loader was still on the job.

Van Vuuren traversed right again, bringing the truck back under his cross hairs. This time you die, he promised. He reached for the laser range-finder button…. The night sight went blank. Cross hairs, glowing green images, and digital readouts all faded out and disappeared.

Van Vuuren stared at his darkened screen in dismay. Both the Rookiat’s ballistic computer and its thermal-imaging system were down. One part of his panicked mind remained calm enough to guess that the vehicle’s delicate electronics had taken shock damage in the same bomb blast that had scarred its turret armor.

“Meitiens!” He scrambled out of the other man’s seat in frantic haste.

Only the gunner had the technical know-how needed to get their ballistic computer up and running again. He collided head-on with the corporal in a confused tangle of arms and legs and curses.

Van Vuuren’s attempt to do everything himself cost Rookiat Two One precious time it did not have.

NIGHT STALKER LEAD, 160TH AVIATION REGIMENT,

OVER PELINDABA

One hundred and fifty feet above the highway, the MH-8 helicopter gunship, known as Night Stalker Lead, spiraled downward in a tight turn to the right. Ghostly images of trucks, hillsides, and patches of brush spun past at dizzying speed.

While the AVS-6 nightvision goggles worn by the gunship’s two crewmen made them look a bit like pop-eyed insects, the goggles also turned night into lime-green-tinted day inside a narrow forty-degree arc. Pilots and gunners using NVGs could pick out tremendous detail-the difference between thin, harmless tree branches and thick tree trunks for example.

That and years of intensive training gave the crews of the 160th Aviation Regiment a combat symbolized by their motto: “Death waits in the dark.”

The 160this gunships had proven themselves invaluable in combat over Panama and the Persian Gulf. Now they were proving it again in the darkness over

South Africa.

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot, a U.S. Army major, leveled out of his turn at fifty feet.

“You see where that shot came from, Dan?”

“Looking.” His gunner, a middle-aged warrant officer going prematurely gray, stared straight ahead-scanning the eerie, cartoonlike world visible through his goggles. A low hill rising steeply ahead. Hard-to-see clumps of scrub brush and scraggly trees. Painfully bright fires raging just over the horizon. There!

“Target! One o’clock! AFV!

Now the pilot saw it-the solid box-shape of an armored vehicle parked in a copse of trees overlooking the highway. He pulled back on his controls, decelerating to give his gunner a better shot.

“Nail him!”

“Doing it! “The gunner swiveled his fire control to the right. Cross hairs settled over the enemy AFV and stayed there.

“Locked on!”

Night Stalker Lead’s pilot dropped the gunship’s nose.

“Firing. 11

The helicopter’s last remaining TOW antitank missile leapt from its right stores pylon and raced through the sky trailing fire and an ultrathin control wire. It crossed the six hundred meters separating the gunship from its target and exploded against the South African AFV’s turret. The

Rookiat’s top armor had been designed to stop 23mm cannon rounds-not heavy weight antitank missiles.

Fuel and ammunition went up in a rolling blast that threw torn and twisted pieces of Rookiat Two One more than fifty feet into the air. Oily black smoke boiled out of the vehicle’s shattered hulk, spreading slowly across a barren hillside now dotted with small fragments of flaming wreckage.

Night Stalker Lead’s missile had annihilated South Africa’s last organized opposition to Brave Fortune. The 1/75th Rangers had a clear road to

Swartkop.

SWARTKOP MILITARY AIRFIELD

Swartkop Airfield’s vast stretches of oil-stained concrete were deserted-almost entirely abandoned to the dead and the dying. Fires guttered low in burnt-out hangars and workshops. Smoke and flame rose from the wreckage of the two MH-8 “Little Birds.” As part of the plan, they’d been abandoned and blown up by their own crews rather than let the South

Africans capture them intact. The only signs of life were concentrated near one end of the flight line where Rangers hurriedly unloaded wounded men from captured trucks and carried them into the huge cargo bay of the last waiting C141. More soldiers lay prone in a rough semicircle around the aircraft, ready to provide coveting fire if any South African troops appeared. Two weary officers stood watching off to one side of the

Starlifter’s cargo ramp.