Lion Resurgent (7 page)

Captain Shumba Geldenhuys watched his second platoon head off, then concentrated on his own job. His Ratel platoon was turning on to the road, track was much more like it, and picked up speed. The Ratel eight-wheeled armored personnel carriers could be in Tshinsenda, a little bit over five miles down the road, in just under ten minutes. The lumbering Olifants would be following him as fast as they could but they were slow. They were Indian-built Centurions, descended from British infantry tanks. Geldenhuys knew what that meant. Excellent armor, mediocre gun, poor speed. McMullen Industries had rebuilt them with van Huis TV-12 diesels instead of their petrol engines and 100mm guns in place of the 90mm the Indians had used, but they were still slow. In this action, time would be everything. The Ratels would speed on ahead while the tanks followed behind and reached the battle as quickly as they could. Geldenhuys just hoped they would be in time to help out if things got really ugly.

Outskirts of Tshinsenda.

The monsters came out of the darkness. Their eyes glared white fire, their voices screamed a terrifying battle-howl of fury. The Ratels had their headlights full on and their sirens were blaring at maximum volume to create the maximum level of shock. It didn’t make much military sense to do things that way, but not everything that worked had to make sense. This was a technique that had proved useful before and against much more determined opposition than a mob of disorganized bandits who called themselves a militia.

The problem was that things were already coming apart in the chaos of a night action. Geldenhuys had followed Second Platoon along the orange-yellow laterite road all right and found the unmarked side turning easily enough. He’d taken them across the disused and derelict railway line. That’s where the trouble had started. The track, it was little better than a path, went through a particularly dense patch of Oerwoud. The reconnaissance photographs failed to show that it was obstructed by fallen trees and partially washed away. The wretched state of the track slowed the wheeled Ratels down so much that Geldenhuys had begun to fear that the Olifants would catch up with him. That was an embarrassing thing for an infantryman who believed in wheels.

The wheels versus tracks argument was one that had bedeviled the South African Army for years. Further south, on the veldt, there was no real dispute. The extra mobility and reliability of wheeled vehicles had led the South Africans to rely on them. But, as the country had expanded northwards, the terrain closed in. Wheeled vehicles were at a disadvantage compared with tracks, as Geldenhuys had just found out. As much as anything else, that was why the expansion had stopped where it did. It would not be many miles further north where the oerwoud changed into real jungle. Up there, even tanks would have trouble maneuvering.

The Ratels struggled through. Eventually they had burst out into a patch of open ground that should have led them to the right position for their attack. They were already more than 15 minutes behind schedule due to the terrible condition of the track they had used so Geldenhuys had hurried his maneuver and swung south too early. Now he faced the job of working his way up the length of the arrowhead instead of taking it all out at once. One part of his mind was screaming abuse at himself.
My hurry, my need to get in ahead of the tanks had screwed everything up and probably cost the kidnapped missionaries their lives.
Geldenhuys looked across at the darkened civilian
area, just where were the tanks anyway?
By the amount he’d been delayed, he’d expected to see them already at work.

Two of the three Ratels had stopped. The seven infantrymen in each were already debussing, spreading out in a line beside their vehicles. The 23mm auto-cannon in the Ratel’s turret poured fire into the buildings ahead of them. The incendiary tracers set the wooden structures ablaze and lit the whole scene in an eerie flickering orange red light. The militia people in the huts were pouring out. Most were mown down by the nine machine guns mounted on the two troop-carrier and Geldenhuys’s command vehicle. More still being picked off by the riflemen on the ground. There was return fire, a lot of it. Most was automatic fire that arched high overhead. Some was rocket fire. The light from the fires and the tracers stained the exhaust trails bright red as they too arched overhead. That was one thing one could rely on when fighting the militias. They always fired high, never allowing for the recoil of their weapons on full automatic.

Across the open ground between the Ratels and their infantry and the huts, Geldenhuys saw the militia who had survived the first savage blasts of fire trying to defend themselves against the assault. He could see them in the shadows cast by the burning huts. Mostly they were standing erect, holding their rifles sideways and over their heads as they hosed out wild, random bursts. He could guess that what was left of the livestock in the kraals behind him were taking the brunt of the gunfire,
that and the poor baastard villagers trying to hide in their own huts.
The white muzzle-flash from the militia’s weapons gave them away more than any other single factor. Geldenhuys could hear his own men firing, the slow, vicious crack of the 7.65x54mm cartridges fired on semi-automatic contrasting with the hammering noise of the automatic weapons on the other side.

The South African Army had never believed in the intermediate caliber idea. Their G1 FAS rifles were chambered for a full-powered rifle round. It was based on the old 7.65x53mm sold by Mauser but redesigned, modernized and boosted to much higher chamber pressures. They’d made the case a millimeter longer to stop the new cartridge being fed into old 7.65mm Mauser rifles, but it had turned out that the tolerances were enough to allow the rifles to chamber both. Fortunately, the immensely strong Mauser action meant no serious accidents had taken place. Geldenhuys could see the effects the rounds were having. As each militia rifleman gave his position away, the heavy, high-velocity bullets cut them down.

One man seemed to be surviving. He was standing in the shadows, waving his weapon from side to side as if he was spraying bullets yet there was no muzzle flash from his weapon. Geldenhuys grabbed the machine gun mounted in the small turret on his command vehicle and fired a short burst at the man. He stumbled with the impacts and then collapsed in a heap. Before Geldenhuys could compliment himself, another man ran forward, his chest a bright orange. For a moment Geldenhuys thought the man was on fire, but the color was wrong. The man was firing his rifle, wildly, hopelessly inaccurately, but still firing it. Before Geldenhuys could draw a bead on the man and cut him down, two or more of his riflemen did it for him.

Under his feet, the Ratel lurched and started to edge forward. The riflemen around them moving forward with the armored vehicle. Gunfire from the first group of buildings faded away. The militia had either been killed or run away. That left the shaft of the arrow still to crush before the job was even half done. The infantry had to keep up the pressure on the militia kamp, to divert attention away from the third Ratel and its crew. They were the critical part of the whole mission.

A hundred yards or so southwest of where Geldenhuys and most of his platoon were pinning down the militia in their kamp, the third Ratel, its crew of four and the seven infantrymen it carried, were approaching the large rectangular building that had been designated the holding point for the missionaries. Compared with the wild explosion of light, sound and fire from the main gun battle, theirs was a stealthy approach without fanfare or flourish. The Ratel pulled up a few yards short of the building, its gunners ready to pour fire into it if there was any hostile movement. There wasn’t. The building was quiet; weirdly, worryingly silent.

Staff Sergeant Lennan de Wilzem braced himself for the sight that he was sure lay in wait for him behind the door. Every instinct that he had was telling him there was nothing alive inside the structure. By every law of logic that meant any people inside were dead. It would be too much to hope for that they would simply have been shot. Instead he knew what he was about to see. Bodies butchered and mutilated beyond any form of human recognition; at least they would be dead. All too often, some were still alive. Trying to keep the contents of his stomach under control, he fired a shot from his rifle, blowing open any semblance of a lock on the double doors, then pushed his way inside. As he did so, de Wilzem rolled to one side and shone a flashlight across the darkened building. It was empty.

Almost sighing with relief, de Wilzem joined his men in quickly searching what was obviously a barn. They pushed through collections of straw, sorted through dark corners, threw open three internal doors. Once they flattened themselves to one side as a mole viper slithered out from a hole in the wall and vanished into the darkness. Human and snake were all too pleased to leave each other strictly alone.

“Building is empty Lenny.”

“Up here too Staff.”

De Wilzem acknowledged. His reply was drowned out by a roar. The building shook, bringing dust, dirt and insects down from the roof. He was slightly thankful. Shaking a roof like that could bring much deadlier inhabitants down on one’s head. Not all snakes were as accommodating as the mole viper.

“It’s the tanks.” One of the younger men started to move towards the door.

“Bystand waar u is!” de Wilzem yelled at the top of his voice. The soldier froze in his tracks. “If the tankies see you come from a building they will think you are a stam and shoot you down.”

That was all too true, not that de Wilzem blamed the tankies. The heavy armor made the Olifants almost immune to shots from the front but the sides and rear were another matter. Not to mention the fact that everybody was edgy in situations like this. The building shook again as the tanks started firing on the buildings ahead of them

They took long enough.
The thought ran through Geldenhuys’s head as he saw the five Olifants push through the kraals and open fire on the buildings that made up the other arrow-side. The 100mm rounds shredded the wooden structures, sending clouds of fragments billowing into the air. The sudden appearance of the tanks and the vicious crossfore of machine guns from the Ratels and tanks had the desired effect. The firing from the militia kraal started to fade away. De Wilzem knew what was happening, the militia was fading away into the jungle. They’d run and would not come back for hours, perhaps days. That suited him fine. With the militia gone, the skirmish was over.

Tshinsenda, South African Border

“So what happened, Lieutenant?” Geldenhuys was inquisitive rather than condemnatory. He had his own navigational error to temper any rebuke he might have had in mind.

“We missed the turning, as simple as that, Captain. We missed it, Lord alone knows how, and we only realized when we saw the glow of the burning huts behind us. So we turned around and came back.”

“You drove to the sound of the guns. Nobody will criticize that.” Geldenhuys and van Huis walked through the blasted ruin of the militia kraal while the infantry checked the rains of the buildings. No sign of the missionaries, but some of the buildings were so badly burned out that nobody would ever know who had been inside. They came across a body, one surrounded by white whispy flakes of some sort of padding covered in orange fabric.

“That’s a life jacket; a seaman’s life jacket.” Van Huis was amazed. “Why on earth was he wearing that?”

“Perhaps it was a fashion statement?” Geldenhuys shook his head. Then an idea came to him. He walked over to where the man he had shot lay. A quick inspection showed why he had never fired his weapon. The bottom plate of his magazine had dropped out and the magazine spring was trailing out on the ground, surrounded by the glittering brass from the magazine. He shook his head. Nothing really surprised him anymore.

“Look here Captain. A double barreled blaster.” Two of the infantrymen were laughing. They’d found a body carrying a weird construction, a stockless Arisaka rifle taped to the side of what looked like an RPG rocket launcher.

“Do you think this one had enough magazines taped together?” The figure stretched out on the ground had six of the Arisaka magazines taped together in what the moddervoete called the 69 position.

Geldenhuys looked at the body carefully. “Perhaps he should have used some of the tape to close his flies, hey boys?” The observation got him a roar of laughter.

“Sir, over here.” This voice wasn’t laughing. Geldenhuys looked across the center of the kamp. The villagers were beginning to come out of their huts. Some women carrying babies were at the front; everybody was moving slowly and carefully, keeping their hands well in view. Sensible of them. Staff Sergeant de Wilzem was moving over to speak with them, or try to at any rate. There was a patois, a mixture of Portuguese, Afrikaans and English, that served for most purposes. Geldenhuys hoped it would here.

De Wilzem spoke for a moment then gestured to some of his men. They ran over to a kraal, one whose stink spoke of the pigs that lived there. The village headman was pointing at the enclosed sty that formed the back wall as Geldenhuys and van Huis joined them. Two of de Wilzem’s men and some of the villagers started clearing the dung- and urine-soaked straw away, moving carefully in case of anything venomous hiding in the mess. It wasn’t just snakes that could give a man a bite that would put his life in danger. This time, there wasn’t anything threatening other than the stink and filth. Before long, the digging had exposed a small wooden patch in the back wall of the kraal. It was cunningly concealed. The tiny hiding hole and pit were lost within the structure of the kraal and the smell meant that nobody would look too closely. The moddervoete ripped the boards away and shone flashlights into the pit. Crouched in the bottom, so closely jammed in that they couldn’t move, were the missing missionaries. Cheers rose from the South Africans as all seven were dragged out from the foul pit. They were suffering from spider bites and scorpion stings, but they were alive.