A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 38

Sean had been hardened by years of brutal warfare, but even he found the carnage stunning. At close range, the volleys of machine-gun fire tore one human body to shreds, then went on to destroy the next rank and the next. Shots boiled the white sand of the river-bed so it rose in a waist-high fog turning the running figures to ghostly silhouettes in the dust, then hid them as they collapsed or were flung carelessly aside by point-blank bursts of fire.

The din lasted for four minutes. Then there were no more targets and the guns fell silent. They had fired fifty thousand bullets into the river-bed. The barrels of the guns were so hot that, like the plate of a stove, they ticked and pink led as they cooled. Though their ears were dulled and numbed by the roar of gunfire, they could hear the moans and cries of those who still lived in the river-bed.

Sean blew another blast on his whistle and they leaped down the bank and went forward in a skirmishing line.

Sean's orders were that the only prisoners to be taken were to be officers or political commissars. As they crossed the river, they shot those who showed any signs of life, holding the muzzles against their heads, a single bullet for each, making certain they would never recover from their Wounds to attack another Rhodesian farmhouse or hack the arms and legs off the black villagers who refused to supply them with food and women. They left nobody alive in the river-bed. Then they went on to sweep through the camp, tossing grenades into the dugouts and searching the huts for survivors and, more important, for maps and documents. Like all good Marxists, the guerrillas were obsessed with record keeping.

The capture of the camp archives was one of the major priorities of "Popeye. Racing at the head of his men, Sean was the first to reach headquarters hut in the center of the camp. He recognized it by the gaudy flag drooping on its flagpole in front.

The doorway was dangerous. He fired a burst through the grass wall and then dived in headfirst through the window. There was a tall black man in the front office. He was dressed in blue denim, and he was scooping armfuls of documents out of the paraffin boxes that served as filing cabinets and dumping them in the center of the floor. Clearly he was going to attempt to burn them, but now he dropped his armful of paper and reached for the pistol in the holster on his belt.

Sean kicked his legs out from under him and, as he dropped, slammed the butt of his weapon into the side of his neck just below the ear. As Sean rolled to his feet, Matatu appeared beside him like a grinning gnome and stooped to slit the unconscious guerrilla's throat with his skinning knife.

"No!" Sean stopped him. "We want that one." Job was seconds behind him, bursting into the room with the heavy RPD machine gun held ready across his hip.

"Okay, Captain," Sean ordered him, "get a detail to recover all this burnt." He glanced at his watch. "The choppers will be here in twenty minutes."

The Rhodesian Air Force was desperately short of helicopters.

Rhodesia was under sanction by every nation in the world except South Africa, and a British warship was blockading the Mozambique Channel to deny those ports to them.

They could risk only two helicopters for this operation. One of those was loaded with captured documents, almost five tons of them: lists of the trainees and their organization, target priorities and supply sheets, equipment dossiers, training manuals, field evaluations of Rhodesian countermeasures, communist propaganda, maps of the attack routes and safe corridors, the entire order of battle of the guerrilla army. It was a treasure trove, its aquisition a greater blow to the enemy than the hundreds of bodies lying in the river-bed, but it filled one of the precious helicopters.

The second Alouette helicopter Sean used for casevac" and for ferrying out the prisoners. However, the Scouts had taken more casualties than he had anticipated: three troopers had been injured in the parachute drop, torn cartilage and sprained ligaments, and five others had been wounded by the desultory and quickly suppressed counterfire of the more plucky of the guerrillas. Then one of the guerrillas had feigned dead in the river-bed and thrown a grenade when the Scouts came forward, killing a black trooper and wounding two others. The Scouts always took their dead out for decent burial and the trooper's corpse was already in its green plastic body bag.

In addition to his own casualties, Sean's men had captured eight suspected officers and commissars. The guerrilla leaders wore no insignia of rank but could usually be identified by the superior quality of their clothing, by their sunglasses, wristwatches, and the rows of ball-point pens in their breast pockets.

They had too many passengers for the helicopters, and Sean was forced to keep some of his prisoners with him for the outward march. He picked those who looked fit enough to survive a forced march with the Scouts. One of these was the man they had captured in the command hut.

Forty-five minutes after the attack had begun, the last helicopter took off and the Scouts were ready to move out. They could expect the Frelimo counterattack to be dilatory and unenthusiastic, but Sean was taking no chances. He was on the riverbank surveying the carnage of the killing ground. They couldn't afford the time to make a body count, but the air force would run another reconnaissance later this morning and they would get a fair estimate from the photographs.

"Must be at least fifteen hundred" Sean decided. They were lying in heaps and windrows like newly cut wheat, and already the flies were hanging over them in a gray mist.

Sean turned away from the scene. "All right," he called. "Move them out!"

The first section of fifty men set off at a trot. The troop trucks would race across the border and come in as far as they could to meet them, but the men would still have to run thirty miles or more before they could ride, a full marathon under arms. But most of their ammunition had been shot away and their packs were almost empty.

Job hurried across to where Sean stood on the bank. "The prisoner you took, Colonel. I have recognized him. It's Comrade China himself."

"Are you sure?" Sean did not wait for Job to reply. "Damn, if I had known I would have sent him out on the chopper."