At the airport there was a cheerfully rowdy young crowd, all the men in uniform, come to see the aircraft leave. Most of them knew Roland and they plied him and Janine with drinks. It made the last minutes more bearable. Then suddenly they were standing at the gate and the air hostess was calling for boarding.
‘I shall miss you so,’ Janine whispered. ‘I shall pray for you.’
He kissed her and held her so fiercely that she almost lost her breath.
‘I love you,’ Roland said.
‘You never said that before.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not to anybody before. Now, go, woman – before I do something stupid.’
She was the last in the straggling line of passengers that climbed the boarding-ladder into the elderly Viscount aircraft parked on the hard stand. She wore a white blouse with a daffodil-yellow skirt and flat sandals. There was a matching yellow scarf around her hair and a sling-bag over her shoulder. In the doorway of the aircraft at the top of the boarding-ladder, she looked back, shading her eyes as she searched for Roland, and when she found him she smiled and waved and then stepped through the fuselage door. The door closed and the boarding-ladder wheeled away. The Rolls-Royce Dart turbo-prop engines whined and fired, and the silver Viscount, with the flying Zimbabwe bird emblem on its tail, taxied downwind to its holding point.
Cleared for take-off, it lumbered back down the runway, and climbed slowly into the air. Roland watched it bank onto its southerly heading for Bulawayo, and then went back into the airport building, showed his pass to the guard at the door and climbed the steps to the control tower.
‘What can we do for you, Colonel?’ the assistant controller at the flight planning desk greeted him.
‘I am expecting a helicopter flight coming in from Wankie to pick me up—’
‘Oh, you are Colonel Ballantyne – yes, we have your bird on the plot. They were airborne twelve minutes ago. They will be here in an hour and ten minutes.’
While they were talking, the flight-controller at the picture windows was speaking quietly with the pilot of the departing Viscount.
‘You are cleared to standard departure, unrestricted climb fifteen thousand feet. Over now to Bulawayo approach on 118 comma six. Goodday!’
‘Understand standard departure unrestricted climb to flight level—’
The pilot’s calm, almost bored voice broke off and the side-band hummed for a few seconds. Then the voice came back crackling with urgency. Roland spun away from the flight planning desk, and strode to the controller’s console. He gripped the back of the controller’s chair and through the tall windows stared up into the sky.
The high fair-weather clouds were already turning pink with the oncoming sunset, but the Viscount was out of sight, somewhere out there in the south. Roland’s face was hard and terrible with anger and fear, as he listened to the pilot’s voice grating out of the radio speakers.
The portable surface-to-air missile-launcher, designated SAM-7, is a crude-looking weapon almost indistinguishable from the bazooka anti-tank rocket launcher of World War II. It looks like a five-foot section of ordinary drainpipe, but the exhaust end is slightly flared into the mouth of a funnel. At the point of balance, there is a shoulder-plate below the barrel and an aiming and igniting device like a small portable AM radio set attached to the upper surface of the barrel.
The weapon is operated by two men. The loader simply places the missile in the exhaust breech of the barrel and, making sure the fins engage the slots, pushes it forward until its rim engages the electrical terminals and locks it into the firing-position. The missile weighs a little less than ten kilos. It has the conventional rocket shape, but in the front of the nose cone is an opaque glass eye, behind which is located the infra-red sensor. The tail-fins are steerable, enabling the rocket to lock onto and follow a moving target. The gunner settles the barrel across his shoulder, places the earphones on his head, and switches on the powerpack. In the earphones he hears the cyclic tone of his audio-warning. He tunes this down below the background infra-red count, so that it is no longer audible.
The weapon is now loaded and ready to fire. The gunner searches out his target through the cross-hatched gun-sight. As soon as an infra-red source is detected by the missile’s sensor, the audio warning begins to sound and a tiny red bulb lights up in the eye-piece of the gun-sight to confirm that the missile is ‘locked-on’. It remains only for the gunner to press the trigger in the pistol-type grip and the missile launches itself in relentless pursuit of its prey, steering itself to track it accurately through any turns or changes of altitude.
Tungata Zebiwe had held his cadre in position for four days. Apart from himself, there were eight of them and he had chosen each of them with extreme care. They were all veterans of proven courage and determination, but, more importantly, they were all of superior intelligence and capable of operating under their own initiative. Every one of them had been trained in the use of the SAM-7 missile-launcher, in both roles of loader and gunner, and each of them carried one of the finned missiles in addition to their AK 47 assault rifles, and the usual complement of grenades and AP mines. Any two of them could make the attack, and had been thoroughly briefed to do so.
The wind direction would dictate the departure track of any aircraft leaving the main runway of Victoria Falls airport. Wind velocity would also affect the aircraft’s altitude as it passed over any specific point on the extended centre-line and crosswind legs of its outward track. Fortunately for Tungata’s calculations, the prevailing northeasterly wind had been blowing at a steady fifteen knots during the entire four days in which they had been in position.
He had chosen a small kopje, thickly wooded enough to give them good cover, but not so thick that it impeded the view over the surrounding tree-tops. From the peak in the early mornings, before the heat-haze and dust thickened, Tungata had been able to see the stationary silver cloud of spray that marked the Victoria Falls on the northern horizon.
Each afternoon they had practised the attack drill. Half an hour before the expected time of departure of the scheduled Viscount flight from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo, Tungata had moved them into position: six men in a ring below the summit to guard against surprise attack by security forces, and three men above them in the actual attack group.
Tungata himself was the gunner, and his loader and backup loader had both been chosen for the acuteness of their hearing and the sharpness of their eyesight. On each of the three preceding afternoon drills, they had been able to hear the turbo-prop Rolls-Royce Dart engines minutes after takeoff. They were in climb power-setting, and the whine was distinctive, it drew the eye to the tiny crucifix shape of the aircraft against the blue.
On the first afternoon, the Viscount had climbed almost directly over their kopje, at not more than eight thousand feet in altitude, and Tungata had locked on and tracked it until it passed out of sight and then out of hearing. The second afternoon the aircraft had passed at about the same altitude, but five miles to the east of their position. That was extreme range for the missile. The audio-signal had been weak and intermittent, and the lock-on bulb had glowed only fitfully. Tungata had to admit to himself that an attack would probably have failed. The third day the Viscount had been east of them again, three miles out. It would have been a good kill, so that the odds seemed to be about two to one in their favour.
This fourth day he moved the attack team into position on the summit fifteen minutes early, and tested the SAM launcher by aiming it at the lowering sun. It howled in his ears at the excitation of that immense infra-red source. Tungata switched off the powerpack and they settled down to wait, all their faces lifted to the sky.
His loader glanced at his wristwatch and murmured, ‘They are late.’
Tungata hissed at him viciously. He knew they were late, and already the doubts were crowding in – flight delayed or cancelled, even a leak in their own security, the kanka might already be on their way.
‘Listen!’ said his loader, a
nd seconds later he heard it also, the faint whistling whine in the northern sky.
‘Ready!’ he ordered, and settled the shoulder-plate into position and switched on the powerpack. The audio-warning had been pre-set, but he checked it again.
‘Load!’ he said. He felt the missile go into the breech and weight the barrel slightly tail-heavy. He heard the clunk of the rim seating itself against the terminals.
‘Loaded!’ his No. 2 confirmed and tapped his shoulder.
He traversed left and right, making certain he was firmly settled, and his loader spoke again. ‘Nansi! There!’ He extended his arm over Tungata’s left shoulder, and pointed upwards with his forefinger. Tungata searched, and then caught the high silver spark as the sunlight reflected off burnished metal.
‘Target identified!’ he said, and heard his two loaders move aside softly to avoid the back-blast of the rocket.
The tiny speck grew swiftly in size, and Tungata saw that it was tracking to pass less than half a mile to the west of the hillock, and that it was at least a thousand feet lower than it had been on the preceding afternoons. It was in a perfect position for attack. He picked it up in the cross-wires of the gun-sight, and the missile howled lustfully in his earphones, a wicked sound like a wolf-pack hunting at full moon. The missile had sensed the infra-red burn from the exhausts of the Rolls-Royce engines. In the gun-sight the lock-on bulb burned like a fiery red Cyclops’ eye, and Tungata pressed the trigger.
There was a stunning whoosh of sound, but almost no recoil from the weapon across his shoulder as it exhausted through the funnel vent in the rear. He was enveloped for micro-seconds in white fumes and whirling dust, but when they were whipped away by their own velocity, he saw the little silver missile going upwards into the blue on the feather of its own rocket vapours. It was like a hunting falcon bating from the gloved fist, going up to tower above its quarry. Its speed was dazzling, so that it seemed to dwindle miraculously into nothingness, and there was only the faint drumming rumble of its rocket-burn.
Tungata knew that there was no time for a second launch. By the time they could re-load, the Viscount would be well out of range. They stared up at the tiny shiny aircraft and the seconds seemed to flow with the slow viscosity of honey.
Then there was a little flick of liquid silver that distorted the perfect cruciform of the aircraft’s wing profile. It popped open like a ripe cotton pod, and the Viscount seemed to lurch and yaw, then steady again. Seconds later they heard the crack of the strike to confirm what they had seen, and a hoarse roar of triumph burst up out of Tungata Zebiwe’s throat.
As he watched, the Viscount banked into a gentle turn, then abruptly something large and black detached itself from the port wing, and fell away towards the earth. The aircraft dropped its nose sharply, and the engine noise rose into a shrill wild whine.
Standing in the control tower, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling non-reflective glass window into the mellow evening sky, and listening to the rapid tense exchanges between the flight controller and the Viscount pilot, Roland Ballantyne was held in a paralysing vice of helplessness and rage.
‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Viscount 782, do you copy, tower?’
‘Viscount 782, what is the nature of your emergency?’
‘We have taken a missile strike on our port engine housing. We are engine out.’
‘Viscount 782, I query your assessment.’
The pilot’s tension and stress flared. ‘Damn you, tower, I was in ‘Nam. It’s a SAM hit, I tell you. I have activated the fire-extinguishers and we still have control. I am initiating a one hundred and eighty-degree turn!’
‘We will have all emergency standby here, Viscount 782. What is your position?’
‘We are eighty nautical miles outbound.’ The pilot’s voice cracked. ‘Oh God! The port engine has gone. It’s fallen clean out of her.’
There was a long silence. They knew the pilot was fighting for control of the crippled machine, fighting the asymmetrical thrust of the remaining engine which was trying to flip the Viscount over into a graveyard spiral, fighting the enormous weight transfer caused by the loss of the port engine. In the control tower they were all frozen in silent agony, and then the radio speaker crackled and croaked. ‘Rate of descent three thousand feet a minute. Too fast. I can’t hold her. We are going in. Trees, too fast. Too many trees. This is it! Oh mother, this is it!’
Then there was no more.
In the control tower Roland sprang back to the flight planning desk, and snapped at the assistant controller.
‘Rescue helicopters!’
‘There’s only one helicopter within three hundred miles. That’s your one coming in from Wankie.’
‘The only one, are you sure?’
‘They have all been pulled out for a special op. in the Vumba mountains, yours is the only one in this zone.’
‘Get me in touch with it,’ he ordered, and took the microphone from the controller as soon as contact was established.
‘This is Ballantyne, we have lost a Viscount with forty-six crew and passengers,’ he said.
‘I copied the transmissions,’ the helicopter pilot answered.
‘You are the only rescue vehicle, what is your ETA?’
‘I’m fifty minutes out.’
‘What personnel do you have aboard?’
‘I have Sergeant-Major Gondele and ten troopers.’
Roland had planned to rehearse night jump-landings during the return to Wankie. Gondele and his Scouts would be in full combat gear, and they would have Roland’s personal pack and weapons aboard.
‘I’ll be waiting on the tarmac for your pick-up. We will have a doctor with us,’ he said. ‘This is Cheetah One standing by.’
Janine Ballantyne had the aisle seat, in the second last row on the port side of the Viscount. In the window seat was a teenage girl with braces on her teeth and her hair in pigtails. The girl’s parents were in the seats directly in front of her.
‘Did you go to the crocodile farm?’ she demanded of Janine.
‘We didn’t get around to it,’ Janine admitted.
‘They have got a huge big croc there, he’s five metres long. They call him Big Daddy,’ the girl burbled.
The Viscount had stabilized in its climb attitude, and the seatbelt lights went out. From the seat behind Janine the blue-uniformed hostess stood up and went forward along the aisle.
Janine glanced across the aisle, across the two empty seats, through the Perspex porthole. The lowering sun was a big sullen red ball, wearing a moustache of purple cloud. The forest roof was a sea of dark green that spread away in all directions below them, its monotony broken by an occasional pimple of higher ground.
‘My daddy bought me a T-shirt with Big Daddy on it, but it’s in my case—’
There was a shattering crash, a great swirling silver cloud obscured the portholes, and the Viscount lurched so wildly that Janine was hurled painfully against her safety-belt. The air hostess was flung upwards against the roof of the cabin, and she fell back like a broken doll and lay twisted across the back of one of the empty seats. There was a cacophony of shrieks and screams from the passengers and the girl clung desperately to Janine’s arm, shrilling incoherently. The cabin tilted sharply but smoothly as the aircraft banked, and then suddenly the Viscount plunged forward and swung viciously from side to side.
The safety-belt held Janine in her seat, but it felt like an insane roller-coaster ride down the sky. Janine leaned over and hugged the child to try and still her piercing screams. Although her head was being whipped from side to side, Janine got a glimpse out of the porthole, and saw the horizon turning like the spokes of a spinning-wheel, and it made her feel giddy and nauseated. Then abruptly she focused on the silver wing of the aircraft below her. Where the streamlined engine-nacelle had been was a ragged hole. Through it she could see the fluffy roof of the forest. The torn wing was flexing and twisting, she could see the wrinkles appearing in the smooth metal skin. Her ear
s were popping and creaking with the violent pressure-change, and the trees were rushing towards her in a sombre green blur.
She tore the child’s arms from around her neck and forced her head down into her own lap. ‘Hold your knees,’ she shouted. ‘Keep your face down.’ And she did herself what she had ordered.
Then they hit, and there was a deafening rending, roaring, crashing tumult. She was flung mercilessly about in her seat, tumbled and battered, blinded and stunned and hammered by flying pieces of debris.
It seemed to go on for ever. She saw the roof above her clawed away and blinding sunlight struck her for an instant. Then it was gone, and something hit her across one shin. Clearly, above all the other sounds, she heard her own bone break, and the pain shot up her spine into her skull. End over end she was hurled, and then another blow in the back of the neck and her vision exploded into shooting sparks of light through a black singing void.
When she recovered consciousness, she was still in her seat, but hanging upside down from her safety-strap. Her face felt engorged with the blood that had flowed into it, and her vision wavered and swam like a heat mirage. Her head ached. It felt as though a red-hot nail was being driven into the centre of her forehead with a sledgehammer.
She twisted slowly, and saw that her broken leg was hanging down in front of her face, the toe pointing where the heel should have been.
‘I will never walk again,’ she thought, and the horror of it braced her. She reached for the release on the buckle of her safety-belt, and then remembered how many necks are broken from a release in the upside-down position. She hooked her elbow through the arm of her seat, and then lifted the release. Her hold on the seat flipped her as she fell and she landed on her hip with her broken leg twisted under her. The pain was too much and she lost consciousness again.
It must have been hours later that she woke again for it was almost dark. The silence was frightening. It took her many groggy seconds to realize where she was, for she was looking at grass and treetrunks and sandy earth.