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Two seconds later, the Shangane ru
"Keep going!" Sean screamed. "We are nearly through!" Now his fear was a grotesque black beast upon his back that weighed him down and choked his breathing. To be maimed was a terror far beyond that of death, and the ground beneath his feet was sown with the steel capsules of terrible mutilation.
Matatu ducked in front of Sean, forcing him to check his stride.
"Follow me, my Bwana!" he piped in Swahili. "Tread where I have trodden." And Sean obeyed, shortening his stride to that of the little manikin.
So Matatu ran him through the last fifty paces of the mine field, and Sean knew he had never witnessed such a display of raw courage and devotion of one human being to another. Two more Shanganes went down before they were through, their legs blown away beneath them. They left them lying in puddles of their own blood and minced flesh and jumped over the single strand of wire that marked the far side of the mine field.
Even in the terror and exhilaration of the moment, Sean felt his eyelids scalding with the strength of his gratitude and love for the little Ndorobo. He wanted to pick him up like a child's toy and hug him. Instead he gasped at him, "You're so damned ski
Sean was firing the AKM from the hip, short, raking bursts, and he could see the head of the Frefirno gu
The gu
Sean unhooked the fragmentation grenade from his belt, drew the pin, and popped it into the embrasure beside him as though he were posting a letter.
He smiled ashe heard the Frelimo gu
"Happy birthday!" he said, and the grenade exploded, blowing out through the opening in an exhalation of flame and fumes.
Sean jumped up and rolled over the top of the parapet. There were two men in the emplacement, writhing and wriggling on the floor, and half a dozen others had abandoned the position and were sprinting away up the hill, unarmed and screaming with panic.
Sean left Matatu to finish off the two wounded men on the floor with his ski
With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean made a sweep with the heavy machine gun. His fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of ru
Ing It seemed to Sean as though more than half the Shanganes had survived the mine field and the bloody charge and assault. Roaring wildly with triumph, they were pursuing and harrying the routed defenders.
The barrel of the heavy machine gun was so hot it crackled like a horseshoe fresh from the blacksmith's forge.
"Come on!" Sean abandoned it and jumped onto the rear parapet, ready to follow his Shanganes deeper into the laager and to begin wrecking the Russian service installations.
As he stood poised on the parapet, backlit by the burning fuel tankers, a monstrous apparition appeared in the dawn sky ahead of him. Rising on its glittering rotor, turbos shrieking, a Hind gunship lifted out of its,-4nd bagged emplacement not two hundred meters from where Sein stood. It looked like some prehistoric behemoth. SupernAral and otherworldly it rotated ponderously until the mirrored eyes of the canopy si@5 at Sean and the multiple ca
Sean reached down, seized Matatu by the scruff of his neck, hurled him to the floor of the emplacement, then threw himself full length on top of him, knocking the breath out of the little man, just as a gale of ca
The sudde
it took long moments to adjust her eyes to the intensity of light orient herself to the swift kaleidoscope of the battle. Job and to had pointed out to her the point on the perimeter of the laager through which Sean would lead the assault, and she searched it anxiously. The tiny figures of ru
confusion of movement and light and 4: "Where is Sean?" she whispered anxiously. "Can you see him?"
411N the left, at the edge of the smoke," Job told her, and she an ahead of him like a picked him out by the tiny figure that r hunting dog.