The Delta

1-2

On the screen she saw another vehicle moving. The police car that had been in front of the bakkie was reversing at speed. The noise had come when the driver pulled on his handbrake and swung his wheel. It was a classic counter-ambush move and well executed. The police driver was getting the hell out of there. That was odd.

The policeman floored his accelerator and headed west, but smoke from the burning pick-up was drifting across the road. As he swerved around the wreck he ploughed head on into the ambulance. Sonja winced at the sound of the impact. The cop’s eagerness to run away had done her job for her.

She shifted the CLU to the left and surveyed the three limousines.

Pop, pop, pop. She heard the tinny reports of AK-47s firing, though she felt no air displaced around her. Way off to her left was a tall knob-thorn tree, Acacia nigrescens, and to her right were the crumbling remains of a mud hut, which she imagined might once have been occupied by party faithful or war veterans who had staked a claim on the overgrown farm where she hid. She had dug her hide in open country, using the long golden grass to conceal herself from the road, and a camouflage net laced with the same to hide her from the air in the unlikely event there was a helicopter shadowing the convoy. Sonja banked on the fact that the paratroopers would direct their fire at the tree or the ruins, as these were the most obvious firing positions.

However, when one of the RPDs next opened up, the machine-gunner randomly raked the open ground, rather than aiming for specific landmarks.

Geysers of red earth erupted in front of her, but she maintained her watch on the limousines. A door opened in the lead Merc and a driver in a suit got out and ran from the car, away from her, scrambling up over the earthen bank at the side of the road to disappear into the grass and scrubby thorn trees beyond. Nothing would make him wait a bit.

The second Mercedes began to reverse and, despite the blaring warning of a horn from the BMW, rammed the car behind him. The two drivers then got out and after a moment’s yelling they followed the lead of the first man and abandoned their vehicles.

‘s**t,’ Sonja said.

She scanned right again. An officer was standing, with stupid courage, in the open, shouting orders at his men. One of the RPD gunners was climbing up the embankment, moving in her direction. A fire team of three men ran down the road, away from the c*****e, and then crossed. They were going to try and outflank her.

There was no other movement from the three limos. She put the Javelin down and snatched up her binoculars. Although the windows were all heavily tinted, the drivers’ doors of all three cars were open. She took a split second to scan each of them.

‘Fuckers.’

Sonja took an M26 fragmentation grenade from one of the pouches on the front of her combat vest and pulled the pin. She lifted the remaining spare Javelin tube and laid the grenade underneath it, the weight of the missile keeping the grenade lever down. It was a crude booby trap but she hoped some inexperienced soldier would be unable to resist the temptation of lifting the expensive anti-armour weapon. Awkwardly, she slung the third missile and CLU over her shoulder and snatched up her M4 assault rifle. She crawled through the long grass as machine-gun bullets cracked and thumped through the air over her head.

She had sited her hide just below the brow of a hill and once over the other side she half ran, half stumbled down the grassy slope. At the bottom of the shallow valley, on the far side of the same dry river the bridge had crossed before she blew it up, was her Land Rover, parked under a sausage tree. The vehicle was an old sandy-coloured 110, the precursor of the Defender. It was rated one of the best offroad vehicles in the world and she prayed it lived up to its reputation.

Sonja opened the driver’s door, reached in and started the engine.

Major Kenneth Sibanda reached forward and tapped the pilot of the Russian-made Hind helicopter gunship on the shoulder. ‘Down there, Land Rover!’

The smoke from the burning bakkie had been a beacon to them and Sibanda had radioed to the lead aircraft of the three Alouettes that he was going to investigate.

After a pause, the pilot of the Alouette radioed back, ‘The Comrade President wishes you good luck, and good hunting.’

Sibanda had smiled to himself. It was an honour to be serving the president, the hero of the revolutionary war, even if his leader knew nothing of Sibanda’s audacious plan. His heart soared to know the man was safe, on his way to Zimbabwe House in Harare. The day was turning out perfectly. The assassination ‘plot’ had been foiled and the Comrade President would address the state-owned media that afternoon, explaining how the Movement for Democratic Change had been implicated in an attempt to kill him in order to illegitimately seize power in Zimbabwe. The assassin, the president would announce, pending the successful completion of the last part of the elaborate plan Sibanda had formulated, would have been wounded by security forces, but would confess, on his deathbed, that he had been paid by an MDC middleman to ambush the presidential motorcade. The president would also announce that the Criminal Intelligence Organisation, or CIO, to which Sibanda belonged, had uncovered the plot and had advised the president to fly from Victoria Falls to Harare instead of drive. The president would cement his position, and that of his ZANU-PF party, as the rightful leader of the nation, while the MDC, who were in reality lackeys of the British neo-colonialists, would be undermined. The CIO, and Sibanda, would be hailed as heroes.

The president was an old man, near the end of his life, and Sibanda and a small group of other veterans of the liberation war serving in the military and politburo were concerned about what the future would hold for the party and themselves when the unthinkable happened and the great man passed away. Their plan, now being so flawlessly executed, would cast the opposition as international pariahs for years to come.

‘What are our orders, Major?’

‘Destroy the vehicle.’

The pilot hesitated. ‘Surely, sir, you want to try and take the assassin alive? Perhaps some warning shots or …’

‘Destroy the vehicle.’ The story about the assassin confessing, about it being a man rather than a woman, was all part of Sibanda’s plan.

‘Yes, sir.’

The avionics and weaponry on board the Hind were not sophisticated – they dated from the early 1980s – but they were nonetheless deadly. In the swivelling turret under the gunner, who sat in front of and below the pilot, was a multi-barrelled rotating 12.7 millimetre machine-gun, and under the stubby wings on either side of the gunship were air-to-ground rockets housed in pods.

‘Pilot to gunner, select guns and destroy the Land Rover,’ the pilot said.

‘Roger,’ replied the gunner, ‘selecting guns.’

The gunner walked the rounds on to the Land Rover and Sibanda’s heart pounded as he saw the fat projectiles strike home, ripping open the aluminium roof of the four-by-four like a tin opener.

‘It is a strong vehicle, Major,’ the pilot said as their shadow passed over the truck which, despite a cloud of steam gushing from a hole in the bonnet, was still bouncing slowly but surely across the open grassy plain.

‘Use the rockets. Obliterate it.’

‘Yes sir. Gunner, you heard the man,’ the pilot said.

‘Selecting rockets.’

The pilot banked the Hind into a sweeping turn and came up behind the Land Rover again. With no visible or briefed ground-to-air threat, he cut his airspeed and brought the helicopter down, until he was no more than 30 metres above ground level. At this height and speed, and from a distance of no more than two hundred metres from the target, there was little chance of the gunner missing.

‘Firing now.’

The first pair of rockets left their pods and scribed two trails of white smoke across the sky. One landed to the left of the vehicle and the other detonated just behind the moving target. For a moment, the truck was obscured in a cloud of earth, stones and smoke.

‘It’s hit,’ the pilot said, ‘but still moving. Gunner, fire another salvo.’

The vehicle was crabbing badly, its right rear tyre shredded by the blast.

Sibanda had to admit a grudging respect for the assassin. If it was him, though, he would have tried to escape on foot.

Two more rockets rushed away from the Hind and this time the gunner’s aim was true. One of the projectiles smashed its way through the glass of the rear door of the Land Rover and detonated inside it. The vehicle ploughed to a halt, ablaze and smoking.

‘Set me down,’ Sibanda said to the pilot. ‘I need to check what’s left of the body.’

The Javelin was an anti-armour weapon and had not been designed to take out an aircraft, but Sonja saw no reason not to give it a try, especially as the pilot was now bringing the Hind gunship down to land.

The laser range finder reading on the screen put the helicopter at twelve hundred and forty-three metres from her, well within the missile’s killing range.

She had planned for a number of different eventualities, but not the presence of a helicopter gunship. She’d needed a sizeable, convincing and moving target to take the helicopter’s attention away from her, which was why she had set the Land Rover’s hand throttle to about four kilometres per hour, tied the steering wheel in place and then jumped out of the moving vehicle.

Had the gunner and pilot not been concentrating so intently on the four-by-four they might have spotted the lone figure, or the flattened path she had left. But like typical men they had been too intent on finding something to blow up.

A fire had started in the grass, ignited by burning fuel from the vehicle. Smoke, combined with dust and grass thrown up by the chopper’s downwash, had temporarily obscured it from view. This wasn’t a problem, however, as the Javelin also boasted an infra-red detection function, designed literally to see through the fog of war. Sonja selected IR on the screen and the glowing image of the Hind, lit up by the heat of its exhaust, materialised from the gloom in front of her eyes. She selected top attack. Even if it missed the body of the machine the warhead would take the Hind down through its spinning rotors.

‘Fambai Zvakanaka, you bastards,’ she whispered, bidding the crew goodbye in Shona as she squeezed the trigger.

Kenneth Sibanda had slid open the door of the small cargo compartment in the rear of the Hind and was sitting in the hatch, his legs dangling outside and ready to jump to the ground as soon as the wheels met terra firma. The helicopter bucked.

He still had his headphones on and heard the pilot shout, ‘Missile inbound!’

Sibanda looked over his shoulder and saw the smoky track of the weapon, arcing up into the sky. The grass was no more than four metres below him. He ripped the headset off and launched himself out into space.

The Hind started to rise above him as Sibanda hit the ground and executed a parachute landing fall, his feet and knees together and his elbows tucked in beside his body. He rolled as he landed, spreading the impact down one side of his body, and moving clear of the shadow of the helicopter. At that instant the missile screamed down from heaven and smashed its way through a rotor blade, then the metal cowling and into the screaming turbine engine.