Oh God, they are good, he thought. Look at them move! They have been going all night, and they are still as sharp and wary as lynx. The point was a tall Shana who moved likea reed in the wind. He carried his AK 47 low on the right hip, anct he was charged with a deadly intensity of concentration. Once the light of coming dawn caught his eyes and they flashed like distant cannon-fire in the blackness of his face. Craig recognized him as the main man.
His drags, two on each side of him, were sombre, stocky figures, full of dark men ate and yet subservient to the man who led. They reactM like puppets to the hand-signals that the tall Shana gave them. "They came on silently towards the edge of the pan, and Craig arranged the wires across the palm of his left hand and ran them out between his fingers.
Fifty paces from the bank the Shana stopped them with a cut-out signal, and the line froze. The Shana's head turned slowly from side to side as he surveyed the low bank and the scrub beyond it. He took five paces forward, stepping lightly, and stopped again. His head turned once more, back and forth and then back again. He had seen something. Craig instinctively held his breath as the seconds drew out.
Then the Shana moved again. He swivelled and picked out his flanks, marking them with a stab of his forefinger, into a and then a pumped fist. Their formation changed reversed arrowhead the Shana had adopted the traditional fighting formation of the Nguni tribes, the 'bull's horns" that King Chaka had used to such terrible effect, and now the horns were moving to invade Craig's position.
Craig felt a surge of relief at his own foresight in spreading the grenades so widely. The two flank men would walk almost on top of his outside grenades. He sorted the wires in his hand, taking up the slack, and watching the flank men come on. He wished it had been the tall Shana, the danger man, but he had not moved again. He was still way back out of blast range, watching and directing the flanking movement.
The man on the right reached the bank, and gingerly stepped up onto it, but the man on the left was still ten paces out on the pan.
"Together," Craig whispered. "I've got to take them together." The man on the bank must have almost brushed the hidden grenade with his knee as Craig let him overrun it.
The man on the left reached the bank, there was a bloody bandage around his head, Timon's work. The grenade ig heaved with would be at about the level of his navel. Cra all his weight on the two outside wires, and heard the firing handles fly off the grenades with a metallic Twang!
Twang!
Three seconds delay on the primers, and the Shana were reacting with trained reflexes. The man on the bank dropped from sight, but Craig judged he was too close to the grenade to survive. The three others out on the pan went down also, firing as they dropped, rolling sideways as they hit the crust, firing again, raking the top of the bank.
Only the trooper out on the left, the wounded man, perhaps slowed by his injury, stayed on his feet those fatal seconds. The grenade exploded with the brilliance of a flashbulb, and the man was hit by fragmenting shrapnel.
He was lifted off his feet as the blast tore into his belly. On the right the other grenade burst in brief thunder, and Craig heard the taut, drum like sound of shrapnel slapping into flesh.
Two of the bastards, he thought, and tried for the tall Shana, but his aim was through scrub and over the lip of the bank, and the Shana was rolling. Craig's first burst kicked white salt inches short, but on line, his second burst was a touch left, and the Shana fired back and kept rolling.
One of the other troopers jumped up and charged the bank, jinking like a quarter-back with the ball, and Craig swung onto him. He hit him cleanly with a full burst, starting at the level of his crotch and pulling up across his belly and chest. The AK 47 was notorious for the way she rode up in automatic find Craig had compensated for it.
The trooper dropped his rifle, and spun around sharply, fell onto his knees and then toppled forward on his face likea Muslim at prayer.
The tall Shana was up, coming in, shouting an order, the second man followed. him twenty paces behind. Craig switched his aim back to' him exultantly. He couldn't miss now. The AK 47 Aked once, and then snapped on an empty chamber. The Shana kept on coming, untouched.
Craig was not as quick on the reload as he had once been; just that microsecond too late he swung back onto the Shana, and as he squeezed the trigger, the man dropped out of sight, below the rim of the bank, and Craig's burst flew high and harmless.
Craig swore, and swung left onto the last trooper who was just five paces from the safety of the bank. It was snap shooting, but a single lucky bullet out of the long burst hit him in the mouth, and snapped his head back likea heavy punch. The burgundy-red beret, glowing like a pretty bird in the dawn light, flew high in the air, and the trooper collapsed.
Four out of five in the first ten seconds, it was more than Craig could possibly have hoped for, but the fifth man, the danger man, was alive down there below the bank and he must have marked Craig's muzzle flashes.
He had Craig pinpointed.
"Keep under the sheet," Craig ordered Sally-Anne, and pulled the wires on the other three grenades. The explosions were almost simultaneous, a thunderous roll like the broadside of a man-of-war, and in the dust and flame, Craig moved.
He went forward and right, thirty running. paces, doubled over, with the reloaded AK in his hand, and he dived forward and rolled and then waited, belly down, covering the spot below the bank where the Shana had disappeared, but darting quick glances left and right.
The light was better, the dawn coming up fast, and the Shana moved. He came up over the bank, a brief silhouette against the white pan, quick as a mamba but where Craig had not expected him. He must have elbow-walked under the bank, and he was way out on Craig's left.