Commandant Henrik Kruger clambered awkwardly out of the plane’s cramped cockpit, stretched, and then leaned in to shake the pilot’s hand.
“Thanks,
Pieter. A good fast flight, that. I may even have an appetite for lunch.”
He checked his watch. He had nearly an hour left before his scheduled meeting with the chief of staff for operations.
“Look, I should be back from the Ministry in three or four hours. Can you stand by to run me back to Upington then?”
The plane’s pilot, wi Air Force captain, grinned back.
“No sweat,
Kommandant. Take your time. They’ve got a blery good officers’ mess here.
Once I get some food in my belly and put some petrol in the tanks, I’ll be ready to go whenever you say the word.”
“Magtig!” Kruger pulled his worn, leather briefcase out from under the seat and stepped back, touching his cap to make sure it was still on straight over his short-cropped, brown hair. Satisfied, he picked his way around the outstretched landing gear. A few meters away, a soldier waiting by a flag-decked car stiffened to attention. His transport to the Ministry of
Defense, no doubt.
“Hey, Kommandant!”
He glanced over his shoulder at the cockpit’s open side window.
The Kudu’s pilot flashed a thumbs-up signal.
“Give them hell, sir!”
Kruger stifled a smile, nodded briskly instead, and moved on toward the waiting staff car. As he’d suspected, the whole base must know why he’d been summoned to Pretoria at such short notice. Secrets were almost impossible to keep in close knit active-duty combat units such as his 20th
Rifles.
It certainly hadn’t taken long for his latest situation report to generate results. Though that certainly wasn’t particularly surprising. Battalion commanders-even highly decorated battalion commanders-didn’t often send such scathing indictments of current policy to the Defense Staff Council, but Kruger had grown weary of asking his men to do the impossible. Too many of the Permanent Force’s best battalions were being used to suppress disorder in the black townships instead of being stationed on the border where they were so desperately needed.
And desperate wasn’t too strong a word, he thought grimly. Given the current military and political situation, the frontier with Namibia simply could not be adequately defended. There were too few troops trying to cover too much territory.
Some staff officers at the Ministry of Defense had done their best to help out. They’d made sure that units such as the 20th had first call on replacements and the latest weapons and hardware.
More important, requisitions for food, fuel, and ammo
were processed with almost unmilitary speed and efficiency. In the final analysis, though, those were simply half measures-interim steps that relieved some of the day-to-day burden on Kruger and his fellow commanders without in any way solving the strategic dilemma they faced. Pretoria must either provide more men and equipment to guard the border or find other ways to end the ANC’s renewed guerrilla campaign Kruger shook his head, aware that the new men in charge weren’t likely to make the right decisions. Like a sizable number of South African Defense
Force officers, he’d privately applauded the Haymans government’s moves toward some reasonable accommodation with the nation’s black majority. The key word was reasonable. No one he knew supported the absurd notion of an eventual one-man, one-vote system for South Africa. The failing array of dictatorships scattered across black Africa showed the dangers of such a course. But few officers could hide from the knowledge that continued white efforts to hold all political power inevitably meant an ongoing and probably endless guerrilla war-a war marked by minor, strategically meaningless victories and a steady stream of maimed or dead men.
Kruger shook his head again, mentally cursing both Karl Vorster’s callous determination to win this unwinnable war and die ANC bastards who’d put the new president in place by murdering Frederick Haymans.
“The Ministry, sir?” The corporal waiting by his car saluted and held the rear door open for him.
“Yes. ” Kruger returned the man’s salute and climbed into the staff car.
He sat up straight against the seat as they pulled away from the plane and turned onto an asphalt-paved access road. Half his mind busied itself by reviewing the arguments he intended to make to the chief of staff. One corner of his mouth flickered upward briefly in a wry smile. He was probably being too optimistic. He wasn’t likely to have the chance to get a single word in edgewise over the tongue-lashing he fully expected to receive.
Headquarters staffs, even in an army as flexible and in-3
formal as the SADF, always had their own rigid notions about such things as the chain of command and proper channels.
Something strange about the passing scenery tugged Kruger’s attention away from his upcoming ordeal. He looked more carefully out the windows to either side. They were paralleling Swartkop’s main runway and flight line.
Both looked nearly deserted. And that was odd. Very odd.
The airfield was ordinarily a hive of frenzied activity. With two squadrons of transport aircraft based here, Swartkop often seemed a practical demonstration of perpetual motion as small, single-engined Kudus and larger
C-47s landed, refueled, and took off again-ferrying men and equipment to the SADF’s far-flung military districts.
But not today. The Kudu that had carried him here sat all by itself, parked in isolation on a vast, empty expanse of concrete. There were no planes on the taxiway taking off or landing. Kruger stroked his freshly shaved chin.
Where were all the aircraft?
The staff car turned onto a wider road running past Swartkop’s huge, aluminum-sided hangars and repair shops. And there they were. Row after row of camouflaged transport planes either parked in the hangars or on the flight line close by. Tiny figures in grease-stained, orange coveralls swarmed over each aircraft, opening a panel here or tightening something down there. Repair and maintenance crews, all working at top speed.
Kruger stared out the window as they drove past, taken completely by surprise. Even under normal operating conditions, perhaps one in five of a squadron’s aircraft could be expected to need routine maintenance at any given time. But nothing about the frantic bustle around the forty or so parked planes struck Kruger as being routine. Had there been some unprecedented and completely unannounced act of ANC sabotage? It seemed unlikely. Even the Vorster government’s stringent new censorship laws couldn’t have prevented word of such a disaster from leaking out.
He sat up even straighter as a more plausible, but equally disturbing explanation presented itself. The Air Force must be preparing its planes for a prolonged surge in flight
operations-round-the-clock sorties that would make it impossible to provide normal maintenance.
Kruger’s mouth tightened. These were cargo aircraft and troop carriers, so whatever Pretoria had planned involved the Army. Were they finally going to reinforce the Namibian border? Maybe. He hoped so. It would certainly save him a lot of grief in his meeting with the chief of staff. He could take a scolding more easily if he knew in advance that the hierarchy agreed with his diagnosis of the situation.
The car rounded another corner, cutting off his view of the parked planes, and Kruger faced forward again. His eyes continued to sweep the surrounding terrain-automatically noting the six Cactus missile launchers of the base’s
SAM battery off to one side and the swarm of harried-looking Air Force officers emerging from Swartkop’s Administration Center on the other. But the logical part of his mind remained fully engaged, raising and as quickly dismissing new explanations for all the activity he saw.