Land of Promise (29 page)

There were more shouts, and then a few more shots were fired. Then there were even angrier shouts. Even without knowing any Arabic, Johan could tell that that someone was being cursed for having used poor fire discipline. He concluded that these raiders were not entirely untrained.

Johan scanned intently through his scope to get glimpses of the raiders through the trees. Most of the horsemen were riding in fits and starts. There were more shouts as most of the men dismounted and handed their horse reins to one man who stood his ground. The group of horses was about 250 yards away from Johan’s position.

Two of the raiders advanced on foot and approached the spot where Johan had first taken cover. One of them pulled out a night vision monocular and started to scan the woods in a half circle. Johan cupped his hand across the front lens of his scope, fearing that it might cause a reflection if the monocular had an active IR emitter.

There was more shouting. Johan pondered the situation and decided that he might have the chance to take a couple more shots, but the first one had to be at the man with the NV monocular. He waited until the man was facing northwest, and then uncapped the scope, shouldered the gun, and took aim. The crosshair was jinking all over the man’s silhouette. Johan struggled to control his breathing, and finally got the crosshair to settle on the man’s chest. The smell of the
kikuyu
grass was strong in his nostrils, and sweat was stinging his eyes.

He let out half a breath and squeezed the trigger. Without waiting to see if his shot was effective, he scooted back and rolled behind the old acacia. Dozens of rounds whistled past, and he heard several thudding into the tree. When he took another peek through his scope from the other side of the tree, he couldn’t see either of the men who had approached his previous position He hoped that he’d hit the man with the NVG, but he couldn’t be sure.

A ten-man squad of IRDF troops (called a “Stick” in IRDF airborne unit parlance), two helicopter pilots, and a door gunner all had to be awakened. They ran from their barracks to the nearby helipad section of the airfield. Their UH-60 helicopter lifted off 21 minutes after Violet’s first call.

There were still lots of rounds heading Johan’s way, but he had to take at least one more shot -- an important shot. It would be the shot that might give him the chance to get back to the camper without the Janjaweed running him down from on horseback. He cranked the scope up to 9X and got into a more steady prone two-elbow rest.

Johan took aim at the man holding the reins on a cluster of nine or ten horses. Since he was considerably farther way, it was even harder to get the crosshairs on this man. By his posture, Johan could tell that the man was holding some of the reins in each hand, and that he was bearing down on them to keep control of the frightened horses. To get his crosshairs on target, Johan scooted to the left and let the rifle’s stock contact the tree trunk. Suddenly, the crosshairs became steady. It took two more attempts at repositioning, but finally he was able to maintain contact with the tree
and
still have the man in his scope’s field of view. Johan whispered to himself, “
Totsiens!
” He let out another breath and then squeezed the trigger.

The horse handler was pole-axed to the ground, and there was a horrible shriek from amidst the horses. The bullet had apparently passed through the man and then hit one of the horses behind him. The horses ran off in all directions. There were more shouts of dismay and more shooting, but Johan didn’t wait to see the details. He fired off three more rounds in quick succession, hoping to get the Janjaweed men to duck behind cover. Then he was up and running.

By the time Johan got back to the camper, his family was up, dressed in camouflage clothes, and armed. Violet and his teenaged son were both armed with R4 rifles, and his teenaged daughter Marlize was armed with her Kommando LDP submachinegun. It had been a gift from her great-grandfather, just before they emigrated from South Africa. His youngest daughter Venica, age nine, was clutching her Ruger 10/22 takedown rifle, and she had a spare 25-round magazine stuffed into the front pocket of her camo jeans. Seeing this, Johan exclaimed, “Good girl.”

Johan said breathlessly in Afrikaans, “There are at least five armed men -- possibly
many more
-- who will be here in just a few minutes. They may come on foot, or they may be on horseback. They have NVGs, so they’ll track us down if we try to hide, and we can’t outrun horses, so let’s play this one with the ‘Camper Bait’ scenario that we practiced. You all know your positions. God bless you.”

He gave each of them a quick hug and then hissed, “Remember: Radios on, but use your earphones
only
. Now,
go
!”

His wife and youngest daughter ran side-by-side to the south, while his teenaged son and daughter headed out at a trot to the southwest and northwest respectively.

Johan ducked into the trailer, lay down his now nearly-empty bolt action rifle, and picked up his R1 FAL rifle and its set of web gear, which included four FAL magazine pouches, a radio pouch, a first aid pouch, and a canteen. He looped the harness over his shoulders. After stepping back down from the camper, he reached back inside and switched on the camper’s interior lights. Somewhere in his encounter with the Janjaweed, he had dropped his flashlight. The brightness of the lights dazzled him as he turned to stumble up a low rise to the east. It would be a few minutes before he got his natural night vision back.

As he was running, he was thinking how foolish he had been to overlook buying a night vision scope. He could have bought a used Gen 2 or Gen 3 monocular for about the same price as just one bred Nguni cow.

He heard the distinctive whine of a quadrocopter UAV. Johan breathed a sigh of relief. He was now hopeful that help was coming. He looked up but could not see the drone. After a minute the whining sound grew more faint. He surmised that the drone was by now orbiting the ranch property.

He waited a few minutes, straining to hear -- hoping that he wouldn’t hear hoof beats. Then he heard the distinctive sound of an approaching helicopter.

“Praise God.”

Per their SOP, the pilot made just one orbit to assess the situation with his NVGs before inserting the Stick. He then deposited them about 400 meters south of the Snyman Corral. As he made his insertion approach, he warned on the intercom, “Be advised that the moon is nearly down and there is still a lot of gunfire in various directions by unidentified individuals. It could get dicey.”

The Stick Leader replied, “That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”

The pilot snorted and said, “Oh yeah, just piles of Pilmos. Did you know that my dad paid for this ‘copter out of his retirement savings? You’re guests in a family bird.”

The insertion took less than 30 seconds. The pilot swooped the Blackhawk down to just briefly touch the ground, and all of the members of the Stick quickly jumped out, sprinted ten meters in the “ten and two o’clock” directions, and formed their typical Hedgehog ovals on both sides. As the Stick members ran, the Blackhawk zoomed upward, leaving them in a cloud of dust.

The pilot warned his gunner, “Weapons tight -- remember we’ve got friendly settlers down there, more than just our Stick.”

The gunner, an American-born Israeli, came on the intercom. “I’ve got a gorram bucket load of white hot possibles, but I can’t tell friend from foe. Some of them are on horseback, some are walking, some are prone, and a couple of those look like they might have bled out, but they’re still warm. And then there’s another bucket load of heat spots from cows, just to add to the confusion. Please advise.”

The quick-thinking pilot immediately radioed the TOC. “Do any of you there know if Mr. Snyman owns any horses?”

The Duty Intel NCO grabbed a microphone away from the watch commander to chime in, “Negative, they herd their cows on a pair of elec-bikes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. I’ve had my eye on courting his daughter, and I’d assumed that I might have to learn how to ride a horse before I could get taken seriously. But I was told that they only have elec-bikes.”

The pilot responded, “That’s close enough to ‘sure’ for me. Gunner, you have the Green Light to engage any MAMs on horseback!”

“Roger that.”

A pair of thermal NVGs, when used in conjunction with a M145 4x optic mounted on an FN-MAG light machinegun, was a lethal combination. Not only could a machinegunner acquire targets by their heat signatures, but he could also fire quite accurately. At night, it was one of those “You can run, but you can’t hide” situations.

The gunner began firing at the men on horseback almost immediately in four- to eight-round bursts. There were tracers loaded every fifth round in the belt. After tracers revealed that he shooting too high with his first two bursts (he had overestimated their range), he aimed lower and started getting consistent hits with almost every burst.

After shooting every horseman he could find and then giving each sprawled form a couple of extra bursts for good measure, the gunner said, “Okay, now I’m back to friend or foe confusion.”

Just then a radio message came in from the Solus Christus TOC. “Be advised that the UAV operator reports that he has a high level of confidence that the group of three individuals that are down prone at the far north end of the ranch, approximately 250 meters north of the main cattle herd, are all carrying AKs, and the same three were all on horseback ten minutes ago. Another data point is that their three horses are tied to trees in their immediate vicinity. The three individuals haven’t moved much since going prone.”

The gunner joked darkly, “Sounds like a prayer meeting.”

The TOC Controller came back on. “You are Green Light to engage those three individuals only. I say again, you are Green Light to engage those three individuals only.”

The gunner chortled and said, “Time to introduce them to their 72 waiting Virgins.”

The pilot cut in, “No, no, no. You’ve heard a
mis-translation
from the Koran. It’s not
72
Virgins, it’s just
one
Virgin, but she’s 72 years old.”