Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

The guard was turning out, four troopers and a noncommissioned officer, falling in outside the guardroom.

The sergeant stepped in front of the leading truck as it drove up to the gate and held up one hand. As the truck pulled up he came round to the offside window, asked a question in Shana, and the bereted guerrilla answered him easily. But immediately the sergeant's tone altered, clearly the reply had been incorrect. His voice rose, became hectoring and strident. He was outside Craig's limited le of vision, but Craig saw the armed guard react. They circ began to unsling their rifles, started to spread out to cover the truck, the bluff was over before it had begun.

Craig tapped the leg of the uniformed guerrilla standing above him. It was the signal, and the guerrilla lobbed the t grenade that he was holding in his right hand with the pin already drawn. It went up in a high, lazy parabola and dropped neatly into the machine-gun emplacement.

At the same instant, Craig said quietly to the man on either side of him, "Kill them." They thrust the muzzles of their AKs through the firing slits in the canopy and the range was less than ten paces.

The volley ripped into the unprepared guards before they could bring up their weapons. The sergeant raced back towards the guard-room door, but Comrade Lookout leaned out of the cab with the Tokarev pistol in a stiffarined double grip and shot him twice in the back.

As the sergeant sprawled, the grenade burst behind the sandbags, and the barrel of the heavy machinegun swivelled aimlessly towards the sky as the hidden gunner was torn by flying shrapnel.

"Drive" Craig stuck his head and shoulders through the slit in the canopy, and yelled at the driver through the open window of the cab. "Smash through the gate!" The powerful diesel of the Toyota bellowed, and the truck surged forward. There was a rending crash, and the vehicle bucked and shuddered, checked for an instant, and then roared into the brightly lit compound, dragging a tangle of barbed-wire and shattered gate-timbers behind it.

Craig scrambled up beside the machine-gunner on the cab.

t(Dri the left-" He directed his fire at the barrack room of adobe and thatch beside the gate. The machine-gunner fired a long burst into the knot of halfnaked troopers as they spilled out of the front door.

"Guard tower on the right." They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted *'nmunition fed into the clattering breech and empty ca*s poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and glass flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.

"Number One hutment just ahead," Craig warned Sarah with a shout. She and her two men were crouched at the tailboard, and as the Toyota slowed, they jumped over and hit the ground running. Sarah carried the bolt-cutters and the two guerrillas ran ahead of her, jinking and dodging and firing from the hip. truck, onto the running, Craig slid over the side of the board and clung to the cab- r. "We have

"Drive for the kopie,"he shouted at the drive to take the radio!" ahead, but they had to The fortified kopie lay directly the white cross the wide, brightly lit parade ground, with washed wall at the far end, to reach the foot of " the kopie.

Craig glanced backwards. Sarah and her team had reached the hutment and were working on the wire with the bolt-cutters. Even as he watched, they completed their ing and broke through, disappearing into the building.

open for the second truck. It was roaring around He looked taking on each guard the perimeter, just inside the wire, fire into tower as they came to it, and pouring suppressing it with the heavy machinegun. They had knocked out four towers already, only two more to gonades dragged his attenThe bright flash of bursting gre son hutment.

tion to the barracks abutting the main pri had dropped a group of guerrillas to The second truck Craig could see them crouched below attack these barracks.

grenades through the the sills of the barracks, Popping darting forward, windows, and then, as they exp laded bright as moths in the floodlights, towards the main prison hutment.

In the first few minutes they had taken control of the entire camp. They had knocked out the towers, devastated the guard house and both barrack blocks it was all he looked and then theirs. He felt a surge of triumph ahead across the parade ground to the kopie. Evmthing but the koVje, and as he thought it, a line of white tracer stretched out towards him from the sandbagged upper slopes of the rocky hillock. it looked likea string of bright white fire-beads, at first coming quite slowly but acceleratthey closed, and suddenly there was ing miraculously as flying dust and the shriek of ricochets all around them and the jarring crashing of shot into the metal body of the racing truck.

The truck swerved wildly, and Craig screamed at. the driver as he clung desperately to the projecting rear-view mirror.

"Keep going we have to get the radioP The driver wrestled with the wrenching, bucking steering-wheel, and the nose of the truck swung back towards the kopje just as the second burst of machine-gun fire hit it. The windscreen exploded in flying diamond chips, and the driver was hurled against the door of the cab, his chest shot half-away. The truck slowed as his foot slipped from the accelerator pedal.

Craig hit the handle and yanked the door open. The driver's body slid out of the seat and tumbled over side

Craig swung himself into his place and jammed his foot flat on the accelerator. The truck lunged forward again.

Beside Craig, Comrade Lookout was firing his AK through the gaping hole where the windscreen had been shot away, and overhead the heavy machinegun returned the fire from the kopje with a fluttering ear-numbing clatter. The streams of opposing tracer fire seemed to meet and mingle in the air above the bare earth of the parade ground, and then Craig saw something else.

From one of the embrasures in the sandbagged walls at the foot of the hill, a lhck blob, the size of a pineapple, flew towards them on0a tiny tail of flame. He knew instantly what it was, but he didn't even have time to shout a warning as the RPO-7 rocket missile hit them.