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Oshakati, Namibia, 13 June
The area around Oshakati was lined with washes, running from north to south where they fed into the Etosha Pan. That is, they ran when the rainy season was upon the land. Right now, the washes held not water, but men and their machines of war. Wheeled armored personnel carriers and gun carriers were spaced out, hull down, in the low ground, their crews resting in the shade created by ponchos stretched out.
The overall commander of these troops—the Pan-African Force (PAF)—was South African, both because the South African Defense Force (SADF) formed the majority of the military might and also because the SADF had the most experienced officers in conventional warfare. General Nystroom had served for thirty years in the SADF and he had weathered the many political and military winds that had swept his homeland. He had steered clear of the right-wingers and thus had survived the change in government. He did this not because he was particularly politically astute but because he had always viewed himself as simply a soldier, not a politician. He was one of the very few white officers of high rank left in the SADF. He wasn’t sure why he had received this assignment and he didn’t really care. Orders were orders.
Right now, Nystroom was standing in one of the top hatches in his South African-made Ratel armored command vehicle. He scanned the surrounding terrain through binoculars, noting the various types of vehicles that were scattered about the perimeter.
Unlike the campaign in Desert Storm, these troops had very few tracked vehicles. The SADF had long ago made the decision to mostly go with wheeled armor, sacrificing protection and weaponry for speed and efficiency. The distances involved in the war that South Africa had waged—prior, of course, to Mandela coming to power—in the forbidding terrain of Namibia, had been the first factor in canceling out the effectiveness of tanks. Most nonmilitary types, Nystroom knew—and many military who have never served in armor—did not realize that tanks were rated in gallons per mile, rather than miles per gallon, necessitating a tremendous logistical tail to any armored beast. A tail that the long distances involved in the desert made almost impossible to maintain.
The wind blew a veil of sand across the top of the vehicle and Nystroom felt it rub against his skin, reminding him of the most important prohibitor of tracked armor in this terrain. The sands of Namibia were soft and shifting. A sixty-ton main battle tank would bog down where an eight-ton wheeled personnel carrier would be supported.
All this knowledge and expertise Nystroom had learned and honed in the fierce guerrilla battles in the buffer states around South Africa while the whites tried to remain in power. It was an irony not lost on Nystroom or many of the soldiers now waiting in the northern Namibian desert that they now were to turn that expertise to the aid of their traditional black foe.
While the Americans were beginning to move by air and sea, the Pan-African Forces, of which the South Africans represented the most potent and skilled part, were spreading out across the desert, just south of the border with Angola, prepared for their historic mission. A map in the cargo bay below Nystroom showed the deployment of the forces in a loose line from Quedas do Ruacan in the west to the Capriva Strip to the east—a thin stretch of Namibia that ran between Botswana in the south and Angola and Zambia in the north.
Nystroom had been here before, and sometimes even he had to stop a moment and sort out in his mind the strange history of this area and the shifting alliances, of which this was just the latest.
The Ovimbundu people who populate northern Namibia are also the predominant tribe in Angola. After the United Nations had declared South African rule of Namibia to be revoked in 1966—which the leaders in Pretoria simply ignored—and the International Court of Justice declared the continued occupation to be illegal, the South Africans responded by beefing up their forces in the country. Nystroom had been a young lieutenant then and had traveled north for the first time in Namibia. The Ovimbundu had responded by forming SWAPO—the South-West African People’s Organization.
The guerrilla war waged by SWAPO was weak at best. Open desert is not friendly to either side, but it is very difficult terrain for guerrillas to hide in. No taking to the hills or jungle here, Nystroom knew.
To further confuse the historical picture, when the Portuguese pulled out of Angola in 1975, the UNITA nationalist movement—also composed mostly of Ovimbundu—rose up. For a few years UNITA and SWAPO worked together and, with safe bases in Angola from which to strike and return, SWAPO started achieving some success. South Africa responded in Israeli fashion, taking the war into southern Angola and attacking the base camps. Thus Nystroom was not only not new to his upcoming mission, he was also familiar with the locale. He had been in the terrain in southern Angola that they were now preparing to invade.
Back then, though, in an even more shrewd move, South Africa had lined up with Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA against the communists in the MPLA government, who were supported by Cuban troops. This alignment left SWAPO out in the cold.
Then, just a few years back, everything had changed once again. With Mandela in power in South Africa, the policy shifted and now the MPLA government was in favor with both Pretoria and the international community. Even the Americans, who in their blinded anti-red vision had supported Savimbi against the MPLA and the Cubans, had shifted and now endorsed the elected MPLA government.
The cease-fire of ‘95 had brought hope that the long civil war would be over. Mandela had staked much of his international reputation on bringing Savimbi into the fold, and when Savimbi had broken his word and taken to the bush again the previous year, Nystroom had felt it would only be a matter of time before Mandela did something about the betrayal. Black or white, the leaders in Pretoria seemed to respond the same.
In Namibia, SWAPO, after decades in the desert, was brought into the fold and now SWAPO guerrillas sat in the desert next to their former enemies in the South African Defense Force. There were also troops representing other former enemies of South Africa present in the Pan-African Force (PAF): soldiers from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Mozambique, Tanzania, Egypt, Cameroon, Senegal, and smaller contingents from several other countries.
Namibia, now technically independent, was still heavily dependent on South Africa for everything. SWAPO had some representatives in the government in Windhoek, but there wasn’t much in Namibia to govern. The largest industry was diamond mining, and that was in private hands. There was talk among some of the right-wingers in South Africa of creating a white homeland by carving a chunk of land out of Namibia, and Nystroom wasn’t too sure whether Mandela would or would not let that happen if the right-wingers tried. So even though he was oriented northward, Nystroom still had to keep an eye looking over his shoulder to the south.
Nystroom knew the entire operation was a gamble politically. He felt confident that the PAF and Americans would defeat Savimbi’s UNITA rebels. The question was what would happen then? Would the country unite? Would it disintegrate into tribal warfare like Rwanda had? Could they hold on to the victory or would the pictures of dead and wounded cause the public to cry out for the troops to come home and give up what they had won? There was a good chance the Americans would leave, Nystroom felt. This was not their continent or their fight. But it was his.
Angola was to be the first test of a new African consciousness, a consciousness Mandela had forced upon the other heads of state on the continent because of the apathy of the outside world. The help of the Americans was necessary both militarily and politically, but the bottom line was that it was the PAF that was going to be left on the ground after the Americans withdrew.
Nystroom ran a hand through his thick beard. He looked more like a friendly grandfather—which he was—than a thirty-year soldier. He had a large belly and sharp blue eyes peering above the white of his beard. His portly presence tended to make others think less of his mental abilities, as if there were some correlation between weight and brainpower. But Nystroom was still in uniform and in command where the vast majority of his contemporaries had been sucked under by the sands of time and political change.
Nystroom considered himself a professional soldier first and foremost, and he had read the great writers of military strategy such as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. He knew there were factors other than pure military operations and political maneuvering involved here, of course. Mandela was not just concerned about the politics of nation building in Africa. There was the threat that the entire region could destabilize if all these civil wars were allowed to rage unchecked. Borders were lines drawn on maps. In Africa many of those lines had been drawn by the colonizing powers with little regard for tribal, geographic, or economic factors. The result was that civil wars in Africa often spilled over such borders. There was most definitely a self-preservation drive in Pretoria to keep such a war from coming south by going north first with peacemaking efforts.
Economics added into it also, Nystroom knew. That was an area that was very sensitive and one he tried to steer clear of. There were shadowy forces at work both in Pretoria and out here in the PAF, all involved in complex maneuvering. There were oil and diamonds in Angola, as there were diamonds here in Namibia. The right-wingers were just one of several factions with interests in this part of the world.
The South African government had publicly maintained for decades that its involvement in Namibia was for protection against incursions by terrorists and guerrillas, but what had not been so public was the vast amount of capital that was flowing out of the diamond mines in the southwest portion of the country. There were over a thousand square miles of coastal area near Luderitz that were a restricted area and highly policed with private armies—the backbone of the Van Wyks diamond empire. No one outside of the Van Wyks inner circle knew how many diamonds came out of that land, since the Van Wyks Corporation controlled over 80 percent of all diamond sales on the planet.
There was little doubt in General Nystroom’s mind that Pieter Van Wyks, the elder statesman of the family, had given more than a little nudge in support of this operation to stop the black market trade in diamonds by UNITA rebels and to try to bring the mines in Angola under his cartel’s control. How strong that push was, Nystroom preferred not to know.
He knew that the officer corps of the SADF under his command was riddled with men drawing more money from Van Wyks under the table than in their paychecks from Pretoria. Nystroom would prefer not to have to find out where their loyalties really lay. When Mandela had come to power, the country had held its breath, waiting to see which way the military would turn, which in reality meant which way Pieter Van Wyks ordered those he controlled to act. It was something of a surprise that Van Wyks had discreetly let it be known that the peaceful transition was to be supported.
Nystroom and many others did not know what to make of that. Perhaps there was some secret deal between Van Wyks and Mandela. Or perhaps Van Wyks had other plans. Whichever it was, Nystroom was not going to worry about what he did not control and did not know.
Nystroom grabbed the rim of the hatch and lowered himself down. He had enough to concern himself with simply keeping the military coalition together. It was the politicians’ job to worry about the other aspects. While the SADF had fought in the area for many years, this was by far the largest deployment of force ever made in this direction. The desolate terrain of Namibia and the Kalahari Desert to the east in Botswana were very effective natural defenses for the homeland, and the SADF had always oriented the bulk of its forces to the east and south.
Nystroom looked at the bank of radios that took up most of the room inside the carrier. They were his link not only with his forces here, but with his higher headquarters over a thousand miles to the south, in the underground communications complex at Silvermine near Cape Town, and the American commanders to the north, already on the ground in Angola. Nystroom had several American liaison officers assigned to his staff, and he had sent several of his men north to work there in coordinating actions.
The report of the downing of the MI-8 helicopter had cheered Nystroom. It meant the Americans were here to do business. At least their military was, he amended. He just hoped that the politicians kept their hands out of the action that was coming, or else they could end up with another fiasco like Desert Storm had turned out to be: a military victory cut short of achieving the strategic goal. While Nystroom tried to keep his own hands out of political affairs, he wished politicians would reciprocate and keep their nose out of the military’s once the die was cast.
Nystroom settled onto a stool and looked at the map of Angola. So much was going to happen in the next several weeks. The operations plan for the PAF movement into southern Angola was over three hundred pages long. And from his long military experience, Nystroom knew there was one truism he could count on: Something they had not planned for would develop and have to be dealt with.
Airspace, Southeast Atlantic, 13 June
They had refueled in Cape Verde and were on the final leg of their long journey. Not only did they have to travel across the Adantic, but they also had to go from northern hemisphere to southern.
Riley walked along the thin pathway between soldiers and pallets. Men were spread out everywhere, huddled under poncho liners, trying to get a few hours of sleep before they arrived in Angola. He found Comsky snug as a bear in his cave in the slight space afforded between two pallets of duffel bags. Even above the roar of the jet engines, Comsky’s snores could be clearly heard.
“Hey. Hey,” Riley said, nudging the sergeant on the shoulder.
“What?” Comsky muttered, not bothering to remove the poncho liner over his face.