The only way to combat this would be to leapfrog ahead onto the main spoor with helicopters to stop them before they all disappeared into the bush but—for some reason I could never find out—we could not get choppers to come to our assistance. The main spoor was a lot thinner now but also a lot fresher. We had been chasing it hard since first light and even I didn’t need a tracker to tell me that these terrs were not far ahead.
Our Buffel was now in front. John Delaney was running on the spoor and I was behind him, scanning the bush for any sign. I had taped two 35-round magazines together for a quick change and stuffed a white phosphorus grenade in my pocket for easy access. I never did like the clip-type chest pouches that we had in our Fireforce vests. They were tricky to clip open quickly with one hand; you had to hold down the vest with one hand and tug on the clip pouch with the other. Sometimes it would get caught on the water bottles at your side.
We had found some huge terr shit next to the spoor that was very fresh. I was nervous. I did not like the idea of running straight into a 50-man ambush.
“Where the fuck are the gunships?”
Doep told us that H Company was on Fireforce standby to come to our aid if we needed it, when we made contact. What would that help us if we ran into an ambush and they took 15 minutes to get here? I was starting to see the great foresight and logic of the men who ran our little war. They did not seem detail-orientated and clearly favoured a brand of impenetrably hidden logic that we were yet to figure out. I had always heard that you wanted to attack your enemy at three-to-one odds but I was quickly learning that this was not how the SADF was run. They seemed to believe in one-to-three, with us being the one!
The still-thick spoor led into a low thicket of thorn bush that grew up a small incline. It was a perfect place for an ambush. John and the tracker in front waved their hands and stopped running; we followed suit and went down onto one knee. The Buffels came to a stop 20 metres behind us. Lieutenant Doep motioned for us to advance into the thicket, then waved us on, annoyed when we hesitated for a minute and none of us moved. No one wanted to be the first to enter the eerie thicket of bush that reeked of ambush. The five of us who were running dog and the two trackers looked at each other as we steeled ourselves to go in.
We slowly stalked into the bush and disappeared in the shadows of the overhead canopy of leaves. I had my R4 rifle on full automatic and held it up high in an odd way, with the handgrip almost next to my temple and with my head pulled into my shoulders, trying to protect my face behind the metal part of my rifle. I was walking in a curious crouch, almost like a duckwalk, in an effort to make myself a smaller target. In this peculiar manner, I scanned the bush with hard eyes.
My stomach had been up in my throat with fear, but now it disappeared and that strange, dead-calm feeling took over over once again. I felt a cold and reckless resignation to get it over with, whichever way it went. I tightened my torso muscles as tight as I could in an involuntary effort to deflect the hail of AK-47 bullets that I expected to come at any second. I was just behind John Delaney, the platoon ‘veteran’ who, along with Lieutenant Doep, had already walked into an ambush like this while running dog and had survived to tell the tale. John, too, was walking in the same strange duck-walk that seemed to be a natural instinct. We had pulled ahead of the others who seemed to be shuffling on the spot and not keeping up.
The tracker was at my side; his eyes were huge and white against his tar-black face. He was in a crouch and stopped in mid-stride with his mouth hanging open as if tasting the air, like a snake, or perhaps just plain scared shitless. We stopped soundlessly in our tracks. He crouched in this position for a second or two and then motioned to us with his wide eyes and pointed with his chin that he thought something was in front of us. I saw then that he was in complete control of himself, but the other tracker—a skinny troop with an oversized uniform—had dropped ten yards behind us.
Bam!
A staccato rifle shot close by shattered the tense stillness like a small bomb. Instantly I dropped like a dead man and rolled into some foliage next to the natural path that led into the thicket. I held my rifle tight into my shoulder and glared with both eyes down the barrel, waiting to see any movement in front of us, my finger tight on the trigger. There were no more shots and, after long seconds, I looked around and saw that all five of us were in the same position, except that one tracker had his rifle pointing forward and his eyes tightly closed.
“They’re behind us,” I hissed to myself. It had sounded as though the shot had come from somewhere behind.
I quickly scanned the bush to the side and saw nothing—no gun smoke or movement. I signalled to John who was staring stone-faced into the bush. I was puzzled, because it now dawned on me that it had sounded more like an R4 than an AK-47. We lay still for a few minutes and then we heard relaxed voices coming from the Buffels some 30 metres back.
“What the fuck?”
I was still intently scanning the bush in front of me, not convinced that it was all clear. So was the black tracker who had not lost his concentration. We both lay flat with our rifles pointing straight ahead into the dark thicket. John was looking back, as he was in a position to see what was happening by the Buffels. After a minute he motioned for us to move back. We slowly backed up out of the thicket. Had there been an ambush waiting for us in that thicket, where the 50-man SWAPO spoor led? We would never know. Maybe now the bush gods were looking with favour on us as they had done on SWAPO when they brought the season’s first rain to wash out their spoor as we had come upon it. Maybe we too had now been saved from walking into an ambush by something that had happened behind us. We slowly backed away from the thicket, back to the vehicles.
When we got to the parked Buffels we found that Kurt Barnes, who had had his R4 on ‘fire’, had accidentally let off a round that had ricocheted into Kevin Green sitting next to him. I never did find out what really went down. As far as I could gather, everyone in the Buffel was ready to open fire into the thicket when Kurt had let a round off that ricocheted off the inside of the Buffel, narrowly missing Greef’s head and ploughing through Kevin Green’s hand.
Kevin’s eyes were clenched with pain; he was holding his hand that was bleeding profusely as Kurt, who also happened to be the platoon medic, tried to apply pressure and put on a field dressing. Kurt was an enormous excompany cook who had grown tired of cooking and, after a couple of failed attempts at the PT course, had finally pulled through, got his wings and had recently been assigned to our platoon. He was a big lumbering fellow with fists like hams and ice-blue eyes.
Kevin, a feisty little guy from the south of Johannesburg, who had chipped teeth and was one of the company’s handful of amateur boxers, was squeezing his eyes, telling Kurt that he was going to fuck him up. Kurt, who was three times Kevin’s size, grunted and told him to put a sock in it as he turned and fumbled in his medic bag for the morphine. But he, and most of us standing around, suddenly all seemed to realize at the same moment that he was not going to find any morphine. The reason being that recently, at a small but wild ‘invite only’ party in Ondangwa, just before we had left on the vehicle patrol, the regulation two shots of morphine per medic bag had been liberated and used as the highlight of the party.
“Give him some Sosagon!” Lieutenant Doep barked as we all watched Kevin closing his eyes, grimacing in agony. Kurt’s voice was barely audible as he said he couldn’t seem to find any.