MCGRADY WOKE ME AFTER MIDNIGHT. The American grunted softly and nodded in the direction of the river. ‘Gunter and the Greek are asleep’, he said quietly.
‘So much for those fuckers guarding our butts…’
From my sleeping bag tucked next to a couple of large boulders, the night seemed less oppressive after the rains. From dawn onwards, it had been a tough slog. Much of the hike had taken us across difficult thorn and mopani country speckled by giant outcrops of granite, some as high as multi-storeyed buildings. Gomos, they called them up Mount Darwin way and probably still do: it’s a Shona word.
There’d been a few stops, usually to brush tsetse flies from our backs and catch a breath, but nothing long enough even for a brew: always tea, because you can smell coffee for miles in the African bush. When we found a temporary camp site we opened a few canteens and drank some of the water we’d taken earlier from one of the few streams we’d crossed. One of the guys tried to filter some of it through his bush hat and while it tasted muddy, the filtering got rid of some of the grit.
Too risky to start a fire, McGrady ventured. I agreed, in part because of the goats we’d heard a few miles back. In that kind of backwater, a single goat equates to human presence. Also, we weren’t quite sure how these people would view a quartet of strange whites spending time on their turf; we were all in camouflage and shouldered an assortment of weapons. News of strangers in remote areas travels fast, especially in the African bush, so we kept out of sight and never crossed open ground if we could help it.
Domestic animals might also signify a gook camp. McGrady had mentioned as much earlier out of earshot of the other two, because they were already on tenterhooks. We two should take extra care, he suggested. I couldn’t argue, especially since these were unknown factors in a land that was being disputed both by the guerrillas and the government.
Now that we’d moved in, McGrady was hoping for a kill or two of his own… if they didn’t get us first…
The insurgents in that area, north-west of Wankie, were a tough, seasoned bunch of fighters, or so we’d heard back at the Quill Club in Salisbury – Harare today. This was the land of the Matabele, distant cousins of their belligerent Zulu forebears; the majority of rebels operational in that region were loyal to the portly Joshua Nkomo. Many, we knew, had been trained abroad, some in Iron Curtain countries. Also, we took it for granted that they’d have been issued with some heavy-duty hardware.
While the four of us were adequately armed for any normal kind of contact – between us we had two FN-FAL rifles, McGrady’s converted AR-15 and my own Mini-Ruger (the last two in .223 calibre) – we really weren’t properly equipped as a hunting party in a war zone. Even with our clutch or two of grenades, we’d never have matched anything sophisticated like the guerrillas used. McGrady had read some of the intelligence reports that passed through his hands from time to time: all emphasized the sophistication of the weapons being lugged by this guerrilla force. Among hardware regularly brought back from bush forays were a profusion of AK-47s, as well as RPDs, RPG-7s and POMZs, never mind the usual batch of anti-personnel and TM-46 anti-tank mines. McGrady had been warned by some of the Rhodesian regulars that the guerrillas knew how to lay them too.
The mines were always a consideration, which was why we moved as cautiously as we did. We slept uneasily as well, because in doing his customary hourly rounds, McGrady discovered the Greek slumped fast asleep over his rifle on his two-hour watch on the first night out.
With McGrady creating a dark shadow at my side – he lay on his sleeping bag rather than in it – I peered into the darkness in an effort to see what it was that had caused him to rouse me. It couldn’t have been all that serious because my slumber had been pretty intermittent anyway.
I leaned over towards him: ‘You hear anything?’
‘Negative’, he whispered.
‘Had a bunch of something come through… must have been wildebeest… moved on towards where they are’, he said, pointing at a position perhaps 500 feet away ‘… probably spooked when they smelt the Greek’s aftershave… galloped off quickly. That’s what got me on my elbows’, he added.
McGrady wasn’t enamoured of the Greek. Within a day or so the sentiment was reciprocated and from then on the two hardly exchanged a word. The European didn’t like being told what to do, which was one of the reasons why the American felt he could have managed better without him.
Just then some heavy cloud moved in and covered what little moon was left over this stretch of Matabeleland. It would rain again, probably soon, he’d told me earlier. If it did, the people we were looking for wouldn’t find yesterday’s spoor. Trouble was, if they’d left tracks in the direction we were headed, we wouldn’t spot theirs either.
David G. McGrady, a private American citizen with no military background, had originally arrived in Africa by way of Soldier of Fortune, that Colorado-based magazine that catered to what it liked to term ‘Modern-Day Adventurers’. These were mostly former military veterans, most of them gung-ho and who had done a tour or three in Vietnam. Almost to man they sought action, legal or otherwise, preferably under a foreign flag.
By McGrady’s time, the magazine had published several features on the ground war in Rhodesia and McGrady, always the iconoclast, got hold of a copy of one of my early books on guerrilla warfare in Africa, titled The Zambezi Salient. 1 A bit of a pace-setter for its time – it highlighted several wars then creeping inexorably southwards – the book covered some of the hostilities in Rhodesia as well as Portugal’s military campaigns then ongoing.
McGrady obviously liked what he read, and through my publishers he was given my address and dropped me a line. His first question was: are there any military opportunities in which I can get involved in Southern Africa?
I replied that there were plenty, but that he’d not only have to get himself across the Atlantic, but he’d also have to consider carefully whether this was something he’d really like to do, especially since he had no military background. I suggested that he arrive reasonably well equipped: ‘you’re going to need your own kit and the kind of heavy stuff that might be useful for fighting in the bush’, was my suggestion.