During our brief stay, two captured Frelimo insurgents were brought in. One was an old man hardly able to walk, obviously malnourished and definitely no belligerent. Yet both admitted they’d been linked to a rebel sabotage unit that had been operating near the rail town of Goa. They had been taken while preparing food for their compatriots in the bush, men, whom they admitted, had been responsible for a spate of attacks on the railroad that winds its way to Beira at the coast.

Ultimately, it had been a squad of Portugal’s crack Commandos Africanos who had scored and subsequently dealt with a larger group of insurgents who had been spreading mines about in the region. Several hundred anti-personnel mines were seized, but curiously not a single anti-tank mine.

The two captives were first interrogated, then fed. More interrogation followed before they were flown to Tete for a more professional session, after which they would probably be transferred to one of the prison camps in the south, Chagas reckoned. After doing some independent news-gathering of his own, the lieutenant told us that the men would probably be of some use to the security forces.

‘They claim they were shanghaied. Had they offered any resistance they said they would have been shot’ he explained. ‘Trouble is’ he added, ‘they all claim that… but the truth is they probably would have been killed had they not cooperated…’

It was late afternoon when we finally made contact with the southbound convoy at the road junction to Caldas Xavier. The crossroads were marked by a primitive wooden signpost on which none of the directions were discernible.

We were again warned that the area had not been cleared of mines and that we should be circumspect. Spent cartridge cases littered the area and its approaches.

While approaching the intersection, we’d crossed a small river that had been prominently signposted in both languages: Zona Armadilhada: Minefield. This deterrent was Portuguese and had been laid in a bid to prevent the guerrillas from setting charges at the base of the bridge and possibly destroying it. As somebody mentioned, the measure was decidedly two edged since it also prevented anybody travelling in our convoy from getting water at a time when stocks were getting low. Water shortages on board the buses, we knew, were already critical, especially among the children.

The oppressive heat which had followed us across Africa from the Zambezi Valley hardly made matters any easier. Even so, a handful of passengers did make an effort. In a small column, some of the men and boys traipsed single file down a path towards the river, each one stepping carefully in the imprint of the man directly ahead.

One of the older soldiers later told us that the week before, a civilian had tripped a mine. He hadn’t been killed, but it did underscore some of the privations that those who had few resources faced when moving across this corner of East Africa.

‘He needed water very badly – not only for himself, but also for his family. So he set out on his own in spite of warnings from the troops. As he stepped near the water his foot triggered something that shot a small mine about six feet into the air.’ It was later determined that the device was similar to the notorious South-East Asian ‘S mine’, or what the Americans liked to call the ‘Bouncing Betty’. Lisbon used these munitions to good effect throughout their colonial conflicts.

Apparently, the man who had tripped the mine while going for water was lucky that eventful day. The mine detonated almost within touching distance of where he stood, but it was apparently facing the wrong way. The victim was concussed by the blast, but not a single shard of shrapnel penetrated his skin.

We waited an hour for the oncoming convoy to arrive. From the start we could see that conditions were much harder in their sector than in ours and a number of times we heard detonations.

Chagas came back not long afterwards to tell us that the approaching column had taken a casualty. He wasn’t specific, but said something about a mine. Moments later an evacuation helicopter veered over our heads and prepared to land in open ground near the crossroads. Ours was the first convoy the pilot reached and he had no way of knowing which of the two columns had triggered the bomb.

Having established that much, the chopper lifted off again, leaving a dense cloud of dust whipped up by its rotors. We watched as the helicopter sped northwards barely a yard above the tree-tops. A minute or two later he was on his way back to base, this time at a higher altitude and making directly for Tete Military Hospital.

When the oncoming convoy eventually did reach us, the word went out that a man had been killed. He’d been second in the line in the unit’s main pica squad, his point man having apparently stepped over an antipersonnel mine. The soldier behind was not so lucky and he took the full impact of the blast.

Three other members of the pica squad were lightly wounded, but they were able to continue with their duties even though their leader was limping badly from a large cut on his thigh. In Vietnam, a wound like that would have meant immediate evacuation to the base hospital. With the Portuguese Army in Africa, such matters were accepted in the line of duty.

Portuguese troops weren’t awarded Lisbon’s version of the Purple Heart because there wasn’t one.

We travelled halfway through the night to reach Mussacuana. The road had been cleared by the oncoming convoy and it was essential to cover the prodded ground as quickly as possible before the insurgents laid more mines. The same held for the convoy that passed us and was heading in the opposite direction. They’d want to cover as much of the ground that we’d cleared.

However, we weren’t quite fast enough. A heavy monsoon-like downpour provided the drivers with the almost impossible task of following exactly in the tracks of the vehicles ahead and, within an hour, two more vehicles were blasted. These were heavy trucks, one from Johannesburg, the other from Salisbury, and both carried cargoes destined for the mines in Zambia. What made it ironic was that the insurgent groups who’d laid the mines were actually using Zambia as a base. The mines that had destroyed the trucks had actually originated from there. Now these same guerrillas were helping to disrupt the economy of one of their allies…

There were no more incidents that night. The mines had been detonated by the back wheels of both trucks, giving credence to reports that the insurgents where using a more sophisticated type of landmine that had recently been brought in from South-East Asia following the deescalation of American military involvement there. Only much later were we to learn that these were ratchet mines.

A curious name, ratchet mines used by the Viet Cong were usually set to detonate after a pre-determined number of wheels had passed; sometimes 10 or 12, often double that. The fact that the trucks involved were well down the column when they were blasted, underscored this development. It could have been us.

One of the vehicles was travelling in our column barely 100 yards ahead of us. The blast happened about a mile out of the village of Capirizanje, our next stop on the long road north. A heavy downpour was pelting down when the blast ripped through one of the open windows of the Land Rover and the column halted.

For a long time we sat in silence, accepting that it would have been foolish to get out and see what was happening. Only when the convoy started to move again and we carefully followed neat rows of new tracks created through the bush around the stranded vehicle, could we see that a set of back wheels on one of the low-loaders from South Africa had been shredded.

Not long afterwards we passed a quarry alongside the road, illuminated by lightning as we passed. We were experiencing one of those African thunderstorms for which the Zambezi Valley is known, the water sometimes coming down in spurts big enough to fill a bucket overnight. Three or four flashes of lightning told us that the area had long ago been abandoned. Some of the trolleys that had probably been part of the facility lay on their sides. A few yards away, a wheelbarrow without its wheel rested upside down in the mud, more reminders of a conflict that had already spanned half a generation.

Mussacuana arrived unheralded. We’d climbed steadily in the mud and muck and suddenly, just before midnight, there were lights ahead. The rain had lifted minutes before and as happens so often in a region only a few hundred miles from the Indian Ocean, the settlement in the mountains above Capirizanje lay swathed in mist. The ground was sodden, for it had poured here as well.

A soldier on guard in an improvised machine-gun turret shouted a greeting. We replied in English and he turned his back on us.

At least the beer would be cold…