Lines of white vapour streamed off the wing tips of the speeding Hawker Hunter jet as it turned tightly in the moist, early-morning air. An eerie, haunting howl from the Hunter’s four gaping cannon ports preceded the war machine, shattering the morning calm. Fishermen on the banks of the Pungwe River fled in panic as the jet screeched over their heads at treetop height. The pilot rolled the wings level on a southerly heading, breaking radio silence with a terse transmission: ‘Red 1 at initial point.’
As the jet sped south, the pilot’s eyes darted constantly from the ground to his stopwatch and back to the ever-present ground. As the second hand of the stopwatch touched 17 seconds, the pilot pulled back on the stick and the camouflaged war machine rose majestically into the Mozambican sky, white vapour now pouring off the whole upper-wing area.
The pilot’s vista changed dramatically – he could suddenly see for miles, and there it was, on his left, exactly where he expected it to be: a whitewashed building with a rusty-red roof. He pushed the radio button again and uttered four electrifying words: ‘Red 1 target visual.’
He rolled the jet to his left, almost inverted, not losing sight of the building for an instant. At precisely the right moment, he rolled the Hunter the right way up, the machine now in a perfect 30-degree dive towards the target. As the rusty-red roof started filling the sights, the pilot’s right index finger instinctively found the trigger on the stick – he squeezed it firmly. The jet shuddered violently and slowed as all four cannons fired, sending a hail of deadly 30-mm cannon shells towards the target.
He saw glints of light and dust being kicked up as cannon shells struck the earth right in front of the house. ‘Perfect,’ he said to himself as he released the trigger and pulled back on the stick, feeling a force five times that of gravity tugging at his body as the Rhodesian warplane pulled out of its deadly dive.
Below, cannon shells slammed through the roof of Robert Mugabe’s headquarters in Mozambique. The Battle of Chimoio, the first phase of Operation Dingo, had begun.