Two helicopters from Shapi Pans (I was still out with Willie de Beer) joined Hoffy in deploying other troops under command of Lieutenant Ken Pierson. Ken’s orders were to set up ambushes on the Nata River directly in line with Leasha Pan and the point the terrorists had crossed the game fence. It was dark when helicopters, flown by John Rogers and Ian Harvey, returned to Shapi Pans where Chris Dixon, who had recently arrived, joined them and me in a helicopter forwardlift of fuel for the following day.
All night long under a brilliant full moon we lifted fuel to a location just beyond the game fence close to a Botswanan border beacon known as Point 222. This was a frustrating job because we could only lift two drums of Avtur in our underslung cargo nets to Point 222 but then had to use one of these to get back to Shapi Pans for the next load. The net result of four helicopters flying throughout the night was that only twelve full drums of Avtur were available at the remote forward logistics base at dawn.
At the commencement of the fuel lift, Prop Geldenhuys flying a Provost at height provided communication between soldiers on the ground, Tac HQ and Brigade. The first sign of trouble came when Sergeant-Major Timitiya told Prop that Nick Smith had been shot and that he was under heavy fire. Nothing more was heard. Nick Smith failed to come up on the HF radio at the scheduled reporting time of 18.00 and there was no response to any call from Prop, the two companies or Brigade HQs. When Ken Pierson checked in on schedule, he reported having heard heavy firing from Nick Smith’s area and said he could not raise Nick on VHF. Deep concern had already set in as Prop continued trying, unsuccessfully, to raise Nick. I remember how impressed I was by Prop’s cool manner and efficiency in conveying what needed to be said.
Prop was then a PAI (Pilot Armament Instructor) on 4 Squadron, which amazed me because, as a past student of mine, he seemed too young to be doing such a responsible job. It took some time before it dawned on me that I had been just as young in similar circumstances.
More anguish was added to the night when Prop relayed the appalling news that Ken Pierson was dead. Ken had been shot by one of his own men when he moved from one ambush position to another. As dawn broke I flew from Point 222 to the Company HQ were Hoffy gave Bob Whyte and me a very welcome cup of coffee whilst we refuelled from his diminishing stock of Avtur. All he had in the way of food was tinned pilchards in tomato sauce. Having eaten nothing since breakfast the previous day, I was able to face the cold fish and hard ration biscuits in preparation for what promised to be a long day.
At some time during the night John Rogers had flown Major Mac Willar from Shapi Pans to the Company HQ. Mac was still in discussion with the company commanders Ray Howden and Taffy Marchant when Ian Harvey called the ops room to say he had been attracted to the game fence by smoke rising from a small fire. Here he found some of Nick Smith’s troops in a state of despair. They reported that they had run out of ammunition following contact with many terrorists in ambush but did not know what had happened to Nick Smith or Timitiya.
John Rogers and Hoffy lifted Mac Willar with troops and spare ammunition forward to link up with these men. By the time he arrived the rest of Nick Smith’s troops, drawn by the earlier noise of Ian’s helicopter, were also there. Mac moved off with the troops to the site of the ambush where he found the bodies of Nick Smith and Sergeant Major Timitiya. In the meanwhile, I had collected the one and only terrorist captured thus far. He was an SAANC man who had panicked during the firefight and had been found and arrested by locals living in a small tribal village about eight kilometres away.
Hoffy and I landed at the ambush site when trackers confirmed the area safe and terrorists well clear. They had left this position in the direction that should have taken them directly to the ambush positions Ken Pierson had prepared. I joined in on an inspection of the contact site that showed the terrorists had moved across open ground, which they had obviously selected as ideal killing ground for a prepared ambush. They then orbited in a wide left-hand circuit and setup a crescent-shaped ambush along the edge of a line of scrub overlooking the selected killing ground. Here they dug shallow shell-scrapes to await the arrival of troops they knew must be close by, because they had heard Hoffy’s helicopter deploying Nick’s callsign at the fence.
The terrorists may have been forced to initiate the ambush early when troops of the left echelon were about to bump the right side of their ambush line. By this time, however, Nick and Timitiya were abreast of the RPD machine-guns clustered at the centre of the ambush line. Nick was totally exposed with no cover at all whereas Timitiya was next to a lone tree. The firefight that ensued was intense and it was clear that Nick and Timitiya had used deliberately aimed conservative fire, whereas the other troops had expended their limited issue of ammunition. In retrospect the standard issue of two full magazines and only twenty rounds of reserve ammunition was way too little for situations such as this. It was a hard-learned lesson!
Clearly the eight dead terrorists, five with RPD machineguns, in the centre of the ambush line had been taken out by deadly accurate fire from Nick and Timitiya. The tree that Timitiya had used to steady himself whilst firing his MAG machine-gun from the hip was riddled with bullet strikes high above his head with just one single graze mark from the round that struck him in the head. Most bullet strikes to his body had occurred after death. Judging from his line of spent cartridges, Nick had run directly towards the ambush line before he went down because, without any cover, outright aggression must have been his only option.
Of greatest concern was that Nick’s VHF radio had been taken by the terrorists. Also taken was Nick’s FN rifle, Timitiya’s MAG and a number of packs which had been thrown off when the firing started. The capture of SF clothing by the terrorists posed a greater problem than the radio, because all spare batteries were still in the possession of one of the RAR survivors.
Only when the loss of the radio became known was Hoffy able to make sense of a VHF call he had received from an African male asking him to come and pick up wounded men. The caller had used the word ‘helicopter’ instead of the usual ‘Cyclone 7’ when a caller did not know a helicopter pilot’s personal callsign. Hoffy had tried to get this caller to give him a locstat (grid reference) of his position. There was no reply so Hoffy got on with what he was doing.
There was plenty of evidence to show that a number of wounded terrorists had left the ambush site with the main body. Along the trail an RAR tracker detected drag marks leading to a clump of scrub off to one side of tracks that showed the group had been walking in single file. Here the bodies of two more terrorists were found. I popped in to take a photograph of these bodies on my way back to Point 222.
A sudden change in course by the terrorists, who had been heading directly for the RAR ambush sites on the Nata River, must have been induced by the sound of the gunfire that killed Ken Pierson. A tracker-combat group under Lieutenant Bill Winall picked up on the tracks from the Nata River at around 10 o’clock.