test please delete

[Diver]

It was over amonth by the time that they called us up.
Telegram to pick up tickets at Heathrow for Jo'burg where we would be met.
Only five turned up, Porky had been killed in a moterbike accident the week before, although we didn't find that out until his replacement met us in SA a week later.

[Diver]

Porky had been a great guy, the nickname wasn't because of his size, he was only a small man but with a big immagination. (Porky Pies) get it
Miss his stories and his weird sense of humour.
He once cought a warthog and chucked it into an SA officers tent for a Laugh.
The Officer was asleep at the time and shot the tip of his own thumb off while trying to fend off the enraged hog with one hand and shoot it with the other.
The officer had double duties on watches after that to stop wild beasties sneaking into camp, He never did find out the truth

[Diver]

Anyway, we were set up at a camp on the border with Rhodesia ok! Zimbabwe, and festered in the heat there for another few weeks waiting for intel.
All of The supplies and equipment were already there when we arrived, except for, you guessed it, Bl00dy toilet paper. That arrived a week later along with a case of germaline that we had to back order, I swear by that stuff now.

[Diver]

Intel came in eventually and we were briefed on the snatch.
We had all assumed that it was going to be someone high up in Mugabi's government. It wasn't.
The Cubans had been sending so called advisors into the Africas, trying to promote communist states for years, in fact they had even sent in military units to aid Uganda in the mid seventies.

[Diver]

They had been noticeable by their absence for a few years though and the west was worried about escalations due to Castro's interference.
The yanks were still denying at this time that they were supporting the SA government, "I think they still are denying it"

Well the op was to pick up one of these senior advisors and bring him back for questioning. Not Questioned by us I might add.
Were were ordered to gag the prisoner and not to talk to him or near him.

[Diver]

Well I won't go into certain details of the op, Ie. where from but we got the guy back and handed him over.
They brought him back to camp a week later and we were ordered to escort him back to ******.
He was a mercenary
They had wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds to pick up a contractor that had deserted from castro's Ugandan force in 75 or whenever, If they had offered him 500 a week he would have worked for them
Anyway we had a good chat with him on the way back to ***** and he told us in very good english that he now had two jobs.

[Diver]

Have to print off some photo's for wifey now

[Diver]

Shame we missed porky's funeral, apparently a few of the Icecream boys turned up for it, but there you go.
The diamond dealers took back over our contract after the gov op, and we lived in style for a while on escort duty bringing consignments into SA so that they could be shipped abroad.
Never knew how many diamonds we escorted over the borders but it must have been millions of pounds worth.

[Diver]

Ambushed a couple of times at the source but only minor injuries, and the money was good anyway.
Got into one firefight when we hit a roadblock and Lofty who was driver at the time tried to ram through and turned the truck over.
We were taking hits from both sides of the road but were lucky the truck we were in and the one we hit shielded us from most of it.
Kurt, a big german that was on the payrole at the time was in the rear and opened up like rambo with a 30 laughing like a maniac.
Iwas shotgun and managed to crawl through to the back and sent a couple of RPG's into the brush on the right side of the road (setting fire to the canvas at the same time

[Diver]

Lofty started shouting at me "put the fire out, put the feckin fire out", I shouted back sod the bl00dy consignment, leave it burn.
Grenades was all he shouted back and I started throwing dirt over the burning canvas.
I'd forgotten the case of RP grenades I'd spilled out.
Lofty leant through from the cab with a tiny fire extinguisher and blasted the flames. It worked.
Lofty threw me his M16 and started to scrabble his way through to the back.
I opened up with the M16 and strafed the opposite side of the road, the M16 fires NATO standard 5.56 mm ammunition and is very smooth weapon to use, Just has no punch through.
Lofty snatched the m16 back off me and shouted "see if you can get through on the radio, and started firing.
I was firing my revolver through the open back of the truck as i searched for the radio and everything went quiet.
a UN convoy including a couple of APC's had turned up and stopped about 200 yards down the road, Boy I loved those guys right then.