A song in the morning

* **

Inside the operations room at the Hoedspruit base, home of 31 Squadron (helicopters), they followed a familiar routine.

The Puma was tasked to take off in the late afternoon, and to reach the point of the border incursion before dusk. The quarry was to be given time to move away from the frontier and so to be unaware of the military movement behind them.

The Puma was a good old workhorse, with improvised replacement parts it had flown for eighteen years in South Africa's colours.

In the thrash of the rotors it took off into the low slanted sun. Behind the two pilots were eight White soldiers of the Recce Commando, a dog handler with his golden labrador, and a skeletal Bushman. The Bushman wore only shorts, his shock of black hair was ringed by a green tennis sweat band. He spoke his own language only, that of the Kavango region of South West Africa.

The officer commanding the hunting team had been given an exact reference for the border incursion.

As they were coming in to land, as they looked ahead into Botswana, the pilots could see a car parked on a dirt track, and pulling away from it were a land rover and an estate car.

It took the Bushman only a few minutes to be sure of his starting point. When it became too dark for him the dog would take over the tracking.

It was not a difficult trail to follow.

Ros drove into the poorly lit one street of Warmbaths.

They checked into a hotel. They took single rooms.

At the reception desk, as they wrote false names and false addresses in the book, Ros remarked to the owner that they were breaking the journey north west to the Ebenezer Dam where her brother and his friend would be fishing.