Massacre at Umtali (Soldier of Fortune #1)

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  Jim Rainey was an ex-marine from Texas who made his living doing what he did best—fighting. Now he was in Rhodesia, signing up for a nice fat fee as leader of a special anti-terrorist squad.

  The men under his command were a bunch of steel-hard killers like himself, the kind of men you don’t turn your back on even when you’re facing the enemy. Their target—a homicidal maniac known as ‘Colonel’ Gwanda and his murderous band of guerillas.

  When the fighting was over, Rainey would be a very rich man … if he lived.

  SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 1: MASSACRE AT UMTALI

  By Peter McCurtin

  First published by Tower Books in 1976

  Copyright © 1976, 2022 by Peter McCurtin

  This electronic edition published February 2022

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Series Editor: David Whitehead

  Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.

  Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books

  Chapter One

  I GOT OFF the plane at Salisbury Airport and stood blinking in the bright Rhodesian sunshine. Most of the passengers on the South African jet were mercenaries—soldiers of fortune—like myself. I had flown from New York to Johannesburg, where I changed planes. Everything had been arranged in New York, and the immigration officials in the terminal building already had my photograph. It was clipped to a photostat of the letter my “recruiter” had sent from the States.

  “Welcome to Rhodesia, sir,” the immigration man said. He stood up and shook hands with me. That’s how it is in Rhodesia right now. They love Americans, especially Americans who know how to kill.

  These days Rhodesia is filled with strange characters. In a way it’s like what the Old West must have been like, with honest immigrants and adventurers and killers and loonies drifting in from all over the world. Some arrive legally, as I did. Others sneak across the border from South Africa, and the security johnnies don’t try to stop them unless they’re black, figuring they’ll have to fight if push comes to shove, which could happen if the neighboring black-run countries decide to stage an invasion. The security boys go easy on passports and ID documents, but they look hard at faces. For instance, any notorious fugitive from South Africa or the United States will be grabbed and held for extradition. The Rhodesians are particularly eager to make friends with the Yanks, as they invariably describe any American whether he’s from Vermont or Alabama. When I arrived there on January 24 1976, Americans were fast becoming the most popular bunch of mercenaries in the country. As one Rhodesian regular army captain said to me a few days after my plane landed at Salisbury, “I’ve served with a lot of your chaps—and they’ll do just fine. Vietnam may have been a frightful mess for you Americans, but I think it will prove to be a godsend for Rhodesia.”

  Yeah, they like American pro soldiers in Rhodesia. Even my taxi driver, a Rhodesian citizen with a clipped Belfast accent, told me how welcome I was in his country. This guy was just one of Rhodesia’s great assembly of wild characters. They tell me Rhodesia is a very law abiding country even with a savage terrorist war going on. I was ready to believe it when I saw the clean, flower-bordered streets of Salisbury. Salisbury is a small city and traffic jams are no problem, but I noticed how all the citizens, black and white, wait patiently for the lights to change from red to green. And the taxi cabs don’t cruise around, making horse’s asses of themselves like they do in New York.

  I came out of the air terminal with two British mercs ahead of me. I got the next taxi in the rank, and drew the Belfast Irishman. That tweed cap he was wearing must have come with him from the Old Sod; you don’t see anything like it in Rhodesia. Man, was this guy ever Irish! The mists of Ireland had given him a rosy complexion, and the Rhodesian sun had added its own shade of red, and that good black Guinness stout had given him a waistline like a sack of spuds. He didn’t say, “Top of the mornin’,” or any of that Hollywood-Irish bullshit. What he did was twist around in his seat, stick out a hairy paw, and say, “It’s good having you on our side, Yank.”

  I pumped his hand and said thanks. I didn’t say, “Thanks, Paddy,” because the micks hate that.

  “By the living Christ I’d give anything to go where you’re going,” he said.

  “You mean Army Headquarters?”

  “Not a-tall, man,” the Belfast man said. “By the look of you I know you’re going to Army HQ to sign on.” His tone grew confidential. “When you’re on a job like this you get to know a man by the look of him. You even get to know if the Army’ll take a man or not. Ah, you should see some of the lads I drive down there to HQ. They come in all shapes and sizes and talking all kind of lingo. Naturally—what else—they all think they’re tough as boarding house steak, but I can size them up pretty good. A lot of them don’t get past the first question the recruiting officers puts to them.” The Irishman was wheeling the taxi expertly through the neat Salisbury streets. I noticed that he hadn’t put the flag down on the meter, but didn’t say anything about it.

  He glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. “When I said I envied you, Yank, I wasn’t just talking. Man alive, wouldn’t I like to be out there in the bush tracking down terrorists!”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake, when they gave me the physical, they told me I had some kind of kidney trouble. It wouldn’t kill me, the medical man said, but it could give me trouble—the heat, the sweating, losing all that precious water. So they gave me a choice: ‘Pat,’ they said, ‘you can stay in the country and find a job like any honest man, or you can take yourself back to Belfast.’ By finding a job they meant I should go to work on a farm, some kind of clerking job I suppose they meant, but what in hell could a city man like me do on a bloody farm? Then what could I do, they wanted to know. Drive a taxi like I’d been doing all my life. ‘Okay then, Pat,’ they said, ‘why don’t you do that.’ So I did it and am still doing it. I’m grateful they didn’t ship me back to Belfast. They didn’t even ship me back when I fessed up and admitted that I was a fugitive from British justice. The IRA, you understand. Or, come to think of it, maybe that’s why they let me stay. The British aren’t exactly loved in this country.”

  We arrived at the gate of Army headquarters and while I was fumbling in my pocket, expecting to be ripped off on the fare, the Irishman turned indignantly in his seat. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Yank? You think I’d ask a man that’s come all this way to fight for Rhodesia to pay a bloody taxi fare?”

  “Thanks, mac,” I said, and started to get out.

  “I’m a Mac all right,” he told me. “Patrick McSwiggin. If it isn’t an intrusion, what might your own name be? Or the name you go by?”

  “Jim Rainey,” I said.

  “By God,” said the mick, “I knew you were Irish.”

  “Texas-Irish,” I said.

  “Maybe someday we’ll go and fight for Ireland,” he suggested wistfully, a fat guy getting old, with a red face that said booze and blood pressure would probably get him before he reached fifty.

  “If the pay is right,” I said.

  The mick drove away in his mini-cab and I walked to the steel-framed chain-link gate that led into the military HQ. As far as I could see, the top of the link fence which surrounded the camp was topped with barbed wire. I didn’t see any sparks, but suspected the whole thing would be electrified just by flicking a switch. At intervals along the fence there were guard towers with machine guns mounted on traverse bars. Inside the fence the brown-green grass had been mowed right down to the nub. There were no trees, no shrubs, not even trash barrels—nothing to hide behind. Back about thirty feet from the gate was a cement-block house with a four-foot sandbag wall surrounding it. I saw a guy behind a machine gun looking at me while I walked to the gate. I stood there waiting for somebody to come out and ask my business. Nobody did, then an amplified voice told me to step up close to the microphone and tell them who I was, and what I wanted.

  I did that, adding that I had a letter sent from Major Helm to Mr. Ryan in New York City. They must have had my name and my date of arrival on a list because after a minute or two an army regular with corporal’s stripes came out of the blockhouse carrying a British Army Sterling submachine gun. He was a little guy, but didn’t have to be any bigger than the automatic weapon he was carrying. And the guy behind the mounted machine gun was backing him up every step of the way to the gate.

  The little corporal had a picture of me. During my talk with Mr. Ryan, one of the many recruiters back in the States, he had taken several Polaroid photos of me. This had to be one of them, the photo in the little corporal’s hand. Even so, he was as careful about letting me in as they used to be about letting people out of Alcatraz.

  There was no chain lock on the ga
te; it was operated electrically. Finally, the little corporal raised his left hand above his shoulder, still covering me with the short-barreled Sterling held in his right hand while the gate swung back smoothly on well-oiled hinges.

  After one more look—the corporal’s eyes flicked from my face to the photo in his hand—I was told I would have to be patted down. He was very polite about it—impersonal but thorough. He took the copy of my letter of introduction and compared it to his copy.

  “Right,” he said, folding both letters. He put them in the back pocket of his army issue pants. Like I said, he was a little guy, but I’d hate to get into a fight with him, with or without his Sterling, which, in its day, was one of the best mass-produced, stamped-parts weapons ever made. It was as dependable as the Sten gun that the British stole from the Czechs—and when it became the Sterling it was even more dependable and had a higher rate of fire. It was never my favorite piece, mostly because I never served in any area of operations where it was widely used. Oh, sure, I had used it, but a piece has to be right for your hands, or you don’t feel comfortable with it. But you don’t throw a good piece away: you trade it or sell it for a piece that fits your own—what’s a better word—your personality.

  The little guy cracked me the best smile he could manage with a mouth full of rotting teeth. These British, these Rhodesians, hate to go to the dentist. “Welcome to Rhodesia, Mr. Rainey,” he said. “You just stand right where you are and I’ll go back and whistle up a jeep for you. Just stand right where you are and everything will be wizard.”

  They used to say wizard in old British movies. They still do on TV. I think wizard is old-hat in Britain. That was all right: in Rhodesia yesterday’s slang is tomorrow’s inside stuff.

  After a while the Jeep came from somewhere in the camp and I climbed aboard and was driven to the office of the recruiting officer for mercenaries, Major Frank Helm. Helm is a tall, blond man with a scarred face and a briskly open manner. He’s close to sixty—but a very tough sixty. He stood up and shook hands with me when the driver directed me to his office.

  “So glad you could come,” Helm said.

  He pointed me into a chair and sat down himself. It was a very plain office, a metal desk, three chairs, one filing cabinet. The floor was wood scrubbed down to the grain; on the wall there was a tinted photograph of Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder who founded Rhodesia. The “George Washington” of Rhodesia had a walrus mustache and a gloomy look.

  My file was already on the major’s desk. It was a fairly thin file, and most of the material in it had been air-mailed from New York by Mr. Ryan. I’m not sure Mr. Ryan was really Mr. Ryan, but that was what he called himself. Helm flipped open the file. “I’ve just now been reading about you, Rainey. Impressive stuff, and no bad marks worth talking about. Born Beaumont, Texas, 1939. Both parents deceased. Married once, divorced.”

  Major Helm looked at me. “Divorced, that’s just fine,” he said. “I hate to recruit men who think only of home and mother. A chap who takes time out to moon during a firefight usually gets himself killed. And probably others as well.”

  “I’m not much for mooning, Major,” I told him.

  Helm gave me his nice-nasty grin. “Somehow I didn’t think you were. I take it you’re ready to go to work. You’ve had two years of college I see. A superior IQ rating. Why isn’t a tough, bright fellow like you making your first million in the oil business or helping them with the Alaska pipeline?”

  I suppose it was part of his business to ask questions like that. I didn’t mind; in my trade you can’t be surprised by anything, the good or the bad. “I don’t know anything about the oil business and I hate the cold. If you want a straight answer, I’m a mercenary because it’s the only trade I know. I’m thirty-seven. How many years would you say I’m good for? If I’m unlucky I may even get so old that I won’t be able to do much more than drink beer and watch the third re-runs of Gunsmoke.”

  Major Helm smiled and said, “I just can’t picture you doing that, old chap. I’d probably be doing something like that if it weren’t for the present emergency. War may have been hell for General Sherman, but it has worked wonders for my aging career. Of course once it’s over they’ll put me out to pasture.”

  Without missing a beat the major went back to my file. It didn’t take long to finish with that. Then he riffled through a stack of index cards like a poker player and looked up at me. ”I don’t suppose I could interest you in a commission in the regular Rhodesian Army? It wouldn’t pay nearly as much as you’d be getting as a mercenary. However, you’d have ever so much status. No offense, old man, but these mercs we’ve been getting are a pretty gummy lot. Oh, they fight and they kill the enemy, but I’d be pleased if you’d consider a career in the regular army. We’re looking for chaps like you, Rainey. Here in Rhodesia we take the long view. After we’ve licked these terrorist blighters there will be other problems. If you sign on with the regular army we’ll grant you immediate Rhodesian citizenship and put five hundred acres of prime land in your name. What do you say?”

  I said no. I grew up on a hardscrabble farm just outside Beaumont, Texas. That East Texas land is supposed to be rich and fruitful, but Mother Nature must have been pissed off at my great-grandfather when she put the place together. My old man may have been a lousy farmer though, Lord knows, the poor guy tried hard enough to make a go of it. I wanted no part of farming—in Texas, Rhodesia, or Glocca Morra.

  Major Helm sighed and his manner became slightly less relaxed, less buddy-buddy. He went back to his stack of index cards. There was a question in his voice when he spoke. “In Vietnam you worked with an ‘internal enemies’ unit. I think I know what it means, but our usually efficient Mr. Ryan didn’t fill in the blank spaces.”

  “I only worked with the Phoenix group for six months,” I told the major.

  He knew the name and liked it. “Oh, the Phoenix group!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that Phoenix Group. Our job was to seek out highly-placed subversives and knock them off. You know, the Viet officers and politicians who were trying to buy insurance for later by working with the Viet Cong. Most of them were guilty.”

  Major Helm smiled and I decided I didn’t like him all that much. “Naturally they were guilty, Rainey. Once you have killed a man he has to be guilty, what say?”

  I said yes and we both gave out short, phony laughs.

  “Yes, I think I have just the job for you,” the major said, taking a card from the pile. “We can’t just sign you on as a run of the mill mercenary, can we? I think you’d be just right as leader of one of our special anti-terrorist squads.”

  I didn’t know the major had a glass eye, the right one, until he winked at me with his good eye. Usually when a man winks with one eye the other one contracts too. But the slightly sinister major’s left eye stared straight ahead. “At least we’ll start you in anti-terrorism. It just might be that you’ll be working with ‘internal enemies’ before very long ...”

  “Whites?” I asked.

  “Men ... and women,” Helm said. “Would killing women distress you, Rainey?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, giving him my own nice-nasty grin. “I suppose if they were ‘internal enemies’ I’d have to like it. How many internal enemies do you think you have? I would have thought that Rhodesia was one big lump of white solidarity.”

  Helm smiled again. “You would, wouldn’t you? But there are always those whites, renegades of course, who are willing to trade with the enemy in the hope of saving their miserable skins. Not just save their skins, mind you, but to keep what they have. And then, of course, you have the white liberals. You know, the chaps who want everyone—black and white—to be the best of friends. They’re always willing to compromise with the blacks and that makes them dangerous to the security of the state. South Africa, our good friend to the south, is strong enough militarily to more or less tolerate its liberals. Here in Rhodesia I’m convinced we won’t be able for long to afford such a luxury. How do you feel about liberals, Rainey?”

  “Not much of anything,” I answered. “That doesn’t mean I want to be the commandant of an extermination camp. If that’s what you have picked out for me, Major, maybe I better take the next plane out.”