Gunship Ace

by Al Venter

  It was also the first time he had sat at the controls of an Mi-8. Fortunately, Pete Minnaar had spent time with Executive Outcomes in Angola and was experienced on these helicopters. He ended up giving the crew the full technical conversion course in their kitchen. They were also briefed by Zarif and his military cronies on what they were going to be doing and exactly what was expected.

  Nellis takes up the story:

  Essentially, he said, our job was to ferry supplies into garrisons in the interior that were under attack by the Serbians. At that point somebody raised the issue of the promised second support chopper as we’d only seen one on the improvised flight line Suddenly he started back-pedalling. He said something about some Russians also flying for them and that they were using it but he couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, tell us anything definite.

  We also told Zarif that the chopper we’d seen on the pad wasn’t the right colour for the kind of military operations he envisaged. The machine still had its original Aeroflot paint job, much of it blue and white, and we demanded that it be black all over. We’d be flying at night, we explained, and we didn’t want to give the opposition the opportunity to shoot at something that would stand out like a neon sign should there be moonlight.

  Zarif said he’d think about it, although he did produce a couple of Russian NVGs which he believed were OK. We thought they were not as streamlined as we were accustomed to and weighed too much. Fortunately, we’d brought with us some Litton NVGs from South Africa. We still had to adapt the helicopter’s interior lighting system with green LEDs to make the cockpit as NVG compatible as possible, something that was tackled by Phil and Pete.

  It didn’t take the South Africans long to accept that while morale within the Bosnian Army was at a broadly acceptable level, discipline throughout was poor. Quite often, Nellis recalls, the soldiers would start shooting into the air for no reason or someone would throw a grenade or two because it was what he felt like doing. Nellis sensed that part of it might have been a reaction to the nightly bombardments to which the population was being subjected. The Serbs were using some heavy stuff, including 155mm guns, and Zenica was at the receiving end of artillery and mortar bombardments just about every night. Usually, the Serbian Army would fire five or six rounds and then there would be a lull. That could last minutes or even several hours, and then it would start all over again. While there was a steady flow of casualties, the city’s inhabitants seemed to have become accustomed to rounds falling about their buildings.

  Although the Bosnians demanded that the new arrivals be put through their paces on the Mi-8 ‘Hip’ to demonstrate that they could actually fly the machine, Nellis didn’t feel that he needed to disclose that he had never flown a Hip before. As he reckoned, he had a basic understanding of the chopper and although he tended to overshoot quite a lot at first, with some high-nose attitudes, it took only a couple of approaches to master the right speed. He did one 30-minute daytime flight and another after dark and it was quite exciting, he recalls

  One of the immediate concerns among the newcomers was the acknowledged anti-aircraft capability of their adversaries, the Serbians. A series of sophisticated radar-guided SAM systems had been installed at vantage points in the mountains throughout the region and, by all accounts, there were a lot of them. Nellis had long been aware that SAM8s were one of the better Soviet anti-aircraft weapons systems, especially against low-flying aircraft. As he explained: ‘We had seen what these missiles were capable of in Angola. We were familiar with the threat—the weapon was deadly, especially in the right hands.’ He continued:

  Although the local people said they were still trying to get us another chopper, we split ourselves into two crews. I’d fly with Jakes, who was designated commander, and Phil Scott while the other crew would be Mike, Jaco and Piet.

  Meanwhile, Jakes and Jaco approached Zarif again to discuss the support helicopter that had originally been promised, and they were adamant. They were still serving members of the South African Air Force and technically ‘on vacation’, they told him, so their concern about going down and being taken captive by the Serbs was real. Should that happen, it would be a huge embarrassment for them personally and, of course, for the South African government as well. For that reason alone, they declared, a second Mi-8 had to be produced if they were to go ahead with the contract. This development reflected some of their concerns about their role as a whole. It was obvious that the work involved was dangerous, critically so. That they accepted. However, they also felt that their hosts had to meet the criteria that had originally been agreed upon.

  Their immediate problem with Zarif was that he had broken a cardinal promise on which the entire operation hinged. Before leaving Johannesburg, the team had been assured by Slade Healy that every flight would be a two-ship operation. On arriving in Zenica, however, that was countermanded by Zarif. He declared that it was not possible to have two helicopters airborne at the same time. He argued that his forces did not have the necessary resources to deploy two choppers for a single operation, which the South Africans felt was duplicitous. Further, he told the group that the matter was a fait accompli. The subject warranted no further discussion, he said bluntly.

  ‘That was that,’ recalls Nellis. ‘The man had said his piece and we were obliged to accept. However, since we’d always been accustomed to flying in pairs, in some of the remotest corners of the globe, his backtracking on that vital issue caused our first real rift with our employers.’

  However, that was not all that bothered the South Africans. The other matter they had raised, said Nellis, was that of the radio set. They had been assured that there was a High Frequency radio set at the apartment. The equipment was needed for the guys who stayed behind so that they could monitor flights to make sure there were no problems. The way they worked was that one team would go out and the other would keep track as things unfolded. However, the South Africans were given VHF equipment, which was limited to line-of-sight reception. Consequently, once the aircraft went into the hills the crew would have no communication with their people. That really bothered the pilots and they said as much. No radio set ever materialized.

  The first flight was taken up by Mike, Jaco and Pete from a sports field in the heart of Zenica, late in September 1995. The weather wasn’t kind. The helicopter was loaded with ammunition and medical supplies. However, they were hardly airborne before they had to return to base because of a powerful weather front that had closed in. They were stymied for the rest of the day and after dark a mist enveloped the hills. With winter almost upon them, bad flying conditions were inevitable, but this was a lot worse than they’d anticipated.

  The next evening, things improved and they tried a second time. This time they made it to Gorazde, their destination. Although the flight was only about 35 minutes each way, with another 15 minutes or so on the ground for offloading, it was about as problematic as it gets. Things weren’t helped by the fact that the LZ into which they were supposed to go was perched on the side of a hill. The reasoning behind this, as offered by their hosts, was something to do with protection against enemy snipers. Mike Hill recalled afterwards that it was a very difficult approach: ‘We had ground fire coming up at us just about all the way … the chopper was hit several times but there was no serious damage. In the end, we brought out a batch of sick and wounded troops and some civilians.’

  On touchdown back at Zenica, the South Africans became overnight celebrities: everybody wanted to pump their hands and, Islamic or not, buy them hefty shots of slivovitz. However, it was during their debriefing that they realized that their mission wasn’t as straightforward as they might have hoped. In fact, it was a lot dodgier than any of them had anticipated because in getting to the target areas, they had to cross several rows of enemy lines, which stretched from the Yugoslavian border all the way to Sarajevo and beyond. Worse, nothing was in a straight line. Mike Hills said that they were required ‘to fly a jagged, winding course that more or less followed the road fro
m the border’. He continued:

  A second, more persistent issue was the deployment of enemy forces around Gorazde itself. Once the helicopter had crossed the first hurdle, enemy troops dug into positions around Gorazde would have been told by radio that there was a helicopter heading their way, so the Serbs would be waiting for us, having been allowed about 15 minutes to prepare for our arrival. Consequently, there would be quite a volume of incoming fire heading for us as we approached.

  Getting to the target LZ was only half the battle. Mike continued:

  Whether that first leg of the sortie was successful or not, we still had to bring the chopper back to Zenica, our home base. So the chances of us getting hit whenever we took the machine out were just about a hundred per cent.

  Because Serb defences around Gorazde were not as concentrated to the immediate west of the enclave, the crew thought that the best route on the return leg would be over the mountains towards the coast. Just then, however, the weather turned nasty again, so they had no alternative but to follow more or less the same flight path home that they had used on the way in. The other possibility was to go high and seek cloud cover, but that would have meant flying blind in the mountains and it just wasn’t an option. Also, Serb radar would have picked them up in a jiffy and the Serbs would have been able to fire their SAMs.

  It didn’t take the South Africans long to accept that since there were no airfields or let-down facilities anywhere between Gorazde and Zenica, their options were constrained, severely, as it transpired. It was a hell of a way to be earning bucks, the guys joked afterwards. Writing about his experiences in the Balkans a few years later, Nellis said that the stark reality of almost certainly being shot down at some stage or other meant that some members of the group were seriously unhappy with the setup in the Balkans. He continued:

  Going into a strange country about which none of us knew shit and dealing with people who didn’t speak English, made us decide very early on that if one of us was unhappy with the situation, then we’d all be unhappy. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it did create something of a common bond.

  It was also agreed that if they couldn’t sort things out, they would all leave. Obviously, it didn’t help that they could not really trust their hosts because they had gone back on their word more than once. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘they’d lied fluently from the start, and we knew that in their eyes, we were expendable.’

  Consequently, the mercenary group felt that if they stuck together, their chances of success would be better, especially if they had to make a dash for it. Nellis continues:

  A few nights after Mike’s mission, it was our turn, with the crew consisting of me, Jakes and Phil. Again, Gorazde was our objective. This time the weather was perfect and we left for the helipad just before sundown. We’d already seen how these people operated so we decided to supervise the loading of the helicopter and do a proper pre-flight check ourselves before it became too dark.

  The helicopter had, meanwhile, been moved to a hilltop outside the town where it was out of sight of anyone who didn’t need to know what was happening. However, intelligence was coming through that the Serbs were being informed by their own sources or, possibly, observation posts in the surrounding hills each time we lifted off. Consequently, nobody had to tell us that the bastards would open fire the moment we approached their positions.

  Leaving Zenica that night was an event. We were just about to cross the first line of Serb defences when we came under some really heavy fire. What was coming up at us wasn’t just cursory, it was big stuff. We could hear the bird take hits, you couldn’t miss it. It was like somebody using a giant hammer on the fuselage.

  This was not the ‘typing pool’ clatter of AKs.

  I felt a heavy thump underneath my seat accompanied by a loud bang. A moment later ‘Natasha’ started screeching.1We knew enough about cockpit warning systems to be aware that something was seriously wrong and, while we couldn’t detect any immediate damage because all the instruments seemed in order, Jakes decided that it might be better to take her back. It was a sudden, impulsive move. Although we were flying a bit high, he turned and dived towards the ground. Luckily, there was a full moon and we couldn’t miss the ground coming up at us. Once we’d levelled out, we stayed low to reduce the threat of incoming fire.

  As it happened, Jakes’ decision wasn’t the best option facing the South Africans. What he’d done was turn the helicopter directly towards enemy gun emplacements. More rounds followed and after taking more punishment, the Hip finally moved out of range. Nellis takes up the story again:

  Back at base, nobody was chuffed with this performance. We’d come back without completing a mission. An immediate result was that we got nothing for our efforts even though the flight was about as perilous as any that I’d experienced in my career. The passengers in the back were even more shaken by the time they emerged; they’d been sitting on three tons of explosive mortar and artillery rounds.

  The team waited several days for the chopper to be repaired and then tried again.

  We had just got to the LZ when the weather started to close in once more. This time Jakes told the Bosnians that neither he nor anybody else was prepared to take her up in those conditions and we were promptly taken back to the house.

  Zarif was furious, and the pilots accepted that he probably had a right to be. In the four weeks that the crew had been in Bosnia, the South Africans had notched up one successful flight. Apart from losing money, Zarif had also lost face with his own people.

  At a confab later that night, Jakes decided that he wasn’t prepared to go on. He told us that he wanted to return home and that was that. We had sensed it coming over the previous weeks because relations with Zarif had deteriorated to the point where he had become both obnoxious and aggressive. He insulted the men, once or twice in public. At one stage he threatened us with arrest if we didn’t fly.

  We stood by our earlier decision that if somebody decided to pull out, the rest would follow. I wasn’t too happy with the idea because I needed the money, but once the decision had been made, that was it. Actually, I was desperate, but since none of the others were prepared to hang in there, and I didn’t have the experience on type to try it alone, I ended up on the plane back to Zagreb with the rest of the gang.

  CHAPTER NINE

  EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES IN WEST AFRICA

  ‘It was November 1995 and the outlook couldn’t have been bleaker’, recalls Neall Ellis.

  I had no job, no money, I didn’t want to go back to work on the farm, the fishing issue was history and Zelda had left me and moved to Stellenbosch on her own. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue what to do next. Then the ‘phone rang.

  The call that came from Ibis Air, the aviation component of Executive Outcomes (EO), was from somebody I knew from way back and who asked whether I was doing anything just then. I hesitated briefly so as not to appear over-eager and answered something about being busy, but what did he have in mind? He suggested that I get myself to Pretoria the next day and find out. I didn’t have the money for the air fare, so I borrowed some cash from a neighbour and headed to Cape Town Airport.

  In one respect, the approach puzzled me. Early on, while EO was still working in Angola, they had spoken to me about taking a contract to fly gunships against the guerrilla forces of Dr Jonas Savimbi. The UNITA leader was somebody I’d worked with in the past and whom I both liked and admired for the consistent stand he’d made against a government that had been a Soviet client-state from the first day they had taken over from the Portuguese. It was Moscow that had helped to bring the ruling MPLA political party to power, so in my eyes this was a puppet regime. As events have subsequently proved, I was right.

  I couldn’t help but refuse the EO offer, even though it was lucrative and money was short. I told EO that it would have meant going operational against somebody who had been a trusted ally in our Border War and, by my book, you don’t just start killing your friends because somebody offers you the
cash to do so. These were pretty harsh words and I never thought they’d actually approach me a second time. However, they did.

  I was told that the new job had nothing to do with Savimbi or Angola. The deployment would be in Sierra Leone. I was obviously pleased because I wouldn’t have to consider going against my conscience this time round.

  Once Nellis arrived in Pretoria, it was explained to him that a particularly brutal bunch of rebels was in the process of murdering civilians in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone. Moreover, they were doing so at an astounding rate and there didn’t appear to anybody able or willing to stop them. ‘Sierra Leone was remote, corrupt and inefficient,’ Nellis declared, ‘and from what I understood, everything centred around diamonds, which were abundant in the country’.

  The EO contact told Nellis that although the UN had a large number of men there, the force was all but moribund. ‘They couldn’t organise a good crap if their lives depended on it’, commented another of the men present at the meeting.

  Sadly, as I was soon to discover, all this was true. The last time the UN had fought a decent war was in the Congo, and that was 30 years earlier. The EO personnel manager explained that if I were willing to leave for Sierra Leone almost immediately, they would offer me a contract to fly choppers there and to become part of a fairly large component of aviators already active against the rebels.

  Ibis Air, the company running the aviation side of things—as opposed to the mercenaries who were actually doing the ground work against the rebel force—was British owned and, as Nellis was to discover, ran a pretty tight ship.

  Ibis’ directors had acquired two practically new Boeing 737s from surplus stock in the United States for US$1 million. The only problem with them was that their engines exceeded newly imposed FAA noise-limitation regulations. That effectively resulted in both aircraft being put out to pasture. Ibis snapped them up for use in the African conflicts in which the company was involved, both in Angola and Sierra Leone. The two passenger jets were used to move mercenaries and their supplies from South Africa to the various operational areas to the north.