Survivor: The Autobiography (33 page)

Following my bout of malaria I was also struck with some pretty uncomfortable dysentery, but by New Year’s Day I was fit again, the boats had been made ready, the engines tested, the crews briefed and a great crowd gathered on the Island of Mimosa near the capital to watch our fight with Kinsuka, first of the thirty-two cataracts of the Livingstone Falls that cover more than 200 miles between Kinshasa and the Atlantic. Assisting us on much of the stretch were the two Hamilton water jet boats. They had been designed in New Zealand and built in Britain. These 220 horsepower, fast and highly manoeuvrable craft were to be a vital part of the forthcoming operation.

At 11.00 hours
La Vision
passed easily through the narrows where the river had now been constricted from something like nine miles wide to one mile across. Running down a smooth tongue of water, the inflatables skirted the line of tossing twenty-foot waves that rose and fell in the centre of the river. Acting as rescue boats the jet craft lay in the lee of weed-covered boulders. Gerry Pass and Eric Rankin, the Survival–Anglia television team, had been positioned on one of these tiny islands to get a really first-rate shot of the drama, which they did when
David Gestetner
appeared with her white ensign fluttering. On the shore an elderly English lady missionary, overcome with emotion, is said to have burst into tears and then fainted at the sight. However, I put this down to the fact that the
Gestetner
’s crew were Royal Marines!

As the boat crossed the first fall, her stern engine struck a submerged rock which hurled it upwards off its wooden transom. The flaying propeller sliced through the neoprene fabric of the stern compartment, which deflated immediately. Aboard the jet we could not understand the cause of the trouble, but we could see the great raft was being swept out of control into the angry wave towers that we knew must be avoided at all costs. In a second Jon Hamilton, our skipper, had opened the throttle and driven the eighteen-foot boat straight into the pounding mounds of coffee-coloured water.

I could see Mike Gambier in the water; his white crash helmet and red life jacket showing clearly, he bobbed amongst the flying spray. Our sister jet, driven by Ralph Brown, was already making for him with a scramble-net down the side. Lieutenant Nigel Armitage-Smith was standing by to pull him in. The deafening roar of water and engines drowned all commands. Everyone was acting instinctively now.
David Gestetner’s
skipper was trying to pass us a line, his face contorted as he yelled against the din.

Suddenly I heard Ken Mason yell, ‘Watch out!’ I looked up and saw an enormous wave had flung the crippled
Gestetner
forward and upward, straight towards us. For a moment she towered above, riding a fearsome wall of falling white water, and then came crashing down with a great ‘ponk’ right across us. For a second we were locked together in the tempest, but then we managed to wriggle from beneath and circle our quarry once again. This time we succeeded in taking the line and were soon dragging the craft like a stricken whale towards Monkey Island, where we managed to do the necessary emergency repairs. In fact, we were probably the first men ever to reach this large jungle-covered island, isolated in the middle of the rapids.

The next day, with all well again, we set off downriver. Rapid followed rapid as we cautiously felt our way through the treacherous waters that gurgled and swirled between the banks of black rock. To get the necessary supplies into the boats meant relays of overland teams working outwards from the capital in our very tired Land-Rovers and a few Toyota trucks that had been kindly lent to us. Wildlife was not much in evidence but on 2 January we did come across some islands literally alive with huge bats. There were thousands of them festooning the trees, and when I fired a flare from my signal pistol, the hideous creatures took off and showered us with their excreta. It is interesting that Stanley reported great flocks of birds in this area; I think that in fact he saw these colonies of bats. They must have had a twelve-inch wing span, and were obviously of value to the Zaïrois because we could see nets set up on tall poles at the side of the river to catch them.

In the days that followed we shot more rapids and avoided the most ferocious waves and water I’ve ever met. For each the drill was the same: air reconnaissance by Beaver, then the jets would take the skippers ahead to examine the heaving inconsistent flood and the swirling whirlpools that went up to thirty yards across. On either side vertical cliffs of red rock rose for hundreds of feet and fish eagles shrieked their yodelling cries as we passed. Meanwhile, our support teams worked day and night to get fuel and supplies into us over the deeply rutted tracks. In my log for Friday, 3 January I recorded a typical day’s sailing:

On 6 January we reached Isangila, the falls that had forced Stanley to abandon his boats and march over the mountains to the sea. Here I decided reluctantly to move the giant rafts overland as far as the Yalala Falls, leaving the jets and the Avon dinghies to tackle the ferocious stream alone. The giant craft simply hadn’t got the power to manoeuvre in these rushing currents and boiling water. In no time, one of the dinghies was ripped open from stem to stern on razor-sharp rocks and Jim Masters was injured. That night it took 900 stitches and a gallon of Araldite adhesive to repair the damaged boat. Jim drank a little J & B and recovered!

It was late afternoon when our jets entered the relatively clear passage that would take us through the terrible Isangila cataract. We were halfway down when I saw two gigantic waves converging on our bows. With a crash they struck simultaneously, hurling the 3,000-pound boat upwards. I fell across Jon Hamilton, knocking him momentarily from the wheel, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Pam almost go over the side. Then as we hit the water again there was another huge wave towering ahead of us. For a moment I thought we were done for. It was a monster. The wall of water smashed over us blotting out the daylight; somehow we were still afloat. There was a strange silence; the engine had died. Ahead a line of black rocks rose like dragon’s teeth on the lip of a fall and we were being swept straight towards them. Jon tried desperately to start the engine, his face creased with concern. Fortunately on the third attempt it fired. It only stuttered for a minute, but it was long enough for us to get into an eddy behind a huge boulder, where we could hold position whilst the electric bilge pumps baled us out.

Finally even the jets were halted by shallows and reefs at the Inga Rapid, but with two more short portages and some excellent warping with long ropes, we got the amazing Avon recce boats through to the foot of the biggest obstacle in the entire river, Yalala. A mile of water boiling over terraces and through jagged rocks at frightening speed greeted us. Meanwhile our giant rafts had been carried by a Zaïre army lorry to within two miles of the river. Here we regrouped. Some of us had marched over the crystal mountains just as Stanley’s men had done. We experienced the same elephant grass, endless rolling hills, ridges and sharp, suet-coloured quartz rocks underfoot that give these highlands its name. We too stumbled and fell on the slippery boulders at the river’s edge. Ken Mason suffered a badly ripped arm and I injured my back. Porters, descendants of the people who had helped Stanley, assisted us.

At last we all came to the Yalala Falls, where the sappers were already clearing a way for us to carry the giant boats down to the river. For three days we toiled in the blistering heat with pick, spade and crowbar, and even some highly unstable dynamite, to clear the boulders and get the giant rafts to the water. Supporting us during this operation was our American officer, Captain Tom Mabe. Tom and his colleague, Sergeant John Connor, had come with us throughout the journey. Both were in the US Special Forces and were useful members of our team, although I fear at times we must have driven them mad. Tom had managed to get hold of the explosive, but it was delivered at the Inga dam construction site and had to be driven to the river over a bumpy track.

It was late at night when Pam, Ken and I set out in a Land-Rover with at least two broken springs. In the back were large boxes of sticky, sweating dynamite and one crate of whisky. The vehicle lights didn’t work particularly well and as we motored along the rutted road in the night, Ken began to ask about the dangers of premature initiation. We soon convinced him that our journey was likened to that shown so graphically in the film,
The Wages of Fear
.

‘Oh my God,’ he said, seizing a bottle of J & B from the back and clutching it between his legs.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Pam.

‘Well, I may as well get drunk and protect my courting tackle at the same time,’ rejoined our jovial photographer as we bounced along with our lethal cargo. The nervous tension made us roar with laughter and swig deep gulps of the bottle.

Pam at this point looked very much like a boy, with her hair covered in mud and her shirt in grease. In fact some Italian engineers whom we had met had referred to her as ‘Fred the mechanic’ and I don’t think they really understood that she was a girl. Earlier in the expedition a chief had greeted her with ‘
Bonjour, monsieur
’, but her confidence was restored when we discovered he was almost blind!

Finally, with sixty porters beneath each huge boat, we moved them like giant caterpillars down a 1,000-foot slope to the river. Here we joined up with the Avon dinghies that had been portaged or controlled by lines through the surging white water towards us. Now only three rapids barred our way to the sea, but with up to sixteen million gallons per second pouring through a gorge which had narrowed the river to a bare 400 yards, the power can be imagined. Indeed the depth here was probably about 140 feet at high water. The river seemed to be alive with great boiling bubbles rushing up from the depths and erupting on the surface. Then as quickly as they came they were replaced by whirlpools and swirling currents.

Our porters, many of them Angolan refugees and some almost certainly Freedom Fighters, came with gifts of sugarcane wine and fruit to see us off, but the river was not going to let us get away unscathed yet.

In the final rapid,
La Vision
, my flagship, was momentarily trapped in a whirlpool, like a cork in a washtub, being bent downwards and spun round and round with engines screaming. Before I could stop them coming down Alun Davies’s Avon was capsized by a fifteen-foot wave. The upturned boat with its crew of three clinging to it was swept towards a yawning whirlpool. The jets at this point had been sent back to Kinshasa, and from where I was situated 1,000 yards downriver, I couldn’t see what had happened. However the following recce boat saw the accident and its skipper, Neil Rickards, a Royal Marine corporal, decided to have a go. Taking his own small craft through the mountains of tossing water, he managed to get right into the whirlpool and circle around inside it, rather like a motorcyclist in a ‘wall of death’ at a fairground. In the centre of this swirling mass he could see Alun’s capsized Avon with its crew of three still clinging on frantically to the lifeline. Eventually, by going the same way that the water was revolving, Neil managed to get his craft alongside the stricken boat so that Bob Powell and Somue, one of the ZLOs, could pull the three men to safety. Then he circled up again in the same direction that the water was turning and out of the top. As they left he looked back and was just in time to see the upturned craft disappear down the vortex. Downriver, I was surprised a few moments later when the capsized boat bobbed up from the river bed beside me. The engine was smashed to pieces, the floorboards wrecked and there appeared to be no survivors. But the crew had all been saved thanks to Neil’s courage and skill, for which he was later awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and made one of Britain’s ‘Men of the Year’.