Because of the insurgency, about the only way to get around Mozambique was to take small planes. The roads were dangerous due to the threat of ambush by RENAMO guerrillas. Cars went in convoy, accompanied by soldiers in trucks. This applied to the highways to South Africa, upcountry, and along the coast from Maputo to Beira.  Outside the capital of Maputo and the major provincial capitals, nowhere was safe.  You never knew where the rebels would hit.  And, they were vicious, taking no prisoners or  torturing captives.  So, we flew. The views of Africa from above were always great.

Today, we were scheduled to fly a twin engine Cessna operated by the UN’s World Food Program to the small up-country city of Macaze in central Mozambique.   Like most of the countryside outside the capital, the area was controlled by FRELIMO government garrisons in the daylight.  But, at night, it was a different story.  Occasionally, RENAMO would dare to launch attacks against the smaller regional capitals, even in daylight.

I saw how unsafe it was on a previous trip upcountry. I had flown with the Ambassador to Tete Province in the north, near Malawi, and walked around the almost manicured small town, still looking Portuguese colonial, with white rocks marking the borders of lawns, trees painted white half way up the trunk, and small stucco houses whitewashed. Escorted by a local military convoy, we drove about twenty miles into the bush, moving along a dirt road in the heat of the day to visit a nearby village and talk to the market ladies there. It was an interesting picture, us in the Mayor’s vehicle and four green military trucks loaded with soldiers in the back trailing us. The Mayor had told us this was a safe area, but the soldiers’ faces told us otherwise. We stopped two times in route, because the soldiers thought they saw something. The visit to the village was shorter than expected, and one of the Mayor’s staff told us we were heading back early to be safe since they didn’t want to put the Ambassador in danger.

At the time, RENAMO was not happy with the U.S. government, which was viewed by them as pro-government. They were angry that we didn’t take them seriously as freedom fighters and that we had just published a detailed report cataloging their atrocities committed against civilians. It was no secret that we were increasing our aid to the FRELIMO government and listening to the Mozambican President’s claims that he was open to democratizing. This was before we started facilitating peace talks.

The purpose of the trip to Macaze was similar to that previous trip to Tete, for the Ambassador to see some U.N.-sponsored vegetable farms supported by USAID funds. She would show the flag and evaluate the project. Going with us was the American Embassy military attache, a Mozambican employee with the USAID office, and a former Mozambican Minister of Agriculture who had come over to the Embassy.  I was coming along to see the country and our programs as part of my orientation visit to the region. I was the Mozambique Desk Officer in the State Department.

I was used to flying in Africa, and had taken a lot of flights around southern Africa, most recently from Nkomati Port in South Africa just across the border from Mozambique, where locals sat on lawn chairs next to the small runway to watch small Cessnas and Pipers come and go.  A week before, I had flown in a twin engine Fokker from Lilongwe, Malawi to the refugee camps on the Mozambican border near Blantyre, clipping tops of trees on the edge of the dirt runway when we took off.  You never knew what to expect, but it would always be anything but routine.

The village of Macaze was said to have a population of about seven-thousand. It was in the central part of the country about 500 miles to the northwest of the capital. We would fly up the coast for about two hours, almost to Beira, over sugar cane fields, then turn west, inland, for another thirty minutes to the Zimbabwe border region, an area of rolling hills and grasslands bordered by the wide Zambezi river and mountains rising to the north. Further west, on the Zimbabwe border itself, were more forested regions. To the south was mainly scrub. There had been cashew groves, but these had been hit by the rebels to hurt the export economy. The skies were light blue and cloudless as we taxied out. In the far distance, to the West, there were a few high billowy cumulus cells, and these had a habit of forming into thunderstorms in the summer evenings.

The World Food Program pilot went through his checks with the Maputo airport tower as we turned onto the runway for takeoff. The engines began the high “whir” and off we rolled with a release of the brakes. As we were taking off, we could see the hulks of the faded red and white Antonov and Iluyshin passenger planes which were being cannibalized to keep the few newer planes of Mozambican Air Lines flying. We quickly gained altitude, being pushed upwards at times by the thermals. Quickly the land fell away and we could see the highways and buildings below, the cars and trucks barely visible moving along the side roads. The view to the right, on my side, was of the Indian Ocean, a mixture of turquoise and blue. The sun’s rays created a glare on the surface, but the feeling was one of peace as we flew smoothly north, the only sound the mild drone of the engines. Below me I could see we were following the coastal highway, a two lane concrete strip that ran straight north with few bends. There were no villages.

About two hours into the flight, we were bumping along, encountering what the pilot called clear air turbulence. We would be flying level, and suddenly be pushed up a few hundred feet or else have the bottom drop out for a few seconds, dropping, then climbing back up quickly. The pilot, looking at his notes on the control panel, and recognizing a landmark below where the railroad tracks went towards the interior, banked the plane gradually to the left, and we headed into the West. The sun was still pretty much straight above us, so we weren’t flying into it. The day was still clear and it made for great viewing below. We could now see the rail line making its straight line into the denser foliage and occasional small villages of maybe thirty or forty small houses. There was a dirt road off to the right, my side, to the north paralleling the tracks, and you could see a few specks on it, no doubt trucks heading inland.

We cruised along, everyone quiet, the Ambassador, a long time Africa hand, sleeping in the co-pilot seat, and after some time, the attache on my left asked me how long we had been flying. I said three hours. He raised his eyebrows and said he thought the flight was only two and one-half hours. I shrugged my shoulders, but noticed that the pilot reached over in the glove compartment in front of the co-pilot’s seat and took out a large plastic laminated map folded into eight inch squares. He unfolded it and laid it out on his lap and found the area he was looking for and looked at the map, marking a spot with his index finger on it, and looking down out his side window at the landscape below, trying obviously to get a fix. We were no longer following railroad tracks. I looked at the gas gauge, which was located on the floor between the pilot and co-pilot’s seats.  It said a bit over one half. We flew on for a while longer, and the pilot looked at his maps again and banked the plane slightly to the north, dropping a couple of thousand feet to follow the dirt road going inland. He asked the Mozambican passenger in back if he had ever flown to Macaze before, and if that was the road to it.

The Ambassador woke up for a minute and looked at the pilot and closed her eyes and dozed back off, unconcerned.  The Mozambican watched the road below for quite a while and said he thought the correct road was further to the north, in the direction of the rolling hills to the right. He seemed pretty sure. The pilot changed course, crossing the road and flying over what now appeared to be more scrub and bush. There were no rivers or other landmarks visible. I turned to the attache, and said maybe we should suggest that we turn back and start over from the coastal highway railroad intersection. The attache said quietly, leaning closer to me, that the pilot had enough on his mind right now, and it would probably be better not to bother him.

At this point, the pilot had the full fold out map laying on his lap, and was looking mainly at the map, his hands off the controls, letting the plane fly itself on a level course. He asked if anyone knew the region, since we appeared to be lost. His voice was matter of fact. No one had been to Macaze before. The Mozambican employee said he was now less sure of the course to the north since he didn’t see any familiar landmarks. The pilot then announced that we were going down to a lower altitude to get a better look, and down we went to about three thousand feet. Now, we could see terrain and forests and a few dried creeks, and we were beginning to fly over some low rolling vegetated hills. We should have been to Macaze at least forty-five minutes ago. The pilot went back up to our cruising altitude, but we were entering a thin cloud layer that obscured the terrain, like a blanket, but with occasional patches where you could see through wispy clouds to the ground below.

But, it was getting more cloudy and the cloud bank soon appeared to cover the entire horizon from north to south in our path. The gas gauge, I noticed was just over one third. After studying the map for a few minutes above the clouds, the pilot banked slightly to the right again, to the north, and said we should cross the east-west running wide Zambezi river at some point, and that would give us a bearing. I was thinking that if we had to emergency land, the territory between Beira and the Zambezi was RENAMOs heartland, including the headquarters in the forest of Gorongoza. I also knew there were mountains north of the Zambezi and foothills to the south.

We went down again, flying slower and lower and lower through the thin cloud layer and coming out above the low rolling hills. There was a second or two when we were all a bit nervous, whited out in the clouds and descending into the unknown. We went to the north, then northwest, then west, then north again, which should mean we would have to cross the Zambezi sooner or later. After about ten minutes, after studying the landscape and a small river that we crossed, the pilot went back up above the clouds to have more room to study the map again, to compare notes from what he had just seen. Again, we seemed to be on autopilot as he sat studying the maps closely.

Finally, he folded the map and put it between the seats and said to everyone that we seemed to have two choices, either to go back down through the clouds again to look for more landmarks, or to turn around and fly due east towards the coast, and once we met it, to turn south and follow it to Beira. There, we could decide what to do, whether to try again. He said he didn’t like going down through the clouds again since we didn’t know what we would meet on the way down. The coastal option had one drawback, that if the coastline was clouded over, we would pass over it, and would be over the Indian Ocean without knowing it.  the Amassador was awake again, and said she felt we should leave it up to the pilot, that the stop in Macaze was not crucial at this point. We could always do it another day. i wanted the coast option, but the choice was clearly hers and the pilots. The Mozambican was glued to the window, looking down for patches between the clouds, no doubt just wanting to be on the ground, like all of us. He would occasionally glance over at me, his eyes questioning mine on how serious our situation really was. I smiled as if this was routine.

I knew we were not in any real danger yet, but, nonetheless, said the Christian Science prayer, the Scientific Statement of Being, to myself, always feeling that prayer can do some good. Being a Christian Scientist, we feel that we are not ruled by the material world, and can influence events by putting our self in God’s power. My aunt, a Christian Science practitioner, who knew I feared flying a bit, taught me the mantra, “Divine Life, Truth, and Love”–in other words, God– “Goes Before Me.” That always seemed to help, knowing, as she put it, that the pilot was being guided by God to do the right things and that the science of flight, inspired by God, would prevail. We just had to know the truth, to put our faith in God.

I had always been “protected,” as Christian Scientists say. I had flown thousands of miles on Air Nigeria, Air Djibouti, Somali Air, Sudan Air, LIberian Air Lines, and Aeroflot. On one night flight to Europe out of Liberia, our Pan Am DC 10, had to suddenly go to full power and pull up over the mountains near Freetown, Sierra Leone, circling around again for a second try at landing. I had been on a Sabena Airbus from Brussels to Kinshasha that had been forced to turn back over the Mediterranean due to aileron malfunction; I had been on an unscheduled quick descent in a Tupolev 154 into Vanino in East Russia due to “technical problems;” and I had flown an Ilushyn 26 whose engine blew out on a night flight from Moscow to Vladivostok. I had been on an overloaded small Yak 40 that barely made it in the air leaving Vladivostok to Khabarovsk.

In the Foreign Service, you naturally expose yourself to dangers you don’t face in the United States. I had known touches of malaria in Africa, been stung by a school of jellyfish in the Eastern Mediterranean, and been jostled by the KGB in Leningrad. In Liberia, I had stepped over a black Mamba, unknowingly crossed a crocodile infested river by foot, and been accidentally shot at with live ammunition while observing a training exercise.  I had been at a Liberian polling station where gunfire erupted, and once briefly detained by a youth militia and accused of being a spy. I had been followed in the West Bank by a group of Palestinians in a Mercedes, and been on the Haifa Highway in Israel when a civilian bus had been hijacked by terrorists who were shooting at cars on the road.  This was life in the Foreign Service.

I was recalling other incidents as we were flying, now in an easterly direction towards the coast. I wasn’t too worried, feeling if worse came to worse, and fuel got short, we could most likely put down on a road or field somewhere. We certainly weren’t at the panic point. But, I wasn’t as cool as the Ambassador, who was asleep again. The military attache seemed absorbed in his own thoughts.

As we were flying back in the direction towards the coast for about twenty minutes, I noticed that the solid blanket of clouds below us began to thin out and we could almost see through at points. It appeared to be brown or green below the clouds, as best I could make out, which was good, meaning land. After another ten minutes, the clouds dispersed, and, at the same time, the coast became visible up ahead, stretching beautifully as far as you could see on my side of the plane. The pilot looked back at us and gave a thumbs up gesture. He banked the plane to the right, southerly, where we followed the coastline. The water was a beautiful dark blue next to the beautiful green and tan shore dunes. There was no highway, which meant we were north of Beira. Another ten minutes and Beira’s sparkling white skyscrapers came into view. We started our descent. We were now talking to each other and the Ambassador was awake. The pilot made radio contact with the tower and received landing instructions. We touched down, and the engines whirred again as they reversed. We taxied up near the hangars and gas pumps and cut the engines.

The Ambassador and pilot got out and walked over to the terminal. The pilot came back, and a fuel truck came out to refuel us as the pilot helped the ground crew and walked around the plane, making visual checks.  The Ambassador came out and said she had called the Embassy to inform it we had decided to fly back to Maputo. The Embassy was calling Macaze to explain that we would try to make the trip another weekend.

While waiting on the tarmac before heading back to Maputo, I overheard the pilot joking with the military attache about a “gut check,” saying we were lucky, that usually clouds build up along the coastline. He never really wanted to try to ditch in the ocean. He added quietly, with a knowing raise of the eyebrows, that an airport controller in Macaze had called Beira to report a small plane had been spotted on radar flying over the mountains to the north before turning east. It looks, the pilot said with understatement, like we made the right decision not to go back down through the clouds. The attache and pilot had a good laugh over this.