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From Ascension Island, where they had been in readiness for a week, the paracommandos flew in 14 U.S.-piloted C-130s to Katanga's giant Ka-mina Military Base and thence toward their target. Below the gaping jump-hatches, the Congo wound broad and tawny through black-green bush; the tin and tile roofs of Stanleyville shone pink in the early light. "Stan," as it is known to both black and white, is the most African town of the Congo. The "Inner Station" of Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, it stands at the very center of the continent.
As Conrad wrote of the journey upriver to Stanleyville: "It was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on earth and the big trees were kings. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.
You thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps." So it must have seemed to the soldiers who last week made the voyage to the Inner Station.
Gold Reserves. The Belgian paras sustained only seven casualties in rescuing the hostages. Four hours after their arrival, the Congolese 5th Mechanized Brigade rolled into Stan, spearheaded by the tough white fighters of Major Mike Hoare, 44, a starchy South African who served behind Japanese lines in Burma under Britain's mystical guerrilla warfare expert, Orde Wingate. No mystic himself, Hoare insisted that his 300 men stay neatly shaved, refrain from drinking beer before battle, but cared not a whit what they did otherwise. Mostly South Africans and Rhodesians, they gave no quarter to any black resembling a rebel.
Some of these white soldiers lived up to the name by which they are universally known—mercenaries. They were not above searching bodies for cash or blowing a few safes in the Stanleyville banks. But a great many of them are fighting for Tshombe's government out of conviction. Certainly, the "mercenaries" are no more mercenary—and far less brutal—than the African soldiers on either side of the Congolese civil war.
Gbenye and his rebel ministers had fled Stanleyville, and with them went more than 1,500 Ibs. of gold (valued at nearly $800,000) from the Kilo-Moto Mines and more than $6,000,000 from the vaults of the Banque du Congo. But many Simbas had stayed behind sniping at anyone who moved, and the mopping up was bloody.
As troops entered the rebel headquarters near Lumumba Square, a black hand was spotted reaching from a closet to clo& the door. A Belgian opened up with his automatic rifle. In the headquarters alone, 25 rebels—mostly unarmed, minor political types —were sprayed with rifle fire as they hid under beds, beneath the kitchen table, and in wardrobes, which toppled like tipped coffins as their occupants died. Outside, Tshombe's tough Katangese gendarmes hunted down Simbas.
Black residents of Stanleyville took to wearing white headbands to show their allegiance to the Leopoldville government, but that did not always work, and many a headband was soon stained red.