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June, 1960, Zambia/Rhodesia Border
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Florence was in heaven. The Mosquito was 6,500 feet up and racing over the Rhodesian countryside, the ground beneath a green blur broken by glimmering blue lakes and the lazy brown waters of the many rivers and streams the cut through the region. They were following a long, high cliff face that stretched for miles through the jungle. 

"What are you looking for exactly?" She shouted above the roar of the engines, leaning in close to make herself heard.

"Communists!" Redeker shouted back as he glanced out of the canopy window.

She felt her gut sink slightly at the words. As a Journalist she was well acquainted with the Bush War, the horrendously violent and largely unknown border war raged between Rhodesian Security Forces and Communist guerrillas. A colleague of hers had once spent a week on the border with the Rhodesian's and come back a changed man. The things had seen, well, he had won a Pulitzer prize for his story and photography. He had painted the Rhodesian soldiers as baby killing monsters, and on his next journey to the country he had been gunned down by the wife of a soldier killed in the fighting. 

"Where are they?!" She shook the memory from her mind as she tried to see something, anything, that might be "human". All she could see was a mass of treetops. 

"Do you really want to know?!" He shouted back. She could see the warning in his eyes and in that moment she was reminded he was a soldier first.

She thought for a long moment and then, nodded. The Bush War was a fact of life for her country and she was a Rhodesian. Communism was a poison and she, as much as her family, feared it's arrival on their side of the Zambezi River.

"Down there!" He was making a gesture toward the ground and she had to partially lean over him to see out. The wall of cliff seemed unbroken until, for a brief second, she a darker patch of shadow beneath the foliage. "Cave mouth!"

She nodded as the planes shadow flitted over the cave and kept going. She sank back into her seat and then got close to his ear. "Can we go back around?!"

He shook his head. "No! Might alert them!"

"To what?!"

His finger extended to point off to their right. It took a moment for her to pick out the three aircraft skimming along over the tree tops, their dull brown and green camouflage making them almost impossible to pick out. Two of them she recognized as Submarine Spitfires. The third plane was something she had never seen before outside of pictures. It had three engines, with a pair of cockpits between them and a tail gunner in the rear. It looked like an oversized De Havilland Mosquito.

"What's the third plane?!" It looked familiar to her, she had certainly seen it on a magazine cover somewhere but couldn't remember where. 

"The Angel!" 

"The Angel of Death?!" 

She felt as if someone had punched her in the gut when she heard the name. The Angel of Death. A strike bomber the Rhodesians had designed specifically to fight the jungle insurgency. It was famous for two things, rockets and napalm. Napalm had been invented in the past three years by Rhodesian weapon specialists. It had proven deadly against the Communist insurgents and the Angel carried two large canisters of it beneath the main fuselage.

"Yes!" 

She sat back into her seat again as the two Spitfires peeled away and climbed up past Redeker's Mosquito, wiggling their wings as they shot past. 

"Do you want to watch?!" He called to her. She glanced at him, ready to be angry, but the look on his face was not one of malice or glee. Rather it was of a man who had seen what was about to happen before and knew what she would see. It was a warning.

She shook her head even as she glanced over her shoulder. Far behind her she saw the twin flashes of a pair of rockets as they shot away toward the cave. She turned away before they hit home.