Word: baraka
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...dared attack the Simbas' mountain redoubt of Fizi, located high above Lake Tanganyika and reachable only by roads so narrow and precipitous that they are impassable during rainstorms. Led by Castro Cuban advisers and supplied with Red Chinese arms ferried in from Tanzania to the lake port of Baraka, the 5,500-man ragtag rebel force was roaming at will through a 200-sq.-mi. patch of the eastern Congo, cutting roads, murdering and terrorizing the population. Tshombe knew the Simbas had to be driven out of Fizi, and to do the job he once again called...
Blinking Lights. Long before dawn one moonless morning, an advance patrol of seven heavily armed commandos, their faces blackened with burnt cork, landed on a rocky beach north of Baraka. Soon their signal lights began blinking the all-clear, and a patrol boat churned in with the first assault wave of ten men. Before they had waded all the way ashore, however, a cross fire of tracers arced down at them from machine-gun nests in the bluff beyond, forcing the mercenaries to take cover behind their boat...
Stalled Column. From there it was only four miles to Baraka, but hardly had Hoare's men moved out than their charge began to stall. On the outskirts of town, two battalions of Simbas rained mortar, bazooka and machine-gun fire on the commandos. A spearhead led by Hoare's two armored cars finally broke through, but it was two long days before he was in firm control of Baraka, and then only after most of the town had been destroyed. Death toll: five commandos, 215 Simbas...
...Fizi had hardly begun. For the first time in his career as mercenary commander, he was forced to halt his drive and change his battle plan. Last week, calling back the diversionary column in the south, he ordered it into boats for a water trip to join him in Baraka. Then Hoare and his officers sat down to try to figure out how to negotiate the 23-mile mountain road to the rebel stronghold itself...
...Bolobo -only 180 miles upriver from Leopoldville. Other shipments arrived by sea at Tanzania's capital of Dar es Salaam, were sent in sealed boxcars to the lake port of Kigoma, then were shipped either directly across Lake Tanganyika to the rebel-held area of the Congo around Baraka or through the small kingdom of Burundi...