Soldier K: Mission to Argentina Read online

  Just beyond the bridge, she stopped the car, pulling over onto the dry gravel of the steppe, reached over for her vacuum flask and at the same time conveyed the plastic bag from its place under the seat to its new hiding place, stuck into her belt beneath the thick sweater.

  She got out of the car, poured herself a cup of coffee and surveyed the road. It was empty for as far as she could see, which was at least a mile in each direction. She clambered down into the streambed, lifted out the two rocks she had previously chosen, and wedged the bag into the space. Then she replaced them, covering one corner of plastic with gravel.

  The bag would not be found by anyone who was not looking for it. As a last safeguard she took the small plastic bottle out of her pocket and emptied its contents onto the dry earth beneath the bridge. After all, where else would a woman stop to urinate on such a road?

  ‘You’re really getting into the spirit of things,’ she told herself wryly.

  After sleeping in shifts through the daylight hours, Brookes’s patrol set out once more, this time in a cross between drizzle and fog, to complete their journey. They were only a few miles from the coast of Falkland Sound now, and the signs of civilization, if sheep farming qualified as such, were thicker on the ground.

  So too was evidence of the occupation. On one frequently travelled piece of ground – ‘track’ seemed too grand a word, ‘road’ a ludicrous exaggeration – signs of wheeled traffic had recently been overlaid by the marks of a tracked vehicle, presumably military. Halting for a moment’s rest at a gate in a wire fence, Mozza bent down to check his bootlaces and discovered a discarded cigarette end of decidedly alien appearance.

  ‘At least it proves we’re on the right island,’ Hedge whispered above the wind. ‘You’re a regular little Sherlock Holmes, you are.’

  It also proved that the Argentinians were in the habit of passing in this direction, which increased the patrol’s caution and slowed their progress still further. But they found no other sign of the enemy before reaching their destination on a hill a mile and a half north of Port Howard. They thought they could detect the faintest of lights where the settlement should be, but, with the rain not so much falling as hanging like a sheet of mist, it was impossible to be certain.

  There was still about three hours until dawn, and Brookes allowed himself the luxury of a fifteen-minute exploration of the immediate area. In such conditions, he decided, it was almost impossible to pick out the best site for their hide with any certainty, and he was reluctant to undertake major earthworks twice. It was not a matter of the effort involved, but the virtual doubling of the chances that their interference with nature’s handiwork would be spotted from the air. He told the men as much. ‘We’ll have to spent another day in scrapes,’ he said. ‘Behind this ridge line, I think,’ he added, looking upwards. ‘As far above the water-table as we can manage without unduly advertising our presence.’

  ‘I think we’ll need stilts to get above this water-table,’ Stanley observed.

  A few minutes later, in a sheltered hollow on the northern slope, they had found what Hedge pronounced to be ‘the shallow end of the pool’.

  ‘Why is it we’re always getting into scrapes?’ Stanley wondered out loud as they started digging.

  3

  Shortly before ten a.m. on Tuesday 4 April 1982, in the operations room of the Type 42 destroyer Sheffield, a blip appeared on the radar screen. Whatever it was seemed headed their way, and fast. Less than three minutes later, on the ship’s bridge, the officer of the watch and the ship’s Lynx helicopter pilot made visual identification. ‘My God, it’s a missile,’ they exclaimed simultaneously.

  A few seconds later the Exocet ripped through the ship’s side, starting fires that proved impossible to control, causing the deaths of twenty-one men, and ultimately dooming the vessel to a South Atlantic grave. For the Task Force as a whole, the war had suddenly become real.

  News of the catastrophe reached the British people seven hours later, at nine p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Even the Ministry of Defence spokesman, who always looked and sounded as if he had been preserved in a cryogenic chamber since 1945, could not flatten the emotional charge of such news.

  All those refrains of ‘Britannia rules the waves’ which had accompanied the Task Force’s departure now came back to haunt the cheerleaders. Plainly the Royal Navy was in less than complete control of this particular stretch of ocean. The mindless glorification of slaughter which had accompanied the sinking of the General Belgrano two days earlier took on an even hollower ring. Were tabloid typesetters in Buenos Aires now arranging the Spanish equivalent of ‘Gotcha!’ for the next morning’s front page?

  More insidious still, for the first time the dread possibility of failure seemed to hover in the British air.

  James Docherty watched the announcement on a pub TV somewhere in the middle of Glasgow, and felt for a few minutes as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. When it was over, when the news had been given, the analysis offered – all the usual crap – Docherty sat at the bar, beer and chaser barely touched, head in hands.

  For four weeks now he had been floating in a drunken ocean of self-pity, anger and hopelessness. He was ‘heading on down’ he had told any stranger who cared to listen, ‘just like the Task Force’, floating further and further away from all those problems which could not be resolved by the heady mixture of modern technology and judicious violence.

  Now, three hours into another magical mystery tour of Glasgow’s bars, he took the destruction of the Sheffield very personally. That fucking Exocet had hit him too, he realized, ridiculous as it seemed. But it wouldn’t sink him, oh no. In fact, it would wake him up. Or something.

  He gingerly eased himself off the stool, wondering if his body had been as sobered by the news as his mind. It had not, but after an endless piss, his head leaning against the tiled wall of the Gents, he felt ready to face the night.

  A chill breeze was blowing down Sauchiehall Street from the east. Docherty leant up against a shop window and let the cold blast revive him.

  After the death of his father he had asked for extended compassionate leave. They did not want him for the war, so what was the point of hanging out in Hereford listening to all the others bellyaching? In any case, he was not at all sure he had any desire to go back. And if the bosses could see him now, he thought, the feeling would be mutual. A faint grin flickered across his unshaven face, the first for a while.

  Two men walked past, talking about the Sheffield, and brought it all back. Enough, Docherty told himself. This is as far down as you’re going. Anything more would be fucking self-indulgence. In fact it already was.

  ‘Who knows?’, he asked himself out loud, as he walked back towards the dump he had been staying in, ‘if things get bad down there, then maybe they’ll need more of us.’ It was not exactly likely, but if the call did come he wanted to be in some state to receive it.

  Four hundred miles to the south the Prime Minister arrived back at Number 10 from the House of Commons. In the chamber she had sat there looking stunned as John Nott announced the ship’s loss, but earlier that day, in the relative privacy of Number 10, tears had been more in evidence. Now she was entering the third phase of her reaction – anger.

  ‘I want someone from Northwood – preferably Harringham – and Cecil Matheson,’ she told her private secretary.

  ‘You have the full Cabinet in the morning, Prime Minister.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Richard. I want Harringham and Matheson here now.’ She started up the stairs, throwing ‘please tell me when they arrive’ back over her shoulder.

  Matheson was still working at the Foreign Office, but Brigadier Harringham had to be pulled out of his bath and shuttled across from Northwood by helicopter. By the time of his arrival he had conquered his irritation – he could guess what kind of a day the PM had endured.

  Once the three of them were gathered around one end of the huge Cabinet table she lost no time in coming
to the point. ‘Two days ago, Brigadier, you said, and I quote, that you were “yet to be convinced that the enemy air force poses much more than a theoretical threat to the Task Force”. I take it the events of the day have changed your mind?’

  ‘Sadly, yes,’ Harringham said quietly.

  ‘If it had been one of the carriers instead of the Sheffield we would now be in severe difficulties, would we not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Prime Minister,’ Matheson interjected, ‘obviously I do not want to minimize the potential dangers here, but I feel I must point out that the best intelligence we have suggests that the enemy only possesses five more of these missiles, and has next to no hope of procuring any more.’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘As you well know, Cecil,’ she said with barely controlled hostility, ‘our so-called “best intelligence” couldn’t even forecast the invasion. You heard that chinless idiot the other day – we have one agent in Argentina, and even she’s in the wrong place! The intelligence you’re talking about is just sophisticated guesswork, and it isn’t half-sophisticated enough for me to risk this whole venture on. I want some people in there, on the ground, counting the damn things. Or at the very least providing some sort of early warning for the fleet.’

  Matheson could not ever remember seeing her so incensed, and for the first and only time in his life he could see the truth of the expression ‘you’re beautiful when you’re angry’. He decided that resistance at this point would just increase her momentum. ‘I agree that the new situation warrants the dispatch of one or two reconnaissance teams,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ the PM replied, thumping the walnut tabletop with the flat of her hand. ‘So I can count on both of you to back me in this regard if it should come before the War Cabinet.’

  ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ they said in relative unison, Harringham offering a sleepy counterpoint to Matheson’s plaintive lead.

  As the two men emerged into Downing Street, Big Ben was striking midnight. A mile to the east, in the Aldwych studios of the BBC World Service, a newsreader was announcing the loss of the Sheffield. Ten thousand miles away to the south, and three time zones away to the west, Mozza was lying in the patrol hide above Port Howard, listening in through headphones to London’s plummy tones.

  He could hardly believe it, and listened all the way through the news broadcast just to make sure he had got it right. Stanley and Brookes were out on a recce, but Hedge was snoring gently in another arm of the cross-shaped hide, and Mozza decided to wake him. This was the sort of news he had to share.

  Hedge couldn’t believe it either. Or at least did not want to. ‘It was actually sunk – you’re sure?’ he said, his voice strained by the need to remain in a whisper.

  ‘No, not sunk,’ Mozza whispered back. ‘They didn’t say that. But it was hit by a missile, and everyone was taken off. The ship was burning. So maybe it has sunk by now. They didn’t say.’

  ‘Christ!’ Hedge muttered. He could think of nothing more appropriate to say. Both of them lay there, looking up at their turf and wire ceiling, thinking the same thing: if the ships of the Task Force were being sunk, then how the hell were they going to get back home?

  Rio Gallegos, 400 miles to the west, was awash with sky blue and white flags. As she walked across the central plaza to the Rakosi Bar, Isabel found herself in a swirl of deliriously happy people. The General Belgrano was forgotten, or at the very least avenged. It was as if all the doubts the Argentinians had silently nursed within their hearts through the weeks of wondering and waiting had finally and explosively been laid to rest. Let the English ships come! Our Air Force will send them to the bottom of the sea, each and every one of them!

  Isabel could imagine the reaction in Britain to the news: there would be a sort of stunned disbelief. One of their ships had been sunk, and by foreigners! She found herself, not for the first time, feeling contempt for everyone involved in the whole deadly farce – including, she had to admit, herself.

  The atmosphere in the Rakosi mirrored that in the main square, only here the wine was offering additional lubrication to the festivities. She was greeted like an old and valued customer – something she was swiftly becoming – and invited to join in the toasts to the Air Force, the Navy, General Galtieri, Admiral Anaya, Mario Kempes, even Eva Perón.

  She thought it unlikely that Raul would turn up that night – he was probably celebrating with his comrades out at the airbase – but resisted the temptation to return to her hotel just in case. Three glasses of wine worked their magic, and she was both celebrating with the best of them and watching herself from some hidden vantage point with barely restrained disgust.

  Raul’s arrival probably saved her from making a fool of herself, though how dangerous a fool she would luckily never know. He seemed to have had more than a few drinks himself, and insisted on taking her for a walk through the riverside park. His arm grew tighter around her shoulder, and when they turned at the end of the promenade to retrace their steps he pulled her to him and kissed her passionately, his beery breath almost turning her stomach, his right hand pressing at her left nipple as if it was a doorbell.

  ‘Raul, no,’ she said without thinking, and tried to disengage herself. She felt both nauseous and suddenly sober.

  He leaned down to kiss her bare neck.

  ‘Think about your Mariella,’ she said softly.

  ‘Ah, Mariella!’ he said dramatically, and dropped his head on her shoulder. To her surprise he started shaking.

  For a few minutes Isabel gently stroked his head as he clung to her. ‘Come, let us sit down,’ she said eventually.

  He allowed himself to be led to one of the wrought-iron seats overlooking the darkened estuary.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

  He gave her a half-laugh, half-sob, then wiped the tears away from his face with an angry sweep of the back of his hand. ‘How can I tell you?’ he asked. ‘How can I tell anyone? You will just think I am a coward. I …’ He looked at her imploringly. ‘One of us sinks an English ship, and suddenly we are all heroes, but … we are … today Juan Morales was lost – I didn’t really know him, but every day one of us is killed, every day …’ He grabbed her arm. ‘I am so afraid I will never see Mariella again,’ he said.

  ‘You will,’ she replied. What else could she say?

  Raul just shook his head. ‘Another one of us dies and we are all celebrating because of the English ship,’ he said. ‘It’s not just me,’ he added, almost belligerently. ‘Everyone is afraid.’

  ‘Are the English so powerful?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it is we who are weak. We have so few missiles, and hardly any spares if the planes are damaged. There are so few of us. And the Army is sending boys to the Malvinas – I see them lining up to take the flight across each night and they are boys. We have experienced soldiers. Why are they not being sent to fight?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Isabel said, though she could make a good guess. They would be needed to protect the Junta from the people if and when it all went wrong.

  The day after the sinking of the Sheffield dawned clear and cold, as if trying to make up for the gloom it had engendered in the SAS hides scattered across the two main islands. For the first time since their arrival eighty hours before, Brookes’s patrol had a clear view of the landscape around them, and in particular the small settlement of Port Howard below. Similarly, this would be the enemy’s first chance to see them.

  Despite this threat, Mozza found himself more taken by the landscape than the apparently sleeping enemy garrison in the settlement below. The two night marches across endless swathes of peat, rock flats and wet tussock grass, had conjured up a rather boring picture of the islands, which the days of mist and fog had only served to reinforce. But here were the silver-blue waters of Falkland Sound beneath a pure blue sky, and the distant hills of East Falkland rising in subtle shades of green and brown between them. A flock of birds was drawing graceful patterns in the air above the water, and th
e randomly scattered handful of buildings which made up Port Howard seemed supremely insignificant, no match at all for the vastness which surrounded them.

  It was weird, Mozza thought. This was what the war was all about, yet it seemed much further away here than it did among the Task Force. He reluctantly tore himself away from such thoughts, and back to the job in hand, jiggling the veil into position so as to prevent any tell-tale reflection, rearranging his legs within the cramped hide, and aiming the telescope at the settlement below.

  It was strung out between the foot of the hill and a narrow inlet, which was itself separated from the Sound proper by a long peninsular no more than 200 yards wide. A couple of small boats were bobbing at anchor in the inlet, but there was nothing bigger – no fishing vessels and no enemy naval craft.

  The settlement seemed to boast five actual houses, but there were three times as many buildings, including two large corrugated sheds, which Mozza assumed were normally used at some stage of the process whereby sheep were turned into either lamb chops, pullovers or both. To the south of these, and partly obscured by them, an acre or two of almost flat meadow had been adopted as a camp-site by the invaders.

  Mozza counted the tents – there were just over 200. Reckoning four men to a tent, and taking into account that the officers had probably installed themselves in the available buildings, he thought the garrison must number about 1000 men. They had no artillery as far as he could see, and only two vehicles were visible: one jeep and a half-track armoured personnel carrier – probably the one whose trail they had come across on their second night’s march.

  He wrote down his observations, and was about to record the lack of air support when the drone of a distant helicopter insinuated its way into his consciousness. He watched it draw a lazy arc across the Sound, and then descend gingerly onto an area which had obviously been cleared with that purpose in mind, the grass waving wildly in the rotor’s wind. Two figures climbed out, both in uniform. One was a lieutenant, the other, to Mozza’s surprise, a general. They walked out from under the still swirling blades and paused, as if uncertain where to go next. Then they moved on across the grass towards the nearest clump of buildings.