Читать книгу Mission to Argentina - David Monnery, David Monnery - Страница 6

The last slice of orange sun was disappearing into the western sea as the eight SAS men made their way across the deck of HMS Hermes toward the waiting Wessex helicopter. For the first time in many days the sky was clear and the ocean was not doing its best to tip the ship over. Maybe it was a good omen. But it was still bloody cold.

Each man was wearing camouflage gear from head to toe, with the exposed areas of the face painted to match. Somewhere in the bergen rucksacks slung across their backs, among the 90 lb or so of weaponry, communications equipment, medical kit and rations, each man was carrying the tubes of ‘cam’ cream he would need to freshen his make-up when the need arose.

They had split into pairs to check each other’s cosmetic efforts before the final load-up. One of the two patrol commanders, Major Jeremy Brookes, had received five point eight for technical merit but only a minus score for artistic impression. He smiled through his mask at the thought.

Brookes’s patrol, all of them members of G Squadron’s Mountain Troop, were headed for the hills overlooking Port Howard on West Falkland, and none too pleased about it. ‘But all the fucking Argies are on East Falkland, boss,’ Trooper Kenny Laurel had observed, with all the mildness of an articulated lorry.

‘No, Hedge, they’re not,’ Brookes had explained, ‘just most of them. And that’s only as far as we know. The point of this exercise is to determine exactly where they are, every last one of them.’

‘And where they’re not,’ Trooper Davey Matthews had observed.

‘Thank you, Stanley. Besides which, someone had to draw the short straw, and it was us, OK?’

‘Yes, boss.’

Admittedly, Brookes thought as he clambered aboard the Wessex, the straw no longer seemed quite so short. There might not be many Argies on West Falkland, but there was likely to be more than four of them. This was hardly a picnic they were embarking on. At the best it would probably consist of lying in a damp hole for days on end, bored out of their minds. He tried to remember who had said that a soldier’s life was ninety-nine per cent boredom, one per cent pure terror. Was it Wellington? No, it was somebody else, but he could not remember who.

As they sat there waiting for the Wessex crew to appear – ‘Fucking Navy were even late for the Armada,’ someone observed – Brookes foolishly asked his seven co-travellers if any of them could remember.

‘Genghis Khan?’ a member of the other patrol offered.

‘Nah, he said it was ninety-nine per cent terror,’ someone corrected him.

‘Bruce Forsyth,’ Hedge suggested. ‘What do you think, Mozza?’

Trooper David Moseley emerged from his reverie with a start. ‘What?’ he said.

‘His mind’s on other things,’ Stanley said.

The little woman back home, I expect, Hedge thought. ‘It drains your strength, Mozza, even thinking about them.’

‘I was thinking about where we’re going,’ Mozza said, wondering guiltily whether not thinking about Lynsey at such a moment was something of a betrayal.

‘We’re all going to sunny West Falkland,’ Hedge told him, ‘where the beaches stretch golden into the distance and the hills are alive with the sound of sheep farting. We’re all going on a summer holiday,’ he sung, with a gusto Cliff Richard would have killed for.

So would their pilot, who had just arrived with the other two members of the crew. ‘If you don’t stop that horrible row Falkland Sound will be alive with your cries for help,’ he said trenchantly.

‘If you dropped him into Falkland Sound,’ one of the other patrol noted, examining Hedge’s undoubted bulk, ‘it would probably drain it.’

‘Then there’d only be one island to argue about,’ someone else realized.

Major Brookes listened to the banter with half his mind, knowing it for what it was, a giddy chorus of nerves and apprehension. He still could not remember the author of his quote, and as he checked through his memory, another, less amenable one came to mind. He had first heard it from the lips of a dying IRA terrorist the previous year. Lying there, blood flowing freely from a neck wound into sodden leaves in an Armagh lane, the man had looked at him, smiled and recited: ‘this is war, boys flung into a breach, like shovelled earth, and…’

He had died then, and it had taken Brookes many months to find the rest of the verse, and its source. Finally, the wife of an old friend had recognized it as a poem by the American Amy Lowell. He had looked it up and found the rest: ‘and old men, broken, driving rapidly before crowds of people, in a glitter of silly decorations, behind the boys and the old men, life weeps and shreds her garments, to the blowing winds’.

These are the boys, Brookes thought, looking round at them: Mozza with his fresh-faced innocence, ginger-haired Stanley with his sleazy grin, the overwhelming Hedge.

At that moment the lights went out, the rotor blades reached a pitch which made conversation impossible, and the Wessex lifted up from the aircraft carrier’s deck and started moving south-westwards, low across the South Atlantic swell.

Cecil Matheson poured himself a modest finger of malt whisky, took an appreciative sip and carried it across to the window. Through a gap between darkened buildings he could see light reflected on the Thames. In the street below he could see theatre and cinema-goers threading their way through the Saturday evening jam of taxis.

The buzzer sounded on his phone, and he took three quick strides across the room to his desk.

‘Mr Lubanski is on the line,’ his secretary told him.

‘Mr Lubanski,’ Matheson said jovially, wondering, not for the first time, why the American State Department seemed to employ more Poles than the Polish Foreign Ministry. He had met this particular one on his last official visit to Washington, and been more impressed than enamoured of him. The fact that Lubanski was known to privately support a neutral American position vis-à-vis the current dispute only made the coming conversation more fraught with difficulty.

The lack of liking seemed to be mutual. ‘Cecil,’ Lubanski replied, with more familiarity but rather less enthusiasm. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m sorry to take up your time at the weekend,’ Matheson said with as much sincerity as he could muster at short notice. ‘It’s just a matter-of-clarification.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The President’s speech on Friday…’

‘The “ice cold bunch of land down there” speech?’ Lubanski asked, a twist of malicious humour in his voice.

That was how Ronald Reagan had described the Falklands, and Matheson winced at the memory. ‘Yes, that one,’ he confirmed. ‘Of course, we don’t share the President’s opinion in that respect, but we are…’ He wanted to say ‘glad that the US Government has at last realized its responsibilities to a NATO ally’, but that would hardly be diplomatic.

‘Pleased that we’ve finally fallen off the fence on your side?’ Lubanski offered.

‘That’s certainly one way of putting it,’ Matheson agreed, ‘though I’d prefer to think you’d stepped down. In any case,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘we’re obviously gratified by the sanctions announced by your Government, and by the President’s promise of matériel aid. As regards the latter…’

‘You’d like to know what’s on offer.’

‘Of course, but I’m sure that question can be handled through the normal channels. I have something more specific in mind.’

‘Which is?’ For the first time, Lubanski sounded vaguely interested.

Time to bite the bullet, Matheson told himself. ‘AWACS,’ he said. ‘Airborne warning and control systems.’

‘I know what AWACS are,’ Lubanski said drily. ‘And without putting too fine a point on it, I think I can safely say the answer will be sorry, but no.’

Like hell he was sorry, Matheson thought. ‘Her Majesty’s Government would like to formally request the loan of just two AWACS,’ he pressed on.

‘Like I…’

‘If I could just continue,’ Matheson said, rather more harshly than he intended, ‘large British naval losses will hardly serve the interests of the United States. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Royal Navy’s primary raison d’être is to safeguard the passage of American troops and armaments to Europe in the event of a major war…’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Then I fail to see the justification for a refusal of this request.’

‘Bullshit, Cecil. You know damn well why we’re refusing it. Put our own military into this little exercise of yours and twenty years of Latin-American policy goes down the tubes. You’ve already dragged us off the fence for the sake of 1800 sheep farmers, and now you want us to send AWACS planes? Are you sure you wouldn’t like us to nuke Buenos Aires for you?’

Matheson took a deep breath, and swallowed the temptation to tell Lubanski the best thing the State Department could do with its Latin-American policy was to tear it all up and start again. ‘If we can’t defend our ships against attacks from the mainland,’ he said carefully, ‘we may be forced to move against the source of the problem ourselves.’

‘You mean bomb their bases? What with?’

‘Vulcans from Ascension.’

For a few moments there was a silence at the other end. Then Lubanski, sounding more formal, replied: ‘I think the British Government would be wise to examine the United Nations resolutions so far invoked, and particularly Article 51’s definition of self-defence. I’m not at all sure that the United States would regard military action against mainland Argentina as falling within the scope of that definition. And, regardless of such legal niceties, I am completely certain that continued US support is contingent on a certain level of self-restraint in the British prosecution of the war.’

Another short silence ensued.

‘You do realize how this looks from the British Government’s point of view,’ Matheson said eventually. ‘You won’t help us to protect our ships, and you won’t allow us to protect them ourselves in the only way open to us. We’ve got young boys out there,’ he went on, wondering whether sentiment would help, ‘with next to no cover. And they’re not fighting for sheep farmers – they’re fighting against aggression, and for self-determination. I seem to remember,’ he could not resist adding, ‘that one of your presidents almost invented the phrase.’

‘Before my time,’ Lubanski said wearily. ‘Look, Cecil, let me be as frank as I can about this. I personally think your war is a crock of shit, and I wouldn’t have risked alienating a single Hispanic voter or a single Latin-American government to support it. I have colleagues who disagree with me, and who’d love to support the old country, you know, all that Ivy League shit. But even they wouldn’t loan you a single airplane. It’s just too much to ask. This is not our war – it’s yours. You fight the damn thing with what you’ve got.’

‘We intend to,’ Matheson said, struggling to keep his voice level. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said coldly, and hung up. He could almost hear Lubanski 3000 miles away, smirking about some Brit in a snit.

He shook his head to clear it, and poured out a more generous shot of whisky. He had, after all, got exactly what he had expected from the call. Nothing. And it would do no harm to make the Americans aware, privately, of how angry the British were with them. A measure of guilt might increase their generosity in other matters.

The real problem lay not 3000 miles away, but less than one. Matheson was almost afraid to imagine what alternatives to the AWACS were brewing in the Prime Minister’s restless mind.

The flight took slightly less than a hour, most of it over the sea. Darkness had fallen, but despite the lack of a moon the Wessex crew had no trouble identifying the northern coast of Pebble Island on such a clear night. The Passive Night Goggles, or PNGs, which they had recently received from American sources, only came into their own when they were contour-chasing across the north-central part of West Falkland proper.

They set the Wessex down in a wide stretch of desolate grassland. The ground looked hard enough, but for an instant seemed to give alarmingly. It was, Brookes thought, as he leapt down onto it, like landing on a springy pine-forest floor.

The other three followed him out, and the door closed on the grinning, waving members of the other patrol, bound for a similar mission further down the island. As arranged, Hedge moved off ahead to take up a defensive position on the slight ridge 100 yards to the east. The words ‘So where’s the fucking hotel?’ floated back across the din of the helicopter taking off.

The others grinned, and Brookes examined the map and illuminated compass as the silhouette of the Wessex faded with the sound of its rotors. An almost eerie silence descended. I’m a long way from home, Mozza thought suddenly. At least there’s no fucking wind, Stanley was consoling himself.

Hedge inched his eyes over the ridge line and suddenly came face to face with a dark and menacing shape. ‘Baa-aaa,’ it said. ‘Kebabs!’ Hedge whispered viciously.

They had been deposited just over 14 miles, as the crow flew, from their chosen site for an OP, or observation point, overlooking the small Argentinian base at Port Howard. Of course, there were no crows in the Falklands, and it was, as one of the SAS planners on Resource had observed, a bloody sight further as the penguin flew. The same terrain in, say, Wales, would not have been considered particularly difficult, but here the general dampness and usual high winds made everything twice as difficult.

The spongy ground often seemed as sapping as the Wembley turf in extra time, but occasionally it would either turn hard enough to jar every bone in the body or soft enough to swallow each foot in a clinging, gelatinous muck. The hills were not exactly steep, but large expanses of the slopes were strewn with flat rock slippery with lichen. And no matter which way you turned the wind always seemed to be blowing right in your face.

Given that this particular stretch had to be covered in relative darkness and near-total silence, with 90lb on each back and a less than perfect map, Brookes fully expected the journey to take two whole nights.

He told himself to look on the bright side. At least it was a clear night – no one was likely to walk off a cliff or trip over a sheep. And what had he joined the SAS for if not to experience moments like this, dumped behind enemy lines in a hostile environment with only a few good mates and his own wits to keep him alive, the stars shining bright above? At his age there would not be many more of them. The Falklands might not be Tahiti, but they sure beat the hell out of south Armagh.

They were walking in a staggered version of the diamond formation generally favoured by SAS four-man patrols on open ground at night. Stanley was out front, the lead scout, picking out the required route, with Brookes himself some 20 yards back and to the left. He was the navigational backup, and responsible for the patrol’s left flank. Further back still, out to the right, Mozza was taking care of that flank, while Hedge was ‘Tail-end Charlie’, occasionally spinning round to check their rear. He was about 50 yards behind Stanley.

As was true of any SAS four-man patrol, each man had one or more of the four specialized skills: Brookes had languages and demolition, Stanley demolition and signalling, Mozza signalling, and Hedge medicine and languages. All but Stanley had some knowledge of Spanish, but there was not likely to be much call for it on this trip, unless they took prisoners. Or were taken prisoner themselves.

As an officer, Brookes was enjoying his second term with the SAS; in fact, his military career had become a series of alternating periods spent with them and his own parent regiment, the Green Howards. His first tour of duty with the SAS had involved active service in Oman and training secondments in two other Arab states, while the current stint, now nearing its end, had found him dodging bullets and bombs in Armagh’s ‘bandit country’ and dispensing advice to local defence forces in several newly independent West Indian countries. Hairy it might be, and often was, but service with the SAS had been a great deal more interesting than service with the Green Howards, whom fate had given a less than fascinating peacetime role. War games in West Germany were a lot less fun than he had at one time imagined.

His wife, Clare, had preferred life with the Green Howards, in the days when she had still cared. Now, with both the boys at Shrewsbury and her own small business taking off, Brookes did not believe she even noticed which unit he was attached to. She was too busy scouring the Welsh Marches for the antiques she flogged off to her fellow-countrymen across the Atlantic. Their Hereford house looked more like a museum every time he returned from active duty abroad. Even the Spanish villa they shared with friends of hers seemed like a little piece of Hay-on-Wye.

He found it all hard to think about, and wondered why he was doing so on a starlit stroll through the Argentinian-held Falklands. Where better? he asked himself.

He was not getting any younger – that was half the problem. Sure, he still had most of his hair, although no one would know it from the grey stubble which protruded skinhead-style from his head. And he was just as fit as he had ever been. But he was not Peter Pan, and maybe the bergen on his back did feel a bit heavier than it should. You could make up in experience what you lost in suppleness of limb, but only up to a point.

He was thirty-eight. What was he going to do in seven years’ time, when his active career ran out? Fight for one of the desk jobs? Not bloody likely. But what else? He had always vaguely imagined that Clare would be there to share their old age. He knew it had been completely unfair, not to mention stupid – after all, what possible reason could she have for putting her life on permanent hold while he had fun? – but he had somehow expected that she would. Now when she bothered to write letters they were full of Stephen, her semi-partner. He was queer, of course – ‘He’s gay, Jeremy, not queer!’ – but then again, what did it matter whether or not she jumped into bed with the bastard: the point was that she obviously found him more interesting than her husband.

And then there were the boys. Total strangers to him, and he really had no one to blame but himself.

This was his real family, he thought, this bunch of highly trained lunatics. Men who could mention Genghis Khan and Bruce Forsyth in the same breath. Unfortunately it was a family with a cut-off date.

Up ahead of Brookes, Stanley paused for a moment to check the map against the reading on his illuminated compass. Satisfied, he resumed his progress across the sodden heathland towards the distant silhouette of a low hill, the M16 with attached M203 grenade-launcher cradled in his arms.

How, he wondered, could a man’s mouth feel so dry in such a place? Walking across this island was like walking along the back of an enormous wet dog. He could feel the damp creeping up his legs and thought about the next few days of endless fucking misery in a damp hole. Worse than a Saturday morning in the West Bromwich Shopping Centre with his ex-wife.

The thought of Sharon cheered him up. With any luck she was having a worse time than he was since Brett – what a fucking name! – had been sent down for armed robbery. Stanley nearly laughed out loud. The prat had rushed into a local sub post office, waved a gun around, escaped with about fifteen quid, and then run out of petrol on the slip road to the M6. Brilliant! And this was the man she had left him for, the Inspector Clouseau of the West Midlands underworld.

Still, he had to admit she had been wonderful in bed. That tongue of hers would win the Olympics if they ever introduced it as a sport. He sighed. So it went. There were plenty more tongues out there.

And come to think of it, the hill ahead looked just like a breast. That was the trouble with the SAS: the old winged dagger was certainly a come-on in the pubs around Hereford, but wearing it seemed to involve long stretches of time in places like this where women were particularly thin on the ground. According to one of the sailors on the old ‘Herpes’, the members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition were away from women so long that they had started sleeping with penguins. ‘Not right away, of course,’ the sailor had said, ‘and only heavy petting to begin with. They just kind of slipped into the habit.’

Stanley had not believed a word of it, of course. But he could understand that sort of desperation, he really could.

About 30 yards behind him, Mozza was snatching glimpses at the night sky between watching the men ahead and the empty country on the patrol’s southern flank. This was undoubtedly the clearest night since his arrival in the South Atlantic, but the book he had brought all the way from England was back on the Hermes, and he was having trouble matching up his memory with the constellations filling the heavens above him.

Not that he supposed it mattered which was which. Though he had always liked the idea of the constellations, and as a kid often wondered who had first connected the dots and made them all up. After all, the stars in Orion did not actually suggest a hunter; it was possible to connect them up that way, that was all. In reality it was chaos, which was just as wonderful, and maybe even more so.

He glanced round to check that Hedge was still in sight behind him, then turned his eyes right again. It was funny: he had been really nervous in the helicopter, but now they were down on the ground and alone and in real danger he felt fine. He did not even feel homesick any more, though maybe he would once they got back to the ship.

Did the others feel like that, he wondered. Both Hedge and Stanley had several more years than his twenty-three, and of course the PC was almost middle-aged. It was not just the years, either: sometimes he felt like a real innocent in their company, although there was no real reason why he should. There were not many tougher places to grow up than Manchester’s Hulme estates, so he knew how to use the two great weapons of self-defence: fists and a sense of humour, and not necessarily in that order.

Sex was another matter. Stanley and Hedge hardly ever seemed to talk about anything else, but Mozza could not help wondering whether they actually enjoyed the act as much as the endless anticipation. According to Stanley there was only one difference between sex and an SAS mission – the briefing and debriefing came in a different order. And that was funny, and Mozza had laughed as hard as the rest of them, but it had nothing to do with real life or real people. When he was with Lynsey…well, it was magical. It was not a joke. And he would not dream of making it into one.

Maybe he was just lucky, he thought. He had often thought it. Maybe most people would not have wanted to grow up in Hulme but he would not have changed places with anyone. He supposed his family was poor by British standards, but only when it came to things, and even then, well, they had always had a TV. He had three sisters and two brothers, which had felt a bit too much at times, but they all got on, and being a bit cramped in the flat was probably what had started off the family tradition of spending each Sunday out in the country. That and the fact that his dad’s job with British Rail got them a good discount on rail tickets.

And it had made him self-sufficient. It seemed strange maybe, but Mozza had thought a lot about this, about his ability to be alone in a crowd, to ‘make his own space’ as Lynsey put it, and he reckoned it was just something you had to learn as part of a big family in a small flat.

He thought about Lynsey. She was two years older than him, and had a kid already from her marriage to Jake. Mozza did not mind that at all: Hannah was a lovely kid and she seemed to like him. Jake had disappeared into thin air about two years ago, so it was hardly as if he was competing with anyone for the father role. And Lynsey…well, she was just perfect. She was kind, she was bright, she was gorgeous. And, after almost three months of intermittent courtship, she seemed to love him. He was a lucky man, all right.

The fourth man in the patrol was feeling rather less fortunate. Hedge – a nickname grounded in both his surname and the unruly tangle of wiry hair which graced his scalp – was suffering from periodic stomach cramps, and wondering what he had done to deserve them. Eaten navy food, probably. He hoped they were a passing phenomenon, so to speak, because in thirty hours or so they would all be sharing a small hide, and if he was still farting like this the others would probably insist on him giving himself up to the Argies.

He grinned in the dark and turned a full circle, peering into the gloom. There was nothing out there but wet grass and sheep, he thought. Life in the fast lane.

Maybe his stomach was feeling better. Maybe it was just nerves. Hedge had seen enough action in Northern Ireland not to feel like a combat virgin, but he supposed being behind enemy lines was a reasonable enough place to feel nervous no matter how often you visited. Crossmaglen was bad enough, although you knew help was in calling distance. But this felt like being out on a limb.

People said the Argies would be poor soldiers, but he had seen their football team play, and they took no fucking prisoners, so fuck only knew how their Army would behave. Hedge was not keen to find out, not just yet. A day or so of acclimatization, that was what he needed, and a digestive system more at peace with itself. Then they could start throwing the bastards his way.

As often at times like this, he thought about his father, killed in a steelworks accident when Hedge was only fourteen. Although he knew it was stupid, he always wished his father could see him in this sort of situation, all grown up, doing something necessary and doing it well. His father had been a Labour man through and through, but he had also been a real patriot, and Hedge knew he would have felt really proud of England these last few weeks. And of his son.

What his father would have felt about an army career, Hedge was less sure, though from what he could remember getting out of the house and away from his wife and two daughters had been one of his dad’s main aims in life. Joining the army had achieved a similar result for Hedge, and once he was in he had quickly found more positive reasons for staying a soldier. There had always been new challenges to drive him forward, right up to the ultimate goal of making it into the SAS. It had been a close-run thing on the Brecon Beacons – he had damn near given up – but the voice inside his head whispering ‘I’ll be so proud of you’ had somehow pulled him through.

They marched on through the night, making frequent short stops to check their position and a couple of long ones to evade what turned out to be imaginary enemy patrols. About two hours before dawn Brookes decided it was time to dig in for the day. They had covered over two-thirds of the distance required, but the final quarter would bring them close to known enemy positions and called for a much more cautious approach. There was certainly no chance of completing the journey that night.

As it was, they were almost too tired to dig out the lying-up positions for use through the coming day. Brookes chose the western slope of a gentle ridge for their camp, and each man had the duty of digging out a large enough ‘scrape’ for himself, and making a roof for it with wire and turf. The excavated earth, which would be clearly visible to Argentinian pilots, then had to be removed from sight. Fortunately, a shallow stream ran down beyond the next ridge, and the soil could simply be spread along its banks.

As the first hint of dawn began to appear in the eastern sky all four of them were entrenched under their own camouflage roof, too tired to worry about the damp seeping out through the earthen floor of the scrapes. Brookes’s last thought was ‘so far, so good’, while Hedge was thinking about the explosive properties of methane and Stanley was remembering his first time with Sharon.

Mozza was using the patrol’s telescope through a hole in his netting to watch the stars fade away in the east, and wondering how the hell he was going to stay awake for his two-hour watch.

Bryan Weighell, or ‘Wheelie’ as he had been known in younger days, briskly made his way through the various checkpoints separating the car park from his destination in the bowels of Whitehall. It was a sharp spring Sunday, sunny but far from warm, and he was still wondering what the hell he was needed for. It could not be anything to do with the teams inserted into East and West Falkland the previous night; all that was being handled through the usual channels. Starting in the ladies’ lavatory aboard Resource, he reminded himself with a grin. He could still imagine Mike Phillips’s face when the Navy told him that this was the SAS’s floating HQ for the duration.

He wished he was there in person. They also serve who sit around and drink Guinness, he told himself. But it did not feel the same, not at a time like this.

In Conference Room B only one empty seat remained. The Prime Minister, whom rumour claimed had been known to punish unpunctuality with exile to one of the caring ministries, actually greeted him with a smile. What does she want, Weighell wondered.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, Officer Commanding 22 SAS Regiment,’ she introduced him.

He acknowledged the various nods and half-smiles.

‘Perhaps I should go round the table,’ the PM decided. ‘Cecil Matheson,’ she began, smiling at the tall, patrician-looking individual on her left, ‘Deputy Head of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’ On his left was Reginald Copley, a thin, grey-haired man who was apparently head of the Foreign Office’s Latin American Desk. Last in line was the moustached Air Marshal Sir George Railton, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff.

At the end of the table an arrogant-looking young man in a plain dark suit represented MI6. His name, hard though Weighell found it to credit, was Anthony Sharp. On the PM’s right, between her and Weighell, sat Brigadier Mark Harringham, representing Fleet HQ at Northwood, and the imposing bulk of Dennis Eckersley, the Number 2 at the Ministry of Defence.

Seven men and one woman, Weighell thought. Seven professionals and one politician. Seven smelling of Old Spice and one of gardenia. He remembered a particularly disgusting joke about Snow White and her favourite Seven-Up. He told himself to snap out of it.

‘We have a problem,’ the PM began. ‘Cecil?’

Matheson recounted the gist of his telephone conversation with the American State Department the previous evening, and though he made no overt criticism of the American decision to deny the Task Force AWACS assistance, he left little doubt in the minds of his audience what he thought of it.

The Prime Minister’s stony face suggested to Weighell that she shared Matheson’s irritation but had had enough time to suppress her natural instinct to express it. Maybe there was an inflatable model of Reagan hidden away somewhere in Number 10, on which she launched occasional assaults with her handbag.

‘Do you have comments, Brigadier?’ she asked Harringham.

‘It’s not good news,’ he said mildly. ‘I don’t want to sound alarmist, but the AWACS were our last chance of going into action with even half-decent air protection…’

‘Perhaps you could spell out the details, Brigadier,’ the PM suggested. ‘I doubt everyone here is fully aware of them.’

‘Certainly. But there’s nothing complex involved. Our ships in the South Atlantic are simply under-protected, particularly against the Super Etendards and their Exocet missiles. The Sea Dart missile systems on the Type 42 destroyers have no defensive efficacy against low-level attack. The Sea Wolf system, which does, is only mounted on the two Type 22 frigates. For air defence we have only the Sea Harriers, and there are pitifully few of them. In fact, there are only thirty-two Harrier airframes in existence. Once they’re gone…’

‘What about radar?’ the MI6 man asked.

‘Shipborne radar is notoriously ineffective in heavy seas,’ Harringham said, ‘and we have no airborne radar. This is not,’ he added with an air of understatement, ‘the war we were designed to fight. But…’

‘Thank you, Brigadier,’ the PM interjected. ‘Very well, gentlemen. This is the problem we are here to discuss. There appears no way in which the Task Force can be certain of protecting itself, and I need hardly spell out the consequences if, say, one of the carriers were to be put out of action. In such an instance I don’t think we could countenance the recapture of the islands. We would have no choice but to return with our tails between our legs. Another Suez, gentlemen. Britain would be a laughing-stock.’ She glared at the company, as if daring them to imagine such an outcome.

‘But,’ she continued, ‘there are other options. Mr Sharp, would you like to give us an update on the intelligence situation within Argentina?’

Sharp almost preened himself, Weighell thought sourly. He had never had much time for intelligence types. As one of his friends had memorably put it: these were the boys at public school who tried to wank in silence.

‘We now have an agent in place,’ Sharp was saying. ‘And we’re expecting some useful information about the location of particular units, and about the sort of stuff the Argies are airlifting into Port Stanley.’ He surveyed the table in triumph.

The PM ignored him. ‘Is that it?’ she asked Matheson. ‘We have one man in Argentina?’

Our man in Argentina, Weighell thought irreverently, and, as it turned out, wrongly.

‘It’s a woman,’ Matheson said coldly. ‘I need hardly remind everyone here,’ he went on, ‘that the budget for what is called “humint” – human intelligence – has been cut to the bone in recent years, with most of the available resources going to the procurement of “sigint” – signals intelligence, of course – either from GCHQ or the Americans. It’s an unfortunate fact of life, but like the Navy’ – he glanced across at Harringham – ‘the Intelligence Services have been organized with Europe in mind, not South America.’

The PM looked less than mollified. Weighell found himself idly wondering who would come out of this particular imbroglio with more egg on their faces: the Foreign Office, the Navy or the Intelligence Services.

‘As a matter of interest,’ the Latin American Desk man was asking, ‘where is this agent “in place”?’

Sharp hesitated, caught the look on the PM’s face, and blurted out: ‘Rio Gallegos – it’s one of the two airbases closest to the Falklands…’

‘But unfortunately not, as we had thought, the one with the Super Etendards,’ Matheson admitted. ‘It seems they are based at Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego.’ He reached into his briefcase, extracted a clear plastic folder full of photocopies of a map, and passed them round.

Weighell examined it with interest. He had spent so much time poring over maps of the Falklands that the mainland 400 miles to the west had more or less escaped his attention.

‘Brigadier,’ the PM asked, ‘I take it that the destruction of these airfields and the planes based there would drastically reduce the vulnerability of the Task Force?’

‘Of course.’

‘Does the Air Force have the capacity, Air Marshal?’

‘I would like to say yes, Prime Minister, but frankly I doubt it.’ He looked round the table. ‘Most of you probably haven’t heard the news, but early this morning one plane dropped a stick of bombs on the runway at Port Stanley…’

There were murmurs of appreciation all round the table.

‘It was an epic flight,’ Railton conceded, ‘and the psychological impact on the occupying force may have been worth something, but I’m afraid the military efficacy of the operation was rather more doubtful. Only one bomb actually hit the runway, and bear in mind that Port Stanley, unlike the Argentine bases, is known territory. Even more to the point, the Vulcan needed seventeen in-flight refuellings en route. I doubt if we could send more than one plane at a time against these two mainland bases. They’d be sitting ducks.’

‘Thank you, Air Marshal,’ the PM said coolly. On her left, Weighell noticed, Matheson was having a hard job concealing his relief. But the Foreign Office man had been conned, Weighell decided: the PM could not have been expecting anything else from Railton. Where was all this leading?

‘One question,’ the Latin American Desk man said. ‘Since the Super Etendards and Exocets pose the main threat, could we not just move our agent in Rio Gallegos to Rio Grande and set up some sort of communication link between her and the fleet?’

It was an intelligent question, Weighell thought.

‘It might be possible,’ Sharp agreed, ‘but it would certainly place the agent at risk. She has a good cover where she is, and promises to provide invaluable intelligence on the airlift. Agents are always more vulnerable when moved, and there would be the extra risk involved in getting the radio to her.’

Weighell suddenly knew where it was all leading, and why he was there.

As if on cue, the PM turned her beady gaze in his direction. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell, how would the SAS like to have a crack at these airfields?’

Weighell noticed Matheson’s eyes roll in horror, and resisted the temptation to let her steamroller right over him. ‘If it’s a feasible option,’ he said, ‘then of course we’d like nothing better.’

‘Does it look like one?’ she persisted.

Weighell imagined he was being given a major insight into how cabinet government worked in the modern age. ‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister,’ he forced himself to say, ‘but I’d need a lot more data than I have now, not to mention a clearer idea of the task required. Are we talking about observation or military action here?’

‘Either or both,’ she said decisively.

‘Prime Minister…’ Matheson interjected.

‘Hold on a moment, Cecil,’ she said, patting him on the arm in as patronizing a manner as Weighell could remember witnessing, ‘let’s find out what we’re capable of before you start explaining why we shouldn’t risk it.’ She turned a smile on Weighell.

You could rob a bank with a smile like that, Weighell thought. ‘We’re talking about two totally different missions,’ he said. ‘An attack on either airfield would require up to a squadron of men – around sixty that is – inserted from the air at night. Probably a high-altitude low-opening parachute drop. From a C-130.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘That in itself would not present any great problems, unless of course they were dropped into the middle of an Argentinian military base we knew nothing about. But there are always unknown hazards – the mechanics of insertion are simple enough.’ As the bishop said to the actress, he thought to himself.

‘The obvious problem,’ he continued, ‘would come with the extraction. Particularly if we’re planning to hit two bases simultaneously. I don’t see any way of getting two squadrons out, by air or sea. You’d need either every submarine in the fleet or, at that sort of range, every helicopter. And I presume the thought of 120 SAS men crashing across the border into Chile is hardly desirable, even assuming they could get to it…’

‘God forbid,’ Matheson muttered.

‘What if the C-130 drops the troops and they secure the airfields?’ the PM asked. ‘Surely then the planes could land and take the troops off?’

‘It’s theoretically possible,’ replied Weighell. He had to admit a part of him was thrilled by the idea. The rest of him urged caution, however. ‘For such an operation to be anything more than a suicide mission,’ he went on, ‘we’d have to know a hell of a lot more about the airbases in question.’

‘Prime Minister,’ Matheson interjected again, and this time she let him have his say. ‘Such action…’ he began, before pausing, apparently lost for words.

‘Such action would have Washington in uproar,’ she said. ‘I know. Obviously we have no desire to upset the United States. Nor would it serve us well to do so, at least in the long run. But we have to balance such concerns against the well-being of the Task Force. Whether we like it or not, Britain’s standing in the world is in their hands, gentlemen. I am not prepared to risk defeat merely for the sake of not offending a few American politicians. So please, Lieutenant-Colonel, I would like some contingency planning done. Just in case.’

‘Very well, Ma’am.’

‘Now, for the second possibility you mentioned – observation.’ The basilisk stare transfixed him one more.

Here at least, Weighell felt on much safer ground. What the four-man patrols were already doing on East and West Falkland could just as easily be done on the mainland. Or almost. ‘We could put two four-man teams down close to the two airbases,’ he said, ‘probably by Sea King helicopter, though I’d have to check the range-to-weight ratios. I would guess it would have to be a one-way trip. The terrain hardly lends itself to staying unseen, but that’s just as true of the Falklands, and we already have patrols ashore on both islands.’

‘If the trip in was one-way,’ Matheson observed, ‘you still have the problem of how to get the men out again.’

‘True,’ Weighell conceded. ‘But eight men is a very different proposition to 120. One or two submarines could probably take them off. At worst, as few men as that could seek asylum in Chile without causing a major row.’

‘My objections remain the same,’ Matheson said. ‘Of course I agree with you, Prime Minister, that we may have to take diplomatic risks for the sake of a military victory. Or at least to avoid a military humiliation. But I cannot see that the military situation at present is such as to justify this sort of operation.’

‘Brigadier?’ the PM asked Harringham.

‘I cannot comment on the diplomatic issue, Prime Minister. Any improvement in the fleet’s AEW capability would obviously be beneficial, but I am yet to be convinced that the enemy air force poses much more than a theoretical threat to the Task Force.’

‘Dennis?’ she asked.

‘I would have to agree with the Brigadier,’ Eckersley said. It was the first time Weighell could remember him speaking.

‘Very well,’ the PM said. ‘I cannot say I feel entirely happy about it, but for the moment we shall shelve the idea of mounting mainland operations.’ She paused. ‘However,’ she continued, turning to Weighell, ‘I want detailed contingency plans prepared for those operations we have discussed. And I expect’ – this time Harringham was her target – ‘the SAS to receive the full cooperation of the fleet in this matter. If and when something happens to tip the balance – if the threat to the Task Force does become more than theoretical – then I shall expect both a different consensus of opinion and the possibility of immediate action.’ She surveyed those around the table – making sure she remembered who had been present, Weighell decided – flashed one wide smile at them all, rose from her chair and swept out through the door.

Around the table there were several heartfelt sighs of relief. Weighell found himself wondering whether sending the Junta a video of the meeting might not encourage an early surrender.

That same Sunday Isabel Fuentes drove out of Rio Gallegos in the black Renault 5 and headed south across the almost undulating steppe towards the Chilean border some 40 miles away. There was almost no traffic on the road: in the first 10 miles she encountered two trucks, one bus and about a dozen cars.

It was one of those late autumn days she remembered from childhood, clear but cold enough to make you think of the winter to come. On the seat beside her she had a vacuum flask full of coffee and a couple of spicy empanadas wrapped in a paper bag. Under the seat, sealed in a plastic bag, were the facts she had so far managed to accumulate concerning the military situation at the Rio Gallegos airbase. There were not many of them, but she had had only two meetings with her sad-eyed pilot, and all he had wanted to talk about was the girlfriend he had left behind in the north.

Which she supposed was both good news and bad news. She had been prepared to sleep with him, at least on that first evening with the alcohol running through her blood, but she had also known that to do so would have marked a new low, a new stage in what felt almost like a self-imposed programme of dehumanization. On the negative side, her new status as a friend and confidante, though easier to live with, did not promise quite the same degree of mutual intimacy or trust. She had the feeling she could get him into bed with her, but was far from sure that her state of mind would survive such a level of pretence.

She was approaching the bridge she had chosen for the dead-letter drop. It was one of about ten such bridges in a three-mile stretch two-thirds of the way to the border. All of them were simple girder affairs, slung across dried-up streams. Presumably when the snow melted in the distant Andes they sent a swift current down to the Magellan Straits a few miles to the south.

The bridge Isabel had chosen had nothing to recommend it but the faded letters ERP, which someone had painted in fiery red a decade before.

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 spend 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.