Stand By Stand By

by Chris Ryan

  In the dark it was difficult to tell whether or not we were leaving any tracks; but as we moved round the plane in single file, Murdo, at the back, was swishing a branch of big leaves back and forth across our trail.

  Leaving the plane, we headed for the wall of forest to the west, aiming for the corner of the field. Sure enough, there was the road, leading off into the jungle, a pale strip just visible. Dark as the night was out in the open, it was still blacker under the trees, and I paused before entering the tunnel.

  ‘Give us your branch, Murdo,’ I said quietly. ‘It looks to me as though security’s very lax. They’re so far from civilization that they don’t reckon there’s any threat. They’re relying on the isolation to protect them. But I’m not taking any chances.’

  I stripped the leaves and side-shoots off the branch, until I was left with a springy stick about four feet long, and I moved down the road with this held out at an angle in front of me, in case we came on a trip wire connected to an alarm. But the track was clear.

  As Tony had described, the track wound in curves between the trees. It could have been made like that for reasons of camouflage – to preserve as much tree-cover as possible – or for reasons of economy, to save shifting obstructions unnecessarily. Probably the engineers had chosen the easiest route, which involved the minimum of clearing.

  We moved in bursts. I’d go on a hundred steps, then stop in the middle of the road. The other two waited a couple of minutes, then closed on me. The darkness was such that twice they went past me, only a few feet away, without seeing me, and I had to hiss at them to stop.

  At that erratic pace it took us half an hour to cover a kilometre. Several times I froze, hearing movements on the edge of the jungle to right or left, but after a while I realized that the disturbances were caused by animals, possibly jaguars, more likely snakes.

  By about 10.30 the moon was rising. The sky was growing lighter, and we could see the tree canopy silhouetted in black against it. Then we began to hear the hum of a machine – probably a generator – in the distance ahead. Finally we made out lights showing through the trees.

  It was after 11 p.m. when we reached the edge of the clearing, and from the lack of movement we reckoned the place had settled down for the night. Hanging back under the trees, we scanned the new settlement. The approach road opened out into a clearing perhaps seventy metres wide and two hundred long. On the left-hand side, as we looked, two long, low buildings were laid out end to end, running away from us and continuing the line of the road. Beyond them, at right-angles across the far end of the clearing, a third building was still under construction, the skeleton of its roof showing up white in the moonlight. In front of it several vehicles were parked: a couple of bulldozer diggers, two or three dump-trucks, and two jeeps.

  The nearest building looked like the accommodation block. It had doors and windows, and the walls went right up to the eaves of the corrugated iron roof. The second building was not much more than a roof on pillars – part of the side we could see had a wall about head-high, but the rest of it was open. That, I guessed, was the laboratory. Somewhere at the back of that a generator was drumming, and a couple of bare electric bulbs flickered erratically.

  ‘How the fuck did they get the stuff here to build all this?’ whispered Sparky.

  ‘By water,’ I told him. ‘A boat comes upriver. An army of guys with power-saws goes ashore. Next they land a bulldozer to clear the road, and the site. Then some trucks to carry concrete blocks, cement and so on. In about a week, it’s cocaine city.’

  Skirting the open ground, we moved forward and to our right to get a closer view. I wished to hell we had PNGs or kite-sights. As it was, we had to make do with one pair of binoculars, which gathered light well but was no substitute for real night-vision equipment.

  On the right-hand side of the clearing we found a high rampart of logs, roots and earth. Everything bulldozed off the site had been pushed up into a heap about twenty feet tall and over a hundred yards long. Immediately behind it was a tangle of virgin forest. In fact, all the debris had been pushed back and piled up into and around the first of the standing trees, so that when we tried to creep round the back of it, we found it impossible to make progress. But when we scrambled up the back of the long mound, we discovered that we had a view of the whole clearing; a naturally commanding position.

  ‘This is the place for the OP,’ I whispered.

  ‘It’s bloody close to the buildings,’ said Sparky. ‘We’re right on top of them. It can’t be more than sixty or seventy metres straight across. If we’re caught here, we’re fucking history.’

  ‘I know. But if we get any farther away, we’ll be in the trees, and able to see fuck-all. Listen: I’m going to recce round the back of the buildings. You guys stay here and cover me. Sparky, rig an aerial and see if you can get a sitrep through to base. Report that we’re on Green Four, and find out if they’ve got any news of the Boat Troop. If it goes noisy, RV back at the dinghy. I just hope to hell these bastards haven’t got any dogs.’

  I scrambled along the back of the heap, working my way left-handed to the airstrip end. Back on the side of the road I paused, listening, then crossed to the rear corner of the accommodation block. Behind it I found a strip of cleared ground maybe ten metres wide, so that walking up it was easy. There were no windows in the back of the building, which was made of bare concrete blocks, only narrow ventilation slits high in the walls. As I crept along I was thinking, If Luisa and the DA are here, they could be right beside me, the other side of that wall. At the far end of the block I again stood still for two or three minutes, but I heard nothing except the cicadas at a distance, the drumming of the generator close at hand, and the mosquitoes aiming for my neck.

  As we had guessed, the second building was the laboratory. It was fifty metres long, and above a shoulder-high wall of blocks it was open to the outside air. Looking over the wall I could see long working surfaces, or possibly vats, and there was a chemical smell in the air. At the far end, a collection of 55-gallon drums stood in one corner, stacked two-high. These would be the ether.

  Beyond the laboratory I came to the end of the new building, and beyond that I found myself on the bank of a small river, which ran past the end of the site.

  I’d started along the back of the unfinished structure when suddenly I smelled woodsmoke. Somewhere ahead of me there was a fire. Maybe people were camping in the open. Then, within a few feet, I heard a noise that made me freeze: a man snoring. The sound came from head level. There was somebody in a hammock almost within arm’s length. Inching backwards, a quarter-step at a time, I retraced my route to the corner of the lab. Earlier, I’d been considering the idea of making my way back along the front of the buildings and getting a look at the doors. Now I decided that any such manoeuvre was out of the question; there were too many people on the site.

  By midnight I was back in our OP at the top of the rampart. Sparky had got no joy out of his 319; he’d run an aerial up, but probably it needed to go higher. It wasn’t on to go tree-climbing in the dark, so I told him to wait for first light. In the meantime, we needed to get our heads down.

  Slinging hammocks at midnight in the jungle was something at which we had had a good deal of practice. If you sleep on the ground, you not only put yourself at the mercy of all the creepy-crawlies on the forest floor; you also advertise your presence by leaving signs – impressions in the earth and dead leaves. The correct procedure is to wrap a length of hessian round the trunk of a tree, so that your support rope doesn’t mark the bark, and then lash on.

  Soon two of us were swinging gently under our mozzie nets, while the third stayed on stag. I don’t think any of us slept.

  FIFTEEN

  Even by their own swift standards, the Boat Troop had made a fast getaway. The ops officer put out a call at 1715 on Saturday evening, when most of the guys were at home or around the town. The commander, Staff Sergeant Merv Mason, an Aussie famous for his walrus moustache, was in
his local Tesco when the bleeper went off in his pocket. Hearing the summons, he cut short his shopping, made a dash for the rapid check-out, and hurtled home to pick up his kit on his way into camp. In under two hours of frantic activity his team had got itself together and lined up the stores and equipment they would need for a drop into the sea and an assault on the Santa Maria.

  In the background, Merv knew, urgent talks were in progress. The boss was negotiating to get the party aboard an RAF TriStar which was leaving Lyneham that evening. The basic need was to lift the team to Belize with the minimum delay, and have them there ready to deploy as things developed. A Herc plodding round the northern route would be far too slow. After pressure from the Director of the SAS in London, the wing commander in charge of air movements at Lyneham had been prevailed upon to hold the TriStar for two hours, and to throw off a dozen less urgent passengers. In the end a Chinook lifted the team from Hereford to Lyneham, together with their kit, and they flew out at 2200.

  Eight hours later, at 0100 local time, they landed in the hot darkness at Airport Camp, Belize. Three four-ton trucks drove out to the aircraft to collect them; leaving the plane before anyone else, they and their kit were whisked away to a holding area in one of the warehouses, where Keith Marshall, their liaison officer, had set up a standby ops room. The rest of the guys got their heads down in transit accommodation, but he was up for the rest of the night, fielding the messages that came in by secure fax from Hereford and Regimental Headquarters in London.

  From the faxes Keith could see that diplomatic negotiations had been going on at the highest level. No matter that in North America it was the early hours of Sunday morning; it was Prime-Minister-to-President stuff as Whitehall urgently requested assistance in lifting the Boat Troop to within striking distance of their objective, wherever that might turn out to be.

  When the Santa Maria sailed from Cartagena at 0830 local time – 1330 in London – an emergency meeting was called at the COBR, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, underground in Whitehall, which was opened up and manned to act as the control centre. There the SAS Director met senior officials from the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office and a representative from the United States Embassy. After an initial conference, as satellite surveillance showed the ship heading north, they stood down the meeting until her destination could be established. When she put into Desierto at 2000 local (0100 in London), the senior officers were routed out of bed by telephone calls, and sleepily reassembled. Later that morning, at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the American Defence Attache called the duty officer in the Operations Center at the Pentagon and confirmed that help was going to be needed again, this time in the form of a warship to put the Boat Troop within range of their target. ‘The British Prime Minister’s been talking with the President,’ he confirmed. ‘The orders are to give every possible assistance.’

  None of this background activity concerned Merv Mason and his men in Belize. All they knew was that they had to prepare for Operation Gannet. By midday on Sunday they were ready to parachute into the sea, with their two twenty-five-foot Geminis fully inflated and secured on platforms with all their gear inside them, including the forty-horsepower Mariner engines. The stream of secure faxes, which continued all morning, told them that the Pentagon had agreed to divert a nuclear attack submarine, the USS Endeavor, from its exercise in the Caribbean so that it could pick them up and take them covertly into the target area. The planners assumed that the Santa Maria, although by no means new, must have effective radar; and this meant that the approach of any large surface vessel or unidentified aircraft would warn the narcos of an impending attack. A submarine was therefore by far the safest option.

  Shortly after 2000 on Sunday evening, messages reaching the standby ops room in Belize began to give information about Desierto. The northernmost of a group of small islands which were the tops of extinct volcanoes, it had never been permanently inhabited. Although the others supported small communities of fishermen, Desierto was deserted because it had no reliable fresh water supply. Intelligence routed from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency revealed that in the 1960s a bauxite mining company had built a quay on the shore of a creek on the western side of the island, but that the venture had gone bankrupt and the port had been abandoned. Recently big-time drug-runners had begun to use it again as a safe haven and transit base, cross-decking consignments from one ship to another, and flying small planeloads into Mexico.

  In the old days the team commander and signaller at Belize would have spent an anxious hour working out latitudes, longitudes, distances and courses to create a rendezvous between aircraft and submarine in the middle of the Caribbean. Now computers made the calculations in seconds, and then did them again, so that their human operators could feel confident they were right. The upshot was that the Boat Troop boarded a Hercules at 2100 on Sunday evening, for a flight of two hours forty minutes on a bearing of 112 degrees for a rendezvous with USS Endeavor thirty miles off the west coast of Desierto.

  As the plane droned through the night, Merv looked round his nine men. All were asleep, or nearly so, and certainly none looked worried. A night jump into the sea was routine for them. Gannet was exactly the kind of operation they had spent years training for. Far from being scared, they were positively looking forward to some action. Merv, at thirty-two, was the oldest in the party – although with his short, curly fair hair and pockmarked face he didn’t look it. He eased a finger inside the collar of his black wetsuit and settled himself into a more comfortable position.

  Once, at about 2230, he went up to the flight-deck for a chat with the captain and a last check of the coordinates. As everyone seemed happy, he moved back down and concentrated his mind on the task ahead. The rendezvous with the sub should be routine; it was the landing on the island which would demand quick assessment and positive decisions. Maps faxed across during the day had given him an idea of the shape of the coast around the creek, but there hadn’t been time to send photographs, so a lot would depend on the nature of the shore where they landed.

  At 2300 the captain began a gentle descent, easing down from 20,000 feet. Merv plugged in one of the headsets hanging along the sides of the hold and listened in. At 2330 an American voice suddenly came up on the compatible radio channel. ‘Alpha Two to X-ray One. How do you read me? Over.’

  ‘X-ray One, loud and clear. Running in on one-one-two. Estimate nine minutes to DZ overhead.’

  ‘Roger. We’ll give you a white light buoy on our starboard side, your port.’

  ‘X-ray One. Thanks.’

  ‘Alpha Two. Happy landings, and please not to drop your goddamn boats on top of us.’

  Merv knew that to have comms with the aircraft, the sub must have her periscope above the surface. By the time they reached her, she would have surfaced.

  ‘Four minutes to DZ overhead,’ the pilot called. ‘Stand by.’

  The head-loadie held up four fingers. The Herc had levelled off and was flying steadily at 1200 feet. All round the hold guys were adjusting and checking their harnesses. The rest of the hold crew were snapping off the fastenings and removing the nets that had held the boats down. At D minus two the head-loadie hit the button to lower the tailgate ramp. Warm, fresh air rushed in as the broad platform descended and the back of the plane yawned open to reveal black water glittering below.

  The head-loadie held up one finger. Merv counted down the sixty seconds to himself. Then they were into the familiar sequence: ‘Red on. Green on. GO!’

  First out were the boats. One big shove, and their platforms slid quickly backwards over the steel rollers in the deck until they toppled clear. The team immediately followed, in two sticks of five.

  As his chute snapped out, Merv saw the brilliant light shining up out of the sea, and beyond it he made out the long, dark shape of the sub’s upper hull. Then he steered for the boats, which were hitting the water with a big double splash three hundred yards away to the east.

  Ten minutes
later each team was clustered round its boat, still trussed on the platform. Cutting the tie-cords was a dicey business, because if anyone got entangled he could easily go down deep six when the platform fell away. With most of the cords severed, all but two men backed off, and they severed the final bonds in unison.

  With both Geminis fully operational, they motored gently towards the long, low hulk of the sub. The crew had already opened up the main hatch above the forward torpedo room – a huge, empty space on the front of the ship – and all the gear went into that; the boats were deflated, rolled up and packed into valises, the engines sealed inside waterproof bags. The guys changed into dry gear and went down into the heart of the ship. The hatches were sealed, buzzers sounded and the crew prepared to dive.

  Merv introduced himself as the commander, and met the officer of the watch. He’d been in submarines before, but they had all been small and cramped. This one was mega, with four decks, passages running for a hundred feet or more, and a luxurious amount of space. The whole ship was very quiet, and only the faintest hum of air-conditioning was detectable. It was also spotlessly clean, with fresh pastel colours on the bulkheads. The temperature was a comfortable 68 degrees, the air fresh, and the crew were in shirt-sleeves. The facilities in the enlisted men’s mess included a TV screen, a whole library of videos, and a bar at which the visitors were encouraged to make themselves tea and coffee. Their American hosts must have been curious about their mission, but they showed professional restraint. Apart from a few cracks such as, ‘What’s it like out there?’ they asked no questions.

  In any case, the visitors were going to be on board for no more than a couple of hours. While the rest of the team relaxed, Merv went along to the CIC, or Combat Information Center, beneath the conning tower, to check details of their approach to Desierto. The island was only thirty miles off, and the sub was closing on it at twelve knots.