Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  Even the discovery of oil, major oil, did not penetrate the minds of the bureaucrats and politicians. Safe in the ironclad security of their own jobs, they whiled away the years in Whitehall, preparing to claim their even more secure retirement pensions, while scowling even at the mention of the very expensive Falkland Islands. Even the Saudis understood the drastic need to protect their oil with a heavy armed presence. Not, however, Britain’s Labour government.

  Left largely to its own devices, operationally stripped to its bare minimum, the garrison was working for a government that believed Great Britain could not possibly be caught out again. Not so long as the new Mount Pleasant Airfield (MPA) was functional and capable of handling a rapid reinforcement force at the first sign of danger.

  But the 2010 government appeared to have forgotten entirely that on May 21, the opening day of the 1982 war, it took about three minutes and one British thousand-pound bomb to render Argentinian takeoffs and landings from the Falklands virtually impossible for fast-jet aircraft, for the entire duration of the war.

  Right now, in the autumn of 2010, there was just a company group of the Third Rifles, 140 men rotating every nine months. They consisted of just a small HQ and three rifle platoons. They had a few heavy machine guns but absolutely no mortars or antitank weapons.

  The savagely diminished presence of the Royal Navy was sufficient to bring joy to the heart of Admiral Oscar Moreno. There was one aging Fleet Auxiliary ship whose sole purpose was to resupply groceries and fuel to South Georgia, the other British protectorate in the South Atlantic, some 1,100 miles away, southeast.

  And there was the 1,400-ton patrol ship, HMS Leeds Castle , which was designed for a 30mm gun with a range of seven miles, a platform for a Sea King helicopter, and facilities for a detachment of Royal Marines. The helicopter was missing and so was the detachment of Royal Marines. But the gun was still there.

  Both ships were stationed in Mare Harbor, a windswept little bay five miles to the south of the airport, where the Royal Navy’s tiny HQ is based.

  A few years back it was decided that a heavily armed frigate, packing a lethal, modern, can’t-miss guided-missile system, was essential for the defense of the islands. But these days, the islands received only an occasional, irregular visit from a Royal Naval frigate on task 4,000 miles to the north in the Caribbean, essentially looking for drugs.

  The Royal Air Force presence had also been scaled right back. They kept a VC-10 refueling tanker and a search-and-rescue Sea King helicopter. But they no longer had any lift capacity. For stores and supplies, the work had been contracted out to a civilian firm, which normally operated on oil rigs.

  A decade ago the Royal Air Force was forced to withdraw from service a flight of four Tornado F3s owing to the prohibitive cost of continuing a service line for obsolete fighter aircraft. At the time it was intended they would be replaced by the air defense version of the new Typhoon (the Eurofighter), which was still not operational, despite having been the RAF’s top priority program for twenty years.

  It was not considered possible to send Typhoons to the Falklands. And the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall considered this an acceptable risk.

  They decided only one thing mattered: making sure the international airfield at Mouth Pleasant stayed operational. And for that they installed a Rapier missile system, manned by RAF personnel. That was two towed launchers, each mounting eight missiles for short-range air defensive cover across the airfield. The Rapier missiles had a maximum range of around three miles and a ceiling of under 10,000 feet. Its surveillance radar was good for about twelve miles.

  Literally thousands of evenings were spent by Argentinian military personnel in the Florida Garden confiteria , most of them gleefully, discussing the British defensive capability in the Falkland Islands.

  They were older now. Mostly in their fifties and sixties. But these were pilot officers who had somehow bailed out of downed fighter aircraft at 600 mph. There were others who had been pulled out of the Atlantic after the General Belgrano was sunk; still others who had fought and been wounded on the freezing mountainous terrain of East Falkland—and perhaps above all, there were the officers who had surrendered their beaten troops, unforgettably, humiliatingly, on the melancholy morning of June 14, 1982.

  That was the core of the Malvinistas who met in the cafe on Cordoba Avenue in downtown Buenos Aires. They were men who believed there would be a next time. They were men who knew that the future attack must be a swift, violent strike, without warning. Surprise was everything.

  This was nothing remotely like the gung-ho amateurish group that had cheerfully gone into a major war against one of the best high-tech naval machines in the world. By the time General Kampf and Admiral Moreno returned from Moscow, the Argentine military had identified and selected a small group of carefully chosen officers and briefed them to begin detailed planning. Information was released strictly on a need-to-know basis.

  This was a burgeoning Argentinian force no longer packed with conscripts who knew nothing of combat. It had a command and staff structure based on the United States model, and its doctrine was based solidly on lessons learned in 1982.

  Conscription had been abolished in 1995, and since then a 55,000-strong regular army had been built, half the size, devoid of rookies and four times more professional than any battalion that had tried to take the Malvinas twenty-eight years earlier. It was infinitely better equipped, better organized, and better trained. Worse yet, for the Brits, this Argentinian High Command knew just about everything there was to know about the troops they regarded as occupying forces in the Malvinas.

  The prime reason for this was the oil. The advent of exploration, drilling, and recovery of the crude, particularly in the North Falkland Basin and the Special Co-Operation Area in the southwest, had opened up the region, wide, in the 1990s.

  Most of the oil consortiums involved had established small bases in the Stanley area, and there had long been a regular flow of personnel to and from the islands. Many of them arrived on the Santiago-based Lan Chile Airline, which flies Boeing 737s regularly between Punta Arenas and Mount Pleasant.

  This had enabled Argentinian agents to move freely in and out of the country for several years, observing the British garrison forces, identifying their strengths, and many weaknesses, their equipment, their base area, their routines, their patrolling patterns, and other military activities.

  In the Florida Garden confiteria they knew more about the British Army and Royal Navy in the South Atlantic than the Ministry of Defense knew in London. And Messrs. Kampf and Moreno had been telling a lie of the most majestic proportions when they first had asserted to their Russian visitor, Gregor Komoyedov, that no one in Argentina had given much thought to another assault on the Malvinas.

  And now, armed with highly detailed charts and notebooks, General Kampf and Admiral Moreno were in conference in Bahia Blanca, the Five Corps headquarters, where the principal military capability for the whole of southern Argentina is located.

  With them was General Carlos Alfonso, the Army Chief of Staff, and Admiral Alfredo Baldini, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Air Force Chief, General Hector Allara, a former Mirage attack pilot over Falkland Sound in 1982.

  All five men thought they could be ready any time in the new year. And all five men believed their attack should begin when the visiting Royal Navy frigate was well and truly on her way home, steaming hard toward the Caribbean, at least five days out of Mare Harbor.

  General Allara was especially keen on this aspect of the strategy since his French-built Mirage jet fighter had been hit and destroyed by a Sea Dart missile launch
ed from HMS Coventry , north of Falkland Sound, in the hours before the British destroyer was sunk by Argentinian bombs.

  Hector had bailed out into the water, and these many years later, no one was more aware than he that a well-handled Royal Navy guided-missile ship represented a serious opponent. He saw no reason to tangle with one, unless it was unavoidable. Sitting still, and waiting for the British frigate to leave town, was, in his view, the most agreeable option.

  Five Corps had under its command the First Armored Brigade, stationed inland to the northeast at Tandil; the Eleventh Mechanized Brigade, stationed far south on the coast at Rio Gallegos, 490 miles directly west of the Falklands; the Sixth Mountain Brigade at Neuquen, deep inland in northern Patagonia; and the Ninth Mechanized Brigade at Comodoro Rivadavia, which stands on the coast 360 miles north of Rio Gallegos.

  Thus Five Corps had a light armored battalion, medium artillery, air defense, army aviation and engineering, signals and logistics. And it had its one-third share of Argentina’s 256 main battle tanks, 302 light tanks, 48 reconnaissance vehicles, 742 armored personnel carriers, and 6 attack helicopters.

  The Corps’s infantry division was armed with the most modern recoilless rifles, submachine guns, general-purpose machine guns, Browning M2 heavy machine guns, mortars, and antitank guided missiles. Five Corps’s artillery carried a formidable range of howitzers. They had low-altitude surface-to-air missiles, Bofors aircraft guns, and a whole range of other antiaircraft guns.

  More important, they knew how to use the entire arsenal. And right now their commanders were beginning to move their operations south, to the coastal regions down toward the Falkland Islands. This applied particularly to the Argentine Air Force, which realized it must once more, for the second time in twenty-eight years, reactivate its sprawling Rio Grande air base in Tierra del Fuego, the 1982 home of Commander Jorge Colombo’s heroic Second Naval Fighter and Attack Squadron.

  The base lies right on the coast at the mouth of the river, forty-two miles southeast of the Bay of San Sebastian, a big inlet, twenty miles across.

  This was the base for Argentina’s French-built Dassault-Breguet Super-Etendard, the single-seat naval attack aircraft that delivered the 650-knot, radar-homing half-ton antiship missile, the Exocet—the one that incinerated the Royal Navy’s Type-42 destroyer HMS Sheffield on the fourth day of the 1982 war.

  The Super-Es, especially modified with extra gas tanks fitted under one wing, had an 860-mile range—sufficient to get well within striking range of the seas around the Falkland Islands.

  Back then, the Rio Grande base was the start point of the Exocet missile’s deadly journey, but this time the strategy would be very different. Because this time the Argentine forces would hold the airfield at Mount Pleasant. Or, at least they would if General Kampf had anything to do with it.

  But any attacking air force needs a home base, on native soil. And Rio Grande would once more be home to a squadron of the fabled French-built Super-Es, and there the pilots and ground crew would live, work, and train as one from November, until it became clear that Argentina not only owned and controlled the Malvinas, but there was no one on the horizon still planning to do anything about it.

  Right now the entire operation was just about as highly classified, utterly secret, as anything can ever be in a South American country. But Argentinians talk, and they talk with emotion, fervor, and optimism. Which was why, back in the Florida Garden confiteria , rumor was rife there was to be a new assault on the Malvinas.

  By eleven p.m. on Friday, October 29, a crowd had gathered before the Casa Rosada Presidential Palace on the Plaza de Mayo. It was not yet in the tens of thousands, but it certainly numbered several thousand. And, as the weekend throb of the tango began to permeate hundreds of bars and clubs in Buenos Aires, there was, very suddenly, a rapidly spreading sense of heightened expectation and hope.

  And even as the moon rose above the dark, faded elegance of the old city, an ever-rising, rhythmic roar of unbridled passion could be heard from the Plaza de Mayo. It was a cry from a thousand hearts, a hymn to the slain Argentinian warriors of 1982… Viva las M-a-a-l-v-i-n-a-s!! Viva las M-a-a-l-v-i-n-a-s!!

  1200, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe normally placed South America about eighth on his list of priorities. Nonetheless, he always enjoyed reading English-language newspapers from foreign capital cities. Sometimes he took a few days to get to them, but he always got to them.

  Today he was scouring the Buenos Aires Herald , the English-language daily that specializes in politics and business news and is renowned for its outspoken editorials, written fiercely against whoever seemed to be screwing life up for the Argentinians.

  During the Dirty War of the 1970s and ’80s, the Herald was so unremitting in its condemnation of military and police abuses that its editor had to go into hiding after threats against his family.

  Of all the newspapers Jimmy Ramshawe was not really interested in but could not afford to miss, the no-punches-pulled Buenos Aires Herald stood right at the top of the list.

  And right now he was preoccupied by one particular story that should have been confined to the business section, but was given enormous prominence on the front page of the paper. The headline read:

  OIL STRIKE ON PATAGONIA COAST

  HIGHLIGHTS MALVINAS OUTRAGE

  “Hullo,” muttered James. “The bloody gauchos are at it again.” This was a statement of such astonishing unawareness that even Jimmy, with his Aussie brand of outback humor but high intelligence, was moved to reconsider.

  “Tell the truth, I’m not so sure what a bloody gaucho is, except he rides a horse, carries a knife, eats a lot of beef, and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone.”

  As a description of the native Argentinian horsemen and cowboys, there was an element of truth in this. However, the badly missed point was the gauchos didn’t give a rat’s ass about the oil strike either. This was a matter for the big hitters of Argentinian business.

  The Buenos Aires Herald had published a story that speculated, with much authority, on a possible rich seam of oil and gas discovered a few miles to the north of the Patagonian port of Rio Gallegos. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Argentinian naval base located in that city.

  Rio Gallegos had long been a seaport for the export of coal from the huge mines found 150 miles west of the city. There had also been oil discoveries in the region, of sufficient volume to justify a sizeable refinery in Rio Gallegos. But according to the Herald , this new discovery was right on the coast, stretching out under Argentina’s coastal waters.

  They quoted an executive from the Argentine state oil company, who said:

  It cannot be a mere coincidence that the Patagonian oil fields plainly run from the coalfields to the coast, and then in a dead straight line to the Malvinas, where the biggest oil and gas strikes in recent years have been confirmed.

  The Herald reasoned:

  If that is true, then the oil fields on the islands MUST be the property of Argentina, since we are the clear and rightful owners of the Malvinas, and the ONLY country with coastal waters and seabed above the oil.

  Argentina’s claim on the islands has always been correct and unchallengeable politically, even the British understand that. It now appears to be unchallengeable geologically. The rock strata that has housed the oil for th
ousands of years is purely Argentinian, not British.

  Their absurd claim to own the Malvinas would be as if we claimed their North Sea oil because a few Argentinian families had settled on the east coast of Scotland.

  Until now, the oil companies have always stated the oil on the Argentine mainland and the oil in the Falklands are separate issues. However, last month’s new discovery north of Rio Gallegos has joined up the last dot in a long chain of Argentinian oil fields. The oil is ours, obviously ours. All of it.

  And what is our government, and indeed our military, doing about it? THEY OWE THE PEOPLE AN EXPLANATION…VIVA LAS MALVINAS!!

  “Christ,” said Jimmy.

  In an entirely separate story in the business section there was a long article about the financial ramifications of the new strike—the likelihood of 500,000 barrels a day, the need for yet another huge refinery in Rio Gallegos, and the prosperity that would occur in southern Patagonia.

  On the editorial pages, there was a piece by the editor of the Herald , pointing out the new strike had made the Malvinas even more difficult to reclaim. The British were now backed by the giant American oil corporation that had joined BP in the oil fields southwest of Port Stanley. They would likely dig in even more fiercely, probably even refuse to negotiate further.

  “The British government has never been anything less than dogmatic, unreasonable, and forever obdurate,” he raged. “Perhaps now is the time for Argentina once more to consider the military option.”

  “Christ,” repeated Jimmy. And then, slowly, “I’m telling you, that oil business causes more bloody trouble on this planet than any other issue in the entire history of mankind. Except religion.”

  He pulled up a map on his big computer and punched in the buttons that would reveal the coast of southern Patagonia and its proximity to the Falkland Islands.