Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  The parachute was off now, but he was gasping for breath as a massive rogue wave rolled right over the trough in which he wallowed. Rick was a great swimmer, and he had a good lungful of air, but it seemed a hundred feet upward before he broke clear of the water again, and gulped in more air. He stared out toward the next oncoming wall of water and prepared to go under once more, but he need not have worried. Two pairs of brawny seamen’s hands clamped on to his shoulders and hauled him out backward, over the broad inflated sides of the Zodiac.

  He landed on his back. “Hold it right there, sir…” someone yelled unnecessarily. And he felt the diesel engine accelerate, dragging them around, in the direction of the advancing waves. Before Rick could raise himself up, Mike Hook, gasping and choking seawater, landed on top of him. Then the diesel roared again, as the helmsman somehow got the boat synchronized with the pattern of the surface and with immense skill steered them toward Dallas MacPherson, who was, unsurprisingly, yelling.

  The inflatable was now rising up through six feet against the hull of the submarine, and Rick could see a succession of safety lines and harness lines being lowered and grabbed by the seamen. Right now he had no idea what was happening, but he could see the sailors moving and clipping with sure, rapid expertise.

  “What happens now?” he said.

  “Grab those boarding nets, sir. The guys will haul you on to the casing…don’t worry…you can’t fall…”

  Just then the second boat arrived bearing Don Smith, Brian Harrison, and Ed Segal. Seven minutes later, the first ten SEALs were being greeted by Captain Fraser.

  It took another ten minutes for all twenty of them to assemble inside the submarine. The last boat recovered all the gear containers, which had been dropped separately.

  This had been a flawless ocean drop—no one lost, no one injured, everyone safe and experiencing a massive sense of relief. This mission might be dangerous, but the part that had concerned them most was over.

  0900, SUNDAY, APRIL 24

  ARGENTINE MILITARY GARRISON

  GOOSE GREEN, EAST FALKLAND

  Sir, we’re getting no reply on the radio. Nothing. It’s dead.

  What time did they leave?

  Around midnight.

  Last contact?

  0105.

  Position?

  Quayside, Port Sussex.

  Contacts?

  Señor Luke Milos. He reported sheep stealing. I just spoke to him, and he saw our Jeep heading up the mountainside around 0130. He heard machine guns, but they were ours. The men were sweeping the area with a searchlight and rounds of gunfire.

  Did he see which way the vehicle went?

  Only for around six hundred yards up the hill behind his home. Do you think we should send a search party? Couple of Jeeps?

  Well, they may be on their way back. It’s very barren up there. I think we should leave it another couple of hours, and then send a helicopter up to Port Sussex. That way we cover more ground ten times as fast.

  Yessir.

  1100, SAME DAY

  Captain Jarvis and his still-intact SAS team had made it to the southern end of Brenton Loch and had gone to ground close to the water at the northern end of the causeway that crosses Choiseul Sound. This rectangle of land is about five miles long and only a little more than a mile wide. The Argentine garrison at Goose Green was in the diametrically opposite southeastern corner, a distance of perhaps five and a half miles from the SAS team. No more.

  The land there is flat, but the shoreline is craggy, with a lot of rocks on the landward side of the pebbled beach. Jake Posgate had found an ideal spot, a group of eight huge, flattish boulders that overlapped, two of them resting on the shoulders of three others.

  This did not provide much space, but it provided enough for eight hard-trained combat troops to hole up, mount their defensive position, and remain invisible from any direction. The only way anyone could locate them would be to squirm straight into the low tunnel formed by the boulders, and then kiss life on this planet a very sharp good-bye.

  The main trouble for Douglas was that there was no possibility of cooking the three joints of lamb they still possessed. At least not until nightfall, and even that was a little risky.

  But they had water, and some chocolate, and there was little to do except wait until dark, and then attempt to cross the causeway and head down to the next harbor without being located.

  So far the day was passing very slowly and very boringly. But at 1110 they heard the whine of a military helicopter, flying low, maybe a couple of miles to the east. Douglas himself wriggled out of their hide and, lying flat on the pebbles, saw it heading north, making a circular course back toward the coast.

  “That’s the enemy,” he muttered. “They’ve decided their patrol has gone missing. Guys, we just became the target of an Argentinian manhunt that is likely to get bigger and bigger over the next few hours.”

  “What do we do?” asked Trooper Wiggins.

  “Nothing. We stay right here, and hope to Christ they concentrate their search six miles north of here around Port Sussex. If our luck holds, they may not bother with this stretch of exposed coast ’til tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ll make our move south soon as the light fades.”

  “How close to the Argentine garrison do we go?”

  “Probably within a mile. We’ll just keep crawling along the coast and make darned sure no one sees us. In daylight we stay right where we are. Hidden.”

  And that’s precisely where they stayed until, at 1300, they heard another helicopter take off from the south end of the causeway. They then saw what was probably the original one fly back. Then they heard two more helos come in from the south—probably, in Captain Jarvis’s view, from Mount Pleasant.

  “Jesus, we got ’em worried,” said Douglas. “They now believe something happened to their guys. And they’re about to scour this fucking island to find out who did it.”

  “Who’s more worried, us or them?” asked Bob Goddard.

  “Us. By fucking miles, since you ask,” replied the Team Leader. “This is beginning to look very, very hairy.”

  “If they corner us, do we fight, or surrender?”

  “I guess we fight. Because if we surrender they’ll shoot us for murdering their colleagues, when the war we came for was plainly over.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Trooper Wiggins. “Are we dead in the water?”

  “Hell, no,” said Douglas. “First of all, they’re not going to find us; secondly, we know someone is certainly trying to rescue us; and thirdly, we must have a chance of getting a boat out of here. We are British, and any citizen of these islands is effectively a British citizen in captivity. We just need a break, a friendly fisherman with a trawler full of gas that will get us to the Magellan Strait.”

  “You sure about that rescue stuff?” asked Bob Goddard.

  “No,” replied Douglas, curtly.

  And they all fell silent, trying not to consider themselves trapped in this hellhole, from which right now there was no escape. And for three more hours they lay flat on the ground awaiting the fading of the light.

  At 1800 Trooper Joe Pearson switched on the satellite radio communication and put on the headset, same as every night. In the background there was that faint electronic “mushy
” sound, but, as usual, no other variation.

  Fifteen minutes later, Joe Pearson was almost nodding off to sleep when he heard it…a voice, indistinct, but a voice.

  “Jesus Christ, there’s someone on the line!” he gasped.

  “Careful it’s not the fucking Args,” snapped Douglas. “Give it to me!”

  Joe ripped the headset off and handed it to the boss.

  And right away, Douglas heard the voice: Foxtrot-three-four…Foxtrot-three-four…Sunray SEAL team…Sunray SEAL team…do you copy? Come in, Dougy…this is Sunray SEAL team…do you copy…?

  Foxtrot-three-four…Dougy receiving, Sunray…repeat receiving, Sunray…

  Get to free-range dockside ASAP…we’re coming in. Good luck. Over and out.

  The unseen line of communication from Douglas Jarvis’s makeshift cave shut down. And the comms mast of USS Toledo slid silently inboard, seconds before the submarine slid below the surface.

  And this left Douglas and his boys to work out the details. Sunray is U.S./UK military code for Commander. And the SEALs were plainly on their way. But free-range dockside? What the hell was that all about?

  As codes go, that one was not trying to fool the entire world. In fact it was not heard by anyone except Douglas Jarvis. And it took about four minutes peering at the coastal map of the western side of East Falkland.

  “Right here,” said Douglas, spreading out the map. “About fifteen miles east-southeast of this place—tiny little place, sheltered inlet off Falkland Sound…see it? That’s where we’re going…Egg Harbor.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  2000, SUNDAY, APRIL 24

  SOUTH ATLANTIC

  NORTH OF WEST FALKLAND

  USS Toledo ran slowly inshore, 51.16S 59.27W on the GPS, five miles north of the rough and rocky north coast of the island. They came to periscope depth and checked for deserted seas. Captain Fraser ordered the inflatable boats launched in twenty minutes as the submarine came creeping into waters only a hundred feet deep.

  Commander Rick Hunter and his team heard the CO order his ship to the surface, and they watched the two Zodiacs being hauled out onto the casing, followed by their four engines, each of which was manhandled up out of the torpedo room on swiftly erected davits set inside the sail.

  Commander Hunter and Dallas MacPherson led the other six out onto the casing, and they all stared in awe at some seriously worsening weather, with heavy swells riding up the bow of the submarine. The wind was not yet gale force, but it was almost certainly building, and Captain Fraser advised them to move fast and make the run into the beach with all possible speed.

  The embarkation nets and rope ladders were in place on the submarine’s hull within two minutes, and the seamen lowered the two boats brilliantly down into the water, each one containing its driver just in case it somehow broke free.

  Commander Hunter would be last away, and Dallas MacPherson led the men down the ladders, four in each boat, carrying as much of their gear as possible in extremely difficult circumstances.

  At 2030 the helmsman turned the boats south and opened the throttles, driving toward the landing site, the headland jutting out into Pebble Sound, sheltered from the onrushing Atlantic waves, and possibly from a big nor’wester. But it was susceptible to a strong tidal pull through the narrows, which might make things extremely tough for the SEALs.

  To the southeast, they could see the 780-foot height of Goat Hill, which would give them some protection from surveillance, if the Argentinians had retained their high garrison on White Rock Point, the western guardian of the entrance to the Sound. But this was ten miles from the landing beach.

  The near gale-force wind buffeted the boats in which the SEALs crouched, their loaded rucksacks packed with ammunition, food, waterproof sleeping bags, and the radio. The helmsmen were unable to make much headway in this sea, but they pushed along at ten knots, aware that it would take a very alert surveillance officer to locate them out here in the pitch-black ocean.

  Rick Hunter was personally acting as navigator, and he knelt on the wooden deck, staring at the compass, trying to locate the gap in the low hills on the shoreline up ahead, the hills that would identify the Tamar Pass, through which they would find shelter and calmer seas, and the landing beach.

  It took ten minutes to spot the flashing buoy on the east side of the gap, and they raced through, much faster now as the water flattened, leaving the warning light a hundred yards to their port side.

  The landing beach was slightly more than a mile ahead, dead straight, and they came in at an easy speed, the engines cut and raised forty yards offshore to avoid grounding out on the shingled seabed, while the men paddled in with big wooden oars.

  They beached both boats and unloaded them separately, with each man moving to a preplanned task, precise as a tire change by a Grand Prix pit team. The disembarkation took less than forty-five seconds.

  Rick Hunter quickly checked his team was all present. And they began the most serious part of the landing, which was to haul the Zodiacs somewhere out of sight. Each of the eight men gripped one of the handles and heaved, generally amazed at how light it was with this much muscle providing coordinated power.

  They moved the first boat back around seventy-five yards into the shelter of a few rocks and some sparse-looking bushes and went back for the second. Then they unscrewed the engine bolts and manhandled them flat onto the ground. They turned the boats upside down and placed them over the engines, propping up the bows to give the wheel clearance. It was a major effort, but it removed the problem of metal engine casing glinting in the sun and betraying their position.

  Rick asked Don Smith and Bob Bland to cut some gorse to lay over the upturned hulls and to weigh them down with rocks. Within another ten minutes the boats were secure and invisible from the air, ready for the attack, and perhaps more important, ready for the getaway.

  Using a flashlight, they discovered they were in a relatively sheltered spot, in an uninhabited area. They pulled out the spade and dug in for the night. It was bitterly cold, but it was dry, and they could stay out of the wind in the lee of a long flat rock.

  Commander Hunter ordered Ed Segal and Ron Wallace to stand guard for ninety minutes each, while the rest of them snatched some sleep, and then prepared to receive the HALO drop at midnight. That would keep them up until dawn.

  Right now at 2100, the United States B-52H long-range bomber out of Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, was refueling in Santiago, in readiness for the final 1,300-mile flight down to the Falklands.

  This great gun-gray warhorse of the U.S. military was 160 feet long and weighed 220 tons. Its distinctive nose cone made it look like a great white shark with wings, and tonight, with its light load, it would fly high and fast, close to five hundred knots, following the lofty peaks of the Andes. It would stay in Chilean airspace all the way south until it angled east above the Magellan Strait, then straight to the open ocean and the Falkland Islands.

  As it skirted Argentinian air space, the B-52 would be cruising at 45,000 feet, too high, but fuel-efficient. It would be transmitting only nonmilitary radar. Civilian aircraft, flying high at night, are not routinely checked out by airline authorities in southern Argentina, nor indeed by Chile. Ryan Holland had been very definite about that.

  At 2120 the U.S. Air Force Stratofortress came hurtling off the Santiago runway and set a course due south, which would take it nine hundred miles down the entire Pacific coastal length of Chile. They had flown on an extre
mely tight schedule from North Dakota, refueling once at North Island, San Diego, where they picked up most of the explosive contents for the HALO canister.

  And right now the veteran frontline pilot out of the Fifth Bomb Wing, Lt. Colonel E. J. Jaxtimer, was running approximately seven minutes late. The B-52 would be directly over the SEALs’ hide at 0007, though he hoped to pick up time during the high-speed run through the very thin air above the mountains.

  Meanwhile, the SEALs slept. And the night hours flashed by. At 2330 everyone was awakened. They ate some concentrated protein, drank fresh water, and prepared for the oncoming arrival of the 250-pound computerized bomb-shaped canister, swinging downward beneath its black parachute, having dropped like a stone for almost 45,000 feet. That was the whole idea of HALO—high altitude, low opening—as untraceable as a falling meteorite for 99 percent of its journey, then too low to be located by anyone’s radar.

  Rick Hunter was checking the high-tech target marker he would place on the ground, sending a powerful laser beam streaking into the black sky to the east. This was the beam that would flash a pinpoint-accurate GPS reading to Lt. Colonel Jaxtimer and his team—51.21.05S 59.27W. The ops room of the Stratofortress would lock right on to it in the brief minutes before they jettisoned the canister out of the B-52’s bomb bay.

  The beam in Commander Hunter’s target finder was life and death for this mission. If it failed, everything failed. If it functioned, the Argentine Air Force could bid adios to their fighter attack bombers parked on the airfield at Pebble Beach. Parked, incidentally, in this remote, inaccessible spot without even a semblance of a guard.

  At 2345, the SEALs took up their positions. Commander Hunter placed the target finder in the precise spot indicated by the GPS system, accurate to within five yards. They made it secure in the shingle and drew out its collapsible aerial pointing to the east. Mike Hook stood with him, and the remaining six spread out in three pairs to form a forty-yard-wide triangle around him.