Ghost Force

by Patrick Robinson

  Nonetheless it beat the hell out of being trapped in their hide trying to get off the island without a boat.

  Meanwhile, back in Egg Harbor, Ben Carey and his wife were wondering what had happened to Ernesto and Carlos—“such nice young gentlemen.”

  Eventually, shortly after 11:30 p.m., Ben decided to go out and take a look. He knew where they had gone, and he had seen their flashlights along the beach, but they ought to have been back by now, especially in this weather. So while Mrs. Carey went quietly to bed, Ben went down to the beach, using his stout walking stick to help him along the shingle.

  Of course he found nothing, certainly not Ernesto and Carlos. So he walked back to the house, but decided to make radio contact with the Goose Green emergency number, which they had been broadcasting all day on FIBS (the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service), which is heard everywhere .

  Hello, this is Ben Carey over at Egg Harbor…had a couple of your boys in here this evening…

  Yes, sir. Please go on.

  Well, around ten o’clock one of ’em, nice young man called Ernesto, thought he saw a light out on the beach. So he and his colleague, Carlos, went out to investigate. I saw their lights along the water, but I haven’t seen either of ’em since. And that was an hour and a half ago. I just took a walk along there, but I found nothing. The place was deserted. And now it’s rainin’ pretty hard, and I was just beginning to wonder if they was okay.

  Mr. Carey, thank you for your call. I think we’d like to send a helicopter up there and make a few checks. Could you listen for us, and maybe give us a flashlight guide down onto the jetty?

  Oh, sure. Be glad to. How long?

  No more than fifteen minutes.

  I’ll be out there.

  Ben poured himself a cup of cocoa, put another log on the fire, and sat down comfortably to wait. Nine minutes later he heard the steady beat of a low-flying helicopter.

  He grabbed a big golf umbrella and his flashlight, and headed out into the belting rain, closing the door behind him. He aimed the flashlight up and began turning it on and off.

  He could see the lights of the aircraft up there, and he saw it bank around and come into land following the position of his light. It touched down on the wide blacktop along the jetty. And he saw the pilot motion his thanks through the windshield.

  What he saw next, however, surprised him. The load doors burst open and one by one Argentinian frontline troops, dressed in waterproof combat gear, came swarming out, machine guns ready. There must have been twenty of them.

  The commanding officer shouted, “Which way, Ben?” in English. And he pointed out along the beach, at which time the entire group headed down onto the shingle and began running along the shoreline. The CO walked across and asked him again what time the two young troopers had left the house, and Ben confirmed ten o’clock.

  He went back inside and sat by the fire, until the CO knocked and came in. “No sign of ’em, Mr. Casey. We’re quite worried. But there’s not much we can do until it gets light.

  “Just to check, you saw nothing else out there, or heard anything?”

  “Not really, but I did see lights on the beach. And come to think of it, I thought I heard a very dull crackling sound at one point, kind of like a firework, but not so sharp. The walls in here are very thick.”

  “Could it have been gunfire? Machine-gun fire?”

  “Well, I don’t really know what that sounds like. But anyway there was not much of it. Just lasted a few seconds. Never thought any more about it.”

  “Okay. Thanks very much, Mr. Casey. And good night.”

  With that he was gone, and Ben heard the chopper clattering up into the skies. What he did not hear was the Argentinian CO open up the line to HQ Mount Pleasant …Bravo Four Six…we have an emergency in Egg Harbor…two of our men missing after reported gunfire…possible SAS bandits now on the run in this area…suggest broadcast warning to islanders, and prepare for first light search…weather conditions right now very bad, and these men are clearly dangerous. Lt. Colonel Ruiz, CO, Goose Green.

  Weather conditions might have been bad in the helicopter, but they were a lot worse in the Zodiacs. For mile after mile Ed Segal and Ron Wallace drove the boats forward, their backs braced against the driving rain and cold. They made their sweep around Great Island, and set sail for the last twenty miles, now head-on into the wind, and against the tide, a buffeting combination.

  By 0100 they were running down into the wide waters surging in from the Atlantic. Wide and deep, that is. They were driving into the wind and sea, using the kind of speed that would normally hold them at fourteen or fifteen knots, but here it just kept them at ten knots over the seabed.

  At 0140 Rick checked the GPS and ordered a two-degree course change at five knots only, to bring them onto the precise position of the RV—two and a half miles west of the kelp-strewn Elephant Cays…52.11 South 59.54 West.

  Ten minutes later the numbers on the little handheld GPS correlated. “Okay, guys, we gottit. Any moment now the submarine should make contact, but I don’t want to transmit anything above the surface of the water…I’m just gonna keep watching this thing…make sure the tidal drift doesn’t drag us off our numbers.”

  And there they sat, in the lashing rain, the pitch dark, the chill gusting wind off the South Atlantic. There were sixteen of them in the two inflatables, the bodies of Ernesto and Carlos having been heaved over the side a mile off Ruggles Island more than an hour earlier.

  The eight Americans, even Dallas, were pretty fed up and wanted nothing more than to get off the decks of these freezing-cold, soaking-wet Zodiacs. Douglas Jarvis and his boys were as happy as any eight men could be, finally off the hellhole of East Falkland, where they had been effectively marooned since April 8, that Friday night below Fanning Head, nearly three weeks ago.

  They were there for fifteen minutes more before Commander Hunter ordered a two-hundred-yard turn to the north. “We’re getting dragged off,” he said. But as the helsmen made the course adjustment, there was a sudden, massive roll on the surface of the water, as the 7,000-ton, 362-foot-long jet-black shape of USS Toledo came shouldering out of the deep, not forty yards from the Zodiacs.

  It was as if a full-sized destroyer had suddenly materialized from nowhere. Nuclear-powered, on a single driveshaft thicker than a telegraph pole, the submarine broke cover at an angle, its massive propeller thrashing below the surface. Then it seemed to lunge forward with a mighty s-w-i-s-h-i-n-g sound in the long swells, before coming to rest, its deck casing only eight feet above the waterline.

  Captain Jarvis only just had time to mutter, “Jesus Christ!” before the bulkhead door at the base of the sail opened wide, and the submarine’s deck crew emerged carrying boarding nets, rope ladders, and harnesses…“ Okay, you guys! Make it real sharp now…get the hell out of those rowing boats…harnesses on, four at a time…”

  Dallas, Douglas, Ron, and Peter were first aboard the Los Angeles–class ship, being half hauled and half climbing out of the Zodiacs, which were now moored tight alongside. Four at a time was right, and the boarding operation took less than fifteen minutes, before Commander Hunter took out his combat knife and slashed four great gashes into each of the rubberized hulls on the port side.

  Then he leaned out and cast off the second boat before stepping onto the rope ladder, no harness, and hauling himself up onto the casing with a shout of, “Cast her away!”

  With
one of the Zodiacs already sinking, the other began to ship water at a fast rate. Before Rick was inside the sail, with the door clipped shut, and making his way down the companionway, both the boats, which had served them so well, were on their way to the bottom in thirty-five fathoms, leaving no trace.

  It was an expensive way to run a Navy, but not so expensive as it might have been hanging around on the surface for a half hour, trying to drag the heavy-engined boats inboard, and being picked up on Argentine radar. Submarines like the Toledo cost a minimum $500 million apiece.

  Nineteen minutes after she had broken the surface, USS Toledo made her turn to the south and was about to vanish with all the Special Forces safely on board …“Down periscope…and bow down ten…five hundred…make your speed twenty…steer course one-three-five…”

  Captain Hugh Fraser had one thing in common with Douglas Jarvis. He just wanted to get away from the Falkland Islands, or whatever the hell they were now called, as fast and as silently as possible.

  1200, THURSDAY, APRIL 28

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Admiral Arnold Morgan had seen a few angry men in his time. But rarely had he sat in the Oval Office, in the presence of a leading U.S. industrialist, who was, quite literally, fit to be tied.

  “Mr. President, I just cannot understand how this goddamned banana republic can ransack a massive U.S. oil and gas field, march my men out at gunpoint, and not raise as much as a squeak from the world’s so-called superpower…not a threat, not even a goddamned postcard. Nothing.

  “And you want me to go back and tell my shareholders, the Americans who actually own ExxonMobil, that not only have we just been robbed of two billion dollars—the President of the United States of America is not prepared to raise one goddamned finger to help us get it back.”

  “Steady, Clint,” said Arnold, a fellow Texan. “This is not quite as simple as it seems. We are doing something; we’ve got guys out there risking their lives to get this thing resolved in our favor. Two days ago we sent a communiqué to Buenos Aires, direct from the President, suggesting we all meet, right here in Washington, DC, and come to terms as laid down by us.”

  “What kind of terms?”

  “The kind that will give you back both of those big oil and gas fields along Choiseul Sound, and the one in South Georgia.”

  “But we don’t have any leverage down there, Admiral,” replied the President of ExxonMobil. “No warships, no big guns, no goddamned muscle. That’s the only language these guys understand. Jesus, we could raise an army out of Texas shareholders who’d go down there and do something .

  “I keep saying we just can’t sit here, losing millions of dollars a day, not to mention our entire investment in cash, time, expertise, and plain ole Texas know-how. Goddamnit, President George Dubya would not have put up with it.”

  And now President Bedford stepped into the conversation. “Clint,” he said, “I have decided to take you into our confidence. You just have too big a stake in this to be kept on the outside.”

  Clint nodded. Vigorously. “Sure do, Mr. President. Sure do.”

  “Well, are you sworn to secrecy? Because there is no one outside this room and the U.S. Navy Special Forces who knows what’s going on. You will tell no one, not your wife, your children, your neighbors, your best friends, your fellow directors, or even your dogs. Because this is about as highly classified as it gets. So tell me, are you sworn to lifelong secrecy, so help you God?”

  Arnold thought those last few words, delivered by the most powerful man in the world, had a resonant, damn near holy ring to them. He liked that.

  “As my old granddaddy used to say,” replied Clint, “To the grave, guys, I’ll take this one to the grave. Swear to God.”

  “Okay,” replied Paul Bedford. “Just so long as you remember, one word of this ever leaks out, the Secret Service will come looking for you, because you’re the only person outside the military who could have leaked it. Right here, I’m talking treason against the United States of America. It’s that serious. No one must ever know.”

  “Like I said, Mr. President. To the grave.”

  “Right, I’ll tell you what’s going on. In the past few days, our Special Forces have obliterated an entire Argentinian air base at the north end of the Falklands, taken out all fifteen fighter-bombers on the ground, and blown sky-high probably the biggest storehouse of bombs and missiles in South America.

  “A second team of U.S. Special Forces has hit the Argentinian naval base at Mare Harbor on the Atlantic side of East Falkland and wiped out the entire Malvinas defensive fleet, two destroyers and two guided-missile frigates.

  “Basically, Clint, we’re gonna go on kicking the shit out of Argentina until they come around to our way of thinking. I probably do not need to inform you this entire strategy was created by Admiral Morgan here.”

  “That’s good. Now you’re talking my kind of language. Takes a Texan, right? Big T , little e —little x-a-n .”

  Arnold chuckled. So, for that matter, did President Bedford, who continued, “Our suggestions to the Argentinian President have bordered on blackmail, intimating, somewhat elusively, that we may be in a position to have this wanton destruction of their naval and military capability stopped. Although, we of course have no idea who the culprits may be.

  “But our last communiqué was very…well, arched…though I imagine the Mafia have a more graphic way of expressing it. And I should tell you that if the Argentinians have not come to heel within the next twelve hours, we’ll hit ’em again. Until they do.”

  “Jeez, this is beautiful,” said Clint, beaming. “Really beautiful. And I’d like you both to accept my apologies, for my presumption in assuming nothing was happening.”

  “It’s happening, all right,” said the Admiral. “We’re just waiting for a communiqué from Buenos Aires, confirming the Argentinians agree to our solutions. And, as the President explained, one of the critical points of the agreement is the return of all the oil and gas on both islands to ExxonMobil.”

  “Gentlemen, you can’t say fairer than that,” said the oil chief. “And I’m real grateful to you both. And I wanna thank those brave guys down there for all that they’re doing on our behalf. By the way, you said Special Forces…did y’all mean those Navy Sea Lions?”

  Paul Bedford smiled. “They’re SEALs, Clint. SEALs. And not even I would dare to tell you whether they’re involved.”

  “Will there be any announcement of the next mission, I mean after it’s completed?”

  “Not a word, Clint. Ever. Like you, we go to our graves.”

  “Well, gentlemen, this has been a very informative and uplifting discussion. Your confidences are safe with me, and I must wish you both good afternoon.”

  He stood up and nodded politely to them both…“Mr. President…Admiral Morgan…it’s been my pleasure.” And with that the Chief Executive of Exxon left the Oval Office, cheerfully whistling that Lone Star classic, “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven, and Your Buns in the Bed,” originally performed by Kinky Friedman’s Texas Jewboys.

  “What the hell’s that song he was whistling, Arnie?” asked the President.

  “I couldn’t tell you that,” replied the Admiral. “But that was one happy oil driller when he walked out of here.”

  “Probably feels he’s won the state lottery after being two billion down,” said the President. “Anyway, on behalf of Big Clint, what’s our next plan in the South Atlantic?”

 
“Well, we got twenty Special Forces on their way into Punta Arenas, and Bergstrom is in favor of an attack on Rio Grande, Argentina’s most southerly air base. In the past eighteen months they’ve taken delivery of a squadron of brand-new Dassault-Breguet Super-Etendard F5 fighter-bombers from France.

  “According to the National Security Agency surveillance pictures, they’re all parked at Rio Grande, twelve of them. These things can deliver an air-to-surface laser-guided missile with a nuclear warhead. They’re lethal and could be launched from that new carrier they just ordered from France. Well, according to Ryan Holland they just ordered it. I’d say those Super-Es would be the Argentine military’s pride and joy.”

  “You want to send the guys in again?”

  “Only if I can be absolutely sure no one’s likely to be caught—and so long as Chile remains onside to help us.”

  “Okay, Arnie, you’re calling the shots on this one. Even if those shots are ultimately in my name…”

  2200, SAME DAY, THURSDAY, APRIL 28

  SOUTH ATLANTIC 52.19S 67.35W

  USS Toledo came smoothly out of the deep to make her rendezvous with the 3,000-ton Chilean Navy transport auxiliary Aquiles . They were sixty miles north of Rio Grande, twenty-five miles east of the Atlantic entrance to the Magellan Strait.

  All twenty-eight of the embarked Special forces—SEALs and SAS—gathered up their kit and left the submarine on board two Chilean Naval launches, which transported them fifty yards to the light-gray, almost empty troopship, sent especially to bring them in by the President of Chile himself.

  Before them was a 130-mile journey, firstly into the 20-mile-wide entrance to the channel, and then on down the long left-hand sweep of the strait to Punta Arenas, the great Chilean seaport that sits at the foot of the Andes.

  Once the Aquiles passed the headland of Point Dungeness, three miles off their starboard beam, the rest of the shoreline, on either side of the seaway, was Chilean. They expected to dock in Punta Arenas at 0700 on Friday morning, April 29.