Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  But after the first euphoria of destiny had died down, Hawker had seen with growing horror the drunkenness of power consuming his fellow officers.

  They started their first battle, an undeclared war against all socialist activities which grew into savage oppression of any view that differed from the official line. Hawker saw hatred and bigotry gnaw like a cancer through his country, while the crippling inflation he knew to be the real enemy went on unchecked. He saw attitudes he’d only previously read about in histories of the Third Reich become part of official policy. And so, he resigned.

  But he had stayed in his native land, partly a prisoner of the staggering inflation which made it economically difficult to emigrate, partly through obstinate refusal to retreat even from the face of unwinnable odds.

  And, to his own mild amazement, he had survived more than well. The marina – a modest investment of capital, an enormous investment of passion and gut-wrenching labour – he literally built out of nothing. It served as a base for the yacht brokerage business he built up in just a few years. He could now pride himself on being among the leading brokers of the South American Atlantic coast.

  But now they had him.

  The car crunched to a halt on a gravel driveway. Hawker felt the chill night air on his cheek as the driver threw the door open. He stumbled out and allowed himself to be led behind the staccato tap of Grivas’ boot heels up several steps and down a long, echoing corridor. He wondered at the reaction of any guards they may have passed on the way, because they would certainly have made a bizarre little parade: Grivas with his trim naval moustache, light sweater and slacks, looking for all the world as if he’d just stepped off a country club golf course; the driver and guard in various degrees of uniform and no doubt armed; and Hawker, still wearing his full length boardsailing wetsuit, padding along in his soft rubber Okewind deck-gripping slippers.

  They stopped, a large door creaked open then closed, and Hawker heard Grivas’ muffled voice followed by an older, even more commanding voice. Then Hawker was pushed in.

  ‘Capitán Paolo Hawker, you may stand at ease. And please, let us dispense with this ridiculous blindfold.’

  Even before the guard pulled the cloth from his eyes, Hawker knew whose voice it was. Almirante Jorge Anaya, Commander in Chief of the Argentine Republican Navy, stood facing him, tall and lean, his sharp Basque features made even sharper by the cut of his dark blue and rich gold braided uniform. He was in the centre of a large room, comfortably furnished in the dark timber and leather of an exclusive gentleman’s club. To one side a crisply liveried steward stood to attention by a sideboard. To another side a large table stood strewn with nautical charts and graphs and teletype commands, the universal flotsam of naval command.

  ‘And now,’ Anaya continued as if he were addressing a properly turned out officer of his own staff, ‘I would like you to join me in a drink. Whisky?’

  ‘Chivas Regal.’ Hawker stared straight at Anaya’s eyes.

  ‘I will dignify that by regarding it as a joke. A poor joke.’ Anaya turned to the steward. ‘Etiquetta for our guest.’

  Hawker waited until the steward brought the glass of poor domestic firewater to him on a tray before silently pointing out to Anaya that he would have great difficulty drinking with both hands cuffed behind his back.

  ‘Release him,’ ordered Anaya.

  Grivas started to protest but was hushed down by an imperious wave of a heavily braided arm.

  ‘We are all officers and gentlemen together. And besides, he could never escape alive from this building.’ His eyes darted to Hawker. ‘You know where you are?’

  ‘The Naval School of Engineering,’ Hawker replied without hesitation, and in deliberate English.

  ‘You are very perceptive.’

  ‘It’s where the Navy’s share of political prisoners come.’ Hawker said it as a simple matter of fact. ‘I’ve heard that few come out in one piece.’

  A dark frown swept over Anaya’s face.

  ‘We are not here to discuss rumours, and in any case, you flatter yourself if you think you pose any political threat to your government. I have simply summonsed you here as an officer with the qualifications to assist in a particular tactical discussion.’

  ‘I am not an officer. I resigned my commission in nineteen-seventy …’

  ‘No one resigns from my Navy!’ The frown became a thunderclap of temper. Anaya’s face turned a deep red, his dark eyes suddenly ablaze with fury. The ice rattled loudly in his glass, his hand clenched and shaking with a rage that took him several seconds to control. ‘Though if that is the game you want to play, Señor Hawker, I have made certain arrangements to ensure your cooperation. You will discover them when the time comes. For now, let us discuss the operation.’

  Anaya moved to the table strewn with maps and charts. He cleared a scatter of papers away from a large naval chart of the Atlantic from 50° south.

  ‘Islas Malvinas.’ His face, now returned to its usual colour, spread into a broad smile of satisfied pride. ‘Finally, they have come to their historic destiny, under the Argentine flag.’

  Anaya dropped his voice to a conspiratorial schoolboy whisper, forcing Grivas and Hawker to both lean in closer over the table, Hawker straining to hear with a fascination that overcame his resolve to remain disinterested, a prisoner of the body only and not the mind.

  ‘History may never record it, but there is one man – one patriotic hero – responsible for this great victory. Jorge Isaac Anaya.’ He thumped his own chest with his thumb. ‘My plan. My strategy. My decisive action forced the hand of destiny and won for us the glorious Malvinas.’

  Even Grivas was taken aback.

  ‘But surely, Almirante, the Army is claiming the glory of the occupation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anaya, ‘Galtieri is making the most of it with the masses. And for the sake of the Junta I must allow it. But he knows in his heart, and Lami Dozo with his precious Air Force too, that it was me who forced them into action. It was my men who landed on South Georgia Island. It was my decision alone to order my fleet to sail,’ he chuckled, as if savouring a private victory, ‘dragging Galtieri and his troops into battle.’

  ‘The battle hasn’t even begun.’ Hawker seized his chance to needle the old man’s arrogance.

  ‘You mean the pirate Thatcher’s task force? They will be accounted for. It will be a battle and a victory remembered as the British have remembered the Armada. Even now a flotilla headed by the General Belgrano is positioning for engagement.’ He sneered. ‘They are “respecting” the British exclusion zone but will strike within 24 hours.’

  ‘Then you lied. You don’t need me.’

  Anaya had been gazing at the ceiling, no doubt seeing visions of glorious conquest at sea. He snapped back to reality.

  ‘Oh, but I do. Unlike so many other great visionary leaders, I am also a realist. Even Galtieri, now I have succeeded in committing him to the battle, thinks of the British reaction as merely a token of resistance. He has garrisoned the Malvinas with conscripts! Holy Mother of God, can you imagine what the British paratroopers will do with them once they land?’

  ‘They will have to get past our Navy first,’ said Grivas. He appeared to be as nonplussed as Hawker by the pendulum swings of Anaya’s moods.

  ‘Yes, and our first victory will be truly historic,’ Anaya slipped back to his dreams for a moment, ‘but never think that we can bring the British to their knees by simply giving them a bloody nose.’

  He rifled through the charts on the table until he found a large buff envelope, from which he pulled a handful of grainy black and white photographs. They were aerial reconnaissance shots, stamped with the insignia of the Argentine Air Force. They lacked detail, because the subject has been photographed from a great distance, but there was no mistaking the hull shapes and disposition of the British task force. Hermes and Invincible were easily recognisable by their bulk against the slender shapes of their escorts. Latitude and longitude coordinates w
ere scrawled in red ink on the corner of each print.

  Hawker noted that the photographs were all marked with the same coordinates, which gave a position at least 500 nautical miles north of Buenos Aires. So, Anaya had no up to date intelligence of the fleet’s disposition closer to the Falklands.

  ‘We can sink several of these ships,’ Anaya continued, now the calm and in control commander talking cold hard business. ‘With luck we could sink Invincible or Hermes. With enormous luck, both. It will be a sea victory the world will sit up and notice, of that I have no doubt. But as you gentlemen both know, one fleet is not the Royal Navy. We know the British are already negotiating with their NATO allies to free ships from the North Atlantic.’

  Anaya allowed himself a sip of his drink.

  ‘To put it simply, they have so many more ships than we that sinking the Royal Ensign can only lead to our own slow, inexorable defeat.’

  ‘Then there is still nothing you need me for,’ said Hawker.

  ‘On the contrary, everything depends on you.’ Anaya scrabbled through his papers on the table until he found a battered dossier file. ‘It’s all in here, the qualifications you and you alone possess to contribute to my coup.’

  Anaya started reading aloud, pulling pieces of information out of the file as he flicked through the pages, lecturing his audience of two with each new revelation. For Hawker, he needn’t have bothered. There was nothing here he didn’t know. It was his own life story.

  It was all there, starting with his Argentine mother, high-born into an aristocratic ranching family, and the rebellious streak that led her to elopement with an English businessman-adventurer. There were brief details of that Englishman’s career – Second World War hero of the Fleet Air Arm, forced by the frustrations of post-war Britain to seek new skies in which to launch his dream of a freight airline.

  It told of their only child, an unusual circumstance in Catholic Argentina, and there were later military psychologists’ reports on how his upbringing had helped to develop the character traits of his adulthood. They spoke of self-reliance and initiative, a streak of the loner, and yet a yearning to prove a worthy part of the team.

  His schooling was there, early in Buenos Aires, later at Winchester in his father’s footsteps. The young Paul Hawker spent as many years in Britain as in Argentina, speaking English like a Wykehamist, Spanish like a Porteño.

  There was his unique achievement of playing rugby for both countries in junior teams, playing with distinction against Argentina for England as a schoolboy, and later representing Argentina against Britain in a competition for services teams. Anaya seemed to dwell on this divided loyalty.

  Anaya then progressed through Hawker’s service record: Naval Academy, brief sea service before training as a naval aviator, then more years in Britain training with the Fleet Air Arm followed by a special course with the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service, the waterborne equivalent of the SAS. Anaya again dwelt on Hawker’s social contact with the British, the crewing in ocean racing yachts, the parties, the friends he made inside and outside the Navy, until he came inevitably to Anne.

  Anne. Daughter of an admiral, the most stunning deb in London in that vintage year for London balls, 1969. The girl most often mentioned in tabloid papers of the time as the secret fiancée of the Prince of Wales. But none of this was true. The heart she set out and succeeded to capture belonged to the dashing young South American mariner. Hawker could still remember with total clarity his first encounter with those sea-blue eyes, sparkling cheekily at him from under a fringe of fine blonde hair.

  They married in ’71 in London, and Anaya had all the details. Hawker felt a pulse of fury at the realisation that so much of his private life was caught in that file, available to be laid our bare and dissected like an anatomical specimen by anyone with access to the records.

  ‘Thank God,’ he thought silently, ‘that I could talk Anne into leaving Argentina when the Falklands business blew up.’

  She and little Elizabeth had flown away on the 3rd of April, taking the first available flight to London after news of the invasion broke. Anne had protested; her place was by her husband’s side. But Paul, almost for the first time in their life together, had remained firm to the point of outright argument. He knew how high the emotions of the public could be whipped and would take no chances with his wife and daughter’s safety.

  ‘A month, maybe two,’ he had said to Anne as she clung tearfully to him at Ezeiza Airport, ‘and it will be all blown over. Settled peacefully at the conference table, no doubt, and then we’ll be back together.’

  He had lied. He had no illusions of the peaceful settlement with the Junta, but there was also no question of his being able to leave his business for the duration of the coming conflict.

  ‘You love them.’

  Anaya snapped Hawker back to the present as sharply as a parade ground command.

  ‘Your family. They are everything to you,’ Anaya seemed to be reading Hawker’s thoughts. ‘Does their security mean more to you than even loyalty to your flag?’

  Anaya allowed himself the indulgence of a smile. He beckoned the steward to refill his glass, then took his time to swirl the whisky around the rim and savour the first few sips. He assumed the studied air of nonchalance of a poker player about to table his fourth ace.

  At last he snapped his fingers, and the guard by the door marched briskly across the carpet with a neat brown attaché case.

  Anaya opened it on the table, using its raised lid to mask whatever he sorted from its contents. He handed Hawker a large buff envelope, the same type from which he had produced the reconnaissance photographs of the British fleet.

  ‘I said I had made arrangements to ensure your cooperation. Look at these and you will have to admit, I think, that I am correct.’

  Hawker showed not a touch of reaction or emotion. But he felt the effort of will power he had to force from within himself to stop his hands from shaking as he tore the envelope open.

  The pictures were in colour. The first showed a young blonde woman, hair slightly tousled, in a light cotton dressing gown. It was taken early in the morning, and the low yellow sunlight lit her slightly from behind, revealing a tantalisingly intimate hint of her figure through the loose fabric. She was caught by the camera as she stooped with the grace of a dancer to pick up a bottle of milk at the doorway of a neat looking cottage.

  The blonde was Anne Hawker. The cottage Hawker instantly realised was near a small village on the coast of Dorset. It was the cottage Anne had inherited when her parents died.

  He sifted, desperately controlling panic, to look at the rest of the prints. There were more of Anne, sometimes dressed for the village, sometimes in old jeans and wellingtons, always in front of the cottage. And there were others of Anne romping with her beautiful little eight-year-old daughter. Elizabeth had the same flashing blue eyes and wispy hair as her mother, hair that flew joyously and carelessly about as the pair played, unaware of the camera spying on them.

  The photographs all had the same cold, detached quality. The images of faces and garden and fences were all compressed with the tightness of a telephoto lens.

  ‘That woollen cap your daughter is wearing,’ Anaya said over one photograph. ‘Do you remember buying it for her at the Harrods store in Buenos Aires not long before they left?’

  Hawker held back a fresh surge of rage. Surveillance on himself he could accept, even expect. But to see his family so closely watched stripped him totally bare. He had never felt so helpless, so vulnerable in his life.

  ‘Bastards! Mother-fucking shit-eating cunts!’ he finally exploded when his trembling fingers revealed the last print. It was a compressed closeup of Anne and Elizabeth, hugging close to each other in a charming embrace. But someone had scrawled around them a crude red ink circle, bisected by an equally crude cross, to fix his wife and daughter in the centre of a gunsight.

  Anaya was prepared for the outburst. He had stepped back and aside, putting the bu
lk of the table between himself and any physical reaction Hawker could make. At the same time, both the door guard and steward stood ready, aiming heavy handguns that would catch Hawker in a lethal crossfire. Grivas moved subtly away to give them a clear field of fire.

  The moment passed. The rage subsided. Hawker forced every fibre in his body back from the brink of madness to the rational coolness he was so well trained for. His mind raced through the situation until he broke into a wry smile.

  ‘Nice try, Anaya,’ he snorted. ‘But I don’t believe even you would smuggle a hit squad 11,000 kilometres into enemy territory just to blackmail someone into cooperating on some crazy enterprise. Which, by the way, you have so far failed to even hint at describing.’

  Anaya said nothing. He maintained the same stony expression, yet somehow contrived to appear even more confident, more menacing. A poker player about to table a royal flush.

  ‘Well, on that point you’d be right, and you’d be wrong,’ said a voice from behind Hawker and Grivas.

  Both spun around, Grivas as stunned as himself, Hawker noted, to see the man who had slipped silently in through the great oak door.

  He was a stodgy little man of perhaps fifty, wearing a tweedy suit and woollen tie that both looked crumpled enough to have been slept in. His face was a splash of crimson, ruddy cheeks and boozy red nose, dissected by a bushy moustache which would have been grey but for the heavy tobacco stains that gingered its fringes.

  He had spoken in English, a lilting melodic English that even Hawker found difficult to understand.

  ‘Patrick Gaffney at your service, gentlemen.’ He stepped forward into the room, moving across to Anaya’s side of the table. ‘The good admiral has been gracious enough to agree that we should use English. Me own Spanish is a little feeble, and besides,’ he gestured towards the guard and steward, still holding their guns at the ready, ‘the fewer ears the better I always say.’

  He casually picked up the photo with the hand-drawn cross hairs.

  ‘Now then, where to begin? Well, you’re right that Admiral Anaya didn’t send his own men on this mission. And you’re wrong about enemy territory. My lads, the ones who snapped these pictures, would tell you they’re up to their balls in danger being where they are, surrounded by their enemy. Our enemy.’ He glanced at Anaya, then tossed the print back on the table, fixing Hawker with a cold stare. His eyes were hard, the eyes of a fighter, yet with a twinkle of mischief.