Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  ‘You’ll have to change your angle as well,’ Kreuzer came up close behind Hawker and seemed to have understood what he’d said to the driver. ‘I was worried this might happen. Unless you hit the shroud dead centre on the ball, it is likely to glance off. That’s why it failed to break through just then.’

  Hawker considered for a moment and said, ‘Yes, I see what you’re getting at. That’s the second thanks I owe you on this. You seem to understand the principles well.’

  ‘A degree in engineering from Stuttgart. My father’s idea, in order that I may take over the family factories and allow him to retire in gracious prosperity.’ Kreuzer spat on the ground with disgust at the concept, but Hawker didn’t see. He was already clambering up to the crane’s cab, where the driver leaned out of the window to hear Hawker’s detailed instructions in rapid Spanish.

  The crane roared again as the driver swivelled its body to the right and dropped the ball lower on its steel wire rope. The ball disappeared again into the darkness and came whipping back into the light, skimming the concrete surface of the dock on its trajectory towards its ridiculously small target. The height was perfect, and Hawker again held his breath as the ball swung up towards impact.

  It came like an explosion, with two cracks that pierced the thick blanket of diesel engine noise to make everyone on the dock wince in instinctive response. The starboard shroud took the full force of the ball’s two thousand kilograms just above the turnbuckle which fastened it to a chainplate fixed deep into the side of the yacht’s fibreglass hull. The boat rolled at first away from the blow, as before, but this time she jolted hard against the mooring lines and it became a matter of which would break first. Hawker superstitiously crossed his fingers in hope that the boat’s mooring stanchions would hold. He had no doubt of the dock bollards. He had planted them in the concrete himself.

  Everything held, and for a fraction of a second it seemed as if the ball would bounce off again. Then the wire of the shroud, not as thick as two fingers, gave up the fight. It snapped with that first piercing crack, the loose end whipping away in a whiplash that would have killed anyone standing on Sleipnir’s deck and the ball sped on, dead centre on the mast.

  A second crack, louder and deeper than the first, assaulted their ears while the first was still echoing off the walls. This time there was not even a split second of doubt. The yacht was already heeled over to the limit of the mooring lines. The mast snapped like a tree trunk hit by lightning and fell away to hit the dark water with a splash they could see but not hear above the echoes of impact.

  Freed of the pressure, the hull bobbed back towards the dock as the ball swept back low across its deck. The driver killed the crane motor and Hawker could hear the cheers of the workers behind him. He didn’t turn back. He was already striding towards the edge of the dock with Luis not far behind him, now with a powerful pair of bolt cutters in his hand.

  Sleipnir was still rocking in the water when Hawker and Luis jumped to her deck. The jagged end of the mast swayed in the air where it was held at a drunken angle by the tangle of shrouds and stays that trailed over the port side of the boat and into the dark water which had swallowed almost the whole length of the mast. Its hollow aluminium structure had enough buoyancy to make it buck against the gooseneck which still held it to the main boom, which now jutted at an angle from the cockpit where the jammed sheets held it tight. Where the mast had once towered up through the cabin top was now nothing more than a twisted and jagged stump, its rough edges glinting in the light with the sheen of untarnished metal.

  Luis started to work his way with the bolt cutters through the tangle around the port chain plate.

  ‘No, old man. Your work is well done and finished. Go home now and forget what you have seen here,’ Hawker said to him in Spanish and then called in English, ‘O’Hara, get your fat arse down here and cut this mess away.’

  O’Hara had been standing on the edge of the dock with the others, marvelling at the effect of the dismasting. He baulked, defiance flaring in his eyes, before complying with an energetic leap across to the yacht. Hawker waited there until the Irishman had taken the cutters from Luis and was efficiently clearing the rigging with only an occasional grunt and curse.

  ‘Nicely done,’ said Grivas as Hawker stepped to the dock next to him. ‘So, you are ready to embark on the mission.’

  ‘As long as your side of the arrangements is in order,’ Hawker said.

  ‘0300, as planned,’ Grivas said, checking his watch. ‘What do you propose to do in the meantime?’

  Hawker looked at his own watch. It was approaching 2030 hours, eight thirty in the evening.

  ‘We sleep here aboard the yacht. We’re going to need the rest. But first we eat. There’s a good fish restaurant not far from here, on the waterfront, good food and very discreet.’

  As Hawker spoke the crane started up again and lumbered away down the boatyard. The driver parked it in a corner, brought the wrecking ball to rest on the ground and shut the machine down, plunging the yard into darkness and silence.

  It didn’t last long.

  The silence was broken by two big motors starting almost simultaneously and the darkness was despatched a second later by the headlights of the two trucks – the prime mover with the low trailer and the utility truck now free of his two tonne burden – as the crane driver emerged from the gloom to climb into the cab of the smaller vehicle. They rolled out of the yard, taking with them the small group of overall clad workmen and the cradle made to hold Sleipnir.

  As darkness and silence swept back over the boatyard, O’Hara cut the last of the yacht rig away. The mast, now free to fill with water, sank out of sight into blackness.

  ‘Where’s that fucking fish?’ he called to Hawker. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Monday 17 May 1982 – AM

  Hawker woke up at 0100.

  He had forced himself to lie down on one of the bunks in Sleipnir’s belly despite feeling too restless to sleep, but he had told the others that rest would be critical, and he tried hard to practise what he preached. He had slept fitfully for two or three hours.

  Linda was asleep on the bunk opposite him, her face turned away towards the hull. Kreuzer and O’Hara were sprawled on the forward bunks. One of them was snoring like a chainsaw. All were dressed in the thick pullovers and sailing pants from the collection Linda and Grivas had gathered together.

  Hawker slipped quietly up the companionway to the cockpit.

  ‘Good morning,’ a voice called softly in Spanish through the crisp cold silence as the door of one of the Falcons parked close to the edge of the dock was flung open. ‘I was about to give you a reveille,’ Grivas continued as he stepped out of the car and stretched with a yawn.

  ‘Then let’s get going,’ replied Hawker. ‘You slip the mooring lines and I’ll get the engine started. The others can stay below. If they can sleep through it, so much the better.’

  Grivas stepped onto the yacht, letting off the bow line as he went. He stepped gingerly aft, trying to minimise noise on the deck, to untie the stern line at the same time Hawker cranked the engine into life. He spun the cockpit wheel hard over to bring the bow around towards the gap in the marina’s breakwater.

  Linda was first up, then Kreuzer, then O’Hara. They were all on deck within a minute of the motor starting, yet nobody said a word as they nosed out into the Rio de la Plata and turned parallel to the shore, heading east.

  They motored slowly, the little Renault diesel ticking over at less than half cruising revolutions, with the loom of the Buenos Aires city lights on their starboard quarter. Sleipnir looked strangely naked under the stump of her mast and Hawker felt a twinge of guilt at what he had done and what he was about to do to such a fine little yacht.

  At 0234 they came abeam the blaze of lights that marked Los Carritos de la Costanera. The wharves and the fishing boats clustered around them were lit bright as day. The restaurants fronting the wharves were a riot of neon colour. Inside they would be
packed with trendy late night diners glowing as brightly as the signs outside with wine and bonhomie. Hawker was sure, when he strained his ears, that he could hear the music of maracas and guitars wafting across the several hundred metres of water between them. But it could be his senses were spooking him because one of those restaurants was where he had spent a last joyful night out with Anne before she had flown away with Lizzie to the safety of Devon.

  Beyond the blaze of Los Carritos was a wide stretch of darkness. This was flat land, not much above the level of the river, and in the starless night there was no horizon visible between the water and the shore. Hawker waited until they were well clear of the light and swung the wheel to starboard, towards the invisible shore.

  It was not totally black. Small points of orange light pierced the night in front of them. Hawker lined up on two of the points and headed the boat directly towards them. He pulled the throttle back to idle when he judged the shore to be 50 metres away.

  ‘Right on target,’ Grivas called from the bow where he had been peering intently ahead. He flicked a torch three times and suddenly a small patch of shoreline ahead of them dazzled into light.

  In the middle of the pool of light was the truck with the flatbed trailer carrying Sleipnir’s cradle. A small knot of men in familiar greasy overalls stood near the trailer wheels. Over their heads, jutting into the light from the darkness above, the large jib arm of a crane threw a crazy pattern of distorted shadows out to the water. This was a larger crane than the one which had smashed the mast off their boat, and swinging under the jib were two heavy capacity slings.

  Hawker looked at the faces of his crew in the sudden illumination of the spotlights. There was no surprise in their expressions, and he hadn’t anticipated any. He had told them enough that they could expect this much. What he did see was the adrenaline sparkle of going into action. It was especially bright in Linda’s eyes.

  He brought the yacht in until he could feel the bump of the keel on the bottom. They were very close to the low bank, which plunged surprisingly quickly to deep water. Using the pivot of the keel, Hawker turned the wheel around hard and gunned the motor. The boat pivoted parallel with the bank and Hawker killed the engine. The crane driver dropped the slings neatly fore and aft. Hawker snapped an order which had Kreuzer and O’Hara instantly helping the workmen slide the slings under the hull at each end. As soon as they were in place one of the workmen jerked his thumb in the air and the slings eased up to take the weight. Sleipnir was lifted, crew and all, clear of the water.

  They stayed aboard while the boat was settled in the cradle, its stern facing to the front of the trailer. The truck driver had already started his engine as the slings were being slipped off and they moved away from the riverbank less than ten minutes after Hawker had conned the boat in.

  Hawker motioned for the crew to sit down and hold on as they lurched onto a road which ran parallel to the shore. A short way along, the truck turned right and passed through a gate with a sign stencilled in blue on white: “Aeroparque.”

  They trundled on down a perimeter road and turned onto a wider apron of asphalt. Kreuzer and Linda nudged each other as they recognised, in the same instant, that they were passing the same rows of Cessnas and Pipers they had seen a few days before. This time, though, there was no DC-3. Instead, squatting massively on the tarmac ahead of them was the grey bulk of a Lockheed C-130H Hercules transport with the insignia of the Fuerza Aerea Argentina.

  The Hercules was parked with its tail to the widest part of the apron, where the truck had room to turn and manoeuvre. As they pulled up behind it they could see that its huge rear door was already open, hydraulic rams holding the cargo ramp horizontal, at what appeared to be remarkably close to the height of the truck’s trailer bed.

  Grivas climbed off the boat down the cradle and walked across to where the Hercules crew stood in a small group in the light that spilled out from the cargo bay. Hawker beckoned his crew to follow and they all climbed down as Grivas had.

  ‘You’re not going to fit this into that.’ O’Hara yelled to be heard over the ear shattering roar of the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit. He said it as a statement of fact as the truck commenced a slow reverse approach to the aircraft ramp. The expression on Kreuzer’s silent face was a considered confirmation.

  ‘I have to admit it looks impossible from here,’ Hawker called back, looking up at the boat. ‘But if I’ve done all my sums and measurements correctly, we’ll just make it.’

  From where they stood on the tarmac a metre below the keel, the yacht towered impossibly large. But Hawker knew the Hercules cargo bay was exactly 10 feet wide, as the Lockheed manual stated. The cradle was nine feet eight inches wide. He was more worried about the height. He knew the aircraft allowed them only nine feet.

  The driver made two attempts at backing the trailer up. It was a painstaking job because the aircraft and trailer had to be aligned perfectly. On the third attempt, with an obviously experienced loadmaster from the Air Force crew on either side, he got it right. The trailer edged the last millimetre up to the ramp and the truck wheezed as the driver pulled the parking brakes on. One of the loadmasters hopped up to the aircraft ramp and deftly juggled a hydraulic control to line its lip up with the height of the trailer bed. The other disappeared into the depth of the cargo bay and came back hauling a heavy steel cable behind him.

  The two airmen shackled the cable to Sleipnir’s cradle, stood back, looked up at the boat and crossed themselves theatrically. The second man went forward again while the first stepped to the side of the ramp. The whirring of a powerful electric motor echoed out of the fuselage and the thick cable started to move, then tauten, then haul the cradle and yacht slowly off the trailer towards the Hercules.

  There was an agonising screech of metal on metal as the cradle scraped over the edge of the trailer. The floor of the Hercules, though, had longitudinal runners and inset banks of rollers which the timber base of the cradle slid onto and over with satisfying smoothness.

  Slowly the yacht slid into the maw of the cargo hold. The bow was first and most critical. With the mast taken down to such a low stump, the stainless steel pulpit rail around the bow was the highest point of the load, and Hawker found himself holding his breath again as the boat edged slowly forward under the tail. The loadmaster called a sudden halt and Hawker’s heart raced as cradle and boat instantly stopped moving. Surely his figures couldn’t be so wrong.

  But he breathed again with a sigh of some relief as the loadmaster gave him a reassuring smile and, with a show of crossing of his fingers, climbed onto the cradle and shimmied his way forward on the boat until he was crouched in the bow, his head close under the pulpit. With another signal to the second loadmaster, Sleipnir inched forward again.

  ‘She’s clear!’ the loadmaster called out in Spanish as he clambered back along the deck and down the side of the cradle as it continued its snail crawl forward. The loadmaster dropped to the cargo deck with a triumphant thumbs up and signalled to his colleague on the winch. The whirring of the electric motor deep in the metallic cave of the Hercules went up an octave and Sleipnir accelerated to be smoothly swallowed into the hold, blocking the interior lights out to almost complete darkness as she filled the space.

  ‘She’s in!’ the loadmaster called again when the transom cleared the sloping edges of the hatchway under the huge tail that soared above them like a cantilevered roof. The whirring, long since muffled by the bulk of this strange cargo, now cut abruptly and the second loadmaster came out through a side personnel door. He was beaming from ear to ear.

  ‘Tighter than a virgin bride, but she’s in with half a metre to spare at the bulkhead,’ he crowed. ‘I’ve loaded some weird shit in my time, but never as wild as this.’

  Hawker stepped up to the ramp and peered in. There was barely space to squeeze his hand between the frame of the cradle and the fuselage frame. The only way to get from one end of the cargo bay to the other would be to climb up to Sleipnir
’s deck and belly crawl along the deck beside the cabin. The clearance from cabin top to the top of the fuselage looked to be less than a foot. Perfect. That would ensure the privacy he had hoped for down in the tail section.

  ‘Will you have enough room to work down here?’ he asked the loadmaster who was now standing beside him.

  ‘Like Manuel says, it will be tight, but I think we can do it, sir,’ he replied as he prepared to close the ramp.

  Hawker jumped down to the tarmac as the loadmaster carried on with closing the ramp, sealing himself into the tail of the Hercules.

  ‘Let’s get going,’ Hawker called out in English. He turned and walked along the flank of the aircraft, under the wing towards the personnel door forward of the fat undercarriage pod. He stopped at the door and turned to where the others followed him in ragged file between the belly of the Hercules and the pendulous propeller blade. O’Hara and Kreuzer were in the lead, their eyes gleaming like schoolboys on an outing.

  ‘Next stop, Port Stanley. Or whatever you Argies are calling it these days,’ chortled O’Hara. Hawker said nothing. He gestured impatiently towards the door.

  ‘And you say we are a race of little Hitlers,’ said Kreuzer. He clicked his heels in mock salute before following O’Hara through the yellow frame of the doorway.

  Linda Kelly followed, her face set with the determination of an athlete about to compete. Grivas brought up the tail but stopped on the tarmac and held out his hand.

  ‘Adios, Paolo, and good luck.’

  Hawker accepted the handshake formally, with no enthusiasm.

  ‘I am astounded. Are you truly intending to let me out of your sight once again?’

  ‘I am too busy with other work here to join you on a jolly aeroplane ride,’ Grivas said. ‘Besides, your plans have worked for us so far, right down to getting the boat loaded for this flight with minimum risk of being seen by unfriendly eyes. I have no doubt that this will continue. And you must surely be pleased that I remain in BA to, shall we say, keep an eye on your family’s interests?’