‘It’s a thin hope,’ Jane said, ‘unless the Rapiers can do something.’
As I banked and put us into a shallow dive towards the plain I saw a burst of explosions like sparks from a bonfire away to the north. A Rapier missile wrote a question mark in the sky, rising and then throwing a loop in the air as its guidance locked to the target and it streaked away to the east. A handful of seconds later there was a huge flash. The dark silhouette of a Hercules was highlighted for a moment by a corona of fire, then it disintegrated into burning fragments and the darkness swallowed it up.
There was a second and a third launch a few moments later, but this time the missiles tracked nothing but empty sky and flew harmlessly away, disappearing into the distance. I kept my eyes fixed on the dark peaks of the mountains, hoping for another launch, but in vain.
The Herc’s position was no longer being updated on my screen. It was now invisible to all our radar eyes. ‘Take your best guess for an intercept, Jane.’
I pushed the jet down closer towards the floor of the plain, skimming over the dark, mottled surface as she wrestled with a lightning calculation. ‘At their speed, they’ll clear the peaks in around forty seconds. Steer zero-three-zero and we may get a shot.’
I set the Tempest on a diagonal track a few miles west of the end of the runway. There was no trace of the Hercules, no sign of a shape moving across the sky. We were less than half a mile from the black mass of the ridgeline and I was already starting to pull up and round when I sensed as much as saw a huge shape form out of the darkness ahead of us.
I hauled back on the stick and rammed the throttles forward. The Tempest engines screamed, but there was a deeper thunder directly in front of me. As the nose came up, I caught a glimpse of the bulbous body of the Herc, then it was past, sliding below us so close that I could read the markings on its fuselage.
We bounced in its wake, then as the wave of turbulence receded, I hauled the Tempest into the hardest turn I had ever made, coaxing every ounce of performance from the already overstressed airframe. I grunted and groaned as the grey tide advanced. Then the angle of turn eased, the G-force dropped and colour flooded back in.
My right eye was sore and my vision blurred. The force of the turn had burst a blood vessel. I shook my head, then became aware of the clamour of the radar warner. I realised I had no idea how long it had been sounding.
I scanned the sky frantically for a sight of the Herc. I could see flashes and tracer arcs from around the perimeter of the base. The Argentine Special Forces had obviously regrouped and were returning to the attack.
Then I saw the huge bulk of the transport once more looming ahead of us. The Herc was on its final run-in, dropping unerringly towards the runway.
We were almost on it, too close for a Sidewinder shot. I jabbed the weapon button and selected the guns. The thunder of the Tempest’s cannon drowned the shrieking radar warner.
The first bursts, the twin tracks illuminated by the tracer, ripped through the air intersecting harmlessly in front of, and below, the Herc. I eased the stick back a fraction and squeezed the trigger again.
The lines of fire moved closer and closer to the target and then two thousand rounds a minute punched a jagged, diagonal line through its skin. They slashed through the fuselage below the cockpit and ate their way through the body, sliced across the base of the port inner engine, drilled through the wing and clipped the tail.
For a moment the Herc flew on straight and level. I jerked the stick violently back to avoid a collision, and as we soared upwards I cranked my head round. The Herc’s wing and fuselage were ablaze and it was slipping down and left in a slide that turned into a spiralling, plummeting fall.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something else, a burning white beacon in the darkness swelling from the size of a matchhead to a blinding, all-consuming inferno.
I stared incredulous, then began to frame the words, ‘Eject, eject,’ as I reached down for the handle. Jane had already reacted a heartbeat faster. I felt the straps whipping around me, pinioning me to my seat. The canopy blew away with a crack and in the millisecond it took the seat to rise up the ejector rails, there was an even more blinding flash as the Mig’s missile detonated.
Chapter Eleven
My first sensation was of icy cold seeping into my bones. I stirred and opened my eyes, but could see nothing. As I moved my head to one side there was a pounding pain in my temples. My mouth filled with black, stinking water.
Coughing and choking, I hauled myself to my knees. I was in a water-filled bog between steep banks of peat. As I looked up, I could see the faint glow in the sky over Mount Pleasant.
I put a hand to my chest. The parachute had already been released and there was no sign of it. I must have twisted the mechanism before I passed out.
I eased off my flying helmet, then pushed myself out of the water and began crawling up the side of the peat bank, my fingers scrabbling into the soft peat. Centimetre by centimetre I raised my head above the edge of the ridge, the hairs rising on the back of my neck.
There was no movement and no sound but the keening of the wind and desultory bursts of faraway small-arms fire from the direction of Mount Pleasant.
I turned my head to look to the west and froze. A crouching figure was visible against the sky not more than fifty yards away. I dropped back into cover, waited until the pounding of my heart had quietened and then slowly raised my head again. As I strained my eyes into the night, I recognised the outline of a flying helmet.
I hissed, ‘Jane?’ but the wind carried the sound away. I dragged myself out of the ditch and began to crawl towards her, pausing every few minutes to raise my head and whisper. I was within ten yards of her when she gave a barely stifled shriek. ‘Sean? Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.’
‘I must have passed out.’ I began to crawl forward again.
‘No!’ The note in her voice stopped me in my tracks. ‘Stay where you are. Don’t move.’
‘What is it?’
‘We’ve come down in a minefield.’
I peered around me. There was nothing but empty moorland. ‘How do you know?’
‘The explosion as we came down. Don’t you remember?’
I stared blankly at her, but then the memory of the ejection started to trickle back, my seat falling away below me and then a blast that tore the air from my chute canopy.
Then I remembered seeing Jane floating down, the orange survival box dangling on its cord below her. As it touched the ground, it evaporated in a vivid yellow flash. I’d heard the howl of shrapnel. It ripped through the canopy of my chute and I’d plummeted the last twenty yards to the ground.
‘Jesus! Are you all right?’
She nodded. ‘A few bruises, nothing serious.’
‘But that mine was right underneath you.’
‘The survival box must have absorbed most of the blast. I was thrown around a bit, but I wasn’t hurt.’ She paused, staring at me. ‘Sean, what are we going to do?’
I chewed at my lip. ‘I don’t know yet. Follow me and stay exactly in my track.’
I began crawling back the way I had come. Even though I was moving over a patch of ground I had already crossed, the knowledge that a mine could be lying in wait if I put my hand or foot down just an inch or two to one side of my tracks almost paralysed me. The photographs of bodies mutilated by mines that Jack had produced before the battlefield tour kept coming back into my mind. It was an effort to lift my hand from its refuge and put it down again a few inches further on. Each time I felt my muscles tense and my hair stand on end.
It took at least ten minutes to cover less than fifty yards. The survival box lay on the edge of the hollow. I slithered down the slope and a moment later Jane followed.
I lifted the rucksack full of rations and survival gear out of the box and we huddled together just above the water, hidden from view. We held hands like children frightened of the dark.
‘Right, where are we?
’
‘Apart from in the shit?’ She checked her GPS. ‘We’re about ten miles north-west of the base, on the Wickham Heights.’
I pulled my map from the pocket of my flying suit and shone the thin beam of my torch on it. The minefield was marked as a long but narrow bar, running north to south, at right angles to the line of the ridge. The GPS position put us near the southern end. ‘It doesn’t look too bad. If we move any direction but north, we should be out of it within one hundred yards maximum.’
‘So which way? There could be patrols anywhere.’
I resisted the temptation to remind her that she was the navigator. ‘South. Then we can go three ways – east, west or further south – if we hit trouble.’
‘But before that, we still have to get out of the minefield.’
There was a long silence. ‘We could follow that stream bed,’ she said, doubt in her voice. ‘If there were any mines buried near it, they might have been washed out or exposed.’
I nodded. ‘It’s better than going straight across the moor, but it’s still one hell of a risk; it’ll only take one mine to kill us both.’
‘Have you got a better plan?’
‘We could prod for them with some sort of rod or stick,’
She finished the sentence for me. ‘But we haven’t got one.’ She paused. ‘We could wait for daylight.’
‘No. It won’t help us find buried mines and we’d be easy meat for an Argentinian patrol. We must be safe or in cover by daybreak.’
‘Then what?’
I stared at the survival box, cudgelling my brains, but I still felt dazed and groggy, and I could see nothing in the box that would help us. Jane followed my gaze. ‘Wait a minute. My survival box saved me. Maybe yours can get both of us out of here.’
‘Jane, I’m too shit-scared to play guessing games.’
‘No more than I am, I promise you. We’ll have to lie flat and push the survival box in front of us. If there are any mines, they’ll detonate under the box.’
‘About three feet from our faces.’
‘Then we need something to extend our reach.’ She peered into the darkness. ‘There.’
I looked, but could see nothing. ‘What?’
She moved forward a yard, then lay down against the far side of the hollow and stretched out her arm. I heard her fingers scrabbling on the peat, then her nails scratched against something solid. When she sat upright again she was holding a three-foot length of broken fence post.
‘It’s not much, but it’ll have to do.’
‘If we hit a mine, it’ll rip the survival box apart. What do we do then?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s hope we don’t hit any. Ready?’ She paused. ‘Wait, my immersion suit’s leaking. I’ll have to take it off. This is such ratshit kit. Check yours.’
I’d been too preoccupied with the immediate danger to be more than vaguely aware of it before, but a raw chill had been spreading slowly over my waist and legs as icy water seeped into my suit. ‘Mine’s leaking too.’
Jane tore off her flying gear and began tugging at the bulky suit, cursing as she did so. ‘The first time you put it to a real test, the seams split. Imagine if we’d landed in the drink. We’d be dead from hypothermia before the search-and-rescue helicopter got near us.’
I helped her pull off the rubber suit. She was shivering with cold. As I began the struggle with my own suit, I felt Jane’s strong hands take hold of the collar and jerk it down and away from my back. The wind knifed through me as my frozen fingers fumbled with the zip.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘It’s too cold to hang around. Let’s get moving, but smear some peat on your face and hands first, it’ll act like cam cream. We’ll take it five yards at a time, scanning the ground first, and then pushing the box over it. I’ll go first, you’re still too groggy. Stick right on my heels.’
‘No. I’ll lead. I’m feeling lucky. The first mine didn’t get us, why should the rest?’
‘Wait a minute.’ She leaned forward and I felt her lips warm on mine.
‘What was that for?’
‘Just in case…’ Her voice cracked.
I stroked her cheek with the back of my hand.
I put my flying helmet on again, more for psychological comfort than for any real protection, then I lay flat, took a grip on the box and began to push it in front of me.
‘Shit. It’s not heavy enough. We need enough weight to trigger the mines.’
We scrabbled around us, scooping up stones and handfuls of wet peat, taking them only from the area where we had been sitting and dumping them into the survival box. Then I flattened myself against the ground and began to push it forward with the fence post. Even holding it at arm’s length, the leading edge of the box was less than ten feet from my head. It was a terrifyingly small margin of safety.
I peered intently at the ground ahead, checking each pebble and stone. Then I began inching forward, hardly able to breathe. Each time the box scraped against a rock, I flinched and pushed my head down into the peat. We had covered perhaps twenty yards when there was a sudden ear-splitting, bowel-loosening roar. There was no flash or explosion in front of me. I froze in panic for a second, unable to understand what had happened.
Then I saw the red glow of a jet’s exhaust as it skimmed down the other side of the ridge and turned in towards Mount Pleasant. There was another roar, and another, as more Argentine jets blasted up the slope of the mountain and over the ridgeline, to begin their attack runs on the base.
Even in that brief moment I recognised the profile of the jets. They were not Mirages this time, but Super Etendards and Skyhawks – strike aircraft loaded with bombs and missiles. The plan to land their own troops on the runway had failed, now they were trying to ensure that no British reinforcements could do the same.
‘Look!’
Jane was pointing away to our left. I saw a series of black shapes outlined against the sky – a square block, the circular dish of a mobile radar and a tall rounded column like a telephone box with sharp spikes jutting out of both sides.
There was a frenzy of activity around it. Figures stood upright firing small arms at the marauding jets, as others sprinted to and fro, stumbling under the weight of missiles. The commander stood motionless among the bedlam, his arm raised above his head like a conductor leading an orchestra, his baton a handheld sight slaved to the missile stack.
He pointed it at the lead jet and as he swung his arm, following its course, the missile stack swivelled in time with him, and a Rapier blasted off the side. It rose almost vertically, then its sensors picked up the jet’s heat signature and it flashed away in a long, shallow-angled dive that ended in a blaze of pyrotechnics as the missile blasted the jet apart.
The seeker heads were already swivelling, homing on the next target. The flare of missiles lit up the night. Some struck home, but others careered wide of their targets as the jets roared in, dumping high explosive and napalm on the airfield and strafing it with gunfire.
Even from this distance I could see the ugly, blood-red pillars of fire reaching up into the sky. Argentine jets continued to skim over our heads on their attack runs. Although the Rapiers took their toll, I could see no sign of Tempests in the air.
I put my head down and began to push the survival box in front of me again. In the flare of another Rapier launch, I saw a series of thin black lines stretching across the moor, twenty yards ahead of us.
‘I can see the fence, Jane, we’re almost out of the minefield.’
I pushed the box forward again. There was a dry scraping sound and then a blast. I felt myself lifted, shaken and dropped back into the soft peat. I lay still for a moment, not even daring to breathe, then raised my head. The front half of the box and its contents had been shredded like a packet of crisps. The stench of explosive hung on the air.
As the ringing in my head subsided, I looked back towards Jane. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes… I think. What now?’
‘We push what�
�s left of the box the rest of the way to the fence.’
Jane gave me a long look. ‘Then I’ll go first.’
‘No chance. If anyone’s getting a medal out of this it’s going to be me.’ My attempt at sangfroid would have been more impressive without the tremor in my voice.
I forestalled any further argument by rolling over and worming my way forward again. Had I stopped to think I would have been too scared to move at all.
There was precious little left of the survival box and the jagged edges left by the blast from the mine made it dig into the earth like a bulldozer. Every couple of feet, I had to stop, lift it clear of the mound of peat it had pushed up in front of it, and then begin again.
I had no idea how long I had been inching forward. I scarcely registered the continuing thunder of jets, the flash of missiles and the crump of bomb blasts. My world was bounded by the smell and feel of damp peat under my body, the thin scraping sound of the survival box as I pushed it forward over the rough ground, and the pain in the cramping muscles of my arms.
I heard a metallic noise and froze again, then realised that the box had struck not a mine, but the lowest strand of barbed wire. I crawled forward, over the mangled remains of the box, climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground.
I turned to look back. A few inches from my face was a skull and crossbones on a red and white sign: DANGER – MINES. DO NOT ENTER. It was the confirmation I needed. Even though I knew we were still far from safe, I let the feeling of release wash over me.
A moment later Jane landed alongside me. We hugged each other in the shared exultation of just being alive and I felt wet tears on her face.
‘We’ve been there and looked it in the face, Sean. If we get through this—’
‘Let’s get through it first. If we can make it to the Rapier site we should be okay.’
We began to move away from the minefield, following the contour round towards the hilltop half a mile away. A handful of jets were still sweeping across the sky. We had covered half the distance when Jane tugged my arm. ‘Better lie up in cover till they’ve stopped firing. God knows what’s going on up there. Let’s wait till it quietens down, we don’t want to get ourselves shot.’
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