Ghost Force am-9

by Patrick Robinson

  Quite frankly, it gave Peter Caulfield the creeps. He never felt at home here, faced with the hard-eyed men who ran the Royal Navy, despite the obvious truth that he was their lord and master, as head of the Ministry of Defense.

  He appreciated their courteous treatment of him, and their impeccable manners. But when he mentioned any government course of action of which they did not approve, their silent, penetrating stares made him feel, unaccountably, as if he was ripping the very heart out of England.

  And this morning he dreaded the meeting more than usual. He was shown into Admiral Palmer's drawing room and introduced to a heavily built, uniformed naval officer, the four stripes on his sleeve indicating the rank of Captain.

  "Minister, I'd like you to meet Captain David Reader, commanding officer of our one serviceable aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal.

  "She's over there at the minute," he added, pointing through the window. "As usual David's brought her home safe and sound, with about a half million pounds' worth of repairs to complete in the next couple of weeks."

  Captain Reader stepped forward and offered his hand, nodding coolly. "Good morning, Secretary of State," he said. "Rather a rough ride you chaps endured in the House yesterday?"

  Peter Caulfield stared across the Captain's shoulder, out through the window toward the 20,000-ton, 685-foot-long Ark Royal, the modern successor to the first Ark Royal, which carried fifty-five guns as the flagship of Lord Howard of Effingham against the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  Somehow, even without one shred of knowledge of naval history, the Defense Minister felt like a little boy in the presence of the man who operated that towering modern fortress at sea, moored on the other side of the harbor.

  "Yes, it was a rather difficult time for the government," replied Peter Caulfield. "You see, strange as it may seem, we are incredibly concerned about loss of life in our armed forces, particularly in a potential war zone such as this in the South Atlantic, which holds just about nothing for us."

  "Oh, I don't know," interrupted Admiral Palmer, amiably. "I think there's something to be said for honor. The Navy's built on it, you know."

  Slightly embarrassed, feeling rebuked, Britain's Minister of Defense said quickly, "Of course I understand that, Admiral. But even with our honor at stake, do you really wish to see perhaps two or three hundred of our best troops killed or wounded, essentially for nothing?"

  "My dear Minister," replied the Admiral, "we do not enter any conflict counting our dead before anything happens. We expect to enter a conflict and win; to misquote General Patton, we don't intend to die for our country. We anticipate making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

  "Yes, yes. Quite," said Peter Caulfield. "That's the way you must think…"

  At that moment an orderly came into the room bearing hot coffee in a silver pot on a silver tray. There were three china cups and a plate of cookies.

  "I'll pour," volunteered the Admiral. "Thank you, Charlie."

  "This is very kind," said Peter Caulfield. "And I shall do my level best to have this over in a very short time, so you won't have me for lunch…"

  "Come now, Minister, we're all on the same side in the end. I would be most hurt if you were not here for lunch…"

  "Well, we'll see how things turn out. But, as you know, I have a very specific purpose here. I am compelled to ask you whether the Royal Navy believes it possible to sail to the South Atlantic, fight off the Argentinian Navy and their quite formidable Air Force, and then put a sizeable land force on the beaches somewhere on the Falklands, and fight yard by yard for the territory? That's my question."

  "Do you want my personal opinion or my official response?"

  "Let's start with the official response."

  "Very well, Minister. I, and all my officers, are loyal servants of the Crown. If the Parliament of Great Britain decides we must go and fight for those islands, we'll go. It's not our place to argue the toss whether it's worth it, even whether it's right. We have all taken the Queen's shilling, as it were, for most of our service lives. If we are asked to go out and earn it, possibly the hard way, then so be it."

  "Captain Reader?"

  "Same."

  "And your personal view, Admiral?"

  "We have a rather greater chance of defeat now than we had in 1982, and even that was a bit of a close-run thing."

  "And your principal reason for that view?"

  "Oh, definitely the loss of the Harrier FA2, Minister. With that, we always had a chance in the air. Now we do not even have a fighter aircraft."

  Peter Caulfield nodded. "And may I ask the commanding officer of our aircraft carrier the same question?"

  "Again, much the same, sir. Except to add that Ark Royal is a quarter of a century old. She's tired, she's feeling her age. Every time we go out we return with some operational defect. This time it's her starboard driveshaft. May need a new one.

  "It's a very distant war for an old lady. Eight thousand miles down there, and if she goes wrong, we'd be in shocking trouble, thousands of miles from a garage, in bad weather and under constant enemy attack."

  "But you'd still go if you were asked?"

  "Yessir."

  Admiral Palmer stood up. He poured himself a little more coffee, and said, "Minister, it's how we were all brought up. It's what I call the Jervis Bay syndrome. That was an old fourteen-thousand-ton passenger ship converted into an armed merchant cruiser for convoy escort in the North Atlantic in World War Two. They mounted seven old six-inch guns on her deck.

  "She was commanded by Captain E. S. Fogarty Fegen RN. And one morning they came in sight of the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. Instantly Captain Fegen ordered the seventeen-ship supply convoy to scatter, and, in an action he must have known was suicidal, he turned his ship to engage the enemy.

  "It took the Scheer about thirty minutes to lambaste and sink the Jervis Bay, by which time the convoy had vanished, far and wide, over the horizon. When rescuers turned up that evening to pick up survivors, Captain Fegen was not among them. They gave him a posthumous Victoria Cross for that.

  "It was the same with Lt. Commander Roope VC, of the Glow-worm, also in World War Two. In desperation, with his ship on fire and sinking beneath him, he turned and rammed the big German cruiser Hipper. Took her with him.

  "That's what we do, Minister. We'll fight, if necessary to the death, just as our predecessors did, just as we've been taught. And should, one day, our luck run out, and we should be required to face a superior enemy, we'll still go forward, fighting until our ship is lost."

  Peter Caulfield took a few moments to compose himself after that. He stood up and walked to the sideboard to refresh his coffee cup, and he did not turn to face the two commanders because he did not wish to seem so affected.

  But he was. And all he could manage was, "Then you will not declare the Royal Navy unable to sail to the South Atlantic to fight for the Falkland Islands?"

  "No, Minister, I will not say that. Not on any account. And neither would any other Admiral who has occupied this office during the last two or three hundred years."

  "However bad it may look? However the odds are stacked against you?"

  "No, Minister. The Royal Navy will not refuse to go. Jervis Bay sacrificed herself to save the convoy. If, of necessity, we must do the same, to save you and your boss, we will not refuse to go."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Peter Caulfield vacated Portsmouth Dockyard shortly before noon and headed straight back to Downing Street. Which was significant only because he missed lunch with the Chief of the Defense Staff, Sir Robin Brenchley, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Rodney Jeffries, who arrived in Portsmouth in a staff car directly from Whitehall.

  Peter Caulfield had made a sensible move in leaving before lunch. Because the following two hours would be as grave and depressing as the late afternoon of October 21, 1805, when Admiral Nelson died on the lower deck of HMS Victory at Trafalgar.

  The two Admirals, one Captain, and one
General were after all discussing the total demise of the Royal Navy, and the likelihood of possibly the worst defeat in the history of Britain's Senior Service.

  "We don't have much," said Admiral Palmer. "So, do we take everything down there, and leave just sufficient here to fight another day? Or do we just say the hell with it and take the lot?"

  "We have so little, I'm afraid we'll have to take the lot, the whole Navy," said the First Sea Lord. "If it's anybody, it's everybody. We don't have fifty destroyers and frigates anymore, we have only eighteen, and three of them are in refit. We hardly have enough to provide a proper escort for the carrier."

  "You say carrier in the singular," said General Brenchley. "I thought we had two?"

  "One of them, Illustrious, is more than thirty years old. We can't take her, she'd probably never make the journey, never mind a battle."

  "Can Ark Royal make it?"

  "Just about," said Captain Reader, "but not for long. The wear and tear on any warship in a sea-battle environment, and that weather, is very high. I'd give her six weeks maximum, and that's only if our luck holds."

  "If anything," said Admiral Palmer, "the aircraft situation is even more serious. I suppose we could rustle up a couple of dozen GR9s, but they cannot fly at night, and in bad weather they can't see a bloody thing.

  "Robin," he added, "we have no air defense. None. And the quicker everyone accepts that the better. This damn government has dug a bloody great hole for itself and jumped into it."

  General Brenchley, a powerfully built son of a Kentish pub owner, had fought his way up the ranks of the British Army to the very pinnacle of the service. He would have made it big anywhere. He was tough, inclined not to panic, inhumanly decisive, and had commanded his paras in both Iraqi wars. Also, he had been a close friend of Admiral Jeffries since childhood, both having attended Maidstone Grammar School, in Kent.

  Never in their fifty-year friendship had Admiral Jeffries seen the bullnecked Army chief so utterly distraught. General Brenchley was pacing the room, shaking his head, torn between obedience to Her Majesty's government, which he had sworn to serve, and the shocking possibility of casualties beyond the call of duty.

  "Rodney, old boy, I suppose we have to decide," he murmured. "Will we allow X thousand men to die, or do we all resign and let this witless Prime Minister and his shoddy little group of ex-communist friends get on with it?"

  An appalled silence enveloped the room. "It seems to me," said the First Sea Lord, "the PM is finished either way. If we, and our principal staff, quit, he'd have to resign because of the uproar. No politician could weather that storm. If we agreed to go and fight for the islands, and were defeated by a greater enemy, he'd also have to quit. Either way, he's done. But in the first instance we'd save many thousands of lives."

  "Not to mention what's left of the Royal Navy," said the General.

  "And yet," said Admiral Jeffries, "we are sworn to duty, in an unbroken tradition of obedience to the government or the Head of State that goes back centuries. You and I are sworn to serve the Crown, and its elected government. And we ought not to be blind to the fact that we would both face lifelong disgrace if we quit and our successors somehow went down there and pulled the bloody thing off."

  "Rodney, despite this somewhat cathartic conversation, you and I are not going to quit. And we both know it. We're going to dig in and go fight for the Falkland Islands as our Parliament has requested. We may think it's a lunatic request, we may seethe with anger at the criminal destruction of the services, but we're still going…"

  "And if our enemy should be too strong, and our ship should be sinking, we'll bring her about, and if she still has propulsion, we'll ram them, correct?"

  "Correct," said General Brenchley, gravely. "We'll both, in the end, do our duty."

  0900, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  MARYLAND

  Lt. Commander Ramshawe had spent twenty-eight of the last thirty-six hours pondering the military brilliance of Argentina's whiplash strike against the British defenses on the Falkland Islands. The operation had been carefully planned. No doubt of that. And anyone with a lick of sense must have seen it coming.

  Certainly the U.S. Ambassador in Buenos Aires had seen it coming. His communique just before Christmas had stated he would be surprised if something didn't shake loose in a couple of months. And Admiral Morgan had told him, Jimmy, that the observations of old Ryan Holland should always be regarded.

  But here we are again. The ole Brits caught with their strides down (that's Australian for pants). And everyone in a bloody uproar about who's going to do what to whom. Are the Brits going to fight for their islands, or will they leave well enough alone?

  "I've got a bloody powerful feeling the Brits are gonna fight," he muttered to the empty room. "And then the shit will hit the fan, because we'll be caught in the middle of it, and President Bedford will have the same problem as Ronnie Reagan — do we help our closest ally, or do we refuse because of our friendship with the Argentinians?"

  Admiral Morris, Jimmy's boss, was again working on the West Coast for the week, and Admiral Morgan had taken Kathy to Antigua in the eastern Caribbean for twelve days. Which left Jimmy bereft of wise counsel. So far as he could tell the United States must protest to the United Nations today about the seizure of the American oil and gas complexes in both the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

  "You can't have U.S. citizens being frog-marched off the islands at bloody gunpoint, their equipment seized," he muttered. "I mean Christ, that's like the Wild West — Bedford is not going to have that. But that military strike was about oil. Buenos Aires thinks it belongs to Argentina and they won't easily give it up. That damn newspaper the Herald laid it out pretty firmly."

  He took a sip of coffee and keyed in his computer to the section on the Falklands he had saved a couple of months ago. "Well," he said, "ExxonMobil and British Petroleum have sunk a ton of money into those oil and gas fields. The question is, will we go to war for it? Bedford won't, but Admiral Morgan might tell him to. And the Brits might think they have no choice. Streuth!"

  Three hours later, the U.S. State Department formally complained to the United Nations about the willful, illegal seizure of the Falkland Islands by the Republic of Argentina. And two hours after that, Ryan Holland requested an official audience with the President of Argentina in Buenos Aires. Thirty minutes later the British Ambassador, Sir Miles Morland, requested the same thing. Neither embassy received a response.

  In London, the Argentinian Ambassador was summoned to 10 Downing Street, and in Washington the Argentinian Ambassador was summoned to the White House. The former was instantly expelled and given twenty-four hours to vacate the building in Knightsbridge, or face deportation.

  In Washington, the President gave the ambassador forty-eight hours to allow ExxonMobil execs to restart the oil industry in both East Falkland and South Georgia, or else the U.S. government would begin seizing Argentinian assets in the United States. In particular, the United States would take the grandiose embassy building on New Hampshire Avenue, Washington, plus the consulate properties in New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta.

  President Bedford also put in a call to the St. James's Club in Antigua and requested Arnold Morgan to return to Washington as soon as possible, since the prospect of a war without the former National Security Adviser's advice was more or less unthinkable.

  Admiral Morgan agreed to come home a couple of days early, so long as the President sent Air Force One to collect him.

  Meanwhile, back in Westminster, the English Parliament gathered to hear the Prime Minister speak at two p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. It was the first time in living memory he had attended the House two days out of three.

  And he was not doing it out of a sense of duty. He and his spin doctors were desperately trying to halt the onrushing tide of editorials and features, which by now had convinced most of the country that he and his
left-wing ministers had ruined the great tradition of British armed forces and that the UK might not have the military capability to fight for the Falkland Islands.

  Defense correspondents, political commentators, editors, and newspaper proprietors were finally expressing the simple truth: if you want to live in strength and peace, you'd (A) better listen to your Generals and Admirals, and (B) be prepared for war at all times. It had taken the media a long time, but this second Falklands crisis had rammed it home, even to them.

  The London Times had produced a scorching front-page headline that morning:

  YEARS OF NEGLECT DISARMS BRITAIN'S MILITARY

  Labour Ministers Stunned at Navy's Accusations

  The London Telegraph, a Tory and military stronghold, had talked to General Robin Brenchley:

  TOP ARMY GENERAL LAMBASTES GOVERNMENT "STUPIDITY"

  Brenchley's Warnings in New Falklands War

  The following interview had nothing to do with the ability of the soldiers or their commanders. It had to do with equipment, air cover, missile defenses, and ordnance. What he called the "criminal neglect of our requirements." Without fear for his own career, General Brenchley described this British Prime Minister and this British government as "the worst I have ever known, and, hopefully, the worst I ever will know."

  And his views were echoed over and over, in all the newspapers, and in all the television news programs, as if toadying up to Labour politicians was a thing of the past. It was as if the government had become a meaningless impediment to the gallant fighting men who would soon be sailing south to fight for the honor of Great Britain.

  It was as if every chicken in the coop had somehow come home to roost. The media gloated, slamming into a Labour government that had thought it might somehow be able to wing it, feigning financial competence by increasing taxes and capping military budgets at well below required levels.