Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  The men in London had given her a new identity, albeit one very close to her own. She was now Isabel Rodriguez, a thirty-one-year-old Argentinian who had lived for several years in the United States, and who had never involved herself in the politics of her homeland. Later that evening, in her room at the Hotel San Miguel, she received the expected visitor from the British Embassy, a sallow, dark-haired man with wire-rimmed spectacles who looked distinctly un-English.

  He introduced himself as Andrew Lawson. ‘I am British,’ he said apologetically, as if in the past doubts had been raised. ‘I just look like a South American. Probably because my mother was Spanish. I have brought you the money’ – he laid two piles of notes, one smaller Chilean, one larger Argentinian, on the bed – ‘and the car is in the underground car park. A black Renault 5, AY1253S, in space B14. Have you got that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I shall also be your contact in the south,’ Lawson went on, taking a map from his pocket and unfolding it on the bed. ‘See, this is Argentina …’

  ‘I know. I was born there,’ she said acidly. Maybe the Junta would win the war, after all.

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry, of course. You know the south well?’

  ‘I grew up in Ushuaia.’

  ‘Ah, right. Do you know this road here, between Rio Gallegos and Punta Arenas?’

  ‘I have travelled it many times, by car, by bus.’

  ‘Good. What we need is a dead-letter drop – you understand? Somewhere where we can leave each other messages for collection. It should be on the Argentinian side, because the fewer times you have to cross the border the better. A stretch of empty road, a bridge over a stream, something like that.’

  ‘It would be harder to find a stretch of road that isn’t empty,’ she said drily. ‘Why must I cross the border at all?’

  ‘A good question. And the simple answer is, I can’t think of a safer way for you to let me know the location you’ve chosen. If you can …’

  She thought about it. ‘You can’t come to me?’

  ‘I could risk it, but let’s face it, I’d have trouble passing as a local at the border. I may look like a Latin American, but my Spanish isn’t good enough …’ He shrugged.

  ‘A go-between,’ she suggested.

  ‘The fewer people know who you are the better.’

  That made sense. ‘OK, so I come into Chile …’

  ‘To Punta Arenas. Your cover is a tourist guide, right? So you have to check out the local museums. There are three in Punta Arenas: the Regional Magellanes, the Patagonian Institute and the Salesian College. I’ll be at the Salesian each Thursday morning from the 29th on.’

  She looked at him. The whole business suddenly seemed completely insane. ‘Right,’ she said.

  The road across the Andes was full of wonder and memories. Isabel had last driven it with Francisco in the early spring of 1973, when they had visited Chilean friends in Santiago, both of whom had perished a month or so later in the military coup. Then as now the towering peak of Aconcagua had shone like a beacon, sunlit snow against a clear blue sky, but then the love of her life had been with her, and the darkest of futures still bore a gleam of hope.

  This time too she stopped at the huge Christ of the Andes, bought a steaming cup of coffee from the restaurant and walked up past the statue and its admiring tourists to where she could see, far down the valley, the distant green fields of her native country.

  She had over 1000 miles to drive, and she planned to take at least three days, acclimatizing herself to the country as she travelled. That evening she stayed in Mendoza and, after eating in a half-empty restaurant, sat in the city’s main square and listened to the conversations going on around her. Most of them seemed to be about the Malvinas dispute, and she found the level of optimism being expressed hard to credit.

  The purchase of a newspaper helped to explain the high spirits. According to the Government, the British were bluffing – there would be no war between the two countries. Britain would huff and puff, but eventually it would come to its senses. After all, what nation would really send a huge fleet 10,000 miles for the sake of 1800 people? Though, of course, the editorial was swift to mention that, if by some mischance it really did come to a fight, then the armed forces of the nation were more than ready to do what was necessary for the glory of, etc, etc.

  ‘Wrong,’ Isabel muttered to herself, staring across the square at the vast wall of the silhouetted mountains to the west. There was no hope of the British coming to their senses, and consequently no chance that they were bluffing.

  Isabel’s sense of a nation with its head buried deep in the sand did not fade as she travelled south over the next few days. Everywhere she went she heard the same refrain: there would be no war. How could the British fight one so far from home? Why would they do so even if they could? There was no antipathy towards distant England; if anything, the old connection between the two countries seemed almost stronger for their mutual travail. Isabel was half-amazed, half-amused, by how many of her countrymen and women felt vaguely sorry for the British. It was almost pathetic, people told each other, the way the old country clung on to these useless relics of their past imperial splendour.

  Her own state of mind seemed to be fluctuating more wildly with each day back in her native country. It all seemed so familiar, and pleasantly so, and it took her a while to realize that what she was reliving was her childhood and youth in the countryside, that memories of the city years with Francisco would need different triggers – the smell of San Telmo streets on a summer evening, book-lined rooms on a college campus, young earnest faces, a gun laid out in pieces on an oilskin cloth.

  Each mile to the south took her further from those years, closer to the innocence which they had destroyed. Driving down arrow-straight roads across the vast blue-grey steppes of Patagonia seemed almost like a trip into space, cold and cleansing, more than human.

  * * *

  It was four in the afternoon on Saturday 24 April when Isabel reached the outskirts of Rio Gallegos. The town seemed much changed from when she had last seen it some ten years before. The oil industry had brought prosperity and modernity, along with a refinery which peeked out over the mostly brick-built houses.

  The Hotel Covadonga in Avenida Julio Roca seemed to avoid the opposite extremes of ostentation and a clientele composed entirely of sex-starved oil workers. It was also centrally located and spotlessly clean. The manager proudly announced himself as Manuel Menéndez, and was surprised but pleased to learn that she intended to make a lengthy stay. Rio Gallegos was not usually noted for its tourist potential.

  After a brief but enjoyable bargaining session over a reduced long-stay rate, Isabel explained about the guide book she was researching, and how the town was ideally located as a centre of operations. But perhaps, she wondered out loud, the trouble with the British over the liberation of the Malvinas had led the military to place temporary restrictions on the ordinary citizen’s freedom to travel?

  Not as far as Menéndez knew. There was no longer any civilian traffic from the airbase, and Navy ships were more often seen in the estuary, but nothing much else had changed over the last few weeks. The border with Chile was still open. ‘It is all over, is it not?’ he said. ‘We have the Malvinas back, and I suppose we must thank the Government for that.’

  Isabel agreed and went up to her room. After unpacking her meagre travelling wardrobe, she felt tired enough to lie down for a short nap. But her mind was racing too fast for sleep, and she soon decided that she should not waste the last hour of light in her room. Wrapped up in an extra sweater and her Gore-tex windcheater, she strolled purposefully down the Calle Rawson towards the estuary shore. Here she found that a new and pleasant park had been created along the river front. Many families were in evidence, the children already sporting their winter woolly hats. Over by the balustrade a group of young men in Air Force uniforms were enjoying a boisterous conversation.

  She walked the length of the park along by the
water. Two coalers were anchored in the mile-wide estuary, and beyond them the northern shore offered only a vista of steppe extending into the grey distance. As she turned to retrace her steps a growing roar lifted her eyes to the sky. A Hercules C-130 transport plane was coming in to land at the airport south of the city.

  Back at the Covadonga, Isabel lay in the bath, thinking that any delay was likely to weaken her resolve. Wearing the dress she had brought with such an eventuality in mind, she went downstairs to the desk and asked Menéndez’s advice. ‘Where could she have some fun on a Saturday night?’

  It turned out there was a big dance that evening at a hall in Calle Pellegrini. After eating a less than exciting dinner at a restaurant off the main square, she made her way across to the hall. At the makeshift bar there were several single women, presumably prostitutes, so Isabel kept her distance and tried to look suitably lost. It was not long before a middle-aged businessman’s wife gave her the chance to tell her story: a single woman in a strange town, wanting some company but … She was soon adopted into their circle, a cross between a guest and a surrogate daughter.

  She actually enjoyed the evening, and had almost despaired of it leading anywhere useful, when the party of Air Force pilots arrived. They were given a standing ovation, treated to free drinks and generally feted as the nation’s favourite sons. It did not take Isabel long to pick out her choice: he was tall and dark with a diffident manner and sad brown eyes. He looked as out of place as she felt.

  His name was Raul Vergara, and fifteen minutes later they were dancing together, the rough serge of his uniform rubbing against her cheek. For one appalling moment she was back in the whitewashed room at the Naval Mechanical School, the lieutenant’s swollen dick pushing against her obstinate lips, the smell of it mixed with the stink of fear that filled the building.

  ‘You dance really well,’ the shy young pilot whispered in her ear, breaking the dreadful spell.

  2

  The last slice of orange sun was disappearing into the western sea as the eight SAS men made their way across the deck of HMS Hermes toward the waiting Wessex helicopter. For the first time in many days the sky was clear and the ocean was not doing its best to tip the ship over. Maybe it was a good omen. But it was still bloody cold.

  Each man was wearing camouflage gear from head to toe, with the exposed areas of the face painted to match. Somewhere in the bergen rucksacks slung across their backs, among the 90 lb or so of weaponry, communications equipment, medical kit and rations, each man was carrying the tubes of ‘cam’ cream he would need to freshen his make-up when the need arose.

  They had split into pairs to check each other’s cosmetic efforts before the final load-up. One of the two patrol commanders, Major Jeremy Brookes, had received five point eight for technical merit but only a minus score for artistic impression. He smiled through his mask at the thought.

  Brookes’s patrol, all of them members of G Squadron’s Mountain Troop, were headed for the hills overlooking Port Howard on West Falkland, and none too pleased about it. ‘But all the fucking Argies are on East Falkland, boss,’ Trooper Kenny Laurel had observed, with all the mildness of an articulated lorry.

  ‘No, Hedge, they’re not,’ Brookes had explained, ‘just most of them. And that’s only as far as we know. The point of this exercise is to determine exactly where they are, every last one of them.’

  ‘And where they’re not,’ Trooper Davey Matthews had observed.

  ‘Thank you, Stanley. Besides which, someone had to draw the short straw, and it was us, OK?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Admittedly, Brookes thought as he clambered aboard the Wessex, the straw no longer seemed quite so short. There might not be many Argies on West Falkland, but there was likely to be more than four of them. This was hardly a picnic they were embarking on. At the best it would probably consist of lying in a damp hole for days on end, bored out of their minds. He tried to remember who had said that a soldier’s life was ninety-nine per cent boredom, one per cent pure terror. Was it Wellington? No, it was somebody else, but he could not remember who.

  As they sat there waiting for the Wessex crew to appear – ‘Fucking Navy were even late for the Armada,’ someone observed – Brookes foolishly asked his seven co-travellers if any of them could remember.

  ‘Genghis Khan?’ a member of the other patrol offered.

  ‘Nah, he said it was ninety-nine per cent terror,’ someone corrected him.

  ‘Bruce Forsyth,’ Hedge suggested. ‘What do you think, Mozza?’

  Trooper David Moseley emerged from his reverie with a start. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘His mind’s on other things,’ Stanley said.

  The little woman back home, I expect, Hedge thought. ‘It drains your strength, Mozza, even thinking about them.’

  ‘I was thinking about where we’re going,’ Mozza said, wondering guiltily whether not thinking about Lynsey at such a moment was something of a betrayal.

  ‘We’re all going to sunny West Falkland,’ Hedge told him, ‘where the beaches stretch golden into the distance and the hills are alive with the sound of sheep farting. We’re all going on a summer holiday,’ he sung, with a gusto Cliff Richard would have killed for.

  So would their pilot, who had just arrived with the other two members of the crew. ‘If you don’t stop that horrible row Falkland Sound will be alive with your cries for help,’ he said trenchantly.

  ‘If you dropped him into Falkland Sound,’ one of the other patrol noted, examining Hedge’s undoubted bulk, ‘it would probably drain it.’

  ‘Then there’d only be one island to argue about,’ someone else realized.

  Major Brookes listened to the banter with half his mind, knowing it for what it was, a giddy chorus of nerves and apprehension. He still could not remember the author of his quote, and as he checked through his memory, another, less amenable one came to mind. He had first heard it from the lips of a dying IRA terrorist the previous year. Lying there, blood flowing freely from a neck wound into sodden leaves in an Armagh lane, the man had looked at him, smiled and recited: ‘this is war, boys flung into a breach, like shovelled earth, and …’

  He had died then, and it had taken Brookes many months to find the rest of the verse, and its source. Finally, the wife of an old friend had recognized it as a poem by the American Amy Lowell. He had looked it up and found the rest: ‘and old men, broken, driving rapidly before crowds of people, in a glitter of silly decorations, behind the boys and the old men, life weeps and shreds her garments, to the blowing winds’.

  These are the boys, Brookes thought, looking round at them: Mozza with his fresh-faced innocence, ginger-haired Stanley with his sleazy grin, the overwhelming Hedge.

  At that moment the lights went out, the rotor blades reached a pitch which made conversation impossible, and the Wessex lifted up from the aircraft carrier’s deck and started moving south-westwards, low across the South Atlantic swell.

  Cecil Matheson poured himself a modest finger of malt whisky, took an appreciative sip and carried it across to the window. Through a gap between darkened buildings he could see light reflected on the Thames. In the street below he could see theatre and cinema-goers threading their way through the Saturday evening jam of taxis.

  The buzzer sounded on his phone, and he took three quick strides across the room to his desk.

  ‘Mr Lubanski is on the line,’ his secretary told him.

  ‘Mr Lubanski,’ Matheson said jovially, wondering, not for the first time, why the American State Department seemed to employ more Poles than the Polish Foreign Ministry. He had met this particular one on his last official visit to Washington, and been more impressed than enamoured of him. The fact that Lubanski was known to privately support a neutral American position vis-à-vis the current dispute only made the coming conversation more fraught with difficulty.

  The lack of liking seemed to be mutual. ‘Cecil,’ Lubanski replied, with more familiarity but rather less enthusiasm.
‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m sorry to take up your time at the weekend,’ Matheson said with as much sincerity as he could muster at short notice. ‘It’s just a matter-of-clarification.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘The President’s speech on Friday …’

  ‘The “ice cold bunch of land down there” speech?’ Lubanski asked, a twist of malicious humour in his voice.

  That was how Ronald Reagan had described the Falklands, and Matheson winced at the memory. ‘Yes, that one,’ he confirmed. ‘Of course, we don’t share the President’s opinion in that respect, but we are …’ He wanted to say ‘glad that the US Government has at last realized its responsibilities to a NATO ally’, but that would hardly be diplomatic.

  ‘Pleased that we’ve finally fallen off the fence on your side?’ Lubanski offered.

  ‘That’s certainly one way of putting it,’ Matheson agreed, ‘though I’d prefer to think you’d stepped down. In any case,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘we’re obviously gratified by the sanctions announced by your Government, and by the President’s promise of matériel aid. As regards the latter …’

  ‘You’d like to know what’s on offer.’

  ‘Of course, but I’m sure that question can be handled through the normal channels. I have something more specific in mind.’

  ‘Which is?’ For the first time, Lubanski sounded vaguely interested.

  Time to bite the bullet, Matheson told himself. ‘AWACS,’ he said. ‘Airborne warning and control systems.’

  ‘I know what AWACS are,’ Lubanski said drily. ‘And without putting too fine a point on it, I think I can safely say the answer will be sorry, but no.’

  Like hell he was sorry, Matheson thought. ‘Her Majesty’s Government would like to formally request the loan of just two AWACS,’ he pressed on.

  ‘Like I …’

  ‘If I could just continue,’ Matheson said, rather more harshly than he intended, ‘large British naval losses will hardly serve the interests of the United States. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Royal Navy’s primary raison d’être is to safeguard the passage of American troops and armaments to Europe in the event of a major war …’