‘The MP5s, the M203,’ Brookes said. ‘And we’ll need the radio, of course. Sorry, Mozza, but you will have to take the extra weight. Get everything else out of your bergen now.’ He turned back to the outside world. The enemy patrol was only about a quarter of a mile away, and seemed to be both spreading out and headed in their direction.
‘We won’t leave you behind,’ Stanley was reassuring Mozza. ‘We can’t do without the radio.’
‘He’s young and fit,’ Hedge observed. ‘He hasn’t spoiled himself with self-indulgence like some I could mention.’
‘No more talk,’ Brookes said curtly. ‘Hand-signals only. If I yell then we’re up and at ’em.’
The next ten minutes seemed more like ten hours, particularly to the three men who could see nothing, who could do nothing but wait and wonder and try to be ready when the time came. For Brookes the time may have gone faster, but at an even greater cost to his nerves. The Argentinian soldiers, each carrying an automatic rifle, were obviously intent on combing this particular hillside, though whether as part of a random sweep or because someone thought he had seen something suspicious Brookes had no idea. At any rate they were advancing across the slope in a long, sweeping line, each soldier walking a parallel path some 20 yards from his nearest compatriot.
Such a wide gap, Brookes reckoned, increased their chance of going undetected. But it also meant that if the hide was spotted, there was next to no chance of their killing many of the enemy, or of getting away.
The line drew slowly nearer. Brookes could see the face of the nearest soldier, a boy of not much more than seventeen, and prayed he had bad eyesight. On his present path he would come within a few feet of the hide, and could hardly fail to notice something. He was now about 50 yards away.
Brookes signalled ‘50’ to the others in the hide. They sat there stony-faced, wondering how their own breathing could sound so loud. Hedge felt his stomach silently rumble, and prayed that they would not be betrayed by one of his farts. Mozza was fighting a mad desire to shout out something, anything, to break the overwhelming silence.
The sound of boots swishing through wet grass grew louder. The boy was almost on top of them when his next in line further up the hill said something in Spanish, something about someone called Pérez which Brookes could not quite make out. It hardly mattered though, for whatever it was it made the boy laugh and look away at just the moment when a downward glance to his left might well have killed himself and all four men in the hide.
The swish of the boots began to fade, replaced by the sound of four Englishmen exhaling with relief. More minutes passed, rather less traumatically, until Brookes was able to report in a soft voice that the enemy patrol had passed out of sight around the far shoulder of the hill.
‘I reckon this hide should get a perfect score for technical merit,’ Stanley said proudly.
‘Either that or the Argies were looking for a restaurant,’ Hedge agreed.
Brookes thought he would tell them about the fortunate joke at some later date, preferably after the war was over.
On Ascension Island Docherty’s patrol had eventually been found four empty bunks in a disused school, and nine hours’ sleep had done wonders for their individual states of mind. They had then done exercises and gone for a much-interrupted run: on Ascension, it seemed, everyone was busy building personal empires and putting up fences around them. In the meantime the Falklands landing force was preparing for its departure the following day, and the small supply boats whizzed to and fro between the larger ships and shore as the fork-lift trucks drew patterns on the airfield tarmac.
The opportunities for entertainment were rather more limited. As Razor noted, the Navy boys could climb into their bunks together, but for real soldiers there was only the Volcano Club. Which was not saying much, Docherty thought to himself after the second pint. He was taking it more slowly than usual, aware that his body was still recovering from the previous weeks’ abuse. The other three seemed to be taking their cue from him, or maybe they too were hyper-conscious of how important it was, in view of what lay ahead, not to risk their level of fitness.
The same could not be said for most of the other revellers. One group, on the far side of the room, seemed to be drinking like there was no tomorrow, and making enough noise to drown out the conversations of the remaining clientele. Every now and then they would burst into a new verse set to the melody of ‘Summer Holiday’: the most recent of which had featured the immortal line ‘napalm sticks to spies’.
‘Arseholes,’ Razor muttered to no one in particular.
‘They’re just REMFs,’ Ben said. ‘Rear-echelon mother-fuckers,’ he enunciated carefully. ‘And you can bet your life they’ve never seen what napalm can do up close.’
‘It’s one of those things,’ Docherty said. ‘It’s always the ones who know nothing who make all the fucking noise.’ He had a strong desire to go over and make his feelings felt.
‘It’s like racism,’ Wacko said. ‘The places it’s strongest in England are the places where there aren’t any blacks. Like East Anglia.’
Razor glanced across at him, surprised. He had never exactly thought of Wacko as a racist, but the man was hardly famous for his liberal opinions. Then the connection hit him. With a foreign father, Wacko would have learnt the hard way.
The singing swelled once more. ‘We won’t cry for you Argentina, we’ll just send you our Polaris …’
The four of them were saved by an Air Force officer, who told them that they would be leaving at 0700 hours the next morning. Suddenly all the noise and ugly jingoism seemed beside the point. Unlike the singers they were on their way to war.
They were in the helicopter: Francisco, herself and the two security men. Francisco was on the floor, smiling up at her, despite the wires which held his wrists and ankles in a knot behind his arched back, despite the burns and bruises visible on his face, despite the six bricks cemented together and attached by chains to the tangle of wires.
‘Please, no,’ she implored the security men. ‘I’ll do anything if you’ll let him go.’
The one with the thin moustache smirked at her. ‘You’ll do anything anyway,’ he said.
‘She already has,’ his partner said. ‘Everyone at the School had her – she was such a nice piece of ass when she first arrived. And she was really eager to please.’
‘No, no, that’s not true,’ she told Francisco desperately, and he seemed to believe her. His smile never wavered, even when they pulled him across the floor, said ‘adiós, pig’, and pushed the block of bricks out into space. Then an expression of surprise seemed to suffuse his face, and he looked up once at her as his fingers grasped at the doorframe, before the foot smashed into his face and he was gone.
And then the face was slowly drifting down through the water, his hair waving, the smile fading into an open mouth, exhaling bubbles …
She woke with a start, shaking like a leaf. The church bells of Rio Gallegos were ringing for morning Mass.
If only Sharon could see him now, Stanley thought to himself. He was walking some five yards behind Brookes, closer when the mist thickened, further apart when it thinned. Generally though it seemed to be growing thicker the closer they got to Port Howard and sea level.
The previous night the patrol had received a coded radio message from the SAS operations centre on the Resource. They were being pulled out on the following night. No explanation was given, merely the coordinates of the pick-up zone some five miles away and their helicopter taxi’s ETA.
It was hard to feel too sad about leaving their waterlogged home on a windy slope, but for Brookes the horrible suspicion arose that this might prove his last-ever mission for the SAS. If it had to be, then it had to be, but if so then it was going to be damn-near perfect. There was still one large gap in their knowledge which they needed to fill: the nature of whatever it was that the Argies had stored in the two large corrugated sheds close by the jetty on the inlet. They were probably full of corned
beef or toilet paper or pictures of General Galtieri, but there was always the chance they might contain something posing more of a threat to the upcoming British landing. Surface-to-air missiles, for example.
There was only one way to find out, he had said, and that was to go and take a look. The others had agreed in principle, but disputed Brookes’s proposed timing. He had intended to do the traditional thing, and go at once, under the cover of darkness. Stanley had disagreed, arguing that the early-morning fog would be just as concealing, and that the Argentinians would be unlikely to be using any thermal-imaging capacity they possessed at such an hour. The trooper’s argument had convinced Brookes, which was why the two of them were now nearing a camp of 1000 enemy soldiers protected by little more than a curtain of water droplets and two silenced Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns.
There was the sudden sound of laughter ahead and to their right, and Stanley noticed the hairs on his wrist were standing up on end.
Ahead of him he saw Brookes move his extended right arm slowly down and up, and accordingly slowed down. Then the PC moved his arm again, this time from the diagonal to the vertical, signalling a renewed advance.
What fun, Stanley told himself.
Brookes veered off to the left, as certain as he could be that the two of them were inside the protective ring of minefields. According to his map of the settlement, first drawn from sight and then transferred to memory, a house should soon be looming out of the fog slightly to their right.
A few more yards and it did. Brookes congratulated himself and signalled Stanley forward to join him. At that moment a loud voice echoed in the silence: Tea’s made, Ted.’
It was almost shocking in both its ordinariness and its Englishness. The temptation to wander across and partake of a cup was almost overwhelming. Brookes and Stanley stared at each other, and both broke into the same stupid grin, white teeth gleaming in their blackened faces.
Brookes led off again, skirting what looked like rotting string beans on a line of canes and climbing over a low hedge and into a muddy lane. The simultaneous sound of feet and murmured Spanish sent him back the way he had come, and the two of them crouched down behind the foliage, MP5s at the ready.
Two uniformed figures slowly materialized out of the mist, carrying what looked like a packing case of ammunition. It was obviously heavy enough to absorb all their attention, because they passed by breathing heavily and dematerialized once more. Brookes and Stanley would have had no trouble coming up behind them and slitting each throat from ear to ear, but it had been agreed that this particular walk on the wild side should remain unknown to the enemy if at all possible. There was, after all, little chance of them slitting 1000 throats on the one trip.
They stood motionless for another minute, ears straining for sounds of any other activity. All they could hear was the murmur of voices way behind them, and the occasional squawk of a seabird somewhere out in front.
They resumed their progress, following the muddy lane in what Brookes assumed was the direction of the jetty. The sound of water lapping against the wooden piers confirmed as much. The dark shape of the first corrugated warehouse loomed out of the mist.
The two men inched along the side wall, and Brookes put an eye round the corner. There was no one in sight, but that was hardly surprising when visibility was less than 10 yards. He signalled Stanley to follow and started edging his way along the front.
The main doors were shut, but the large, rusty padlock – ‘Made in Warrington’ – had not been fastened. More sloppiness, Brookes thought to himself. He listened up against the door, and heard no sounds coming from inside. Signalling Stanley to cover him, he pulled the sliding door to the left as silently as he could.
Inside there was hardly any light, and it took their eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom. When they did it was to an unexpected sight. The shed was empty save for two tables and about twenty blank road signs. Only one seemed to have been completed: it stood proudly against the far wall, reading ‘BAHIA ZORRO 57 KILOMETROS’.
‘Fox Bay,’ Brookes translated for Stanley, and the two men looked at each other with disbelieving faces. The enemy was concentrating on getting the islands’ road signs right! There were not even any roads worthy of the name. Brookes wondered what they would discover in the other shed – copies of Teach Yourself Spanish For Sheep?
It turned out to be empty, save for some shearing equipment. The Argentinian garrison at Port Howard was what it had seemed from the hide: a concentration of force entirely lacking in mobility; no threat to anyone other than the dozen or so locals. And even the latter seemed to be still enjoying their breakfast cup of tea.
Brookes led off once more, back the way they had come. It might not be the safest route when it came to unexpected meetings with the enemy, but many hours of telescopic observation had seemed to indicate it was free of mines. And the fog, if anything, seemed to be thickening.
They passed down the lane, passed by the house where they had heard the English voices, and started up the hill away from the settlement. They were just passing the familiar landmark of an abandoned oil barrel when the shadows came out of the fog.
The three enemy soldiers saw Brookes at the same moment he saw them, but training and speed of reaction made all the difference. They were on their way back into base, not expecting trouble, their minds on breakfast or a warm bed. Two were carrying their automatic rifles by the barrel, one had his over the shoulder, and Brookes’s cradled MP5 had killed the first two while they were still juggling. The third actually tripped in his shock, causing Brookes’s second burst to miss him, but it seemed that Stanley, stepping swiftly out from behind the PC, had prevented the man from getting his finger to the trigger with an accurate burst through his chest.
Then, almost posthumously it seemed, the rifle fired once as the man crumpled, shattering the silence.
‘Shit,’ Brookes said with feeling. He thought for a second, half his mind listening for an alarm in the camp behind him. It came as a slowly swelling chorus of questioning voices and sporadic shouts. ‘Let’s at least get them off the track,’ he whispered.
They lugged two of the men – boys, really, judging from their faces – some 10 yards into the fog, praying as they did so that they were not trespassing on a minefield. Stanley then dragged the third to join his comrades while Brookes waited on the track, listening to what sounded like a headless chickens’ convention in the camp below.
‘Let’s make some speed,’ he told the returning Stanley, and the two of them started up the hill at a half-run, the voices growing ever fainter behind them. For the moment they were safe, but only for the moment. To make matters worse, Brookes had the distinct impression that the fog was beginning to thin. If it evaporated entirely, he did not think much of their chances of escaping detection. Looking for a possible hide was one thing; looking for one you knew was there was another matter entirely. And with three of their comrades dead the Argentinians would hardly need motivating.
When he and Stanley got back to the hide, Brookes knew, there would have to be some swift decisions. He tried to get his own thoughts in order as Stanley navigated their way through the fog.
It took them an hour to reach ‘home’, where Hedge and Mozza were relieved to see them. They had spent the same hour nervously waiting to find out why the enemy had fired a shot, and whether he had hit anything valuable, like Brookes or Stanley.
‘Decision time, lads,’ Brookes insisted. He looked at his watch. ‘We have sixteen and a half hours before the pick-up, at least seven of them in daylight. We can either head out now or stay put until dark. If we go, we risk being caught in the open if the fog clears. If we stay, we risk being found or so hemmed in that we can’t make the pick-up at all.’
‘Nice choice,’ Stanley murmured.
‘Isn’t it? Preferences, gentlemen?’
‘Yes,’ Hedge offered. ‘I’d feel better on the move. If the Argies don’t find us during the day then they’ll be out in
strength tonight, and we were warned that they probably have thermal imagers. At least while the fog stays put their choppers can’t fly, and we’ll have no problem keeping ahead of the foot soldiers.’
‘OK. Mozza?’
‘Sounds right to me.’ The thought of another long and tense vigil, cramped in the sopping hide, with no real chance of fighting their way out if they were discovered, held no appeal at all.
‘Stanley?’
‘Suits me. Though I’d feel happier if we had a couple of those hand-held surface-to-air missiles “Air Troop” got their grubby paws on.’
‘I’d feel happier if we could find a greasy spoon,’ Hedge said. ‘Eggs, bacon, beans, sausage, mushroom, burger, onions and a double portion of chips. All of it hot.’
Brookes licked his lips despite himself. His wife was always going on about his cholesterol level. ‘Let’s get packed and out of here,’ he said, ‘before the Argies have us for breakfast.’
A little under ten minutes later they were ready to move. Stanley led the way, the others following in the accustomed order, though considerably closer together than usual because of the poor visibility. The hide’s camouflage had been left in slight disarray, on the off-chance that the Argentinians would not only spot it, but waste valuable pursuit time by laying siege to an empty hole in the ground.
Since the most counter-productive thing they could do now was to get lost, the patrol’s progress was slow, with Brookes and Stanley checking and double-checking each change of direction against their illuminated compasses and what little they could see of the terrain. Generally they were climbing, but the grain of the land ran against their chosen direction, so it was often a case of two steps upward, one step down. The only apparent witnesses to their march were sheep, most of whom expressed their resentment at the intrusion with a succession of indignant bleats.
All four soldiers continually examined the fog for signs of thinning, and were frequently convinced that they could detect as much. But the overall level of visibility somehow remained as restricted as ever. At around three they gathered beneath the lip of a convenient ridge for a ten-minute rest and a silent lunch of chocolates, biscuits and three-day-old rainwater. Mozza, looking around at the other three and the cocoon of mist they inhabited, found himself thinking about Dr Who, the favourite TV series of his childhood. The reason, he realized, was that the foreshortened horizon made it look like they were in a studio.
Soldier K: Mission to Argentina Page 10