Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  They strapped their bergens back on and resumed their march. Once more it seemed obvious that the fog was thinning. And this time it really was: slowly, but definitely.

  After climbing up a small valley and crossing another ridge line, Brookes called a halt. Visibility was now about 100 yards and increasing rapidly. Somehow ahead of them to the west a pale wash of sunlight was trying to make itself seen.

  ‘Scrapes,’ Brookes said. The others groaned, but nevertheless took to the job with all the speed they could muster. The turf was carefully removed, the four shallow trenches dug, the excavated earth stuffed under a convenient slab of overhanging rock, and the hessian nets fixed for relaying the turf roofs. Less than fifteen minutes after Brookes’s order the four of them were each lying on damp soil in relative darkness, listening to their own hearts beating.

  It was hardly a moment too soon. Their last view of the outside world had been of mist peeling away from the land and rising into the sky in great swathes, like the smoke of gunfire escaping from a nineteenth-century battlefield. Now, through the gaps afforded by the clump of tussock grass above his head, Brookes could see patches of blue sky. What a life, he thought. He sincerely hoped any future wars the SAS got involved in offered a better climate and more amenable terrain.

  ‘Action stations!’ the RAF dispatcher shouted above the C-130 engines. ‘Get your gear ready, lads!’ He waved an imaginary wand, and the plane’s tailgate started lowering itself, letting in the world with a roar and rush.

  The four men began the tricky manœuvres necessary for inserting themselves in divers’ dry suits. It would have been hard enough in the middle of the pitch at Parkhead, Docherty thought, let alone in this space between supply cases where there was barely room to swing a cat. But eventually they were all suitably encased, and zipping each other up like happy debutantes. Fins were stuffed into belts, and then each man hoisted himself into the parachute harness which had been adjusted to his measurements before their take-off from Ascension. Once the distress flares had been strapped to their wrists they could start worrying in earnest.

  His three comrades were not especially nervous about jumping, but Razor had never taken to it. He knew his fears were no more sensible than those of anyone getting on a plane, but somehow the knowledge did not help. When all was said and done, the ground was a bloody long way down and bloody hard to boot. It was all very well them saying the odds of both parachutes failing were a million to one. If odds like that never came up then no one would do the football pools, would they? And as for jumping into the ocean: well, it might look all soft and welcoming but that water down there was hard as concrete if you hit it from this height. And even if it all went well those idiots in the Navy still had to find you before your balls froze and dropped off.

  Look on the bright side, Razor told himself, at least there were no sharks. Or at least he hoped not. Jesus, what had brought that thought into his head? A picture of Corinna’s face crossed his mind, and he visualized her up the ladder in the restaurant, painting the ceiling, the overalls tight around her bum. Now that was the type of thought he needed for a leap into oblivion.

  ‘Five minutes,’ the dispatcher in charge yelled at them. The pallets holding all their gear were already waiting on the tailgate ramp, and when the cargo-hold light turned green the team of dispatchers, all wearing full parachute gear in case of accidents, started rolling them off the end and out into space.

  They were next. Docherty took the lead position, knowing that most jumpers, no matter how experienced, still found that first look down a touch unnerving. He rather enjoyed it. Inverted vertigo, he thought to himself, looking down at the churning grey sea 1000 feet below. The only ships he could see were way to either side, but at that moment one slid almost directly beneath them. The pallets containing their bergens, weaponry, signalling equipment and personal kit were floating down gracefully.

  The dispatcher slapped him on the back, and he launched himself out into the C-130’s slipstream, into the first sensation of being hammered forward, then the relief of the harness tugging at the body, the open canopy filling the sky. The thought crossed his mind that it was like going down a slide as a kid: the series of familiar physical sensations, the excitement.

  He jettisoned the reserve chute, pulled down on both steering toggles to reduce his forward motion and unclipped the reserve hooks from the main parachute as the ocean rushed up to meet him. A split second before impact he hit the harness release, eliminating the risk of drag and allowing the canopy to go with the wind.

  The water was cold, even through the dry suit, but he felt exhilarated, as he always did after a jump. He managed to get the fins on, inflated his life-jacket, and trod water as he tried to get his head high enough for a look around. He could see nothing but waves for a moment, then one of the others became suddenly visible. Half a mile or so beyond the bobbing head a frigate was sailing blithely by across his line of sight.

  How long could a man survive in water this cold, Docherty wondered. It would be rather an ironic end to his career – being transported halfway round the world just to be dropped from a great height into a watery grave. ‘Where are you, you bastards,’ he murmured to himself.

  As if on cue, a rigid raider suddenly appeared not 20 yards away, headed his way. A hand reached down with a knife to puncture the life-jacket and make it easier to pull him aboard. Razor was already sitting there, a huge smile of relief on his face.

  In his scrape Mozza was composing a letter to Lynsey, even though he knew he would forget most of it before he had the chance to write anything down. She would be worried, he guessed, and so he would not be telling her much of the truth – always assuming he would be allowed to. Nobody had said anything, but he supposed there would be some sort of restrictions.

  He had not seen any penguins yet, so there was nothing much to report to three-year-old Hannah. When it came down to it he supposed the only thing he really wanted to say was that he loved them both and missed them. For a moment he had a picture in his head of Lynsey’s face a few inches from his own in her candlelit bedroom and he almost felt choked with yearning.

  A few feet away Hedge was not missing anyone half as much as a good meal. It was his only real grudge against the SAS: the way the bosses delighted in putting such a distance between the men and any half-decent canteen. There should be an SAS equivalent of meals-on-wheels, he decided, delivering hot meals to the various OPs. Either that or the Navy could run a take-away pizza service from one of the carriers. The OPs could order by radio. He started working out the Morse code for extra pepperoni.

  Stanley, for once, was not thinking about sex, Sharon, or sex with Sharon. Well, not directly, anyway. He was remembering the ten-point guide to the ideal woman which he and Barry Saunders had made up one night, sitting in a car outside the Divis Flats. It had been a good way to spend a few hours, but it all seemed a bit stupid now. Fuck knew why. His needs had not changed, or at least he hoped not. It was bloody Mozza’s fault, Stanley thought, with all that crap about love and understanding and equality. Women were not equal, no matter which way you looked at it. If they were they would have them in the SAS, right?

  OK, so that was crap reasoning, Stanley told himself ruefully. But the point was …

  The drone of the helicopter forced its way into his consciousness. Number one – great breasts with great nipples, he silently mouthed as the drone grew louder. Number two – legs long enough for skiing on. It seemed almost on top of them now. Number three – a kiss you could splash around in. It was on top of them, a black shape against the sky, and the down-draught from its blades was tugging at the knot of grass which covered the head end of his scrape.

  But had it seen them? There was no way of knowing.

  Suddenly the grass was swept away, leaving Stanley looking straight up at the belly of a Puma helicopter. He reached for the M16, and at almost the same moment a pilot’s face appeared round the edge of the machine, staring straight down at him.


  The head jerked back, the helicopter reared up and to one side, and Stanley realized there was no longer any risk of bringing it down on top of them – all in less than a second. He threw himself out of the scrape, brought the rifle with its grenade-launcher attachment to his shoulder, aimed at the open cockpit door and fired.

  With a dramatic whoosh the grenade exploded inside the cockpit, catapulting one pilot out and instantly killing the other. The chopper itself fell like a stone, bounced once on the ridge and toppled over and out of sight, before a loud explosion and a sharp plume of smoke announced its total demise.

  The four SAS men climbed to the top of the ridge, and looked down at the burning wreckage below. ‘Nice shot, Stanley,’ Brookes said over his shoulder, as he walked back down to examine the pilot who had been blown clear. He was decidedly dead.

  Brookes rejoined the others. ‘There’s another hour or so of light,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of them had time to radio in, but we’d better get moving.’

  They resumed the march, and spent that hour of light waiting for the tell-tale sound of distant rotor blades. But none came, and a further two-hour journey in the dark brought them to the flat valley earmarked as the pick-up zone. They slept and watched in two-hour shifts until near the designated time, then set out the infrared lights to guide their taxi in.

  It arrived on time, the pilot in his PNGs looking like a refugee from Star Trek. ‘All aboard, chums,’ he announced in a cheery whisper, ‘and try not to dirty the seat-covers.’

  Brookes asked how many of the other groups were being collected that night.

  ‘Just you lot,’ the pilot told him. ‘Either you’ve been very naughty, or they’ve thought of somewhere worse to send you.’

  5

  At almost 23,000 tons the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Resource was one of the Task Force’s larger ships. Surveying it from the helicopter which had brought them across from the Hermes, Docherty’s patrol had expected a stateroom each, generous deck space for sunbathing and a personalized leisure centre. They had been given four bunks in the middle of a smoke-filled hold, and had needed to fight their way through G Squadron’s clothes, equipment and bodies to stake even this claim.

  They had swiftly been spotted.

  ‘Oh, they’re really scraping the barrel now,’ someone observed. ‘B’ Squadron’s arrived.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve fallen overboard once already,’ another voice noted.

  Brookes’s patrol returned to the Resource in the middle of the following night, but an unusually beneficent Navy found more amenable quarters for their first night back than the bunks in the hold. After glorious hot showers, they laid themselves out luxuriously on soft mattresses and dry sheets, and all but Brookes slept for ten hours straight. Even he managed nine.

  They were allowed a copious brunch before business, and Hedge redeemed all the promises he had made himself over the past week. After draining a second huge mug of tea he leaned back in his seat, belched his satisfaction and wondered out loud: ‘What now?’

  ‘We’ll soon know,’ Brookes said. ‘I don’t suppose they pulled us out to send us home.’ At least he hoped not. He looked at his watch. ‘Come on, it’s time we moved. Mustn’t keep the Green Slime waiting.’

  Several corridors, ladders and hatchways later the four of them were rapping on the door of the ship’s ladies’ toilet and being bidden to enter. Things had improved since their last visit. The tables in the centre were overlain with files, tide charts and military reference books, a mass of radio equipment was neatly stacked on benches, and maps were pinned to the cubicle doors. In one open cubicle doorway a hot-drinks machine was humming quietly to itself. Through the two portholes the grey-green sea was seething.

  The Green Slime – as SAS Intelligence was (sometimes) affectionately known – was represented by Major Bill Hemmings, a tangle-haired Welshman whom Brookes had known in Oman. They were about the same age, but intelligence work was taking its toll on Hemmings, adding a few inches to his waistline and the first glimmerings of a second chin. His brain, though, showed no signs of going to seed.

  After almost an hour had been consumed in debriefing their completed mission on West Falkland, he told them to help themselves to drinks from the machine and disappeared.

  ‘He’s gone for our medals,’ Stanley observed.

  ‘He’s gone for a crap,’ Hedge said.

  Mozza stared out at the sea while Brookes scanned the littered tables for any clues to their next mission. He found none.

  Hemmings returned, trailing in his wake Docherty, Razor, Wacko and Ben. Some introductions were not necessary: Docherty and Brookes, though hardly friends, had often served in the same operations together, while Razor and Stanley knew each from the regimental football team. Everyone knew Hedge.

  ‘You gentlemen,’ Hemmings told them once everyone was seated, ‘are Operation Backyard. Now since only half of you have any idea what this is all about, I’d better fill you in.’

  After he had finished he asked if there were any questions. Brookes was feeling almost too happy for rational thought: this was indeed a mission worthy of ending one’s active career – he could have hardly have asked for anything better. The other members of his patrol were still busy absorbing the idea when Docherty raised his voice.

  ‘I have a couple,’ he said. ‘At Hereford we were told there were still two issues outstanding – the helicopter crew and the business of uniform. Has anything been decided?’

  ‘On the former, yes. The Navy have found us some heroes, gentlemen …’

  There were groans of disbelief, and murmurs of ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’

  Hemmings smiled sweetly at them. ‘Who have volunteered – volunteered, gentlemen – to drop you lads off in Argentina, get as far into Chile as they can with what fuel they have left, and then bring the chopper down somewhere uninhabited and hide out for at least a week before giving themselves up. They could hardly do more, now, could they?’

  There were groans of grudging acceptance.

  ‘As for the uniforms, we’re still waiting for the politicos to make up their minds.’

  Docherty nodded. He did not mind what happened to him, but he wanted to be damn sure the younger ones knew what they were getting into before he agreed to lead them onto the mainland.

  Isabel kept the Renault at 60kph as she drove it down the dead-straight section of the road from the Chilean border, and only occasionally bothered to check the rear mirror. Her mind told her each trip had to be more dangerous than the last, but her heart told her the threat was minimal. The local military was busy with the war, and the police in this part of the world were only accustomed to the problems posed by drunken oil workers. The security apparatus’s natural habitat was in the cities of the north, and in any case the threat to the ruling class’s security had always come from the people they exploited, not the agents of foreign powers.

  They had been well prepared to catch her as a revolutionary, Isabel thought, but were ill equipped to catch her as a foreign spy. The thought brought a bitter smile to her lips.

  That morning she had awoken with the word ‘traitor’ echoing in her brain, and no matter how vehemently she denied the charge to herself, the word refused to go away. ‘So what?’ she said out loud in English, the way Michael used to say it. The way he no doubt still did, she reminded herself. Somehow it was hard to think of him as still alive. Francisco seemed more alive, and he was dead.

  She was a traitor to her country, but only insofar as her country could be identified with the Junta and its retinue – the rich families, the bought union bosses, the animals who did the dirty work for all of them. She was no traitor to her class, nor to humanity as a whole.

  But she was a traitor to Raul. That was the problem. That was what was beginning to get to her. He had done nothing to her, nothing to humanity. He had joined the Air Force because he loved to fly, and because it was a career that offered good money and social prestige. And maybe because, like most young men,
he liked his girl to admire him in his uniform.

  There were nothing wrong with such ambitions, or such a life. And because he had pursued them the Junta was sending him out to die against superior forces, and she was milking him of information under the guise of friendship, and then sending it to the enemy, increasing the chances of his being blown out of the sky.

  In the plastic bag she had left under the stone there had been a full report on morale at the Rio Gallegos airbase, information on the number of nightly flights to Port Stanley, and Raul’s considered opinions of both his fellow pilots and the defensive tactics employed by the British ships. Thanks to Raul’s male-obsessive interest in numbers and lists – what Michael had always called the ‘trainspotter mentality’ – there was also a complete breakdown of the planes stationed at Rio Gallegos.

  If this little information package did not get him killed, she thought savagely, then nothing would.

  But the die was cast, at least for her. Guilt over Raul might be consuming the last of her soul, but the reasons for doing what she was doing seemed stronger with each week back in her native land. Argentina was like a nation in thrall, a country under a spell. Reason, judgement, any sense of real collective interest – all had been jettisoned in this fit of chauvinistic madness. Something or someone had to puncture this bubble, break the evil spell, and from where she stood it could only be the British. To help them was to help her country, and all the Rauls would have to pay the price.

  Hemmings had told them that ‘Backyard’ would probably be set in motion on the night of either Thursday 13 May or the following Friday. Docherty’s patrol was eager to get moving, but realized that Brookes and the other three needed several days to make a full recovery from their week on West Falkland. Any longer, though, and there was a danger Hedge would completely strip the Resource of edible food.