Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  Maybe she would write a guidebook when this was all over, she thought. She was rapidly accumulating all the necessary information, and if such books needed their authors to have a feel for the area in question, then she thought she was well qualified. In Ushuaia there was a Museum of the End of the World, and it was not just a matter of geography. There was something about southern Patagonia and southern Chile that almost revelled in the idea of being a long way from anywhere else.

  ‘Don’t they know it’s the end of the world – it ended when I lost your love,’ she sang to herself. If she had anything to thank Michael for, then it was an education in English and American rock music.

  No, that wasn’t fair, she thought. He had tried to understand her.

  The road went into a long curve around an outflung shoulder of the distant mountain. At the point where it straightened once more a car was parked off the road, and as she went past it pulled out onto the road behind her. She felt a sharp stab of anxiety, and a lightness in her stomach. In the rear mirror she saw the car accelerate to pass her.

  She turned, heart in mouth, to glance at the driver and was relieved to find that it was Andrew Lawson, who she had last seen three weeks before in Punta Arenas. If he had come across the border in person, it had to be something important.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he shouted through the window. ‘I’ll pull up when we have a decent view in both directions.’

  He pulled off the tarmac at a spot close to her bridge, where any approaching traffic would be visible at least a mile away. She left the road behind him and got out of the car. He was walking towards her with a gun in his hand.

  Her heart sank.

  ‘Have you got a spare tyre?’ he asked.

  ‘What? Well, yes …’

  He took aim and squeezed the trigger. Her left front tyre exhaled noisily. ‘So I’ve stopped to help a lady in distress,’ he said with a smile. ‘I take it you can play the helpless woman if you have to.’

  ‘As well as you can play the moronic male,’ she retorted. She felt really angry at him for scaring her like that. Only a man who had seen too many films and not enough reality could do something so stupid.

  He was already retrieving her jack from the boot, oblivious to her anger. She decided to let it fade away. After all, how could an Englishman be expected to know anything about fear?

  She looked up and down the highway. It was empty. ‘Shall I put the stuff in your car?’ she asked.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, unfastening the second bolt. ‘Just put it under the front seat.’

  ‘Won’t they check your car at the border?’ she asked. It had occurred to her that if he got caught she probably would too. And he would probably have diplomatic immunity.

  ‘It had occurred to me,’ he said mildly, hearing the implied criticism.

  ‘Yes, OK. I just …’

  ‘I have a false compartment in the door,’ he said. ‘Real James Bond stuff.’

  ‘What about the rear-mounted machine-guns?’ she asked drily.

  ‘’Fraid not. Budget cutbacks, probably.’

  ‘What do we need to talk about?’ she asked pointedly.

  ‘Ah, yes. The purpose of this little tête-à-tête in the Patagonian wastes. Some of our soldiers will be dropping in nearby in the not-too-distant future. In fact, they may well be here already – my boss hadn’t been given the precise date when I last spoke to him. There’s …’

  ‘You mean here on the mainland?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Ummm, yes. Only a few men, I believe. They will be watching your airbase at Rio Gallegos for planes taking off, and so on. Under cover, of course.’

  She found it hard to believe, though after a few moments’ thought she could see no overwhelming arguments against such an operation. The next thing that occurred to her was how this might affect her own mission. ‘You’re not expecting me to take them breakfast each morning, are you?’ she asked belligerently.

  ‘No. But in the event of an emergency London thought it advisable that you should know of each other’s existence.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It makes sense, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what could they do for me? What could I do for them, come to that?’

  ‘They could get you out of Argentina when they go. On a submarine, I presume, though I don’t know. As for what you could do for them …’ He shrugged.

  ‘I could hardly hide them under my hotel bed,’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘You could perhaps help them get to the border,’ he said reasonably. ‘I don’t know. Like I said: it just seemed sensible to give both you and them another possible option. That’s all.’

  ‘It also gives us both someone else to betray,’ she said. ‘What do they know about me?’

  ‘Only your name and the hotel you’re staying at. And they wouldn’t betray you.’

  ‘Why, because they’re English gentlemen?’

  ‘Because there’d be no reason for the Argentinian military to ask them.’

  ‘You probably don’t have many torturers who enjoy their work in England,’ she said coldly. ‘Are you going to give me the name of their hotel?’

  ‘No, but I’m going to show you on the map the general area where they’ll be holed up.’

  She looked at him in amazement. ‘And then what? You expect me to wander round the local countryside looking for a bunch of men in a hole reading the Sun?’

  6

  Aboard the Resource they had received word that the operation was to begin shortly before midnight on Saturday 15 May. The eleven men most concerned were told first thing the next morning, and a frantic day’s preparations ensued. The supplies and signalling equipment were checked through once more; the weaponry given a final test fire from the ship’s rails. Last-minute letters were composed, decisions on personal gear taken and retaken, nerves kept under control by the constant banter.

  That morning the eight men of the two patrols – ‘North’ under Docherty, ‘South’ under Brookes – were introduced to the Sea King crewmen: Lieutenants Billings and Hatchard, and Petty-Officer Crabtree. This threesome seemed to be under the impression that they were going on a fortnight’s camping holiday in Chile, and Hatchard asked the others what they thought about taking a hamper with them for the inevitable picnics. All three of them, the SAS men decided, were ‘OK for the Navy’.

  Docherty remembered the hamper as he stepped out onto the rolling deck shortly after ten-thirty that evening, and smiled to himself. The Resource was still making good headway into the west, and seemed to be showing fewer lights than usual. With all the modern detection equipment available, Docherty knew, it still counted for something to be hard to see in the dark. It was probably his imagination, but he felt he could feel the tension aboard the ship, accompanying this dark, silent voyage towards the enemy coast.

  They might still be in the self-proclaimed exclusion zone, but they were a long way from help, and the moment the helicopter was airborne the Resource would be heading back towards the relative safety of the Task Force with all the speed its engines could muster.

  The Sea King HC4 was waiting for them on the flight deck, its newly acquired extra fuel tanks adding to the ungainliness of its silhouette. Inside it had been stripped of all but the essentials, and maybe a few of those.

  ‘It looks like a burglar’s been in,’ Razor observed.

  ‘They’ve even taken the seats out,’ Stanley complained.

  ‘We have a normal range of 480 kilometres,’ Lieutenant Billings announced, ‘and we’re probably travelling 700. I’m afraid we can’t even carry your normal supply of bullshit.’

  ‘They get testy when you complain,’ Hedge noticed.

  ‘Probably his time of the month,’ Wacko murmured, and found himself thinking about Anne.

  ‘It would have been more comfortable if they’d fired us at Argentina from a cannon,’ Stanley said, grabbing a piece of fuselage floor to park himself on.

  ‘They’ll probably
send us back that way,’ Hedge said.

  The nervous chatter continued until the door slid shut, whereupon a brief interlude of silence accompanied the helicopter’s ascent from the moving deck. According to the weather report the low-hanging bank of clouds above them extended all the way to the Argentinian coast, and would at least reduce the chances of their being spotted by the naked eye. There was also a stiff wind blowing out of the west, buffeting the helicopter and ensuring a far from easy ride.

  Spread around the walls of the Sea King’s belly the eight SAS men could see nothing of the outside world, and it seemed an eternity before Crabtree passed back the information that the coast was in sight. Docherty’s North patrol began preparing themselves, stretching limbs, checking, for the umpteenth time, that all fastenings were secure, and running narrow-beam torches over each other’s make-up.

  ‘Try not to kiss each other too often in the first few hours,’ Stanley advised them.

  ‘He still thinks he’s in West Bromwich,’ Wacko said.

  ‘One minute,’ Crabtree told them, and almost before the words were out they were settling down onto Argentinian soil.

  ‘Do you think they’re still angry about Rattin and Alf Ramsey?’ Razor asked.

  ‘I would be,’ Docherty said, as Brookes pulled back the door for them and let the wind in. A flat expanse stretched away into darkness.

  The four men leapt down one by one, feeling the weight of their bergens as they landed.

  ‘Good luck, lads,’ Brookes shouted above the roar of the blades, gave them one last wave and slid the door shut. The Sea King lifted off into the cloudy sky, and flew off towards the south, leaving the patrol alone in a silence that was broken only by the wind and in almost total darkness.

  Assuming that they had been put down in the right spot, they were about six miles in from the coast and roughly 25 south-west of the Rio Gallegos airbase. The countryside around them was virtually treeless steppe, which sloped gently up towards a line of low hills some 10 miles to the west. It was almost as empty of people as the Falklands, and almost as full of sheep.

  For the moment, this was all hearsay, and the patrol was forced to rely for direction solely on its two illuminated compasses. Ben led off, followed in fairly close formation by fellow Scotsman Docherty, and Wacko and Razor. Each man carried a silenced MP5 sub-machine-gun cradled in his arms, a 9mm Browning High Power handgun and a favoured knife on his person.

  Unlike Brookes’s patrol, North had elected not to further burden themselves with more esoteric weapons. Docherty was a believer in sticking to basics unless there was a good reason not to, and since no members of his patrol shared Hedge’s skill with a crossbow he had deemed it wiser to travel without one.

  They were carrying more than enough, he thought, and increased mobility was usually worth a slight reduction in the range of fire-power at a patrol’s disposal. But there was no set answer. Brookes had judged differently, and only time would tell who was right on this occasion. Maybe both of them. One thing was certain: it was too late for either of them to change his mind.

  The thought of the woman crossed Docherty’s mind. Hemmings had made a bad mistake in telling both patrols about her at the final briefing that morning – there had been no sense in giving her name and address to South, who would almost certainly never come within 100 miles of her. If one or all of Brookes’s South patrol was captured and tortured – which was hardly out of the question given all they knew about the Junta – then she had been needlessly endangered.

  Docherty had not said anything at the time – the younger men were wired up enough as it was – but he had been surprised by such an elementary error. Nor had he much liked the idea of her knowing of their existence: for all he knew she was incompetent enough to get herself caught and tortured. It had happened once. He thought about what Hemmings had told them about her: college student, urban guerrilla, tortured prisoner, exile. The only one the Intelligence Services had managed to persuade to work for them. She had to be special, he decided, one way or the other.

  He would like to meet her. Since his time in Mexico he had come to realize that distance was a great aid in understanding one’s own country, and he would have liked to hear what she had to say about Argentina since her exile and return.

  He would like to meet her, but not on this trip. This time around he had no desire to talk Spanish with anyone but the sheep. And according to Razor many Patagonian sheep spoke only Welsh. Docherty smiled and checked his watch. They had been walking an hour.

  Up ahead of him Ben was in his element. The wind, the smell of clean air, that sense of space which even near-zero visibility could not hide – it all seemed a far cry from the Hereford barracks or the crowded hold of the Resource, far more akin to the vast silence of Lochaber and the Great Glen. All the bustle and the restrictions and the pettiness were gone. All the artificiality. They were in the middle of nowhere, and at the centre of everything.

  At the rear of the column Razor’s thoughts were rather less cosmic. The Cup Final was only six days away, which seemed far too short a time to win the war and get Ossie Ardiles back to England. It would be the eighth time Spurs had been to Wembley since his birth, and the first visit he would miss seeing, though admittedly he had been a bit young to appreciate the Cup Finals in ’61 and ’62. His mother even claimed he had slept through the former, but that was hard to believe, even of a three-year-old supporter.

  At least the coming Saturday’s game would be on the World Service, and he would be able to listen in on earphones, provided they did not need the radio for anything trivial, like warning the Task Force of a massed Exocet attack.

  Fifteen feet in front of Razor, and only just visible in the gloom, Wacko was still trying to drive thoughts of Anne and Brendan from his mind. The truly horrible part was that while the thought of her having sex with someone else, of her letting some other man slide his dick inside her, produced a sinking feeling in the pit of Wacko’s stomach, he was simultaneously asking himself whether he was still in love with her. Alone of the four SAS men walking across the Patagonian steppe, Wacko would have almost welcomed some sort of impediment to their progress. Anything to take his mind off his beloved wife.

  After dropping off North patrol the Sea King had swung sharply south, crossing the Chilean border and continuing across the wide expanse of Lomas Bay, which separates the south-eastern corner of the South American mainland from the volcanic island of Tierra del Fuego.

  Once over the island, the Sea King crew kept their craft some six miles to the neutral western side of the Chile-Argentine border, which bisects the island from north to south. Forty minutes later they turned abruptly east, back across the border into Argentina. Ten minutes more and they were putting the chopper down onto a stretch of meadowland some 18 miles to the west of Rio Grande.

  Like the members of North before then, Brookes’s men jumped down onto enemy soil, but from this point on their experiences began to diverge. An hour had passed, they were 100 miles further to the south, and the low cloud cover had begun to break up, revealing patches of starlit sky and vastly increasing ground-level visibility.

  Like most things in life, Brookes thought, this was both a plus and a minus. But, remembering that dreadful first march through the mist on West Falkland, he was inclined to look on the sanguine side. At least it would make some sort of change, being able to see where they were going.

  And the further they could see, the less paranoid they needed to be about making noise. ‘Ready?’ he asked. Then let’s go.’

  The land sloped down from north to south, and the four men set off on a south-easterly course, which was intended to take them slowly down to the Rio Moneta. Following this would bring them to a confluence with the Rio Grande, and five miles downstream from that they should encounter the bridge which carried the island’s main road across the neck of the river’s estuary. A turn to the left would take them into the town of Rio Grande; a turn to the right towards the airbase.

&n
bsp; All four men were enjoying themselves after the cramped noisiness of the helicopter, mostly from the pure sense of release, but also from the simple satisfaction that came from confidence. Each man was thinking that they had been through it all before: the marches and the scrapes, the bored and cramped hours in the OP. The wet, the cold, Hedge’s farts. What could Tierra del Fuego throw at them that West Falkland had not? It even seemed drier, and anything less than an inch of water in your boots had to count as luxury.

  The Sea King had reversed its aerial tracks, crossing the border into Chilean Tierra del Fuego at almost the same spot it had entered Argentina. The sky above and to the west was now clear, a moon shining somewhere behind them, and ahead to their left they could see the forested slopes of the Pico Nose, the glow of it’s snow-capped peak shining in the moonlight.

  ‘How are we doing for fuel?’ Crabtree asked.

  ‘Looks OK. We can make Dawson Island, at any rate.’

  The Sea King flew on, across grass-covered hills and the black waters of the Whiteside Channel, which separates Dawson Island from Tierra del Fuego.

  ‘Doesn’t look very inviting,’ Lieutenant Hatchard remarked, as they flew across the dark forested island. ‘I’d guess we have enough fuel to reach the mainland.’

  ‘How much of a guess is that?’ his fellow lieutenant, Billings, wanted to know. ‘The island looks a damn sight more inviting than the sea.’

  ‘I’m pretty certain. And they wanted us as far away from the drop zones as possible.’

  ‘So they did,’ Billings agreed, only a hint of irony in his voice.

  The Sea King ventured out over water once more, this time the famous Strait of Magellan. The three Navy men watched in silence as the fuel indicator stopped even bothering to flicker and the Chilean mainland inched steadily towards them. Ten minutes later they cleared the coastline and the coastal track, and Billings brought the helicopter down in a convenient clearing some 200 yards inland.