Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  As the thought crossed his mind the gunfire stopped. Mozza hoped to God it had stopped because Hedge had surrendered.

  He veered round the end of a darkened building and into another stretch of open ground. A hundred yards in front of him the airbase entry-exit road passed through a wide gateway in the fence and onto the highway beyond. One floodlight stood above the security checkpoint.

  The idea of using stealth to escape flickered across his mind, but failed to take a hold. He was too wired up, too psyched out by the events of the last fifteen minutes, to even consider slowing down. Still running, he aimed himself at the open gateway like a torpedo, and for reasons he could not begin to understand, found himself wailing like a banshee as he did so.

  A guard emerged from the doorway, more surprised than ready, and Mozza’s MP5 took out both him and his companion before they could fire a shot. If he had not seen the two motorbikes leaning against the far wall he would probably have kept running straight across the highway and on towards the centre of the island.

  But somehow the bikes registered in his consciousness, and brought him to a halt. He looked back – no one was heading his way, not yet at least. The bikes were both 250cc Yamahas, and of a type he had ridden before, both in Hereford and Manchester. He got astride one, rolled it a few feet and then fired two treble-tap bursts into the tyres of the other, before throwing the MP5 into the darkness.

  He rolled his machine out onto the highway, which sloped down towards the south, away from the direction he wanted to go. Or did he? He forced himself to spend time thinking it through. The way back to their kit was to the right, but what was there in his pack that he needed? There was no way anyone from the Task Force was going to come and collect him, so the radio would be no help.

  What the hell – a silent exit was the best start of all, and the best thing he could do was get as far away from the airbase as fast as he could, in any direction. Once he was far enough away he could start heading west towards Chile. He eased the Yamaha onto the slope, and freewheeled away from the airbase gates. The hill went on and on, as if placed there by a friendly god, and he was almost a quarter of a mile from the gates before he needed to slip the bike into gear. The noise seemed deafening, but there was no sign of chasing lights on the road behind him.

  He tried to picture the detailed map which Brookes had been carrying. Almost opposite the airbase, he seemed to remember, there was a turn-off which ran in a roughly westerly direction all the way to the border.

  He had no sooner had the thought than a turn-off appeared. It had to be the one. Mozza swerved off the highway and onto the gravelled track, slowing down until he was more sure of the surface. It was OK, he decided. At a steady 30 miles per hour he could be at the border in an hour. But first …

  He brought the bike to a halt, took out his Browning and used the butt to smash both front and rear lights. Then he replaced the PNGs and started off again. The track ran across the same sort of landscape they had first encountered after landing on the island: not exactly flat, but gently undulating grassland with little vegetation above knee height, just a few stunted trees in the stream bottoms. It was an easy ride, Mozza thought, but as the miles passed he began to get the distinct impression that the road was curving more and more to the south, and away from his intended direction.

  The illuminated compass said he was going south-westwards, but compasses were notoriously unreliable this near to the poles. Meanwhile the sky was showing signs of clearing. It was not, he thought, as if he had any real choice but to follow this road wherever it went. Not when the alternative was a return to the airbase.

  When the sky cleared he could get a proper fix from the stars. He resumed his journey across the dark and apparently empty landscape, and soon the road turned comfortingly towards the west. It held this direction for several miles, descending gentle rises to ford shallow streams and climbing gentle rises to begin descending again. It was like crossing a vast, wrinkled face.

  Stars were becoming visible between the clouds as the road took another wide turn towards what he thought was the south. Another fifteen minutes and the clear sky to the south confirmed Mozza’s worst fears. He was not on the road he wanted to be on.

  He came to a halt and took off the PNGs. Almost directly ahead of him the four stars of the Southern Cross hung in the heavens. Extend the longer arm by four and half times its length, he told himself, and from that point draw a line vertically to the ground. That was the way to the South Pole. And he was heading directly towards it.

  He let his mind wander for a moment, enjoying the unfolding majesty of the night sky: the inky depth of the Coal Sack hard by the Southern Cross, the yellow-white brilliance of Canopus low to the right, the almost devilish red glow of Antares above and to his left, like Sauron’s eye in Lord of the Rings. The whole Milky Way seemed to float like a huge veil across space.

  Faced with all that, the direction of the road seemed somehow less important. Unless and until it made a definitive turn to the east, Mozza decided, he would stay with it as long as he could. It was now approaching two o’clock, and in about four hours he would need to be under cover.

  The road now seemed set in its ways, rarely deviating from its southward course. It was also climbing steadily, and the landscape was losing its openness, with stretches of grassland first alternating with swathes of trees, then giving way altogether to a rapidly thickening forest. It was in a rare break from the trees that Mozza noticed the first major signs of human occupancy he had seen since leaving the highway: a group of buildings clustered in the shelter of a valley away and down to his right. He wondered what they would make of the sound of his bike, and whether they would do anything about such an unexpected intrusion. There would be no telephone out here, but whoever it was might well be in radio contact with civilization.

  There was nothing he could do about it if they were. He rode on, out of the forest and onto another stretch of high moorland, before the track came to an abrupt and unexpected end by the side of a rushing stream. The remains of a house, apparently long consumed by fire, sat on an adjacent rise.

  Mozza concealed the Yamaha in a cluster of bushes that overhung the stream, took his bearings from the heavens, and headed out along the bank of the stream towards its source. Away to the west across the open heath, anything from 10 to 40 miles away, lay the Chilean border, but he now knew there was no chance of reaching it by dawn. Given that, he wanted tree cover by the time the sun came up, and memory told him the further south he went the more chance he had of finding it.

  He knew he was physically tired, but adrenalin was still pumping life into his limbs, and he managed a steady four miles an hour across the often spongy surface. There was still an hour of darkness left when he found himself entering the fringe of a beech forest. Another half a mile brought him to what looked an ideal spot for a shelter. The earth-choked roots of a fallen tree offered a windbreak, and with some judicious scraping out and covering of gaps he had a relatively cosy, hard-to-detect place to sleep.

  The thought of a cup of tea was almost irresistible, but he knew a fire would be too great a risk. Instead he breakfasted on water and a biscuit, and stretched himself out to sleep in the shelter he and nature had made together. Through the gaps in his roof he could see the fading stars, but now that he was motionless their stillness seemed almost depressing, like a reminder of his aloneness in the universe.

  He remembered a psychological technique Lynsey had told him about – ‘visualization’ it was called, and that was what it was. You just had to visualize things you wanted as a way of making it more likely that they would come true. At least that was how he remembered her description of it.

  He closed his eyes and tried to visualize his homecoming: Lynsey opening the door of the flat and the smile on her face as she opened her arms to take him in.

  8

  Soon after first light on that same morning a young Argentinian lieutenant was the first unfriendly witness to the British landing
in San Carlos Water. He radioed his army superiors in Port Stanley that two landing craft were discharging troops. But since Argentinian experts had already declared San Carlos an impossible spot for the landing the lieutenant’s superiors could only believe he must be imagining things.

  The Argentinian Navy had intercepted the signal, however, and thought it worthwhile sending an Aeromacchi to check out the story. Its pilot flew blithely across the last ridge before San Carlos Water and was more than a little shocked to find what appeared to be the entire British fleet spread out before him. Less surprisingly, he beat a hasty retreat.

  On the ships themselves, and in the defensive positions busily being constructed ashore, the British spent the next hour or so casting anxious eyes at the clear blue skies overhead. When would the enemy Air Force put in its first appearance en masse?

  On the hill to the south of Rio Gallegos, Docherty and Ben watched the Mirages take to the air, arc away across the city and fade into the sky above the ocean. ‘SEVEN MIRAGES DEPART RIO GALLEGOS 0842’, Ben typed onto the keypad.

  Ten minutes later four Skyhawks took to the air, and followed the same path out towards the Task Force, some 400 miles to the east in San Carlos Water and Falkland Sound. Ben’s two typing fingers recorded the departure, and from the Resource it was relayed to the Task Force operational centre, and from there to the Sea Harriers hovering above the approaches to the islands.

  On board the Resource Hemmings experienced a variety of emotions as the morning wore on. North was providing all the advanced warning that could have been expected, but the Mirages and Skyhawks were dropping to sea level before attacking, and there was still little the Sea Harriers could do to intercept them on their way in. At least the Task Force knew that no Super Etendards had left Rio Gallegos airbase that morning, and that there would be no surprise Exocet attack from that direction. North could have done no more.

  As for South, there had been no news of any kind since the cryptic message the previous night, which Hemmings had received with a rare mixture of admiration and anger. The ‘take-it-or-leave-it-but-we-know-best’ style seemed to exemplify both the finest traditions of the SAS and irresponsibility on a grand scale. Where the hell were the four men now? Had they managed to put the Super Etendards out of action? There had been no reports of the plane that morning, which gave Hemmings grounds for hope, but there had been no radio contact from the patrol either, which gave him cause for anxiety.

  And not just for the four men under Brookes’s command. If any of them had been captured, who knew what sort of treatment they were receiving from the enemy. The Argentinian military hardly inspired confidence, and the fact that the SAS men were out of uniform – thanks to the bloody politicians in London – would not exactly help their case. If things got nasty …

  The SAS men were trained to withstand certain interrogation techniques, but not many men could hold out against the sort of brutality some regimes practised. And if any of them broke, then both Docherty’s patrol and the woman in Rio Gallegos were in danger.

  Hemmings cursed himself for giving her name to South, and wondered how long he could afford to wait before warning North. They could nothing before nightfall in any case. So why distract them from the important job they were doing? He wished he could send a submarine to pick North up, but all of them were needed to protect the Task Force from their Argentinian counterparts for as long as the landing operation required.

  Hedge guessed it was sometime in the late morning, but he had no way of knowing for sure. The small room they had placed him in had no windows, and his watch had been removed by one of the soldiers. What was more, he seemed to have been slipping in and out of either sleep or unconsciousness ever since they had carried him in from where he had fallen.

  They had not been gentle. Either the destruction of the three Super Es or the death of their comrades – maybe both – had enraged the Argie troops, and no effort had been made to spare him any pain as they manhandled him across the airbase towards his current lodgings in this anonymous room. Hedge reckoned he could not blame them: he knew how pissed off he would have been if the boot had been on the other foot.

  Since then, however, he had mostly been left alone. On the only occasion he had been visited, by two officers in Air Force uniform, Hedge had feigned both an inability to understand Spanish and virtual unconsciousness, confining himself to an array of moans which he hoped would produce some medical attention. He had already reached his own diagnosis: the injury to his calf, while painful, was not serious, but the knee was in really bad shape. Such bad shape, in fact, that he was trying not to think about the possible implications for his future life. Always assuming he had one.

  A man had eventually arrived with hot water and bandages, and, whether or not he was a doctor, had proved to possess remarkably gentle hands. Unfortunately he had not left any painkillers behind. Or any food.

  Hedge would have liked to start banging on the door and demanding tortillas, or whatever it was they ate in Tierra del Fuego, but standard practice in such situations dictated a more restrained form of behaviour. He was supposed to pretend to be more tired and more badly injured than he was, just in case the Argies took it into their heads to start asking him questions with the gloves off. No torturer liked his victim to be continually slipping into unconsciousness.

  Hedge shivered, and hoped he would be able to cope if and when the time came. He wondered where Mozza was. For all he knew, the boy was in the room next door. Come to that, he was not even sure that Brookes and Stanley were dead.

  There was the sound of a key in the lock. Hedge lay there with his eyes shut and feigned sleep.

  ‘I think you are awake, Englishman. And I think you probably speak Spanish as well. My name is Segrera, Colonel Segrera of the Argentinian Air Force. I am here to inform you that Military Intelligence will soon be assuming responsibility for you. Before that happens – as one military man to another – would you like to ask me any questions?’

  Hedge considered. The man sounded genuine. He opened his eyes and looked up at a thin-faced man with cropped, iron-grey hair. ‘Are my companions dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Two of them are. The third escaped.’

  Hedge’s heart leapt, but his faced showed no sign of it.

  ‘Will I be receiving any medical attention?’ he asked.

  ‘That will be up to Military Intelligence. There are no facilities here on the base.’

  ‘And just exactly who are Military Intelligence?’ Hedge asked, not really expecting an answer.

  ‘My country’s darker side,’ the officer replied. ‘If I were you, I would deal with them as carefully as you can.’

  The sun was still high in the northern sky when Mozza woke. He did a 180-degree sweep of the surrounding countryside, and found only dappled forest in every direction. Feeling stiff, he scrambled out of the tree roots and tried some exercises. The pins and needles in his feet did not go away though, and removing his boots and socks he discovered a distinctly purple tinge to the skin, swelling and blisters. The trench foot which had threatened on West Falkland had finally come home to roost.

  He felt a twinge of panic and let his mind settle back into reason. The only cure for trench foot was a combination of rest and warmth, and since he would have precious little of either until he reached Chile, there was not much point in getting himself in a state about it.

  It was time to do some strategic thinking, he told himself sternly. First, he needed a good directional fix. Taking his knife he cut a three-foot length of straight branch from the nearest beech tree, and walked towards an area that looked light enough to be a clearing. Once in the sunlight, he pushed one end of the branch into the peaty ground and inserted a small twig where the shadow of the branch ended.

  Back at the scrape he did an inventory of what he was carrying. He had two days’ worth of high-calorie emergency rations in his escape belt, along with fish hooks and line, needle and cotton, and waterproof matches. The water bottle was still m
ore than half full, and there was half a bar of chocolate in his jacket pocket. He was, he decided, unlikely to starve. And by the next morning, if he remained free, he should be far enough away to risk a fire and eat a decent hot meal.

  In matters of clothing he was less well off. The Gore-tex jacket and trousers were warm enough for sea level, but from what he could remember the going would get higher before it got lower again. He was not really equipped for travelling in the snow, particularly at night.

  He would worry about that when the time came. His only other serious problem – potentially, at least – was the state of his feet. And they would be warmer in motion than standing still. He gathered his stuff together and walked back to the sunlit clearing. Fifteen minutes had passed, and the shadow had moved significantly to the east. He placed another twig where it ended, removed the branch and used it to draw a line connecting the two twigs. He then checked his compass against this east-west axis, and found with much relief that it was hardly out at all. Now he could navigate with confidence at night whether or not the stars were visible.

  Reckoning he had four hours before nightfall, Mozza started walking, keeping as close to a westerly direction as the configuration of the land would let him. At first the forest restricted his vision to not much more than 100 yards, but as the ground rose the trees became sparser, and a distant range of snow-capped mountains became increasingly visible. Eventually he emerged onto a small, bare plateau and found to his surprise that the range was a lot nearer than it looked: the snowy peaks had fooled him into thinking the mountains were bigger and further away. He was in fact confronting a range of snow-capped hills, and the snowline was only a few hundred yards above him.

  For the next few miles the walking was ideal. He was on a north-facing slope – the warmer slope in the southern hemisphere – and out in the open, just above the tree line. Only once did the distant sound of a helicopter cause him to duck back beneath the cover of the trees, and that soon faded. It would not be the Argies who stopped him reaching Chile, Mozza decided. This was going to be a contest between himself and nature.