Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

by David Monnery

  Ben pulled away from the kerb, and Docherty turned to face Isabel. ‘Which way?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him blankly for a moment, then her eyes came back into focus. ‘Calafate,’ she said.

  ‘Where …’

  ‘There’s a map in the glove compartment,’ she said.

  ‘Where the hell’s Calafate?’ Ben asked.

  ‘It’s about 150 miles to the north-west,’ Docherty said, examining the map. ‘Not that far from the mountains and the Chilean border. And she’s right – the whole Argentinian military will be looking for us in about half an hour’s time. This border’s a lot further away, but there’ll be some cover. The road to the southern border is just flat and empty, like a target range. We’d never have made it.’

  The other two absorbed this information. ‘Join the SAS and see the world,’ Ben murmured. ‘So which way?’ he asked, taking another turn to the right. He liked the idea of seeing some mountains again.

  Behind him Isabel was remembering Calafate, which she had visited two weeks before as part of her cover job. It was a beautiful place, she thought, as she drifted into unconsciousness.

  ‘Pull over for a minute,’ Docherty told Ben. ‘I want to know what we’re doing before we hit the open road.’ He squirmed round in his seat. ‘How is she?’ he asked Razor.

  ‘Out like a light, but I think she’ll be OK. There’s not much I can do without any kit. I’d like to wash the wound though, first chance we get.’

  Docherty looked at her. The face was still pale, but he had no reason to doubt Razor’s diagnosis. Solanille’s bullet had not killed her, but if his friends caught up with them then they probably would. And it did not look like she would be up to climbing any mountains for a while. Which meant …

  ‘We need another car,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ Ben asked, surprised.

  ‘Nothing. I meant an additional car. As in two.’ He sorted out his thoughts. ‘Look,’ he told the two men, ‘according to this map, four or five hours’ drive should get us within a few hours hard hiking of the Chilean border. But there’s no way she’s going to be able to do any hiking at all, and we can’t leave her behind. If it wasn’t for her, you two would still be back there,’ he added.

  ‘OK, boss, but …’

  ‘Just listen for once in your insubordinate life. If she and I can get to Calafate then there’s a good chance we can pass ourselves off as a married couple or something. But if all four of us drive in then it’ll look like an invasion. You two have camouflage trousers on, for Christ’s sake …’

  ‘You don’t look that elegant yourself, boss …’

  ‘Meanwhile you two can take this road,’ Docherty insisted, showing it to them on the map, ‘dump the car somewhere round here’ – he pointed out a particular spot – ‘and get the hell out of this fucking country.’

  Ben and Razor said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Boss,’ Razor began tentatively, ‘you’re not getting carried away by, well …’ He nodded towards Isabel.

  Docherty grinned at him. ‘Who the fuck knows? The point is, can either of you clowns think of a better plan for giving all four of us a chance?’

  They could not.

  ‘Right, we’ve been here long enough. Let’s find another car.’

  They found an anonymous-looking black VW Beetle closer to the outskirts, parked on a convenient slope, its doors unlocked. Razor freewheeled it down the slope, and then hot-wired the engine. The sound seemed to carry alarmingly.

  ‘The Renault’s tank is almost full,’ Ben said. ‘What about yours?’ he asked Razor.

  ‘Better than half.’

  ‘Follow us,’ Docherty told him. ‘I want to make some improvements, but let’s get out of town first.’

  He directed Ben down a wide, dusty street, looking for the large lagoon shown on the map. It appeared, black and still, reflecting a few dim yellow lights on its far shore. They came to a crossroads and followed the signs for Ruta 3 and the north, passing two cars and a full coach going in the opposite direction. The estuary appeared to their right, though it was hard to work out how wide it was. Clouds had driven in from the west and the stars had all been extinguished.

  ‘If you see somewhere to turn off, take it,’ Docherty told Ben.

  They eventually found a turning, and less than a minute later found themselves in a car park for a picnic area by the side of the estuary. The three men got out.

  ‘Have we really got time for a picnic, boss?’ Razor asked in a concerned voice.

  Docherty was looking back towards the city, where a light seemed to be bobbing in the dull black sky. It was a helicopter. ‘Disconnect all the lighting in the Beetle,’ he told Razor. ‘I’ll drive the Renault,’ he explained to the two of them as Razor started work, ‘with lights full on. You two should be able to follow the road by my lights. If we’re spotted from the air, then, provided the night stays as dark as this, they should only see the front car. If they land on the road up ahead then you two hang back. If they believe it’s me and the missus on our way to the mountains for a holiday, well and good. If they don’t, then you two will have surprise on your side when it comes to rescuing us. Got it?’

  ‘A masterplan, boss,’ Razor murmured. ‘The chopper’s headed our way,’ he added, almost as an afterthought. All three men watched it head up the highway they had driven out on, and pass low above the turning they had taken 200 yards away.

  ‘We’ve got time for you to wash her wound,’ Docherty told Razor.

  ‘OK.’ The Londoner found a way down to the river and soaked a piece of cloth in the near-freezing water. Back in the Renault, its application brought Isabel back to life, if only for a couple of minutes.

  ‘Qué pasa …?’

  ‘I’m just cleaning up the wound,’ Razor said in Spanish.

  She winced as he dragged dry blood away with the cloth. Still, at least that meant the bleeding had stopped. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Just outside Rio Gallegos.’

  ‘And going to Calafate?’

  ‘So I’m told. You’d be better sleeping,’ he told her. ‘Let us worry about the travel arrangements.’

  She managed a hint of a smile. To rely on the English SAS for escape from her own country – how many ironies could one situation contain? She closed her eyes.

  Razor noticed the car clock, which said it was almost two. Add three hours for the time difference, he thought. The Cup Final was only ten hours away. He hoped Hoddle was having a better night’s sleep than they were.

  Outside the car Ben and Docherty were staring into space.

  ‘All finished,’ Razor said. ‘We can go now,’ he explained patiently.

  ‘I was hoping to see that helicopter again before we moved,’ Docherty said. ‘But …’

  Its light appeared in the western sky, and soon the accompanying drone of its engine seeped out of the silence. A minute later it was sweeping past them, still hugging the highway, this time heading back towards the town.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Docherty said to no one in particular. ‘Let’s go.’ He climbed into the front seat of the Renault, took one look at the sleeping Isabel in the back seat, and started the engine. A minute later they were on Ruta 3 again, the Renault showing all its lights, the VW travelling just behind the limits of the other car’s aura. It worked well: even knowing there was something to look for, Docherty could often see no sign of the VW in his rear mirror.

  In the six miles to the Calafate turn-off they passed only two vehicles, both trucks, headed in the opposite direction, and once on the narrower Calafate road they seemed to be almost alone in the universe. To either side of the road the darkness stretched away, not yielding a single light for miles on end. They could have been traversing a desert, travelling through a tall forest or crossing an endless bridge. It felt more like a tunnel than anything else. For Ben, struggling without lights to keep the VW inside the tracks of the
Renault, it sometimes seemed more like a video game than a real drive.

  In the car ahead, Docherty was trying to calculate times and distances. It was one-fifteen when they left the Intelligence building, which meant that they could have been at the southern border around an hour later. How long would it take the Argentinians to realize that they were not on that road? Another couple of hours, perhaps. And then what would they do? Widen the search, and keep widening it? But they did not have an unlimited supply of helicopters or pilots. And they were supposed to be fighting a war.

  The telephone, he thought. The poles ran alongside the road. Cutting the wire might be a giveaway, but it might be worth it. No, he finally decided. He and the woman would be stuck this side of the border for a couple of days at least, and he could not afford to leave any more trail for the enemy to follow than they already had.

  It took him a while, but eventually Hemmings managed to get through to Bryan Weighell’s home in the suburbs of Hereford. It was midnight, but Weighell was still awake. The events of the day had served as continuing shots of adrenalin, and even two large malt whiskies had failed to slow him down.

  ‘What’s the news?’ he asked Hemmings, marvelling yet again at the clarity of the connection.

  ‘Mostly good.’ Hemmings briefly outlined what he knew of the situation ashore on the first night, and the current condition of the SAS units on the islands.

  ‘What about North and South?’ Weighell wanted to know.

  ‘That’s the bad news, and that’s what I’m calling you for …’

  ‘What’s happened now?’ Weighell asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  ‘We’ve lost radio contact with both groups. You know about Brookes’s patrol. Well, they may have taken out some Super Etendards – we’ve no way of knowing. There’s been no sign of them today – the Super Es, I mean – which looks good. If Brookes and the other lads have managed to nobble them then they deserve knighthoods. But there’s no news of them. They could be dead, captured, or just lying low somewhere without a radio.’

  ‘And North?’

  ‘No idea. They radioed in that Docherty was going into Rio Gallegos to warn the MI6 woman, and that once he returned they’d be heading for the border. They may be on their way, but we tried to raise them again an hour ago and couldn’t. So …’ He let the implications speak for themselves.

  ‘You think they may have been captured,’ Weighell said.

  ‘I think there’s a good chance some of those eight men have been taken,’ Hemmings admitted.

  Weighell rubbed his eyes. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll get onto it. Thanks for calling, Bill.’

  He hung up, took the whisky over to his desk and sat down with a pen and paper. He needed a list of people to call, a list of people to pressure. Somehow, through any and every channel available to him – and even a few that were not – he had to get word through to those Argentinian authorities who were holding his men. The message would be twofold: one, that he expected his men to be accorded all the privileges and rights due to prisoners of war; and two, that there would be no escape from retribution for anyone who treated them otherwise.

  Ten miles short of Esperanza, Docherty flashed his brake lights twice to indicate he was stopping, pulled over to the side of the road, and got out of the car. A landscape of undulating hills was dimly visible: either dawn was coming a lot earlier than he had expected or the cloud cover was imperceptibly thinning. The latter, he decided, studying the sky.

  The VW pulled up behind the Renault, and the other two got out. ‘What’s up, Doc?’ Razor asked.

  ‘Nothing. I’ve just been doing some calculations in my head, and I reckon that at some point in the next hour there’s a good chance they’ll be checking this road again from the air.’

  ‘Can we afford to hang around, boss?’ Ben asked. ‘It’ll start to get light in a couple of hours.’

  ‘I don’t know – it’s a toss-up. But a fifteen-minute break wouldn’t do me any harm, and I don’t suppose driving that thing without any lights is exactly relaxing.’

  ‘Not for the poor passenger, it isn’t,’ Razor complained. ‘I just sit there expecting Jim Clark here to drive us off a cliff any moment.’

  ‘You’ve spent most of the time sleeping,’ Ben said trenchantly.

  ‘Thinking. Not sleeping.’

  ‘He snores when he thinks,’ Ben told Docherty.

  Docherty grinned.

  ‘How’s the invalid?’ Razor asked.

  ‘She’s asleep. And she looks OK. I …’ The sound of a helicopter insinuated itself into his consciousness.

  ‘Boss, you’re a genius,’ Razor sighed.

  Docherty said nothing, but felt absurdly pleased that his calculations had proved so accurate.

  The helicopter swept towards them, flew straight over their heads and on up the road towards Esperanza. If Docherty had not pulled up, the Renault’s lights would undoubtedly have been spotted before he heard the approaching helicopter above the car engine.

  ‘Ten minutes to Esperanza and back,’ he murmured.

  ‘Unless they land,’ Ben suggested.

  ‘Let’s pray they don’t.’

  The minutes passed slowly, and it was more than fifteen before the whirr of the blades re-emerged, and the single pinpoint of light brightened as the helicopter approached. The black shape loomed out of the black sky, clattered above them and was gone again.

  Docherty gave it a couple of minutes, and then pulled the Renault back onto the road. In fifteen minutes they were entering the small town of Esperanza, where, until the appearance of the helicopter, he had been most afraid of their finding a welcoming committee. But it seemed as if the military authorities in Rio Gallegos were keeping matters exclusively in their own hands, presumably as a way of handling the whole business with the minimum damage to their own credibility. Whatever the reason, Esperanza was fast asleep, and blissfully oblivious of the passage of fugitive SAS.

  Ten miles or so beyond the town the roads to Calafate and the border at El Turbio diverged. The three men got out of the cars once more, but there was nothing really to say, except good luck and goodbye for the moment. Docherty gave them a portion of Isabel’s money, just in case. Then the two troopers solemnly shook hands with their PC.

  ‘We’ll be staying at the Santiago Hilton,’ was Razor’s parting shot through the window, as the VW rolled away into the darkness. Docherty stood by the Renault for a few seconds, savouring the moment. He had good mates, there was a beautiful woman in the back of his car, and he was standing in the dark in the middle of nowhere, hunted by the forces of the enemy.

  It sure as hell beat feeling sorry for himself in the Slug & Sporran.

  10

  It started to get light as the VW clambered up the last few miles of the long valley. Clouds still filled the view behind them, diffusing the dawn sunlight, but to the west the sky was clearing again. As they breasted the last in a series of slopes, a vista of snow-capped mountains appeared in the far distance.

  The Andes,’ Ben murmured.

  ‘And there I was hoping it was the Chilterns,’ Razor replied. He was driving now, and enjoying it a lot more since he had been able to see where he was going. The hour he had driven without lights of any kind had been a nightmare. It would probably have been quicker to have just sat in a lay-by, if they could have found one in the dark.

  Ben was still taking in the view. ‘You’ve got no soul,’ he complained. This was the reason he was not prepared to give up the SAS, he thought.

  ‘A mountain range is a mountain range. It’s just a lot of rock in one place, that’s all.’

  Ben looked at him pityingly.

  ‘OK, it is sort of … majestic,’ Razor agreed. Corinna would love somewhere like this, he thought.

  ‘It’s also Chile,’ Ben said. ‘Over there, it is.’ He gestured in the general direction of the west.

  ‘Would you like to be a bit more precise,’ Razor suggested. ‘Like, how far from the border
are we, and how far on the other side can we expect to find a suitable hostelry?’

  ‘I think pubs are pretty thin on the ground in southern Chile,’ Ben observed. ‘In a couple of miles this road takes a bloody great turn to the left, and after another couple we’re about five miles from the border. It looks like a downhill walk. Unfortunately, there seems to be something like a 40-mile walk on the other side.’

  ‘Downhill?’

  ‘Mostly. On the other hand,’ he continued, ‘if we keep going till we’re a few miles outside El Turbio, then the border’s still only about five miles away, and the main road to Puerto Natales is only a couple of miles on the other side.’

  ‘But is it all downhill?’

  ‘For you, it’s all downhill.’

  ‘That’s the one then.’

  ‘Wake me up when we get there,’ Ben said.

  Razor ignored him. ‘I wonder how the boss is getting on,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, has he had her yet?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Well, yes I do. But not as crudely as that. It was all a bit weird, don’t you think?’

  Ben considered. ‘I don’t know. What else could he have done? She’s one of ours and he couldn’t … ah, Docherty’s always been … you know, his wife getting killed and all that … he …’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Freud. I think I’ll just go back to wondering if he’s had her yet.’

  The first hint of light was still colouring the sky when Docherty pulled up the Renault on the outskirts of Calafate. It was obviously not a big town, but the plethora of helpful signs for the tourists suggested it saw a lot of custom in season. Unfortunately the season had ended a month ago, which might mean all the hotels were closed for the winter.

  At least there were no signs of a welcoming committee, he thought, watching the view gradually unfold with the growing light. Calafate seemed fast asleep beside its beautiful lake. It was almost seven – not the best time to be searching for a hotel room, but late enough not to be waking everyone up. And he did not want to be sitting here by the side of the road much longer.