The sheep were penned and so were the horses — rubbed-down, fed and watered, and one of them tethered nearby — the nochero, kept ready in case of some emergency in the night. Torres and Félix had been admitted to the puestero’s house — a shack made of adobe bricks and plastered externally with lime and sand, roofed with tin — but only for long enough to pay their respects — so Torres had described it, to Andy — to Agustín’s woman, who was a Chinita from the south and not at all bad to look at. Agustín evidently had more on the ball than you’d have guessed from the look of him, Torres and Félix agreed.
‘Qué va. When you’ve been in the saddle all day—’
‘You’re right. You’re right…’
The others had kept their distance and had been careful not to speak in earshot of the puestero. He was in his house now and the six of them were lying around the fire which Félix had built. Packs — not Service-issue bergens but special packs, unattributable, made in Czechoslovakia — served as backrests.
Torres was proffering an unlabelled half-bottle that had once held whisky. The liquid in it was colourless, like gin.
‘For the fire in the belly, Don Andrés!’
The suggestion was that he should put some in his maté. Torres assured him it was of the finest quality.
‘I have no doubt it must be the finest caña ever made. But this time, Don Pepe, I‘ll have to pass it up.’
‘Just a little! Mínimo, mínimo!’
‘We have a long ride tomorrow. No camp — we’ll be leaving you, remember, riding on through to the estancia El Lucero.’
Torres shrugged, tossed the bottle to Félix who caught it deftly and whipped the cork out. Andy advised the others, ’Safer to lay off. Caña — local firewater.’ Félix was lacing his maté heavily with the raw spirit — then offering the bottle to the others, who declined. Cloudsley turned to Andy. ‘Listen, now. A word or two about the programme from here on.’
He was more than ready to hear it. Having seen Monkey and Jake ride south this morning, and knowing he was the only one in the dark about where they were going… OK, so he could see the point, but it still left him feeling more of an outsider than he’d have liked to be.
Cloudsley said, ‘Assuming we get to Strobie’s place some time tomorrow night, we’ll spend the following day getting some rest and then push on as soon as it’s dark. I’ve been reckoning on two nights’ yomp from Strobie’s to the target, lying-up for one day en route, but having given it more thought, today mostly, seems to me we might have a shot at doing it in just one night. By having you come along, Andy Mac, as far as the ruin, the Sandrini house. We could take a pack-horse that far, then at the ruin we’d transfer the stuff to our backs and yomp on, and you ride the nag back to Strobie’s. All right?’
‘Well — as far as it goes—’
‘Then you stay with Strobie, drink his Scotch — if Monkey left any, which I wouldn’t count on — and keep your head down. Right down — adopt the profile of a pancake.’
It would be no hardship to spend a few days with old Tom. He asked, ‘How long, roughly?’
‘Depends. How many missiles we find there, how long it takes to fix each one, how many hours of each night we get to work in. And one or two other unpredictables. But from Strobie’s place to that ruin is — what, six miles? With a horse for the gear, we’d get there in next to no time.’
‘Why not take horses to ride, too? I can lead ’em all back.’
‘Why not, indeed…?’
‘And why bother with the Sandrini place? You’d get a much better start, and I’d still have plenty of time to get back before daylight, if we rode directly north, cut off that corner. You’re going out of your way, otherwise.’
‘I thought the ruin might be a good place for the change-over. Cover of sorts — which there can’t be much of?’
‘There’s none. But cutting the corner, you’d be ten miles nearer your target before you have to start humping your own loads.’
Beale said, ‘Make a big difference, Harry. Bloody marvellous.’ His eyes with the firelight in them seemed to glow; and teeth gleaming too, in the dark, bony, bearded face. Cloudsley asked, ‘Without that Sandrini ruin as a starting point, are you sure you’d be able to point us in the right direction?’
‘Absolutely. I’d take you to Diaz’s western boundary. All you’d have to do would be follow that fence up to the northwest corner of his land, then strike out on a predetermined compass course.’
‘So we’d make it easily in one night.’
Geoff licked mutton-fat off his fingers. ‘And Andy’d have time enough to get the gee-gees back where they come from.’
‘It sounds very good, Andy.’ Cloudsley nodded. ‘We can go over navigational detail when we’re at Strobie’s — compass course, etcetera… But now before we all hit the sack, there are a couple of other points I want to run over with you. First, question of cover story — because once you’ve left us up there and you’re on your own, it has to change, d’you see.’
The present cover story — for use in the event of capture and interrogation — was that they were on a search and rescue mission. A Sea King helicopter carrying an unarmed intelligence-gathering party had vanished, was thought to have crashed, nobody knew where. Andy, as guide and interpreter with this rescue team, was leading them to the estancia La Madrugada to set up a base from which enquiries and searches could be made. It didn’t matter that this might have been a silly way of going about it, Cloudsley had pointed out; the place did half belong to him, it was natural he’d make use of it. He could give the questioners plenty of convincing detail: his own recruitment and crash-course of training could be described, for instance, with no loss of security that mattered in the least; the only omissions would be any mention of Exocet missiles or of the real names of SBS personnel.
Cloudsley said, ‘As before, it’s to be hoped you won’t have any need for any cover story. But if you did — well, you’ve come to visit your brother and/or his wife and if possible find some way around the trade sanctions. You disapprove of this war, you think the Malvinas rightly belong to Argentina. You never heard of the SBS — you’d ask, “Don’t you mean SAS?” Not that you know anything about them either, but you’ve heard of them, who hasn’t…? The only way the war has affected you personally is it’s shut down your firm’s trade, so you took a working holiday to the States to see if you could stir up some business — Argentine business via New York, right?’
‘How did I get here?’
‘The obvious way. Pan Am flight New York to BA, ten days ago. For obvious reasons you booked under an assumed name. Carlos Henriques, you think you called yourself, but you wouldn’t be bothered if they produced some passenger lists and couldn’t find that name. It was a spur-of-the-moment move, you didn’t make notes, just took a chance and showed your own passport when you landed. Your Argentine one, naturally.’
‘It happens to be a year out of date.’
‘I know. Here, you’d better have it with you.’
It came out of a pocket inside Cloudsley’s poncho. Andy had last seen it when he’d slid it across a table to the two men who’d interrogated him in London. It had seemed to gratify them that after he’d taken up permanent UK residence he’d let it lapse and applied for a British one, to which of course he’d been entitled.
Cloudsley yawned, stretching.
‘So. You showed that at Ezeiza airport. But the guy only just glanced at your photo in it, and flipped it back to you. Matter of fact there’s one badly smudged stamp that he might have put in: but you can be vague, there’s no reason you’d have been watching every move. They are’t likely to disbelieve you or to bother checking; this is you, you have roots here, you own half that bloody great farm — right?’
Andy nodded.
‘You see, it’s a natural. And the great thing is that if you were nabbed on your own it wouldn’t involve us. We’re out in the clear, getting the job done, nothing’s lost.’
‘All r
ight.’
‘So far, so good.’ Cloudsley went on, ‘Here’s a logical extension to it now. Suppose at any stage we had to split up — were split up, for any reason. Any foul-up of that sort, what you should do is take advantage of your local connections, go to ground and sit out the rest of the war under cover. OK?’
Watching Tony Beale cleaning his knife, scraping mutton residue from its blade, Cloudsley added, ‘Should be easy for you — chez Strobie?’
Beale sheathed the knife inside his poncho. They all wore them – not commando fighting knives but the hunting kind, of similar weight and size to the ones they were used to, and serving all the same purposes, but in no way identifiable as Royal Marine equipment. They’d given Andy lessons in using his in close combat, but he fervently hoped that was one thing he wouldn’t need it for.
‘You’re saying I may be stuck here.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to stay put? If the worst happened?’
‘While the rest of you—’
‘Andy, that’s the whole point. You don’t have to worry about the rest of us.’
He’d said ‘you don’t’, not ‘you wouldn’t’ — as if it was all planned, intended… All right, so they had their special, extraordinary skills, and he could see that an amateur might cramp their style and slow them down; and the only really important thing was to get the job done. This would certainly be their view, and he happened to share it. He told himself, So what the hell, it’s only common sense…
He nodded. ‘OK.’
Suppressing — partially — the feeling he’d been conned… Tony Beale’s gaze was on him thoughtfully, understandingly; and Geoff Hosegood too, Geoff displayed a hint of amusement, but it was an amused sympathy, in that steady regard and the absence of any comment. Cloudsley said, ‘Good man’, and settled back; then he asked casually, an after-thought, ‘Nothing in your pockets to connect you with us, is there?’
*
For breakfast, before sunrise, the puestero’s woman provided coffee and tortas, doughnut-like buns made of maize flour. Andy saw her only as a shadow outlined by the glow of the fire’s embers; he’d heard a low exchange in Spanish as he woke, her voice and either Torres’ or Félix’s, then she’d left the urn and the basket of tortas and slipped away. Cloudsley was returning from a visit to the bushes. Torres ribbing Félix: ‘You must have won her heart, you old devil! Slipped in there in the night, did you?’ Laughing his wheezy laugh, nudging Andy: ‘They flock to him, you know, he keeps a stick to beat them off with!’ Félix, a haggard scarecrow, leant to the fire and spat. Cloudsley mumbled, ‘Wonder how it’s going. Whether the boys are ashore yet. Seems like a million miles from here, somehow… Don’t tell me this is coffee?’
Tom Strobie would have a radio, Andy told him. They’d catch up on the news when they reached his estancia, about this time tomorrow.
The thought of being discarded and left here had given him a bad night. He’d lain awake for several hours, hearing the night sounds — the wind, the fire, foxes, and sometimes the sheep’s alarm, and the men’s snores and mutterings… Trying to sleep, but thoughts incessant and repetitive, finally in half-sleep the concept of hiding-out at his own estancia, La Madrugada, with Francisca there, Robert away at the war, Francisca as she had been so often — in his arms, the young, warm, lovely Francisca…
Ridiculous, in retrospect. She’d made her choice. He knew it, had reminded himself of it hundreds of times. The dreams still came, though. Even now, as they saddled-up in the dawn’s grey light and Torres and Félix extracted the sheep from the O’Higgins pen, that one lingered.
They rode as they had the day before — Andy with Cloudsley and Hosegood, and Torres with Tony Beale a few miles off to the left, each team with about half the sheep. Félix, as before, had a roving commission, ostensibly quartering the ground for strays but also keeping in touch with both groups so he’d be able to steer them towards each other at the end of the day. The line of match was due east, aiming for a waterhole still on O’Higgins land which Torres had used on his drive west three days ago.
Cloudsley said, ‘Knows his stuff, that guy.’
‘He ought to. Done nothing else all his life. Tom gave us the best man he has.’
They were riding about fifteen yards apart. Andy in the centre, Cloudsley and Hosegood on the flock’s right and left flanks, the sheep moving more slowly than Cloudsley would have liked but without any checks to their progress, no tendency to wander. The men rode long-legged, relaxed in their saddles. Each saddle had a sheepskin over it, fleece outward, for the rider’s comfort, and a thick felt rug under it for the horse’s.
The sheepskin softness made Geoff Hosegood’s claim to saddle-soreness an obvious exaggeration. So the others had been telling him.
Andy asked Cloudsley, ‘Have you three worked together before, operationally I mean?‘
Cloudsley shook his head. ‘Not Geoff.’
Hosegood told Andy, ‘I’m like you, see. First time out.’
‘Not quite my shade of green, I’d guess…’
But he was surprised to have been given any answer at all. He tried for another — asking Cloudsley, ‘What kind of operations before? I mean where?’
Plodding hooves, and sheep bleating… Hosegood leaning down, muttering something to his horse. Andy ignored the silence, added, ‘I suppose you get called to places we don’t hear anything about. Nobody really has ever heard anything much about the SBS…’
‘Andy.’ Cloudsley seemed to emerge suddenly from deep thought. ‘What did you say this colour of horse is called?’
‘All right.’ He smiled. ‘I’m just generally interested, that’s all. In my fellow men, you know…’ He told him, ‘It’s a malacara.’
So called because it had a white star on its forehead. The Indians had had literally hundreds of colour descriptions for their horses, a different word for every variation and combination. The thought reminded him of Strobie’s peón, Anselmo, and his instant recognition of his horse and Francisca’s. Then from that to some slight regret that he’d talked them out of using the Sandrini place for a stopover. He’d have liked the excuse to see it again; he explained to himself, For old times’ sake…
‘What’s this bugger, then?’
Down to earth with a bang; to see Hosegood nodding at his horse’s ears… Andy told him, ‘They’d call that colorado.’
Chestnut, of sorts. As distinct from Cloudsley’s white-starred animal, which was buckskin-brown. His own mount was a black, an oscuro, and the pack-horse, a grey roan, would be called a tordillo. Cloudsley said sharply, ‘Hey, there.’ Pointing. ‘Aircraft.’
In the west — over distant Strobie land, maybe – but it wasn’t easy to guess how far off… He’d reined in. So did Hosegood; a hand up to shield his eyes, squinting into the wind. Andy saw three planes, slightly north of due west, flying left to right and banking now, the turn starting as he focused on them, turning this way… He called to the others to close in round the sheep, up on the flanks, and urged his own horse forward. To hold the flock together — otherwise the planes might well scatter them. Although if those pilots had spent any time at all flying over Patagonian sheep-stations they’d surely have learnt to keep clear.
Meanwhile this would look right to them. Any puestero would try to get tight control of his animals when he saw that noise coming. And they did know: they were banking again, in file now, falling into the new formation as they turned towards the south. They’d have seen the other part of the flock a few miles on the other side, he guessed. Rising in his stirrups, waving — in case any of the pilots might be glancing down this way to recognise the natural reaction of a simple man a hundred miles from nowhere… He heard Cloudsley identifying the planes as Pucarás. Their markings were clearly visible as they banked away, exposing their undersides: green and grey-brown camouflage design, yellow tactical bands between the twin turbo-prop engines and the wingtips, white anchors superimposed on the yellow. Navy aircraft, fleet air arm — as distinct, cont
rarily enough when it was interpreted into English, to FAA standing for Fuerza Aerea Argentina, the land-based air force. Levelling now, showing yellow rectangles on their high tails, and a small, light-coloured splodge above that, a badge of some kind but too far now to see. Cloudsley shouted to Hosegood, ‘They’re bombed-up, did you see?’
‘Yeah.’ Hosegood was edging his horse over towards the centre; the sheep had held together, all right, probably hadn’t been able to make up their silly minds which way to run; they’d jostled around a bit but it hadn’t come to anything. Andy had seen the bombs — at the last moment, because he’d been studying the markings: there’d been one central and one out under each wing, fat white eggs, shaped more like fuel drop-tanks than any bomb as he’d have envisaged it. The Pucarás were swinging east now after that jink to the south. Cloudsley talking to Hosegood: ‘The Argie HE bombs have yellow snouts. God knows what those were. Could be practice bombs, I suppose — since it’s a training base.’ Andy thinking, fleet air arm training base — which figured, since it was close to Diaz land. Not that Diaz — or for that matter Roberto MacJuan — had necessarily to be around; Diaz might only have had something to do with setting the place up… Cloudsley was looking back over his shoulder, staring after the three ground-attack planes as they dwindled — flying northwest, engine-sound faded out. He muttered, still with his mind on those odd-looking bombs, ‘Like outsize rugger balls with fins on… Hey, they’re splitting up.’
One black insect banking right, one left, one holding on straight.
‘Can’t be far from where we started yesterday. The rescarpment?’
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