‘As you say’ — Cloudsley nodded — ‘we’ll have to do something about it. And to start with I want to have a close look at it, Monkey.’
‘Why not? We’ve got hours and hours of dark left.’ Start had looked at his watch; he offered, ‘Show you the beach as well, while we’re at it.’
‘Yes. We might split into two parties, then join up and put it all together. But look here — question of time.’ He explained — glancing at Andy — ‘Zero hour for the extraction is the second midnight after they get our signal. And they’ve got it now — please God. But we’re keeping local time at the moment — 0100 — whereas it’s Zulu time, meaning GMT, Andy, that counts. So in fact it’s now 2200.’ He told them all, ‘Shift to Zulu now, gents, and nobody’ll get confused. Time right now is 2204 — and a half — and thirty-five… OK?’
Beale explained to Andy — everyone suddenly taking pity on his state of ignorance: ‘Like Harry said, the R/V’s to be at midnight — tomorrow midnight, that is — nine miles out. We motor out there in our rubber boat, and the sub sends in a Gemini to meet us. Then we carry on out together to where the sub surfaces again and takes us on board.’
Jake West interrupted: ‘Steak and onions then, Andy. And chips — and—’
‘What I’m saying’ — Beale cut across it — ‘is we have to shove off from the beach an hour or more before midnight, Andy.’
Cloudsley added, ‘Hoping to God the outboard works as well as it did on the lake. That’s no millpond out there… Next question, Monkey. The boat, outboard, gas — oh, Christ, you did get petrol?’
‘Siphoned it out of an army jeep.’ Start grimaced. ‘We’re not just pretty faces, are we, Jake?’
‘You can say that again… But the boat, outboard, fuel, PNG — all that gear?’
‘Buried at the top of the beach. As close as it could be to where we need it. Have to allow a bit of time, of course — digging it out, lugging it down to the surf-line, inflating it, loading up — and as you say, making sure the motor works…’
After days and nights with nothing to drink except cold water, the tea was like nectar. Warmth burning down, radiating… Jake had put more water on to boil, preparing for second helpings, by popular demand. Cloudsley put another question: ‘Fixing up the boat and launching it — if the night happens to be a clear one, or the Argies on the headland have PNG or anything like it — any chance they’d spot us?’
Start shook his head. ‘You saw the high ground out there, ahead of us as we were coming? That’s the headland — we’re on the promontory, as described in Tony’s recitation, here and now. There’s cliff all round, and a beach to the left — north — which is overlooked from the headland. That side there’s an almighty great barrier of kelp too, so the choice of beach was obvious, one way and another… Anyway, the cliff extends around like this, in a curve — it’s irregular, little coves in it, but effectively it’s a curve facing east then southeast, and a short south-facing bit where it falls suddenly to low-lying coast again… That’s your general layout, and no, they couldn’t see us taking off because from where they are it’s dead ground.’
‘Any possibility of observation from anywhere else?’
‘There’s no manned O/P — other than this bastard — for three miles or so either up coast or down. We’ve checked both ways. By day you have random helo patrols, but that’s all. Except for these local Argies, of course, when they send patrols out — and they’d certainly have a view from the cliff path on that side if they happened to be on it.’
‘We’ll need to make sure they aren’t. Somehow…’ He held his mug out for a refill. ‘Thanks, Geoff. Bloody marvellous, I must say… Monkey – the route from here to where the boat is — d’you go along the edge of the cliff?’
‘Uh-huh. You’d get there, of course, but the direct route is straight across, southwestward, cutting off all that corner. Roughly one point six miles.’
‘But you still reckoned this was the place to dig in?’
A nod… ‘The cover’s good here, and non-existent lower down.’ Start sucked up tea noisily. ‘Also, although I admit we’d made the hides before the missile crowd showed up, as it’s turned out we couldn’t be much better placed — that is, if you decide to kill two birds with one stone.’
‘It’s what we’ll have to do, isn’t it.’ Cloudsley agreed. ‘So to kick off with, here’s the immediate programme. Monkey will take me for a crawl around the headland, while Jake will guide you, Tony, and Geoff, over the route to the beach. See where the gear’s stashed, take a gander around the area then come back over the same route.’ He looked at Andy. ‘You’ll be on your own for a few hours, all right?’
‘I might not wait up for you.’
‘No reason you should. Long as you don’t snore too loud… But that’s it, gents. We’ll finish this char, then piss off.’
Andy asked him, ‘This kind of missile’s different from the airborne kind, is it?’
‘Right. It’s for mounting on ships. Each missile’s inside a big steel container, not unlike the things they move cargoes around in. When you press the firing tit the front end gets blown off and the missile whizzes out. No need to aim, you launch it in roughly the right direction and the missile-head radar does the rest. It’d be particularly simple to use from a coastal site like this, with only one target offshore that it could choose to aim itself at. But if the point of your question was couldn’t we fix it like we fixed those others, the answer is no we couldn’t because apart from anything else it’s inside this sealed, gas-filled tank and you can’t get at it.’
‘I see.’ He had a question for Monkey Start too, though — since he was being allowed access to information hitherto withheld from him… ‘Monkey — did you ride here, straight from where you left us, up by the escarpment?’
‘Uh-huh. Had another beach job first. Nursemaiding another crowd. Then we moved up here, suss’d the place out and dug the hides, and since then we’ve had two nights and a day for a surveillance job on the new arrivals.’ He looked at Cloudsley. ‘You did your thing all right, did you?’
Cloudsley nodded, grunting an affirmative as he swallowed the last of his tea. Start said, ‘Congratulations,’ and Jake West nodded: ‘Yeah.’
The fact he hadn’t enquired before this, Andy guessed, meant he’d simply assumed the operation would have been completed successfully. They were a fairly remarkable bunch, he thought. He asked Start, ‘What did you do with Tom’s horses?’
‘Turned ’em loose among others, in three different places. Wouldn’t expect the new owners to cut up rough, would you?’
‘We paid Tom for them, anyway.’
‘Yeah. Good… How was the old gaffer when you left him?’
‘In great form.’ Cloudsley said it. ‘Fantastic.’
‘He’s a one-off,’ Start told Andy. ‘You gave us the right man there, all right.’ He turned his mug over, and shook out the dregs. ‘I’m not house-proud… Get moving, shall we?’
*
After they’d gone, Andy slept for a while — in the hide allocated to him and Tony Beale. Departing virtually wordlessly they’d left him with an impression of high-speed movement and cryptic utterances bridged by something like thought-transference; as if they understood each other so well that verbal communication was only a luxury.
The three hides were quite far apart, but linked by string for signalling purposes, and not only in sight of each other but so placed that if an Argie patrol stumbled on to one of them there’d be uninterrupted fields of fire from the other two. Awake now — they’d been gone for about three hours — he was wishing he’d stayed in the hide where Start and West had their tea-making equipment; Cloudsley’s having been abandoned up at the airbase when they’d had to evacuate in a hurry.
He’d also been thinking, on and off, about the phenomenon of having become a murderer.
Killing Juan Huyez had been straightforward self-defence. He felt sure this view of it was sound; and Tom Strobie had reacted
similarly. Paco Huyez though — Paco was something else; or might become so. He could see it as he guessed an outsider might; judging that the man who’d driven Paco to his death had acted in cold blood – methodically, even sadistically. It had not been so, but to an outsider basing judgement on a plain account of the sequence of events and actions it might well seem to have been. And to oneself it might in time come to seem that way. This was the point: whether in years ahead he’d begin to feel he had a particularly vicious murderer hiding inside his own skin.
It was all clear at this moment: the two killings had comprised one act of self-preservation — their lives or his own. But he needed to have it fixed and permanent, not take it for granted now and at some later stage wake screaming and shaking in the night — like he’d woken that morning at Strobie’s. Unable to explain the horror to a wife in the bed beside him — or discuss it, ever, with any living soul…
It would have helped to have been able to talk about it. The urge was all the stronger, he supposed, from having dwelt on it through these hours alone in the dark, half-awake and half asleep. Natural enough, he thought, to want the reassurance of an outsider’s objective view. Tony Beale’s, for instance; Beale would have been ideal to talk with about it. Intelligent, intensely pragmatic but also very much an ordinary human being — loving husband and doting father… It would have been an enormous relief to have been able to blurt it all out to him, when he slid into the hide some time around 0230.
‘That you, Tony?’
‘It’s not Galtieri… Thought I’d have to wake you.’
‘I did sleep. How’d it go?’
‘OK. My end of it. And Harry wants us, over the road again. Brew-up and briefing — right away, OK?’
17
Saddler ordered, ‘Stand by State Three.’
Getting dark. Shropshire at dusk action stadons, rolling hard to the southwesterly blow. She was leaving the northwest rim of the Exclusion Zone on a heading of 302 degrees, preparing for fast transit to the mainland coast. Darkness was arriving here about ten minutes before it would spread itself across that coast, and in his mind’s eye he could visualise the SBS team stirring after a day in hiding, making their own preparations for the rendezvous.
Expecting a submarine, not a County-class destroyer.
They’d done their job, all right. He’d seen the proof of it — yesterday and last night. At which time he’d had no idea he was about to be given this job…
Radar had had a contact: closing, on bearing three-four-eight.
Like tonight, last night had been pitch dark. But the sea had been moderate and sleet-showers temporarily in abeyance. Shropshire had spent the preceding hours on gunline, and at this point — when she’d picked up the radar contact — had been in transit to join the carrier group southeast of the islands.
‘Action stations. Air warning red…’
‘Range three-six miles!’
Ops Room patter gathering shape and density over the Command Open Line as men had hurried to their action stations, pulling on anti-flash gear as they ran…
‘Echo Nine Tango has hostile three-three-zero, forty!’
‘That’s Boreas.’
‘Same hostile. Track 2801.’
‘Seacat red and green, sharp lookout for low-level missile attack!’
Under helm: turning stern-on to the threat…
‘Missile-head radar on three-four-nine!’
Then EW had it identified: an AM39. Closing, therefore, at a speed of Mach 1.2… Saddler ordered into the Command Open Line, ‘Window Charlie two-seven-zero, fire!’
Firing chaff, the Charlie — ‘C’ for confusion — type meaning shells stuffed with metal foil, fired from the gun to explode way out on the beam, confuse the missile’s radar by offering it a new point of aim. He heard Knight’s broadcast warning: Impact imminent — brace, brace, brace… Shropshire plunging to the quartering sea — a fine, live ship and within seconds she could become a mass of flame, gutted and foundering, a funeral pyre in the wind-torn night… The thud of the 4.5” gun had followed so closely on his order that he knew the AAWO, Ian Prince, must have anticipated it. He ordered now, ‘Fire four barrels chaff Delta, bows and quarters!’ The ‘D’ of Delta stood for ‘distraction’ and again the Ops Room was on the ball, the EW director must have had the control box already set and his thumb close to the firing button. The warning hooters blared almost before Saddler had uttered the last word, and precisely two seconds after that klaxon roar the chaff-launchers, situated just abaft the bridge, blasted a protective screen all around the ship. It was only a momentary protection, in this wind, Saddler suppressing in that same moment a chilling vision of the AM39 impacting in or under the main Seaslug missile magazine, explosions ripping his ship apart; and the re-play then, the horror of flame, gushing smoke, the struggle to save life…
‘Green system fired!’
Starboard Seacat. The Seacat transmitting station would have locked the director sight to it: one anti-missile missile with an effective range of three miles had scorched away astern and the operator — one of the late Able Seaman Pitts’ chums — would be holding the Seacat missile’s tail-flame in the centre of his binocular sight. He had only to keep it there, steering it by means of his thumb-operated joystick, to achieve an interception. If two and two equalled four, tonight. Sometimes they seemed to make five. Twenty seconds had elapsed since the call to action stations.
‘Radar lost target! EW reports missile-head radar faded!’
Seacat hadn’t done it. Either Seacat had missed, or the AM39 had made its dive into the sea before they’d got together. Otherwise, there’d have been an explosion out there. Saddler had looked round at his white-hooded, white-gauntleted bridge staff — cautious about speaking too soon, tempting the Fates which time after time in recent weeks had kept his ship afloat and most of her men alive. Man proposed, but they’d all seen enough just lately to know that disposal was quite another matter… Anyway, Bernard Knight the PWO had been less hesitant: his voice had come over the broadcast right away, telling Shropshire’s crew at their various stations around the ship, ‘An Exocet missile was launched at us from a range of about thirty miles, but it must’ve gone in the drink. Third dud today.’ Then he was on the Open Line to Saddler: ‘Relax the air warning to yellow, sir?’
‘Yes please. And thank God.’
‘Amen to that, sir.’
He told the OOW, ‘Bring her back on course. One-four-seven, was it? Pilot, adjusted course?’
He’d discovered as he spoke that he was short of breath. In a period of tension, of course, your lungs worked harder without your knowing it, to supply oxygen for a faster heart beat. He’d begun taking deliberately long, slow breaths, to slow it all down; and thinking that Knight had spoken nothing but the truth when he’d said ‘third dud today’. Two other missiles which had been launched at the Task Force’s ships earlier — one in the afternoon, and the other after dark which seemed to have been aimed at Broadsword — hadn’t stayed in the air even as long as this last one had, had vanished from the screens right after they’d been fired. This, incidentally, had been the first appearances of Etendards in action for quite a while. The daylight attack had been a joint effort by a single Etendard and some Skyhawks, the Etendard’s target being the carrier Invincible while the Skyhawks had picked on Avenger as a target for their bombs — all of which had missed. Exeter had splashed one Skyhawk with Sea Dart. The postscript to the abortive attack had come as a news bulletin from Buenos Aires claiming that Invincible had been hit and disabled. This was the third time they’d claimed to have hit her; on a previous occasion she was supposed to have been sunk.
A shrug was more appropriate than a laugh. A fourth time, it could be true.
Except — Saddler had reasoned — that so far all attacks on the carriers had been by Exocet-armed Etendards, and if all the Argies’ remaining AM39s had been so to speak rendered sterile — three failures in one day did seem a bit much to be coincidental, he tho
ught — well, a minute earlier he’d said ‘Thank God,’ and he had no intention of retracting that, but he’d wondered whether it might also be in order to thank the SBS…
‘Course should be one-four-five, sir.’
‘Steer that.’
When he’d drafted a signal about the attack and the dud missile, he’d checked his Night Order Book to make sure he’d put down as much as needed to be there, then paid a short visit to the softly lit, electronic-humming Ops Room before retiring to his little hole of a sea-cabin in the hope of getting a few hours’ sleep. In about one hour Shropshire was to have been taking station in the defensive screen around the carrier force as it withdrew from its own night’s engagements off East Falkland, but he’d seen no reason to be on his feet for that. With luck, he’d thought, he might get to sleep right through to 0600, the time he’d put down to be called.
Everyone was getting a bit tired. Not least, the ships — weapons, sensors and machinery. The weeks were wearing on, they’d been a hell of a long time at sea and the weather wasn’t getting any better. But it might not be much longer now, he thought. In the last two days 5 Brigade — including Scots and Welsh Guards, and Gurkhas — had been disembarking at San Carlos, were probably all ashore by now, and there could only be the logistical build-up to complete before the big advance began. Once it started, repossession of the island should be quick, with the ground already so well prepared. Like 45 Commando on Mount Kent, 3 Para on Mounts Vernet and Estancia, SAS on the Murrell Heights north of Stanley harbour. There were SAS and SBS teams in other places too: Shropshire had put some of them in.
A week or two — then home?
Well, hardly. Everyone couldn’t buzz off at once. The ships in worst shape, presumably, would be the first to go, and Shropshire was in better nick than some.
Special Deliverance Page 29