Marine D SBS

by Peter Cave

  ‘This bloody mission,’ Willerbey said. ‘Does it sound like a real shitter to you – or what?’

  Crewes eyed his partner warily. Martin’s orders to treat the operation as a matter of the highest possible security had been clear enough. However, they didn’t specifically rule out discussing it among themselves, within the confines of the base. Although it was a practice which was certainly not encouraged within the SBS, it wasn’t actually forbidden.

  He shrugged non-committally. ‘Been on worse,’ he said, picturing in his mind the nightmarish landing on South Georgia two years earlier in which he had witnessed three out of five Gemini assault craft containing his comrades swept away by howling winds into a freezing hell of pack ice and thundering water. That was followed by three days of living rough and hiding out in a near-Arctic wasteland, knowing that you were outnumbered at least seven to one, and the enemy were all around you. After an experience like that, just about anything seemed comparatively tame. Crewes shuddered slightly at the memory before snapping back to reality – a tremor which did not go unnoticed by his companion.

  ‘You got bad vibes about this one too?’ Willerbey asked almost eagerly.

  Crewes felt a little sheepish. ‘No, no,’ he protested with false bravado. ‘I was thinking of something else, that’s all.’ He stopped in his stride, looking at Willerbey with a slightly puzzled expression. He’d known the man for three years, and had never seen him so unsure of himself. ‘What the hell’s got into you, anyway? You’re acting like a virgin in a whorehouse.’

  The man gave a sad, wistful smile. ‘Tell you the truth, I just don’t bloody well know. Just a feeling I can’t quite shake off. Fucking weird.’

  Crewes thought he understood. ‘Are you still worrying about those two bandits we topped the other night?’

  ‘A bit,’ Willerbey admitted candidly. ‘But it’s more than that.’ He caught the strange expression which flickered momentarily across Crewes’ face and recognized it as embarrassment with something of a shock. He forced a grin on to his face. ‘Oh, shit, I must be getting soft in my old age.’

  The matter dropped right there. ‘Which side of the beach do you fancy?’ Willerbey asked, quickly changing the subject.

  Crewes shrugged. ‘I’m easy. I’ll take the far end if you like.’

  Stepping on to the shingle, Crewes began to trudge up towards the headland, not sorry to be alone again. He found Willerbey’s strange mood quite unnerving, for it struck uncomfortable chords in his own mind. Killing the man in the inflatable had not caused him a single second of anguish or self-doubt. He’d been given orders, and he’d followed them. He felt no sense of personal responsibility for causing the man’s death, and that was the bit which bothered him now. Perhaps he should feel something, Crewes thought to himself. Willerbey had made him look into the dark mirror of his own conscience for a moment, and it was disconcerting to realize that there was no reflection at all.

  Willerbey watched his companion walk away up the beach for a few moments before turning in the opposite direction and falling into a steady pace along the water’s edge. He too was now glad for the solitude, feeling that he had somehow made a fool of himself in his fellow trooper’s eyes. Besides, it would give him a chance to analyse his own thoughts more clearly, and try to pin down the odd sense of depression which had affected him ever since Lieutenant-Colonel Martin’s briefing.

  It wasn’t fear, of that he was perfectly sure. Fear was natural – even healthy – and it could even be turned to positive advantage. The confused feelings which bothered him now were decidedly unhealthy, lurking below the surface like the first symptoms of a disease about to erupt. At the very heart of the matter, it was probably that he distrusted peacetime missions, Willerbey told himself. And a peacetime mission which involved civilians was even worse. Inexplicably, the word ‘dishonourable’ sprang into his mind, along with a whole set of negative emotions.

  A war situation was something else. There was something essentially honest about war. You knew exactly who your enemy was, and he accepted you as his. You were both trained, professional soldiers – not only aware of the risks, but prepared for them, accepting them as part of the job.

  And in his own case, that was a job taken by choice, for a specific reason. Willerbey was no secondary school drop-out, lured into the local army recruitment office by poor qualifications and a lack of drive. He’d left grammar school at seventeen with five GCEs, having seriously considered the possibility of A levels and then university.

  The armed services had been chosen not as a job, but as a career. A chance to serve the country he loved, and believed in. Admittedly the army had not been his prime ambition. Willerbey’s first choice had been to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot training officer. He’d more than made the grade on the entrance examinations, and would have been considered prime officer material if a poor colour-perception rating had not let him down. Medically unfit for aircrew membership, he’d been forced to rethink his position, finally deciding that if he couldn’t fly then there was nothing else in the RAF he wanted to do.

  Although offered Willerbey’s services by default, the army had been grateful to recruit this potential officer, and he was accepted into service, eventually taking up a posting to the Royal Marine Commandos. He became a corporal shortly before his twentieth birthday and a year later applied to go on the SBS Potential Recruits’ Course at Royal Marines, Lympstone, Devon. Sheer guts and determination pulled Willerbey through the three gruelling weeks of selection and testing, which were followed by nearly three months of intensive training in all forms of seamanship and a range of specialist skills which included diving, underwater demolition work, close-quarters combat and handling a wide variety of explosive and special weapons.

  Two months later, after jungle warfare training in Brunei and a four-week parachute course, Willerbey was entitled to wear the trophies of his ordeal in the form of the legendary green beret and the two badges of parachuting wings and the ‘Swimmer Canoeist’ (SC) emblem to adorn the right-hand shoulder and forearm of his Royal Marines uniform. Corporal Simon Willerbey was finally an SBS Marine, just as the Argentinians were preparing themselves to invade the coveted Malvinas Islands.

  The Falklands War threw Willerbey in at the deep end, and somewhat to his surprise he found that he liked the water. To say that he enjoyed his first taste of war was not strictly true. Killing did not come easily to him, or sit lightly upon his conscience, but he fought with a sense of pride and dedication which was a source of pleasure in itself. In the brief and bloody weeks which followed, he truly discovered his own complicated self and found that he was one of a rare and strange breed of man. He was a soldier who loved soldiering and was totally committed to the job, although the ethics of warfare would continue to disturb and bother him.

  The intervening two years had been both a relief and a disappointment to him. He had spent much of his time enrolling for every new special-skills course and continuation-training programme going. The rest he dedicated to the one love which had never left him – the thrill of flying – and it was his vast experience of every form of aerial sport from free-fall parachuting to hang-gliding which had assured him his place on Samos, as part of the Windswept team.

  The crackling roar of powerful twin turbo-fan aero engines snapped Willerbey out of his reveries. He looked up and to his right as the jet fighter seemed to materialize out of a cloudless sky, streaking almost vertically towards the surface of the Aegean before flattening out at about three hundred feet and banking on to a course which would bring it straight along the coastline. The screaming of the engines rose in pitch to a shuddering whine as the aircraft streaked along the beach and almost directly over Willerbey’s head. Reaching the headland, it banked once again out over the sea and began to rotate into a steep climb. Moments later, as it dwindled to a mere speck in the sky, Willerbey heard the double crack of the engines’ afterburners cutting in, followed some thirty seconds later by a duller explosion as it a
ccelerated past Mach 1 and sent the boom of its supersonic footprint reverberating across the sounding board of the sea.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Martin was running from the villas down toward the shoreline, gazing helplessly up into the empty sky.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he called to Willerbey.

  Willerbey was in no doubt at all, having recognized the aircraft immediately by its outline alone. Planes remained one of his enduring hobbies, and he was virtually a walking Jane’s Guide. ‘French-built Dassault Super Mirage Delta, sir,’ he told his CO. ‘Built for the export market as a long-range combat fighter specially designed for low-altitude penetration attack.’

  If Martin was impressed by Willerbey’s fund of aviation information, he didn’t show it. ‘Then what the fuck was a French plane doing here?’ he barked.

  ‘It could have come from anywhere,’ Willerbey, replied calmly: ‘The frogs have never been too fussy about who they sell arms to. Various versions of the Mirage are in service with well over a dozen countries throughout the world.’

  But with one notable exception, Martin realized with something of a shock. He was no match for Willerbey when it came to identifying individual aircraft, but he had a pretty extensive knowledge of strategic arms deployment in both Western and Eastern Europe. ‘But not, to the best of my knowledge, with the Greek Air Force,’ he said pointedly. ‘So what the bloody hell was it doing in Greek airspace? More to the point, what was it doing here?’

  He turned to Willerbey with an afterthought. ‘I suppose you didn’t spot any markings?’ he asked hopefully.

  Willerbey shook his head. ‘Sorry, boss. She went almost directly over my head. I only saw the underside of the wings and belly. Besides, it only made the one quick pass – if indeed it was a pass at all.’

  ‘What else could it have been?’ Martin asked suspiciously. The plane overflying this particular section of the island coastline was another mystery.

  Willerbey thought for a few seconds before offering alternative explanations. ‘The pilot could have had engine trouble at high altitude,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe one of his engines flamed out or something. He certainly came down in one hell of a dive before flattening out. That’s a pretty common trick to kick an engine back on line. Mind you, I’d have thought any pilot worth his salt would have tried a stunt like that well out over the open sea.’

  Martin had already come to the same conclusion. In the absence of any other plausible explanation, he could only assume that the plane had deliberately overflown the cove.

  But what had the pilot thought he might see? Martin’s brain screamed. The question only served to raise another, and much more important one. If Windswept was as secret as it was supposed to be, then why the hell had anyone come snooping around in the first place?

  16

  For several hours Martin agonized over whether or not to report the latest apparent incursion to the Foreign Secretary.

  ‘Keep me informed should there be any further developments,’ the man had said. But then he had also told Martin he had full discretion – effectively passing the buck straight back. It was a tough call, Martin felt. Any decision he made more or less hinged on his personal interpretation of the incident. Could the mysterious, but quite possibly coincidental, appearance of an unknown plane really be called a ‘development’?

  There was the panic factor to consider, also. The whole concept of the operation was already regarded as highly sensitive in government circles, and his last call would have done nothing to raise official confidence in the mission. Another negative report could well trigger a knee-jerk reaction which would result in someone pulling the plug, with all the consequences that might unleash. The Western powers would lose their one chance of getting their hands on the Russian missile-guidance system and the possibility of a disastrous flare-up in the volatile Middle East would take a sudden and lurching step forwards. Within a couple of months the Syrians, and perhaps the Iraqis too, would have the capability of launching a major offensive against Tel Aviv. As the Foreign Secretary had already chillingly spelled out, the repercussions of such an attack could easily affect the whole world.

  Martin was also honest enough with himself to consider the possibility of overreaction on his part. Looking at it coldly and objectively, what did he actually have? Two mysterious incidents, either of which might have been purely accidental and which might or might not be connected. Given the fact that the operation itself was still barely out of the planning stage, it gave only the thinnest excuse for reaction at all, let alone a reason to abort such a vitally important mission.

  Finally, after much deliberation, Martin decided to take the Foreign Secretary at his word and exercise his own discretion. With that decision made, and the full burden of responsibility firmly shouldered, there remained the question of what he was going to do about it.

  Martin let his mind go into free, unassociated thought. It was a trick he had learned many years ago, and frequently resorted to when he had to consider any particularly complex problem, or a situation in which there were no clear, unequivocal factors. A form of parallel thinking, it enabled him to mentally step outside facts – or the lack of them – and review the situation in holistic terms. Sufficiently detached, he could process the most complex problem in terms of a series of ‘ifs’ which might be independent or related.

  This technique quickly unmasked the single key point on which everything else hinged. The Samos base was either being spied upon or it was not. If not, then the two mysterious incidents had no significance and were unrelated. Operation Windswept proceeded as planned, and the problem solved itself. At a single stroke, Martin had reduced his worries, and his field of consideration, by a straight fifty per cent.

  The alternative viewpoint – that the operation was indeed under some kind of surveillance – could also be broken down into two distinct and separate possibilities. Either someone knew what they were looking for or they were simply looking for something. On the surface, that might seem to be an extremely subtle distinction to make, but it carried much deeper and more vital significance. If the former were true, then the whole operation was already compromised, and probably past salvaging. The second scenario was more hopeful, offering the distinct possibility that there might still be time to initiate some sort of a damage-limitation exercise or put up an effective smokescreen around the exact nature of Windswept.

  But which of the two was most likely? Martin asked himself. He considered the matter gravely for several minutes, reviewing each possibility in turn.

  On balance, it appeared almost impossible that any specific details of the plan could have leaked to an outside source. His own men had only been fully briefed earlier that day, and no one had left the complex. Up to that point, Martin himself had been the only person outside the confines of Whitehall who knew the exact nature of the mission, and he had confided in nobody. If any leak had already occurred, then it could only have come from British government sources themselves, and that was unthinkable.

  All things considered, it appeared highly probable that there was no leak, and that sudden activity around the previously abandoned complex had merely aroused curiosity in some quarter. Someone, somewhere, had got a sniff that there was something going on, and was making tentative moves to find out what it was. The question of who that someone might be was a tantalizing one, but hardly relevant at that point, Martin decided. Identifying the most likely contenders could probably be achieved by a fairly simple process of trial and error, starting with the most likely. With this thought in mind, he began to run through the outlines of a plan which he had already begun to formulate in his mind. If he could work out the details, it was possible that he could kill two birds with one stone.

  Martin was still not fully convinced that Selina was as totally innocent as she claimed, or that the Greek Intelligence Services were remaining quite as detached as they had promised. Which made them the number one suspect, he reasoned. It also simplified the formulation of his c
ontingency plan.

  Ten minutes later, Martin had it all worked out in his head. A two-pronged plan, it should be as effective as it was simple. Resolved to put it into operation as soon as possible, he went in search of Selina.

  The girl was not in the kitchen, nor in the common room. Excusing himself to Bright and Mallory, who were engaged in creating three-dimensional CAD designs on the computer, Martin headed for Selina’s private quarters. He tapped gently on her door.

  There was a longish pause before he received an answer. Martin imagined that he heard a brief exchange of muted voices, and the sounds of some rapid tidying up from inside the room. Finally came the rattle of the lock being turned and the door opened a few inches.

  Selina peered out, looking slightly surprised to see him. She hesitated before opening the door any wider. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Martin, is there some sort of a problem?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ Martin said, feeling that some apology was merited. ‘It’s just that something rather urgent has just come up, and I need to talk to you. Can I come in, do you think?’

  The girl looked dubious for a second, then opened the door reluctantly.

  Martin stepped into the room, and was immediately embarrassed. Randy Havilland lay sprawled on Selina’s bed, an awkward grin on his face. Martin felt the heat of a flush spreading across his face. ‘Look . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t realize . . .’ he began to stammer, avoiding Selina’s eyes.

  Randy swang his legs lazily over the edge of the bed and rose to his feet. ‘It’s all right,’ he said easily. ‘We were just talking. Unfortunately,’ he added, with a rueful smile. He looked over at Selina. ‘Look, I’d better go. Perhaps I can see you later this evening?’